There are many who complain about missing features and existing bugs in Adobe Flash Runtimes – Flash Player and AIR. But some choose to use their energy in improving the platform by using it and providing feedback.

If you believe in bringing the change:

• Download Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta 2 and AIR 2.0 Beta 2,
• Install them
• Help Adobe fix issues and add features by logging issues at https://bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer/

Our feedback matters, as it has always.

As soon as I read, Ted Patrick’s post, I started writing this post.  Please spread the word by writing on your blog and retweating the following text:-

Improve Flash 10.1 & AIR 2.0 via Beta 2 http://bit.ly/cty7Nm READ & RT #Flash #AIR #QUALITY

In India, Apple service doesn’t work well. As far as I know, most of Apple customers in India end up paying more to purchase the same products than someone in USA or other countries.

Why are we treated as second class citizens?

Anyway, the current Apple support process in India seems to be:-

1. Register service-request with Apple India over phone
2. Take your Apple device to nearest apple-authorised service-provider (AASP)
3. Give the case-id given by Apple India Support(in step #1 above) to AASP
4. AASP would run the diagnostic tests, if required, get the parts and fix things.

You might think, that’s a nice process and should work fine?

There are some issues in above process:-

• Apple India might not register your request and can get away by saying your hardware is overused and not covered in warranty anymore. Unless you are confident and technical enough to explain them things. Not everyone can do that.
• Not all cities have any authorised service-providers
• AASP might not be trained enough to deal things as per Apple standards.
• AASP might have broken process within their organisations, i.e. it takes them days to get details/approvals from their own headquarters and bosses.
• AASP might miss a step or two required before they can order the parts. If they do it, later Apple makes their life miserable by asking many questions. Eventually a customer suffers.

My recent experience with Apple support process has not been good.

Apple Macbook Pro (within warranty) Battery Problem

I bought my Macbook Pro in June 2009.

Somewhere in July 2009, I realized battery is not lasting as it should be (for 6 hours) and also machine shuts down instead of going into stand-by.

I registered my complain with Apple India Support. I was suggested to go through various support article and try the various things (battery calibration, resetting smc, pram, etc). They also suggested to take my nearest AASP. Unfortunately at that time, there was no AASP in my city. I couldn’t go to other cities due to my busy schedule.

In November 2009, when I had some free time from work, I wanted to get battery problem fixed. I called Apple India support, explained the problem once again.

The Apple India support agent asked me some questions (cycle-count, full-charge-capacity, current-charge-capacity, etc) and decided upfront that battery is overused and I have to purchase new battery.

I got very upset, hence I had to remind her about July-2009-case-id and told her this problem had been there since I bought the machine. I also told her that battery-cycle-count was 114, still less than 300 (or 500), so device is qualified for battery-replacement. She consulted with her superior and came to realise that I was right. She suggested me to go to AASP, they would place the order for new battery.

Fortunately, by this time there was a AASP in our city, so I took my macbook-pro to them and they did some calculations using numbers shown by system-profiler’s power-section. They assured me that battery is defective and they would place order, and I would get a new one in three-four days time.

Three weeks passed and I didn’t get any battery-replacement, I never got any calls from service-provider to update me what’s going on. I was the one, who kept following up, where I was told, battery was on its way but got stuck due to some forms (state-government requirements).

I called them again, after some days, to know the status. I was told to bring my macbook-pro to them and they would run the diagnostic tests. I asked, what did they do three weeks back? Why they kept saying battery was on its way and would be delivered soon?

They said, they didn’t run the tests and attach report while demanding new battery. Now Apple  is asking all kind of questions to this AASP, why they didn’t run the tests before ordering the parts. Eventually, I am suffering and yet to get the battery after spending so many hours sitting in and visiting service-center.

Apple Cinema (20 inch) monitor, broken LCD

I bought Apple Cinema in 2007 for INR 35,000 and it’s not in warranty anymore. Last month, something knocked the LCD screen and it’s broken internally. I wanted to know how much it would cost to replace the LCD screen.

I called Apple India Support and asked how much it costs to replace the broken-lcd-screen? They told me they can’t provide all that details and I should visit some autorised-service-provider.

I took my Apple cinema to AASP, who assured to give me cost-estimate in two days time. Three weeks passed and no details were given to me. I have been calling them and I was given same reason “we have sent email, but have not received any response”.

