Entrepreneur Geek

Do you dream of writing a book? A technical one? Three years ago, I was creating my future plan and writing 6 books was one of the top items in the list. 

Today, I have two books already in print and have learned a lot on the way. One of the lessons is to get the right publisher. I am fortunate to have Packt as the publisher of both my books – Mobile Web Development and Open Source Content Management Systems: Beginners Guide. 

A wannabe author will have a lot of questions. They may include:

• How is the overall experience of writing a book?
• During the writing process, what issues/ difficulties I may expect? And how to deal with them?
• Does writing a book overshadow personal life?
• I have a full time job, how do I manage my time?
• What benefits can writing a book bring to my specialist area?

Want to hear my story? Go ahead, and read my answers to these questions! At the end, I have valuable tips from my own experiences too!

Big Lie Repeated Audaciously becomes Truth

Hitler, for good or bad, changed the world history. Some of the things going around me, just reminded me of Dr.
Joseph Goebbels – Adolf Hitler’s public relations / marketing / propaganda man.

What’s most remembered of Goebbels is his explanation of Britain’s Big Lie theory (which was adopted by Hitler / Goebbels very well). Quoting:

That is of course rather painful for those involved. The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

So a big lie + repetition + audacity will soon become truth! People won’t care to find the truth, they will just listen to the big lie, and blinded by it, soon they will start believing that’s the real truth.

If you look at it, what were the primary rules of Hitler?

• Never allow the public to cool off
• Never admit a fault or wrong
• Never concede that there may be some good in your enemy
• Never leave room for alternatives
• Never accept blame
• Concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong
• People will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

The mentality of people is such that they will believe a big lie sooner than they would believe the truth. Malintentioned people use this to their advantage. They skew the facts and present only portions of it to public, omitting the original context and adding their own “big lie” context to it.

Some people realize this is so ridiculous, since they know the original facts. But the number of such people is generally less. And the propaganda man walks away to his advantage fooling everyone. By the time people realize the truth, it’s too late for them.

Have you ever experienced this happening? With you?

How would you fight it?

• Would you start countering every big lie?
• Would you keep quiet and wait?
• Would you expose the big lie?

(Image courtesy: notionscapital)

I do not believe there are traditional qualifications which make a business owner a winner. Drive, common sense and intuition count for a lot more. Even inventors and technical experts who start businesses tend not to be organisational types. They are often mavericks who want the freedom of self-employment. And although entrepreneurs have a reputation as wild risk-takers, in reality they judge the downsides carefully – because they have their own capital at stake, and they have learned about the dangers of the marketplace first hand.

…

Typical entrepreneurs would have never been hired by these corporations – or indeed understood the complex modelling upon which the financiers based their entire business model. But the bankers placed far too much faith in such artificial worlds of computer programs and clever buzz words – and completely lost the plot.

Rajesh Patel, a client who’s starting on his own after an impressing career, suggested a Financial Times article about entrepreneurs and why top companies failed. It was a very interesting reading. My belief in entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship just got thicker!

Entrepreneurs take decisions on gut instincts. They of course study the background and numbers, but more often than not, their decisions are based on their intuitions. It’s managers who decide by spreadsheets!

What’s your take?

I was shopping with family in Bandra Link Road area two weeks ago and spotted this board. It’s labeled “Gogola: Gola’s made of mineral water ice”. What caught my attention was obviously the spin on Google’s logo. I couldn’t resist and had to take a photo!

And by the way, these guys also have a website! Go check it out! (It’s just one page, but so what? Did you ever see a website for any ice gola vendor??) Gogola says it was inspired by Google. They also have a joint at Fun Republic in Andheri.

For anyone who does not know what an ice gola is – it’s our Indian version of slush or snow cone.

Have you seen any other non-tech business inspired by Google? If so, would love to hear about it via your comments!

If you are a PHP developer, you probably know that you can type “php.net/substr” to look at documentation for the substr() function. This works for many other keywords as well and is a superb feature. It’s just so convenient, I stopped using my local copy of PHP manual.

But yesterday, I wanted it offline. I downloaded the “many HTML files” version of the documentation, extracted it and set it up on my local Apache. I can now open up http://localhost/phpman/ to read the documentation. (this is how I actually learned PHP 11 years ago!!)

And I wanted the smart lookups – auto complete! I searched around to find if there was a ready .htaccess file that I could use. Or if someone had made something similar already. I did not really find anything solid. Suddenly I realized I can just look up the PHP.net site source code and figure out what they are doing, and replicate it on my local setup. (Yes, PHP.net’s source code is open too!)

Eureka!

So after a few minutes of hacking around, I have my nice little setup that mimics PHP.net’s quick / smart lookup of functions. Typing http://localhost/phpman/substr takes me to http://localhost/phpman/function.substr.html in a split second.

Jai ho!

Let me jump to the code now that you’ve read so much!

Here’s the .htaccess file. And here’s the PHP file – “manual-lookup.php” placed in the phpman folder. The file is an adaptation from php.net website’s source.

Here’s the complete procedure:

1. Ensure you have Apache / PHP setup locally.
2. Download the many HTML files version of PHP documentation.
3. Extract it in a folder called “phpman” in your website root. You should now be able to see it at http://localhost/phpman
4. Download this file, and save it as .htaccess within the phpman folder.
5. Download this file, and save it as manual-lookup.php within the phpman folder.
6. Try http://localhost/phpman/substr – it should work if all went well!
7. Enjoy!

Hope this helps someone like me