Author Archives: Gangadhar

Startup Depression?

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You might have heard about it. Most start up founders get depressed. (Here are exhibits A, B and C). I read about it and in my naivete, I thought I was immune to it. This is a post to put my depression out into the world and hope that it also helps some other founder who might experience it during their startup life.

As with everyone, I have had my share of depression. The good thing is that I get out of it soon thanks to my awesome wife and son. So far most of these episodes have not affected me longer than a day. Like they recommend in the exhibits above, surrounding myself with awesome family and friends is a good way to get out of the d-spot when it hits you.

This time it was different. We encountered a problem with our Android app. You can read about it here. The issue was that we had done everything we could to test the app before it was released to the market and yet we encountered this problem. We even tested the app once again using the Android 2.3 emulator but we could not replicate the issue.

I have to give credit to our awesome users throughout this process. They were extremely nice and willing to provide screen shots, logs and any other information that we needed to identify this issue. One of them even sent us an email saying “Don’t be embarrassed about this problem. I am glad to help you guys since you are creating such an useful tool for people like us!”.

But even with these words of encouragement, I felt depressed. I realize now that my depression had to do with the fact that I am unable to do much about this problem (mainly because I am not developing the Android app). Looks like one of the ways I have been staying clear of depression is to meet my problems head on and take care of them. Since in this case, I cannot take a hands on approach to solve it (by writing code myself!), I felt depressed. Very.

Once I realized this, I knew that the only thing that I can do is to go to the other ways to tackle the d-situation. Go back to family and let the knowledgeable people solve the problem they know and understand very well. So I went for a walk with my son, talked about people, sky, earth and the moon and I am now back to being my normal self.

BTW, the Android problem is still unsolved. I know that having the confidence that it will be solved is almost 90% of the way there. I will hopefully post an update on that front soon.

The Connection was reset?!

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You might have encountered this error at one time or another when you try to access a website. The browser suddenly gives you an error which says “The connection was reset”. See the attached image of how it looked like on my browser.

The problem in my case was that I was getting this error every time. And this would happen every time I accessed a domain that I OWNED!

 

So I called godaddy.com, who hosts my domain and is the registrar for my domain. The agent initially denied that there was a problem (after checking it and discussing it with someone). Then I explained that of all the domains that I visit, I get errors only on this one domain. Then he told me that he will do another check with another “server admin”.

 

Then sure enough, he came back with this explanation “your website has been experiencing some strange activity lately and in order to protect your website, godaddy has instituted a security layer. Your website is still up and running but this security layer helps in preventing the strange activities and will only prevent those with malicious intent from accessing your site”.

 

I don’t know if Godaddy wanted me to feel great about this but I did not feel that way at all. I know myself really well and I DO NOT have any malicious intent about my own website! So armed with this confidence, I requested him to remove the security layer which was targeting me from accessing the site. He asked me for a bunch of technical details like my IPAddress, trace route output etc which I duly provided.

 

After all this, the agent tells me that “Godaddy does not guarantee that they will consider my request favorably. They also will not inform me in any way (phone, email etc) on how they have addressed this problem”. This was the last straw! After making my access to my own website difficult, how can Godaddy claim that they will not guarantee that I can access my site? After mentioning this to him, the agent understood the absurdity of the situation and he told me that “Godaddy will probably address this issue in 72 hours but they cannot give me an update about this”.

 

Now I am seriously considering moving out of Godaddy. Any options on where to go?

My review of Saravanaa Bhavan in Paris

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Saravanaa Bhavan is the chain of vegetarian restaurants that originated in Chennai, India and now in many countries around the world like USA, UK, France etc. This is one of the only handful 100% vegetarian restaurants in Paris.

Being a vegetarian and also one who loves South Indian food, I frequent this restaurant a lot. After going there so many times, I felt that I should write a quick post which can help others.

The restaurant is located near the Gare Du Nord area of Paris, which is also known as little India, little Sri Lanka etc. Here is a tip – if you are going to this restaurant on a cold winter day, the best exit from the railway station is the exit going towards “Rue Du Faubourgh Saint Denis” from the Magenta RER station. Even though Gare Du Nord is the main station, you are better off making the indoor walk to Magenta and exiting out from the Faubourg Saint Denis exit.

The restaurant specializes in South Indian cooking. If you know about Indian cuisine, there are many varieties and among the different varieties of South Indian cuisine, the restaurant keeps true to its Tamil Nadu (state in south India) roots. So the best bet to try at this restaurant are items like Idly, Dosa, Upma that are local to South India. The good news is that there is an overwhelming variety of Idlies and Dosas that can keep one occupied for a long time! They also make North Indian items like Chapathi, various North Indian curries etc. As any good Indian restaurant should, they also serve Chinese items like Gobi-65, Vegetable Spring roll, Chilli Paneer etc. I am sure my friends from China will recognize these items (not!). These items are better avoided even though they take up half the menu.

The many varieties of Idly and Dosa has its downsides too. They come with the same sauces, chutneys and sambars. So even though you might be expecting three different things by ordering three different idlies, they all turn out to be almost the same since you will get the same sauces and chutneys to go with them. My suggestion would be to try one idly, one vada and one dosa. If you feel adventurous, you should add something from the North Indian and Chinese menu.

