Category Archives: Featured

The best articles

The 10 industry trends programmers need to understand -Anand Deshpande

Featured, Miscellaneous, , ,

Anand Deshpande, CEO of Persistent, gave this keynote address last week during the IndicThreads conference on Java technologies. I’ve already included this in my overall report on the IndicThreads Conference, but thought that it was interesting enough and important enough to warrant a post on its own. The basic thrust of his talk was that often, programmers just think about their programs and disregard what is going on in the industry outside. Having this perspective is important, and keeping track of important industry trends will improve you technically. The top trends he identified are:

  1. Multicore chips, and why programmers need to worry about them
  2. Mobile Telephony: the desktop/laptop is no longer the primary target device for programmers. Think about the mobile users, and how what they want is different from the traditional PC users
  3. Cloud and SaaS: is coming in a big way, and will change the way people use software. Also, it makes life easier for users, but much more difficult for programmers. So need to improve skills in these areas
  4. Web 2.0 and Social Networking: these are exciting new fields with a lot of growth. They require a different kind of programming mindset.
  5. Rich Internet Applications: Similar to above
  6. Large Volumes of Diverse Data (including BI and analytics)
  7. Open source is on the rise. As programmers, you must have a good understanding of various open source licenses
  8. Gaming and Entertainment boom: Too many programmers think of only corporate world & green monitors etc. Think different. E.g. Gaming and entertainment are large markets and require a different mindset to come up with new ideas in these fields.
  9. Green IT: Instead of worrying about speed and efficiency, for the first time, worrying about power consumption has started affecting programmers
  10. Be a part of the community. Give back. Do open source. Join CSI ACM. IEEE. (and I would like to add contribute to PuneTech)

His full presentation is here.

Recession, Linked-In, OpenSocial, Grails and more at IndicThreads Java Conference

Events, Featured, , , , ,

Note: Most of the presentations are online at the conference homepage.

The IndicThreads conference on Java technologies, which is an annual occurrence in Pune happened over the course of 3 days last week, and IndicThreads were gracious enough to invite me to attend the conference (sort of a press pass, so to speak), and although I wasn’t able to attend the whole conference, I did manage to squeeze in a couple of hours each day, and was very glad that I did, because I ended up with some really enriching sessions.

On the first day of the conference, the two big names of the tech industry in Pune, Ganesh Natarajan and Anand Deshpande gave keynote addresses. Ganesh, who is CEO of Zensar, and President of NASSCOM gave the NASSCOM view of the coming recession. His main thrust was that the Indian software / BPO industry will not be as badly affected by the recession as the rest of the world. He had a large number of graphs and figures to make the following points:

  • We had already been tightening the belt for almost an year now, so we are in much better shape to handle the recession than those who weren’t being so prudent
  • We are creating new products, tackling new verticals, and focusing on end-to-end service (and these claims were all backed by facts and figures), and this diversification and added value makes us resilient

And he spent a lot of time pointing out that to do even better, or primary focus needs to be the tier 2 / tier 3 cities, 43 of which have been identified by NASSCOM and whose developement will get some attention. Also, our tier 2 / tier 3 colleges are sub-par and a lot of work is needed to improve the quality of students graduating from there. NASSCOM has started a number of initiatives to tackle this problem.

Since this was a conference for Java techies, Anand Desphande, CEO of Persistent, presented his view of the broader context in which the Java programmers exist, and what are the things they need to think about (other than their code) to have a better long term view. Basically:

  1. Multicore chips, and why programmers need to worry about them
  2. Mobile Telephony: the desktop/laptop is no longer the primary target device for programmers. Think about the mobile users, and how what they want is different from the traditional PC users
  3. Cloud and SaaS: is coming in a big way, and will change the way people use software. Also, it makes life easier for users, but much more difficult for programmers. So need to improve skills in these areas
  4. Web 2.0 and Social Networking: these are exciting new fields with a lot of growth. They require a different kind of programming mindset.
  5. Rich Internet Applications: Similar to above
  6. Large Volumes of Diverse Data (including BI and analytics)
  7. Open source is on the rise. As programmers, you must have a good understanding of various open source licenses
  8. Gaming and Entertainment boom: Too many programmers think of only corporate world & green monitors etc. Think different. E.g. Gaming and entertainment are large markets and require a different mindset to come up with new ideas in these fields.
  9. Green IT: Instead of worrying about speed and efficiency, for the first time, worrying about power consumption has started affecting programmers
  10. Be a part of the community. Give back. Do open source. Join CSI ACM. IEEE. (and I would like to add contribute to PuneTech)

Anand also predicted that in the next 6 months, the Industry will see serious job cuts and salary cuts, and he things it is unavoidable. But pointed out that those who take trouble to keep themselves updated in their area of expertise, and go deep (instead of just doing “enough”) will not have a problem, and in fact will be best positioned to take advantage of the situation when the financial situation starts recovering after 6 to 9 months.

