Hmm… 199 out of 200 programmers can’t program

We are gearing for the next big hiring campaign, keeping the company small is a dream but in reality you need more people to handle the increasing work (not pressure). Hiring more people is not the right solution but hiring the right people is. Hiring a bad programmer is like having a talented digger on your fast sailing ship, who will keep digging holes on your ship (You know what I mean). Hiring good programmers is as simple as beating Australia in 40 overs (Cricket fever is catching up). One of the best posts a recruiter should read before hiring a programmer, this says it all. Hiring the right programmer is very important for companies like Grmtech, do read Paul Grahams point #6 under his article on “The 18 mistakes that killed startups“.

Know the programming talentosphere,

A list where orkut is used for drug/pic-scam/hate-groups

These days my Posts on orkut are attracting more and more traffic. Orkut was known (introduced) as platform for creating a social circle (supposedly good and healthy ones). For last 3 months (an increasing trend, some of my close acquaintances involved as well) I am hearing various scandals where orkut played an important role. From Photo scandal to hate groups, now the latest Pune drug case.

The Pune Police claim they have evidence that drug parties like this particular one are organised using social networking sites like Orkut and isratrance.com (Israeli Psychedelic Trance Experience). …………… Users began posting their reviews and pictures and more invitations for other drug dos began to pour in till a user named Indiandawg posted the bad news that the Pune party had been busted by the police and all the invitees arrested.

Then came the shock and the anger and users like Cosmic Tandava, phazed, twistedfunkie and N’euroToxic began cautioning fellow members to be more careful when posting invites online

Click here for complete story.

Other Orkut stories

I am sure there are many other cases which I am not aware of (I haven’t put down few latest ones as it is not published in any newspaper).

Should we blame Orkut for it?

I will put my opinion in next post.
Orkut - new den

W3C sets new version of HTML in motion

I have been working on HTML rendering with different browsers, the quirk mode, the standard mode, almost standard mode and related topics. I must accept that these topics are really interesting to dive deep in. Today I have gone through the Microsoft standards, Mozilla and Opera standards and rendering under quirk mode. Now I am checking the rendering speed difference at browser level and other issues involved.

It is really good to hear that W3C has announced the formation of a Working Group of content designers and browser and application developers to put together a specification for a new version of HTML. Hope to see a simpler world with less CSS compatibility errors. This post is also interesting. Also you might like to visit http://www.htmlhelp.com/ for more information on various info. Also another post that caught my attention was, “Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful and The Myth of “HTML-compatible XHTML 1.0 documents”” ( Ian Hickson is a member of the Mozilla.org Browser Standards Compliance QA team and an invited expert in the W3C CSS Working Group )

How to handle over 100 mails a day

The days when you get over 100 mails you need more than 2 hands to reply. I have many email accounts (official and personal) and till some time back I had problems in handling all at the same time. I hated outlook for the complexity it offered me (I am using three computers, one desktop and one Laptop in office, one desktop at home). Configuring outlook every time and exporting the mails was a messy stuff. Moreover I had saved some documents inside mail accounts which was needed during meetings where I was not carrying the laptop. I liked the way Gmail handled my accounts and the simplicity it offered me. I could upload my files and access it easily. I liked its search too. Google made my life even easier with Gmail multiple account handler.

Over 100 emails a day

Even with these features I was finding it difficult to answer all the emails. I tried arranging it with various labels but it did not work for me. At the end of the day checking all folders (labels) was again complex. Sometimes I forgot to answer some important emails because of the overloaded inbox or multiple folder arrangements. The unread mails had higher chances of getting an answer, I used to forget about the read ones.

to reply label

Now I have started using one label (to-reply). If I get an official mail on Sunday eve, instead of adding a task for it I will label it with “to-reply” and forget it for Monday, similarly a personal mail will be labeled “to-reply” during office hours. This allows me to reply at my ease without forgetting the important emails. Now

  1. I handle all my mails using one master account.
  2. I read all mails whenever I want to read and reply with ease.

Other useful resources on mail management

B-School Tag Game/ Blog Tree (Level 0)

Welcome to the B-School Tag Game/ B-School Blog Tree. The complete details are available at http://inferno.aimk.org/bschool-blogtree.html. Let me start the game. It is going to be very nostalgic and fun. I have so much to write, let me start with the first point.

5 things I miss about college

  1. The sleep (both in classroom and in hostel room).
  2. Burning roomy’s undies to kill ants.
  3. The clean, tidy hostel rooms (ha ha ask my roomies). We had all our chairs full of clothes, everything so professionally unorganized.
  4. GP ke parathe, we use to have it at 3 am or 5 am in the morning, breaking the fast before going for sleep.
  5. The Batch, friends and all people. I really really miss the group.

