A Logical Explanation

The Grass and the Cloud

2014-08-17T02:17:00.003-07:00

The Mountain

2014-08-17T02:17:00.001-07:00

The City

2014-08-17T01:25:00.001-07:00

The Night

2014-08-17T01:23:00.001-07:00

The wow effect - Gabriel Weinberg's Blog

2012-02-26T21:07:00.000-08:00

The wow effect - Gabriel Weinberg's Blog: "There is a startup proverb that says you have to be 10x better than your competition to get people to switch. A related one is that you should concentrate on being a painkiller as opposed to a vitamin"

Redis

2012-02-16T03:11:00.000-08:00

Redis: "Redis is an open source, advanced key-value store. It is often referred to as a data structure server since keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets."

Overview - D Programming Language

2012-02-15T07:15:00.000-08:00

Overview - D Programming Language: "What is D?"

Puppet Labs: The Leading IT Automation Software Solution

2012-02-14T06:41:00.000-08:00

Puppet Labs: The Leading IT Automation Software Solution: "Puppet Enterprise 2.0 gives systems administrators the operational agility, efficiency, and insight they need to manage dynamic infrastructure, on-premise or in the cloud."

Apache Kafka

2012-02-14T06:40:00.000-08:00

Apache Kafka: "Apache Kafka is a distributed publish-subscribe messaging system"

Finagle, from Twitter

2012-02-14T06:26:00.000-08:00

Finagle, from Twitter: "Finagle is a network stack for the JVM that you can use to build asynchronous Remote Procedure Call (RPC) clients and servers in Java, Scala, or any JVM-hosted language. Finagle provides a rich set of protocol-independent tools."

Func

2012-02-14T06:11:00.000-08:00

Func: "Func is a secure, scriptable remote control framework and API. It is intended to replace SSH scripted infrastructure for a variety of datacenter automation tasks (such as taking hardware inventory, running queries, or executing remote commands) that are run against a large amount of systems at the same time. Func provides both a command line tool and a simple and powerful Python API. It is also intended to be very easy to integrate with your provisioning environment"

0:00 A VC: The Management Team - Guest Post From Joel Spolsky

2012-02-13T06:18:00.000-08:00

A VC: The Management Team - Guest Post From Joel Spolsky:

"The “management team” isn’t the “decision making” team. It’s a support function. You may want to call them administration instead of management, which will keep them from getting too big for their britches."

0:03 Why we are much smarter than we think we are « Leo starts up

2012-02-12T21:24:00.000-08:00

Why we are much smarter than we think we are « Leo starts up:

"Bravery is what I’m working on the most. It’s downright the hardest work we could ever do. ~ Chris Brogan
"

Textism: Tools: Textile

2012-01-19T10:24:00.000-08:00

Textism: Tools: Textile:

jQuery Masonry

2012-01-16T23:39:00.000-08:00

jQuery Masonry: "A dynamic layout plugin for jQuery
The flip-side of CSS floats"

OpenShift by Red Hat

2012-01-09T22:10:00.000-08:00

OpenShift by Red Hat: "OpenShift is a free, auto-scaling platform-as-a-service for Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl and Python applications."

DotCloud - Deployment made simple

2012-01-08T10:00:00.000-08:00

0:00 DotCloud - Deployment made simple: "DotCloud lets you create the best cloud stack for your application. We give developers and IT professionals the freedom and flexibility to mix and match languages, databases, caching and messaging components without the need for additional servers or infrastructure."

'via Blog this'

ifttt / About ifttt

2012-01-04T20:51:00.000-08:00

ifttt / About ifttt: "Put the internet to work for you by creating tasks that fit this simple structure:
if this then that
Think of all the things you could do if you were able to define any task as: when something happens (this) then do something else (that). "

'via Blog this'

Travian – online strategy game.

2008-12-23T08:42:00.001-08:00

I recently started exploring Travian. Its a online strategy game, or one could only version of Age of empires and Caesar. Though it is not as graphical or musical as the desktop versions but it has all the other features like the resources, buildings, army, wars. Begin an online portal, there can be hundreds if not more player playing at the same time.

In travian the player start as a chief of a village. Almost all the villages are same, they have some resource where you can extract wood, clay, iron and crop. The village center has some building area where we can build new buildings like, granary, barracks, palace etc Typical strategy game stuff. In the travian world you have neighboring villages which is owned by fellow players. You can interact with these players and trade resources. One can also form alliances. And the feature list goes on and on.

Travian is served in many sub domains so that the no of players can be distributed. They also have different servers for different countries. Eg. s1.travian.com, s2.travian.com , s1.travian.us, s1.travian.ca etc.

