Learning is an Art

After looking around for a while for a review of JIRA 4.0 , I didn’t found much of stuff needed seems like people are not talking about it but than I thought lets give JIRA 4.0 much needed review and probably I would be able to help someone and vent out some of my liking and frustrations as one of customware employee and JIRA fan replied to me on twitter

I want to start on happy note so lets start with whats so cool about JIRA 4.0….obvious answer by any big fan will be JIRA gadgets, yes I would say nodding my head in affirmation, gadgets are pretty cool no doubt about them but Atlassian big fat claim that it can work in any social container and any other gadget will work in JIRA’s container is only partly true may be due to some container specific thing or what ever may be the reason for same.

2nd coolest thing is JQL it stands for JIRA Query language, please keep in mind I am calling these things cool and cool is not always the business case, so whats so special about JQL, it allows you to write SQL like queries from with JIRA, which actaully removed alot of or may be all JIRA’s limitation for filtering issues on criteria, now filters in JIRA are much more powerful than ever before thanks to JQL.

I can not control my self and I want to move on to what’s so bad, kindly note my point I am calling bad not uncool to affirm my point that cool is not the business case, first of all the current licensing model simply sucks what costed you $4k earlier now you even get that after paying $8k double appreciation in price in matter of one release, I don’t think any of the Atlassian customers would have ever imagined this catastroph it’s simply ridiculous.

Moving on other perils of JIRA 4.0 is the migration path from 3.13, Atlassian is a very open company they provide alot of documentation helping you in writing plugins and customization you want and than they screw you by breaking the API, I am not a big fan of M$ but one thing I always liked about them is they never break the contract with the developer old API’s always stay. What Atlassian did was just one release and few API’s were gone with the wind without even a single intimation of them being deprecated, I did analysis for efforts required to migrate from JIRA 3.13 to 4.0 for one of my customers and results were not so pleasing from him as they heavily customized JIRA and written around 27 odd plugins and to my surprise none of them worked out of the box in JIRA 4.0 what a crap, I suggested better not to migrate but than Atlassian will stop supporting 3.13 soon than they will be in much bigger soup.

One pending feature for ages better ldap support their strategy on this is pretty clear they want to sell crowd to you and will not add this feature in JIRA, every user comes and reads documentation that it’s planned some where in the road map and buys JIRA in hope he will see it soon but I didn’t got to see it in last 4 yrs , this issue has been recently estimated, I hope it gets completed in this decade, Atlassian has been very prudent in suggesting it’s customers to use crowd for ldap, I liked the business model but I hate it as customer and end user.

I can go on venting my anger on Atlassian but I don’t think they have any concerns about their licensing as alot of people are trapped and they can’t get out of it even they want to, my simple request to Atlassian and all other vendors if you expose API’s to developers than it’s your reponsibility to keep it intact, otherwise better not expose API’s.

PS: Alot of people might ask why I am reacting so late, fact is that this post was in my drafts for quite sometime now I was just not getting impetus to finish it today I had to write something but didn’t had a topic so completed this post

I wanted to write this post from long time at least 2 years now, when I came across MLM for first time, I think the company was some ‘quest’ selling some gold coins, but I was refraining from writing but few days back I got a similar mail saying it’s some ecommerce business and details will be only disclosed when I meet them in person, I was able to sniff the MLM from it pretty easily.

Mail contents are as shown below

I have removed contact details and some irrelevant things from the mail.

So why I say MLM is fraud, I say it because the basic principle on which it is based is flawed, I am not going to cover all the detail of MLM there is umpteen material available on interent just Google for it, adding fraud word it leads to lots of results too, yeah getting back to why I say it’s a fraud being a programmer I have read the concept of binary trees so what so special about binary trees every programmers knows about it, special thing is that number of nodes which will have two nodes below them is half the total number of nodes, so drawing this parallel to MLM which seeks every person to have at least two person(Nodes) below them, wait a moment what I just said contradicts concept of binary trees so that’s practically not possible. So come what may half the people joining in MLM pyramid is bound to loose all their money. People who get money out of this are not getting it by doing something but fooling more people to join in and laying there hands on their hard earned money, so there’s no business here.

