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

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)?

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.

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).

• webyantra.net
• yourstory.in
• nenonline.org
• startupdunia
• india.smetoolkit.org

I have more sites bookmarked in my delicious, but I want to create a list and put it here just for an exercise. It seems due to productivity tools, I hardly remember website URLs or names. So keep watching this space, you might find more links over the time.

We are a design and development company in Kanpur, though we are small but we are ambitious and have a great vision.

I posted the details on Flex-India sometimes back, pasting the same (edited the typos and formatted) over here:-

I have been meaning to post this for sometime but thought would it be appropriate to do that here?

I am part of a small design and development shop in Kanpur, U.P. Where, we mostly do web development using FOSS, mainly LAMP.

I moved to kanpur around 10 months back with a desire to build a great Flash Platform Team that would work on non-trivial type service projects and some great product ideas.

I could now start doing it, after we have managed to fix a lot of issues mostly a nice office, a good culture and some projects and a product in pipeline.

I need an experienced Flash Platform developer in my team, who can help us to make our vision, desire and dreams a reality.

Since Kanpur is not a metro or fancy place to live, it takes more than just technical aptitude to be here. That is some more strong reason f.ex. A desire to be part of a growing team, desire to be close to family, desire to contribute in the development of IT ecosystem in North and/or a desire to prove, hell yeah we can do great stuff from anywhere, even cities like Kanpur

If you think, you want to help me by being part of my team and understand what I meant above, please don’t hesitate to contact me on [abdul dot qabiz at gmail dot com] off-list i.e. Direct email to me, please don’t reply here on this list.

As far as job description goes, I have already given an idea. However, we are looking for someone who understands web very well that is HTTP and other standards. Fundamentally good at problem solving, the real world ones, ActionScript, Flex Framework, Adobe Flash Player and AIR fundamentals and APIs.

Of course, good experience that says about in your behalf. We would also talk to you so things would get clear, i.e. If we are match for each other.

If you want to know more about company, please check out http://www.alliesinteractive.com

Existing posts and comments were easily migrated i.e. export from MovableType and import in Wordpress, that’s all. The challenging part was retaining permalinks of posts published using MovableType. I didn’t have to do anything for monthly-archives beacuse the url-format being used in MovableType was exactly same I chose for WordPress so I just removed old directories  (created by MovableType).

Category and individual archives’ permalinks were taken care by putting some code on top of MovableType templates for those archives. So request still goes to old archive pages, where code on top constructs the new wordpress page URLs and redirects there. Which means I am going to maintain old MovableType installation (at least php pages) until I figure out other way. This bit is tricky because MovableType generated filenames (permalinks) in very inconsistent manner, perhaps due to configuration issues back then.

Feed permalinks were taken care by simple rewrite rules in .htacces. Over the time, I would be fixing the look and feel of the blog and other minor issues (line-breaks and all that). Please let me know, if you find any broken links (from your bookmarks) on this blog or any other things. I would appreciate that.

I could share the code and .htaccess stuff here, but it’s not really very clean. I would do it once I am done figuring out a better of doing category and individual archives’ permalinks handling. However, if you really want to see the stuff, please leave a comment and I would send you whatever I have

Infibeam is shipping free anywhere in India, that’s another good thing.

I have been buying books from Infibeam for sometime, so far experience has been good except one particular instance.

I ordered a book, everything went well and I was told within one or two week, book would be shipped. After waiting for a week or so, I get an email from Infibeam that since book is out of stock, they would not be able to ship it. I exchanged couple of emails with their staff, asking the reasons and how it should be – if you confirmed the order, you should deliver the book, otherwise you might loose some customers.

BTW! It has been more than a month, I believe, they are yet to refund the money for the order they could not complete

Having said all (positive and negative experience), I feel, overall, it looks good to me. That one instance is out of 10, so I am going to continue trying them

I loved the move when, recently, Flash Platform was redefined. It brought a lot of clarity and removed the confusion built since Adobe (Macromedia) Flex was introduced.

