Lets start with an adage. “I was so occupied in work that i did not get time to blog!”.

Now some details.

• I have moved migrated to a better server machine for this blog. The last machine was hacked and became part of a botnet for some 2-3 days. Really ashamed to disclose this. The machine was running and pretty old version of Ubuntu dirtro. It was time to rebuild, and upon some research, i decided to migrate instead of rebuilding. First migration after 4 years.
• I suddenly decided to play with iPhone apps. I had a pretty old apple developer account. I bought a macbook, courtsey my younger brother
• Got a new Wii, and spend a couple of nights first playing with it, then modding it, and then playing again It now runs linux and mplayer as apps.
• I realized that movable type is not my piece.
• I learned erlang, android and iphone.
• I got a blackberry bold.
• I got a new car (actually swapped with Dad’s new car).
• I gained a lot of weight and latest tests report increased LDL cholesterol and alarming triglyceride levels. Have started exercising again since last one week.
• Said goodbye to many friends imigrating abroad for studies and work.
• Have experienced how doctors in US and India make fool of patients.

And i finish this post by yet another cliche. “I promise i will resume blogging again.”

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In last post i had mentioned Boxee’s dev challenge. Also, i had thrown a semi cooked idea out of my brain regarding putting academic lecture videos on boxee.

This evening, after 15 days of hectic work, i got some time to read my feeds. To my surprise, Whatever i had mentioned, had won Judge’s choice award in the video category. Roshan Revankar had built the app and won.

Looks like there are other working on the same wavelength as well

Since few weeks now, i have been pushing out my learning curves on various techs on a blog. It is hosted in a subfolder on jatspeak. Its called learning curves. Unlike this blog, Learning Curves has been put on movable type. I had never used movable type a try in my life, so i thought it would be good to get a feel of that as well. The installation acted as a perfect learning curve to be published in one of the earlier posts there. The latest post is about building android OS image from scratch.

I has written about disqus more than a year back. At that point i had compared it with intensedebate, sezwho and js-kit.  The post can be read here. A long time passed since. All of these startups have matured into good products. For a change, i decided to give disqus a try. The transition was very smooth and in no time, blog started speaking to disqus commenting system through a wordpress plugin. It’ll be good to see what postive vibes it sends for the blog and its readers. May the blog see more conversations.

Its been quite some time since i switched to Zemanta. The thing works like cakewalk. I got to know about it through Fred Wilson. He has hosted it on his own blog. Being an early adopter, i could not stop myself in putting it on the pages. It turns out to be a good blogging assistant. I plan to continue using it for some time atleast. Zemanta has contributed to an image and a couple of links below each blog post. I do not use the linking and tagging feature much.

Zemanta can be better undertood as an elderly learned fellow who takes a look at your scriblings and suggests that you can augment the draft with subtle links, pictures, links and tags. Reminds me of a university professor who used to send detailed mails after reading the initial drafts of papers .

I would like to see the support for standard blogging clients like scribefire, as well as ability to pick up things from the same blog in order to redice the cross reference time.

I used scribefire to write this post. I saved it as draft, logged into the client and zemantified it before showing it the browser window.

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This is a guest post by Shashikant Kore. He is co-founder of Bandhan.com. He speaks about his experience on founding bandhan, and general entrepreneurship blues .

Our tiny achievement after almost an year of work is Bandhan.com, which went live few weeks ago. We see a lot of wisdom dished out on entrepreneurship by anybody who is remotely connected with startups. The intention of this post is not give gyaan to you. Rather, this is an opportunity for us to pause, look back and jot down our experiences and learnings.

Genesis: When I was looking for a match last year, I wanted to evaluate right online matrimonial service(s). A general discussion with friends revealed that everybody has different opinions about each service. The reason being we had different partner expectations.  Of course, these services have their own strengths – they are strong in certain regions, languages, or community. The choice is easier if you have a clear option.  But then what about people like me who have difficulty right at the beginning?  I felt the need for a service which could suggest me the right services for me.