I missed the rest of day 1, but it has been covered in great detail by Dhananjay Nene. on his blog, as well as Varun Arora on the IndicThreads blog (part 1, part 2).

The highlight of day 2, and in fact the highlight of the whole week for me, was the presentation by DJ Patil, Chief Scientist of Linked-in. DJ Patil is in charge of all the data analysis that happens at Linked-in – basically the advanced guess they make like: “people who viewed this profile also viewed these other profiles”, and “people whom you might know” etc. He was not listed on the conference schedule – and was just passing through, and got invited to talk. He gave a great talk on an overview of how linked in works, their strategy for linked-in apps (the third-party apps that are integrated into the linked-in website). Again Dhananjay has already captured most of DJ’s important points on his blog, so I will not repeat those here. But I did have a very detailed conversation with DJ afterwards, and one of the things that came through was that they are looking seriously at India and wondering what they can / should do to get more Indians on linked-in. India already has about 4.8% of linked-in’s users. He was very open about trying to find out what are the things about linked-in that we don’t like, what are the things in linked-in that we would like to change, and what are the features we would like to see. If you have suggestions, send them over to him – he is dpatil on twitter.

The third day had a session on Grails by Harshad Oak, and if you are not familiar with Rails, or any of the other “programming by convention” schools of software, it is definitely something you should check out. It can reduce development times by orders of magnitude on things like building web applications and other things that are done over and over by programmers all over the world.

For other talks that happened, but which I missed, unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any reports or blog posts giving details, but you can see the conference schedule to get an idea of what went on.

What to expect at Barcamp Pune

Events, Featured, , , , ,

Update: Our hearts go out to the people of Mumbai, but our bodies continue their day-to-day activities in Pune. Barcamp Pune 5 will happen. It starts at 10am, at SICSR (Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research), Model Colony, Atur Centre, Opp. Om Super Market, Pune (map).

Barcamp Pune 5 is this Saturday (29th November) and I am hoping that this time, a lot of people who are not familiar with the concept of barcamp will show up. Earlier, we wrote about what is barcamp, and why you should attend. For those still sitting on the fence, wondering whether to attend, let me try and give an idea of what to expect at BCP5.

The barcamp page shows 250+ registrations. So expect at least 150 people or more to show up.

Expect chaos. I mean that in a good way. Conferences are thoughtfully organized by committees of experts to include topics that you should know about. Barcamp is not a conference – it’s an unconference. No suits, no committees. What you will get is talks on topics that you want to know about.

Expect a tweet-up. At 5:30pm. A meeting of people who use and love twitter. If you are not a twitter-user yet, you should be. Attend the tweet-up to find out why.

Expect talks from a set of very wide-ranging topics (mostly tech): how to secure your home wireless network from hackers, PHP, how to build iPhone applications, the semantic web, using maps in your applications and websites, robotics, bootstrapping your startup. And many more. It’s an unconference, so can’t know in advance all the different presentations that will ultimately happen. And some of the presentations will actually happen with 4 people huddled around a laptop in a corner on the floor.

Expect enthusiasm. Expect to see lots of energy. People passionate about technology. Blogging. Web-2.0.

Expect to see people not just from Pune, but also Mumbai, Bangalore, Aurangabad, Hyderabad and other cities. Yes, barcamps are worth travelling 800km for.

Expect to see students, junior techies, people with 15+ years of experience, programmers, managers, designers, NGO volunteers, open source fanatics, .NET gurus, savvy businessmen and geeks.

Expect to make new friends. You’ll meet lots of interesting people. If you are thinking of a startup, you might meet your co-founder. If you are interested in Erlang, you might meet other Erlang enthusiasts. If you are a recruiter, you might meet your latest recruits. If you are single, you might meet your future partner (hey! it happens).

Expect to go off to dinner parties with strangers.

Expect to give and receive business cards – some old school habits die hard.

Expect people to take lots of photographs and upload them to flickr. Expect blog posts about barcamp to trickle in all through the next week. Expect wi-fi. Expect live-blogging. Expect twittering.

Expect struggling startups to demonstrate their work. Some of them would have been doing this for the nth time, because they’ve been going to every barcamp in the country to get visibility for their startup. In other cases, you’ll be the first people in the world to see the new product.

Expect the unexpected.

Expect to learn. To teach. To discuss. To argue. To agree. To disagree. To clap. To laugh. To giggle. To boo (yes, that happens too.)

Expect the boring people to stay at home, and only the interesting people to show up.

Expect those who wanted to come but could not to be profoundly unhappy.

Expect those who did not attend to have missed something great.

