If you subscribe to this blog, you would have noticed there have not been much activity for past few months. So Hello world! Yours truly is still alive, and a bit older and wiser, thanks to the sine wave of life

Where was /me? Somewhere during July, I got this idea of custom domain, a handcrafted stylesheet. And I got lured by tumblr.

World of tumblr

Tumblr was a snap to set up. Simple user dashboard. Great set of themes. Neat post types that categorize your writing and media.

Tumblr has a great community, I found it more focused on arts, photos and general themes (explore tumblr). Tumblr has totally nailed reblog experience. You’d find photos (usually quotations on relationships going fire across community). My blog was at the other end of spectrum, mostly related to technology and so on.

Spam killed my experience. Spammers would create tumblogs and like your post. That would skew the feedback loop with readers. Not cool.

And then my blog had a downtime (or blocked?) for no reason I could understand. They fixed it. But I wrapped and moved on.

I do maintain another blog of mine on tumblr. It mostly focuses on philosophy, spirituality, and other meta thoughts. It blends into tumblr community, and I am liking it there

On to posterous

I liked it. Markdown support for posts. Post by email was great too. I even started refactoring vim-blogit to support posterous. Customer/Developer support at posterous is awesome.

Posterous nails down collaboration and post-anywhere beautifully. They support embedding gists, tweets, scribd documents, so literally anything can be in your post And now they are focusing on Spaces and group blogs, I haven’t played with it.

On a quick glance, I feel exploring new community content could be better in posterous. Honestly I didn’t get a chance to get involved with posterous community a lot, so take my observation with a pinch of salt.

I couldn’t get a theme that was minimalist, yet customizable. I tried creating my theme. But testing it was a pain. The appearance editor could do better in terms of usability, highlighting errors. Gave up.

The other glitch was web-based editor. It is basic, which is ok; but somehow it skewed up formatting of posts. I spent few hours in some cases editing post, saving and looking at website to check the formatting If you’re into posterous, try embedding your code into Github Gists, documents to Scribd and including them in your blog post.

WordPress finally…

This blog started off when wordpress.com was still in beta. Has been with me through the college years, and much part of my professional life. Time to give it the attention it deserves.

And yeah, got the variety themes. A “Just Write” full screen editor. Formatting works. Imported posts from posterous

At this moment, my only goal is to write and share my experiences; with as much less distraction as possible. Let’s see.

If you haven’t watched the video yet, go do it. There are quite a few gems embedded in that inspiring talk. Don’t waste time reading further

Just thinking out aloud… on a possibility of introducing our students to Wikipedia and getting their help in translating content.

Most of our children in State Government schools (India) are taught English as Second Language. And as part of the curriculum, translation of English to First language (native language) and viceversa is a common exercise.

Some data points -

• As per 2009 est. (wikipedia), around 31.1% (~ 362 million) of India’s population is in age group 0-14
• As per 2009-10 DISE report (pdf, page 21), 69.71% of total students in classes I-VIII are enrolled in schools managed by the Government

Can we introduce Wikipedia or similar sources at School? Our students can try to translate it as part of their regular curriculum? With wikipedia, our younger generation will be introduced to the vast reservoir of knowledge. And with translation, we are making information available to a millions of non-english people.

Couple of hurdles I can think of. First, requirement for a computer infrastructure in government schools (infra is something we terribly lack in, check DISE report). Second, the authenticity of translation. We must ensure that the translation is correct. This problem is already being solved by Duolingo.com, by combining multiple translations for the same source, we can obtain an approximately accurate result.

On a related note, WikiBhasa is a nice tool (developed by Microsoft Research India) towards Indic language translation of Wikipedia.

Features

• Minimalistic pomodoro timer (with countdown support)
• Standard short/long pomodoro breaks
• Notifications via modal “take a pause” dialog or gnome-shell taskbar
• Sound notification
• Durations configurable via Shell UI or a json config file

Kudos

Thanks to all our contributors for patches, bugs and feature requests; special thanks to Kamil Prusko, Aman Bhatia for awesome patches.

Screenshots

See the full gallery on Posterous

Let us know your feedback here. Wish you a productive week ahead!

