To tell you the truth, I never intended to guide people in becoming entrepreneurs. Far from it. It just happens that three people pinged me on facebook to tell me that they thought my blog was good.

I believe in science. And I believe that science says that when you have the same observation thrice, it's about time for deduction. Which in this case has lead to an attempt to bring my dead blog back to life.

Before you start, to prevent you from getting any false ideas about me, I would like to clarify the following.

• I come from a family where they have never been any entrepreneurs/businessmen. In short, no one I am related to has ever made a "profit".

• My family does not believe in entrepreneurship. In short, everyone I am related to tries to explain why the whole idea of entrepreneurship is not a very smart one.

If you still want to learn from me, I would gladly feel sorry for you. Here goes the list of do's and don'ts.

• Don't start deciding the name first. We spent the first two months doing nothing except working on the name!! And what we finally agreed on (and have stuck to), in our college lingo means 'idiot'.

• If it's an internet/software startup, forget about getting a server. We wasted the next two months thinking about the advantages we would have with a dedicated server. When we finally worked on the disadvantages list, it turned out to be so long that today we host our website on a free webspace.

• If you haven't already, do not watch the movie "The Social Network". Not that it isn't an awesome movie, but they day my partner watched it (I recommended it to him), he started talking about how much each of us own and how we should always inform the other before every decision taken. *wink*

• This one is very important. Never, and I mean never ever announce a product before you have it completely ready. The following things could happen:

- Out of the blue your day job may start demanding hectic hours and you won't get any more time to work on the product.

- You may start getting bored with working on the same thing for a long time.

- You start getting the feeling that the product is useless. This is usually the most common.

• Well this one is a revelation. You have your website up and running which tries to tell people what you intend to do and how you intend to do it. Simple enough. You post the link somewhere (a little bragging never hurt anyone), and next thing you know is you start getting the following type of messages on Facebook -
  
  
  "Awesome work man! Btw what are we supposed to do on the site?"
  
  
  You are not supposed to do anything dumbo! All you are supposed to do is to look at it and tell us if you think it's good/bad.

• If you are a group of one/two/three etc people, you must understand that you can't be one/two/three for the rest of your life. So you need to bring in new people. How? Don't ask me, we are still two.

• This one is a secret. Odd jobs never hurt anyone. I suspect that all entrepreneurs have done some at some point. For example, I sometimes do assignments for grad students in US/Europe to keep my paypal account ticking. *wink*

• You always live in the morbid fear that you are getting accustomed to (and maybe even interested in) your day job. Trust me, it's not true. After spending an uncomfortable more than a year, I finally realized this. "All day jobs suck and have always sucked".

• Try not to tell everyone you know that you are the proud owner of a company without a product. I understand that at it's really difficult, but atleast try.

Well, I suppose that almost sums up my knowledge of becoming an entrepreneur. If you are a lonely reader who happened to wander to this dead blog, post a comment if you feel like.

Hello blogging world!!

I'm back. After a hugely successful stint in the college technical festival, INSTRUO as Internal Coordinator. This would rank amongst the most satisfying experiences of my life.

As a part of the package, comes the hype and the recognition. Only to dwindle and die away with time. Not that I'm complaining one bit. Yeah, I impressed lots of people. And as usual, none of them were girls. *wink*.

But that's something I will talk about some other day. Today, with the Instruo experience and the anticipation of the cultural fest just around the corner, I want to talk about something entirely different. I want to talk about the two mistakes of my life.

I would have loved a better physique. With an imposing physical appearance, some things would have been far easier.

I should have learned some music. That's one area I have never explored. Except listening to music; some idiots call that a 'hobby'.

Perhaps its too late to amend these mistakes. Perhaps its never too late. Only time can tell. Instruo pictures coming soon.

MERRY CHRISTMAS and HAPPY NEW YEAR (all belated) to all my readers.

For the past few days, I've been frustrated with the way things have shaped up. My work on the search program and the IC tester is stuck. To add to that, the final year project on 3D IC testing algorithms has still not taken off. My singleton status prevails and I continually keep switching between ready to mingle and not ready to mingle *grin*. I'm still trying to beat that time posted on that NFS Most Wanted track by that guy on the internet. And I'm yet to start getting used to with JAVA.

In short life isn't that rosy now.

Now, people continually keep switching in and out of states of frustration like these. We all have our own strategies to keep stress and frustration at bay. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. Sometimes things get better by themselves and we credit that to the stress buster algorithms. But we never stop trying, do we?

So I decided to post my stress buster algorithms in the hope that you will give me an insight into yours. (In case you haven't noticed, there's a comment link at the bottom of this post).

This is what I do.

• Stop sleeping all day - The more frustrated you get, the more you sleep. The more you sleep, the more frustrated you get. Vicious cycle.

• Shave - If you are a guy who doesn't shave regularly. If you do, grow a big stubble and then shave *wink*.

