Gaurav Gupta's Blog

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27
Aug 09

Top 50 Technology and Business Books – Part 1

direct-from-dell 1. Direct from Dell by Michael Dell – Talks about Michael Dell’s early life, obsession with computers and electronics, founding of Dell and Dell’s direct to customer business model.

2. iCon Steve Jobs by Young and Simon – Coming together of Steve Jobs and Wozniak, starting Apple computers and Steve Jobs eventually performing the “greatest second act in the history of business”

biz-speed-of-thought 3. Business @ Speed of Thought by Bill Gates – Interesting insights into Bill Gate’s vision of the future of computers. A few interesting examples from Microsoft too.

winning-jack-welch 4. Winning by Jack Welch – How Jack Welch single handedly changed the course of General Electronics leading from the front as CEO.

google-story 5. The Google Story by David Vise – An amazing book on the formation and rise of the Google we all know today. A must read.

the-dip 6. The Dip by Seth Godin – Seth describes how the “dip” is inevitable and is the biggest differentiator between success and failure. Like many of his blog posts, the book is short and precise.

men-of-steel 7. Men of Steel by Vir Sanghvi Well known Indian journalist interviews the czars running a few of the largest businesses in India.

one-minute-manager 8. One Minute Manager by Blanchard and Johnson – Management can be simple. A must-read if you want to learn how. Read my complete review of the One Minute Manager.

9. The Road Ahead by Bill Gates – Another great book by Bill Gates about his vision of the future of computer science.

good-to-great 10. Good to Great by Jim Collins – Your product is good. What differentiates a “good” product from a “great” one? This book has the answer.

The above is the first post from a 5 part series of book recommendations.

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25
Aug 09

GMail Wishlist – Features I’d love to have in GMail

1. Tagging conversations

Search in GMail is useful but not perfect. A common problem I face is not being able to search for a particular email thread just because I don’t know what to search for.

Ex. I call up my friend Asok and ask him to email me his mobile number. He sends me a blank email with his phone number in the subject. No text, no words, just the number.

Say, I need to find his number a few months later. By then, a few thousand emails would have cluttered my inbox and the email I’m looking for is lost in the haystack. Of course I can short-list emails by using filters (“from:Asok”, in this case) but this may not always work.

A possible solution – The ability to tag a conversation and search by tags seamlessly. So I could tag the above conversation as “asok mobile number” and later search for “asok mobile” and fetch the email.

2. Sharable permalinks for email threads

GMail assigns a unique URL to each email message, which look something like https://mail.google.com/mail/#inbox/12345abcdec79ed9d . If you send an email to more than one of your contacts, it would be great if I can later send this URL to one of those people and it opens up that email thread in their inbox. This could be incredibly useful – you can refer to a previous conversation with a simple URL. You can share this URL, put it as a reference in your bug tracker etc.

What do you think about these ideas? Do you have any ideas you wish to share? Post a comment.

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24
Aug 09

Top 10 reasons why iPhone 3GS will be a success in India

1. Just like Nokia phones, we were waiting for iPhone 3G prices to drop. It never happened. Then why wait with 3GS?

2. Apple announced a tentative launch date way back. We’ve all saved up the cash.

3. It has been a year since 3G launch. We were all hoping for an “iPhone killer”. It never happened. iPhone still rules.

4. Old habits die hard. It was hard to digest that Nokia is no more the #1. Today usability is more important for some than features.

5. The iPhone lacked a lot of basic features even a 5k phone had. Apple fixed most of them.

6. Back then, the iPhone was new, un-reviewed and untested. Not many were ready to take the plunge. Not so anymore.

7. We were waiting for “3G” before buying an iPhone 3G. It never happened and it doesn’t seem likely either. The world has already started talking about 4G.

8. We were hoping that the iPhone will also open up to other carriers. Never happened.

9. We’ve seen it, touched it, heard about it. Everything seems so much more familiar.

10. 30k sounded like a lot of money those days. Now, a lot of phones kiss the 30-40k band. It doesn’t seem “that” expensive anymore.

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11
Aug 09

Nokia N97 – Has Nokia played it’s trump card already?

We happened to get a test piece of the recently launched Nokia N97 after attending the Nokia N97 Bloggers Meet at Delhi a few days back. The Nokia N97 arrived at just the right time – I recently did away with my Nokia E90 communicator and was looking forward to my next smart device – And for a change, there were only a few models which I was considering, which included the iPhone 3GS, Nokia N97, Blackberry Bold and a few recent models from Samsung and HTC.

Read the complete review on WebYantra…

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19
Dec 08

Reset forgotten Windows Vista password without formatting

I recently happened to mistype the password when trying to set a password on my Windows Vista machine. As a result, I could not login to my computer after restarting it.

