So, why we decided to start Lamp?

(1) I had an itch to start my own company since long. I was not sure about what it takes to start your own company, but I was very much sure that I can do far better than what I was doing. I always felt that, things can be done different ways, things can be changed, things can be manageable. Some time you get chance to make things proper and some time you need to accept what others believe is true. Certainly, the later part was not so convincing for me. So, starting our own company was one solution for me to control my professional life and fortunately I have friends and partners with me who believed & supported the same idea.

(2) There are two types of people in this world.

• One, who spent their entire life; doing job, making money, getting married, having children and live happily ever after. Now nothing is wrong in that. that’s what normal people do, seek for stable life.
• Others (like me), who don’t want to die with regret of not doing something, which their heart tell them to do.

When I was in college, I read somewhere

Bit philosophical, but its driving factor for me to make decisions. Seriously, if we have only one life, do we need to do what other people, community think right or what our heart says is right? Simply I follow my dreams.

I always wanted to be entrepreneur… Of course not!

I belong to a middle class family and in India, every parent thinks that their child become engineer, doctor or do government job. my parents (my father was bank clerk and my mother is housewife) thought same for me.

When I was in college, I didn’t have good academic record until final year and by the end of final year, it was clear to me that getting a good job is not easy. After struggling for 2 and half year, finally I ended up in Yahoo!, a dream company for me to work at that time. Eventually I realized, Yahoo was not final destination, I was looking for something more. Finally I no longer had a question in my mind: Should I Startup or Continue a Job? I knew what I wanted next.

Was it hard to leave job?

Once you start earning handsome money and at the end of the month bank message in your cell phone makes you smile, its hard to make such decision like kicking your well paid job.

But remember that you have only one life quote, I mentioned above, that’s what helped me to make my decision.

Was it right time?

Frankly, there is no right time. You just need to believe in your self.

When we decided to start our own company in July 2008, world was all set to welcome economy crisis. Recession was already started. We thought, its right time to see if we can survive in economy collapse.

Another reason, I was single (Ok, I’m still single) and my parents wanted to get me married. Somehow, I had a feeling that, once I get married, I wont be able to take such hard decisions. So, at least it was right time for me.

What it takes to be an entrepreneur?

As I said earlier; you need to believe in your self. My parents advised not to start any business and I also got some free advise on everything regarding why job is more secure and what not from relatives and friends. OK guys, that may be true. Every one has their own version of truth and believes and we must respect that. I respected my own version of truth.

If you want to start your own business, don’t ask everyone around whether you should start business or not. Ask yourself first: Are you ready to compromise with your current life, life style? If you wont get handsome salary, will it be OK? And there you go. If you are all set for entrepreneur life; money and risk wont bother you.

In fact, you must be ready to take risk and must accept the fact that, you might get failed. So, what? Its not end of world. Failing is necessary to learn some important lessons of life. If you are not ready to fail, entrepreneurship is not for you.

I will be lying if I say, personal relationship doesn’t get affected. During those initial two years, I was heavily engaged with business and had very less interaction with my family. Not intentionally but accidentally. I have to admit that, I failed to balance my personal life with professional life. You can’t change the past. Just learn from your mistakes and move on. that’s entrepreneurial spirit.

Why we decided service based start-up?

If you have great product idea and if someone is backing you then you can easily invest your time making products and even if you fail, you don’t have to worry. But if no one is backing you and if you don’t have that killer idea, you need to make sure money is keep rolling so that your organization survive. Its not like we don’t like product based start-up but you need to make right choice at right time. You need to make right choice even if time is not right.

We didn’t had any projects/clients…

Many of you might think that, we already had some clients / projects when we decided to start. that’s not true. We didn’t had a single project in our hand when I left Yahoo! But what really matters at that time was taking first step (which was to leave job and start following dream) and once you take your first step, you will find out next step eventually. Of course we got two good projects in first month it self through friends reference.

