Do you know how hot it has become in Hyderabad? Well, really hot. Driving in the sun has become a big pain, if you are standing for a short while at the traffic lights, your skin starts burning – that hot. But, early mornings and late evenings are a treat.

My partner and I have started the paperwork for registering a private ltd company. Have a click and mortar business model planned out. We invited a quote from a small IT services company for the development and design of the website. It’s not a very out of the way website, but I though the money they’re asking is ridiculous – Rs. 80,000. This is for a php-mysql website. I guess I’ll have to find some Joomla! developers and get them to build it for me – I know it can be done in 10 days (or less) if its an experienced Joomla! developer. If you know anybody who can work on the sides or full-time (we’ll need a maintenance crew later anyway).

My Joomla! site is coming along ok. It had to take a backseat as I had other pressing jobs. But, I have had some progress on it. I need to find a good designer who can help me make it look better. I am yet to integrate events and reviews with the maps. Once that is done I’ll start looking for a decent hosting service as well.

I have been trying to setup an SMS gateway with Gammu on my Ubuntu Hardy machine (this was one of the pressing jobs). I don’t know how many hours i’ve spent trying to get my N70 working as a GSM modem. I finally gave up and tried with Sony Ericsson phones yesterday. I was using Wammu (the GUI for Gammu) to configure the port and connection type, but was having a problem getting the phone detected. Finally found a way – use the manual configuration in Wammu, select the ‘phone mode’ in the phone (the other modes are file transfer and print) and use set port=/dev/ttyACM0; connection=at19200. This works like a charm. I also got the gammu-smsd to work so that all incoming and outgoing messages are routed through a mysql database. So, now I can proceed with developing the front-end for my SMS VAS platform. Pinaki is already working on the algo engine. Hopefully, we’ll have something working very soon.