Usual Perspectives.

Setting up Gmail to work from Command line on Ubuntu

2009-07-03T16:23:00.004+05:30

After some looking around, particularly this post on Ubuntu email with Mailx (which is incomplete, if you follow all the instructions, you will realise that the certificate he is talking about does not exist in the tgz that you download) and a few others, I got my mailx to work with my gmail account.

I guess you can try setting up an MTA such as exim and use sendmail or even mail, but that seemed quite complicated and I wanted to send out a mail from my shell script as quickly as possible.

Here are the steps involved which I wrote up as a little shell script:


#! /bin/sh

sudo apt-get install ca-certificates
sudo update-ca-certificates
sudo apt-get install msmtp mailx
echo "# config options: http://msmtp.sourceforge.net/doc/msmtp.html#A-user-configuration-file
defaults
logfile /tmp/msmtp.log

# gmail account
account gmail
auth on
host smtp.gmail.com
port 587
user EMAIL
password PASSWORD
from EMAIL
tls on
tls_trust_file /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
# set default account to use (not necessary with single account)
account default : gmail" > ~/.msmtprc
chmod 600 ~/.msmtprc

echo "# set smtp for nail
set from=\"EMAIL (YOUR NAME)\"
set sendmail=\"/usr/bin/msmtp\"
set message-sendmail-extra-arguments=\"-a gmail\"" > ~/.mailrc

echo "Edit CAPTIALS in .msmtprc and .mailrc and run a test message like this:"
echo "echo Message | mailx -s \"this is subject\" user@email.com\n"

Enjoy!

Fixing a dead Ipod Video 5G

2009-06-04T22:21:00.006+05:30

After close to two years of ignoring my Video ipod, I took it out today to get it back to life. I always had a hunch that it was a hardware issue, but I didnt want to decide so quickly.

The basic problem being, as soon as I power up the ipod, it will show me the "Language" screen and as soon as I try to do anything with it, it will get stuck. And all I got to do now is to reboot/reset it by now famous "holding the Menu and center buttons" for a while.

I tried updating the firmware, formatting, restoring etc. but nothing would work. Then, I decided to install linux on my ipod thinking something might be wrong with the firmware partition of the hard drive.

Atfer spending a few hours, I realised that linux was getting stuck as well. Now, I gave up trying to be nice to the ipod. I ripped open the thing by after reading an article and watching a few videos. Although, I scratched the top case a little bit, it opened up nicely and I pulled out the Toshiba MK3008GAL hard drive out. I am convinced that the hard drive has conked off, but I can't really prove it.

Then, I started hunting around to see if there are any suppliers of the hard drive in Bangalore. None. Very disappointed. I have sent a mail to a couple of folks from Good-Hardware-old China and found another reseller from Ebay. I have shot them a couple of emails to ask them about taxes and import duties etc. Will post an update once I get a hand to the hard drive.

So, If you have a dead ipod and you are around here in Bangalore, let me know and I will help you with it.

The Flip side of National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (India)

2009-03-16T16:27:00.003+05:30

This is a guest post by one of my good friend Rajagopal. Quite a thinker.

National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) act was passed in August 2005, which provides a guarantee for 100 days of employment(unskilled labour) to atleast one adult in every household. Though enacting the same took some more time, it is in place now, and rural dwellers below and near poverty line are definitely benefited by this. The laymen call it "The 100 days of employement Plan". Though this plan appears to be something that would make a positive impact on our economy in the long run, there is a flip side to it which is due to the lack of policies or thoughts put into making this scheme beneficial in the long run, coupled with the attitude of the beneficiaries towards work, and improving their own economic status.

What do you think is be the work being given to these employees?
The act states that it should be public work. That sounds good! This act should ideally provide employment and at the same time get rid of some of the infrastructure and developmental issues associated with the villages, such as bad road, lack of canals into the farming fields, etc.

But in reality, the people responsible for this in the Panchayat boards seem to lack interest or intellectual ability, and incentive to identify the real issues and address them using the funding that comes through this scheme. It seems that these Panchayat boards aren't being held accountable for getting constructive work done out of these resources, but just to be able to use up these resources to keep the act active.

"This 100 day employment programme is a boon to us. My daughter-in-law gets paid Rs 80/- per day of employment, without having to do much work. She just signs in an entry register, deweeds the place for an hour, informs the supervisor that she needs to milk the cow at home and comes home, goes back in the evening to sign the leaving register." said a member of a family being benefited by this plan.

"They would just give us a Shovel(Mannvetti), and ask us to uproot the weeds in a field(specifying which area it is)." said the lady when asked about the nature of work. She also added that it is the same field all the time :-)

The Panchayats are empowered to figure out what development work could be done in their village, and get approval from the Panchayats at the higher level(according to point 13 in the Gazette for this act). The people administering these village panchayats seem to not have the ability to identify, plan, raise fund, manage and execute on real development activities that would benefit the village in long term. And moreover, when they are accountable only to provide 100 days of employment to all households, and there is no incentive from the top down to get any useful byproducts out of the same, why would some one do it, unless they are passionate about making the village better.

Now lets get to the other part of this programme which indirectly affects agriculture.

"Most of the workers who used to come for deweeding, ploughing, cultivation and other activities needed to carry out agriculture no more are ready to work in the fields due to the 100 days employment plan, since they get paid without doing any work. The plan had made them lazy. Given that they get rice at Re.1 per kg, they could get enough money to keep them away from hunger for the year through this plan. Though they could come for the farming activities apart from the 100 days of employment and get paid more, they don't do that. Agriculture is no more easy to manage given the lack of manpower. The lack of manpower is also fuelled by the self help groups that have emerged. Seems like we'll just have to sell off the farming fields to these builders and go to the cities where our wards live." says a farmer in the village, who had been cultivating different crops and been providing employment to a lot of people over several years. This resounded with a few other farmers that I happened to interact with.

There two things that appear scary to me in this:
1) The availability of subsidized rice and guaranteed income through NREG is making the rural dwelling unskilled people lazier than before. They lack the incentive to work, learn skills, earn more, etc. They would gradually turn unemployable along with being unskilled, and would become more dependent on the availability of the subsidy over rice from the government.
2) Due to unavailability of manpower forces the conventional farmers to sell off their cultivable lands and head towards the towns and cities. Given that there is already a decline in the percentage of farmers in India due to monsoon dependency of farming, further decline in farming activities would just make things worse. This might even lead to a state where there might be a requirement to import grains if enough attention is not given to the issue.

These are just things that came OTOH, and there might be more.

The NREG Act would greatly benefit the economy if:
1) The Panchayat officers are given management trainings, and educated and incentivized enough to handle this scheme in a constructive manner.
2) Social Entrepreneurs enter this arena, and provide consulting services to these village Panchayats on effectively handling this.
3) Self help groups be encouraged to do farming activities as well; not just commodities. Self help groups have been developing some skilled labour, and had been stimulating the microeconomy of these villages and continue to exist.
4) Educated people should start looking at agriculture in large scale with modern equipments, and farming methods(that require less manpower). This might help sustain the self sufficiency of food in the country. Risk management could also be done by selecting a set of regions that have differing demographics interms of monsoon. Easily said than done, but operational efficiency would become the core of agricultural success.

The first two suggestions are aimed at equipping the Panchayats to be able to make the right plans and decisions locally without having to expect developmental plans to come from the higher ups. This also would ensure that the human resources are being utilised in a constructive manner.

With appropriate incentives and accountability in place for people executing on these plans, this plan would transform the economy in a positive way. But that doesn't seem to be the current scenario.

PS: All the conversations above are from a small sample set of people in a few villages in the Cauvery Delta Region(Near Poompuhar) of Tamil Nadu, India.

-- Rajagopal
(One of those a***oles sitting in his cubicle cozily with a Mac Laptop and typing out a blog post with the dreams of a Knight in White Horse emerging out of nowhere to make these transformations)

Five minds for the future Indian leader

2009-03-02T12:41:00.005+05:30

Inspired by Howard Gardner's five minds for the future (I haven't yet read the book. Really need to), I thought about writing the five minds for the future Indian leader. When I look at the top five, it seems to me that these minds are essential for any leader. But, I don't know what it takes to run Burkinafaso, so, I will stick to what I think is critical for that leader who is going to sail India through the rough times ahead of us.

Actually, there are just two minds. The Rational/Analytical mind (Cortex) and the Emotional Brain (Amygdala). And all the minds I list below are really just a combination of these two. Now, I say they are midway between the two and not just a part of the Cortex, because an analytical or synthetic knowledge of the following(cortex) followed by a deep sense of commitment and Passion(emotional mind) towards each of these topics is essential to make the cut. And that will happen only in one who has a healthy rational and emotional mind.

There were a number of contenders. I have listed a few that did not make it to my top five towards the end. There are a few others that I have not listed here, because I felt they were not as important or they could be learnt during the course.

Environment: It is burning in Bangalore. And it is just the beginning of March. I have been here for five years now and I haven’t seen anything like this before. Like most of us, I have always known that we are disturbing our environment but was of the opinion that disaster is still a long way away. As a kid, I recollect reading about “El Nino” as early as my eighth grade. Until very recently (a year ago), I was still skeptical about the seriousness of the problem, motivated largely by alternative perspectives such as the Great Global Warming Swindle etc. But, now I am thoroughly convinced that this is a problem that needs attention at the highest levels, such as the leader of the second most populous country. And this is critical for a country that is largely (60% to be precise) agrarian and that has millions of people living in low lying areas (West Bengal, Kutch, Bangladesh).

Economy: This is a country that is confused if it still is socialistic or if it has jumped over to the other side (capitalism). There is emphasis on both and hence the vision and strategy are quite mixed up. The younger generation seems to thoroughly love the reforms of the 1990s and the older generation wonders what was so wrong about their times. Some of the greatest institutions (Indian Railways, State Bank of India, IITs and IIMs) are all products of the socialist regime. A lot of our leaders still have heavy socialist influences. Combine this with the current or potentially current collapse of some countries (economies) built on Capitalism, One begins to wonder what the right thing to do is. I believe my leader should possess a clear understanding on the rationale behind Nehruvian theories and trends in globalization. The world is truly a global village and advances cannot be made without a big picture.

Energy: This might seem a little off place here. Not many people talk of energy as an essential qualification for a leader. I remember sitting in my physics class and reading in my text book that our oil reserves will last only for twenty years, ten years ago. And the more you look (and read) around, the clearer it becomes that those times (Peak Oil, Volatility in the oil market, our increasing dependence) are already here. And unless my leader appreciates the grave energy situation we are in, none of his policies or infrastructural investments are going to make sense in the hard times that we all live (or going to live) in.

Sociology: India is a Europe. It really is 28 cultures put together. There is a lot of literature around the complexity of the concept that India is. And the more you read, the more you know that any one person understands very little. I believe, only that person who sees the soft nuances of millennia of inter relationships between these numerous cultures & demographics from an outsider's perspective will be able to resolve, relate and communicate with them all. A vision that is inclusive, fair and free for one and all is the need of the hour. Put this in perspective that much of our resources are depleting and that a conflict of interest between civilizations is impending, you probably will realize that to provide solutions for the future, you need to understand the past.