A lot of people were confused and didn’t really think that even though there were different development paradigm but all targeted to Flash Runtime(s). I have been using the term for sometime, even before Adobe redefined it to bring all these different technologies/tools, which targeted Flash Runtimes (Player, AIR, FlashLite), under it.

I think, sooner or later Flex SDK should be renamed so no such confusion develops further. Having consistency increases simplicity and clarity in understanding things, developing, learning, talking and building brand.

It would be nice to have one framework with many sub-frameworks targeting various different Flash Runtimes and development tools (Adobe Flash Authoring tool, Adobe Flash Builder, etc). We need consistency that leads to shorter learning curve and better development platform, eventually.

Technorati Tags: Adobe+Flash+Builder, Adobe+Flex+Builder, brand, Adobe, Flash

I am sure, you must have heard about last BugQuash which was organized last month, by Flex community members: Nate Beck and Marty Mickelson.

Hundreds of community members participated including me.

I submitted some patches, which are not big ones, but I got a lot of appreciation from teams within Adobe and other people from community. It suggests that even small contributions matter, hence I should be contributing more often.

Dave Story (VP Developer Tools, Adobe Systems) sent some pictures from one of the all-hands meeting, where BugQuash was discussed, where entire team, along with Dave, thanked to each contributor for their contributions over phone.

Thanks to everyone who organized and participated. It helped me to get started contributing, which I always wanted to do. I am going to try to contribute as often as I can.

Update:Next BugQuash is happening on May 17, 2009. Check out BugQuash for more details.
Update: BugQuash on May 17, 2009 was successful and your truely submitted two patches

Technorati Tags: bugquash, flex, opensource

I requested a friend in USA to buy it for me, he has been trying to do that but it seems Adobe store application, which is done in Flex, throws a lot of errors. A few things, which I have reported in past, like asking for exact address (line by line). In this case, I guess, store application requires the address even when you choose Paypal as payment option?

I don’t have exact details in hand now, but I can see my friend has been having trouble buying Flash CS4 on Adobe store. I know this friend of mine, he is a developer himself and very good at things, so I know,he is doing right, I would rather say, store-application is not done well. He has recently helped me getting a FlexBuilder 3 upgrade license and he had problems even then. It took two days and various attempts, perhaps a phone call also, to get that license.

No wonder, why people blame Flash Platform for lack of usability and accessibility, most of the times it’s the developers who don’t implement things correctly and platform gets a bad name.

I have also started feeling, why can’t stores have multiple options – I might want to choose simple html interface, if I am on mobile or slow connection?

Yet another frustration and my project is delayed by now. I could have bought license earlier, if I knew the requirements earlier.
I hope someday, Adobe and Apple would realize that they can help thousand of people like me, by just enabling online purchase, even if it takes order and makes me send cheque/bank-draft to them, if not credit-card/paypal integration.

I hope someday, these companies would realize that most of people in countries like India don’t have access to real stores/resellers in their cities or states. Yes, I happen to live in a city where it’s hard to get things, I have to travel, at least twelve hours (round-trip) for even simple purchase and with no certainty, I would get the stuff at the stores, whichever is there.

I hope, these companies help to reduce the piracy in India. I hope, these companies realize they can make people do the right by being more accessible to them.

I wonder, what is holding these companies? Is it sales guys who don’t want to have an online store? Is someone getting some favors from resellers?

I don’t get, why to have a middle man in this age, when an online store can enable a lot of users, not only buy but also have faster access to things.

I can not believe it’s tax issue or things like that, it’s lack of will to do. I am sure, there are other stores running well here in India.

Technorati Tags: adobe, store, error, flash, cs4, india

We are doing good in business, I believe, it’s because of our diversified service offerings and our team of talented designers and developers, who are agile, quick and fast learner.

A great culture is an important thing, in fact, it’s very important. That’s why, we have been very focused on building the same in our office here. When I look back, I see we have achieved things but there is a long way to go.

