Side Projects

I started my professional career in July 2008, fresh out of college I was really excited about working on real projects. After two months of training I was assigned to the Call Handling (IVR) team, a .Net based project. Soon I realized that the project did not require much coding, whole day went into writing test cases and IVR workflows in XML. This motivated me to work on the following side projects:

Indews.in (2008)
Soon after 2008 Mumbai attacks, I decided to create my own news aggregation site for India, hence the name Indews (Indian News). I was not happy how Google News clubbed the news and sometimes ended up showing stale information as the main headline. I implemented some part of the site, wrote a very basic crawler in C#, hosted the site on a local IIS server at home. It had a really bad interface and did not survive more than 3 months. I had lost all my interest in a general news aggregator, now I was mainly interested in the tech/programming news.

9AM.in (2009-2010)
After shutting down indews.in, I started a project called 9am under http://www.natmac.org/9am/. I got bored with ASP.Net technologies, there was a lot of abstraction and many times I did not understand how things worked underneath, for example ajax implementation of ASP.Net. It was all magic and lots of dlls. And there were a very few open source projects in C#. So decided to move away from .Net and migrated all my code to Java. Having worked on Java and J2EE in college projects, it was easy.
9am was again an RSS/ATOM aggregator, but this time I was crawling the whole web for the tech related stuff and some news sites for general news (kept general news anyway from indews!). You can find an internet archive snapshot here.
9am had a many features, like: finding top keywords, grouping similar items, inbuilt search, categorizing a feed item into one of these categories:

DBs, UI, .Net, S/W Engg, Languages, Mobile, Java, XML, OS

Categorization was based on bag of words and worked fairly well. It was also hosted at my home computer using a static IP and had a 384 Kbps network connection. Crawler used to crawl a few thousand URLs everyday based on a Revisit Policy. The database had around 60,000 feed (RSS/ATOM) URLs and everyday it used to discover new ones. Some of the website owners got pissed with the crawling and asked me to remove the URLs. Since everything was automated, I had no control over URL discovery.
9am was really fun, it used to discover really good articles on the web everyday and I always had something amazing to read in my office. Following is an internet archive screenshot of the Language category under TECH tab:

The whole setup had many issues, day time power cuts, internet outage, slow internet, slow machine, poor MySQL full text search. Despite of all, it used to get ~5000 visits/day from Google.
When I was moving to another city, I had to shut it down. For unknown reasons it remained that way forever. The crawler code can be found at https://code.google.com/p/crowl/ and https://github.com/vikasing/crowl

Mozvo.com (2011-2013)
Mozvo analyzed the sentiments of tweets, reviews and blogs to create a Mozvo score for a movie. It had many other cool features like: movie recommendations, actor profiles, friends' tweets about a movie, movie explorer based on many attributes etc. This was the most ambitious side project I ever did. It also involved two more guys from the same company I was working at. We worked after office, almost everyday, initially it felt like it might end up evolving in a startup. I mainly worked on the back-end part of it, which had MongoDB as its database and a data layer written in Java. It was fun building the core parts. I ended up learning lots of new stuff.

We kept on adding many features without asking our users whether they really wanted them or not. It was like a playground for us, whatever we (or any one of us) thought was cool, we ended up implementing that ignoring the outcome. We did not analyze whether any feature was helping us in retaining the users. Google brought all the traffic and that was not really enough, ~200 visits/day. Gradually we lost our interest and in April 2013 we altogether stopped working on it. It is still alive at mozvo.com but in a dormant state.

GizmoAge (2012)
This was an Android app built on top of PhoneGap, main aim was to collect latest gadget news and group it to remove ambiguity.  The first version of the app was ready to use and did look much better than many apps in the Play Store. I published the app in Play Store, but removed it after a couple of months, don't remember why :), I guess there were some server issues.

Cryptocurrency Mining (2014)
This was my first hardware hacking project. I ended up investing around $1000 in this project, bought 2 top end graphics cards, a 850 watt SMPS and lots of hacky stuff like PCI risers, power buttons from Hong Kong etc.
The rig mined all the popular alt coin currencies at that time from Dogcoin to Coinocoin. I also did some trading at various exchanges. After three months of mining all the fun was gone so I stopped my rig and decided to sell the hardware. But before that following happened:
I had to RMA one of the graphics card and the motherboard short circuited (no RMA). Also lost around 0.1 bitcoin in trading. Sometime later I sold my 0.42 bitcoin and stopped the crypto currency madness all together.
Nevertheless it was fun, got to learn many things about crypto currencies eg. bitcoin, blockchain, ASIC, primecoin, mintcoin, CPU only coins, and there were these crazy ideas of coin drops, also country specific coins like Auroracoin for Iceland.

