If I wanted a job, I would want one at UTV Motion Pictures

Posted on August 15, 2009 by Sudhanshu

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If there is one production house that is on a roll, it’s got to be UTV.

Over the last few years, the have given us Kaminey, Dev.D, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, Khosla Ka Ghosla, Bluffmaster, Swades, Parineeta, Rang De Basanti, Life in a Metro, Aamir. Their forthcoming flicks include Paan Singh Tomar, Peter Gaya Kaam Se, Alibaba Aur 41 Chor and Arjun – The Warrior Prince

It’s literally the complete list of the best movies to have released of late.

The facebook fan page of UTV has over 2355 fans and twitter account has 1928 followers, which is a little less when you consider that their valuation is at $321 million. UTV ‘Spotboy’, which got Dev.D into this world, had also made it to the US top 20 distributors in 2008.

But as they say, a company is only as good as the people driving it. So it’s not surprising that the UTV group as a whole was started by Ronnie Screwvala who is a self made entrepreneur with a story worth knowing. He created the first organised cable TV network in India around 1981, when he was just 19 years old. Soon he was into making advertisements, producing TV shows, and finally he managed to get into movies.

At age 28, Ronnie Screwvala started UTV Software Communications and just five years later they went public. Walt Disney currently owns 32.1 percent share in the company.

They also recently started Hungama TV, which became the most watched channel in it’s genre, and who gave us Shin Chan. They also acquired Indiagames last year, from entrepreneur Vishal Gondal.

Anyways, the whole point of the post is that I just heard that their Chief Creative Officer and the COO have resigned, and I have just been thinking if I should let them know if I am interested in the opening… What do you think?

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Gist is finally here!

Posted on August 11, 2009 by Sudhanshu

gist

I finally got a beta account for Gist and it looks really really awesome. Trust me!

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The tipping point for Firefox and Ubuntu

Posted on August 4, 2009 by Sudhanshu

The tipping point for Firefox and Ubuntu is finally here.

HISTORY

firefox

I have been an evangelist for Firefox and Ubuntu for quite a few years now. The obsession with Firefox started quite a long time ago, when I was in college. Linux too hit the right notes then, but Ubuntu itself came in later, specifically when I started Vercingetorix Technologies. The biggest reason was that when you work on the LAMP stack, you need everybody on the team to be comfortable with the operating system. And Ubuntu was just perfect.

TIPPING POINT

There is always a time for each product when people decide that they need to stop using it. It is the tipping point, when markets start shifting to a new product and the market for the old one disappears.

After having successfully used them for years, this tipping point for Firefox and Ubuntu is finally here for us.

The reasons are many, though the biggest is that they didn’t evolve with time, or atleast as much as they should have.

WHY I QUIT FIREFOX

chromeFirefox can’t stop hogging memory, and at times takes up over 700MB of RAM. It has been completely ousted by Google Chrome, which has two things which Firefox could never do, and which now, I can’t live without

1. Each tab is a different process. So when it crashes, only one tab crashes. The rest of the pages are still up and running.

2. The memory consumption is negligible. The sum of the memory consumed by all tabs increases and decreases based on the number of tabs which are open.

There are other reasons, like the area being bigger and the inability to add plugins (which really make Firefox drag).

As a side effect, I have also stopped using Delicious. Firefox had an awesome plugin, which made it way too simple to add anything to Delicious. Chrome doesn’t give me that feature, but now I’m content with saving bookmarks right there on Chrome.

WHY I QUIT UBUNTU

The reasons for getting over Ubuntu were slightly different.

The single biggest issue was that there is no good enough browser available for Linux. Firefox was the best browser available, but Firefox on Ubuntu is even worse that Firefox on Windows.

Also, the last version of Ubuntu that I liked was 7.10. They have had three different versions after that, but I just don’t see what value they have added, except a slightly better looking UI. (Though the UI still sucks compared to a Mac or Windows).

We have finally replaced all machines from Ubuntu to Windows 7. Microsoft gave the final blow to Ubuntu by starting the BizSpark program, which gives free access to all Microsoft programs. Google did their bit by making sure that Chrome doesn’t work well on Ubuntu.