What is multi-core architecture and why you need to understand it

In Depth, Technology, ,

Dhananjay Nene has just written a brilliant article in which he gives a detailed overview of multi-core architectures for computer CPUs – why they came about, how they work, and why you should care. Yesterday, Anand Deshpande, CEO of Persistent Systems, while speaking at the IndicThreads conference on Java Technologies exhorted all programmers to understand multi-core architectures and program to take advantage of the possibilities they provide. Dhananjay’s article is thus very timely for both, junior programmers who wish to understand why Anand was attaching so much importance to this issue, and what they need to do about it, and also for managers in infotech to understand how they need to deal with that issue.

Dhananjay sets the stage with this lovely analogy where he compares the CPU of your computer with superman (Kal-El) and then multi-core is explained thus:

One fine morning Kal’s dad Jor-El knocked on your door and announced that Kal had a built in limitation that he was approaching, and that instead of doubling his productivity every year, he shall start cloning himself once each year (even though they would collectively draw the same salary). Having been used to too much of the good life you immediately exclaimed – “But thats preposterous – One person with twice the standard skill set is far superior to 2 persons with a standard skill set, and many years down the line One person with 64 times the standard skill sets is far far far superior to 64 persons with a standard skill set”. Even as you said this you realised your reason for disappointment and consternation – the collective Kal family was not going to be doing any lesser work than expected but the responsibility of ensuring effective coordination across 64, 128 and 256 Kals now lay upon you the manager, and that you realised was a burden extremely onerous to imagine and even more so to carry. However productive the Kal family was, the weakest link in the productivity was now going to be you the project manager. That in a nutshell is the multicore challenge, and that in a nutshell is the burden that some of your developers shall need to carry in the years to come.

What is to be done? First is to understand which programs are well suited to take advantage of a multi-core architecture, and which ones:

if Kal had been working on one single super complex project, the task of dividing up the activities across his multiple siblings would be very onerous, but if Kal was working on a large number of small projects, it would be very easy to simply distribute the projects across the various Kal’s and the coordination and management effort would be unlikely to increase much.

Dhananjay goes into more detail on this and many other issues, that I am skimming over. For example:

Some environments lend themselves to easier multi threading / processing and some make it tough. Some may not support multi threading at all. So this will constrain some of your choices and the decisions you make. While Java and C and C++ all support multi threading, it is much easier to build multi threaded programs in Java than in C or C++. While Python supports multi threading building processes with more than a handful of threads will run into the GIL issue which will limit any further efficiency improvements by adding more threads. Almost all languages will work with multi processing scenarios.

If you are a programmer or a manager of one, you should read the entire article.  In fact, as we mentioned in  a previous PuneTech post (Why Python is better than Java), you should really subscribe to his blog. He writes detailed and insightful articles that, as a techie, you would do well to read. If you are interested in programming languages, I would recommend reading “Contrasting java and dynamic languages”, and “Performance Comparison – C++ / Java / Python / Ruby/ Jython / JRuby / Groovy”. And if you are a blogger, check out his tips for software/programming blogging.

Dhananjay is a Pune-based software Engineer with 17 years in the field. Passionate about software engineering, programming, design and architecture. For more info, check out his PuneTech wiki profile.

Introducing Ask PuneTech – Ask us anything and we’ll get you the answer

In Depth,

Update: Ask PuneTech is being replaced by ForPune.com, a site that is much better suited to answer questions you might have about Pune. Please ask a question there, and we (PuneTech and the rest of the tech community in Pune) will monitor that site and try to get an answer for you. To ensure that the right people read your question, please make sure to tag your question “punetech” so that it gets read by the right people.

The rest of this page is kept for historical purposes, but we prefer that you use ForPune.com instead of the mechanisms described below.

Quick Summary for those too lazy to read the whole page: Ask PuneTech is a One-Stop Shop for all the information needed by infotech professionals and infotech startups in Pune. Ask us a question, or for a referral, or for some information and we find it for you, or we will put you in touch with person who has previous experience in that area to guide you. Just send an email to ask@punetech.com.

Details: PuneTech has been running for 8 months now, and it has been very successful in filling the information gap that existed in the tech ecosystem in Pune. The PuneTech blog reaches about 700 people on a daily basis. The PuneTech wiki is slowly adding more and more useful data (see, for example, the page on tech user groups and organizations in Pune). The PuneTech calendar has become the most comprehensive source of information about tech events in the city.

However, one of the more unexpected ways in which we are helping people is in finding answers to our readers’ questions, or connecting them to the right people. In doing this, we have realized that there is a a need of a service where people who are facing some problem need to be connected with someone who has solved that problem in the past. The internet and google are supposed to solve this problem, but it doesn’t work that way. The web is not particularly useful if you are looking for specific, local information (like, who is a good CA for STPI registration). And sometimes the problem complicated and you need to talk to a human who can guide you. We noticed that we have been doing more and more of that in recent times, and we decided to formalize the concept and announce it. Thus was born the “Ask PuneTech” service.