The mining rig, mining #Fluttercoin pic.twitter.com/SgcwsNIYoa
— Vikash Singh (@vikasing) April 14, 2014

Others
There were some other small projects here and there:

• Crowl (2009- ): The web crawler which powered 9am, still working on it, its much more powerful now.
• NiceText (2012-): This is a very small library I wrote to extract the text from a webpage. Other libs boilerpipe and readability port did not work that well on many pages. This is a part of crowl project. I wrote a post about it and here is the github link.
• jaLSA (2014-): A lib I wrote to do Latent Semantic Analysis. It was needed for a project I was working on in my previous company.
• velocityplus (2011): An eclipse plugin for Apache velocity templating engine. Worked on it when I was working in my first company. It is unfinished, got really bored while developing it.
• Fing.in (2012): A Bollywood news portal, it was supposed to be a sub project of mozvo.com. Finished it locally but did not publish it anywhere.
• Paltan.org (2008): I briefly worked on creating a social networking website for my college group, it was based on Wordpress based Buddypress. But the Buddypress itself was in beta development and lacked many obvious features. It was all PHP, lost my interest very soon, did not go anywhere, shut it down after sometime.
• letsj.com (2012): An aggregator for Java related articles. Intention was to use Lucene as a database as well as indexing engine, got into many issues, abandoned. 

Ubuntu Fail

Recently I tried to switch permanently to Ubuntu, the logic was that I mainly do 3 things on my laptop: internet browsing, coding and watching movies/videos on VLC and none of them require Windows, so switching to the Ubuntu made sense, also it has got some tools which I wanted to learn, e.g. octave. I didn't want to loose my Windows 8 installation and wanted to install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS parallel to W8. Earlier attempt of installing Ubuntu failed due to a lot of EFI related issues.

Ubuntu 12.04

Installation was smooth and I was able to get the grub screen, which displayed a number of options to choose from. I logged into Ubuntu. The familiar Unity interface came up, which I did not like so I went ahead and installed GNOME. But it ran in fallback mode due to graphics driver issues. My laptop has hybrid graphics: ATI with + Intel 4000 . I looked on the web for the drivers but found nothing, Intel stopped developing a graphics driver for 12.04 due to some dependency issues but there was a driver for 12.10.

Another issue which I faced due to the lack of the graphics drivers was the pixelated video play in VLC. So I thought of upgrading from 12.04 to 12.10.

Ubuntu 12.10

After upgradation was done, I could not get the grub, it got screwed somehow. I got a blank screen, nothing else. I ran the live cd and did a boot repair. It restored the grub, but when I selected the linux option in the grub and hit Enter, a blank screen appeared and kept appearing until I switched of the system. I tried recovery mode, which logged me into the command line mode. There was a message which said I could upgrade to 13.04 from 12.10. Having known that Intel has provided a good support for 13.04 I decided to upgrade.

Ubuntu 13.04

Again I had to run boot repair to fix the grub issues, even after that I was not able to log in, the blank screen didn't go away no matter what I did. This time I thought of installing 13.04 from scratch, a fresh installation. Everything went smooth and I was able to login. After using about half an hour I noticed a weird issue of my mouse pointer moving a little out of place, the motion was not precise. It seemed to be a driver issue for Synaptics touchpad. A latest driver for Synaptics was already installed. I tried tweaking Synaptics settings, but nothing noticeable happened. And this issue was affecting my whole experience, I was not able to open links I intended to open, I was not able to close windows etc. It was worse than that graphics issue I had in 12.04.

So I went back to 12.04 and this time I installed Xubuntu desktop. It worked ok for some time until one day, I had to connect my laptop to a projector. Due to no graphics driver only one display was supported, I selected monitor option and my laptop screen went blank. When the job was done, I disconnected the projector hoping my laptop screen will lit up, it remained blank.

Xubuntu-desktop had another issue, the fan would start spinning at full speed after waking the laptop from suspension. I tried a patch which I found on the net, it did not help.

Linux Mint 15

Finally I thought of giving Mint a try, since it came with a lot of pre-installed software and drivers. Installed it after wiping the previous 12.04 installation. When I tried to boot I got a grub rescue screen, I tried many things to restore grub but failed all the time. Now I was not able to boot into any of the systems, neither Windows 8 nor Mint 15. I gave up, removed grub and booted into W8 and formatted the Mint partition. Now I have decided to run linux on top Windows; in VrtualBox.