Technology: It might seem like I am technologist and hence I have a preferential bias towards technology as a future mind for my leader. But, it still makes sense to me. Investing in technology for the greater masses for inclusive governance and mitigating corruption & red-tapism is one thing. Understanding technology as a tool to access knowledge for insightful governance is another. And I want my leader to embrace both these ideas in a manner that is unique & Indian. I don’t really care if he reads his emails on Blackberry though.

And one mind that did not make it into this list but I wish it did:

Gandhi: I am fan of this man and I am not even one of the most well read(about him). But, understanding Gandhi still comes out as a no brainer for understanding India. No other man has travelled the lengths and breadths or spent so much time thinking about (and in some cases thinking for) this country as him. Nobody else’ ability to connect with the Indian Masses, consensual prowess or methodologies worked as best as his. And when one looks at the volatile global situation that we have ended up creating in the last half a century, Gandhi’s ideals (economic or otherwise) appear right more than ever.

A few other minds that did not make into my list:
Law
History
Linguistics.

Now, each one of these topics are huge & probably will require the attention of a life time for deep understanding. Unless my leader is a super hero, he is probably not going to be a master of all these five trades. The next best thing is to have a team of people who are experts in each one of these fields to be a part of the core decision making team.

Alright, so this is what I want in my leader? But, is he out there?

Businesses, phones & India

2009-02-24T16:27:00.004+05:30

I am starting to believe that Indian businesses don't know how to do business on a phone. The large corporations (such as ICICIs and Godrejs and Pizza Huts) get the point to a reasonable extent. But, there are multiple issues.

First, there aren't a great lot of large corporations in India. So, you are most likely going to encounter many small businesses in your life time in India for everyday requirements.

Second, it doesn't seem like the large corporations are putting in a great lot of effort in getting their phone link to the customer right. I have first hand experience with Bank "A" and I know the main menu of their IVR by heart. But, everytime I have wanted to call them, nothing in the main menu seems to match the question I have in mind for them. And I begin to wonder. I know that if I keep pressing something, Bank A's IVR gives up on me and transfers me over to the first customer care person available. I subconciously know that once I get to a customer care person, things will start rolling. And, I am the best case scenario. I am in technology and I think I understand the phrase "Technology as an enabler". Wonder what percentage of people who dial up end up speaking to a service representative. If it is a huge percent, then the point of the IVR is lost.

The worst case scenario is my mom. To begin with, she is perplexed by the idea of an automated voice system which is not a human being. Second, She is scandalized that if she presses a wrong button, the world might end and bad things might happen. She is also worried that this voice person will not give her any help. How is it that she can't ask questions to this computer voice?

Also, folks at the call center want to put the phone down or transfer the call as quickly as possible to another department. It feels like "red tapism" except it all happens on the phone line and you are sitting. Your time isint anyone's concern. You are not running around, right?

Lets talk about the Torso and tail, the medium and small businesses. The service stations, restaurants, Gas stove repair, flower shops. And it sucks quite a bit here. It is almost like customers who call up on the phone are second grade and do not require the same treatment as folks who show up in the showroom or shop. It is not like I am not going to pay.

Atleast once, I have been asked to call back later because the person who picked up the phone was busy. She didn't even care to ask me what it is that I wanted. Because I am on the phone, I am not real? Other times, the person who picks up the call hasnt a clue. I called up a dance company and the person who picked up goes "Oh, you want to talk to my husband?". More often than not, it is someone's personal phone number which is listed on the internet. And when you call, the person gets infuriated about how you could call him at 8 PM in the night? I am expected to know his office timings, right? Cutting the call, Number busy etc. have happened quite a number of times as well. And these are all institutions that treat their customers normally when you visit them. What these businesses don't take seriously is, a bad user experience on the phone is a bad user experience about the way they run the business.

Honestly, this doesn't come to me as a surprise. On the other hand, It is more of a wishful thought. 400 million phone connections isint a joke. We have virtually covered all people with any purchasing power. I wish our businesses understood the power of remote & voice communication. I am a believer that voice is the most natural form of human communication. And there just isint space in your jeans pocket for a keyboard and a mouse. The fact that 1-800 as a concept is not popular (Not sure what the reasons are here) itself is a standing symptom of how businesses arent embracing the telephone yet.

Just like every other industry in India, telephony is fragmented, de-standardized and over regulated. Customer side phone revolution has already happened. Wont the businesses see this?

Out of Maps & Local

2009-02-24T16:23:00.003+05:30

I am done writing about Maps & Local in India. It is not interesting to me anymore. And the symptoms are showing. I havent written anything on this blog for over 5 months now. Not that I didnt have anything to say all this while. Just that they didnt fit into a blog that was titled "On Maps & local in India".

So, here it is. I am taking the blog back to what it was earlier. A blog on thoughts, experiences and incidents from my life. Now that is broad enough that I can write virtually anything.

Adieu Maps & Local.

Honey, They killed the Yahoo! India Maps Print Page!

2008-09-16T11:45:00.003+05:30

"The print page is dead". Put your hands together for in-context printing.
Yahoo! India Maps print page just became better, faster and a lot cleaner. Fancy this, you are new to Bangalore and are staying with a friend in Indiranagar. You have heard much about the new Lido Mall, and the Fabulous seating at the Fame Cinemas Multiplex. You are in a hurry to catch the movie. Now visit Yahoo! India Maps at http://in.maps.yahoo.com, search for "100 feet
road indiranagar to lido mall" and click on the "print" link in the left hand corner.

A helpful pop up shows that your print will need 2 sheets. Now, click on Print and you are all set to enjoy pop corn at the movie. The Map is also in wide screen (landscape), so what you see is indeed what gets printed. The Printout also gives useful tips on the distance, approximate time taken and local auto rickshaw fare, all of which will aid you in making sure you pay only what you need to pay to that friendly Auto driver

Just that Simple

Subramanyan Murali
Yahoo! Maps Engineer

Nokia Navigator ad at Bangalore airport

2008-08-30T16:02:00.001+05:30

Nokia Navigator ad at Bangalore airport
Originally uploaded by shivku.

Nokia, having bought Navteq, has Navteq's data in their mobile apps. And the map coverage sucks.

Drive, walk, motorbike or Cycle to your destination.

2008-05-15T14:25:00.004+05:30

Have you ever noticed the amount of homogeneity that exists in the roads of the western world? I am pretty familiar with California and spotting a motorbike is as rare as spotting a mosquito. It seems like vast majority of them are, infact, on the same type of vehicle ( a car) and hence are most likely to take the same route/direction given two places. And so Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and all of these guys have just one type of route. Fair enough.

Bring India in and the equation changes quite phenomenally. Just like our people, vehicles on our roads are of various types. Between two and six wheels, we have all the kind of Vehicles known to man kind running on our roads and each one of them is as important as the other.

Now, let me build a hypothesis on top of that previous statement. Arguably, The same person travelling between the same two given places may take a different route depending on the kind of vehicle he is on.

I, for one, prefer the side roads (gallis) and small roads that are less polluted and less crowded over main roads when I am on a motorbike. I am willing to ride a few hundred meters extra if I can skip a few junctions/signals which are a big bottleneck on traffic speeds. But when I am in a car, I would rather stick to the main roads because the condition of side roads are unpredictable. Plus, you never know if that big gravel truck is parked blocking the entire street. But, whenever I take the cycle, I really want to avoid main roads completely if possible, because, they are simply not safe.

There are very many ways to get to a place. Sometimes, you want to take the fastest route, Sometimes the shortest. But the kind of vehicle never used to play a part. But, now it does. At Yahoo! India maps. Search for a route and watch out for buttons on the right pane. Choose the one that fits you well and drive safe and with a smile.

Ladies & Gentlemen, Please welcome Yahoo! India Local

2008-04-30T02:44:00.004+05:30

Yahoo! India has now introduced Local/Business search in India starting with a few cities (Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai and Delhi ). It is the usual, Find "what" in "where" local search destination except there are a few cheeky cool things.

Locality pages: for Koramangala, Indiranagar, Bandra West and Andheri West.

Essentialist: On the Koramangala Locality page, I found a couple of interesting questions such as "Are you getting married?" , "Moving to Koramangala?" being asked at me. And on click, it gives an essential list of all businesses you may ever need in the process of getting married (Assuming you already have a girl) or moving. Pretty cool.

Footprints: Assuming you have visited that business, then you could click on a "foot" looking icon and it will bump up a number. Something like digging a web page, I guess. I guess higher the footprint, more the listing will feature in your search, frontpage etc.

If you are business owner of if you know a business, you could add details of it using the "Add a Business". I did'nt quite find a page/link to do that. But Y! Local did ask me about it when my search query did not yield a result. Such as this

There is a fair amount of Maps integration as well, but is not useful practically yet. You can do stuff like move around the marker of a business to it's correct location, vote on it, save it etc.

You can also send the listing on SMS, email etc. I also like the UI and the layout, but I also wish the frontpage was a little light and plain. Right now, it has one too many links.

Cheers! to Yahoo! India.

Local Touch to Yahoo! Maps

2008-04-14T14:25:00.003+05:30

Just showing off a bit because The Hindu still remains my favorite newspaper.

The Yahoo! + MS 300 parody

2008-04-10T16:36:00.001+05:30

I throughly enjoyed the 300 parody on the Yahoo-Microsoft deal. All credits to Amr. Get set to rotfl.

Mapquest & OnStar deal

2008-04-04T03:48:00.002+05:30

I haven't heard of Onstar before, but nevertheless, the voice commands part impressed me. Mapquest, ofcourse, is spot on when it comes to giving right directions.

Yahoo! India Maps TV commericial

2008-04-01T17:35:00.004+05:30

I haven't seen this on TV myself. A bunch of my friends say they saw in on Sony TV.

Did you see it sometime? Do you like it?

The Yahoo! India Maps compass

2008-03-31T11:34:00.001+05:30

The Yahoo! Maps compass
Originally uploaded by shivku.

Although we sit and write code to make sure that You don't even need a compass, we still like it the old way.

Sridhar got us these Keychains a little while ago.

Megadeth in Bangalore...

2008-03-27T17:04:00.002+05:30

... Was Awesome. Throughly loved listening to heavy metal after a long time. Some videos I captured. The Holy wars intro was as good as it can ever get.

Did you spot Yahoo India Maps on Radio?

2008-03-20T15:18:00.003+05:30

If you haven't, then you can listen to a few of them right here. I think they played in all the major metros in Radio Mirchi. Not sure about it. They have turned out to be pretty cool. Do you like any of them? Which one?

Bewafaa: Sonam told me that meant Disloyal. One more Hindi word under my kitty. The guy gets lost and by the time he turns up, his girl friend is already married to someone else. My personal favorite.

Directions: This dude wanted to go to Goa and ends up being in Nashik. And then gets a good bashing from his beloved.

Trekking:
A couple of guys get lost in a trekking trail at night. Sure, they could have sent themselves an SMS of the directions they need. Now, don't ask me which trail it was.

Your Maps, Your Language

2008-03-19T16:47:00.004+05:30

Here in India, we speak several hundred languages amongst the billion of us. Even the Government officially recognizes 23 of them. No single person can possibly learn all Indian Languages in his lifetime and so, most of us make do with a few. Yahoo! India Maps ( http://in.maps.yahoo.com ) is no exception. After sitting through a lot of language courses, Yahoo! India Maps has now learnt to speak nine languages (Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati, Oriya, Kannada & Malayalam) apart from English. Watch out for the "Vernacular" button along with "Map", "Satellite" and "Hybrid" buttons to see an area in it's primary language. We have covered the major cities and towns and will expand the "Language Map view" to other regions in the time to come.