Partners

You need to find like minded people, people you can trust and people who believe in your potentials. If the partner is your friend that’s plus point. As an entrepreneur you must avoid 3 type of people as your partners.

• Those who want quick money.
• Those who don’t believe in team work.
• Those who want to invest money without adding significant values.

Relationship matters

Every relationship is important. In small & medium size organizations I used to see people (including some of my friends) leaving an organization without serving notice period. People just call project manager or HR to inform that they are not coming from today Or some time people just send email Or some time they don’t even bother to inform.

People don’t realize that every single contact is important. We don’t know what future has for us. When we started Lamp, we used to get good projects from one of our old employers for more than a year time and that’s only because of our good relationship.

Was is easy to hire first few employees?

When you are a service based start-up, hardest part is to convey others about your vision and goal. If you want to get good developers while having a office setup in one room in some residential area, its hard. So, look in your social circle. Find people who are not too demanding and same time help you to move forward.

Hard Time?

Yes, we had hard time, many times! In first two months of starting Lamp, one of our partner ditched us for some issues and that too totally unethically. I don’t blame him. As I said, every one has their own version of truth. It was bad and depressing time. But if you choose entrepreneur life, you need to move, move alone if time demands.

Some clients didn’t pay on time so I had to use my personal savings for developers salary. Its really frustrating to keep reminding people for payment for work you did three-four months back and they make false promises. But that’s how we learn some valuable business lessons (fyi – none of us have MBA degree or management background, we are bunch of techies so learning business lessons with every single mistake is important to us)

So, where we stand now?

We are learning, failing and progressing. Entrepreneurship is not about to reach somewhere or to achieve something. Its journey. As an entrepreneur, you must be ready to fail, get up and move on. You need to set one goal, reach there and make another goal and work to complete your goal.

If you have reach so far reading this post, thanks for reading. Some of you may not agree with some points, but hey, remember? its my version of truth So keep posting your comments.

Nilesh Gamit
Lamp Technologies

find PATH_TO_DIRECTORY -type f | xargs perl -pi -e 's/SEARCH_KEYWORD/REPLACE_KEYWORD/g'

Find a text in files in a directory and subdirectories

find PATH_TO_DIRECTORY -exec grep -l 'SEARCH_KEYWORD' {} \;

Find all modified file in last few days within a directory (exclude some sub-directory for e.g. CVS)

Create 2 files as below under DIRECTORY (e.g. find all modified files between 1st July 2011 and 31st July 2011)

touch -t 201107010000.01 FILE_1 /* 2011[year]07[month]01[day] */
touch -t 201107312359.59 FILE_2 /* 2011[year]07[month]31[day] */
find PATH_TO_DIRECTORY -type f -newer FILE_1 ! -newer FILE_2 -exec ls -ogh {} \; | grep -vw 'EXCLUDE_SUB_DIRECTORY' | cut -f4,5,6 -d' '

Batch resize image using ImageMagick

cd PATH_TO_IMAGE_DIRECTORY
mogrify -resize WIDTHxHEIGHT *
mogrify -resize WIDTHxHEIGHT -quality 80 * (to reduce quality)

Copy directory structure without the files

find * -type d -exec mkdir PATH_TO_DIRECTORY/\{\} \;

@ Lamp Development Center

@ Lamp Development Center

“I am very pleased with the responsiveness and dedication to this project.”

Erich Gombocz & Eva Cortez
Ontrackteaching.net, USA

“Lamp ‘s professionalism and dedication to this project has been an excellent experience which is rare among developers. The responsiveness to unexpected, yet important changes and the solutions for implementing those have been remarkable. We will use Lamp again for our next projects.”

Erich Gombocz & Eva Cortez
Ontrackteaching.net, USA

One solution I found was, using html2ps and then ps2png/ps2jpg/ps2gif to convert it to image. Then ImageMagicK for image manipulation. Somehow I stuck with some weird memory related errors, some package conflicts, some formatting issues etc. So, after spending one day on nothing; I dropped this solution.