Through PuneTech, we now know enough experienced people in the field of infotech that for any question you might have as a techie in Pune, or an infotech startup in Pune, we can connect you to the right person who can help you. More importantly, we know enough people who would happily help others like this for free – just for the satisfaction of preventing others from going through the same pain that they went through. So send the question to ask@punetech.com and we’ll get back to you with the answer.

This is a free service, but if you ask a question, you need to promise that when you get a solution to you problem, you will write it up in an article and send it to us for publishing on the PuneTech wiki for the benefit of all the others in the future. This way, the knowledgebase will continue to grow.

The rest of this page has more details in a Q&A format to make you think that you are talking to yourself:

Q: How does it work?

A: If you are a techie in Pune, or a Pune-based info tech startup, and you have some question or difficulty send us the question at ask@punetech.com. If we already know the answer (i.e. someone has asked that question before) you’ll get the answer right away. If not, we’ll tap our network of volunteer experts, and try to get the answer for you. Or, we’ll put you in touch with a person who we believe will be able to guide you appropriately, and whose judgment we have some confidence in. We’ll provide you with of the source of the information, and our confidence in the validity of the information, and/or our confidence in the reputation of the source.

This will be a completely free service, but there is one rule you have to follow: If you find a good enough solution to your problem (and assuming that the question / answer happens to be of general interest), you must write it up and send it to us so that we can post it to the PuneTech wiki for the benefit of the rest of the world. You must promise us this as a “payment” for using our service.

Sample questions:

1. Can you suggest a good consultant / service provider for the following:

a. Accounting

b. Company registration

c. STPI registration

d. Branding / marketing

e. Design (logo, website)

f. Intellectual property (copyright, trademarks, patents)

g. Legal questions (cyber law, privacy)

h. Facilities (rental accommodation, furniture, etc.)

2. Can you suggest a good free / paid service for

a. Web hosting

b. Broadband internet

c. Website development

d. Search Engine Optimization

3. Where can I find a Ph.D. in statistics / maths / data-mining in Pune to help me with xyz

4.

Warning: Ask PuneTech is not intended to be a jobs board. Do not post about open positions you might have. Do not advertise yourself as a candidate. Such requests will be summarily deleted. Requests for persons with specific skills will be entertained only if the skills required are very specific (e.g. good: looking for help with Erlang; bad: looking for Java expert) and for a short consultation (e.g. good: need help with installing SuSE on a Dell laptop, bad: need a QA person).

Q: How much do you charge for this?

A: This is a free service. We are a group of volunteers doing this because we really want the tech ecosystem in Pune to improve, become more vital, become more active, and in general increase the productivity of Pune’s techies. We personally benefit from this indirectly: vastly improved networking, increase in visibility, increase in exposure, having a finger on the pulse of Pune, and the undying gratitude of some of the smartest people in Pune.

Q: Do you take money from services/experts whom you are recommending?

No. PuneTech and “Ask PuneTech” are community-driven, non-commercial services that do not accept any money from any source for any purpose whatsoever. Services/sources will be recommended purely on the basis of quality of service provided.

Q: Why not create a wiki for this and be done? Why is this service needed?

A: We tried and it doesn’t work. For some reason, people don’t add content to a wiki. There isn’t enough critical mass, and/or visibility for this to work. So, to tackle that problem, we are trying this, where we manually connect the “askers” to the “askees”, and “force” the “askers” to update the wiki after the question has been answered.

Q: Why not have an open mailing list where anybody can post questions and answers?

A: One problem is that there are many people who are not aware of the appropriate mailing list or website or forum where the question can be asked. In such cases, the Ask PuneTech service will simply point you towards the appropriate forum where you should ask your question. And in case, the question doesn’t get answered there, then we try to find an actual person to answer the question for you.

That brings us to the second problem: Sometimes posting to a mailing list works, but often it doesn’t. In other cases, there are many questions which do not get answers on the mailing list, in spite of the fact that the list does contain members who know the answers. It is often the case that the person who knows the answer would be happy to guide you if you called him up on the phone, but doesn’t have the time to type out the answer in email (or doesn’t read the mailing list so closely.) We are hoping to overcome this problem by introducing a personal touch.

Where possible, we will redirect you to an appropriate mailing list. e.g. if you have problems with connecting to BSNL broadband from your Ubuntu system, we’ll send you to the PLUG mailing list.

Q: How do you keep tabs on the quality / reliability of the information you provide?

A: We intend to tackle this in two ways. First, for all the suggestions you get, we’ll provide you with of the source of the information, and our confidence in the validity of the information, and/or our confidence in the reputation of the source. Hopefully this will be enough for you to take a slightly more informed decision. We feel that this will be better than having no information at all.

Second, over time, we intend to build a database of information sources and our confidence in the accuracy of their information. After we suggest something to someone, we expect them to provide us feedback as to how well it worked out. We’ll collate this information over time so that the quality of the information improves.