Personally, Maps in vernacular languages is magical for me. Because for once, my Grand-moms and Grand-dads will get to see and understand what I do all day long sitting at Yahoo!.

We have also released "Walking directions" along with this push. If you are the one who walks, You could simply type a query like "Walk from Yahoo! egl bangalore to Yahoo! MG road, bangalore". Alternatively, You could also choose the "Walk this Route" link on the right pane when you have driving directions.

Digression: Stuff Brown people like

2008-03-09T15:57:00.002+05:30

I don't expect you to have heard of Stuff White people like. I heard about it only minutes ago. And from what I see, it is (getting) quite famous (in the white land, ofcourse) and is quite hilarious (especially if you are not a white person). You probably already know of all the stuff they talk about in that blog if you have interacted with a bunch of whites and have been to the US atleast once. But you should still go ahead and read it. Rarely do you get to laugh so much at stuff you already know.

Anyways, this blog is not about Stuff White people Like. It is about stuff Brown people like. Yeah, Brown People. You, me, my neighbour, your beer buddy. We are all brown. In California, brown people call themselves (and us) desis, but they are brown too.

Kaysov is one of the authors of the blog, and he is not this funny. Not in real life. Maybe he learnt to be funny by going to Berkeley. Nevertheless, subscribe and spread the word if you like it. Kaysov has agreed to give me 50% of the stuff he makes out of adsense.

Yahoo India Maps as a pincode service

2008-03-06T17:46:00.004+05:30

My dad used to be a master of pincodes in Chennai. He has been and around Chennai for such a long time that he can beat the Head Post Master to his Job. Infact, it was one of our favorite time pass activities. I used to get hold of an yearly diary that had Pincodes of Chennai city as an addendum and then I will pick and ask Pincodes of random and weird localities that nobody goes to in Chennai. And he used to be right every time.

Now, You don't have to live in a city for 30 years to know it's pincodes. You can leave that job to Yahoo India Maps . The next time you have a pincode with you and you are wondering where that place is, go ask Yahoo India Maps.

For instance, 600001 is Chennai GPO, 560034 is Koramangala, bangalore. Those are my places.
What Pincode are you?

Happy birthday Yahoo!

2008-03-06T17:40:00.001+05:30

060320081409
Originally uploaded by shivku.

On March 2nd, thirteen years ago, little did Filo and Yang know that they are going to create the most visited site on the planet.

They did and here we are. Happy Birthday Yahoo!. I love you.

Yahoo! India Next launched a little while ago.

2008-03-04T12:29:00.003+05:30

Yahoo! India Next, which is an Indian clone of Yahoo! Next was launched a little while ago. Yahoo! India Next will talk about innovations and cutting edge technology that gets built in Yahoo! Bangalore for India.

I was asked to write about "Landmark based driving directions" that we launched in a India sometime ago. And I did. You can read about it here.

I also made this little banner for the blogpost.

I made an ad-hoc small "Yahoo! India Maps, Try it!" kinda badge which you can see on the right pane.

What do you guys think?

Hummaa.com looking for LAMP experts

2008-03-03T19:34:00.002+05:30

One of my friends who runs Hummaa, is looking for Software engineers and Senior Software Engineers who are cool in Linux, Apache, MySQl and PHP. If you are one of them or you know one of them who is looking for some cool stuff to do, let me know.

Nokia Maps on my N73

2008-02-29T16:31:00.003+05:30

Inspired by Pradeep B V's comment on my earlier post, I went on to check if Nokia has any (updated) Maps for my Nokia Phone (N73). My phone does not have GPS like the Nokia Navigator, but nevertheless, Maps on mobile (with GPRS for Search) can still come in very handy. Also, my phone came pre packaged with a dumb local application (with maps), but it only used to show the outline of India. Now, I have seen that many times in my sixth class Geography and that level of map is not useful for any god damn thing, let alone Local Search.

So, I started from here , downloaded and installed the "Nokia Maps" application over to my phone and then downloaded and installed a windows only (Infact, you won't even find the download link on firefox on windows. Visit the link on IE) application over to my PC. And then, after a few glitches, I downloaded the India data pack.

The map data is from Navteq. And we all already know Navteq does not have the best data set for India. For instance, the data pack for China was about 190 MB whereas the India one was 21MB. (India is about a third in size compared to China).

I was checking in and around Bangalore and they have all the major roads named and searchable. But more importantly, because you can download the data pack into your mobile, you don't need a network connection to search or view the Map. That is cool, because GPRS (or EDGE, 2.5 G) is real slow for Maps. Also, there is no connectivity in places where you generally tend to get lost.

Now, the technology is also different when you compare this with Google Maps Mobile or Yahoo! Go. Nokia Maps is a vector map application. What that means is, the maps are rendered by an engine that understands shapes rather than showing images that have maps pre-rendered (aka raster maps ).

So, the application is smaller, renders what needs to be rendered and ignores layers and shapes when it needs to, It is probably a bit slower because of all the bits it needs to flip/flop before rendering the shape. I may be wrong here, that is just my guess.

I don't have GPS on my phone. Earlier, I tried to buy a bluetooth GPS receiver that I can hook up with my phone. But the pieces that I tried never worked with my phone and I gave up. So, I couldn't check if GPS worked well with the application and if the map is, infact, accurate.

Anyway, If you have a Nokia big smart phone, go download the maps. It will come in handy.

Mobile phone based navigation will outweigh other PNDs

2008-02-23T18:59:00.002+05:30

Telematics Research Group released a press release a little while ago and they say that the future of Portable Navigational devices look promising. Also, Mobile phone based GPS will become popular than traditional PNDs from makers such as TomTom or Garmin. So, if you are going to buy an in-car navigation system, you may want to hold on. Maps may just be available on your mobile phone.

More here

Google Maps + Twitter = Super tuesday

2008-02-06T01:01:00.000+05:30

<quote here>
We've joined forces with Twitter and Twittervision to give you instant updates on Super Tuesday. Throughout the day, you can watch Twitter texts from across the country. And send in your own updates!
</quote>
Twittervision has always been fun to watch. And to make your ordinary super tuesday fun (after you've voted, that is) , visit Google Maps + Twitter. I think this is basically twittervision with filters on words like "obama" and "poll" and "vote".

Top ten tech books

2008-01-14T15:38:00.000+05:30

Someone was asking me for the top ten tech books that I would recommend for someone in my domain of work. Which is Internet & Computer technology. This is the list I came up with:

1) heads first design patterns By Eric Freeman; Elisabeth Freeman; Kathy Sierra; Bert Bates ( 500 rs)
2) Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML By Elisabeth Freeman; Eric Freeman (500 rs)
3) c++ programming language by Stroustrup (600 Rs)
4) JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition By David Flanagan 750 rs
5) Learning Python, 3rd Edition By Mark Lutz (Not sure)
6) Introduction to Algorithms - Cormen/Leiserson/Rivest/Stein - 305 rs
7) Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly)) [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback) by Andy Oram (Author), Greg Wilson (Author) - 38$
8) Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design by Andy Clarke, Molly E. Holzschlag (32$)
9)Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, 2nd Edition (Paperback)
by Jon Erickson (Author) - 33$
10)The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman (800 rs)

What am I missing? What should I not include in this list ?

The best of geo web says hi to Yahoo India Maps

2008-01-11T16:29:00.000+05:30

Be it Wikimapia or keyhole or any one of those innumerable sites that have geographic information, the community has painstakingly marked those bus stops and milk booths and restaurants and even houses. Probably for personal satisfaction. Or maybe to help those lost and stranded. With a billion helpful minds behind, India suddenly seems too small. And now it is payback time.

Starting today, Yahoo! India Maps will cut across the web so that the best of location intelligence is available to you behind one text box at http://in.maps.yahoo.com. Try "Mumbai cst" or "metro, Delhi" or "garuda mall, Bangalore" and you will know what we are talking about. Looking for ATMs near Forum mall? Try "ATMs near forum mall, Bangalore". Or maybe you are on that Motorbike drive across Chennai, "Shell petrol pumps in Chennai" will come in handy. These are locations that we have captured from various locations around the internet, wherever they exist.

And it does not stop with just that. Combine the mighty power of users with our unique Indian driving directions and suddenly, it seems like you may never be required to pull over and ask the pan-wallah for directions ever again. Yes, we know that many roads don't have names and when they do, they probably don't have sign boards indicating them. So, We thought landmarks and turns in your route instruction will help make it easier for you. Now, we have also added information about localities, towns, villages and cities along your route so that you know what you are leaving behind and what you are entering when you are on your journey.

Print it out or Send yourself an SMS and get going, because, getting lost is not so easy now.

- Says Yahoo! India Maps.

Making money out of Maps

2008-01-08T21:13:00.000+05:30

This is a long pending post.

Search? Making money out of Search? yeah ok. We have a 200 billion dollar company doing that right. Social networking? Facebook is trying out a few things and they are likely to crack it sooner than anybody else.

Now making money out of Maps? Now that is a complicated problem. In my opinion, nobody has quite solved this. Yahoo and Mapquest stick to what are best at. Banner advertising. But with the advent of Mashable maps (Ajaxified maps), you just have one page to do all you want. Real estate is prime and crunching a banner ad there ends up being ugly. I have always disliked the ad at the bottom left corner of Yahoo Maps.

Now, Google has tried a few things too. They have tried to sneak in their adwords in. But then again, 75% of the page is maps and there is only so much you can do with the right pane which is already so full of local results and driving directions instruction set and what not. Plus, it hardly and rarely makes use of the biggest context available. "Geography". In other words, "location".

Yahoo then tried the branding with the "See these business locations on the map" bottom bar. Now it is quite static with no intelligence. And like I argued earlier, and only slightly makes use of the fact there is a location context. Plus, It suits only those business that have a wide (nation wide) presence. In other words, businesses that are chains. It simply refuses to cater to the needs of the long tail.

Also, Maps is a very unique service. Most online services and properties tries to keep the person online. It works by the charm of referrals. But maps works the other way around. The user actually wants to get offline. He wants to get off the internet and get going somewhere. Most Ad models and networks are not best suited for this. They all work in a "Click here to go to the site" way when I want to get off my chair.

A real long time ago ( a year or two ago) Google was trying to sneak in a few sponsored listings as markers on the map. In a given map view, you will find (different looking) markers strewn all over the place. Once clicked, it will tell you about a restaurant or a book store with the phone number etc. Somehow, that has disappeared. Mostly because they didnt find enough interest in the advertising community.

Most recently, I came across Lat49 which is trying to do the same thing. They have tied up with a bunch of map services and hacks (on top of Gmaps and Yahoo maps etc). As an advertiser, you gotta go and buy rights for an area (location context) and place your ad. Everytime anyone see that particular area on any of those Mapping partners, your ad will be displayed.

I think this is the way it needs to proceed. Because fundamentally, the context is location. Not keywords, not your IP, Not the referral page. It is like you are driving to that coffee shop you love the most, but the book store exists on the way. Whether you like it or not. From such a perspective, these ads stop looking like ads anymore. Right?

Now the real challenge is to generate interest in those physical businesses. They need to educated that it is possible to promote their physical store just as well and easy as their online store. It is even possible to advertise on the internet even if you are not online. And that Advertising on Maps is the way to go about it.

