sp2hari@weblog...

Photolog 6…

sp2hari — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 01:56:21 +0000

A nice pic :) Painted by a very good friend of mine. :)

One month @ Interviewstreet

sp2hari — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:23:31 +0000

One month since I’ve quit IBM.

1 month.. 30 days… 720 hrs…

So, how was the experience as an entrepreneur? How does it feel to work all on my own without a big fat cheque waiting for me on the 1st day of every month? This is my blog and this post is going to be all about me. This is the one place I get to pen down my thoughts. So, you are already warned. Boring content follows. :-)

How does it feel to work without a manager?
To tell the truth, it’s scary. Very scary. You don’t have anyone to assign you tasks. This is what my friends told me when I quit my job
"me: yes, that way, koyaboo will think that I'm the one who works hard and might give me good rating :P (evil) N: lol wht rating??!now only you can rate yourself! thts soo cool!"
And it was at that moment than I realized that I have to rate myself and that’s no good. Even if I work for 24 hours a day, I’m going to rate myself as a lazy guy (because I know that’s what I’m). And that’s going to affect me in the long run.

How was it quitting IBM?
It was one the most difficult decision I’ve taken in my life. I know I can get a job any time I want, but I really loved the team I worked with. Made some very good friends and the whole team was fun loving. :-). They play pranks, steal others stuff and bug them till they threaten to complain to managers, play TT the whole day and call each others by nick names ( of course, I invented the names for everyone :D ). So it was really hard quitting now.. 6 months back, I would’ve been a happiest guy to jump out. :)

So, how many hours I code for interviewstreet everyday?
Hmm, I sleep for around 6 to 8 hours a day. I code for around 6 hours for interviewstreet, read new technology for around 6 hours and the remaining time just somehow vanishes. Maybe I should start time tracking now.

How does it feel to work without getting a salary every month?
Simply nothing. I’ve been working without a salary for more than 4 years in college and it feels great to work on things you like and learn something new every minute. :-)

MVP’s Super 10 :-)

sp2hari — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:50:44 +0000

The summary of the story

startupCount += 10; mentorCount++;

Yes, MVP has announced their new batch of 10 startups. To make things more exciting, they have Indus Khaitan in the team.

Things you might know about indus.
1. Chief Technology Officer of SezWho, a Silicon Valley startup
2. 5 bare minimum things a web startup CTO MUST worry about, at bar camp.

Things you might not know about Indus,
1. Only CTO who can whistle in an open auditorium. http://entrypreneur.blogspot.com/2009/05/xtreme-starups-iim-bangalore.html
2. Had the guts to be an entrepreneur after losing his 8 years savings. :O.

And btw, the real heroes of the day, the 10 startups are.

1. Adscoot
2. EasySquareFeet
3 InterviewStreet
4. Naabo
5. Picsean
6. ReachTax
7. RetailVector
8. RobotsAlive
9. Scopial
10. VeriCAR

A picture is worth 1000 words. So this picture should tell you the real story :) Click on the picture for the bigger image :)

No Related Post

Interviewstreet

sp2hari — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 10:30:03 +0000

Yes, I’ve quit IBM and now the signature in my emails says

Harishankaran Software Developer, Interviewstreet.com

Now that I can post anything I want (not that IBM stopped me writing what I wanted to write :P), let me try to answer a few questions my friends asked, when I told them about my venture.

What triggered you guys [ working in big MNC's like IBM, Amazon ] to quit your job? What more do you ppl want? especially when you are just a 1 year old kid in the industry.

Well, whether you are a year old in the industry (or) 5 years (or) 10 years, if you do not have the passion towards your product, the ‘experience’ makes little sense. It does count to an extent, I agree, but the yardstick I would use to measure an entrepreneur will be his degree of commitment more than anything else! I personally feel, passion coupled with dedicated effort to your product can help you solve any problem that you encounter and that’s what most startups do!. I can’t speak for others but I guess their reason should be on similar lines. I want to learn everything. Probably I’m more ambitious here. Or maybe greedy. Or anything else you might like to call it. But at the end of the day, you have to accept this – you’ll learn lots and lots if you work in a startup and the amount one gets to learn if we start our own venture is awesome and that’s what I find attractive. :)

So does that mean you won’t be worried if you don’t make money of out of this?

Well, actually yes. I don’t think I’ll worry about that. But we are looking somewhere around a million dollars in a couple of years time! ;)

How long are you going to do this?

Three months back I had no idea that I’ll quit from IBM so soon. So, I’m not too sure I can even predict what I might do after three or six months.