We are not perfect, for that matter, no one is. The good thing, we are aware of our limitations and strengths, hence, we are constantly working on it. I hope, a constant effort would improve things day by day.

We are planning to have some more people in our team, so I have been interviewing developers from different parts of country. We acknowledge, it’s hard to get smart guys stay in Kanpur or get developers from outside of city. But we think, if we share our vision and what we want to do and have been doing, a lot of developers do see things differently, then location becomes secondary thing.

BTW! Kanpur is not as great place to live as Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai, etc are. But it does have good things – less hectic life, earning/expenses ratio is higher here, etc.

According to Paul Graham’s essay, bad-location is/could-be one of reasons for startups’ failure. It is true, location does matter for many things (not just hiring), but we have chosen to be where we are now, and I think, we have figured out how to achieve things here, we are just getting better at it day by day. But yeah, we do miss things – events, barcamps, apple-store, crowd, talent, etc. Who knows, someday Kanpur would have all that and who knows, we might have played a good role in that process

A lot of people have asked me, why I am not active lately in Adobe Flash Platform (i.e. Flash/Flex/AIR) stuff? Well, it’s different phase of life, where I am focusing on other things that would enable us to do a lot of great things that include stuff for Adobe Flash Platform.

I am also busy doing a good project, which does have some challenging work (web dev + flash platform). Also busy doing some hacking once in a while, which is trying to use technology to improve my productivity – like home media/filer server, vpn at office, boxee, etc.

We are looking for some smart guys – interaction-designers, flash-platform-developer and web-developer. If you know someone, who doesn’t not mind working from Kanpur, want to work on cool stuff, want to part of our team and help us achieving the visions/goals we have. Please let us know (abdul dot qabiz at gmail dot com). Thanks.

As we all know, Apple builds innovative products but at the same time, it does suck by keeping it’s platform very closed. Be it iPod, iPhone or Apple TV, it’s just really hard to do anything except the ones Apple wants you to do.

Anyway, thanks to the great community of hackers, who spend hours figuring out things and building some great stuff. Some great hackers came up with various ideas to open the closed Apple TV, well initially it was physically opening up the box but later on smarter solutions appeared. Now it’s so simple, one can patch (enable SSH and install some apps) Apple TV by using patchstick, it doesn’t require you to open the box physically.

I can mount my USB disks and use keyboard/mouse in the patched Apple TV. Well that opens to a lot of possibilities.
With the simpler patching process, a lot of applications for Apple TV started appearing, one of such products is Boxee.tv, which is a media-center application. Of course, Boxee is available for all other platforms (Windows, GNU/Linux, OSX, etc) but I believe, it’s the best companion of Apple TV like devices.

I have been having good time using Boxee on Apple TV. I can not only play all my media (pictures, videos, music) in much better way but also enjoy online stuff (music, videos, podcasts, pictures, etc), be it recommended by my friends in Boxee social network or various other channels/apps available on Boxee.

Boxee can download movie-subtitles and show with a great ease. It can also fetch a lot of metadata (covert-art, album-art, thumbnails, information, ratings, reviews, etc) for videos/music from various online databases (f.ex. IMDB, etc).

The latest version (still in testing: 0.9.9.5324 build) allows you to easily install various applications made for Boxee by community or Boxee developers?

I even noticed, Boxee can run applications that are based on Adobe Flash Platform, yeah Joost or MTV feeds/apps are Adobe Flash based.

The best thing, Boxee is based on XBMC, an open-source application. I think, it’s worth writing a post about Boxee, hence I just did that. Boxee.tv rocks!!!

