Problem Description: Crappy interface for playing .avi files with .srt files for subtitles on Media Center PC.  This interface is what I predominantly use My Media Center PC for these days – simply to play movies sitting on my home network, with subtitles.  Since Windows Media Player itself can’t handle .srt files for subtitles, I am using a VLC Player plugin on Media Center to play these movies.

Proposed Solution: Install boxee on my Apple TV and have it discover my networked movies/music.

I got boxee Alpha installed on my Apple TV this morning and the little Apple TV has been reborn.  After getting onto the Alpha earlier this week I followed the instructions on the Google Code project for atvusb-creator and got a USB pen drive formatted and installed with the additional XMBC and boxee applications.  After watching “how-to video: boxee on Apple TV” I realized that the installation process wouldn’t be too tough, and put it on my list for the weekend. 

Sunday morning: I dug up an old 512Mb USB Flash drive and, after reading the Google Code project notes, got started on my Mac Book Pro.  The patchstick created I rebooted my Apple TV with the patchstick and watched the Linux boot kick up.  Then it hung.  After groaning I went to the bug list for the Google Code project and found out that SanDisk 512Mb USB Flash drives have been reported not to work.  Found another USB Flash drive (1Gb Verbatim one this time).  Went through the process again, and this time the patchstick loaded completely and installed boxee and XMBC.

First I needed to tune boxee to display correctly on my DLP television (which was painless and obvious with a great settings interface for manipulating the display properties) and then the full interface was accessible to me.  The interface is beautiful.  In no time I had it discover by shared movies on my local network and my shared music.  My .avi movie files with .srt subtitles played without a hitch, and the interface is perfect for watching movies.  Later I’ll walk my wife through it and see if it passes the wife test.

Solution Analysis: boxee is clearly in alpha, but I’m already hooked to it (crashes and all).  Hopefully once it becomes more stable I can officially retire my Media Center PC (which is on its last legs) and just use boxee for my movie / music playback.  Kudos to the boxee team and thanks for creating such a polished alpha.  I can’t wait to see what the team puts into this product next.

Finally got around to cleaning things up on my website.  Upgraded Gallery2 and Wordpress.  I also started separating my Twitter Tweets as a separate category so the daily digests will keep from cluttering the main page and my RSS feeds.  Thanks to this article for explaining how.

Though I haven’t made it all the way through my reading from 2007, I will finish it off soon enough.  In 2008 I haven’t been reading as much so there is less to write about.  The backlog of posts published today are:

1. "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" by Jim Gray
2. "Founders at Work" by Jessica Livingston
3. "The Myths of Innovation" by Scott Berkun
4. "A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini
5. "The Namesake" by Jhumpa Lahiri

It feels good to be blogging again, even if it is mostly for my own archival purposes.  Lots of pictures to upload, there are a handful of draft posts that I really want to get back to and finish off - some actual content from inside my head.  I realized recently that the reason for my lack of blogging was the lack of free offline blogging tools on Mac OS X.  This sounds strange, but I feel most compelled to write new content when I am not online.  Once I’m online there is always other stuff to do.  Introspection time is often reserved to offline time.  Now that I have a new Windows box I use everyday again (Lenovo ThinkCentre M-Series) I installed Windows Live Writer and have been using it more and more.

The look and feel of the site is totally stale, no rounded edges and fixed width are annoying me.  One of these weekends I’ll revamp the theme for the site.

Thanks to everyone for putting up with my daily Twitter posts in RSS etc - won’t have to worry about that anymore.

This is a quick post saying that pictures from Shaily and my wedding are finally online. They are missing captions (right now) and need another round of organization, but the pictures there.

Check them out here, and leave us comments on the ones you like.

My website has become remarkably stale. And honestly I don’t have the time to document all the changes that have gone on in my life since the last time I’ve posted. But I also cannot just ignore this past year and pretend nothing has happened.