My village is in s2.travian.com. Its called NicoBar (The land of Nicos.). My nickname kmanicka.

Moving To Wordpress

2008-11-11T22:42:00.001-08:00

After a long stint with blogger i have decided to move to the Wordpress. Blogger is great for a starter but as we grow we see its limitations.

Wordpress has more flexibility compared to blogger and being open source it has lots of plugins and templates available. Plus the support community is prety large which can help us resolve our day to day problems.

I have choosen BlueHost for hosting the blog. The blog is called Digital Derby.

I will be cross posting to this blog and the new blog for a while. And once the new blog is fully set up, I will leave this blog as is.

www.digitalderby.com

The best blog editing tool so far

2008-10-24T10:09:00.001-07:00

Just downloaded the new Windows Live Blog Writer. Am not a big Microsoft fan but this shows why Microsoft is so good when it comes to User Interface. The design is sleek and its loaded with features.

The one feature which really got me was the preview pane. I have been using lots of other Blog editing tools but none of them had this. The preview pane actually shows how the blog will look when its posted not just a simple mockup.

The other feature like inserting links, pictures, videos etc are common among all the blog editors. But windows takes it a step further by providing a plug-in framework. Using this framework developers can provide custom built insert options. Whole galary of plug-in have already been created and they are all pretty useful.

One Plug-in which I have been looking was the Code formatter, And here it is in all its glory.

   1:  class MyClass {

   2:      public static main(String[] args) {

   3:          System.out.println("Hello world");

   4:      }

   5:  }

UPDATE : Looks like my blogger theam doesn't like the code generated by the code formatter plugin. It looked nice in Windows Blog writer.

Looking forward to more useful plugins which can enrich the blogging experience. I remember the days when I used to edit the blogs on blogger website. :(. It was one of the biggest turn off during my initial blogging days.

And here is the screen shot of the preview pane.

Comments not working in iTheam Blogger Template

2008-10-23T11:16:00.001-07:00

Looks like blogger has released a new feature, where in users can comment on a blog from the same page. They will not be redirected to a separate blogger style page. Full story here.

This is really a great feature. This will make the user experience uniform across the whole blog. The comments section can now gel with the post.

I had actually searched a lot for a blogger templates which has this feature. This feature is readily available in all the Wordpress templates.

Unfortunately this has broken the Commenting feature in the iTheam blogger template I use :(.

To fix the issue I had to change "Comment Form Placement" setting to "Pop-up Window" which enables the old style commenting.

Blogger Dashboard -> {Blog Name} -> Settings -> comments -> Comment Form Placement.

Will try / search for a better fix till then "Old is Gold".

How to create a Windows Service.

2008-10-22T05:05:00.001-07:00

While working on one of my projects .. I wanted to run background thread in windows. Its pretty simple in linux/unix kind of env.. just append "&" to the command.

To do the same thing in windows.. i had to use a windows service. The article has detailed steps to do the job.

I was testing the example provided in the article. The try to start Notepad as a service. When i started the service i was expecting to see the notepad window. But nothing like that happened. Not sure why.

To test it I created a simple php script which writes to a file.

<?php

$filename = "c:\\temp1.txt";
$fh = fopen($filename, 'w') or die(" Fatal ERROR can't open file");

while(true) {
fwrite($fh,"hi \n");
sleep(100);
}
fclose($fh);

?>

And in the "Application" key of the registery provided the following command

php test.php

Now when I started the command saw the logs in c:\temp.txt file.

Using Gdata apis in Appengine

2008-10-11T06:05:00.001-07:00

I started digging into Googles appengine recently. Its a great service provided by Google. Now developers like us dont have to worry about the servers.. deployment and other stuff. If we have an Idea we can jump in and start working on it.

As my first project on appengine, am trying to develop a simple which fetches videos from youtube and displays in a page. Its pretty basic.

Nice articles describing it can be found here.

Found a small issue in this article. There is a small hack we need to do to use the Python gdata apis in appengine. This article talks more about it.

This hack is failing in gdata-python api 1.2.1 With the new gdata api instead of doing

gdata.service.http_request_handler = gdata.urlfetch

We should do this

client = gdata.youtube.service.YouTubeService()
urlfetch.run_on_appengine(client)

Lost a day figuring this out. :(

days of java are numbered

2008-10-02T06:00:00.000-07:00

Are the days of Java and c numbered?

We are seeing a new wave of websites which are offering online application development and hosting.. the prominent being zoho creater. Here is a list of other such services..