Technorati Tags: boxee, apple+tv, media+center, xbmc, apple, hack

• Adobe releases Distributable Flash Lite player
• Adobe and Nokia set up Open Screen Fund ($10 millions)
• Palm joins Open Screen project
• Adobe announces timeline for Adobe Flash Player 10 on devices

Adobe and Nokia made a right decision by setting up a fund, it’s really important to have a good ecosystem of developers, designers and content-creators. The success of Adobe Flash Platform over the the years is because of this outstanding community of developers, designers and everyone who has been interested into the platform.
Though, I feel Adobe is little late on doing these. They should have been more aggressive. Some of my wishes, Adobe would:

• Release some great tools for all platforms (not just Windows and OSX).
• Provide a good documentation on best-practices, performance, etc
• Some good reusable libraries, components, etc

Technorati Tags: adobe, flashlite, mobile, flash, openscreenproject, player, flash+platform

What is AptonCD?

APTonCD is a tool with a graphical interface which allows you to create one or more CDs or DVDs (you choose the type of media) with all of the packages you’ve downloaded via APT-GET or APTITUDE, creating a removable repository that you can use on other computers.
APTonCD will also allow you to automatically create media with all of your .deb packages located in one specific repository, so that you can install them into your computers without the need for an internet connection.

How are we using it?

We have started moving most of our machines to use Ubuntu as primary operating system. This time, we wanted to streamline installation process and make it easier, so that our system-admin, who doesn’t know much about GNU/Linux can do things easily.

I documented most of the process on our internal wiki, I was wondering:

• What would the easiest way to upgrade packages on new installations?
• How can we save bandwidth consumed in upgrade process?
• Importantly, how can we save time?

Now there were couple of options:

• Set up a local apt-archive-mirror
• Install via net-boot using local mirror.
• Setup a local internet-proxy, which can cache things during first installation and serves cached data during further requests.

I am not an expert in GNU/Linux world, I have just basic knowledge and I am yet to learn a lot of things. Above options looked good to me, but I was not sure, I want to do all these (apt-mirror, etc) on our windows-server. Yes we are still using windows as server and we hope to replace with Linux server, after we are done moving all workstations.

I learnt about APTonCD while finding out an easier option for our requirements, I can say, APTonCD makes life lot easier. This is what I did:

1. Installed Ubuntu
2. Downloaded all latest updates using Update Manager
3. Rebooted machine
4. Installed APTonCD using sudo apt-get install aptoncd
5. Installed LAMP using sudo tasksel install lamp-server
6. Installed Likewise for Active Directory integration using sudo likewise-open
7. Installed Subversion
8. Replaced default Network Manager with WICD
9. Installed many other packages
10. Rebooted machine
11. Configured likewise-open (i.e. joined AD domain)
12. Configured all other (WICD, LAMP, etc)
13. Launched APTonCD and created an ISO

APTonCD ISO image is stored on our NAS. While setting a new box, we just skip #2 from above list and instead use APTonCD to restore the packages from ISO image.

Now, we all understand, new updates keep coming every next day, how to keep machines updated in that case? Well, developers would be suggested to update, if they find it relevant. In any case, we would be doing update on each machine in scheduled way. On every Saturday, we would create a new APTonCD ISO image and use it on all other machines.

I think, we could manage to save a lot of time and bandwidth without really getting into a lot of hassle as shown in first list of this post.

I hope, you find APTonCD useful too. BTW! I think, APTonCD should work on other Debian based distros too, as said, I am no expert hence just can’t confirm except my gut-feeling

Technorati Tags: AptonCD, Linux, apt, installation, package management

They asked, if we (three of us) are professionals and would want to be photographed for an article on professionals. Initially, I was very reluctant because I hardly knew them and can’t trust if they are really journalists. Anyway, my brother said, it’s alright and they are from iNext by Jagran (he went on Jagran’s image in India).

Anyway, today we noticed our photographs in iNext in a music-section. Where we are shown praising some music from some movie, honestly I never heard that song and about that movie.

In any case, this is totally wrong reporting/journalism and irresponsible act, where they are not only presenting false information but also lying to people. How irresponsible journalists can be and on top of that, how can a news-paper hire such lame people?

Since morning, I have been asked several times, it’s irritating and I am upset. I have just written an email to editor of the iNext, let’s see what he has to say.