abhishek desai’s posterous

If you are still using Dell Inspiron 1150 which is having unsupported chipset for Windows 7 you must have faced display drivers issue. When you install Windows 7 beta or Windows 7 RC1 it will take you back to 1990s in terms of screen resolution.

Here is the solution:

1) Download the drivers from this link.

2) Restart the laptop in safe mode

3) Unrar the drivers in a folder

4) Install the drivers using Device Manager (Shortcut: Windows Key + Break -> Device Manager)

5) Restart

And you are done!

You are back to your old 1024x768 resolution. 

Special thanks to my friend and colleague Kuntal for helping me find this.

Rock-Star Programmer Productivity

“A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.” –Bill Gates

Why is tech news so fun and addicting? Why do I keep scanning my RSS feeds hourly for the latest?

Great programmers are rock stars. Their heroic abilities and exploits are why we RSS Techcrunch and Siliconangle, continuously scanning articles for the latest hits and misses.  Programer rock-stardom, however, is founded on the well documented variation in software programmer productivity. Programmers, as it turns out, have one of the highest productivity variations of any profession.

“Numerous studies have found 10:1 differences in productivity and quality among individuals and even among teams…. programmers with an average of 7 years’ experience and found that the ratio of initial coding time between the best and worst programmers was about 20 to 1; the ratio of debugging times over 25 to 1; of program size 5 to 1; and of program execution speed about 10 to 1.” -Steve McConnell, development productivity guru and “10X Software Development” blogger

Anyone who has spent much time in a software engineering environment knows “the guy” to go to with the hardest problems, the one who can bang out the solution in an hour, instead of weeks. For me, it was an über-nerd named Roy who was the best talent in our 200-strong engineering group, despite having never spent a day in a college classroom. I once saw him in Blockbuster Video with his family. I was completely  star-struck  and I asked the woman at the register if she had any idea who she was renting videos to. I reacted this way despite sitting two doors down from him at work–he was a legend and I wanted everyone in Blockbuster to know it.

It was a similar reaction to the one in this recent USB Rock Star Commercial.

The same dynamic plays out at companies, and then fun begins! These rock star programmers have the power to create new markets, or topple top brands seemingly overnight. There seem to be two types of visionary programmers.

The first group makes a common thing uncommonly well:

Some of the greatest computer scientists out there excelled in this category. They go to the mattresses in a hiding place in Mountain View, San Francisco, or Atlanta and emerge with an unexpectedly awesome new edition of an already common piece of software. They work in small “best-of-the-best” teams with few breaks. They create value where the market thinks no more can be created. Google Search, Jboss, and Sun’s Fishworks, are examples that readily come to mind.

They upset markets by adding a radical dose of speed, reliability, manageability, or simplicity to known functionality. This first group of rock star programmers have the rare combination of smarts and passion you can’t teach.

The second group of rock star programmers grab the opportunity no one else sees yet:

These programmers revolutionize data or user behavior that was seemingly waiting to be coded appropriately. Napster is a great example of a somewhat simple piece of software that - despite its technical simplicity - was the result of a programmer seeing lots and lots of interesting data waiting to be harnessed into an application. I would also add Twitter into this group. It is an expansive view of where new linkages can be created that drives this group of programmers more than any outstanding ability to write the best code (as evidenced by the frequent sightings of the Fail Whale!)

Don’t always expect reliability, scalability, and general code perfection from this group - they are the visionaries of outstanding and radical applications that turn the everyday and mundane on its head.

How are you taking your productivity and vision to the next level?  Sometimes its hard to tell just how productive you are, but for now it’s a good sign if the young engineers in your group are starstruck when they see you in public.

What are your rock-star coder stories? I’d love to hear them!

Why joint ventures fail so often

There are two reasons joint ventures fail. The joint part and the venture part.

All ventures are risky, because they involve change and the unknown. We set off on a venture in search of something, or to make something happen--inherent in the idea of a venture is failure. It’s natural, then, for fearful people on both sides of a joint venture to back off when it gets scary. When given a choice between a risk and sure thing, many people pick the sure thing. So any venture begins with some question marks.

