Phone Warrior

Phone Warrior:
by Visinor Tech

With PhoneWarrior, we aim to simplify your phone experience. As a first step, we will help you get rid of the pesky marketing smses which clutter your inbox. We have leveraged the power of machine...

TRAI regulation

TRAI ban goes effective from 27 Sept AFAIK. From what I could gather 1. TRAI has regulated there will be 2 categories of messages Promotional and Transactional 2. Transactional messages can be sent anytime. Promotional only between 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. 3. DnD numbers will not receive any Promotional messages 4. All Sender Ids would be terminated and origination point (provider address) would be mentioned as sender

Configuring Subversion access control

Found a great resource for configuring Subversion per-user per-directory access control. http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.0/svn-book.html#svn-ch-6-sect-3 Essentially can be controlled from the apache2.conf file with an authz file and passwd file.

Pizza Hut is no longer a brand for me!!!

Pizza Hut - the name itself would probably remind everyone of some or the other fond memories and cause some serious churning of gastric juices. For example we had our first date at Pizza hut. I also remember vividly, the first time my daughter tried a spicy veg pizza and said "Papa isme se Mirchi nikal ke do"

However, this Saturday the 24th of September, 2011 Pizza Hut ceased to be a loved and trusted brand for me.

We were so excited when we received an offer from ICICI bank where a free personal PAN pizza was being offered when a new menu item was ordered one at a Pizza Hut outlet. Hey!! We love Pizza hut anyways so lets go and get it, we thought. Our daughter was really excited at the thought of Pizza.

However we could never have preditec the turn of events.
Pizza Hut at V3S Mall, Luxmi Nagar was full as it is expected on a Saturday evening and the servers almost seemed to enjoy turning people down. We thought we would give the offer a pass this time and instead go for chinese.

But our daughter just could not let go of the thought of having Pizza. We trudged our way back to Pizza hut after vain attempts to convince her, where the wait decreased to 15 minutes. In between grumblings and mumblings of dissatisfied customers, we decided to hold our ground. The great taste of FREE pizza would make up for the wait we thought.

Eventually we did manage to make it inside inspite of a couple warning us that some of the items on the menu were unavailable. We decided to order after carefully going over the terms and conditions of the offer. We found to avail the offer we had to order a minimum of Rs 500 and a NEW item on the menu. We carefully gleaned over the menu and came out with a well crafted order guaranteed to win us the free pizza.
2 Tomato minestore soup
1 Spicy Tomato Pasta (NEW)
1 Tuscany adventure singles
1 Diet pepsi
1 Regular pepsi

We handed over the voucher to the Server, who at first accepted it. He came back a few moments later and told us since we had not ordered a "NEW" item and therefore could not give us the free pizza. We protested, since we had ordered a NEW item as per their menu, which was the Spicy tomato pasta. He said it was the "OLD" NEW and not the new "NEW"

Sounds ridiculous doesnt it, then we spoke to the manager who after a long drawn discussion accepted that the Spicy Tomato Pasta was indeed a new "NEW". The war was won we thought, but little did we know.

As we waited hopefully for almost 45 minutes at the cramped table listening to grunts of dissatisfied customers all around (delayed orders, unavailable items, not honoring the voucher). It was not just the music that was too loud, and the staff seemed to be having a difficult time. We wanted to give Pizza Hut the benefit of doubt, maybe it is just the promotions and too many customers.

Our order finally arrived - the soup was no good, neither the Pasta. The waiter also conveniently forgot to bring the Pepsi we had ordered. We now suspect it was to make sure our order would not fit the terms of the offer since we would fall just short of a bill of 500 without the Pepsi. We insisted on the Pepsi since we feared this game plan, which eventually and reluctantly was served.

This was not all, the bill when calculated was a little more than my mental calculation. I could not believe that it was 722 when we had ordered 575 worth of goodies and after taxes should have been closer to 700 tops. The staff did not offer us the bill, I insisted on getting one and went through it.