Why does your email say “Software Developer” and not “CTO”?

Simple. That’s my job in Interviewstreet. I don’t have 100 people under me to tell them what to code or what should be the next product we release. I’m the designer, developer and tester here. And that’s why it says “Software Developer”

So what have you learnt in Interviewstreet till now?

Well, one thing I’ve learnt and am still learning is to make decisions on the product stack. From small to big decisions. And trust me, it is not so easy.
For example, should we use Git or CVS or SVN? IF Git, then why Git? The point to note there is that it doesn’t matter whether Git is the best SCM available out there. What matters is how much can it leverage your product. How much time will your team spend in learning it if they have to learn that?

Have all the decisions you have made have been perfect?

Of course no. But luckily, most of them worked out well. For example

Jquery or YUI javascript library or script.aculo.us? We use JQuery and we are totally happy about it.
Blueprint or YUI CSS or 960? We use Blueprint. Solves so many CSS troubles.
Git or CVS or SVN? Of course Git. Do I need to explain why?
Cake PHP or Zend or php without any MVC framework? This is where we went terribly wrong. None of us had used MVC frameworks before and we didn’t get the concepts right. We lost a couple of weeks trying to code with MVC model and finally decided to come back to simple PHP.
The important problem with these decisions are that they are costly. Any mistake you make in deciding the software stack is gonna hurt you real bad if it doesn’t suit you and you have to change it after a few months.

Now that you are working for your startup, will you be working 7 days a week? Or even worse, 8 days a week?

No. You have to understand one thing. A startup is not a short sprint, it is a marathon. You need to build an empire, which means you need to run for more than 10 years. And working 20 hours a day is not going to help that. What we have in mind is to work for 5 days a week, 1 day just to learn new technology/skills and a day off. Sounds perfect now, but the difficult part will be forcing ourselves not to work on the 7th day!

You sound like a geek/programmer to me, who likes only to code. Will you be able to manage marketing/business and every other non-technical stuff?

Didn’t I tell you? I want to learn EVERYTHING. I will make my own mistakes and learn from them.

Install multiple firefox extensions

sp2hari — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 16:23:25 +0000

I’m a full time web developer now. Million thanks to Firefox, web development is made much much easier. To make the web development process easier, there are many many extensions.

A few of them I use for my development,

1. Firebug
2. Web Developer
3. ColorZilla
4. MeasureIt
5. ViewSourceChart
6. FireCookie
7. YSlow
8. Delicious.
9. Twitterfox
10. CSS Viewer

One problem I face when I have to work in a new machine or a new user account is installing these extensions. Not that I face this problem everyday, but this is something which is very irritating. One simple solution will be to backup the extensions folder and protect it safely, so that I can use it on any machine I use. Finally, I wrote a simple shell script which does this job.

#!/bin/bash
declare -a EXT LINK

#Let us populate the extension and the link for the extension here

EXT[0]=”ColorZilla”
EXT[1]=”Firebug”
EXT[2]=”WebDeveloper”
EXT[3]=”MeasureIt”
EXT[4]=”ViewSourceChart”
EXT[5]=”CSSViewer”
EXT[6]=”FireCookie”
EXT[7]=”YSlow”
EXT[8]=”SenSEO”
EXT[9]=”Delicious”
EXT[10]=”Twitterfox”

LINK[0]=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/271/addon-271-latest.xpi”
LINK[1]=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/1843/addon-1843-latest.xpi”
LINK[2]=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/60/addon-60-latest.xpi”
LINK[3]=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/539/addon-539-latest.xpi”
LINK[4]=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/655/addon-655-latest.xpi”
LINK[5]=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/2104/addon-2104-latest.xpi”
LINK[6]=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/6683/addon-6683-latest.xpi”
LINK[7]=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/5369/addon-5369-latest.xpi”
LINK[8]=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/file/57302/senseo-0.8.9-fx.xpi”
LINK[9]=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/3615/addon-3615-latest.xpi”
LINK[10]=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/5081/addon-5081-latest.xpi”

if [ ! -d "/tmp/firefoxext-$USER/" ]
then
    echo “Creating directory in tmp”
    mkdir -p “/tmp/firefoxext-$USER/”
fi

i=0
count=${#EXT[@]}
while [ "$i" -lt "$count" ]
do
    echo “Installing ${EXT[i]}”
    filename=`echo ${LINK[i]} | awk -F “/” ‘{print $NF}’`;
    rm -rf “/tmp/firefoxext-$USER/tmp”
    mkdir -p “/tmp/firefoxext-$USER/tmp”