So, in classic, boring, corporate style, here is an ordered list of events in my life since my last post (maybe someday I will get to expand on any of these items, but we’ll see):

1. Worked on Windows Live FolderShare
   Worked on some infrastructure to facilitate refactoring the backend FolderShare code - still waiting to hear an official announcement from my old team regarding a release of FolderShare.
2. Worked on Windows Live Messenger (my work released in v8.5 and whatever next version turns out to be)
   Worked on the existing Sharing Folders feature, worked on implementing major changes for the next version of Messenger, hopefully this will be released soon. My v8.5 changes were mostly bug fixes.
3. Resigned from Microsoft
   So this might seem like a shock, but it fell quite cleanly into my five year plan. Yep, I had one when I graduated from college. Having never imagined I would work for Microsoft when I was in college and after getting a lot of flack from my classmates for accepting a job at Microsoft I made up a five year plan in terms of things I wanted to learn from Microsoft before leaving. Aw hell I’m just left-brained like that anyway, I make goals for just about everything (ask me how long my car is supposed to last before I consider it a good “reasonable” purchase).Over the summer I started evaluated where I was against my goals, and I realized I had accomplished everything I had set out to learn from Microsoft. The decision to leave was made doubly difficult since I could not imagine a better team to be a part of anywhere. Written another way, I loved my team. There were so many competent, talented, smart, and experienced people who I could learn from and had learned from. My lead was my advocate, knowledgeable, and fully-focused on unblocking me from my goals.

   The team’s philosophy on quality was completely inline with how I believe software should be engineered, and the process and focus on infrastructure in place is truly enviable, in any commercial environment. An incredibly small example - my team was able to go from 0 to shipping at scale (at Microsoft scale that is - meaning localized, distributed data centers, redundancy, etc) a storage-in-the-sky solution in 3 months.

   However, even though everything at my team in Microsoft was going so well, I realized I was at a critical junction in my young career. Knowing that I would be getting married over Thanksgiving (see point 6 later on) I realized that I may not have another opportunity to dramatically change my career without impacting at least one other person. Not that my fiance was not a part of my decision to resign, but at least I wasn’t asking her to change jobs and/or relocate with me. And I also realized that if I stayed at Microsoft I may never leave. Many people would love to be in that situation, but having never worked in another company full-time I felt it would be remiss to limit my entire professional experience in software to one company. Plus there was an element of me wanting to keep my word with my own personal goals.

   And finally, things don’t happen in a vacuum. A couple recruiters called me, coincidentally, at the same time. I was not overly excited by the kool-aid they were trying to preach (I had been drinking large public-company kool-aid for five years already). Far more importantly my friend Hooman Radfar called me to catch up.

   My last day with Microsoft was my five year anniversary exactly, September 17, 2007. Take that five year plan.

4. Accepted a position at Clearspring Technologies
   So Hooman started talking to me about what Clearspring has been up to (one could argue that he had been trying to recruit me to join him since when I visited Clearspring in 2004 when it as two guys in one office). Well, as I always told him I had a five year plan at Microsoft. Except this time, my five years was up and the things Hooman was telling me about sounded really exciting. I think the salient quote from that first call, “If you want things to be neat at clean don’t join us, but if you want to bring order to the chaos of a startup then we could use your help”. Or something close to that - at least that is how I remember it, so that is how it happened.Within three weeks I had: spoken with the VP of Engineering, gone to VA to interview, negotiated the offer, and accepted the offer. So the fun of the speed of a startup had begun even from before starting full-time.
5. Relocated to Washington DC area
   Moved to Arlington VA and found a sublet on craigslist for three months while I was trying to sell my townhouse in Redmond. Realized that there are worse rental markets than Seattle (namely around DC). I also first-hand got to experience why they say moving is one the ten more stressful things in a person’s life. My advice from the situation - live simply until you get married so you don’t have to do something like a cross-country relocation by yourself, or negotiate a personal assistant into your new job’s contract to help with the relocation part.
6. Started working at Clearspring
   Rapid-dynamic team going through lots of changes - like any startup. I was immediately impressed with the quality of the folks around me, and the changes we were making were highly needed and smart decisions. The ramp up was rough, as it always is, but the fun and satisfaction was immediate. Still is.
   