Regarding the beverages to have, the standard mango lassi is too sweet and is best avoided. The fresh juices are really good. If you want to have it the way it is made in Indian roadside juice stands, ask them to add some sugar to it.

The best dessert here is the Falooda. If you can get the sweet pongal, it will be awesome but it is made only on special days. The other desserts like Rava Kesari, Gulab Jamun are available at all Indian restaurants in Paris and should be similarly avoided.

A note about the timing of the restaurant. They are open until 11 pm everyday. The best days to visit are Friday nights and Saturdays. They make special items on these days (rava idlies!). Even though the restaurant tends to be crowded on these days (see the line in the attached picture), the service is really fast. Avoid going there on Sundays (and Sunday evenings especially) since the food seems to be almost spoilt!

If you are interested in the interesting story of the founder of Saravanaa Bhavan, who is now in a jail in India, check out this news.

Why DuckDuckGo is my new search engine

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This is not old news. Google has been concerned about Facebook’s rise and has been wanting to come up with a social product of its own. So they create Google+ and we all joined enthusiastically. They have impressive growth in numbers and I also supported G+   until I remembered what happened more than 15 years ago.

So Microsoft did not get internet back in the 1990s while Netscape was dominating the browser market. Then Microsoft decides to use its dominance in the desktop space to thrust IE on its users. Not many liked this move but here we are in the future knowing that Microsoft killed Netscape.

I realized that our support for G+ is similar to supporting IE when Microsoft is trying to kill Netscape through unfair means instead of building a good product. As soon as Netscape was dead, Microsoft IE also stopped its innovation until Firefox came along. Do we want the same thing by supporting G+?

I also realized that many like me were interested in supporting a competitor to Facebook thanks to Facebook’s heavy handed dealing with our privacy on the site. So it was Facebook that was making us support its competition.

Now Google comes up with “Search Plus Your World” (SPYW) which apparently is great for us. I have been worried with all the junk that shows up in our search results on Google. Now Google wants to pollute the search with G+ results? No thanks.

Google learns from Facebook and decides that it knows what is best for us. I liked how Sarah Lacy talked about it here. So Google is now emulating Facebook too?

From now on, it is going to be DuckDuckGo.com as the search engine for me. I hope they continue with their privacy first philosophy.

What I saw at Quantified Self Europe 2011 part 1

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I was at the Quantified Self Europe conference this past weekend at Amsterdam. Quantified self is a community of hackers who track and monitor their activities to improve (mostly) their health. I came to know of them when I attended the Healthcamp in Bay area in October 2009. Since then, the movement has spread to all parts of the world with the help of Alexandra Carmichael and Gary Wolf.

 

The conference was held in an unconference format which means that the attendees chose to present their work and the conference is organized around these presentations. There were many parallel sessions and it was very hard to choose one session over another. So depending on which sessions were chosen, the experience of the participant would vary. There were many who did not present but talked about their work when we spoke during the breaks. I have included them also in here.

 

Theme #1: Quantified Self is preventive health (in other forums, this would be called participatory medicine since the patient takes charge of their own health).  There were many variations of this theme. John Amschler (@jxa) conducted a session on hacking the Zeo clock, fitbit device to understand your health better. He is trying to get the data off these devices, put them together and then understand what his “health baseline” is. He feels that we should be able to understand our health baseline by tracking them often. After we know our baseline, we can then measure your baseline once a year and take action if you are trending away from your baseline. I felt that this is an awesome idea. In factories, we create trend charts for quality of products produced which gives us an understanding of the health of the production process. Why not use the same theory to understand our health better?

 

Sara Riggare presented how she controls her Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s disease is a degenerative disease of the central nervous system. She has been able to manage the disease due to her keen interest in controlling it. She uses a smartphone app (tonic) to keep track of her meds and understand how they affect her. She uses a Nintendo Wii for adjusting and fine tuning her balance. She is now doing a phd starting in summer 2012 to do research on Parkinson’s! She is a true inspiration. She is moving from being a patient to someone who is actively trying to find a cure! You can read an interview with her here.

 

Robin Barooah presented his learning from his effort to lose weight. He had gained about 45 lbs after his move to the USA. He designed an interesting process to lose weight. He just tracked his mood 2-3 hours after lunch. He did not even go back and analyze what made him happy and what did not. Just by tracking his mood, he was able to lose about 45 lbs in 18 months.  Just by looking at how he felt after lunch, his brain was able to get a feel for what is healthy and what is not. His conclusion was that our body and brain is wired to do the right thing for being healthy.

 

The same theme was echoed in another talk about how the presenter lost weight by following a paleo diet. He felt that the act of tracking was making the difference and that it was not the data and the fancy graphs that made the difference.

 

I also met Martin Suba who was able to reverse his type 2 diabetes by using a combination of exercise (tracked with fitibit), diet control and weight control (tracked with Withings). He is in the process of writing up his experience. I look forward to sharing it.

 

There were so many other themes and many more talks. I hope to write about them and share them here.