I was sure there was a way to “hack” into Vista without having to re-format my PC, and neither was I interested in downloading any software which claimed to reset forgotten passwords. Some amount of googling and I was “in” and ready to post this as a “tutorial” from my Vista machine

Here is what I did (find a geek to do this for you):

1. Boot your computer from a Linux Live CD (eg. Knoppix, Ubuntu etc.)
2. Open the “terminal” and type in the following series of commands:

sudo su – (gain superuser privelages)
cd /mnt (change directory to mounted drives)
ls (get the list of mounted drives)
cd sda1 (sda1 is the main hard drive)
cd Windows/ (change to the windows directory)
cd System32/ (change to the system directory)
mv Utilman.exe Utilman.old (backup original file)
cp cmd.exe Utilman.exe (copy cmd.exe as utilman.exe)
reboot

Now take out your Live CD and let Windows boot normally.

Once rebooted, on the Vista logon screen, Press Windows key + U (or click on the small Accessibility Options icon on the bottom left)

This will try to invoke Utility Manager (Utilman.exe) but cmd.exe will spawn instead, with ‘System’ privileges.

c:\>net user mynewuser mynewpassword /add
c:\>net localgroup administrators mynewuser /add

Reboot the system.

Now on the Login screen, you will see a new account “mynewuser” created. Login to Vista using the password “mynewpassword”

Now, go to Control Panel > User Accounts and remove the password for your original account. Reboot and login from your original Vista account and remove the “mynewuser” account you created for this hack (optional).

You can now (optionally) revert back Utilman.old to Utilman.exe to prevent misuse, incase a non-geek gets hold of your laptop

Geeks are sexy!

P.S. You’ll find this trick on many other websites too, but the reason I “re-blogged” it is because it really works!

Technology — 2 comments
09
Sep 08

Ten Years in the Digital Era

Somewhere in the middle of 1998 I got my first computer at home. Which means 2008 is the year I complete 10 years being a part of the digital revolution. Like almost everyone who’s been a part of this since the early years, I love looking back at those early days and recalling how the journey has been.

I remember playing cricket outside my house with friend’s when someone came to deliver our first desktop computer – an HP Vectra machine. I dropped everything I had in mind and ran towards my house in maddening excitement. A cool “HP” branded desktop, sparkling white with (Genuine) Windows 95, 16 MB RAM, 133 MHz Intel Pentium Processor, 2.1 GB hard disk and a 14″ color monitor was jaw dropping. One of my first questions to the “engineer” who came to install the computer at my house was “if we save a file to the hard disk, do I need to remember where I saved it to be able to access it again?”

Next year I upgraded to 32 MB RAM, 266 MHz processor and somehow convinced my dad to move to Windows 98. Software was moving quickly and applications for Windows 95 were getting harder and harder to find.

Somewhere around that time I started buying computer magazines, mostly for the free CD’s that used to come along, containing games as big as 100 MB. “Chip” and “Computers@Home” were my favorites. CD’s were the one and only source of gaming. My dad gifted me a Cricket 97 CD on my birthday and I can hardly under emphasize the countless number of hours I spent playing that. Soon after, I laid my hands on Need for Speed High Stakes, which added many more hours of fun and games after school hours.

In a few months time, the Internet made way into my home, with a “cool” 3Com U.S. Robotics 56kbps voice modem. I was regularly visiting sites like Hotmail, AltaVista, HappyPuppy and many other sites which were a rage that time. It was not long when I made my own web-page using a text editor I installed from one of the “free” magazine CD’s. By year 2000, I had my own website on the web. One of my first web pages had a bright blue background and text in yellow containing a recipe of an Indian sweet dish. I advertised the URL wherever I could. I even spammed a few high-profile guys to force them to see my website (yeah, I was really really proud of it!) which ultimately caused my website to be taken down by my web-host where I was hosting for free.

Getting into college marked the next big move- a mobile phone, a cheap but popular Nokia 3310. Not to mention, I fell in love with brand Nokia instantly, although I hated it initially.

It has been a journey ever since- today I own multiple dual-core CPU based portable computers, over a 1000GB of permanent digital storage, satellite radio system, ultra high end mobile devices which are more powerful than the first desktop I owned! Whew!

I don’t know how long the journey will be and when humanity will reach it’s ultimate limits, but till where we’ve got so far, it has been pretty exciting! I am sure a lot of you have similar stories to share. I would love to hear them from you.

Update: A humorous video on those times:

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04
Sep 08

Roundup of upcoming Tech Events in Delhi

1. Social web and cloud computing workshop, organized by Google

Talks about OpenSocial, Shindig and Google App Engine. Must attend for all developers. Details can be found here. Registrations for the event are now closed.

2. AV Expo 2008, Ashoka Hotel, New Delhi – 5 Sept to 7 Sept, 2008

A great place to catch up with what’s hot in the world of electronics and gadgets.

3. OSS Camp Delhi, Sept 27-28

An “unconference” for techies to meet and socialize around tech, the Internet or anything else they want to discuss. Details can be found here.

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02
Sep 08