   
7. Shipped my first product at Clearspring - Launchpad
   Within two months of starting at Clearspring I shipped my first product there. I joined part way into this project and helped guide it to through release. In the interim I had become a lead at Clearspring. I’m trying my best to follow my lead’s example from Microsoft in how I operate at Clearspring, and I guess time will tell how well I am doing.I am incredibly proud of our first release in this space, providing an embeddable HTML/JS menu to facilitate sharing widgets using Clearspring’s platform. There is still lots of work ahead of us, but it is overwhelmingly exciting and I can’t wait to dig in further.
   
   
8. Sold my townhouse in Redmond
   With a great sigh of relief my townhouse in Redmond finally sold. The realization of paying mortgage in WA and rent in VA was starting to creep in and in the knick of time a great offer came in with a very accommodating closing date. I was able to close and settle the sale the week before I left to get married - a giant burden removed from my shoulders.
   
   
9. Traveled to India to get married and enjoyed a brief honeymoon
   Had a very enjoyable wedding and honeymoon over a three week trip to India. I have not gotten or seen many pictures from the trip yet (apparently when you are the groom you don’t get to take or see many pictures) - as soon as I have them they will be published here.A group of close friends came to India to participate in the celebrations along with Shaily, myself, and our families. I am pretty sure they all had a great trip and I certainly loved introducing them to Shaily and sharing my wedding with them.

   Went to an awesome lake resort in Kerala for a short four day honeymoon. It really was a unique experience - nothing like anything I have seen in India, US, Jamaica, or any other tropical place I’ve been to. Really something special. If you are looking for a way to vacation at the end of your vacation, you want to stay in a resort like this one (check out slh.com for the listing of similar small luxury hotels).

   Unfortunately my wife’s visa isn’t ready yet, so I had to return to the US without her. Hopefully she will be joining me soon.
   

If you’ve made it this far then I think you understand why I have not been able to post more often. 2007 has brought more dramatic changes in my life than any other since I turned eighteen (it is hard to quantify the magnitude of each change before that). This year I tackled three of the ten most stressful life events at the same time, and I triumphed: switching jobs, relocating cities, and getting married.

(If anyone is wondering how come I made time to write this post, it is entirely because I am at the JetBlue free WiFi zone in JFK on a long layover and the wifi connection isn’t strong enough for VPN support - so after catching up on Google Reader this was next on the list.)

Read in October 2007.

This is a book about India’s problems as they relate to the world.  The position that Kamdar writes from is that India is a microcosm of the world’s problems - and if India can solve them - so can the world.  She writes about the problems that most people who know anything about developing countries already know, but makes the problems seem more concrete with numbers and some historical insights.  She also helps the reader to see the rate of the problems’ escalation, making the need for improvement more immediate.

About half the book is about India’s problems and successes in becoming a world-force, and the rest is about people who are trying to solve them.  She interviews people from India or that have Indian origins and details exactly what they are doing to address the problems.  These interviews and the stories of these people is inspiring and shows how ordinary people can make a difference - with the right attitude and the intention to improve one small thing.

This book is worth reading on many levels, it isn’t dense or textbook deep but still packed with information.  India’s problems are not unique to the world and like it or not, the world will have to solve them in the next two generations.  Kamdar’s book is a great primer on the problems India faces today and some of the ways it can improve itself in the coming years.

Read in September 2007.

I read this book after watching the movie with my parents in a Portland OR theater.  It was the first time all three of us left the theater with our eyes swelled up.  The story resonated so perfectly with my parents’ generation as first generation Indians coming to this country and trying to raise a family.  The story resonated equally well with my upbringing as a second generation Indian being raised here.  The choices in my life where I had to choose how Indian I wanted to be are echoed by Gogol’s choices in the story.