What do you think?

Who wants your New year Wishes?

2008-01-08T18:05:00.000+05:30

It is crazy how many unsolicited "New year Wishes" mail I have in my inbox. Give up your generosities and philanthropy and get some work done guys. I am talking to cleartrip and IRCTC and bigadda and minglebox and indiaproperty and even some Mutual fund guys like Birla sun life and reliance.

My inbox and time is a little more precious than you think.

So you all do need a map ?

2007-12-21T00:53:00.000+05:30

This is a big surprise for me. The 2007 zeitgeist list for India (Fast rising queries) has just one English word which is not already a Google product in the top five:

01. Orkut
02. YouTube
03. Gmail
04. Map
05. Google

And what it is? "Map"!? So, what does this tell you? Maybe there is a big market for "Maps" and my gut feel has been wrong all along..hmm..But I still cant believe it is map. Not facebook. not iphone. Not javascript. But map. Not "Google maps", Not "Yahoo Maps", but "Map". Interesting.

If you are curious..the six to ten are these. Not sure how zapak managed to jump in there:

06. Indian Railways
07. Yahoo Mail
08. Technology
09. Yahoo
10. Zapak

Traffic Violators

2007-12-19T14:15:00.000+05:30

So, You may have heard about the first result in youtube for the search query "India". It is called "India driving", a candid potrait on what happens on Indian roads. One of my friends has even come to a conclusion that Indians dont have the disciplined driving gene in us. Even if you forget the bad PR that such a video could do to the country ( and it's tourism), it is still necessary that we figure out a way to fix this problem just so that we reach our homes safely.

A little while ago, Siddharth was talking to me about traffic violations and an idea he had about creating a wall of shame and possibly also enable people to say sorry. And then he stumbled upon Traffic Violators.

Although the idea is novel and I have to congratulate Abhishek Kant for the initiative, the website needs to come a long way before it can really make a change.

For the most part, the people who report the violation probably want to remain anonymous. As much as I want better driving conditions, I would rather not get fire from someone else. I dont understand why I have to create a login to report a violation. If you are going to trace me back, I guess, I would not even report in the first place. Also, Login/Register is a big fallout. When it comes to "citizen initiatives" you have to make it as easy and compelling as possible.

There are about four violations as of now in a corner of the page. If the site is about violations, should that occupy center stage? Also, it is unclear what happens once I report. Do you give an opportunity for the owner to come back and say sorry? What about "cabs" driven by employed people? Most of the "travels" vehicles have a "Do I drive bad" sticker stuck somewhere on the car. Shouldnt it be possible to report that too? Other related information such as what is the kind of vehicle and what is the kind of violation is worth reporting as well. How will the information get disseminated? The more places you are able to see it, the better. I am probably talking about an API or a widget.

Anyways, Cheers! to Abhishek and all others involved and drive safe. Please dont Honk.

Yahoo Maps is now Ajax

2007-12-18T14:20:00.000+05:30

And you wont even notice it. Well, I guess, that was the idea. It is magical how they all have managed to pull this one through. I mean, everything that worked in Flex works exactly the same way in JS? Makes us wanna think, that they initially used flash for the wrong thing, or they had other feature rich ideas initially which they never managed to roll out.

But, I think this is a good way forward. It takes a lot less time to load for sure. ( Still not very ideal, takes about 8 Secs from a good broadband in India). It will begin to work on those Airport Computers that dont have flash installed. The Yahoo Maps Ajax API will start to get some of these benefits. It will begin to grow faster and cooler.

But having said all of that, It still has some distance to cover before I become it's fan. Starting from reducing the number of text boxes to removing unnecessary links like "save to my web".

Kudos to the technical for achieving something close to a marvel. Writing this kind of Javascript and CSS is a painstaking effort for sure.

Google India goes really Local

2007-12-03T21:47:00.001+05:30

Google Local India Sticker
Originally uploaded by shivku.

I was at a watch repair shop at BDA, Complex in Bangalore and I was surprised to see a Google marker stuck on one of the side walls of the small shop. On Closer analysis, It revealed itself as a "Google India Local Maps" sticker that Google possibly has shipped it over to these guys.

So, did the shop owner marked himself on the map (Using My maps) and got the sticker shipped? Very unlikely. I dont think he has used email, let alone maps online. I also tried searching for "Clock repair" and could not find anything useful. Infact, I could not find "BDA complex" in Koramangala, Let alone the "clock work shop" inside it.

So, that just means someone came over and distributed these stickers? That is cheap.

Having said that, the idea rocks. First, They have gone really local. This is as random a shop as it can get. Not the kinds you will find even on yellow pages. Second, this is free physical contextual advertising. Not many people are online in India yet, and not many non-internet ( Newspapers or TV) ads are contextual. Now, things in the physical world that you can relate to on the internet which is (also) contextual, well..that is a killer combo. Precisely what made me come back home and search for "clock works" near my house in Google maps.

BTIS traffic Comes to chennai. And to Yahoo India Maps

2007-11-24T08:51:00.000+05:30

So, You all have heard about this wonderful little company called Mapunity trying to take on the daring problem of Traffic information services which nobody thought was possible to solve in India? If you havent, visit, their Bangalore, Hyderabad and recently, Chennai Traffic information services. Chennai traffic is still in Beta and was released sometime last week. If you are from Chennai and if you find something glaringly wrong (with respect to traffic, that is), make sure you let the guys know.

BTIS has also put out a little mashup with Yahoo India Maps, for Bangalore. If you ever thought the basic maps of BTIS wasnt enough, then you know where to go.

You gotta know this

2007-11-20T07:33:00.001+05:30

TWO BILLIONTH
Originally uploaded by yukesmooks.

The two billionth photo on Flickr. I am sure someone is asking about this in some quiz somewhere.

Walking directions, a first look

2007-11-16T19:57:00.000+05:30

So, the online maps battle is not being fought just between Google and Mapquest. We also have Ask Maps on the hood. (along with MSN and yahoo! and a bunch of others). It surely does not win over the other map services yet, but they seem to be the only ones so far to have "Walking directions". Although (what they have implemented is) no "rocket science" technology wise, We still have to cheer them for first to market.

Walking directions are significantly different from (GMaps's) "Avoid highways", when properly implemented.

Walking doesn't (Infact, shouldnt) need to take care of One ways.
Walking should strictly be the shortest. It needs to avoid every other consideration, how wide the road is, speed limits, How many lanes etc.
It needs to take care of which side of the road to walk and Zebra/pedestrian crossings and subways. I dont think zebra crossings is an easily available information and don't think Ask considers it. For instance, that is not how I cross over from Yahoo's one building to another.
What about (underground) subways? What if the subways have many exits? What about stairs along bridges and ramps? I can just climb up the stairs right? Again, Lack of data.
How can you possibly walk 115 miles? I mean, not unless you are Forrest Gump mindlessly running around. Features need to make (human) sense.

This is a spectacular feature that has been in my mind for a long time. It is nice to see Ask making it happen, but needs to improve. This along with "Cycling" and "public transportation" and a combination of the three should be fantastic.

What do you think?

In seoul for ten days

2007-11-15T20:07:00.000+05:30

Reached like six hours ago. Beautiful place. Awesome weather ( a little chilly, but I like it that way). Amazing people, lovely babes. My only problem, Just no food for me. All the Maggi and Ready to eats that I got is of no use. No microwave in my hotel.

Anyways, As time progresses, I will get introduced the online space of the country with the largest internet penetration. I will try to give a desi view of what is happening on the web in this part of the world. For now, Naver is a very popular search engine and portal. Barring a few services, Neither Google nor Yahoo is all that big here.

The pictures that I take will be here.

An All new Yahoo India Movies

2007-11-06T08:32:00.000+05:30

I am not exactly sure when they released this new looking Yahoo India Movies, but finally , they are thinking about movies and what people do with movies.

The older version used to be service with no real value add to anyone. It had a bunch of images, videos and links and stopped at reviews and comments. With the world talking about web3.0 and mobile2.0 , it was time the site had an overhaul with layout, content and everything.

Yahoo India Movies now tries to give movie showtimes close to about twenty three cities. The show times are apparently from bookmyshow ( which is a pretty good service, btw) with ticketing option coming soon. Now, we are talking business.

The "A-Z index" was pretty interesting. It gives a list of all the movies releasing this year and in the past. I discovered a few movies that I ve never heard of before. "Coming soon" should be pretty handy too, considering Imdb does not do a very good job for Indian movies. Not sure if you are the kinds that sits and reads interviews of random celebrities. If you are, there is a section for you as well. I guess, they will also have some downloadable stuff like ringtones and wallpapers and what not. Not for me. Oh, you can watch trailers too.

Dont expect to see a radical layout change. It is a very usual Yahoo look with a banner ad on top and left with links that says "replay ad"! (Give me a break guys. ).

No feeds either. Wish I could subscribe for "coming soon" movies. Or maybe subscribe to a search criteria (say action movies) in a few theatres.

But there is still one reason why I would never go back to this site. No Search. How am I supposed to see "No smoking" trailer now? Keep clicking the links and hope that I will find it ?

Hyundai i10 is out..

2007-11-05T07:41:00.000+05:30

(Source Hyundai India)

And my temptations to get a car have come back. All is well, the car looks ok, but they have not given out the technical specifications for nuts. All I know is, it probably has a 1.1 L engine. Just registered myself for a test drive. Will tell you how it goes.

Sadak Map

2007-11-05T01:36:00.000+05:30

Considering most of my posts are related to GIS, internet mapping and local anyway, Why not talk about a new entrant in the Indian internet mapping space? Called SadakMap

Sadak Map has "Mark your place" , and then another "ask a question/post a message with a location relevance". I guess it really is about a discussion forum with location specific topics. Mark a point? Well, I can do that on G Maps.

local.google.co.in in google.com

2007-11-05T00:03:00.000+05:30

Was just trying to see where Opus Bangalore where, apparently, this gorgeous subject constantly performs. And found out that Google has integrated results from local.google.co.in. They have also managed to crawl reviews from Burrp. The data set itself hasnt improved much though.

Zero petrol week, Gone for a Toss

2007-11-04T21:33:00.000+05:30

A couple of my friends already asked me about it. Although it is a shameful thing, Big deal, I tried!
Had to give it up on the fourth day for that eighth milestone Tailor I mentioned in the first of this series of posts.

But, that does not mean I have given up on Cycling. She is still my baby and I am still coming to office on her. She also goes with me for all the corner shop related activities.

Anyways, Thanks all for cheering. Maybe it is time you took it over from me! :)

zero petrol week - Day 1

2007-10-29T21:43:00.000+05:30

Trust me, this doesn't seem as easy as it sounds. First day, and I already have a good mind to hell with my bicycle.

Firstly, Too much pollution around. I need to get a mask from somewhere. Second, You have no idea how long distances will take. Fortunately, it is not so much a factor of traffic, but your own being fit. Early in the morning, a trip to my office took around 20 mins. I was very happy because it takes minimum 10 minutes on my motorbike. But then, after the gym in the evening, the same distance took a full half hour.

I was going to go meet Lipi and wish her a safe trip for her sojourn to the US, but then I was only 3/4 the way to the airport in the estimated 40 mins. Lipi, being lipi has to go and check in three hours before her trip. And she asked me to ^&*$ it and go home. Damn!