Q: Why are you doing this manually? Shouldn’t you use technology / wisdom of the crowds / automation to do this more efficiently?

OR

Q: Is this the same as Yahoo!Answers / LinkedIn Answers / xyz Forums / CraigsList?

A: We believe that technological / wisdom-of-the-crowds solutions only work at a large scale (like Wikipedia / Yahoo!Answers). It does not work at a smaller scale (like Pune). Otherwise, a viable technology solution would have emerged by now. The lack of that has forced us to try this out.

That said, we definitely intend to use leverage technology as much as possible in this endeavor. We just feel that initially this has to be done manually until it gathers enough of a critical mass.

Also, if you feel that a technology solution will beat this, we would encourage you to try. This is one argument we’d love to lose. We don’t care whether our approach wins or some other approach. We just want a solution to the problem of lack of reliable information.

Q: If this is free, it is not sustainable! This service will shut down after 6 months!

A: We have been doing http://punetech.com as a free service for almost an year now, and we have a pretty good feel for what is sustainable and what isn’t. In any case, we’ll worry about sustainability a little later. For now we are focusing on proving that there is a need, and people will use a service like this, and it will be useful. (We are convinced of that, but we need to prove it.) Once that has been proved, we can worry about how to sustain it.

Q: Since this is volunteer driven, it is not scalable!

A: See answer to previous question.

Q: How can I help?

A:

  1. Start using the service. The more people use it, the more useful the service becomes (and the knowledgebase grows)
  2. Make yourself available to us as an expert who can provide the answer (in whatever happens to be your area of expertise). We promise to not bother you too much. We’ll only forward you as many questions are you are willing to handle. If we don’t know you, we’ll initially put you down as an “untrusted source” and over time, your designation will (hopefully!) change to “reliable”.
  3. Tell all your friends about this service. (Actually, while you are at it, also tell your friends to subscribe to PuneTech at http://punetech.com/subscribe/ to get information about all the latest news, events, tech groups, startups and technologies in Pune.

Q: Who is behind this service?

A: The questions asked to “Ask PuneTech” are answered by a network of volunteers across Pune, who all share a passion for technology, or a passion for Pune, or, in most cases, both.

The service is coordinated by the people who run PuneTech, the most comprehensive source of information about technology in Pune (if you find a better source please let us know!) It was started by Navin Kabra. Amit Paranjape is a key advisor and evangelist for PuneTech, and one of the top volunteers. Another special mention goes to the Pune OpenCoffee Club, which has a close symbiotic relationship with PuneTech. There are a number of other people, too numerous to mention, who contribute in varying degrees.

Both, PuneTech and “Ask PuneTech” are intended to be community-driven, non-commercial services. To ensure that the content remains free from bias and vested interests, we do not accept any money from any source for any purpose whatsoever.

81% of Pune’s Wi-Fi Networks are insecure – ClubHack report

Featured, News, , , ,
Wi-Fi Security in Pune. Only the WEP encrypted access points (cream colored pie) are secure. Everything else is unsecure.
Wi-Fi Security in Pune. Only the WPA encrypted access points (cream colored pie) are secure. Everything else is insecure.

ClubHack, the group hell-bent on hammering some sense of security hygiene into the heads of an ignorant and careless public, went around Pune making a note of how secure or insecure various Wi-Fi hotspots in the city were, and found that a full 50% were not protected at all, and another 31% were only weakly protected. That just leaves 19% adequately protected.

If you have no idea what I am talking about, here is a little bit of explanation. More and more users are now using wireless networking cards to get their internet access. In such a setup, there is a Wi-Fi card that goes into your desktop/laptop (most modern laptops have this built-in), and to complete the connection there is a device that needs to be plugged into your internet connection (i.e. your broadband cable, or telephone line). This device is called an access point (AP), and is typically a wireless router. The computer then communicates wirelessly with your wi-fi router to connect to the internet.

The above report points out that in 50% of all wi-fi access points installed in Pune, there is no protection against random third-party computers from connecting to the AP. That’s like leaving your front door open. Not only can they access the internet using your AP, but more importantly, it is very likely that they can access the other computers on your network, and can tap into the network traffic going back and forth between those computers and the internet. If you are unlucky, they can get access to sensitive data, like passwords to your email account, or worse, bank account. Or, if, like our government, you want to focus on the wrong thing, you can worry that THE TERRORISTS CAN USE YOUR NETWORK TO SEND BOMB THREATS!!! (and we dutifully reported that in PuneTech.)

Of the remaining, 31% think that they have protected their AP using encryption, but the encryption scheme they are using (WEP) is known to be very weak, and can be broken in a matter of minutes. Which means that a hacker (cracker actually) sitting in a car outside your building can easily break into the network without anybody realizing it.