I called them again after some days, where I was told the LCD screen would cost around INR 30,000. I asked them to make an official estimate/quotation, they couldn’t do it. I came to know, Apple told them to give me current price of Apple Cinema (20 inches) as cost-estimate. Weird?

Anyway, I brought back my Apple Cinema with broken-lcd-panel. I don’t think I would want to spend INR 30K to get it fixed.

I hope, Apple gets serious about customers in India.

Happy New Year to everyone, hope this year would bring more happiness and success in your personal and professional life. I also hope, a lot of problems in this world would be solved and make everyone (including animals, humans, trees, et al.) life easier and better.

New year (2010) started some ten days back, I am writing this post now? I can say, I have got lazy when it comes to blogging. It’s not that I don’t want to write, perhaps, I think too much before posting anything. There would be at least ten different posts in draft mode, I never posted those because I am not sure, those make any sense.

Anyway, many good things happened last year (2009) including my marriage. I am very hopeful that more good thing would happen in this new year (2010).

Last two years, I have been most inactive in Adobe Flash Platform community and social-media (blogging, etc).  I know, I would bounce back because I love to work on Adobe Flash Platform (specially actionscript), share what I do and help others. We all go through different phases in our life, for me it’s entrepreneurship where I am spending more time on things which would enable us to do great things in future.

Our company is doing very well, we have been focused on many things, specially a different culture, that would enable us to do great things in future, hopefully starting this year. We are happy that we have got very smart and nice individuals in our team, which makes us a great team.

As usual, I am always looking for smart developers (web and flash-platform), who can join us and be part of our journey. We are working on some nice projects and have plans for interesting products, I would surely need more passionate and smart people in my team.

For last many years, I have had new-year resolutions but this year my resolution is to get better at everything I do, that includes my health.

Once again, happy new year to everyone.

Most of us have heard about “Don’t live with broken windows” or “Broken Window Theory” in software world, through books (Pragmatic Programmers by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell) and other sources (wikipedia, blogs, articles, etc).

Like many others, I have also experienced that Broken Window Theory applies to many business and personal-life (and many others) other than software-development.

Over the time I have read books and articles, as listed below to learn more and apply in day to day life. You might following links useful.

• Fixing Broken Windows @ wikipedia
• Don’t Live with Broken Windows
• Broken Windows Theory in Software and Your Personal Life
• Chapter 14: The Ultimate Broken Window – Broken Windows, Broken Business (book)
• How Broken Windows can Kill a Business

I have been thinking to start sharing my experience as an entrepreneur through blog posts.

As someone wise once said, you can’t make everyone happy or completely happy. It’s so true, we all realize sooner or later in our personal and professional life.

The context of this blog post is, how some of changes in an organisation can upset some people, even though changes were done with good intention and bring good results after some time.

It’s just little more than an year, since I moved back to rejoin this company, where I am also co-founder.

First couple of months, I was just focused on doing some projects (as solo contributor), talking to team, helping them, sharing and observing various things around here. In little over three months time, I figured out, all aspects of this organization needed some sort of change.

Team, culture and process were three top most important things, we wanted to start fixing. When I say “fixing”, it means to make things great when things were just good enough. I wanted to have culture, I have experienced in some of the best companies like Macromedia, Yahoo!, etc.

We made a decision to move into a better facility, which is lot better than earlier one. It was critical to do it for all good reasons we know – comfort, productivity, pride, etc.

While in parallel, we were fixing thing other areas – HR, Accounting, Administration, etc.

We started to spend most of our energy on our team and clients. I wanted to have a team of individuals who are smart and passionate, better than me. I wanted a process, which is simple and solid enough to handle complex projects as well as our future products.

Internally, we were trying to help our team to get more organised and focus on right things i.e. the approach instead of just getting things done in any manner. In long term, our success comes from our learning, experience and a great team. If we don’t focus on doing things in right way, we would never learn, hence never achieve one of our visions – a great team together, a great company.

When I look back, I see we are different company now, but there is a long way to go. It’s all getting better with each passing day, however, while “fixing” – people, operating-systems, tools, development-methodology, philosophy, vision and many other things changed – we couldn’t make some people happy.

Had I bootstrapped a company from scratch last year, I would have spent half of my energy which I did “fixing” things in this company. But I learnt a lot of things, which I could have never learnt in total new company. Managing change is tough job, we did in good way, it would be better next time.

I couldn’t keep this post as short as I wanted to, in fact, I had to delete some paragraphs to keep it to this length. I would keep sharing my experiences, perhaps you can relate to some of those.

