Good News Bad News

There has been a lot of activity within Yahoo after the recent earnings announcement and the subsequent internal meetings relating to the layoffs and the like. There was the Worldwide All-Hands by Jerry and Sue and there was a India All-hands by Sharad and Venkat. It was good to listen to these functionaries. There was some straight talk and some positive talk. I liked the positive talk. I came to Yahoo (chosing over Microsoft) because I felt that the company had the potential and intent to do something interesting. So, thinking positive about Yahoo is a natural reaction for me.

I read a lot of blogs and they all trash Yahoo from time to time. I read them and take them with a pinch of slt. Their tone, often I feel, is a result of sentiment rather than facts. And sentiments take time to change and every small positive step Yahoo takes is one step closer to the goal of that positive results. Along the way, the sentiment will also change and momentum will shift for the good.

Recently (last week or so), I read the following positive notes about Yahoo:

• http://venturebeat.com/2008/01/29/att-and-yahoo-reach-agreement-to-vastly-expand-their-alliance/
• http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080129/yahoos-hail-mary-at-ces-in-six-parts/
• http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/23/yahoo-may-offer-drm-free-music-for-free/
  

But, today news about Yahoo doing well in Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) is the icing on the cake for me. :-)

MS -> Yahoo -> Google -> Facebook

Couple of years ago, the Yahoo India outfit was getting badgered and really damaged because of the outflow of engineers to Google. Google in fact was hiring engineers from a lot of companies famous of recruiting good engineers - Microsoft, Trilogy, Amazon, Yahoo to name a few. At that time, it seemed that the only place there was anything getting done was Google.

Then sometime back, I heard some of my colleagues at Ugenie talk about how Google's amazing run will last only till a certain point of time after which they become yet another company. In fact, the company which spoils the party might do to Google, what Google did to Yahoo and others. In June'07, I read this post on Paul Kedrosky's Infection Greed blog about a Googler who left for Facebook and made the following comments about Facebook:

"That company that shows up once in a very long while -- the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago. That company where large numbers of stunningly-brilliant people congregate and feed off each other's genius. That company that's doing with 60 engineers what teams of 600 can't pull off. That company that's on the cusp of Changing The World, that's still small enough where each employee has a huge impact on the organization, where you think about working now and again, and where you know you'll kick yourself in three years if you don't jump on the bandwagon now, even after someone had told you that it was rolling toward the promised land."

I was still thinking this was a one off incident before I read today of the recruitment war between Facebook and Google going on in Stanford. Has the time come for Google to be disrupted? Is it going to be Facebook? Shortly, we should all be able to see.

OpenId and Yahoo cutting down workforce

We are living in interesting times. I know it sounds cliched and it will probably be repeated every year. But the news of both Yahoo and Google opening up as OpenID providers is huge. It literally means that you never have to bother about remembering any other password except your Google/Yahoo passwords. Great to know.

I admit that I knew of Yahoo's plans a little before it was publicly announced as I had been to a tech talk that showed how the whole thing is gonna work. It was quite amazing since Yahoo thought through some of the obvious issues with OpenID - specifically context-specific spam and allowed a different Yahoo ID than your mail id to be your OpenID URL. I love this part.

Secondly, openid.yahoo.com is supposed to be in beta and being an Y! employee, I am on their whitelist. I tried it out and loved it. Firstly for the functionality and ability to easily login to any site supporting openID and secondly, the amount of messaging they are doing to help new users who may not understand openID.

My morning blog reading led me to some unhappy news about Yahoo possibly cutting down 20% of its workforce. There is no official news yet. In fact, there are no rumours yet also. Maybe, me being in Bangalore will hear it later than the guys at Sunnyvale. Anyhow, am I afraid of losing my job? Not much, and indeed the general morale is good and everybody is carrying on with their work. Good for all of us.

Starting Up? Think of a name

For any person or team, putting together a name for a project or a company is an extremely tough task. There are various considerations involved - Will it be a good brand name? Will it stick? What about trademarks? What about URL?

I have found myself in the midst of a bunch of these processes and just found it almost impossible to find reasonably good names. First, my first employer rechristened itself from Wibhu technologies to AirTight Networks after our investors wanted a industry acceptable American sounding name as against an Indian sounding Wibhu. Interestingly Wibhu had a deep philosophical meaning, it being short for "Wi Bhu" with Wi standing for wireless and Bhu being Sanskrit for Earth. They aimed at building a wireless earth. I still love the old name and hate the fact that I am a shareholder of "AirTight Networks" and not "Wibhu".