• Sport - Indulge in your favorite sport. But mind you, if you lose, things can get worse.

• Don't chat - Stop chatting on the net. It increases my frustration levels.

• Stay away from the Internet - If you have a slow connection, this is a must. Even if you don't, it might still help.

• Indulge in something creative - This can be very very tough. But if you are successful in doing this, the battle is over.

• If you are a foodie, get a big heavy delicious dinner. Don't, if you want a size zero.
  

• Splurge, go shopping - What the mags say. Probably valid only for women. One of the main reasons why men get frustrated in the first place.
  

• Get up earlier than you ever have and stroll a mile - Works wonders!

But remember, the most important stress buster is that you try one of these stress busters! Waiting for your tips.

Yep, that's what I said 5 minutes ago.

Placements have started and I'm yet to get a job, yes, I'm unemployed.

No, I'm not that big a duffer as you might be assuming, I haven't tried any company yet. But you know what, it hardly makes a difference.

But there is one positive to it. My frustration levels are increasing every day and if I manage to use that to motivate myself, I might actually end up doing something worthwhile in my final year.

I have one unfinished project and I need to start another as a final project, its irritating. And yes, the GUI for the search engine is yet to start, though the rest is done.

And if there is anyone waiting for my software, I apologize. Laziness has come in the way of the software getting uploaded, but I will do it very soon.

Long time since I last posted. Thanks to Feedjit, I found that most of my visitors visited my projects page which has no mention of my current favorite baby- The IC tester.

When I used to look at IC testers with their little LCD screens and heavy price tags, something in me told me that not everything was the way I wanted it to be.

Why?

Now all testers contain some microprocessor/microcontroller, LCD screen/7 segment display and all such stuff. I'm not doing anything out of the world, all that I plan to do is to use a processor and a display far better than possible in an IC tester. But won't that cost even more?

Thankfully no! Because my customer would already own it, since it would be a computer present in all hardware labs today.

Such a design would have other advantages as well. When I add support for new IC's, all that would be required is to upgrade an existing database, and it might prove to be as simple as downloading a file from a website and pasting it into a directory!

Here are the basics. The tester consists of an interface with a PC which can be used to switch between the various pins of an IC (to be tested). Now similar to an 8051 microcontroller, data is always written to the port latch for each pin and read directly from each pin. Initially, the data lines are switched between each of the pins and then data is written to the pins. Now the controls switches to the O/P pins and the voltage values available there are read into the PC. These values are matched with the values in the database and the IC can be tested.

Every pin can be configured as an O/P or I/P pin as per requirement and hence a wide array of logic IC's can be tested. Moreover analog voltage values can be applied and hence most analog IC's can also be tested.

Other than building the actual tester, I am currently working on the design to enable it to test sequential circuits as well. I'm keeping my fingers crossed as far as the pricing is concerned. If all goes well, it can be priced very competitively.

The UNIX desktop search facility is almost complete. At least I'm in a position to release the first edition of the utility in about a week's time( optimistic view ). For those interested, this blog is going to sport a download button very soon. Do keep me posted about any bugs or suggestions, they are going to be very helpful ( do understand that I'm still an undergrad student ). So what are the features that I would be providing?? Not much really, people would need to wait for features. Right now, all that I offer are:-

1. A simple search utility that would search your local disks for files, by name only( non -indexed, no content searching ). Format searching is supported, i.e. *.jpg and *ash*.jpg* are all valid formats.


2. An indexed search utility that would also search for file names only( No content searching, yet again). Format searching would be supported as above. The entire file system can be searched within 10 seconds. (I'm no google, at least, not yet. )

System requirements are not demanding, as can be expected. 256 MB of RAM and about 50 MB of hard disk space would be enough.

All I need is to write an installer and upgrade the indexing process to a daemon process. All valuable suggestions and queries are welcome.

Yeah, I'm happy today. My search program is working with its index. Indexing is really painful, it takes around two hours to index the entire file system in my machine. Searching is still painfully slow by industry standards, but yes, it works! It took around 4 seconds to list all the .jpg files in my system. I dared to speculate that the google desktop search would take less than 0.5 seconds. Yes, lots of guys more experienced than most of my profs work on their projects and get paid for it as well, but still, I gotta do better. I say so cause deep inside me, I feel I can bring down the time. A lot still remains to be done, the volume of pending work is huge. Google indexes content, pictures, music, media and more. And I've just been indexing names. But, picture abhi baki hai mere dost!. And the Satan in me (the guy's real powerful), says that people really never search content in a desktop file system *wink*. But I will do it anyway.
Right now I must fine tune the indexer, it must keep running on(rather than running just once as it now does), restrict its RAM usage(it hardly runs like a background process these days), and move on to multilevel indexing and also introduce search options with flags. I would love an API. If only someone were to gift me one, I could do anything for the guy. And I need one more brainwave. Maybe I should try more visits to the loo, yes, that's where I get most of my brainwaves *guffaw*.