ISyncSession record validation failure: Value other pushed for enumeration property service on com.apple.contacts.IM is not an allowed value.

If you get above error while synchronising your OSX addressbook with Google Contacts, you might want to remove various IM types (Skype, Google Talk, etc) specified for contacts. OSX AddressBook can only accept “AIM”, “Yahoo”, “Jabber”, “MSN” and “ICQ” as types.

In most common early start-up mistakes, Mark Suster talks about very interesting and insightful points. However, I feel like adding one more point, quite known but often taken granted, more specific to software or web start-ups.

If you are a software or web start-up, it’s really important to use the experience of founders (if they are come from technical background) or your core team to have following in order, as soon as possible.

Guidelines and best-practices: code, documentation (wiki), version-control (branching/tagging – when and how?), bug-tracking, testing (unit-tests, functional-tests), deployment, performance objectives and related stuff.

I would not go crazy (get distracted too much) about these initially but have these in place and encourage(mandatory – certain cases) everyone to contribute, follow, discuss and document. It’s lot easier to adapt things at an earlier stage rather than later.

I strongally recommend you to read Martin Fowler’s article Technical Debt to learn more about the importance of having things in order.

I still remember the day, when Jon Boutelle shared his idea of organizing first BarCamp in India (i.e. New Delhi) and wanted to know, if we (Manish Jethani and I) can connect him to someone at Adobe Noida for venue. Then the first BarCampBangalore, how idea started and how some of us met initially to plan, though I had to drop out just before event due to health reasons.

I must say, I have been fortunate to be part of some of the first events in India, be it Bangalore or Pune.

I really miss events like BarCamp in Kanpur, hence been planning to organize BarCampKanpur, if I can find more like-minded people and collaborate with them. Last year, I sent an email to couple of mailing-lists (including BarCampBangalore) to share the idea and request contacts, if any, who can help us.

Thanks to all those who sent me offline emails and shared the contacts from their connections. I tried to reach out couple of those but it didn’t work out. I couldn’t really follow up a lot.

Today, I decided to create wiki-page for BarCampKanpur and a google-group (mostly for mailing-list purpose for planners and volunteers). Following are the details:

• BarCampKanpur – Wiki
• barcamp-kanpur – Mailing List

I am very positive, we would soon have some volunteers to plan and organize the event. Venue should not be problem, I can manage to get one easily for first event and perhaps later.

Once we have some volunteers, we plan to have some meetup in local cafes or anywhere to talk about things (get to know each other, plan the event, share the responsibilities, etc).

Please spread the word and participate, if you can.

Peter Elst posted his thoughts about ActionScript and where it’s going. I agree with him and prefer to have simplicity we had once with ActionScript and Flash Platform.

I wrote my two-cents as comment to Peter’s post, that’s how it goes:

Nice post.

We have witnessed how Flash Platform evolved over the years, it has got more attention by people but at the same time, it has lost a lot of attention of those attached initially (as Keith said above).

Jeff Raskin, in Humane Interface, said something like that – complex tasks would require complex user-interactions but that’s no excuse to make simple tasks complex.

I believe, that’s what has happened. It’s not any more simpler to do simple things.

Adobe must think why they are doing it and for whom they are doing. If ActionScript is going to be clone of Java or C#, then why a new language – why not just use one of those?

There must be a philosophy behind a language and platform, what is that behind Flash Platform and ActionScript?

I had more fun in old days than now, just enjoyed the company of everyone (designers, developers, trainers, etc). It was because of simplicity that brought all of us together. I agree a lot of bad implementations were result of ease of doing things in Flash, but hey – there were far more good stuff then than now. A lot of innovation, cool stuff and apps to showcase. How much do we have now?

A few days back, Adobe announced Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), which was known as Strobe earlier.

A few minutes back, I received an email confirming that Open Source Media Framework website is up with all the information, specification, developer-documentation, source (Subversion repository), downloads (binary and source) and bug-database.

Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) has an interesting list of features and goals. I like it’s plug-in architecture, that would allow a lot of extensibility and various amazing plug-ins from different providers in coming time.

If you are a developer spending a lot of time developing various work-flows around online media-players (audio, video, images – players), I strongly recommend you to check out Open Source Media Framework (OSMF). I am sure, you would find it worth start using it and also contribute back whatever you can.