A few months later, when me and Shanky put together the plan for a customer-oriented mobile bill optimizer, coming up with a name was a challenge, but I am guessing it was Shanky who put together the name of "YourBillBuddy" with which it was launched and is still on.

Moving on, Ugenie also had a significant inner meaning with Genie depicting somebody who would fulfil your (shopping) desires and U being the new focus as against "I" and "My". More recently at Y, we had to find a new name for a different flavor of our product - PacMan and it was yet another exercise all over.

All said and done, finding a reasonable name remains a tough task. Tom White explains how Hadoop got its name from a kid and his preferences over names. John Catherino tells us how he named cojo. Rich Skrenta recently blogged about he came up with the name Blekko for his recent start up. So, if you are starting something up, worth going through these reads to give you some pointers.

Setting up a Home server

Setting up a home server out of your desktop given a static ip is a relatively easy task. Whats normally tougher is to do it without such a facility from your ISP. My ISP, BSNL does not give me a static IP on the plan which I have taken, which is Home UL Plus.

I still wanted to tinker around to get an external face to my new proud acquisition - a desktop. My colleague, Arup, did point me to dyndns.com, which provides a facility to wire together your dynamic ip to a static domain free of cost. Well, if you are lucky enough, it should work.

For me, unfortunately, I also have a Netgear WGR614v7 Wireless router installed at my home which connects to the Modem. Firstly, the modem, UT Starcom UT 300 R2U is hardly the kind of modem which allows for port forwarding. It does have av Virtual Server section, but I couldn't get it to work. More so, I was not sure how modem+router will behave.

Just when I had spent almost the whole evening to get it to work, I hit upon this page, which hit the bulls eye - to use the modem in bridge mode and let your router acquire the IP address. Not just did this work, but my Netgear router also has automatic integration with DynDns. So, updating the IP to the DynDNS server also became a non starter for me.

The final output is http://iyer.homelinux.net which is my new face to the internet. I don't have current plans on how to use this, but I am guessing some interesting things will come up.....

ps: I realize that even with my 600 VA UPS, I can't keep the server up and running in the face of constant threats from the power guys....

My Proud Acquisition

I am sorry for not blogging for so long now. I was busy acquiring and setting up my new Desktop. Before reciting a bit about that, let me go down memory lane and tell you about the first computer I owned.

Back in late 1996, when I had entered 11th standard in the Non medical computer science stream, my father bought a second hand computer at throw-away prices to fulfill his ambition of being a computer savvy banker. He worked at Punjab National Bank all his life and its not one of those tech-savvy organizations, but he always admired the potential in computers and wanted to try it out. He wanted to primarily use the desktop to type out the long EO/PO reports he was working on. He had checked out Wordstar earlier and this machine was meant to do that.

Do the first laptop was actually a 20 MHz Intel 80286 with 640 KB RAM with 40 MB HDD. It could run nothing more than DOS 5.0. 1996 was already a time when Pentium processor was out which could work at 133 MHz. It was a rather outdated beginning to my compute power, but was good enough to get a C compiler running and I was off trying to work out my C programs on it.

A few months later, he managed to acquire a second throw-away computer (and I am guessing this time it was free). This time it was a 80386 40 Hz process with, hold-your-breadth, 2 MB of RAM and an awesome 200 MB of disk. It could run DOS 6.22 comfortably and with some creative help, I even managed to get Windows 3.0 running on that machine. It was a great victory for me and my constant desire for compute power.

I finally managed to finish school in 1998 and ended up in SGTB Khalsa College as a BCA student. Since I was studying computers, I wanted a little more than the 80386 I got, which by that time started looking like a Museum piece by then.

Finally in 1999, with a loan supported by my father and the earnings from the tuitions I was giving out, I ended up acquiring my first "new" computer. This time it was a AMD Athlon 350 Hz processor with 64 MB of RAM and 8 GB of disk. It also brought along a 33.6 Kbps modem which was used to connect to the then prevalent VSNL internet service. This was certainly exciting as this machine, was pretty much contemporary by 1999 standards and could almost do anything I desired out of it.

As of the modern day, last week, I acquired a Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz machine with 2 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD. With a 256 Kbps Broadband connection, DVD writer and a Ubuntu installation, it completes all the requirements I have of it. I am proud to have acquired it.

I am also proud to have been an active part of the Moore's evolution. :-)