Finally, the UI is beautiful. Maybe not as awesome as the Mac, but it’s definitely a huge improvement.

And in case you haven’t heard it yet, Windows 7 take up less memory on it’s own that Firefox with 10 tabs!!

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Adobe should support more platforms!

Posted on July 28, 2009 by Sudhanshu

We always knew that Adobe really needs to start supporting more platforms if they need to stay in the game, but now it turns out that Google is also saying it.

Check this out :

Adobe

Another interesting point which comes up is that if this was because the server on which the Google Spider was running was not in the list of operating systems supported by Adobe.

If this was because of it, some companies are at a real disadvantage!

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Setting up emails via SVN

Posted on June 3, 2009 by Sudhanshu

We finally managed to setup SVN to start sending us emails on each commit. I also wrote about it in more detail on the company blog.

If you’ve just started hosting svn on your server recently, you should take a look.

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Slicehost : Setting up outgoing mail and Google Apps (postfix)

Posted on February 17, 2009 by Sudhanshu

We just moved to SliceHost recently and have been trying to get the server up and running. Every thing was super cool, but getting outgoing email to start working was a bitch.

What happens is that our poor little sendmail tries to be smart and deliver as much mail internally as possible. So even though the email address is set up to be used via Google Apps, sendmail tries to relay it internally and gets a ‘User unknown’.

This was confirmed by peeping into /var/log/mail.log and setting up a simple script in php which called the mail function. The user was never found, because we were looking at the wrong place.

Since I wasn’t prepared to spend a good part of the day on this thing, I decided to look out for options. After looking at a number of options, I decided to go ahead with ‘postfix’.

Let me take you step by step through the procedure :

1. As always, aptitude is there to help us out, so first we install postfix

sudo aptitude install postfix

2. During the installation, remember to choose the ‘Internet site’ option (because that is what you are doing. Right?)

3. Now that installation is done, it’s time to tell postfix that the domain is set up on Google Apps and not on the server (Actually we only tell postfix that the domain is not on the server). In the file /etc/postfix/mail.cnf we change the following

mydestination = mydomain.com, localhost.mydomain.com, localhost
to
mydestination = localhost.mydomain.com, localhost

4. Once that is done, just quit and restart (using sudo reboot) and you’re done.

In case you run into issues with the above, or find out a way to run this with sendmail, do let me know.

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The ultimate Dev.D trailer

Posted on February 10, 2009 by Sudhanshu

The masterpiece of our times.

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How the banks have shrunk

Posted on February 6, 2009 by Sudhanshu

Here is an unsettling picture from Bloomberg which shows how much the market capitalization of the major banks have shrunk in the last two years. (Click the link to view the full image)

How the banks have shrunk

How the banks have shrunk

Citibank and RBS look really bad, falling by almost 92.5% and 96.2%.

Interestingly, among this lot, HSBC has the maximum market cap these days, followed by JP Morgan and Sant ander.

Luckily market cap is not something startups have to worry about!

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Fixing ‘Could not determine fully qualified name’ issue on localhost

Posted on February 5, 2009 by Sudhanshu

Whenever you setup Ubuntu on a new machine, every apache restart always ends up with a silly error which goes something like :

apache2: Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName

Other than the fact that it is slightly irritating, it is usually harmless.

But if you still want to get rid of it, so that you can have a seemingly beautiful apache2 restart, you can just add the following to /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

ServerName vxtindia

Now apache knows what is your server called. But it will get an error if it tries to access the server name directly.

To fix this, you need to go to /etc/hosts and add your IP there.

192.168.1.10 vxtindia

That’s it. You are done!

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Shifted to wordpress 2.7

Posted on December 11, 2008 by Sudhanshu

After a long wait, the new version of wordpress is finally here.

The admin looks really different from the old one. It looks like it has been stripped of all color. The lovely blue from version 2.6 has disappeared and can only be seen in traces.

One great new features it that you see the tag cloud while selecting the tags for the post. This really sucked in the older version.

Do let me know how were your experiences with it.

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