What I saw made me completely lose faith in Pizza hut as a brand. The Service charges were calculated including the Personal Pan pizza and then only the cost of Personal Pan Pizza was discounted. The offer had not mentioned we would have to pay Service charges on the "FREE" pizza even after running a bill of 500+. Morever there was a Voluntary donation of Rs 10. (Bill image attached) for World hunger. Now I am all for charity and good causes, but I don't understand how Pizza hut can charge me Rs 10 as Voluntary donation, without me volunteering it. Its crazy, when challenged the staff told me we usually ask customers but we forgot asking you. I'm sure there are many customers who dont look at their bill or never ask for the bill and Pizza hut manages to make Rs 10 out of these unsuspecting folks who trust the Pizza hut brand.

I lost my temper and asked the staff to pay Rs 10 from their pockets on which I was told I would be contacted by Pizza hut personnel. Whether or not they contact me or reimburse me, I hope they would look into the issue and understand the serious damage such things are causing to their brand. I would be twice wary to go back to Pizza Hut and also request every body to look at their bills carefully.

How to add a username/password to unix passwd file

sudo htpasswd -m /etc/passwd2 android
New password:
Re-type new password:
Adding password for user android

Interesting traits of software developers

In my near 8 years of experience in IT industry, I have come across different types of programmers. Saw some interesting traits in these geeks, which sometimes make me smile. This is a light hearted post not to offend anyone. I might myself have been one of these stereotypes at different points in time.

1. The geek who believes he owns the product. The software is his fiefdom and he would not share his knowledge or let anyone near 1000 lines of the business logic.

2. The geek who always thinks the last book of technology/design pattern he has read is applicable to the current problem.

3. The geek who believes that the way a problem was solved in his last project is the best way to solve the problem.

3. The geek who never seems to get it right, patch after patch introduces newer problems in his code.

4. The geek who wants to tell about every little issue to the management, to let them know how hard his job is.

5. The geek who believes he is a genius and keeps testing himself on online IQ tests, lest his IQ might erode.

6. The geek who believes coding is sorcery, there is something mysterious about code and the computer can at times do strange things which it was not intended to do. There are issues which can not be solved by mortal programmers.

7. The geek who suspects the libraries and frameworks every time his program crashes.

8. The geek who believes, the more complex a piece of code is - the better it is.

9. The geek who always misses timelines and looks forward to the next release to deliver features.

10. The geek who always believes the requirements and design were in-adequate and there is never sufficient time to complete development.

14 interesting trends identified by the Startup Genome Report

Interesting stuff lifted from Techcrunch, only because I want to go back to it when I get a chance.

1. Founders that learn are more successful: Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth.
2. Startups that pivot once or twice times raise 2.5x more money, have 3.6x better user growth, and are 52% less likely to scale prematurely than startups that pivot more than 2 times or not at all.
3. Many investors invest 2-3x more capital than necessary in startups that haven’t reached problem solution fit yet. They also over-invest in solo founders and founding teams without technical cofounders despite indicators that show that these teams have a much lower probability of success.
4. Investors who provide hands-on help have little or no effect on the company’s operational performance. But the right mentors significantly influence a company’s performance and ability to raise money. (However, this does not mean that investors don’t have a significant effect on valuations and M&A)
5. Solo founders take 3.6x longer to reach scale stage compared to a founding team of 2 and they are 2.3x less likely to pivot.
6. Business-heavy founding teams are 6.2x more likely to successfully scale with sales driven startups than with product centric startups.
7. Technical-heavy founding teams are 3.3x more likely to successfully scale with product-centric startups with no network effects than with product-centric startups that have network effects.
8. Balanced teams with one technical founder and one business founder raise 30% more money, have 2.9x more user growth and are 19% less likely to scale prematurely than technical or business-heavy founding teams.
9. Most successful founders are driven by impact rather than experience or money.
10. Founders overestimate the value of IP before product market fit by 255%.
11. Startups need 2-3 times longer to validate their market than most founders expect. This underestimation creates the pressure to scale prematurely.
12. Startups that haven’t raised money over-estimate their market size by 100x and often misinterpret their market as new.
13. Premature scaling is the most common reason for startups to perform worse. They tend to lose the battle early on by getting ahead of themselves.
14. B2C vs. B2B is not a meaningful segmentation of Internet startups anymore because the Internet has changed the rules of business. We found 4 different major groups of startups that all have very different behavior regarding customer acquisition, time, product, market and team.