How did ClubHack find out? This is what they did:

On 10th November 2008, ClubHack created a setup in a car which included laptops & GPS enabled devices for the exercise. The car was driven in all the popular areas which included IT parks, multiplexes, residential areas, markets, busy streets etc. While the car was driving at a normal speed, the GPS and wireless enabled devices sensed the availability of wireless signals on the road. These signals were then recorded with details like MAC address of the access point, name of the network, security used, longitude and latitude of the location where the signal of a particular network was highest.

And just in case anybody amongst you is thinking that what they did was illegal and actionable, don’t worry! They took permission of Pune Police to undertake this mission, and Pune Police actually sent an officer to accompany them. For some more details of their project and findings, you can check out the short report, or the full report (PDF).

What should you do? If you are reading PuneTech, then no doubt you are one of the smart ones who are in the 19% that use WPA based encryption. But just in case someone slipped through, what you need to do is educate yourself about wi-fi security issues, and ensure that you change the settings on your wi-fi access point to use one of the WPA based encryption schemes. (There are 6 or 7 variants like WPA-PSK, WPA2-Personal, etc. Any one of them will do.) And please change the default administrator password for your AP. And if you have no clue what I am talking about, get a friend who understands to help you. Or pony up the Rs. 1000 for the wi-fi security workshop that ClubHack is going to conduct next month, or the Rs. 8000 for the wi-fi security training that AirTight networks is going to conduct later this month. This last one is certainly recommended if you are the network admin for one of the IT companies that ClubHack managed to snag during their wardrive.

And just in case the remaining 19% are feeling very pleased with yourself, I should also point out that security guru Bruce Schneier keeps his own wi-fi network open. It is a fascinating, and insightful, and a different take on this issue that you should read. But inspite of Bruce’s sage advice, I keep my router protected with WPA. Because Bruce’s advice amounts to saying that I should leave my door open, but keep all my drawers, and cupboards, and closets and bedroom door locked, and the fridge and TV chained to the wall. I’m not a security guru, and I am sure I’ll leave some door open. Don’t want to take that chance.

Pune company watch: Companies that are doing work related to this area in Pune: Airtight Networks, Symantec, QuickHeal.

Upcoming conferences and tech events in Pune – Nov/Dec 2008

Events, Featured, Technology, , ,
IdeaCamp Pune (source: InsideSocialWeb.com)
Idea Camp Pune, 2008. Photo courtesy InsideSocialWeb.com

The next couple of months are going to rather active in Pune, with a host of really good conferences and events coming up. Some of these are free events, while others have a fee associated with them. We have written about some of them on PuneTech before, while some you’ll be hearing about for the first time. Some of them are for hardcore techies, while others are more tangential. In any case, there is something for everyone in here. Take this opportunity to improve your skills, or improve your business network.Except for power cuts, it is a great time to be a techie in Pune.

Nov 19 CSI Pune Lecture: Data Management for BI : Ashwin Deokar from SAS R&D Pune will talk about issues in data management in Business Intelligence. Free for members & students, Rs. 100 for others, Rs 50 for Persistent employees
Nov 22, 23 Code Camp: 24-hour code camp organized by Pune Linux Users Group. Free: anybody can attend.
Nov 22 Pune OpenCoffee Club Meeting – Pune Startup’s Pain Points : Get together with other startups in the Pune area and discuss solutions to common problems. Free, anybody can attend, no registration required.
Nov 25,26,27 IndicThreads Conference on Java Technologies: 3-day conference on Java; speakers from all over India. Fees range from Rs. 4000 to 8500 depending on various things.
Nov 27, 28 Conference on Advances in Usability Engineering: organized by Viswakarma Institute of Information Technology. Rs 3500 for professionals, Rs. 2000 for academics and Rs. 500 for students.
Nov 27, 28 Wi-Fi Security Training from AirTightNetworks: Airtight Networks has some of the best wi-fi security products in the world, and they have all been developed fully in Pune. Rs. 8000 before 21 Nov, Rs 10000 afterwards
Nov 27 World Usability Date, Pune 2008 (part of the Usability Conference: This event is a part of the Usability Engineering conference listed a couple of lines above; but this part of the conference (3pm to 6pm) is free and open to all.
Nov 29 Barcamp Pune 5: If you don’t know what a barcamp is read this to find out and figure out why you should attend.
Dec 4,5,6,7 Pune Design Festival 2008: Fees and registration details not yet available
Dec 06+ ClubHack – 2-day InfoTech Security Conference: One day of presentations on security, and one day of workshops. INR 1000 for talk sessions, INR 1000 for each workshop. On the spot registration INR 1500
Dec 12+ Society of Technical Communication – 2-day conference on technical writing: Fees and registration details not yet available
Dec 17 CSI Pune Lecture: Data Management for BI: next in the Business intelligence series by SAS R&S India. Fees most likely: Rs. 100 for others, Rs 50 for Persistent employees
Dec 20 OpenSocial Developer Garage: Conference for OpenSocial developers and enthusiasts. This is a free conference, but by invitation only – Register here to be considered for invitation.