Where to dump the variables/properties?
The Project
task defines an interesting entrypoint called InitialTargets, it is
run before actually building the project (defined in DefaultTargets
attribute). Modify the csproj file to something like:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

<Project ToolsVersion="4.0" InitialTargets="Log" DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <!-- other properties go here.... -->
  <Target Name="Log">
    <Message Text="SearchPath = $(AssemblySearchPaths)"/>
  </Target>
</Project>

That will dump AssemblySearchPaths before your actual project is built.

1: kd> .formats 183616ac 

Evaluate expression:

  Hex:     183616ac

  Decimal: 406197932

  Octal:   03015413254

  Binary:  00011000 00110110 00010110 10101100

  Chars:   .6..

  Time:    Mon Nov 15 14:15:32 1982

  Float:   low 2.35344e-024 high 0

  Double:  2.00688e-315

1: kd> ?183616ac 

Evaluate expression: 406197932 = 183616ac

1: kd> .formats 0n406197932

Evaluate expression:

  Hex:     183616ac

  Decimal: 406197932

  Octal:   03015413254

  Binary:  00011000 00110110 00010110 10101100

  Chars:   .6..

  Time:    Mon Nov 15 14:15:32 1982

  Float:   low 2.35344e-024 high 0

  Double:  2.00688e-315

0nXXX makes XXX treated as decimal number

One useful pattern is creating a test matrix. Outline all the parameters which affect the behavior of a feature. Usually these fall into buckets – a) inputs from user or another component, b) the configuration of environment/ecosystem in which your application runs. Now based on the priority of a particular combination dive deeper into the scenarios by modifying these. Or you could use a pairwise testing tool to do the scenarios generation (nice introduction here). Also consider explicitly mapping the functional requirements to the scenarios.

A test matrix clearly calls out the cases you’re not covering (because of low priority etc.). This coherent presentation of the scenarios will enable anyone with understanding of functionality of this feature to review/contribute to the scenarios (may be trick your Program Manager or Developer to help you with the test scenarios ).

Looking back…

I needed to get into the System again, let the System worry about ideas/projects/tasks. And then my goal should as simple as knocking the tasks off, one by one. My previous attempts to hack on a System were only moderately successful (apart from the few months when I hosted Tracks on my domain). Two lessons from the past -

• Go for the most minimalist yet tweakable user interface. You must know where what is
• Carefully choose the system (GTD et. al), or the system would get too complex, and ultimately take me down with it

Made the jump

Remember the Milk, it is. The biggest other online contender was Toodledo with great many features (per this comparison chart). I do care a lot about how and where my data goes (read encrypted), todoist only provides SSL with premium accounts. No go. Plus with RTM, I loved their usability and the amazing community around. If you haven’t done already, check out their Tips and Tricks blog posts. So far so good

Next, choosing a system. I started with Zen To Done (loved the principles), thanks to ssimon for this nice writeup on implementing ZTD with RTM.

Tweak it up

Here are the RTM mods I’m using:

• User style: Remember the Milk – Keyboard Shortcuts (Smart Add)
• User style: RTM on top -chrome (with some modifications, available here)

And this is how the interface looks currently.

———————–

Read it early this year. Notes seem to be not complete

- “You Punk! If you don’t know how to lose, you will never know how to win. If you don’t know this,
  you shouldn’t be playing” (page 4)

- Building self confidence in others is a huge part of leadership. It comes from providing
  opportunities and challenges for people to do things they never imagined they could do – rewarding
  them after each success in every way possible. (page 5)

- Building self esteem is very pivotal too. Small praises help a lot (page 6)

- The same is true for most business problems. The process helps you get closer to the darker shade of gray. There are rarely black-and-white answers. More often than not, business is smell, feel, and touch as much as or more than numbers. If we wait for the perfect answer, the world will pass us by. (page 18)

- Bosses usually have answers in mind when they hand out questions. They’re just looking for
  confirmation. To set myself apart from the crowd, I thought I had to think bigger than the
  questions posed. I wanted to provide not only an answer, but an unexpected fresh perspective.
  (page 24)