The second issue for me was to track other services which have profiles matching my criteria. There should be easy way to track profiles matching my criteria.

There was no service which could solve these problem. So, we decided to solve it ourselves. Bandhan.com has been started out of genuine need.

Company:  Sachin, co-founder of the company, is my classmate for graduation days. After his M.Tech CS from IIT Madras, he was working with D E Shaw, Hyderabad for nearly 4 years. I have completed my M Tech CS from IIT Kanpur, worked with Veritas (now Symantec) Pune and was working with Webaroo, Mumbai when the idea hit us.  We decided to pursue this idea full time and moved to Pune in December 2007. Bandhan.com is a product of Discrete Log Technologies. The term “Discrete Log” is from abstract algebra. These are class of problems which are very hard to solve. They are as hard as prime factorization. In fact, for me they were too hard to even understand during Kanpur days.

Product: The product has a lot of engineering jugglery going in the background, which user is neither aware nor does she care. That is the invisible work. And it can get unexciting if you are working on such a thing.  But once we reached a stage where we could see something tangible, even if it is devoid of any HTML glory in the browser, it was exciting. It motivated us to push even harder.

We spent quite some time on getting the user interface right. Many of our users tell us that the UI is very simple. But, this simplicity is result of bunch of brain-storming sessions with our friends and lots of iterations.

Working Style:  Since we are only two people working on this product, the focus is always on doing only essential things. 80/20 is just too expensive and slow for us. We look for 50/1 – the 1% effort that will give us 50% results.

The philosophy adopted here is that of 37 Signals – Do less. These nice folks have even documented that nicely in their guide – Getting Real.

Funding: We are a self-funded startup. Once our product was in a good shape, we met couple of investors just to bounce off our idea and not really seek funding. Almost all of them liked our product, but expressed concerns about size of the opportunity. Though, none of these discussions helped us financially, we got a lot of quality feedback and advice. Also, in the process, we realized the sagacious advice of Paul Graham, Raising money is hard.

Boot-strapping means a tight control on costs. On a blog of ex-googlers, they wrote how Sergey Brin considered the opportunity cost as their biggest cost. This is the cost of not being live yesterday. How do you address this cost? By releasing early and releasing often. Bunch of times, we write downright bad code which we would be ashamed to own. But the excitement of solving problem outweighs such concerns.

Roadmap: As stated above we would be doing absolutely essential features on the product. And one thing which we will need to work on constantly is breadth (adding new services for search) and depth (improving our search.)

As the feedback we have received from users is overwhelmingly positive, we know we are pretty much on the right path. We just need to keep walking. The user growth will happen at its own sweet pace.

Presently, we are not really looking at other verticals, but we believe we have building blocks in place which could be potentially replicated. Let’s see how things pan out.

Image via Wikipedia

So as i had guessed, feedburner is serving me wrong analytics. I was testing the instaltion and monitoring feedburner’s live feed. It shows hits from my firefox as hits from Australia. To best of my knowledge, i feel i am pretty far from australia and never ever been there. I am using airtel broadband connection. I tested my ip address over ip2location, and it still says that i am very well not only in India, but in New Delhi .See the picture below for evidence. I am letting it go on for 2 days, and will post updates soon.

Image via CrunchBase

After some initial scripting, and some tweaks to older blog, i was able to put together a good tracking scheme. It was still missings for feeds, so i decided to switch to feedburner. After google’s acquisition, it has opened up the pro features. I am closely observing it for some time now, and will continue to do so for next one week. If all’s well, feedburner, you are my newest par’d'ner!

Related feedburner articles spread over web

• FeedBurner’s New Home
• FeedBurner’s New Google AdSense Feed Advertising — Disappointing
• FeedBurner to Google
• Google Assimilation Complete: FeedBurner Accounts To Merge With Google Accounts
• Is It Time To Say Goodbye To FeedBurner For Good?
• The Troubles with Google FeedBurner
• Google kills $100 million RSS ad system [Blogging For Dollars]