Then I tried khtml2png (http://khtml2png.sourceforge.net) and after some r&d, it worked for us.

Some points to remember…
- You need to have VPS/dedicated hosting to setup these tools. On shared hosting, its not possible to install due to various restrictions by hosting providers.

- This tool requires, some libraries and tools: g++, KDE 3.x, kdelibs for KDE 3.x, zlib (zlib1g-dev) and cmake

- This tool uses KDE (K Desktop Environment), that means whenever you use khtml2png tool, it will open one window for *a while* at time of capturing webpage screenshot. We can remove this by using “Xvfb”. We will see how to install and configure it later.

- These links will be helpful, if you are planning to develop web application with webpage screen capturing using khtml2png
http://khtml2png.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=faq
http://www.mysql-apache-php.com/website_screenshot.htm

Here is step by step guide to install various dependencies and packages. (I installed these tools on Fedora7 & RHEL5 successfully)

I used “yum” command to install and auto-configure these tools. If “yum” is not available on your machine, get if from http://yum.baseurl.org/ and install it.

Step:1

yum install ImageMagick

yum install Xvfb

yum install gcc gcc-c++ automake autoconf nano zlib zlib-devel

yum groupinstall "X Window System" "KDE (K Desktop Environment)"

yum install kdelibs kdelibs-devel

yum install Xvfb xorg xorg-x11-font*

Step:2 Install *cmake*
Go to share directory by typing command

cd /usr/local/share/

or any preferred directory where you want to download package. (check http://www.cmake.orgfor latest “cmake” version)

wget http://www.cmake.org/files/v2.8/cmake-2.8.1.tar.gz

tar -xzvf cmake-2.8.1.tar.gz

cd cmake-2.8.1

./bootstrap

make

make install

Step:3 Download & Install *khtml2png* on your server as per instructions in this link.
http://khtml2png.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=download

Step:4 Check if *khtml2png* is working

/usr/local/bin/khtml2png2 'http://www.yahoo.com' yahoo.png

(this will capture yahoo homepage in yahoo.png)

Step:5 Install *khtmld* (a daemon which will be required to run khtml2png in background)
http://wiki.goatpr0n.de/projects/khtmld

I faced couple of problems while setting up *khtmld*, but it got solved by reading suggestions from above link.

I installed above all tools as *root* user.

Once you are done with above steps, lets play with *khtml2png*

How to start?
Run following command to run khtml2png without a visible X session

Xvfb :2 -screen 0 1024x768x24& export DISPLAY=localhost:2.0

(you can put above 2 lines in rc.local so it will start automatically whenever server restarts)

Then start *khtmld* daemon as your webserver user (for me it is *apache*) so that PHP script can have permission to talk with this daemon. (run below command after login as *root* user)

khtmld -K /usr/local/bin/khtml2png2 -c /etc/khtmldrc --user apache&

“-K /usr/local/bin/khtml2png2″ is path to khtml2png2 as by default “khtmld” will look for old “khtml2png” (khtml2png2 is latest version). Find khtml2png2 path using

whereis khtml2png2

“-c /etc/khtmldrc” is config file path for khtmld (you can create this config file if its not already there)
Sample content for khtmldrc

width=1024height=768display=:0.0

Capture image using *khtmld*

echo "http://www.yahoo.com /tmp/yahoo.png" >/tmp/khtmldspool

(for more details – http://wiki.goatpr0n.de/projects/khtmld)

We have also used ImageMagicK command “convert” (http://www.imagemagick.org/script/convert.php) to trim the image for removing whitespace.

convert /tmp/yahoo.png -fuzz 1% -trim /tmp/new.yahoo.png

Sample PHP code for capturing & displaying PNG image using “khtml2png”

<?php
ob_clean();
header("Cache-Control: no-cache");
header("Pragma: no-cache");
header("Content-type: image/png");

$webpage_url= "http://www.yahoo.com";