- When people make mistakes, the last thing they need is discipline. It’s time for encouragement and confidence building. The job at this point is to restore self-confidence. I think “piling on” when
  someone is down is one of the worst things any of us can do… Piling on makes leaders lose their
  confidence, panic, and spiral downward into a hole of self-doubt. (page 29)

- If we’re managing good people who are clearly eating themselves up over an error, our job is to
  help through it.. That doesn’t mean you have to take it easy on your star performers… Obviously
  a negative role model act doesn’t play nice on everyone. You can do it with your best – as long as
  they know they’re your best. Using role models always helped me make a point to the larger group
  (page 31)

- The best way to support dreams and stretch is to set apart small ideas with big potential, then
  give people positive role models and the resources to turn small projects into big businesses..
  (re failure in a similar swing for a product that never took off) we made a big point of rewarding
  people in the team. We wanted everyone in the company to know that taking a big swing and missing was ok. (page 31)

- I “kicked”, but also I “hugged” (page 43)

—————

Read the hard copy in 2010. Digitizing them Some notable parts from the book I loved:

- I failed my way to sucess -Thomas Edison
- ..I felt stupid for trying to sell christmas cards in August, so that also ended up being my last
  stop. I went back home trying to think of a business idea that had less seasonality to it.
- Even in school, sometimes it pays to take risks and think outside the box.
- I was given the opportunity to present my case, but I didn’t really have a case because I had no
  idea how the lunch card wound up in my pocket. Instead, I went into the session with the blind
  faith that the right thing would happen as long as I told the truth, so that’s exactly what I did.
  As it turned out, nobody believed me, and I was suspended from school for a day,…
  *sometimes truth alone is not enough, and that presentation of the truth was as important* as the
  truth (page 20)
- I had discovered the beauty of selling products with high average selling prices and high gross
  margins.
- “hubris” in greek is defined as “an exaggerated sense of pride or self confidence” which often led
  to downfall of many a greek hero.
- ..The power of crowdsourcing. (page 26)
- I felt I’d succeeded. I’d won the game of what I was told college was supposed to be all about:
  getting a job that paid as much money as possible…
- But we wanted to run our business and be in control of our own destiny. (Page 36)
- _*Start-Up*_: By the end of first week, it dawned on me that neither of us was actually passionate
  about doing Web design work. We loved the idea of owning and running our own business, but the
  reality ended up being a lot less fun than the fantasy. (Page 37)
- We didn’t know what we wanted to do, but we had learned what we *didn’t* want to do. We didn’t
  want to work for Oracle. We didn’t want to do any more Web design work. We didn’t want to make any more sales calls. And we didn’t want to be bored out of our minds. (Page 38)
- As a thought experiment, I made a list of all things I would do with the money if I had it.. I was
  surprised that my list was so short, and that it was actually difficult for me to add anything
  else to it. With the savings I already had, I already had the ability to buy some of these.
  ….
  I was already helping run a company that I was excited about. It seemed kind of silly to sell a
  company that I was excited about in order to start another company to be excited about.
  ….
  I knew in my heart that, even if we failed, going after the opportunity was the right thing to do.
  It was much more important than owning a condo or loft at the age of twenty-three. Becoming a home owner could wait until later in life.
  ….
  We were still young. We could afford to be bold.
  ….
  “We have decided to turn down their offer.”.. “There will never be another 1997.”.. It was us
  against the world, and we were going to make sure we would win. (Page 44)
  ….
  I remember looking around the room at all the happy faces and thinking to myself, I can’t believe
  this is real… It was about everything that had happened in the past year. It just didn’t seem
  real.
- _*Rapid growth*_: Walking up and down the stairs in our building I wasn’t sure if the people I
  ran into worked for !LinkExchange. At that time, we didn’t think it was a bad thing.. Not
  recognizing people due to our hyper growth fueled the 24/7 adrenaline rush we were feeling. This
  should have been a *warning sign*.
  We should have paid more attention to the company culture. In the first year, we’d hired people who wanted to be part of building something exciting and fun. Without realizing we had built a company culture we enjoyed being part of. Then, as we grew more than 25 people, we made mistake of hiring people who were joining company for other purposes. Good: people we hired were smart and motivated. Bad: many of them were motivated by the prospect of either making lot of money or building their careers and resumes.