We are using Backbone.js to build the Agent Dashboard for SupportBee. We test drive our javascript code using Jasmine and Sinon JS . We use Handlebars for templating and Jammit for packaging the assets and compiling the handlebars’ files. The JS UI talks to the server using a RESTLike API (I’ll talk about why we don’t call it RESTful yet in the conference). The talk will describe this setup and walk through a small application that can demonstrate backbone’s features and patterns.

There are also several other interesting talks in the two day conference. Do checkout the schedule and register for the event. See you there!

Some of the talks that I enjoyed were Ruby Can Haz Everyone by Mikel and Under the Covers with Rails 3 by Gregg. Apart from the talks, I had some interesting discussions on API designing with Tom and Ryan that I really enjoyed. Here is a list of other talks from the conference.

The best part was attending the Github Drinkup on the second day of the conference. The drinks and food were good and the conversations awesome. Here are some pics from the day two of event and the drinkup

Apart from meeting some great rubyists, I had the chance to meet Superman, Batman and Robin. Here is a pic of them from first day of the conference

The conference was really well organized and executed. Thanks Andy for the great conference (and coffee). I’ll be back next year :)

The very next day, I downloaded an old HN codebase, bought the domain hackernews.in and set up a Hacker News for India (HNI). It had such an awesome reception that it was like everybody was waiting for something like that all their lives. Yeah, okay I am drumming it up a bit in saying so. The reception was awesome nevertheless. We have over 300 users and 700 submissions (posts + comments) in less than 72 hours of setting up HNI.  Also, lets compare some posts on HN and HNI

Ask HNI: Silent places to work in Delhi? – http://hackernews.in/item?id=112 (An India specific logistics question with 12 replies)
Ask HN: CoWorking space in Delhi/India? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1163808 (4 points, 2 replies)

Discussion on a blog post by Swaroop on startup hiring issues in India – http://hackernews.in/item?id=69 (An India specific blog post)
Ask HN: Startups hiring in India? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1631940 (1 point, 0 replies)

Ask HNI: Subscription and recurring billing management systems for India? http://hackernews.in/item?id=355 (12 replies)
Ask HN: Accepting Online Payments in India? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1755854 (3 points, 1 reply)

I think you see the trend. India specific questions mostly go un-noticed and unanswered on HN. There are many more unanswered ones on HN that you can see at http://searchyc.com/india

Amateurish, Illegal, Rip-off. If the person was actually concerned shouldn’t he have participated in the discussion on HNI itself or the mailing list and offered his side of the argument? If I was allowed to grade amateurishness his behaviour was definitely more amateurish than starting HNI (if at all that can be called amateurish!) Or may be he was dying for some attention.

In all this confusion, I knew one thing for sure. If this is a problem for PG I would change the name. I was not going to change the name assuming PG has a problem. So I mailed PG.

Here’s my mail

Hi Paul,

I have been a reader of HN for about 3 years and we recently had a HN meetup in Bangalore. One of the things we discussed was how some issues are very India specific and HN is not the best place to discuss them (as not everyone is interested). So I went ahead and created http://hackernews.in and it has had some good traction in the last couple of days.

There have been some concerns over the name “Hacker News”. I picked up the name because we were essentially catering to the same community and we are clearly not running this for profit. However if YC has a problem with this, I can change the name. However, I think that having local HN sites may be very useful to startups (as you can see from the discussions on HN India).

I am happy to put a disclaimer in the footer saying that this site is not affiliated to YC. However since the code is in lisp, its taking me a little longer ( I have no lisp background).  Please let me know your thoughts and I will comply.

Finally, thanks a lot for HN and YC. Its been very useful.

Thanks,

and here is the response I got from him

Hrm, I don’t know.  We’re not usually very fussy about such things,
but it’s possible this is something we might want to do ourselves
someday.  Not immediately but maybe in several years.  You’re
welcome to use the code of course but would  you mind calling it
something else?  You’ll probably find any other name will do just
as well anyway.  –pg

Since he did not want me to continue using the name, I went ahead and bought hackerstreet.in and redirected the site to it. In a followup email, I also asked PG for the latest codebase but he needs a few weeks to clean it up before he can release it.

Only time will tell the whether HSI will succeed or not but I believe that there is a great need for something like this in India and would always be proud that we started this.

I have been using this setup for a few weeks now and I think it has almost doubled my productivity. One big benefit is that I can have code (vim) and terminals (log and shell) on one monitor and I can have two browsers (firefox for debugging and chrome for reference) on the second monitor. This makes sure that I never have to alt-tab to switch to browser or other windows needed for programming. This in turn makes sure that I don’t lose focus. Overall I have found this to be really productive.

Go ahead and try this setup out if you think you can be more productive than you currently are. You may wanna try three smaller monitors instead of two really large ones. Some people have found it to be better. Also be sure to read monitor reviews before buying the monitors.

The cafe is run by some people who started an online forum in Vietnam called tinhte.com. They started the cafe after the forum became popular and they wanted a place for people to hang out. You can see a lot of gadgets being unboxed here for reviews or pictures and a lot of freelancers working on their stuff. The staff is really friendly and you can hang out here all day. In fact, if you come here for a few days, you will start running into the same people. Its like a virtual office. Checkout the video of the place below

This cafe and the online operation is what would be termed a lifestyle business. Basically they are not looking at growing or opening more cafes or maximizing profits from this cafe. They wanna create a friendly environment for people to hang out and work and in the process keep the entire operation profitable. In some ways, being a lifestyle business gives this place its friendly touch and character.

I think we need a lot more lifestyle businesses like this. We need more friendly places and businesses that don’t put profits before customer service and customer happniess.