And there are some great events in January too.

Did we miss any? Please add them to the common tech events calendar of Pune. Or, send us a mail with details of the event, and we’ll add it.

Interesting blog posts by Pune’s techies

Featured, Pune City, ,

This is a round-up of some recent intersting blog posts written by Pune’s techies. These blogs don’t necessarily fall within the narrow charter of PuneTech, but introducing PuneTech readers to these blogs and bloggers does.

At the top of everyone’s mind is of course the financial meltdown. Arun Prabhudesai (who is CEO of hover.in) details the serious effects it is beginning to have on Indian industry, and on the jobs of regular people:

L&T Infotech is trimming its work force by 5%. That would mean a job loss for 10000 people. Goldman Sachs has fired 100 employees in Mumbai and 30 in Bangalore.  Satyam has fired 30 employees over fudged bills. Corus steel (part of Tata Steel now) has cut 400 jobs in UK because of poor business conditions. Tata Steel has ruled out any jobs cuts in India. Airlines are fearing that they have to lay off 8000 ground staff. Kingfisher has announced a 90% cut in the salaries of trainee pilots. Jet Airways has sacked 25+ expat pilots.

See the full article for even more scary figures. His blog (trak.in) is focused on Indian Business. Amit Paranjape also has a series of posts about the financial crisis (one, two, three) that you might find interesting. He also writes about Pune’s history, restaurant reviews, and cricket. (While on the subject of the financial crisis, you should also check out Sequoia Capital’s 56-slide presentation of doom. That is really scary.)

So what is to be done in these bad times? Manas Garg points out that before any success, whether it is in good times or bad, there is a dip.  And you need to persist and make it through the dip before you succeed. (see also Seth Godin’s thoughts on this.) Another thing that can be done, technologically, is to cut costs by shifting from real servers to virtual servers in the cloud. Mukul Kumar of Pubmatic often writes detailed posts about this on his blog, but in his most recent post, he cautions you to take into account the cost of data transfers in your calculations, as that is likely to be more expensive in some cases, than the cost of compution time on the servers.

Switching gears to security, the ClubHack blog warns us about “Free Public WiFi” – why it is bad, and how it works:

If an unsuspecting healthy laptop is searching for wireless networks in vicinity, it will see the advertised viral SSID in its list. If the laptop is configured to “Connect to any wireless network” as it comes in range, it will attach itself to the respective network. The connection can also be made when an unsuspecting user manually connects to an advertised viral SSID. As soon as this connection is made, the viral SSID appears in the PNL of the healthy laptop and thus gets infected.

Read the full article. And if you’ve been following the PuneTech calendar, you’ll know that ClubHack is organizing a security awareness conference in Pune in early December.

Just because of scary financials and scary security warnings, doesn’t mean that we need to go around feeling depressed. In fact, this is probably the best time to start something new, get involved in the community. PuneTech gave you an idea of upcoming tech community activities that you can get involved in. (By the way, the Pune Mirror agrees with us, and reprinted that article on Saturday.) Anthony Hsiao of entrip.com got together with other tech entrepreneurs in Pune to start Startup Cinema. Read about it on his blog. Also, don’t forget to check out his older post on why he prefers the chaos of Pune to the perfection of Singapore/Germany.

Pune is different, of course, and being away really helped appreciate the warmth of the people, the beauty of apparent chaos and disorder (having lived in Singapore and Zurich, I can honestly say that happiness is not derived from perfection…), the very decent lifestyle I can afford as an expat here (despite being constantly broke!), and just the interesting stuff that goes on all the time (it has to, there are so many people here, something has to be going on all the time).
In many ways, I think Pune (or many parts of India in general) are quite the opposite to places like Singapore – which is clean, orderly, safe, modern, connected, etc.

Know of any interesting techies in Pune who should be featured here? Let us know.

In the downturn, get involved with the tech community

Events, Featured, , ,

The next few months are going to be a thrilling time to be a techie in Pune. On the one hand, the financial meltdown is suddenly making its presense felt uncomfortably close to home – multiple companies are firing 5% of their employees, and ASSOCHAM promises more (retracted under pressure); bonuses are being cancelled; salaries are being reduced (yup! negative increments). The word “thrilling” goes both ways.

On the other hand, there are some really great tech events that are coming up and what better to do during a downturn than network with a bunch of people who are passionate about technology that you are interested in! (I know that a lot of you techies really dislike networking – I was like that once. One of these days, I am going to write an article for engineers on how to do networking without feeling like a cheap salesman.)

This is your chance to get involved with the tech community. It means increased exposure to interesting work that is going on elsewhere in Pune. It means improving your tech skills by becoming aware of latest trends and techniques. It means making friends with some really passionate people who share your interests. It means greatly increasing your chances of getting lucky.