Following are the reasons, I am going to use OSMF and give up my existing frameworks:

• It’s open-source
• It would solve core issues (video playback, delivery and workarounds for various limitations in Flash Player, etc)
• It would adopt various standards (playback, cdn, advertising, etc)
• Larger developer base, that means bug fixes and various features would be available very often
• I love open-source and see myself contributing to OSMF in future, beyond my current projects.

Mrinal Wadhwa started a discussion, in Adobe India Community Champions mailing-list, to raise concerns about Adobe India’s role in Flex India community, he raised some good points.

It’s unfortunate to see how one of the Adobe evangelists took it personal and reacted publicly and made some personal attack on Mrinal.

You can check out Mrinal’s post to read what happened.

This is what I posted during discussion in the mailing-list.

My two cents after reading entire thread.

1) Adobe India works differently, the hierarchy and culture is different. More focused one engineering and marketing (to whom – God knows) than anything else. So any such event is aligned with sales and marketing needs. A lot of people who work enjoy their work but beyond that they don’t do much. A lot of them even maintain low-profile for various reasons.

2) Adobe India Evangelist team works differently compared to their counter parts in USA. In India, they report to engineering director of Flex or platforms team, which is not the case in USA, if I am right.

3) Expecting Flex team engineers to participate would be too much, it’s individual’s curiosity/passion to do that. If their managers make it as on objective/gaol, most of them would show up for sake (performance review, appraisal, etc) – we don’t want that. I have been through it and opposed the idea when my manager wanted entire team to do what we (Manish and I) were doing our own, due to our own curiosity.

I have always asked these questions (what Mrinal is asking) to myself and during discussions, but could never really understand. I have learnt that it’s better not to expect much from the Adobe India, it’s not really Adobe USA. Culture comes from top to bottom, and top management is not really anywhere close to what it’s in USA.

I like Evangelists in Adobe India, most of them are passionate and are there because they love technology and what they do. Unfortunately, when you work for a boss who got a different agenda or things, you can’t do much. As said earlier, Evangelist team reports somewhere to engineering director or someone like that, now you can imagine things.

These are some of my random, but based on my observation and experience, thoughts. No offenses meant to anyone.

I am keeping kind of low profile myself in Flex community, I realize community is doing good – there are far more developers than we had couple of years back. I also see there are far more passionate developers than before, you can judge that by seeing some regular names in lists/forums.

I am also sure, there would be far more people who are religious about Flash Platform and one can see tears coming out of their eyes while they talk about technology. As it used to happen with me

Expect the unexpected – the formula for peace of mind. Let’s talk, inpsire and act to spread the words about things we believe in and love. I have been working hard to find a smart Flash Developer for my team, yet to find. I want to contribute in my way, I would love to have people in my team contribute to SDK and other opensource projects, now that’s what I can afford to do now

Thanks

-abdul

I expressed above based on my observation and experience, might not have been put properly as I wrote it quickly. But you might get my point there.

Somtimes Google would lock your IMAP account due to too many authentication tries using wrong password or too many IMAP simultaneous connections. I have not been able to figure out a solution to unlock it.

What I noticed, it gets unlocked after five days, yeah that’s right you would have to use webmail for those days. It’s also important to make sure, your email clients have right passwords otherwise they would keep making requests and getting IMAP locked.

It seems BSNL secretly changed the 3G access-point details around couple of weeks back, so my 3g connection stopped working. I looked over internet to figure out the latest configuration details, I couldn’t locate one.

I talked to BSNL 3G technical guys in Kanpur and to my surprise, most of them were also not aware of the change. Thankfully, one of the guys from BSNL Bangalore office, confirmed the latest access-point details, as shown below:

Access point name: gprsnorth.cellone.in bsnlnet

In case you are wondering, what all other changed, that’s it. JFYI! Old access-point name was gprsnorth3g.bsnlmobile.in, which doesn’t work anymore.

So if you have been unable to use BSNL 3G during last couple of weeks, perhaps new access-point name can work for you.

I am not sure, if there are different access-point name for different parts of country (north, south, east, west)?

I am sharing my experience while finding a good media-server (software that can store, transcode and serves various media formats to devices – computers, mobile, apple-tv, etc).

We all (parents, brother, sister-in-law, sister and myself) stay together, which means we have got more than one TV, various devices (mobile, computers, laptops, etc). We realized, it’s useful to host the media at one central computer.