The book is very similar to the movie, with only two notable exceptions.  The book is based in Boston where as the movie is based in and around New York City.  This makes more sense for the movie but is a notable change.  The other notable change is that in the book there are two white girlfriends in Gogol’s life.  In the movie they sort of merge the two of them into one.  Though the storyline doesn’t change it gives the book a little more depth.

This is a book that I will keep on my bookshelf and I will encourage all Indian Americans who are being raised in this country by first-generation Indians to read.  The story is simple and the choices are real and anyone who has wanted to know the decisions necessary for someone who is trying to integrate two cultures into one while fitting in and growing up and still maintaining an individual identity - this is one great story to read.

The Namesake was my first Jhumpa Lahiri book, though I am convinced I will have to read all of her short stories and future writings now.

Read more about it and purchase it from here.

Read in July - August 2007

A sweet story by Hosseini about two female characters and their lives/hardships through war-torn Afghanistan.  I found his character development and story development to be less cheesy than "The Kite Runner" and quite enjoyable.  This story does not pull at the emotional heartstrings like his first novel.  This could be due to his style of description subduing the reader so when bad news needs to be told the reader is not shocked by it.

The story has many sad points, but the inner strength and resilience of the two women stuck in a terrible marriage is admirable.  Though this story has a slightly happier ending, it still has the character I was most attached to abandoning the reader - which I think is part of Hoesseini’s point - that in all the violence and turmoil of Afghanistan at the time of the story it is impossible to think any story can fully escape the surroundings and remain authentic.

Read more about it and purchase it here.

Read in June 2007.

Short book on how innovation can come from many different places.  Good to keep around and read whenever you feel your creative juices are stifled.  Consider it a feel good / self-help book for the entrepreneur.

Read more about it and buy it here.

Read from April to May 2007.

This is a collection of 32 interviews with founders from recent technology startups.  The book is well written and Livingston speaks enough of the technical language to ask the right questions.  This book fules the entrepreneurial spirit of the reader and makes clear that startups have their ups and downs - even though this particular story is about 32 startups that were successful, at least for a while.

The most engaging part of the story for me was how patterns emerged between the founders and common experiences they all shared.  It became clear that tech startups have to be ready for anything and be willing to alter the original plan again and again as development continues.  This flexibility plus a commitment to the customer regardless of the circumstances was also novel to me.  Often times you think of a startup running as fast as it can without regard for the customer, hoping the customer will understand the product.  The people interviewed in this book were the opposite - they only cared about the customer and constantly made changes accordingly.

It was also really interesting that many (of those interviewed over half) were established engineers with families and prior careers.  These interviews were particularly insightful to me, since the media glamorizes the phenomenon of a college drop-out success story.  For example, can you name the founder of Tivo?  Turns out they all were established middle-aged engineers.  That doesn’t make for a great scoup but certainly makes for more interesting reading.  The perspective these seasoned engineers provide on their experiences in leaving a steady job, steady salary, and steady lifestyle for the 24-hour pace of a startup fills the reader with confidence that he too can be successful in the startup.  And, even if not successful, that the experience was worth the effort.

I highly recommend this book if you have the desire to enter the tech industry at any level.  The interviews are short and sweet and you get a sense of each of the founders from their own words.  I hope Jessica Livingston continues to write about tech startups - I will keep reading what she writes.

Read more about it and buy it here.

Read from February to March 2007.

This self-help book on relationships is interesting, but many of the things discussed have proliferated into common society now.  There still are techniques mentioned that I found somewhat helpful.  As an engagement present this is a good book to read.  It is a good skimming book because Gray repeats himself over and over again - something common in self-help books.  At times I felt the entire book could be condensed into a 30 page pamphlet.

But the wisdom is useful, especially if you are in a relationship and going through a difficult period.

I would recommend this book if you have not read any other books in the last 15 years on relationships - I am assuming that most of the book cover the same material.

Read more about it and purchase it from here.