Entrepreneur Geek

Yesterday, 27th May 2007, Magnet completed 8 years of building high end web applications. Last 8 years have been a roller coaster ride. We have been at the peak, and we have hit bottoms. But bit by bit, through the hard work of all the people who have worked with us, we have grown. We have grown in experience, size and wisdom.

Thank you, to all the people who contributed. From the college friends who started off, the Magnet e-zine team, initial employees, to clients, associates, families, and everyone else.

We celebrated the 8th Anniversary! Pictures over here!

If you are like me, you use X11 on your Mac only for OpenOffice (I am waiting for the native build). But when you start OpenOffice, it also starts X11 – which in turn starts xterm – a command line for X11. I just upgraded X11, and the xterm started coming again. I forgot how I had fixed it last time, so searched for it again. Here’s the perfect solution for doing this. (Taken from a post by Peter on BML)

The default settings for startup under the Mac X11 create an xterm window. This can be annoying if one primarily uses X11 for openoffice or other programs and uses the Mac Terminal program for the command line.

The default settings for startup are contained in the file ‘/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/xinitrc’. Each user can override this by creating a .xinitrc file in their home directory. One line in this file needs to be changed to remove the launch of the xterm window.

Here are the specific command line instructions for doing this:

cp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/xinitrc ~/.xinitrc
chmod u+w ~/.xinitrc
sed 's/xterm/# xterm/' ~/.xinitrc > foo
mv -f foo ~/.xinitrc

After this, quit X11 (if running) and relaunch and there should be no xterm window.

Worked like charm!

We had another Hackfest in Magnet this weekend. The last Hackfest was a roaring success. We had only five participants this time, but it was fun as well. For me, it was a “Samosa to Samosa” hack fest. We started at Saturday 7pm, and I really got on after 3 samosas in my tummy around 8.30! And after a Sunday morning dose of samosas, I started pacing down!

Collectively we did a number of things. Let me put some bullet points:

• Openfire integration with MSN, Yahoo!, Google and AOL messengers. So now we can easily talk to our clients using the same internal Jabber based messenger system.
• Streamlined user level backup system – spanning multiple servers and multiple configurations
• Lot of research on Microsoft Share Point Portal Server
• 3D UI with standard Flex components on Outsmart Labs. Amazing work! I wonder how they are doing it!
• We read a lot of blogs and learnt many new things!
• A lot of QuickSilver hacking
• Batch audio conversion using Switch as I wrote earlier
• Lot of research on mobile and mobile web – the trends, technologies etc
• SQL Injection and general hacking around
• SVN
• MySQL Clustering
• And we watched “Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro” – had a great time laughing! Spent more than an hour getting the VCD to show up on the projector though!
• The dinner and in-between discussions were insightful – we talked on topics ranging from security, grid computing, mobile as a computer, IPTV, Windows hacking, Benefits of eating healthy food, GTD philosophy, planning with a calendar, RSS subscriptions with Thunderbird and MP3 streaming

Good fun as usual! I am always looking forward to Hackfests in Magnet! Missed Kartik, Ameya and Naveen though!

If you are working on a software project, usability testing (and understanding it in the first place) is very important. From 24 Ways:

Natalie Downe describes a simple approach to usability testing for those of us working to tight timescales or budgets. That’d be nearly all of us then. Learn how to make the most of your available user testing time, and perhaps this year you’ll not end up quizzing auntie as she stuffs her face with turkey.

Impress your friends with your schedule-friendly user testing

Wanted to transfer some songs to my phone from iTunes. I have the default encoding set to AAC, so songs that I imported from CDs, get stored as m4a (MP4 audio) files. Realized that this format wouldn’t work with my phone, so was looking for some converter. Tried ffmpegX (that I normally use for video conversion) and it worked fine. But then I was lazy to do all files one by one.

Found Swith! A nice little utility that can batch convert you audio files to and from a number of formats. Including wav, gsm, ogg, mov, aac and mp3.

Worked pretty well and I was ready to roll in a few minutes! Power of simple utilities!