Perspectives

• "Our favorite holding period is forever." – Warren buffett #
• Makes sense to me: "too much focus on profit will destroy profit." – http://bit.ly/9wdps2 #
• RT @roopitwit Almost dead free UPS in Banaswadi – Roopit http://bit.ly/9bhONI #
• #mokkai #
• wait pannitte irundhaa dubukkunu paaku will also go away #mokkai mohan #
• "Mokkai try pannaalum yenakku varaadhu da" #mokkai #mokkamohan #
• Poetry is coming out of my mouth machan – #mokkai #mokkamohan #
• Vanara and ravana are anagrams #mokkai #mokkamohan #
• "If you are going to hell…Keep going" – Winston churchill via @ysudhir #
• #correction – "If you are going through hell…Keep going" – Winston churchill via @ysudhir #

• The Roopit "Hi" Video http://youtu.be/9nPBO9p_tH4 – http://www.roopit.com #
• The Roopit "Hi" Video – http://bit.ly/dCVA7z #roopit #launch #startups #india #bangalore #roopit.com #
• Damn it. My gmail is locked, I think. #fail #
• And at the end of it all, @moxada says "I feel like Google" #
• Micromax mobile – Nothing like Anything….This is so profound. I am not able to imagine what that could mean. #
• Horror at Harare #

Chart of Pagerank vs Websites

Have been studying SEO quite seriously lately. Specifically,  I wanted to know how the promotion from one pagrank to another happens, how frequently, and on what basis.

Dont have the answers for all of them yet, but in the process, I made up this chart on the left which lists all the websites from the internet (atleast, the ones that Google knows about) on the y-axis and pagerank on x-axis.A few interesting inductions can be made from this chart.

• There are a ton lot of websites that simply dont have a pagerank. That’s possibly because there isint even one previously pageranked site linking into them.
• But the moment you fall under Google’s pagerank radar, it seems like you get promoted from 1 to 3 quite easily. Indicated by the fact that there are fewer PR 1 sites than PR 3.
• From PR 4, it is a climb against a mountain. Fewer and fewer websites get promoted further up. Infact, there are just 15 websites with PR 10.

So, if your website is in PR 3 or PR 4, it is reasonable to say that is an average website in Google’s eyes. At PR 5, you can really claim you have left the crowd behind.

After some looking around, particularly this post on Ubuntu email with Mailx (which is incomplete, if you follow all the instructions, you will realise that the certificate he is talking about does not exist in the tgz that you download) and a few others, I got my mailx to work with my gmail account.

I guess you can try setting up an MTA such as exim and use sendmail or even mail, but that seemed quite complicated and I wanted to send out a mail from my shell script as quickly as possible.

Here are the steps involved which I wrote up as a little shell script:

Update: The Script got messed up when I ported the blog from Blogspot to wordpress.

#! /bin/sh

sudo apt-get install ca-certificatessudo update-ca-certificates
sudo apt-get install msmtp mailx
echo "# config options: http://msmtp.sourceforge.net/doc/msmtp.html
#A-user-configuration-file
defaults
logfile /tmp/msmtp.log

# gmail account
account gmail
auth on
host smtp.gmail.com
port 587
user EMAIL
password PASSWORD
from EMAIL
tls on
tls_trust_file /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
# set default account to use (not necessary with single account)
account default : gmail" > ~/.msmtprc
chmod 600
~/.msmtprc
echo "# set smtp for nail
set from=\"EMAIL (YOUR NAME)\"
set sendmail=\"/usr/bin/msmtp\"
set message-sendmail-extra-arguments=\"-a gmail\"" > ~/.mailrc

echo "Edit CAPTIALS in .msmtprc and .mailrc and run a test message like this:
"echo "echo Message | mailx -s \"this is subject\" user@email.com\n"

Enjoy!

I am done writing about Maps & Local in India. It is not interesting to me anymore. And the symptoms are showing. I havent written anything on this blog for over 5 months now. Not that I didnt have anything to say all this while. Just that they didnt fit into a blog that was titled “On Maps & local in India”.

So, here it is. I am taking the blog back to what it was earlier. A blog on thoughts, experiences and incidents from my life. Now that is broad enough that I can write virtually anything.

Adieu Maps & Local.

Nokia Navigator ad at Bangalore airport
Originally uploaded by shivku.

Nokia, having bought Navteq, has Navteq’s data in their mobile apps. And the map coverage sucks.

I throughly enjoyed the 300 parody on the Yahoo-Microsoft deal. All credits to Amr. Get set to rotfl.

The Yahoo! Maps compass
Originally uploaded by shivku.

Although we sit and write code to make sure that You don’t even need a compass, we still like it the old way.

Sridhar got us these Keychains a little while ago.

If you haven’t, then you can listen to a few of them right here. I think they played in all the major metros in Radio Mirchi. Not sure about it. They have turned out to be pretty cool. Do you like any of them? Which one?

Bewafaa: Sonam told me that meant Disloyal. One more Hindi word under my kitty. The guy gets lost and by the time he turns up, his girl friend is already married to someone else. My personal favorite.

Directions: This dude wanted to go to Goa and ends up being in Nashik. And then gets a good bashing from his beloved.

Trekking:
A couple of guys get lost in a trekking trail at night. Sure, they could have sent themselves an SMS of the directions they need. Now, don’t ask me which trail it was.

060320081409
Originally uploaded by shivku.

On March 2nd, thirteen years ago, little did Filo and Yang know that they are going to create the most visited site on the planet.

They did and here we are. Happy Birthday Yahoo!. I love you.