$out_put_file = "/tmp/yahoo.png"; //captured screen
$new_out_put_file = "/tmp/new.yahoo.png"; //whitespace removed

$cmd = "echo '".$webpage_url." ".$out_put_file."' >/tmp/khtmldspool";
exec("$cmd");

// some delay till khtml2png capture screen
while(!file_exists($out_put_file)) { sleep(3); }

exec("convert $out_put_file -fuzz 1% -trim $new_out_put_file");

while(!file_exists($new_out_put_file)) { sleep(1); }

// display image on browser
echo file_get_contents($new_out_put_file);

unlink($out_put_file);
unlink($new_out_put_file);
exit;
?>

Hope this will be helpful.

That’s all for now.

1. Div based design
2. PDO library
3. JSON
4. OPEN ID
5. PHP web services &
6. AI in PHP

and we got to learn so many things. Thanks to all participants for all your hard work to make this event a success.

That’s all for now.

Thanks

We didn’t have open training session at Lamp on 30th Jan (Saturday), instead we organized “Programming contest for Lamp developers”. It was surprised event for developers.

The idea was to check  our developer’s proficiency in  ‘Problem solving skill’, ‘Technical skills’, ‘Adoption of new tool/technology’, ‘Coding practice’, ‘Requirement understanding’ and ‘Quality of work’. It was 7 hours long contest (from 12:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.).

It was quite helpful event as we got to know some of our limitations and area of improvement.

Here is the problem statement, if any one wants to try @ home.

Problem Statement: Create a site search module from scratch (without Lamp framework / any other ready made php framework) using PHP & MySQL.

What is required?

An interface where a user can search for a string and result will be listed on same page using AJAX (use YUI javascript library for AJAX call).
- Result will include title of page having link to the page, 140 characters description, highlighted search term(s).   No pagination required.
- Display count for no. of times particular page appear in search result for any search query.
- Display total time your script took for displaying result.

An interface where a user can submit the site URL and script will index first 50 pages of the site URL (1st level crawling).
- Script will not crawl any pages which has different domain then submitted.
- Script will not crawl any link which has reference to same page.
- Crawler will not index JS & CSS.
- Indexed page will not store any HTML tags, JS, CSS in description.
- Whenever crawling is done for a URL, display it on webpage and display total time taken for crawling
- At the end display total time taken for crawling 50 pages.
- Store all indexed pages in MySQL.

[Question] What changes are required so that same script will run from command line?
[Question] List few well known ready made site search scripts with URL.
[Question] Have you heard about Yahoo! BOSS APIs, Google Search & Lucene? If yes, can you tell difference between all 3?

NOTE:
- Develop your code so that base scripts will be used by any developer as reusable components with easy instructions.
- Do not use any 3rd party script or ready made php script except YUI library.

That’s all for now.

Thanks

Finally we started our first “open training program” at Lamp, Surat. We were having training programs every first and third saturday, but as time passed, people lost interest. So, we decided to invite outside people (who are ready to learn new things) to attend training at Lamp development center (ldc).

The idea behind this initiative is to provide higher level technical training, free of cost to php developers  and students (B.E./B.Tech Comp/IT, M.Sc I.T., MCA), living in Surat. This will help them to stay in touch with latest technologies and upgrade their knowledge. This will also help us to meet new people and share our idea with them.

In Surat, we can find good developers but their base is not concrete and not all developers are spending enough time to learn new/upcoming technlogies. This is needed to develop high quality & high performance applications. We feel that, just educational knowledge is not enough to sharpen your domain skills. It requires that, people know right things from right people

Our first training was held on 16th Jan 2008 (Saturday) from 6:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. The topic was “Inside memcache – develop highly scalable and high performance websites using memcache“. It was very helpful training and everyone enjoyed it. If you are in Surat and want to attend upcoming trainings, just drop a mail at contact@lamp-technologies.com

That’s all for now.

Thanks

Attachments:

Memcache.15.01.2010 PDF

Memcache PPT