I have further pain points now. I need to go collect a Jacket for my brother from some God Damned Tailor sitting on the eighth milestone from Silk Board junction. I also need to make another trip to GK Vale in CMH road because the Korean Embassy needs a weirdo 35mmX45mm passport photo of mine before they can issue me a Visa.

hmmm...Life without energy definitely sucks. The only good thing so far? zeropetrolweek.com and zeropetrol.in are both not taken. Yay! Do you think I should start a community around this now?

zero petrol for a week

2007-10-28T21:17:00.001+05:30

zero petrol for a week
Originally uploaded by shivku.

I ve had this on my mind for a long time. A Bicycle. Yesterday, I got my motorbike towed away for putting it in a NO-parking zone. It was a pain finding the bike back especially when I was crunched for time. And I parked there because of intolerable traffic in the first place.

I was also contemplating buying a swift mostly because many people around me started asking me if I was going to buy a car. Sometime during the last week I also read an article about how global oil production has already peaked and gone (sometime in 2006, they claim).

Anyways, the climax of all of this ended up with a bicycle. Now I have another mission to accomplish. Zero petrol until 4th november. Wish me all the best.

Yahoo India Maps, Now with Driving directions

2007-10-24T17:03:00.000+05:30

Yahoo India Maps has just released driving directions for destinations inside of India. Ofcourse, locations in NA and EU work as well. There are a lot of easter eggs hiding all over. Read about it at ycoolthing. Go find your favorite directions here.

Go Anywhere!

Yack Day In Bangalore

2007-10-04T21:01:00.000+05:30

After huge successes a couple of times at the Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale, California and Yahoo, London, Hackday comes over to Bangalore. Hack Days in Yahoo are always a single day love affair with your computer. So, this one happens between October 5th 2007 from about 5 PM to October 6th 5 PM at Taj Residency.

So, If you are one of them who has registered and have an invite, Kindle the hacker head in you and come and show us your genius. You wont be disappointed. Ofcourse, we have lots of stuff happening all through the day to keep you all awake. Food is going to be yum. So are the games and talks. And we also should have some serious music from a sexy band at the end of the day. You should spot me somewhere there with an orange shirt. Pull me over and I will be glad to help you. I will also give a short talk on hacking with, well ofcourse, maps. I may just have a surprise in store for you.

And for those who did not register or did not get an invite..well, hang on here for more updates. You can always hack and post it at Yahoo! Gallery. If it is brilliant enough, someone will take notice.

Someone also managed to make a huge banner (60ft x 20ft) and put it outside our office in inner ring road, Bangalore. Unfortunately, the Wind Gods didnt like it and tore it into pieces in less than 12 hours. I managed to get some bad pics of them here:

Pubstandards Bangalore - I @ 7:00 PM Wed, Sep 26, Pecos

2007-09-25T19:05:00.000+05:30

If you're a Web developer, or have an interest in web and online standards, and you also like booze, then Pub Standards is the place for you. If you don't like booze, but don't mind hanging out in a pub with a fresh lime soda, that's good too.

The plan is to meet at a pub somewhere near Brigade Road, talk about web standards, and current trends on the web, have a few drinks, have a lot of fun and meet new people.

Be there.

For full details, including attendance, visit:
http://upcoming.org/event/268075

India maps on mobile, first look

2007-08-23T00:10:00.000+05:30

Just learnt that MGMaps has added Yahoo India maps support. What that means is now, using mgmaps and selecting Yahoo India maps as the map provider, you have lesser ways of getting lost in India. The default search is still from Google though. I actually didnt know about mgmaps until the Google controversy. But the app is one helluva sweet little thing. Works like a charm.

I was thrilled for a different reason though. I wanted to see how our maps look on a mobile. Sort of a first look for me as well. Aah, looks sweet. I searched all over the place and got my archaic digi cam to take a pic of my phone with our maps (these days, I click only with my phone).

What do you think? Is a mobile map app something that Indians want ?

Drum Jam

2007-08-15T23:51:00.000+05:30

Heard about it from Siddharth. Was an independence day special I guess, went over all the way to Hebbal. The place is called Lumbini Gardens along the shores of Nagavara lake, close to Hebbal flyover, bangalore. Well, Drum jam was not so bad.

Started off as a passive on-looker, I was slowly in the groove and before I realised I was following Roberto's beats with a single congo in my lap. At the least, it was a different experience. Nobody invites me to play drums for free. Was fun. Thanks guys.

Here are a few videos I captured. And one of the fat white women in the middle is vasundhara Das.

Doing all it takes

2007-08-13T23:42:00.000+05:30

The official orkut blog is in portuguese, the official language in Brazil. ( Well, they do have an english version at en.blog.orkut.com).

And now, they got that picture in my front page. Everyone knows that Orkut is most popular in India ( actually, the subcontinent) and Brazil, but I just love the fact that Google has not only accepted the fact, but also is actively pursuing it. Really actively that it is not about videos and features but about making it work on 800x600 resolutions on low bandwidth and on IE5.

Remember the friendster filipino screw up?
Happy Independance day, by the way.

Athena Health is looking for Tech lead, Developers and innovatiors

2007-08-13T13:08:00.000+05:30

A friend of mine at Athena Health is looking to hire smart people with Perl, PHP skills. He says they want tech leads, developers and innovators. The job will be based out of chennai and the company is in an expansion mode with peers from IITs and RECs. Good thinking and problem solving skills is what they are primarily looking for.

If you are one of them or know someone, let me know.

They succumbed too

2007-08-12T16:53:00.000+05:30

Sure, you are welcome to move the blog wherever you want. But giving two line snippets off on the feed and making people click, wait for the page to load to see the post with half the page taken up by stuff that I dont care about...I didnt expect that from you guys.. Very annoying.

Do you know how to play Mafia? Or ping-pong?

2007-08-12T11:51:00.000+05:30

Have you mafia-ed yet? The addictive game that has kept me and a number of my friends busy in their lives? Well, next time there are about more than five of you together (preferably with a few girls - why would you meet up otherwise anyway - ) and dont quite know what to do. Try Mafia.

If you cant read the ton of stuff written in that wiki, listen it out from one of the greatest proponents and players of the game, Ankit.

And ping-pong? No, I am not talking about table tennis. This is again a group game, preferably with five or more people. And this how it goes.

Everybody picks and says a country out loud, just so that group hears it. Now, someone starts off saying "ping".. the next guy in line (or circle or whatever) says "pong" and the next guy says one of the countries picked by the someone in the team (other than his own, that is.). Now, whoever picked that country starts off again with "ping". And it goes on. Simple enough? Two things: Play it fast and confuse people around you. For instance, Mukund (where the %^&* do you write man? ) points at you with a wrong country. And by instincts, you will probably blurt out something when you were not supposed to. The game ends when someone either says something when he/she is not supposed to. Or you say your country, or you say ping instead of pong or viceversa. Ofcourse, you play many such rounds.

Still confused? Call me in one day to your get together, give me food to eat and I will kick start it off for you ..

Gawd, How do people upload to youtube? Sucks. Failed thrice now. Is there a desktop uploader for youtube? I know Google video has one. Guess I will just stick with it.

What is UED ?

2007-08-08T14:18:00.001+05:30

Image used without prior permission from apple.
For illustrative purposes only. All copyrights possibly belong to Apple

Unband at barcamp4

2007-08-07T22:24:00.000+05:30

Some soul captured videos from unband at Barcamp Bangalore a few weeks ago. On the last day, I was at the audi, and two poor souls were jamming to their own beats. I thought I d just walk up and lend my voice. And this is what it turned out to be:

Summer of 69:

Sweet child of mine:

And, ofcourse, smoke on the water:

Thanks, Prashanth, for all those recordings..

ubuntu2mac in one day

2007-08-05T12:48:00.001+05:30

ubuntu2mac
Originally uploaded by shivku.

So, here is something I wasted one full day on. The day I got my laptop, I was eager to make a mac out of my gnome/ubuntu. I got a few of them working. Like the GDM theme, the iconset, the window manager theme, setting up the carousel etc. I would attribute most of my work to this blog entry here. Quite neat and thanks.

Ofcourse, somewhere along, I lost interest. Guess the new gizmo enthusiasm lasted for less than a couple of days. It was about a week for my Nokia N73 and prolly a day for my currently-defunct video Ipod.

The Map is the new satellite

2007-08-02T20:15:00.000+05:30

One of the things cool about satellite imagery is the feel that it gives you of the surface of earth. The ups and downs, rugged terrains, deep blue oceans...satellite imagery have been wonderful in giving you a perspective of earth that only astronauts working in space stations enjoyed. A view of earth sitting on earth was un-imaginable a few years ago.

Now what if you could get the same feel on a political map? The map that was not really photographed from a satellite. Well, that is what Yahoo India maps have tried to capture. Ever wondered how a map of kargil would look embedded with the great himalayas ? Or what about "Bandipur and mudumalai? A lot of geometry and look and feel fixes have gone in too.. So, Did you know that connaught place, new delhi runs anti-clockwise? Or what about the loop overpass that they have been building for ever at airport road, bangalore

Update: The links to connaught place and airport road were incorrect. Just fixed them.

Enjoy. Be sure to tell us how you like it.

Google mashup editor..

2007-07-29T00:39:00.000+05:30

Just got an invite to mashup with Google Mashup editor. Definitely looking promising. More later as I fiddle with it deeper. Looks like Pipes has got some competitor.

Some more updates:
Barcamp bangalore day 1 was boring
I havent spoken yet coz I ran out of time. If I end up going tomorrow, then I will speak.
Check out Mootools and moo.fx. I am checking out too. I felt that I was so biased to YUI that I didnt know there are these other things.
Just installed apache2 on my ubuntu.
Ever thought "du -hs" sucks? Especially when you dunno who is taking up the space? Try gdmap.

Forget all that I have said so far, Go check out babalife.com. Spend sometime. You will be surprised!

MapCruncher, Make your own maps.

2007-07-26T11:34:00.000+05:30

Have you guys seen Microsoft research's Mapcruncher? There are multiple versions of this software that can do multiple things, but the one that caught my eye was this version here that can basically make maps out of the images that you may have. The idea is, you have a map to scale. But that is all you have! You can then crunch this map on to the existing satellite imagery that MS has and then using Mapcruncher.

Load up your map image, then mark a few points on this map with the help of global map that you know. Now, lock them both up and ask Mapcruncher to render the tiles for you. Map crucher then provides you an HTML web kit, that you can just copy over to your web server and then, yes, you are done. As simple as that. Your map is now pannable, zoomable etc. I would have also loved if they managed to go some kinda OCR so that the contents on your map are serachable too.. Too much to ask for, I guess.

Here is a small mashup of the map of India from Yahoo India maps mashed up with Live earth's satellite maps.

As usual, something needs to suck ass with microsoft, so you need ".Net 3.0" before you can get mapcruncher working. Download it from here.

Blink Geo - Digg for geospatial news

2007-07-25T14:24:00.000+05:30

If you have something to do with GIS and want to stay on top of what is happening in this industry, and you also think Digg is too much crap, then BlinkGeo's RSS is what you may want to subscribe to. Basically a Digg style news percolation but dedicated to geo.

Maps, Maps, all the way

2007-07-25T10:58:00.000+05:30

This is probably a right time to sit down and write about how mapping services are going to change your life, especially if you are living in developing or going to develop countries. In a few years, hopefully, this post wont have much relevance. GIS, GPS and LBS would probably already be a part of your life. This post is an Indian outlook to it.