• Storage
• Wiki – to jot down the links and ideas
• Development and Testing – when we work at/from home
• Media Server (software that serves media to various devices in home)

Most of the requirements (above) are sorted out except the last one “Media Server”. I looked at various options, some of these are listed below:

• TVersity
• PS3MediaServer
• XBMC (as UPNP server)
• Darwin Streaming Server
• VideoLan (VLC) as Server

I found myself more comfortable with TVersity, though it’s not opensource and only runs on Windows, for following reasons

• Ease in administration:
  • anyone in my family can add/remove media using it’s easy to use administration interface.
  • admin tool runs using Adobe Flash Player, has been built using OpenLaszlo framework and executable has been created using Zinc like tool.
• Ease while using:
  • Web based interface for administration – runs on Adobe Flash Player
  • Web based interface for media library
    • Simple HTML
    • Flash based (built using OpenLaszlo) – where media is transcoded and played using Flash Player, awesome, isn’t it?
    • iPhone friendly interface
• Support for Open DLNA and UPNP
• Automatically detects (most of) devices, transcodes and serves media, if required
  • That means, ffdshow and other tools can be used to add subtitle and apply various filters before serving the videos.
• XBMC/Boxee that runs on my macbook and apple-tv worked really well with TVersity

You can find the complete list of features on TVersity website.

So now life is simpler and easier, we all store our media at one place and can see it anytime and on most of our devices. Having web-based access to media makes life easier. I also feel, it’s lot easier to extend web-interface, which I plan to do in sometime.

I would love to post about detailed comparison between various options (media-servers and tools) mentioned above, perhaps in another post, sometime in future. Another post would be there to share how our home network looks like. Hope, I can spend sometime drawing diagrams which would be lot easier to understand.

Running a company in India is not an easy task, not because you don’t know what you are good at. One has to know a lot more to do things – laws, acts and statutory requirements. It’s easy for anyone with just technical background to make mistakes (i.e. unintentionally not being able to follow things) unless one is surrounded by people who are either domain-experts or professionals.

For last one year, I have been spending a lot of time reading about basics of accounting, acts, laws and such things. Thankfully, there are some good resources (listed below) which proved super useful to anyone like me (technical guys with hardly any background in accounting, laws, etc). I am listing some websites (forums) below, which really helped me a lot.

• citehr
• citelegal
• citeops
• caclubindia

Though I missed doing things (programming, development, flash/flex, etc), I love to do, during last one year. But I realize, as an entrepreneur, I would have to learn things sooner or later. I hope, in long term I would feel it was worth spending time (almost an year).

(If you are interested in more resource, keep looking at my delicious bookmarks.)

Anyway, let’s talk about things which are related to the subject of this post.

Towards an attempt to be more organized and productive, we started looking at various software/SaaS options for accounting, HR and Payroll. In a small company like ours, which is located in a city where it’s hard to find many good consultants and professionals in these domains, SaaS might be super useful.

At first, we thought of using and customizing some opensource software like openerp for our requirements. But we know, we don’t have domain experts in these areas (accounting, hr, payroll, etc), hence can not keep changing the software the various compliance and statutory requirements by law/government. On the other hand, the total cost (time, money, etc) of ownership for such things is lot more. We find there is more value to use professional services offered in the form of SaaS . That would allow us to focus on things, we should be i.e. innovating, doing great work, building great team and providing great services to our clients.

We are trying to move to a smart SaaS that helps with our HR and Payroll stuff. I have been playing with following websites that offer SaaS for Indian companies.

• greytip
• evetan

There are other companies but they don’t allow you to quickly signup and check out their services, before you can make a decision.

• i-Admin
• hr2payroll
• humanet
• intelliob (paycare)

I also found one interesting software (windows desktop application), it’s not expensive and actually allows most of things for small companies like ours. The only issue I see, it’s desktop based  and requires windows.

• processweaver

I was expecting Zoho might have payroll solution, it seems they are still working on it (I got a confirmation via email). Zoho seems to have HR (HRM, HRIS) stuff:

• Zoho People

After spending a lot of time during last week checking out and playing with various services/software (some listed above). I realize,  greytip is the most mature, flexible and smart solution but user-interface in greytip can be improved a lot.

On the other hand, evetan (thanks to Swaroop for pointing me to it) seems to have a simple user-interface and workflow. It can be improved a lot too while keeping the simplicity.

Hopefully, I would choose one very soon and start using it for our company. If I get some time, I would love to post a detailed comparison of these SaaS/Software (listed above).