With that in mind, I am listing the major tech events that are coming up soon. Many of them (but not all of them) are volunteer driven, so they need your help. Please get involved. Help the community, help Pune, and help yourself all in one shot.

Barcamp Pune 5 aka BCP5. The big daddy of volunteer-driven tech events in Pune. This will be the fifth installment. A must visit, if you want to see energy and enthusiasm. And it is in a bit of trouble as the date keeps getting postponed due to lack of a venue. Get involved, make it happen and become famous, and earn the gratitude of the community who are keenly looking forward to the barcamp. Date not yet fixed – tentatively November 15th (but almost certain to be postponed now).

The IndicThreads conference on Java Technologies. Not a volunteer driven event, but a big event for all Java lovers. If you work in Java, it would be difficult to justify why you are not attending, and Java people from all over India will be attending. Dates: 25 to 27 November.

ClubHack, a group of volunteers interested in educating the public on security issues, is organizing the ClubHack 2008 conference which will feature presentations and workshops on security issues that you must worry about in this big bad world of viruses, trojans, phishing, and all sorts of dangerous threats that are lurking around the corner waiting to pounce upon your computer and your bank account as soon as you let down your guard. Better to be prepared than to be sorry. Dates: 6 & 7 December.

The OpenSocial Developer Garage. A volunteer-driven get-together of OpenSocial developers from all over India. They are looking for a venue, for sponsors, for speakers, and for volunteers. Check out the OSD mailing list. Date: 20 December.

The TCS Excellence in Computer Science Week will feature lectures by experts from all over the world on the topic of de-centralized and co-operative computing. The last day to apply is today, so hurry. A world-class event is happening in your backyard, and is free – why wouldn’t you go? Date: 5 to 9 January.

Other, smaller, but more regular events:

The Pune GNU/Linux Users Group meets on the first Saturday of every month, but this time they postponed it by a day due to Diwali vacations. They are meeting tomorrow (Saturday, 8th November) at 4pm. Getting involved with the open source community is a great way to sharpen your skills, improve your resume and get to know some of the most passionate techies. They also have a Code Camp coming up on November 21st.

The Pune OpenCoffee Club, a group of Pune-based entrepreneurs and expectant entrepreneurs meets regularly and informally. Just yesterday they got together for a movie courtesy Entrip.com. The POCC monthly meeting, normally on the third Saturday of every month, might happen on the 4th Saturday (22 November) this month so as to not clash with the barcamp. Keep checking the PuneTech calendar – the event will be announced there soon.

The Pune Chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI-Pune), is a very active organization, and their regular monthly meetings happen on the second Saturday every month. That luckily happens to be tomorrow, and this time will feature three talks, one on “Six Sigma for organizational excellence”, another talk giving information on the “Right to Information” (and you have a right to have that information), and finally one on “Trends in Project Management”.

So get out there, and start networking, start volunteering. Please.

Type in 15 languages using Lipikaar – winner of Manthan award

Featured, News, Overviews, ,

Pune-based startup Lipikaar, creator of software that allows typing of 15+ Indian languages using a standard English keyboard, and which was one of the companies selected for in this July’s proto.in, is once again in the news – for winning the Manthan award.

The Manthan Award is a first of its kind initiative to recognize the best practices in e-Content. It was launched on 2004, by Digital Empowerment Foundation in partnership with World Summit Award and American India Foundation. The Manthan Award South Asia 2008 had received 284 nominations from 8 countries across 13 categories. Participating countries were India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka. The award cites Lipikaar for its coverage (15+ languages), its ease of use, and it applicability to the masses.

Here is a profile of Lipikaar from the PuneTech wiki:

Lipikaar sells software tools that allow a simple method for typing in Hindi (and 15 other Indic languages) on an ordinary keyboard. It requires no learning, and within a few seconds you will be able to type in Hindi any word that you can imagine.

Lipikaar aims to be different from all other transliteration competitors due to its use of patented technology which allows anybody to enter text without requiring any knowledge of English, which is a requirement for most other method

[edit] Features

[edit] Desktop Software

The Lipikaar technology is available as downloadable desktop software for Windows. It works as a keyboard overlay, which means that once installed, it allows you to input Indic language text into any application – Microsoft Office (i.e. Word, Excel), all websites, chat and e-mail.

[edit] Firefox Addon

Lipikaar is also available as a Firefox add-on that allows the user to enter Indic text to create emails, blogs, scraps, comments, chats and search in your favourite language on any website. Unlike the desktop software, this add-on is free.

[edit] Web publisher services

Webmasters wishing to allow local language text input on their website can avail of Lipikaar’s services, and they will work with the webmasters to integrate their technology in the website.

[edit] Languages Supported

Lipikaar supports 15 languages – Arabic, Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Nepali, Konkani, Sindhi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Urdu.

[edit] Links

[edit] Awards

[edit] Articles

[edit] People