GoDaddy Customer Support gets 10/10

There is something about customer support that makes you like them or hate them. Its the way they talk, the feeling that you get about they knowing how to solve your problem, their eagerness to fix your problem, and finally they actually being able to do it without having to ask you stupid things . Its like going to a hotel and liking the service.

Having talked to GoDaddy couple of times now, they have a great set of folks sitting at their customer support. You get the feel that they can solve any problem with ease. They asked for my to call me back if the call disconnects, and when I said I am in India, he said "thats no problem". One really stupid of them is they do not advertise their toll free number on the website! I had to Google for it so that call call for free from Skype.

On a related note, setting up a domain name and pointing it to a hosting server is so damn complicated for a novice like me. All the cname, nameserver, and all the crap that comes with it, and if you get one step wrong, you are doomed! Its impossible to find out where you went wrong!

Gantter - Free and Online Project Plan

As usual, looking for Open source and Free software, this is another good software to use if you occasionally want to open or create Project Plans:
https://app.gantter.com/

Meetings: where work goes to die!

How many meetings did you have today? This week? This month?

Now ask yourself how many of those meetings were worthwhile, versus the work that you could have accomplished in that same time.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/meetings-where-work-goes-to-die.html

OpenProj: An open source / free MPP

If you want to create a Project Plan but do not want to blow money on Microsoft, then OpenProj is a great open. It has everything you need to create basic MPPs .

You can open existing MPPs but cannot save in MPP format. Instead you can export an XML file which anyone with MPP can open.

www.openproj.org.

CutePDF: Create PDFs by using it a printer

I have been using this since long time now. Its free. Install it and it show up as a printer. You can easily create PDFs from anything by saying Print and selecting "CutePDF" as the printer.

http://www.cutepdf.com/

~Sri

New York Seeks National Effort to Curb Salt in Food

First New York City required restaurants to cut out trans fat. Then it made restaurant chains post calorie counts on their menus. Now it wants to protect people from another health scourge: salt.

Read on...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/11salt.html?hp

Cervical cancer drug majors vie for India pie

http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/cervical-cancer-drug-majors-vie-for-india-pie/381580/

Cervical cancer drug majors vie for India pie

Joe C Mathew / New Delhi January 04, 2010, 0:04 IST

Global cervical cancer drugs majors Merck and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) are battling it out in India, which is potentially the world’s largest market for such drugs.

US-based Merck is confident that its cervical cancer vaccine Gardasil will help it to secure a position among the country’s top five drug companies in the next five years. The world’s second largest drug manufacturer currently ranks 30th in domestic sales.

“We expect Gardasil to play a key role in our India growth,” says Naveen Rao, head of medical affairs for Merck’s Asia Pacific Region. Merck wants Gardasil as catalyst for government’s plan to immunise India’s young women from cervical cancer.

Represented through its wholly owned subsidiary, MSD Pharmaceuticals Pvt Ltd, Merck will roll out one of its biggest clinical trial programmes involving about 20,000 girls shortly. The partner for this trial is the health ministry.

This mega-trial, which is on top of the statutory clinical trials required for getting a drug or vaccine approved for sale in the country, is aimed at convincing the government on the importance of the vaccine, and also the need for a national immunisation programme.

Merck is the only company other than GSK, which has developed a vaccine for cervical cancer. According to World Health Organization estimates, India registers over 130,000 new cervical cancer cases every year, with 74,000 women dying from the disease annually. According to medical experts, women are affected with the disease during their teens or early 20s. The vaccination should be given at a young age, they add.

According to official census figures of 2001, almost 35 per cent of India’s one-billion plus population were women below 14 years.

Merck, which launched Gardasil with an India specific price tag of Rs 2,800 per dose last year — three doses mark the completion of the course — has charted out a five-year programme to convince the Union government of the effectiveness of its vaccine.

Prices will be much lower once these vaccines becomes part of the government’s national immunisation programme.

Merck’s collaborators, International Agency for Research on Cancer and a host of Indian partners such as All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Cancer Foundation of India, Tata Memorial Hospital and others, have identified eight locations to conduct the clinical trials.

GSK, which is among the top five drug companies in the country, has also launched its cervical vaccine Cervarix in the domestic market. It, too, is believed to have pitched for a collaborative clinical trial agreement with the government.

GSK’s attempt to advertise its product had recently come under the scanner after Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) issued a show cause notice for advertising its vaccine. DCGI stated that the advertisement was a violation of rules under which marketing licence was issued to GSK. GSK India averred that it was merely an awareness campaign.

“We have received a show cause notice from DCGI regarding our disease awareness campaign on cervical cancer. We are in the process of responding to the same suitably,” a spokesperson from GSK India told Business Standard.

journey of entrepreneurship...