The joint part, though, is where the real problem arises. Pushing through the dip is the only way for a venture of any kind to succeed. The dip separates projects that begin from projects that finish. It’s easy and hopeful and exciting to start something, but challenging and often painful to finish it. When the project is a joint one, the pressure to push through the dip often dissipates. “Well, we only have a bit at stake here, so work on something else, something where we have to take all the blame.”

Because there isn’t one boss, one deliverable, one person pushing the project relentlessly, it stalls.

Every joint venture involves meetings, and meetings are the pressure relief valve. Meetings give us the ability to stall and to point fingers, to obfuscate and confuse. If a problem arises, if a difficulty needs to be overcome, it’s much easier to bury it at a meeting than it is to deal with it.

In my experience, you’re far better off with a licensing deal than a joint venture. One side buys the right to use an asset that belongs to the other. The initial transaction is more difficult (and apparently risky) at the start, but then the door is open to success. It’s a venture that belongs to one party, someone with a lot at stake and an incentive to make it work.

Only one person in charge at a time.

Does America Need to Make Things?

KIGALI, RWANDA– As I’ve mentioned before I like my entrepreneurs risk-taking and a little crazy. Earlier this week on TechTicker, we ran an interview with a guy who fits that bill: Shai Agassi.

In some ways, Agassi is even more ambitious than Elon Musk—you know, the guy who builds rockets and $100,000 electric sports cars. Agassi wants to re-engineer the entire auto and oil infrastructure with electric cars, charging stations, battery replacement stations (staring robots who actually change the battery for you) and sophisticated software to keep it all running—one country at a time. His company is called Better Place, and while some have accused Agassi of being an egomaniac, I give him huge props for walking away from one of the most powerful jobs in the tech world to start a new company that was this hard to pull off.

I last interviewed Agassi several years ago on stage when he was at SAP, and I was covering the oh-so-sexy enterprise software beat for BusinessWeek. If memory serves, we were good-naturedly sparring about whether Oracle’s acquisition strategy would work. (I’d argue I was right.) But I have to say, I like this Shai better. He made his name as an intense and gifted entrepreneur who wasn’t afraid to take risk and sometimes people like that are wasted inside big organizations, even if they have the top job. Agassi seemed inspired and unleashed compared to his SAP days. There’s more about Better Place itself and Agassi’s plan here.

But at the end of the third segment (embedded below), Agassi said something that’s been sticking in my head ever since: America has to start making things or the economy won’t work. He argues you don’t have a country with just a service economy to support it. I’m starting to fear that he’s right, especially spending time last month in China and this week in central Africa, both places where manufacturing and consumer goods industries are being built fresh and in incredibly innovative ways. It’s a bit like what you kept hearing after the dot com bust: When things turn south it’s good to have hard assets to fall back on.

Trust me, as I sit on a terrace in a landlocked African nation that has to import almost everything to great expense, America doesn’t want to get in the pure-consumer, non-producer game. And while some argue the intellectual work—ala thinking up the idea or doing the hard core engineering—is higher margin, it’s absurd and arrogant to think we’ve got a lock on the people who can do that kind of thinking.

This is clearly the biggest concern in the rust belt where thousands of manufacturing job are at risk. But if Agassi is right, Silicon Valley is in trouble too, because we hardly make anything anymore. Look at the semiconductor business: Most start-ups for the last ten years have been so-called “fabless” chip companies. And how many gadgets are made here? The great age of networking and telecom rollouts are over—instead monopolies are upping revenues by “metering” our broadband not rolling out a newer, faster infrastructure. Even outsourcing low-level software development to Balkan states contributes to this. It’s a win-win for now, but long-term emerging markets benefit more than we do.

Tech got in this situation for two reasons: technology advanced quickly enough we could outsource all the assembly and VCs liked it that way because it’s cheap. But there’s more than enough cash flowing around this Valley to fund a few risky, expensive manufacturing plays. Here’s what I’d like to see America start making again. Leave your ideas in the comments.

1. Better consumer devices. For decades VCs have shied away from consumer devices given the manufacturing and consumer marketing costs. Sure there are loads of duds out there to support that point. But whether they’re entirely made in the US or not, haven’t the iPhone, the Flip, the Kindle, the Jawbone and others proven a good device that does something well still has a future coming out of the Valley? Increasingly, people will pay up for brilliant device execution even if it only does one thing well, even if it’s not necessarily a new category.