Like I mentioned before, Local seems to be the buzz word in Indian internet industry. People have saturated or will saturate entertainment needs of the indian internet/mobile user. Wallpapers, ringtones, call tunes etc are already the biggest revenue generators for many companies and telcos.

Now infotainment is the in thing. And Maps will be an integral part of this industry. We already know onyomo does maps. Next, there are folks like routeguru and tolmolbol. While Tolmolbol will probably source their maps from Google, Routeguru, which gets it's local and GIS data from Eicher, will probably use Eicher for rendering their maps as well. Routeguru is a very interesting routing service in that they use landmarks along the way to give you routes. Now, that is how Indians are used to driving directions. Burrp is another neatly done local's site, and maps+burrp will be even better. Ilaaka doesnt deserve to be in this list, but what the heck, they show you a map too..from wikimapia.

The folks next in line are property services, of the likes of indiaproperty, 99acres etc. It will be a wonderful addon and a great service to folks looking to rent/buy real estate.

Certain other holiday/travel based sites show you maps too. Check out holidayiq for instance. Cleartrip is almost there with their "small world" service. The map is just too important there to be missing.

What do you think? GIS are here to stay? Or is it still too early to talk about it?

TomTom acquires Teleatlas

2007-07-23T20:52:00.001+05:30

Big news for the GIS folks. TomTom acquires Teleatlas.

Google goes Local in India

2007-07-23T11:45:00.000+05:30

Sometime last friday, I heard about Google's new Local service for India. As expected, they just have two text boxes in there unlike a yahoo, where you would expect links all over the place that will get you to forget what you came to the site for.

Although I am a very critical guy, I would refrain from commenting much because I know the problems one encounters with Local and India. No, it is not technology at all. Local is a solved problem in many other countries. Data is, and there is no easy way out. Hard work and innovation is needed from the data guys if this or any other local portal is going to become useful to the layman.

I just came back from proto.in and clearly, Local is the where the buzz is. A lot of startups trying to get their piece of cake from this potentially large and untapped market opportunity.

Coming back to Google India Local, there are some disconnects. Data that works on Google maps doesnt work on India local. I am sure they are fixing it.

But, a larger thought problem these biggies need to understand is there is a thin line between what a business is and what is not. For instance, the keyword "icici atm" doesnt give me a result, but "icici bank" does. Not fair to expect the end user to know what is "local" enough to be a part of "local". At the look of it, seems like they are sourcing their data from Indiacom (never heard of these guys before) and Infomedia (JustDial is still trying to be a Google/Yahoo all by themselves? ).

Anyways, Thanks Google for the service. Hoping you will get usable content quickly in there somehow.

MineKey

2007-07-22T13:15:00.000+05:30

Folks from Minkey just gave a presentation on the minkey widget at proto.in. Pretty interesting, Sort of similar to adsense/ypn except, the content is organic. Something like a recommendation for the blog reader on other similar content pages..

Check it out at minekey.com

Tyroo..

2007-07-22T12:55:00.000+05:30

I just registered with tyroo, the advertiser/publisher network, very similar to YPN or Adsense. I also hear that Yahoo! India has invested in this company. I just heard them talk at proto.in (where I am sitting right now). I signed up and this is what I get:

"You are just one step away from earning ad revenues. You will receive an email from us within the next 48 hours confirming your successful registration. We take this time to ensure that your payment details have been accurately logged with us. "

C'mon guys!

Speaking at Barcamp @ IIMB on maps & hacks..

2007-07-15T19:44:00.000+05:30

The closest I have come to barcamps was when it was held at the Yahoo office last year in Bangalore. Even in that one, I was busy with something else that I could not really attend it. Although I am hearing mixed opinions on the effectiveness of Barcamps, and more specifically, the ones in India, I want to see it for myself.

Registered for a Talk in the Ajax collective. I will either be speaking about "Hacking with Maps" or "Mapping with hacks". Really, there is a difference. Not sure if it is going to be on 28th ot 29th but for sure, it will be in IIMB.

Incase you are going to be there too..Let me know, I d love to meet up with you..

House for rent..

2007-06-24T23:33:00.000+05:30

We have a house in chennai for rent. spacious three bedroom apartment, two years old, close to kodambakkam railway station, Ornate Ceiling, marbonite designer flooring, two Air conditioners, designer french window with sitout, three restrooms, bath tub, wooden cupboards and wardrobes. For about 17000 a month.

Get a gist of the house here (photos).
Here is the craigslist ad and here is the indiaproperty ad.

Here is the rough area of the apartment (If your blogreader strips off the map, visit the blog) :

Moving to a new place...

2007-05-28T12:03:00.000+05:30

Come June 2nd, I will be out of my current home and single life. My family is joining me and I would be roaming around the streets koramangala (Well, I am doing just that even right now..anyways!). So, next time you are heading over to forum and would like a hot home made cup of filter coffee on the way, give me or my mom a call. We both make good coffee!

I will be here somewhere:

Incidentally, Yahoo India maps has released a new share feature. Go check it out!

Big Adda

2007-05-25T17:05:00.000+05:30

Big Adda, the Reliance invested Social networking initiative, is out on now, on an alpha. Two words from my side:

"Yeah, whatever"

A view you will get only in bangalore!

2007-05-09T12:17:00.001+05:30

A view you will get only in bangalore!
Originally uploaded by shivku.

Took this pic yesterday on my walk to office. There is ANZ round the corner as well, but my Nokia N73 doesnt have a wide angle lens like my eyes.

This is Embassy Golf Links, Along Inner Ring road in Bangalore.

finally.. Moblogging on blogger

2007-05-03T19:45:00.000+05:30

Tada.. I have finally managed to set up my nokia n73 to work with gmail mail servers and blogger's mail interface. So this maiden blog comes straight from my phone. Considering i am posting after such a long time, i guess you guys deserved better. No more crap posts. Promise.

cartosat, up flying and now live.

2007-04-20T03:19:00.000+05:30

Remember CARTOSAT-2 launched early this year ? Well, it seems to be up, flying somewhere above us and even sending back images now. ISRO seems to have released images from this commercially usable satellite.
Image courtesy :ISRO

So, how do you like vidhana soudha and Chinnaswamy cricket stadium side by side? GISindia seems to think that the real exiciting thing is the cost factor. Apparently, these imagery can be twenty times cheaper to buy than the ones at say, Yahoo India maps, which is most likely from IKONOS.

Oh, talking of satellite imagery, did you know that Yahoo India maps has added new satellite imagery for a lot of places in India, very recently? For instance, check out the the lovely Golden temple, Amritsar or maybe the Ganga,Yamuna ( and arguably), saraswati confluence at Allahabad.

Usability: Auto Saving users' work

2007-04-19T17:51:00.000+05:30

I have found many applications ( couple of them from Google) doing auto-save. This is amazing and a very thoughtful move towards better usability. But, though I dont seem to remember where, I was once searching for a "save" button and did not find it. And I realised the site was auto-saving my work and I didnt need to save anything specifically.

Maybe due to legacy, many of us have gotten used to actions like "edit" , and "save". I feel one can actually design a site (and probably an application too) without requiring these. The only concern is, will it actually confuse the users more.

Thinking on those lines, I came up with this small little text box to give the user the assurance that his work is infact saved and he doesnt need to do anything extra. Go ahead! Type in a few characters and see it for yourself. I already know that one cannot click and go back to any part of the typed text and I dont have a solution for that yet. Do you think this is too flashy? Too many things moving? Or is it good ?

Update: Original idea was to paste the javascript here. But blogger is screwing the shit out of me. I dont seem to be able to do that!

iPhone Hello

2007-04-18T21:27:00.001+05:30

How in the world did I miss this ad? Many thanks to Anand to pointing this out!

Hack: All things movies

2007-04-17T18:09:00.000+05:30

I was talking to a friend of mine a little while ago. I was telling her about the movies I had watched over this weekend. I recollect one of them, but the other, I just could not! Just goes to show what I think of the movie I guess.

Immediately, I headed over to my rusting "My Movies" section of IMDb and updated it with these two movies. But, frankly, IMDb is an archaically designed website and I wish folks at Amazon do something about it before some whizkid comes up with something more usable.

So, Conviced that "My Movies" ( Personalization features needs a little ingenuity in their naming. We got "My Yahoo" and "my Web" from Yahoo, "My Maps" from Google and this, "My movies". ) is not what I am looking for, I hunted around to see if there is any usable Movies API out there. The closest I came to is IMDb interfaces. It is definitely a good start, but you need a ton of storage. Plus, I dont exactly understand how they (or me, if I were to use it) intend to keep it up-to-date. Do I need to keep downloading and compiling their data package ? But, if you are really eager to do something with movies, I think it is fair to begin with this.

I did not find anything else worth mentioning. I think this space is completely empty and the movie guys like Yahoo, aol, go etc should come forward and give us something to mashup with.

So, want an idea with Movies? Ofcourse. So, I need a place where I can quickly go type in a couple of words. It then gives me back a list of matching movies. I want to pick a movie out of it. (This is the movie I just watched). Now, as time progresses, You should be able to guess my favorite actor, actress, director, language, genre etc.

Hopefully, you can hook up to your database and give me suggestions on what I should be watching next! ( The puritans will have a problem with privacy, but not a problem for me). This is adding practical value ( I am looking for a term for this, any suggestions?). If you were to stop with just collecting my data, I aint giving you any!

Give me a badge that I can show off on my blog (yeah! ofcourse, I will say that)
Game to do?
Update: Oh, Forgot to tell you these two things:

Saw movie reviewr. Good start. And, found this on blogthings.

Your Movie Buff Quotient: 42%

You are well on your way to becoming a movie buff.
You've seen many of the great films, and you have even probably developed an expertise in a few genres.

Are You a Movie Buff?

Hack: I am feeling lucky..

2007-04-16T13:42:00.000+05:30

Writing a blog is more than writing. It is an art. A way of disseminating valuable information. Although blogging is a lot of fun, the little quirks involved tends to get on to my nerves sometimes. One of those overheads is finding what terms might be alien to your reader and creating link-offs, just in case the reader wants to know a bit more on what you are talking about. But, linking off is at core of the web and it must be harnessed. Web exists because of it's hyper-links.

To create outlinks, this is what I generally do: Go search for that term in Google/Yahoo. Click on a few links and find what is appropriate. And then copy and paste the link over to the term I just blocked. In many cases, I have found the first link just works fine.

In some cases, I just create a link over to wikipedia and type out the query term hoping that the wiki entry will exist. And it does. For instance, for the above wikipedia hyperlink, I just typed "wikipedia.org/wiki/wikipedia" (Seems like this is the web2.0 version of your recursive shell command "man man").

Now, what if I could do the same thing without having to go to either google or type the wiki url? So, the idea is, I block a text and then either click "make wiki url" or "I am feeling lucky" and get done with it. Altough you can write this up as a plugin quite easily for wordpress or typepad, The only way it seems possible for LJ or blogger is Greasemonkey.

What do you think? Do you have time to do this ? Let me know.

Hack: How shakespeare are you?

2007-04-15T16:11:00.000+05:30

Yesterday, I bought Freakonomics from Landmark. The cover they gave me had interesting tid-bits about reading. One that caught my mind was this line "Shakespeare has used 29,000 different words in his plays". I was wondering where I would stand compared to Shakespeare. And the closest I am to writing, is my blog.

