Gautham's Space
Pains of a Startupper!!
Bus Journey
Feb 14th
I was on my way to my aunt’s gruhapravesham in a bus. After I got into the bus, conductor waited patiently for everyone to onboard the bus and then started issuing tickets from the last seat of the bus in reverse order. I started thinking, why does he start from the last, if someone gets into the bus and goes to the seat where conductor has already issued the ticket, he will have to go all the way back in the end. So it should be better to start from the front.
But then as I started thinking more about it, possible reasons started to surface. May be if he issues from last and someone on boards the bus, he will have to pass the conductor to go into the seat where conductor has already passed. So he will know the number of people who are yet to buy a ticket. If he issues from the front, he will not know how many have seated after he started issuing the ticket and now has to remember seats which were blank when he was issuing the ticket.
Things like these are the ones that only come with experience. Or evolution. So experience counts 
Ubuntu Developer day
Jan 27th
I’m happy that I decided to attend ubuntu developer day and I had few things to learn from the session. The slides which were used have been promised to be put up in this link(still waiting for them).
The most important point I learnt was that cloud computing is not the same as virtualization. Even though the underlying technology is same(cloud can be said as a massive cluster virtualized servers), there is a paradigm shift with how you view both of them. Nick@Canonical made a nice point when he said cloud instances are like objects in object oriented programming. So what exactly does it mean? in cloud computing, you can scale up or down the resources instantaneously so much so that it can be automated. No more manual intervention when you need to scale up the infrastructure. This also means that the website is now better prepared to withstand slashdot effects. And what’s more, you can scale down the infrastructure once the traffic cools down!! I think this is going to make a massive impact on hosting.
I guess the downside is that DoS attacks would prove more financially damaging. I’m not sure if there is a way to tackle it.
Advantages of cloud:
-> Dynamic scaling.
-> Introspection.
-> Storage. (expandibility of storage)
Ubuntu has a very nice feature called ubuntu-init which can be used to instantiate a ubuntu image on Amazon EC2. And puppet for package management and installation. Will explore these more in the near future to implement dynamic scaling and will probably have more to say then.
Another impressive feature of Ubuntu is UEC(Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud). You can use it to run your own private cloud on your own servers. Added advantage is that it offers same API as Amazon AWS so you can seamlessly deploy the same on both. This is a very nice feature for testing with our own testing servers without incurring charges of using AWS(for testing) and easily deploy it into AWS for production.
These were my main learnings from the developer day. Other things like UTouch, plans for the upcoming 11.04, Ubuntu One(App store for Ubuntu) were also touched upon. But my main concentration was on cloud computing.
Happy Moments
Jan 18th
A small message I received from my dear friend Arindam today on facebook. My adventure turns a happy venture due to these
Arindam Mandal: Dude, had an amazing experience today .. Was talking to my schoolmate, who is now currently working at Oracle, but got an offer from Amazon yesterday.. He was sharing his interview prep experiences and was just literally going ga-ga on the geeksforgeeks.org website and how it helped him a lot to crack the interviews. Later I told him that this website is developed by my classmate . He was taken aback and I really felt proud. Just wanted to share this with you. Keep up the good work.
Gautham Ns: hey thank you very much It feels good to know the effort paid off These are the moments which keeps me going forward with my adventure.
Saying it with Charts
Jan 18th
A small presentation I created for a session on presentation using charts in my previous company. Response was mixed as this was of-topic for techies
Handling Images as easy as WordPress in Drupal 7
Dec 16th
I have been using drupal 7 for my new website ppprep.com and its been a positive experience working with drupal so far. The main difference I found between drupal and wordpress is how much unfinished state the drupal is out of the box compared to wordpress. Its easy to develop large and complex websites in drupal but is annoying if you want to use it for casual purposes with minimal setup required. The difference became obvious when I wanted to embed images in my posts for drupal website.
You cannot embed images insite your posts out of box in drupal and you have to go through lot of pain to get it right. After lot of googling, I’m glad I found a solution that works. The module that helped me achieving my goal was media.
1. Download and install the modules media, styles and entity. I have alpha-4 release of styles installed.
2. Installing styles module gave an error for me. This thread helped me solve the issue http://drupal.org/node/984630
3. If you are not using wysiwyg module, I recommend using it for editing purpose, I use Tinymce plugin.
4. I use filtered html text format for entering the data and configured to use Tinymce editor.
5. Configure Tinymce to allow uploading of images. For this purpose, enable the Media Browser plugin of the editor of your choice(Tinymce in my case).