2. Cars. Yep, we’re doing it already but it largely hasn’t been funded by the Valley. Musk invested $70 million of his own money and Agassi’s cash mostly came from Israelis. Props to Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers for funding Tesla competitor Fisker. But now that these pioneers have proven there’s a viable market here, the US establishment whether it’s the Valley top brass, DC lawmakers or Detroit need to get behind it in action, not words. Although President Barack Obama has been careful to say the government won’t dictate strategy for the car companies we now own, Agassi thinks America should take the opportunity to push on electric manufacturing hard. After all, we do own them. Why not get something out of it? (More on that in the video below too.)

3. Medicine. What ever happened to the biotech boom? The promise from decoding the genome? The rhetoric that the Valley was going to give birth to dozens of Genentechs? I’ll tell you what: VCs got into the habit of selling promising pre-clinical research to big pharma early and often. There’s no more company building in biotech, and that’s a shame. I get that drug discovery is hard and expensive, but we need the innovation, real science and jobs if you ask me. There’s also the side benefit of screwing with the big pharma oligopolies. And saving lives is generally a good thing for the country.

4. Electric planes that go really fast. Ok, it sounds even crazier than rockets or electric cars, but every time I board a creaky old Boeing jet for a 10-hour-plus international flight, I can’t stop thinking about Musk’s idea for an electric plane that’s supersonic and lands vertically. I don’t even know if that’s feasible, but I’m ready to retire my much-beloved noise-reduction headset if it is. If anyone would like to build a teleportation device I’ll sign up for a beta tester on that one too. I don’t care if there’s a risk that my organs will arrive on the outside of my body, I’m so over 20-to-30 hour flights on planes older than I am.

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How to Become a Better Entrepreneur in the Next 30 Minutes

Do you want to be a better entrepreneur?

Do you want to make more money?

Here’s how you can do it in 6 steps.

1. Take a break

Just for a moment, sit back and relax. Before you dive back into your work you need to figure out where you are financially in life. One of the main reasons you are going into business is because you want to make more money. So the main question that should come to your mind is:

How much money do you want to make?

You don’t need a billion dollars and the odds of you making anywhere near that are slim to none. So what’s your number?

Chances are the amount you want to make is far more than you’ll actually need. Sit down and take a moment to write down everything you want to buy and how much money you’ll need to make to buy it all. Maybe a fancy house, some exotic cars, and enough cash where you don’t have to worry about working. If you add up the total of everything you want, it shouldn’t run you more than a few million dollars and if you break it down into yearly income it probably won’t be more than a few hundred thousand dollars.

If this isn’t the case, then you are smoking crack. You don’t need tons of toys to be happy. If you think you do, you will have a tough time making all of that money because it is really unlikely that you will make a few million dollars a year or sell your company for a hundred million dollars if you haven’t even made a few hundred grand first.

So stop swinging for the fences, especially if you haven’t hit a single yet!

2. Stop innovating and start copying

Now that you know that you don’t have to make millions of dollars a year, you have to come up with a business that will help you make a decent amount of money. It doesn’t have to be an innovative business that solves a pain in the market place; it just has to be a business that can turn a healthy profit every year.

A good way to find one of these businesses is by talking to friends and family. You’ll be amazed on how many basic businesses like plumbing (I am not saying you should be a plumber) make a decent amount of money. Find something that you’ll enjoy and start the business. Just don’t pick something that requires millions of dollars to start.

If you already have a business analyze how you are currently doing and see what tweaks you can make to it, so that it fits your financial objectives.

3. Time isn’t on your side

Nothing has to be perfect. What you may see as faulty might look perfect to your customers. It doesn’t matter what you want, it matters what your customers want.

This is why you don’t want to make any big decisions because if something goes wrong you’ll end up wasting a lot of time. Break that big decision into a few small decisions. Then survey your customers or potential customers to get their opinion; this should help you determine what route to take.

Even after you talk to your customers you are still going to make mistakes. Just make sure you are agile enough to adapt quickly. It is all about testing small things instead of taking months to roll out changes in your business.