So, this is the idea. Create a small embeddable widget that will compute the number of distinct words I have used in my blog and allow me to show it off on my blog. Either as absolute number or by a simple (number_of_my_words/29000)*100 percentage. The widget should be similar in concept to the "feedburner" widget. I already have a design in mind, but dont think have the bandwidth to do it now. If you have some spare time or if you are someone who wants to work on web technologies and dont know where and how to begin, this is a nice one. If you want to get my opinion on how to do it, leave me a comment and I will be happy to help you.

Leveraging India, as India stands up

2007-04-15T15:07:00.000+05:30

This is an inspirational and ingenious talk from Dr. Ashok Jhunjhunwala at a tech talk in Google. More about Dr. Jhunjhunwala and TeNet here.

Until this, I have only heard about him through my friends and colleagues from the IITs. After seeing him talk, I have become his big fan. The line that captured my mind in that talk is "The only way to bring about a change and to chase a big dream is by becoming an entrepreneur". I couldnt agree more.

Creating your own firefox search plugin

2007-04-15T01:36:00.000+05:30

Do you know that it is absolutely easy to create the firefox (and now IE7) sidebar search plugin?

First, read a bit about opensearch.
Next, head over to this page and this page at Mozilla developer center which explains the entire process beautifully. (What we discuss here is true only for FF2 and IE7. There is no search plugin concept in IE6 and for earlier versions of firefox, those two pages will tell you what to do.)

So, you essentially have to create an XML opensearch file. But, ofcourse you dont have a search engine for yourself. So, what to do ? Here is a template that you can use to create your plugin. Save it. And then, Read on.

A few things those pages wont tell you are these:

How do I get a icon like the one Yahoo or Google's in the search bar? You probably have a favicon.ico for your site/blog. If you dont, Use an image creator. My favorite is GIMP. Create a small, 16x16 image with whatever you want inside it. For instance, mine has "S" which is the beginning alphabet in my name. Now, you probably have a jpeg or png image. Head over to the online favicon creator by html-kit. They give you a zip file. Unzip and you will have your favicon ready.

Next, You need to create a base64 version of your .ico file. Head over to this page. Replace the text on the textbox named type: with "image/x-icon", check base64 and then upload the favicon that you just created and click generate. You get the base64 encoded string of your image file. Now, copy that string and paste it between the Image tags in the template file.

Third, make use of the fact that Google does all the hard work in indexing your pages. And that you can ask G to search just within your site by adding "site:yourdomain.com" to the search query.

There are two Url tags in that file. The first one is used for suggesting a query (auto suggestion). Did you realise that from FF2, when you start typing in the search bar, Google or Yahoo ( or most plugins) gives you an autosuggest ?

So, in these URL tags, replace yourdomain.com with your domain. And that is it. You are all set. Publish this XML and hopefully, if someone thinks your blog has a wealth of information, they may install it. For instance, here is a mine!

Need: A central firefox syncer..

2007-04-14T23:25:00.000+05:30

How many times have you installed that same firefox extension once on your laptop, and then on your office desktop and once again on your home box ? Isint that kinda silly? If there was a way to tell firefox that it is, after all, the same "you" and that you the same things when you browse, no matter from where, wouldn't that be cool?

Now, there are many ways to extend this fundamental idea. What if you have the same skin? what about any local bookmarks ? Or, in the extreme case, you want all the tabs you had open when in office, at home(a couple of friends' of mine have done this part a little while ago. I am not sure if it is available for public use yet. Will update once I know) ?

When I get around having some free time, I will code it up and let you guys know about it. Hopefully, you wouldnt need to install that del.icio.us' plugin everywhere you go.

Firing a native event with Javascript..

2007-04-13T17:59:00.000+05:30

Tech post after a really long time. And probably my first real piece of advicing in Javascript. So, take it with a pinch of salt. And tell me if I am writing something incorrect.

Ever wondered if it was possible to simulate a native event from your javascript code? Yes it is! Generally, you would probably have registered for an event and written all the logic in that callback. But sometimes, a need to do execute the same logic arises due to a completely unrelated event. To give you a real example, head over to this view of Yahoo! India maps. If you notice, clicking on any of the "local search element" on the right pane shades the element and also opens the marker. Now, clicking marker does the same thing too.

Instead of writing the code to shade the element all over again on the marker's click callback, what you could do is to fire a click element on the corresponding search element on the right pane.

As you would expect you would have to do this differently in firefox and IE. And it will look something like this:

incallbackfunction() {
var fireOnThis = document.getElementById("yourunrelatedelement");
If(IE) {
var e = document.createEventObject();
fireOnThis.fireEvent("onclick",e);
}
else {
var e = document.createEvent("MouseEvents");
e.initMouseEvent('click',true,true,window,0,0,0,0,0,false,false,false,false,0,null);
fireOnThis.dispatchEvent(e);
}
}

There are too many things to explain, but you should be able to get a hold of what is what with a little bit of search.

Ourcity..with ourcity's map

2007-04-11T23:31:00.000+05:30

Ourcity recently went live with Yahoo India's maps(YIM) a little while ago (3rd april, do be precise). You can view your city's map, click, drag, zoom and all the other things you can do with YIM. You can also search for a location and a few essential services inside the map you are viewing.

So, what do you think?

Real time transpotation status, couresy New york City

2007-04-11T23:10:00.000+05:30

From Dr.Dobb's,

New York State's Department of Transportation has integrated Google Maps with its system for reporting traffic conditions, giving travelers more up-to-date information. The department's Condition Acquisition Reporting System Web product, known as Cars Web, reports information on roadwork, accidents, and closures

Interestingly, this traffic information tool's url reads "carsgoogle" :) Looks like these folks have installed cameras all over the place and give you live (well, almost) pics from them. Quite cool and fairly handy. There are also other layers such as "road work" , "accidents" etc.

So, how long do you think it will be before Bangalore gets it's own live camera for traffic ? 10 years? Well, You can watch it right now at sify's bangalorelive. Enjoy Maadi!

what the beep was that ?

2007-04-10T00:31:00.000+05:30

I was listening to "Boulevard of broken dreams", one of my favorites of Green day on one of the radio stations in bangalore. During the course of the song, Billy Joe Armstrong sings

"Read between the lines..
whatz fucked up and everythings alright"

In a desparate effort to conform to what is plausibly Information and broadcasting ministry's regulations..they had to insert a beep. Unfortunately, I heard the entire god-forsaken word before the beep arrived. I couldnt stop bearing a smile. :)

That got me thinking how they do this entire music censorship! I mean, does someone sit and listen to all the songs waiting for the adult word and insert this beep ? Or, does the censorship board take all the songs that has ever been and run it through some voice recognition system that can insert the beep? Can this system identify Billy Joe Armstrong's fuck and Dave mustaine's and James Hetfield's?

Wow! That must have been the most amazing voice software ever written. AFAIK, even Google is having trouble recognizing people speaking, forget singing

Dont be asshole!

2007-04-05T20:12:00.000+05:30

Google has removed yahoo India maps from it's index. Artifically, forcibly and manually. For a search query such as "yahoo india maps", or "domain:yahoo.com india+maps", I dont think there is any other site more relevant. Secondly, all the blogs that announced Yahoo maps' arrival are very well in it's index. And each one of these blogs have an inlink to in.maps.yahoo.com. Heck, even my pic on flickr is turning up. Googlebot knows how to reach the site then, right?. Not that I say technorati is right, but from what I see there, organically in.maps must atleast be third in the result list.

But that is not what is interesting. I saw in.maps.yahoo.com on google's first search result page yesterday.

Dear Google, Do you know what you mean when you say "Dont be evil?"

Yours truly.

Sumit Misra on the drums

2007-04-03T23:18:00.001+05:30

Check out my friend Sumit jamming on his drums. He claims he plays much better now. And he is already quite good over here. So, I guess he is phenomenal now. Watch out for the hyper paced roll in between. If you like d it, send him a message at sumit underscore misra underscore 3 at hotmail (without the spaces, ofcourse)

Sensex crashes! 1.14 trillion wiped off

2007-04-03T15:58:00.000+05:30

Wanna know Who's Driving the Market up and Down and how?

It was autumn, and the Red Indians on the remote reservation asked their new Chief if the winter was going to be cold or mild. Since he was a Red Indian Chief in a modern society, he had never been taught the old secrets, and when he looked at the sky, he couldn't tell what the weather was going to be. Nevertheless, to be on the safe side, he replied to his tribe that the winter was indeed going to be cold and that the members of the village should collect wood to be prepared.

But also being a practical leader, after several days he got an idea. He went to the phone booth, called the National Weather Service and asked "Is the coming winter going to be cold?"

"It looks like this winter is going to be quite cold indeed" the meteorologist at the weather service responded.

So the Chief went back to his people and told them to collect even more wood in order to be prepared. A week later, he called the National weather Service again. "Is it going to be a very cold winter?"

"Yes," the man at National Weather Service again replied, "It's definitely going to be a very cold winter."

The Chief again went back to his people and ordered them to collect every scrap of wood they could find.

Two weeks later, he called the National Weather Service again. "Are you absolutely sure that the winter is going to be very cold?"

"Absolutely," the man replied. "It's going to be one of the coldest winters ever."

"How can you be so sure?" the Chief asked.

The weatherman replied, "The Red Indians are collecting wood like crazy"

Sivaji, the boss

2007-04-03T13:26:00.000+05:30

I am a big fan of RajniKanth, just like entire Tamilnadu.

Sivaji, probably the most awaited Tamil film ever is coming soon. There is no official word on when, but I hear it is roughly around May 8th. Sivaji's music, scored by isai puyal, A.R Rahman is out of the box now.

Vijay fernando of hummaa.com, just told me you could listen to sivaji's songs, first and completely legally, from hummaa.com. Hummaa, based out of bangalore, has been around for a little while now and it is a Indian film music lovers' paradise. They are basically a streaming music service covering pretty much all indian film music in most major languages.

Check it out if you havent. And it seems to work fine on firefox & linux. Good work guys.

get Zooked in

2007-04-03T11:46:00.000+05:30

This is one long pending post. Zook is a new sms and/or wap based local search service that a good friend of mine and others released a month back or so. Sameer calls it "Mobile answer engine". Pretty funky huh?
There are quite a few reviews about zook all over the web now, and Zook's blog is here. But why keep reading when you can actually try it ? Point your mobile browser to http://zook.in or send in a query like "Zook ringtone" to 3030 in bangalore. (not sure if it works in other citites).

The USP of this product, ofcourse is the way it helps you narrow down on what you are looking for by way of asking a few unintrusive questions. Pretty neat, I should say. My point of contention there is that, zook kinda assumes that most queries have multi meanings. For instance, Zook excels if your query is leading, like "thai". But, most users come from a Google background where they help the search engine find what they want rather than confuse it. If I am really looking for a restaurant, I would explicitly say "thai restaurant, koramangala, bangalore". And for a query like that, Google or any other local search works just as well or sometimes better than Zook.

But, zook could work like a charm for the long tail of (confusing) queries. I guess that is the intent , but I dont think they have that rich data yet. For instance, I know of a very famous coffee shop recommended by "Lonely planet" in colaba, mumbai. Google does a decent job. Zook returns nothing.