Five things that I do not miss (optional)

  1. The mess food.
  2. The frog music (during the monsoon season).
  3. Surprise exams by Prof Arnab Laha.
  4. Rammstein and the desi 70s music.
  5. Warden Maam’s message.

5 favorite Professors

  1. Arnab Laha (Statistics, data compression, data encryption and digital signal processing).
  2. Debashis Jana – ( OOPs through C++ , Artificial Intelligence) – He is an amazing prolog programmer.
  3. Probal Sengupta – I did my summer project under him (and Mr Annirudha Dasgupta) in alumnus.
  4. Pinaki Mitra (Crytography & Data Security)
  5. AK Halder (Marketing – He motivated me to learn marketing, now with globsyn).

Passing the ball to

  1. Rajesh Rana (MBA-8, AIMK)
  2. Sandhya-Krishnan (XLRI)
  3. Aditya Sanyal (Symbiosis Institute of International Business)
  4. Shailesh Gopale (JBIMS)
  5. Subhash Veeravalli (Jaypee Institute Of Information technolgoy university)
  6. Ravi Mevcha International Institute of Information Technology
  7. Shiju Thomas (IIMB)
  8. Narendra (MBA-9, AIMK)
  9. Rohit Nair (UVCE, Bangalore)

There is a list of other bloggers from various colleges.

Why Wikipedia rules Google SERPs?

At many instances people have asked me this query, “Is Google giving wikipedia some priority in search?”. No, I do not think so (but they can do it easily, look at the coop custom search, it has a manual priority setting too). Search for any keyword, even the commercial keywords and you will find some wikipedia results. At instances you might find even more than one result for wikipedia under a search.

Wiki is ruling the search engine esp Google because of following reasons :-

  1. Incoming links: People love linking to wikipedia. I have not seen any other site which is so link attractive. Wikipedia attracts link. Bloggers love linking to wikipedia for any term. Wikipedia also acts as a dictionary, where people link to explain the work.
  2. Overall Site value: Total Pages indexed (10,600,000 in Google, 49,710,962 in yahoo) + Total backlinks (32,121,814 sitewide links in yahoo, which is close to Yahoo’s backlinks).
  3. Link distribution: Wikipedia gets links to almost all pages and thus it has a good link distribution as well.
  4. Relevant Anchor text: Most of the links comes with relevant anchor text for the pages.
  5. OnPage factors: OnPage factors are strong too (Yahoo still loves this factor).

In short it is very highly SEOptimized.

Meet the Smartest and dumbest Google Blogger

Finally I am back home after spending some 58 hrs in office. Slept for 10 hrs and feeling a little fresher. Google uses blogs as their major communication tool. Google has many official blogs to communicate with its users. There are many Googlers who own a personal blog as well (many of these blogs are not active, see the list below). Also there are few who are ex-employees with a personal blog (see the list below).

Who is the smartest of all these?
Last year at AIMAA meet I talked about creating brands inside brands and took his blog as an example. He has created his own brand being inside Google. His blog is referred everywhere on the web. Everyone seems to love his everything. A post about his cat being sick got him 99 comments. He must have hired one person to handle comments. Yes, I am talking about none other than Matt Cutts. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/.

Meet the dumbest Google Blogger
Jen worked for Google between January 17, 2005 and January 28, 2005. It looks to me that he started the right thing in a wrong way. According to him, “i thought i could make connections to real people in the outside world and get first hand feedback”. Mark Jen is known for being terminated with cause by Google, Inc. for distributing corporate secrets in his personal blog, 99zeros.blogspot.com. Now he blogs at blog.plaxoed.com.

Smartest

VS

Dumbest

Matt cutts Mark Jen

Did Matt cutts learn blogging from Mark’s Mistake? Mark stopped the Google blog in Jan 2005 and Matt Cutts started from July 2005. Enjoy Google and Google blogs