"We feel that the journey of entrepreneurship is like driving on a highway at night. You never get to see the end of the road, you only see a few hundred meters ahead, but as you keep moving ahead the road keeps unfolding. The only secret is to keep going, even if you do not see the destination,"

http://business.rediff.com/slide-show/2009/dec/03/slide-show-1-they-designed-child-friendly-syringes.htm

~Sri

Is Sachin Tendulkar the greatest schoolboy cricketer ever?

While is easier to talk about Sachin for what he is today, it is interesting to read what they thought of him before he started. Who better to write about Sachin than Harsha Bhogle who was himself at the start of his writing career.

Is Sachin Tendulkar the greatest schoolboy cricketer ever?

http://www.cricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/434247.html

~Sri

How much is $4 billion worth in 10 years?

January 29, 1999: Yahoo to Buy GeoCities for $3.9 Billion

October 26, 2009: GeoCities' time has expired, Yahoo closing the site today

If they had drank beer worth $3.9 Billion, imagine how much they would have got by selling the empty cans!? :)

~Sri

Bill Gates - 1986 Interview

MS was 160 people then and Bill Gates says:

"And even though there’ll be more and more machines, our present thinking is that we won’t have to increase the size of our development groups, because we’ll simply be making programs that sell in larger quantities. We can get a very large amount of software revenue and still keep the company not dramatically larger than what we have today. That means we can know everybody and talk and share tools and maintain a high level of quality."

http://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/bill-gates-1986/

~Sri

emails.....to read or not to read....

Of the many things i want to change in me, this is among the top of the list.

Checking emails only once or twice an hour! I have made several attempts. Going to do it again after reading this post now!

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001302.html

~Sri

Creating PDF....

http://www.cutepdf.com/

Its added as a "printer", so anything you can print, can be created as a PDF file. Works pretty well.

~Sri

Sync google docs with your desktop....

Of all the web startups you see on the net, once in a while you come across one which solves some real problem of real people! Syncplicity is one.

Since I have been using Google docs I found it hard to believe that Google does not sync it with a folder in desktop. Documents being online is great and I love gDocs for lot of its nice features, but not having a copy on the desktop is a serious handicap.

Syncplicity solves this problem. More importantly, very easily too and in a couple of clicks.

Unfortunately, it just syncs docs but not XLS yet. But I am sure/hope it will supported soon.

~Sri

Seth Godin on why marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department

From: http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2009/07/seth-godins-talk-from-business-of-software-2008.html

David Heinemeier Hansson at Startup School 08

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Ruby on Rails framework and Partner at 37Signals gives insight into creating a profitable startup company.

Jason Fried (Founder 37signals.com) Talk

Jason Fried @ Big Omaha 2009 from Big Omaha on Vimeo.

Korea re! Bappa Korea re!

Yours truly will be speaking about caTissue in Seoul in the First Asian Chapter Meeting of ISBER and Asian Network for Research Resource Center (ANRRC). It will be in Sep, 09.

http://isber.knrrc.or.kr/

It will be 20 hrs travel for a 20 mins talk but...sab chalta hain! :-)

~Sri

N Korea vs India!!

Can you believe this: N Korea today qualified for the Football World Cup, India got trashed in the cricket world cup!

N Korea:

- a tiny country with an idiot as a leader who supposedly owns the world's biggest pron collection!

- very poor country with no food or jobs

- no facilities to train, no foreign coaches

- no endorsements!

Now compare this with the great Indian cricket team!

The only good thing about the never-ending IPL is that, it converted me from being a cricket fanatic to someone who has almost completely lost interest in it. While many felt bad about India crashing defeats in the world cup, it didnt bother me as much. Not surprisingly, that is what many others feel too.

Update: And while the guys are hogging all the limelight even when they lost badly, the Indian women team is making good progress in the Womens WC. At least they are in the semifinals. Wishing them good luck!

~Sri

Google Page Speed

Google has Introduced Page Speed, an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on.  Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the  performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve  them.  Google Page speed is very much in analogy of Yahoo’s YSlow a similar  Firefox/Firebug plugin which analyzes web pages and suggests ways to  improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance  web pages, although google come late with such thing nevertheless  Google’s Page Speed provide bit more in-depth analysis than YSlow.  Page Speed performs several tests on a site’s web server configuration  and front-end code. These tests are based on a set of best practices  known to enhance web page performance. Webmasters who run Page Speed on  their pages get a set of scores for each page, as well as helpful  suggestions on how to improve its performance.  Page Speed add-on also displays a timeline of network, cache and  Javascript timeline event and events are displayed along the timeline  and one can also record activities and collect complete call graphs for  any single web page.  http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/ http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/rules_intro.html http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/using.html  If someone downloads it and finds it useful, please do comment here with  details.  ~Sri