6. After this stage, if you are able to add images but not able to view them on your posts. follow the steps below:
7. Configuaration -> Text Formats -> Filtered HTML -> Configure, allow Enable Converts Media tags to Markup filter. After that, change the filtering order to first limit the HTML tags and then convert the media tags to markup filter.
Now you should be ready to upload and view images, videos and audio with ease to your drupal 7 site.The problem with videos are they are rendered with <video> tag in HTML5. HTML 5 does not provide protection against downloading data so I’m going to have to rely on flash. I’ll probably have something to talk about it later.
Penning down my experiences so far.
Dec 16th
Its been almost 4 months since I started my new journey and its been the time of my life. Lots of learning, ups, downs, changes and all. So I decided that I should pen down my experiences with technology, entrepreneurship mainly for my own use. Will be happy if it helps someone.
So about the stuff I’m going to talk about: Mainly about the technologies and tools I have been using to develop PPPrep.
Operating System: Windows 7 for Dev and Ubuntu 10.04/10.10 for Production( I still do not have test and staging servers)
Technology stack: XAMPP for development and LAMP stack in production.
IDE: Netbeans.
Version Control System: Mercurial (Mainly because its available by default in Netbeans)
Hosting: Amazon AWS, EC2, S3, EBS, CloudFront etc etc. I’m an illiterate in Cloud Computing but I’m learning to deploy my code into AWS considering it a VPS. Probably I will learn more about the power of cloud computing and slowly start harnessing the power it promises to deliver.
Content Management System: Drupal 7
I’m also trying to understand other niceties like Memcache, Varnish, CDN, lucene for search, flash for upload & streaming of videos, WYSIWYG editors like Tinymce, etc.. I will add to the list as and when I find new stuff I start to use.
That is all I can remember now. Hope this serves as a wiki for myself about the stuff I will need to do again and again
My new phone. Worth the cost?
Oct 11th
I bought a Galaxy S phone recently. Though it costed me huge amount of money (31 grand. More than the startup capital of my new initiative 
), I have found some of the paisa vasool uses for the phone.
1. Email via gmail: Gmail works like a dream. I dont have 3G in my area. So internet is rather slow. But Gmail syncs all my mails and access is fast. Sending is a problem sometimes but all in all, a positive experience.
2. Internet browsing. 4″ screen is gorgeous. Internet experience is not bad but can’t be compared with the big screen devices. Still this is the best option for me while on the move.
3. Tethering to my computer: I live in a remote part of India where the only broadband provider is BSNL. There reliability and customer service is something we all know of. So when I’m out of internet, I just plug my phone to my computer for internet. Its not the fastet, but works for my urgent needs and better than nothing.
4. WordPress: The wordpress plugin helps me moderate comments on GeeksforGeeks when Sandeep is on a holiday. Also helps me blog from my phone. Not very pleasant but works.
5. CardioTrainer: Helps me keep tab of my jogging/walking. Very helpful as it tells me distance, speed etc and inspires me not to miss a day.
6. Time Recording: After trying many solutions to keep tab on the number of hours spent on working, this appeared easy to use. Helps me analyze the number of hours I put in everyday and analyze the timings. Very useful as I’m my own boss.
7. gReader Google reader: gReader app syncs my rss feeds from Google reader. I read only Techcrunch. I’m not sure a better app but gReader suits my requirements.
I’m not sure if the money I shelled for my phone is worth the benefits I’m getting, but these are absolutely must for me. I feel alright about my decision to buy Galaxy S.
Meditation – For business reasons.
Oct 3rd
I found this nice article about meditation and how it helps us all.
Functions – Poojas
Sep 11th
Its been festivals since I have been home. Krishna janmastami, ganesha chaturti and a function at home. The decoration for the function took an evening and was fun.
Happy ganesh chaturti to all.
Blogging from my galaxy s
Jul 26th
Smartphones like iphone and android phones have ushered in a new era of mobile working. It looks incredible that i can blog from my mobile, manage bulk of the work through my mobile device. Its nothing short of magic!! i cant wait to explore the world of possibilities through my android device
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