4. Work hard, play hard

If you work 12-hour days, you are going to get burned out. It doesn’t matter if you love what you are doing you need to take breaks.

• Don’t work longer than a few hours without taking a break. Taking small breaks throughout your day will make you more efficient and cause you to accomplish more.
• Every week you should do something that is out of the ordinary. It doesn’t have to be expensive, it could be as simple as going to the park and having a picnic with your family. Just do something that will take your mind away from work and reduce your stress level.
• Create a work environment that you want to be in. Small things like having plants in your workspace, putting up motivational posters, and having a window to look out of can do wonders for you. If your work environment is dark and boring you’ll be forcing yourself to work everyday.

5. Stop deviating

New business opportunities are going to come your way and you will want to jump on them. But all of these things are going to be distractions. They’ll cause you to deviate from your path to success and it will take longer for you to reach your ultimate goal.

You to have to resist the temptation.

If you happen to take any of these opportunities you’ll soon find out that you will be increasing your risk intake. The more things you do, especially ones outside of your skill set, the higher the chance that something is going to fail.

Plus, the more things you do, the more spread out you will be. Once you spread yourself too thin you won’t be able to spend enough time on any of your businesses and you’ll notice that they will all suffer.

6. Never stop learning

The most important and last thing you should know is that you should never stop learning. No matter how successful you are, there is going to be someone out there who has accomplished more than you.

So instead of being arrogant, take every opportunity you get to learn new things. Whether it is from an experienced entrepreneur who has been around the block, or a 16-year-old kid, everyone can teach you something. You just have to learn what to take away from a conversation because there are going to be some things that are going to benefit you and others that won’t.

Conclusion

As an entrepreneur you have learned a few other things that I didn’t include in this blog post. Would you mind leaving a comment with some tips that would help others become a better entrepreneur in the next 30 minutes?

Email Advice to Keep Clients Happy

Everyone knows that great communication is essential in any distributed team. I’ve put together my list of Do’s and Don’ts based on the last few years of working in and managing distributed teams. Add your do’s, don’ts or pet peeves about email communication.

Do:

1. Address the email carefully. People that are going to need to act on the email should be in the To: addresses. People that you’re just keeping in the loop should be in the CC: addresses. When in doubt, include people on the CC list.
2. Suggest a call to action. If you need action on the email, state it clearly. Tell me what you want me to do with the email. eg, “Josh - please provide feedback.”
3. Bullet point items. If you have a lot of things to say, try to make a nice bulleted list. Nobody likes reading long paragraphs in emails.
4. Use highlights or bold type. If you’re sending an email to a team and need several people to do different things, call that out. Eg, “Elizabeth - please provide a final draft. Brian - please publish on the blog.
5. Confirm action. You’d be amazed how far a simple email reply of “Done” can go. If a client asks you to do something, and you respond with “Done” shortly after, there will be a big smile on their face.
6. Reply immediately. If you can’t immediately address the issues, you should still reply as soon as you can and confirm that you’re working on it and ideally a provide an estimated completion time / date.
7. Send weekly status reports. Even if your client hasn’t asked you to, she will be impressed if you send a nice bulleted list of actions completed over the past week as well as actions planned for the next week.
8. Include links and screenshots. oDesk provides screensnap tools, so does Jing and Skitch for Mac. Use them, they’re useful and pretty.
9. Use FYI labels. If you’re just sending me an FYI - let me know. Include it in the subject or first line so I know that I don’t really need to read it.

Do Not:

1. Mark an email as Urgent. This is such a flagrantly annoying tag. It should never be used. Period.
2. Put URGENT in all CAPS. This is just as bad. An annoying replacement for the urgent tag. Look, if it’s really urgent and you really know me, give me a call or ping me on chat.
3. Remove people from the CC list. If I sent the email to a group of people, I probably thought carefully about who should be on the CC list and who needs to stay informed. Replying directly to me probably means I need to do more work to coordinate everything.
4. Write a novel. Emails should be short, everyone gets a ton of email.
5. Have a bunch of typos. Some typos ok, a ton of typos is unacceptable.
6. Send an email with no subject. I hope everyone already knows this.
7. Send an email with just a link to an article. I am not a mind-reader. Tell me why you’re sending me this link. Do you want me to read, bookmark, forward, link?