I use the wap zook along with seraja for events, which is pretty good. Also, I dont think value added SMS is a viable option given the current state of things. Maybe, more on that later. On the whole, it is a very good start and Sameer is a think tank. Full of ideas all the time. I am sure they will crack it as we go along. He just gave a podcast on podtech with kamla Bhatt. He gives a few interesting data points there. Listen to it here. Or I have also embeded it in this blog post.

Err print what ?

2007-04-01T19:50:00.000+05:30

Sridhar pointed out this, the other day. Go to Google maps. Search for Chennai. Click on "Find business" tab. Search for a business, like pizza. Click on print map. God Bless America.

Interestingly, the map is of some place called coffeyville in Kansas. Do they know folks at chennai drink a lot of coffee ? :)

No, it is just centre of the United states, with whatever zoom level you choose to view the Indian location with!

Google does India, On the mobile

2007-04-01T19:38:00.000+05:30

I am not sure when this got out, but remember Google included tiles for India a little while ago? And do you know they have a downloadable mobile app for maps? Now, they have put them both together. And it is rocking!

You still cant search for anything within India. You would still have to head over to Yahoo maps for that! :) But what strikes me is the clarity of the map when viewed on my Nokia N73. I was to go to a school for an admission for my brother. I just knew it was somewhere in Indiranagar. The "city local on telephone" guys like 080-22222222 and 080-2777777 were both unreachable at that point.
I remembered G had many interesting points of interests on their maps. I just gave it a shot and I was able to find the school in 2 mins!

Again, Rock on google. What are you enabling search ?

So, whatz cool about YIM ?

2007-04-01T18:58:00.000+05:30

I would like YIM to stand for Yahoo! India maps. Unofficially, a couple of us assumed our mission statement to be "Go Anywhere" . So, what is so cool ? Frankly, nothing as of now. Anyways, read on.

Firstly. We cannot find your house. I will be sweetly surprised if we can. We are far away from that. But it will happen.
We dont give you driving directions just as yet. There are a few challenges there.
We do have satellite and hybrid imagery for many popular places.
We are quite comprehensive on mapping data when you consider whole of India. Our search is getting better. You still have to be very explicit and try out a few things before you get a hang of it.
The link of the map you are viewing is always on your browser's address bar. You dont have to do anything special to get a link to the map. Just copy paste it. so, this is roughly where Yahoo is , in Bangalore.

Oh, by the way, there is no reason you should have to visit another destination to search for a non Indian address. If Yahoo! works for that address anywhere on the planet, you can have a look at it right here in India maps. Check out paris or 10, downing st, london here.

Are you used to searching for India by typing in http://wikipedia.org/wiki/India ? Try http://in.maps.yahoo.com/kolkata

You can search for Airport codes. For instance, IXB is baghdogra's airport code. You can get to it this way.

Would you prefer Anna salai, nandanam, Chennai ? Or mount road, nandanam, madras? We love both.

There are a lot more cool things in there waiting to be figured out and a lot is in store. I hope you all have a good time finding your places and like it as we move along.

Yahoo India maps, A Journey began

2007-04-01T10:01:00.000+05:30

It has been a wonderful few past months. Yahoo India maps is a very special product for me. Ever since I joined Yahoo!, in bangalore, I have been wanting to do something for India. I guess it is my way of giving it back to my country. Also, I always believed indians deserved more and better. And my time finally arrived with maps. The levels of passion and interest India maps generated inside of me were unprecedented. At times, I was myself surprised. Sure, I did have my few ups and downs on the way, but who doesnt?

Maps was completely new to me. Now, I understand that it is, to India. Over the period I was with maps, I have learnt up quite a bit about GIS in general, the other open source activities around GIS in India etc. It seems pretty obvious that a large portion of the cake remains uncut. GIS and mapping activities are few and far apart in India. Mostly in research labs of companies trying to come out with GPS devices and in a few graduate institutions. There are a few enthusiast groups. But nothing of the levels of understanding and appreciation that you would see in the US and elsewhere. To say it has been a wonderful learning experience is an understatement.

And as lack of icing on top of this cake, many people, including me, begin to wonder if India really needs GIS and GPS. Havent we rolled down the windows of our cars and found many willing people to give directions? Havent we reached our places without any of these tech supplements? Is technology trying to do too much when we probably dont have tarred roads in most part of the country ? And when a sizable portion of the population dont possess a vehicle? Maybe there are a few corporate requirements for GIS. But, I am mostly a end consumer GIS person. I get convinced that was the case with most other inventions too. When the television came into existance, I am sure people were thinking "Why would I need it?, Am I not happy with the radio? "

In the days to come, according to my gut feel and from what I see around, Local and Yellowpages is going to be big in India. And if it is the case, Maps is going to be a lovely supplement. Maybe, maps will never take the podium in a long time. Here are some of the reasons:

1) we are a decade away from usable end-customer GIS data in India. My mom wouldnt give a damn if she cant find how to go to her bank from her home. For her, it will remain un-usable until we do that.

2) Indians perceive addresses very differently. We dont differentiate between a landmark and a point of interest and an address. I have found many people specifying "Opp. regal cinemas" even in postcards and envelopes.

3) Thanks to colonisation, we have every possible addressing schemes in the world here. I have been trying to write a regex to possibly parse and understand Indian addresses. I have hardly been successful.

4) As most places have local language names, which are proper vocabulary words in that language, it gets hard to understand what the user is trying to say when it gets to english. Road is called "marg" and "galli" and "pathai" and "veedhi" and "salai" and "vazhi", to name a few. To top it, every user prefers a unique spelling to the place. Is it Ahmadabad or Ahmedabad? Thiruvallur is right, so is thiruvellore and tiruvallur!

5) There are zillions of people out there who use public commute. I dont think we are doing any kinda service to them if we are not able to tell them when the next train to his preferred destination will arrive. Or which bus to catch where.

6) Considering there are no road signs and boards telling you what road it is, does it make sense to give directions based on road names? Do all roads have names? Are all roads motorable? Do we know if it is a one way? And if it becomes one way, is there standardized way with which the city corporation disseminates that information? I dont know!

I can go on to write more of these things. But the point being, maps is and will remain a challenge. It is going to be an interesting problem to solve. And when we do solve it well, I am confident people will embrace it. For now, maps will have to be looked upon as a supplement to local and a thing to mashup with.

Back to Yahoo! India maps, we have lots of interesting ideas. And there is no time to do all of them. Very soon, you will be able to mashup with our maps. It will be our honour and pride. And there are a few surprise elements too. We are confident you d love it. I will write another post on what is cool about what we have done in a bit.

Do you have a few suggestions? Let us know. We would love to consider it and possibly implement it.

Presenting in.maps.yahoo.com

2007-03-30T19:13:00.000+05:30

Ladies and Gentlemen, Please welcome the newest member of the Yahoo! India family, Yahoo India Maps.
Even as I would like to write a book on the "making of India maps", for now, I would just recommend you just get there and check it out for yourself.

Got any comments? Flames? Leave me a note. Leaving you with a picture that hopefully captures the mood amongst us and with you!

Interesting Views Favorite Comments

2007-03-27T01:27:00.000+05:30

I wanted to find out what has been my most popular photograph to date. Frankly, I know very little about photography. But, I dont suck at it either. Flickr seemed to tell me about four different categories.

Though I dont have a clue about how they come with "interesting-ness" of a pic, here is my apparently most interesting pic:

This is a view of a tea garden bed taken in Munnar, Kerala, India from a moving vehicle with a Fujifilm FinePix S3100 on 15th of January 2004.

Most people have viewed the thunder thighs of this wonderful lady. I have no idea who this is. I used to have a big obsession for thighs. I am saying that in past tense because, I cant make up my mind on whether I am still interested in them :). It was the time when I had just gotten introduced to Picasa. So, I had tried a few funky things wth it and ended up with this. I think, this female was flaunting hers in san francisco, somewhere around Pier 39, again taken with a Fujifilm FinePix S3100.

My most favorited pic is also the most interesting pic we just saw. So, I thought I will pick the next best: A view of the Magical Golden Gate Bridge, San francisco. I dont have to add much detail about the probably most popular bridge in the world.

Finally, most people had commented about my dumb post about a computer for sale. As most of those comments suggest, I am going to give this off to some foundation that can possibly teach computers to girl kids. It is my contribution to increasing the fairer sex population in the tech industry in India. I am hoping the next gen men engineers in India will have more reasons to come to office.
This was taken with my Nokia N73 cameraphone at my chennai home a few months ago.

So, Do you like these pics ? Find more of my pics here.

Finally,
What are your interesting pics?

Mail Unspuned..

2007-03-27T01:13:00.000+05:30

It is the 200 and odd product question. Which is the best Yahoo service ? A little while ago, I created this list on Amazon Unspun. Flickr is my personal best. Nothing comes close. I also tend to use gmail more because I got my favourite id shivku with them. I also hate messenger for the simple fact that it is so heavy on my computer for nothing.

Anyways, the rest of the world seems to think otherwise. As it stands, Y! Mail beats them all by far. If you still havent voiced your preference, head over to the list and say what you think.

Road Information system by NHAI

2007-03-26T00:41:00.000+05:30

I just came across the RIS project undertaken by the National Highways Authority of India. Frankly, I was sweetly surprised. To give some context, Golden Quadrilateral is probably the largest and the most ambitious infrastructure projects undertaken by the Indian government. It connects the four largest cities of India and has made me proud the couple of times I have driven on it.

But this blog is about the RIS, which apparently has GIS data on these highways. I tried to check it out, but as expected, I was asked to come back with IE. So, more info on what exactly it promises as soon as I check. But, I am pretty certain it is going to be interesting.

From the site:

Road Information System (RIS) is an application having data of highways on Golden Quadrilateral (GQ), North-South (NS) and East-West (EW) corridors of NHDP with features of graphical viewing through GIS technology.
The application provides the information through different modules on various parameters such as NH location details of above corridors, Wayside amenities, Bridge location and details, Corridor Environment related information, Toll plaza location and toll data, Construction contractor details. Over the GIS interface additional thematic and raster maps are available.

More Mandira More..

2007-03-24T20:44:00.000+05:30

As promised earlier, and as predicted earlier, the only real reason to watch world cup now would be Mandira. But, my only worry is, she is getting dumber by the day.

Anyways, here we go from the India Sri lanka match that you want to forget:

Wanted: A TV guide for India

2007-03-22T01:19:00.000+05:30

I just came across Zipazap, which apparently claims to be the first online and mobile TV guide for India. I was thrilled and wanted to check it out. But, sad that they asked me to come back later.

Undeterred, I screwed around a bit to see what is the best we have otherwise. I came across indiatimes TV Guide. Now what the %^&* is that ? If you guys dont have anything better to do, please dont write websites. Anyways, Star seems to have a pretty decent but cluttered site that has all the programming info that one would look for. And then, I headed over to Sun Network. They have an even better site and their schedules are sweeter. Point is, by writing a small screen scraper for these two sites, I would have already covered 25 channels. The same is true with Zee and covers another 10 channels.

Now that we are confident we can create a compelling TV guide, both on mobile and web for about 35 indian channels in about half day this saturday, the only thing I am worried about is, can I get into trouble ? Do you guys think I should just do it anonymously anyways ? Should I call these TV folks and try to explain I am probably driving more users to their channels which is their primary business anyways ?

A more basic question, do you think it is a worthy enough service ?