Blogs by Google employees

  1. Adam Bosworth’s Weblog (Adam Bosworth)
  2. Alpie.net (David Alpert)
  3. Beyond Satire (Ellen Spertus)
  4. Bo Cowgill.com (Bo Cowgill)
  5. Brightly Colored Food (Chad Thornton)
  6. Continuations (Christine Davis)
  7. CrazyBob.org (Bob Lee)
  8. Dave Barr’s Journal (Dave Barr)
  9. Doctor Awesome
  10. Douwe Osinga Thinks (Douwe Osinga)
  11. Ego Food (Chris DiBona)
  12. Fury.com (Kevin Fox)
  13. Goldtoe Lemon.Nut (Jason Goldman)
  14. Graham’s Page of Stuph (Graham Waldon)
  15. Hixie’s Natural Log (Ian Hickson)
  16. Joe Beda Eighty Percent.net (Joe Beda)
  17. …that she might be a sufficient reason for young Candide (John Hawkins)
  18. Kimbalina.com (Kimbalina)
  19. Kraneland (David Krane)
  20. Marked for Dearth (Mark Ayzenshtat)
  21. Massless (Chris Wetherell)
  22. Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google and SEO (Matt Cutts)
  23. Natala la la la … (Natala Menezes, also at MSN Spaces)
  24. Nelson’s Weblog (Nelson Minar)
  25. The Oliver Project (Oliver Deighton)
  26. Otaku (Cédric Beust)
  27. Ovidiu Predescu’s Weblog (Ovidiu Predescu)
  28. persistent.info (Mihai Parparita)
  29. Piaw’s Blog (Piaw Na)
  30. Rahrah feminista (Lilly Irani)
  31. Shellen dot com (Jason Shellen)
  32. Shumans.com (Shuman Ghosemajumder)
  33. snarfed.org (Ryan Barrett)
  34. So Many Games (Greg Stein)
  35. Sowbug (Mike Tsao)
  36. The Other Eighty Percent (Chip Turner)
  37. Vedana (Eric Case)
  38. Weschan.com (Wesley Chan)
  39. Xenomachina (Laurence Gonsalves)
  40. xdelta (Josh Macdonald)
  41. Youngpup.net Journal (Aaron Boodman)

Some Ex-Googlers…

  1. Biz Stone, Genius (Biz Stone)
  2. Evhead (Evan Williams) – He was the CEO of pyra labs (Blogger creator)
  3. Mark Jen’s Life @ Plaxo (Mark Jen)

(list collected from blog.outer-court.com anbd other sources), please let me know if you come across other blogs. I will also go through the list once again.

Quote 2: Be good at Plan B

As I mentioned yesterday, I will continue with quote of the day. (Just to add few lines) I am in office for last 48 hrs and will be leaving only after 8 hours. Office has improved with new guest rooms (hot water tub, ACs, Indian Home made food and everything needed), kudos to the CEO and VCs. I am working on few new products like “Simplified Email Blogging”, “Simplified Subscription and redefining Email Blogging”, “Redefining forum communication for non-techy people”.

Back to the quote, “Be good at Plan B”.
An inbuilt feature of any leader. Plan A is what is planned with all analysis and thoughts, which is predicted to do wonders. If Plan A works (as planned) it goes smoothly without a leader but if it fails you certainly needs a leader (and its you and only you). Hey, this is not something new for all of us, right? Let me take an example to explain.

You have called a party and given the contract to the best caterer in the town. Caterer did not turn up, some communication problems (or some other unavoidable circumstances). Plan A fails here and there is no Plan B. Plan B is your instant decision made out of your thoughts (it is not a backup plan). You certainly need to be good at that.

How to be good at Plan B? (7 tips)

  • Rule 1: Failures are a part of life, do smile at it. Be cool headed.
  • Rule 2: Do not play a blame game at this moment.
  • Rule 3: Do not go angry as you need to take a faster but smarter decision, you need a calm head.
  • Rule 4: Do not analyze the failure of plan A. It should be done later, current need is to make (act) Plan B. (My sentence, “Its ok, Its ok, it did not happen, lets see where we are and what we need to do now”)
  • Rule 5: Do not involve a lot of people in discussion at this moment, not everyone is in the same mood for Plan B.
  • Rule 6: Believe in yourself.
  • Rule 7: Take the involved people into confidence with a smile and apology. Trust me, people understand such situations.

Good Day to everyone. Take care

Quote1: Move Forward with possible strength

When we can run , we will run ,
When we can walk , we will walk,
When we can crawl , we will crawl.
But we will not stop moving forward and will not fear failures

Great message, your availably for improvement can make you able for improvement (wow my own thought 🙂 ) do move forward in all possible ways. Many do not move forward as they fear of falling down. Fail, Fall but keep trying and keep moving. I can put the above sentence like this as well,

I did learn crawling before walking,
I did learn walking before running ,
Now I run.
But at all stages I did fall and raise again to move forward.

Enjoy the day. Quote for 1 March 2007. I will keep adding one quote everyday.