    if [ ! -f "/tmp/firefoxext-$USER/$filename" ]
    then
        echo “Downloading $filename”
        wget –quiet -O “/tmp/firefoxext-$USER/$filename” ${LINK[i]}
    fi

    unzip -qq -d “/tmp/firefoxext-$USER/tmp” “/tmp/firefoxext-$USER/$filename”
    fffolder=`cat “/tmp/firefoxext-$USER/tmp/install.rdf” | grep “em:id” | head -n 1 | awk -F “>” ‘{print $2}’ | awk -F “<" '{print $1}'`

    if [ -z $fffolder ]
    then
        i=`echo $i+1 | bc`;
        continue;
    fi

    for j in `ls -1 "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox"`
    do
        if [ -d "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox/$j" ]
        then
            rm -rf "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox/$j/extensions/$fffolder"
            mkdir -p "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox/$j/extensions/$fffolder"
            cp -r "/tmp/firefoxext-$USER/tmp/"* "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox/$j/extensions/$fffolder"
        fi
    done
    i=`echo $i+1 | bc`;
done

You can download the latest version of this script from here.

Logic : Download the xpi file. Unzip it. Copy it to extensions folder.

Disclaimer: Download and run the above script at your own risk. I have tested it with many cases. Worst case, this will remove all your extensions from all your profiles (OMG) (Happened to me once). Also, I would advice you not to run this script in windows. I haven’t tested it there.

Save Before Save – Gedit Plugin

sp2hari — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:32:05 +0000

A few days back, I got a mail from my friend, saying,

Subject: Versioning in Windows
Hi guys,

Does any one know a software that can version files in windows?
As simple as: There’s a certain folder of files I want to be “version” tracked, I specify the list of folders.
After this, every change I make is time-archived. So later, I can say, how did it look exactly at 3:47 am on Monday, and I get it back.

Any one has seen any s/w that can do this for me today?
Perhaps something like this, but more frequent: http://www.apple.com/timecapsule/backup.html
I remember having one like this within Google for Linux. I have a feeling they built this in the file system from scratch.

Thanks,

I replied to him about some windows software I found after some googling and also found out that there is a file system in Linux which can perform this. But changing the file system of a current system sounded “dangerous” to me. I didn’t explore much into it. I use gedit for almost all development in my machine and started wondering how hard or easy can it be to create a gedit plugin which can do this.

That resulted in the following plugin.

Installation instructions.

1. Download the latest plugin file from here.
2. Extract the files and copy the two files to ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins
3. Open gedit and enable the plugin.
4. For the first time, configure the path where you need the backups to be stored.

TODO
1. This is a 2 hour hack. Gedit plugin’s coding convention standards (if there is anything) is not followed.
2. The time taken to save might increase if there are too many backup files. //TODO for next version.
3. A neat GUI to show the diff and all the saved versions in the backup folder.
4. An option to save diffs or the full text.
5. Format of the filename can be provided as an option to the user.

Hope you like the plugin. Please fill in your feedback as comments to this post.

Gedit Plugin (0)
Gedit (1)

One Year in IBM.

sp2hari — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:49:01 +0000

Completed one year in IBM today. Ironically, I told my manager that I’m going to quit today. :)

I’ve learnt lots and lots in this one year, both technically and non-technically. Nothing much more tell. Rather, I prefer not to say anything in my blog here. :)

Online Programming Contest Calendar.

sp2hari — Tue, 26 May 2009 00:39:17 +0000

Hi all,

I’m very happy to present you Online Programming Contest Calendar (http://www.opccalendar.com/). This is something I wanted to do for Spider in college. All I could finish in college was a simple fetcher from algorithmist.com and topcoder.com. Now, I have everything I wanted to have in this new site. And yes, I hated the algorithmist.com calendar. There was so much I wanted to do for that calendar and the result is http://www.opccalendar.com/.

Some of the cool features I like in this site are.

Long list of services like Twitter, Google Reader, Google Calendar, Google India SMS Channel, Wordpress plugin, Firefox plugin and lots more.
Alerts through Email, Orkut and Facebook are on the way.
Automated parses for most of the common programming contests.
Neat interface.

Things I would like to have in this soon. (Of course, depends on how much time I have to spend on this project)

Accounts for each member, where they can choose the alerts they want to have. (probably Google accounts integration)
Interface for members to add contests on their own.
A simple forum

Any volunteers out there?

There are so many people who helped me in build this site. I guess this is right place to thank them.