Final Thoughts

Ubuntu 13.04 with GNOME has better looks than Windows 8 but when it comes to hardware support, many h/w companies don't care about this market segment (linux). GRUB is another rotten area in the Linux territory, if you are damn lucky then only it might work. Linux guys need to work together to create a better alternative to GRUB. Finally I still hope that one day I'll be able to make a permanent switch to Ubuntu or any other popular distribution.

Angelhack 2013 Bangalore Experience

Angelhack 2013 was held at Microsoft Research/Microsoft Accelerator for Azure Office at Lavelle Road, Bangalore. We were given 23 hours to code/hack, from 2PM June 22nd till 1PM next day. Me and my partner divided the work and started to code. Soon we realized that there were issues with wi-fi connectivity at the venue, there was no internet for a long time and we were expected to code/hack without internet. After a couple of hours when technician could not sort out the issue, we were given a generic wifi access, which was slow to the death, occasionally inaccessible. For important things I relied on my mobile data connection, many had USB modem, this situation did not improve at all.

Organizers were happy to help/instruct.
Facilities were good, probably the best I've seen in an IT office.

I slept around 3AM after a 2nd git commit. Some did not sleep. I woke up around 6:30AM. We resumed our work around 7AM

Demo Time

Demo session started somewhere around 2:30PM, each team was given 2 Minutes for presentation + 1 Minute for QnA from judges. We'd prepared a video of whatever we could finish, it was not even half backed, just featuring some HTML mockups and FB integration.

Judging (Only reason behind this post)

Initially when the judges were ROFLing and making fun of the ideas and passing stupid comments, I was forced to think that these people really knew what they were talking about. But when a team presented an idea of querying the data by typing the human readable questions in a text field, one judge (the dominating one!) started to compare it with Wolfram Alpha, and went on saying that Wolfram Alpha was not present in Indian market, but when they come, your app wouldn't stand a chance.

Another team presented an app based on some medical data, it could tell you what disease you might have based on your symptoms. One Judge suggested him to participate in a kaggle competition "The Heritage Health Prize" . BTW that event ended in April 2013, it may re-start this year sometime, but no announcement has been made yet about the dates.

When we presented an idea about a generic platform for peer to peer learning, the judges responded with "many tried it and failed".

One guy presented an app which created cinemagram of a video, he explained how it worked and claimed that it was faster than the apps present in the market. When judges asked why it was faster, he simply said that he didn't know. Guess what? he won the hackathon.

Finding out that something like cinemagram already exists was just a google search away, in fact there is a company named cinemagram which has got apps on both Android as well as iOS app stores. And when you search cinemagram on Play Store you get more that 60 apps.

Why am I pissed?

My hackathon partner has a startup and he told me that he'd met most of these judges at least once for pitching his product. They are well known in India's VC circle, kind of celebrities in startup world in Bangalore.

This is what upsets me, at an event like hackathon we don't need celebrity judges, who can only focus on India when the event clearly wasn't about India. These people have a certain mindset, for example "this has failed before and would fail again" or "this already exists" or the ignorance about what has been happening around the world, like this cinemagram concept. Judges had great knowledge about Indian market and showed complete ignorance about outside world. Imagine about the people who seek funding from these ignorant people. Lots of great ideas may be dying everyday.

Now I am a bit concerned, because I'd be launching my startup in near future, and if the whole Indian industry is filled with such idiot VCs, I am going to face some really hard time.

State of Broadband in India

Today I received a surprise call from my Broadband provider, Tata Indicom. The person on the other end talked about their new Fair Usage Policy for those who have unlimited plans. The details of this policy are given here. The Indicom guy said that it was forced by the government (a lie!!). I have an unlimited 384Kbps plan, now according to this policy I can not upload+download more than 70GB (limitation!). I wonder if both speed and data transfer are restricted, why they call it an unlimited plan. On asking the same question from the Indicom guy, he said that this policy enables other users to use the Internet fairly (I use it unfairly!).

I have around 200GB in the downloading queue and with these restrictions in the place it will take around 4 months to download (not to forget the downtime and power cuts!). I can not get rid of Tata Indicom because Airtel does not cover my area (heard they also have similar policy!), Reliance broadband is worse than Indicom, BSNL guys are deaf and they don't really care about a thing in the world (govt employees!). Other option, USB Modems is another nightmare, never heard a good thing about them. Only BSNLs EVDO is good (based on rumours!) but again its availability and support is NIL in the Indian IT Hub.

To be frank, India (a third world country!!) is still far behing in this field, we pay huge amounts to get nothing but headache in the name of broadband. Lets pray that one day after hundred years we'll get an unlimited 32 Mbps connection.

Here are my speedtest results:



And I pay 1100+ Rs. for this, which works 15 days a month and 15 hrs in a day.