That was just one point but there is more to it, products which you have to sell is at much higher costs than their actual value, for e.g. some coin which you need to sell was around 30k 2 years back it was rare according to them as it was manufactured in less quantities and will have a very high value in future, is that the definition of rare if today I start manufacturing something and just create on piece out of it will it make it rare, I looked at ebay to get actual price of that coin, it was easily available and at much lower cost.

Though many a times it’s difficult to prove that this business is illegal but than there are things which are legally right but ethically wrong and things which are legally wrong but ethically correct.

I will end this here promising to revisit this post again sometime in future with some more details, but for me bottom line is MLM is fraud in most of the cases.

Some links related to MLM happy reading.

Wikipedia definition of MLM

RBI flashes red signal at MLM companies

MLM Watch

It’s been almost year since I and my partners started fiddling with idea of providing hosted Application Life Cycle Management to startups and small companies, slowly but steadily we started building specs for it , we looked at all existing applications and tried to analyze what are the problem in using these applications and than we concluded that one thing which can make us stand out is simplicity, ease of use and sensible way of doing things. With this objective in our mind we started building BootStrapToday, we tried to keep things as simple as possible and along with keeping it simple we tried to make complex tasks possible on demand by user.

Today I am announcing the official launch of BootStrapToday to readers of this blog, a maiden product by my company Sensible Softwares Pvt Ltd

Below are some snapshot of BootStrapToday , off course there is more to it , to know more about BootStrapToday visit our website.

We have free account as well as 30 day trial for our premium account.

There is sandbox account available for those who don’t want to signup before getting feel of it.

Sandbox URL : https://sandbox.bootstraptoday.com Username: bst  Password: sandbox

Looking forward to hear your feedbacks on BootStrapToday

I want to blog regularly but so far I have failed in my endevours to take blogging as regular affair. After going through this presentation I have found new motivation to try again, Merlin has hit the bulls eye in this presentation of his, no fancy stuff pretty simple and obvious thing but than you need to figure out what is obvious sometimes. Enjoy the presentation and keep rhyming

Find you obsession. Everyday explain it to one person you respect. Edit everything, skip shortucts, and try not to be a dick.Get Better

I have been thinking for a while to write about my experiences but was refraining from this for some reason or the other but today something happened that I can’t hold my anger against the shity policies of companies in India; I will illustrate three experiences of my life which forced me to believe that India is still way behind when it comes to serving customers and listening to there problems and promptly providing the solutions.

So I will start with my latest problem which I am facing with Tata Indicom broadband connection; I took a plan of RS 1300 6GB combo so it was all goody goody initially when I didn’t used much of my allotted usage of 6 GB free usage which I had; than this month I had to download some linux operating system from internet that started the nightmare experience it was 3.7 GB of download still less than my free usage and the very next morning I got a call that you have exceeded your credit limit of RS 1700 and you need to make a payment of 3100 I am still trying to figure out from where the hell that figure of RS 1700 came from; if I do a flat conversion of 6 GB of free usage with their rate 0.9/MB it leads out to some where around RS 5000 I was totally surprised with this and in next two days my line was barred; I didn’t had a option there I went to the office of tata indicom and made the payment of RS 3100 and it took them more than a day to restore my line.
I haven’t even realized that my lines are fully working I got another call next day asking me to make a payment of RS 1500 and since I was afraid that my line might get disconnected again which may cause another day of work getting lost so I made the payment immediately but I was even not able come out of two back to back payments I got another call from them today that I have exceeded my credit limit again and I need to make a payment of RS 2300 I was so badly pissed of I called the customer care and asked what the hell is going on and he had more shocking news for me sir your billed amount is RS 7000 and your unbilled usage is RS 11000 I was shocked WTF and than I asked him to check again than he started saying actually the correct unbilled usage will start reflecting in 48 hours that amount is not correct that was some respite for me.
I was told I can check my unbilled usage from tataindicom site but there another tragedy stuck me I had registered to that site already but never received the first time pin I told the same thing to customer support executive, he tried to reset password but it was in vein he kept getting that customer not registered and I kept getting you are already registered and you can not registered again.
He told me sir you will have to write a mail; now I have to write two mails the first one which I had already written for increasing my credit limit and another to fix my account on tataindicom.
I hope they will not f*** any more as I have already given up with them. I am planning to change ISP any suggestions are welcome.