Yazhini for helping me with the first prototype of the parser code to fetch from algorithmist.com. Written in C++ and still works cool :) Vivek for helping me with the text context for this website. Sindhu and her friends Sathyajith and Gautam for helping me with the ads. Taggy for giving me webspace in his mediatemple account. Seriously, I should thank this guy for his continuous support with his mediatemple account. Arvind, Vinod and Prasanna for their feedback during each iteration of this site.

Hope this becomes the one and only place which has all the details about programming contest.

How can you help me promote this site?
1. Keep this site url as GTalk status message. That will really help many many people know about this site.
2. Tell your geek friends about this site.

Dictionary attack

sp2hari — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 01:14:38 +0000

This is a tutorial about how to perform a dummy dictionary attack and how web-masters can prevent a dictionary attack.

Wikipedia defines Dictionary attack as,
In cryptanalysis and computer security, a dictionary attack is a technique for defeating a cipher or authentication mechanism by trying to determine its decryption key or passphrase by searching likely possibilities. A dictionary attack uses a brute-force technique of successively trying all the words in an exhaustive list (from a pre-arranged list of values). In contrast with a normal brute force attack, where a large proportion key space is searched systematically, a dictionary attack tries only those possibilities which are most likely to succeed, typically derived from a list of words in a dictionary. Generally, dictionary attacks succeed because many people have a tendency to choose passwords which are short (7 characters or fewer), single words found in dictionaries or simple, easily-predicted variations on words, such as appending a digit.

In this post, I’m going to write a simple code which will send POST requests to the web server and process the response of each request. Before I start, let me tell you that there are many softwares which already do this. Some of them are,

1. Burp Suite
2. John the Ripper

But what’s the fun in using a software and cracking something. :) The fun part is when YOUR code does something. After all, Code is Poetry (Check wordpress.org footer) ;)

For the demo here, I have this login page, which is very similar to my college mail server (or any horde server). The user-name and password for a successful login is “cs10528″ and “remember” respectively. If you provide a valid user-name/password combination, the page will display “Login Successful”. For any other user-name/password combination, the page will display “Login Failed”. So, now all we need is a code which can send POST request to the login page and a dictionary from which we can pick up the probable passwords.

This is the PHP code I’ve written to automate the login process. It reads from the “dict.txt” file and uses that to send the HTTP request. The code is well commented and main login process is done by curl functions. And finally, here is the dict.txt I’ve used for this demo. It has only around 25 words, so that the processing ends sooner. In case you are not comfortable with curl in php, you can see this post, which explains about curl basics.

You can see the whole login process in action here.

So, how can a web-master prevent these automatic logins?

1. Captcha
Adding a captcha prevents almost all the automatic login attempts. But be careful about what kind of captcha you choose. There are quite a few captchas which confuse people and scare them away.

2. Math Puzzles
Instead of images, you can ask the user to enter some simple arithmetic calculations (like what is 10+15). This loads much faster and prevents any confusion.

3. Maintaining the state in server
Store the login access time for each user, and if the time difference is less than 5 seconds, then block the user for next 10 minutes. This needs some more modification in the server side code, with new tables needed to store the login access time data.

Note :
1. The code posted here won’t work for horde. There are cookies and other stuff to be handled in many cases.

And miles to go before I sleep…

sp2hari — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:54:09 +0000

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.

Happy Holi !!!

sp2hari — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:08:04 +0000

No Related Post

FAQ for a startup

sp2hari — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 21:03:48 +0000

I’ve been to Proto.in a month ago. I should have posted this long back. Better late than never.

The event was awesome. The experience and inspiration I got when seeing other startups can’t be described in mere words. The last session of the second day was pretty interesting. People were asked to pool in the questions they had in mind and again people were “forced” to answer them. (If you don’t answer it in 10 seconds, they were bashed by smiley balls).

Here is the list of questions and the answers people had. I started writing this from the first question. So I’m pretty sure this is the comprehensive list.

What made you decide stop thinking about the product and actually start work on the product? What gives you the initial push to quit the current job and work on your idea?

Picked up a date to start working on the idea.
Boozed lots with a group of friends. Got high and decided to quit from current job and start working on the idea.
This comes in automatically.
Did some initial market research, then mailed the friends circle and got initial feedback. The feedback was too good and they started working on it.
One day, just realized that they have to start things at that moment.
They analyzed the web for sometime and his friend wanted someone who can work with Web 2.0. So the moment they formed the team, they started.

How do you spread your product by word of mouth? What are the different means by which you can advertise your product without paying much?