I have now been using the macbook for over a month now and I can confidently say that it’s the best computer I have owned so far. There are things about the mac that make it the best development machine ever. One of the best features for me is the fast sleep and wake up. You almost never have to wait for the laptop to wake up. As soon as you open the lid, its back up. There is a nice battery level indicator on the left side that you can use to query the battery status even with the lid closed. Also, the battery lasts for a long times so you never have to really shutdown your laptop (and lose the workspace)

The hardware is really top notch. The trackpad is the best I have seen so far and mouse gestures are really useful. The sound quality is awesome and the screen super crisp. It works really well with external keyboard, mouse and displays and so when you are in office, you can use it as a desktop. Apple desktop keyboards have the same layout and spacing as their laptop keyboards so you will never feel any difference.

On the software side, it comes bundled with iPhoto and Garageband so you have some good apps to begin with. The inbuilt pdf viewer is very good too. Also, there are some really good free applications available for mac, especially for developers (for example GitX)

I think macbook is totally worth the money if you can afford it. Its a little expensive but no other laptop comes even close. They can probably match up or do better on the processor speed or RAM but as a package (hardware + software), nothing beats the macbook. If you want , you can read more 15” apple macbook pro reviews

I was expecting to see something like Bangalore but I was in for a total surprise (and a pleasant one at that). The city is big, not as crowded as Bangalore and hundred percent fun. First thing that you notice is that the cabs are very efficient here (if you follow this advice and get a good one) and as a result its very easy to get from anywhere to anywhere any time of the day. I have used the cabs as late as 4 AM and I have always had a very pleasant experience. Another thing that I loved about the city is the different kinds of cuisines that you can sample here. So far, I have tasted Vietnames, Korean and Japanese food and desserts and everything has been really good and reasonably priced. I never thought I would say this but the vegetarian food here is exceptionally good. Here are a few pictures from MoF (Ministry of Food), a japanese dining and desserts place

This place has a great night life and a lots of live music. A lot of restaurants have live music and there are some great places for rock lovers. Most places are open till 2 AM. There are a lot of cafes and clubs which are open all night and you can get some great food all through the night. Here is a picture of a place called Q-Bar which serves coffee and drinks till about 3 AM in the morning.

Thats all for now. I will post more pictures and updates/info in another blog post. So long!

I will be giving a presentation on basics of Facebook Connect and a small tutorial on developing a simple application using FB Connect. This is the same talk that I gave earlier in ACM’s compute event. However, unlike the ACM event, this event is free to attend.

See you there!

In simple terms, Facebook Connect lets you provide a ‘Login with Facebook’ functionality on your website. Once users login with their Facebook credentials, you can help them post the activity they perform on your website back as news feeds on Facebook. You can see Facebook Connect in action at Muziboo. In fact, our implementation was the winner in Facbook Developer Contest India.

If you want to implement FB Connect on your site, there are plugins available for some blogging tools and popular CMS packages. However, if you have your own platform, you need to use their Javascript library to integrate the functionality. I will be doing a hands on tutorial at the upcoming Compute 2010 conference in Bangalore on building applications using Facebook Connect. Here is what we will go through:

• What is Facebook Connect and what are the benefits of using it.
• A simple application for logging into a site using FB Connect, perform an activity and post a news feed on Facebook
• Advanced capabilities of Facebook Connect (ex. sending email to the user)
• Integrating with your login/signup mechanism
• A note on the terms and policies of FB Connect

Prerequisites: The tutorial will assume familiarity with Facebook platform and working knowledge of Ruby and Javascript.

Hope to see you there! If you are a startup, you can apply for some free passes. More information here.

The first one is a review of the Nokia 5800 xpress music phone that I got in August. I had an imate (windows mobile) phone before and though it had some good features, it had a very tough interface and wasn’t very usable. Also, I was not very happy with the build quality and spent a lot of time gluing the parts together every time it fell down.  Apart from decent build quality, this time I wanted to buy a phone which had the following features

• Wi-fi, Email and a decent web browser (atleast usable enough to login to some web consoles and perform admin tasks for Muziboo in case of an emergency)
• A usable music player with decent headphones  (I generally look for good bass)

I wanted to upgrade to an iphone but found it to be damn expensive (in India and US). I then ran into some reviews of 5800 and decided to buy it as it offered great features for its price. Since there are a lot of detailed spec reviews of 5800 on the net, I will just post what I personally liked and disliked after using the phone for a couple of months

The Good

• Wi-fi is very easy to setup and works great. You can easily select if you want to connect to Wi-Fi/ GPRS everytime an applications wants to access internet. The web browser is also pretty usable and supports Javascript (and more importantly flash)
• Comes with a 8 GB memory card (upto 16 GB supported)  so you can load hundreds of songs on it. It has a pretty decent music player and the video playback is great too. The bundled headphones are good quality and it supports a standard 3.5mm phone jack so you can use better desktop headphones too. The headphones come with controls for next/previous/stop/play/pause and volume so its very easy to change tracks while you are on a treadmill. It also comes with lots of preloaded music (both Hindi and English).
• There are some pretty useful apps available for symbian (such as putty)
• There is a 3.0 megapixel camera that takes decent pics. Not as great as a cybershot phone camera but good enough to capture memories. You can see a pic I took here
• It has a pretty big screen (bigger than iphone screen)
• Comes with maps and GPS (3 months free trial)
• Its currently priced at 13.5k so its pretty cheap (I got it for around 16.5k). strongly recommend checking out offersforshoppers.com for 5800′s coupons

The Bad

• Does not charge through a USB cable. You need to carry the stupid Nokia charger. I find this pretty irritating
• The touchpad is not as good as that of an iPhone (However its still pretty usable)
• There are not as many apps available for 5800. iPhone clearly is a winner here

Overall I find the phone good value for money. Let me know if you have any questions.