I think this story has taken quite out of me I will write other two experiences some other day, keep watching this space for more bitter realities of customer support in India.

As always Google silently launched new version of its one of most popular application that is Orkut, I don’t exactly when it was made available as I noticed it couple of days back.
I thought to give it a try and realized that the features added are heavily inspired from Facebook, its quite apparent that Orkut was seem to be loosing to Facebook on many aspect so redoing the Orkut was always on the cards and they have done a fare job but still I haven’t found many people using the newer versions and you can not use newer features like commenting which is one of the most used features of Facebook unless other person is also on newer version.
Lets see what strategy is used by Google to move to people to newer version. One thing I liked and appreciate about changes done by Google is that you always have option to hop between versions very unlike Facebook which shifted me to lite version without my knowledge and only switched back after a month or so.

Yeah you heard me right today Atlassian JIRA 4.0 was officially released after doing many beta’s and release candidate…I was expecting that it will take people with a storm with opensocial gadget JQL and many other improvements yes it did took people with storm but for some other reasons and the reason was its licensing policy you can find details of same here and my favourite one is there reason of changing the licensing that’s really cool and pretty lame at the same time for reasons of increasing the licensing cost or changing it all together.

I really doubt the fact that any hundred people company will really like to pay $4000 JIRA and the biggest one is the Enterprise license now costs you double that is $8000 and the cherry one the cake is licensing is now based on number of active named users that means that if you have 100 users and you are now 101 ; you need to run behind Atlassian to upgrade your licenses.

I want to write more on this but may be some other lets wait and watch for reactions from other people; I will be back on this topic with more detailed analysis of pros and cons of same this was just an initial outburst.

Few days back first release candidate of JIRA 4.0 was announced that means JIRA has moved pretty closer to one of the greatest release in the history of JIRA releases; there was a mixed bag in JIRA 3.13 which people were speculating to be 4.0 at that time but Atlassian decided to mark it as 3.13 as they were planning something really big for the mega release 4.0.

Two features which look killer to me are Opensocial gadgets and JIRA query langauge; I was really wondering why Atlassian went ahead with implementing Opensocial while missing out few popular issues like ldap authentication which has been around for six years now but after pondering on thought of Opensocial  I realized that Atlassian has cooked up something really big which is not easily comprehensible in current scenario of issue trackers what I feel it has a potential to cause a paradigm shift in the way we look at issue trackers and way we use them I can smell something really big coming out of it.

I would loke to end with a not to all those who have AMC to start getting ready for a Opensocial. I am also eagerly waiting for this release to happen.

I was never a ardent fan of facebook I signed up just to see what its all about and I found it some what interesting so I started using it occasionally; but couple of days back I noticed something has terribly changed in facebook application; I was not able to relate if I had ever earlier used this application and on top of it you even don’t have an option to switch to older version which is pity.
I don’t know what has caused these people to change it but I am sure of one thing that I am not going to use it in future any more this is not the way you should force on people you want.

Some random thoughts on Entrepreneurship, I have been reading about this topic for 3-4 years now and feels like eternity or a life time. Every now and than this question gets raised and people come of with various answers like entrepreneurship is a mind set rather than anything else; some say they are born with entrepreneurial qualities in there DNA.
IMHO anyone can be an entrepreneur in his or her own way it just takes a determination, grit to survive in toughest of circumstances. A spirit to keep things moving when the whole world is against you, a never say die attitude and the list goes on with such qualities or virtues but it all boils down to one thing that is entrepreneurs are like rebellions they don’t believe in traditional wisdom of life; they have already realized and got enlightened with what they want to do in life.

Those were few thoughts in my mind may be I will elaborate more on it some day but it is not this day
Cheers to all entrepreneurs out there keep dreaming don’t loose hope, keep faith in yourself, as some one rightly said sooner or later a person who wins is person who thinks he can win; nothing happens out of the box there are no free lunches. Go out and world awaits to embrace you.