Give the media a story about your product. They are always hungry for news.
Educate people and give free suggestions.
Advertise with give away t-shirts and in autos.
Social networking like orkut, facebook and blogger
Get a widget from tellafriend.com. It mails all their friends in gmail, yahoo and hotmail about your product if they are ready to give their password.
Get involved with NSACOM ( Happens every 2nd Friday in Bangalore). Contact is bangalore@nascom.in
Tell your friends and get review from them. They will tell their friends.
Hang out in local user groups and open coffee clubs. People will know you by person. This works only when the number of customers are small.

How do you hire employees for your startup? What do you do to keep your employees motivated and work with enthusiasm?

Go to good colleges and train them to work on your startup. Initially they won’t charge much. But once they find the team and work interesting and fun, they will join the team.
I had a friend who was working in other company. He explained his idea to his friends who work with him. And those who are interested join the team.
Tell people about your startup in events like proto.in and college technical festivals.
If you have company space, then allow events like barcamps, discussions and other local events to happen in your company. This will give a great publicity for your company.
Have bill boards with puzzles in your company. People who come to visit the company will get impressed.
Go to hackathons and barcamp sessions and talk to them about your product.
Hire a fresher as an intern for a week or two. If he/she is intersted and he is good, hire him/her.
Go to companies that are sinking and get cheap people. :)

When you should quit from your current job?

When you feel you can’t do justice to both your current job and the startup.
When the current job is not able to satisfy yout needs. When you are not happy with the current job.
If for more than a week, everyday morning you feel your job is boring the moment you enter your company.
When you feel that urge to do something so that you do it before others do.
When pay hike and promotions doesn’t excite you anymore.
Save enough money and quit won’t work.
Quit if you don’t find your work challenging and interesting.

No Related Post

Update…

sp2hari — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 20:25:57 +0000

/*
Personal post. Exit here if you don’t know me or if you aren’t interested. Read this at your own risk.
*/

Hi all,

Been a long time since I posted anything here. So many things have been happening around me and as usual, I was caught up with all _personal_ issues. :)

So here I’m. 4 in the morning. Typing whatever that comes to my mind. I’m not a great planner. Till now, I remember planning only about when to get up tomorrow morning. It usually is 8.15 if I have class at 8.30 or 9.00 if I have class at 9.20. And after joining my job, it is 8 if I have a meeting at 9. Or 11 if I have a meeting after lunch. So, what exactly I’m trying to say here is I’m planning something big here.

Hmmm, I’m going to plan what I want to do in the next 3 months. And yeah, it is not by coincidence that I choose 3 months. So here comes my plans or todo’s or whatever you may call them.

Finish InterviewStreet.
Watch all the movies under IMDb Top 250. Yes, all work and no fun makes everyone a dull boy. :)
Become Div 1 in Topcoder. This is here not because this is my ambition or anything. I don’t have any craze for blue. Nor I’m dying for a better topcoder rating. I hate waiting for the system results. I hate waiting and I want to move to Div 1 just for this reason.
Finish reading Lord of the Rings.
Skip lunch only twice a week and should NOT skip all three meals anytime. If you know me, then you must be knowing that there is no question about breakfast. :P
Finish OPCCalendar and make it real good.

Oh god, these look like my resolutions. But trust me, they aren’t.

Software Development Cycle

sp2hari — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 04:26:36 +0000

Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free.
Product is tested. 20 bugs are found.
Programmer fixes 10 of the bugs and explains to the testing department that the other 10 aren’t really bugs.
Testing department finds that five of the fixes didn’t work and discovers 15 new bugs.
Repeat three times steps 3 and 4.
Due to marketing pressure and an extremely premature product announcement based on overly-optimistic programming schedule, the product is released.
Users find 137 new bugs.
Original programmer, having cashed his royalty check, is nowhere to be found.
Newly-assembled programming team fixes almost all of the 137 bugs, but introduce 456 new ones.
Original programmer sends underpaid testing department a postcard from Fiji. Entire testing department quits.
Company is bought in a hostile takeover by competitor using profits from their latest release, which had 783 bugs.
New CEO is brought in by board of directors. He hires a programmer to redo program from scratch.
Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free…

I’m Happy

sp2hari — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 20:03:53 +0000

No, not because it is a new year.

A single chat changes your mood totally. Can’t tell anything more. And yeah…

CONGRATS. :) :) :)

I’m so so so so glad now. :-)

sp2hari@weblog...

Photolog 6…

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Interviewstreet

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Dictionary attack

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And miles to go before I sleep…

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