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Anjanesh

Anjanesh
Assignment Statements, Comparisons and Observations

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Webfaction
2009-08-25 06:29:00
I am not going to get into another general shared-hosting review. Infact this is something in between shared-hosting and a VPS. I signed up for 2 webfaction accounts - I was primarily looking for a VPS switch, for which I already decided on SliceHost. But there are 2 challenges to SliceHost - one, it costs $20/month for 10GB/100GB space/bandwidth which is still pretty expensive for Indian standards. Two, since its unmanged, a fair amount of linux sys admin skills is required to keep it up and running without downtimes. WebFaction is mainly known for its Python hosting (previously python-hosting.com), but the best part is that you can run it like a VPS. The base install managed by the hosting company itself and the custom installs mananged by the customers themselves. For example, you can install another version of MySQL in your HOME directory and run it at a custom port (each user account gets a predefined range of ports for use in custom setups). And yes, you can install anything...

Whats up with Yahoo!?
2009-06-18 13:16:00
A few months ago, I blogged about Yahoo ! shutting down its Kisckstart service. Well, off lately Yahoo! has been shutting down a whole lot of its services most notably Yahoo! 360 - soon in July 2009. The other common services of Yahoo! that shutdown were : Yahoo! Mash, a social networking service lasted for a year ended in September 2008. Yahoo! Live, a real-time video broadcasting experiment ended after a 6 months stint in December 2008. Yahoo! Content Match, a Google Adsense clone shuts down in Europe. Jumpcut, an online video editing tool closed down just a couple of days back (15th June 2009). Yahoo! Podcasts, a podcasting directory end after 2 years in October 2007. Yahoo! Auctions, an eBay competitor ended in September 2008. Yahoo! Photos shut down in September 2007 but got replaced with their better acquired service, Flickr. Yahoo Briefcase, a free storage service ended after a decade in March 2009. Geocities, the 90's most famous free static website hosting service is closi...

Hiring => Aquiring ?
2009-06-16 23:41:00
With jobs cut stories being published everyday, more and more smaller companies are sprouting up daily. While on the quest for a job myself, most of the recent postings at various job portals like Naukri and Monster are from startups companies with 5 to 25 employees. I was going through various companies' websites and came across many more startup companies and related websites that seems very fascinating. I don't remember all the websites I've been through except for one which was uniquely enough to be rememberable - IonLab. Big companies are now looking to aquire rather than hire. Google and Microsoft have been acquiring constantly in the recent years. But Google has pushed this even further with Google Ventures - a $100 million annual funding for startups and Google App Engine - web hosting on Google's high-end scalable servers. Commenting on Microsoft's Bing, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that : "We have been wandering around looking at all of the different companies. With ...
More About: Hiring

Finally a full-time job
2009-05-18 15:16:00
Last year I worked with a client here in Mumbai for their online store, BombayElectric.in which is based on Magento, an open-source platform. My client was the national winner of British Council's Young Fashion Entrepreneur (YFE) Award 2009.For the last 4 and so years I've always shyed away from a full-time job since I managed to get freelance work right after college. After a ring of uneventful events last year, I decided to shift base and take up the stature of an employee. Earlier last month, I finally took up a full-time job in an internet ad/marketing agency here in Mumbai. To my surprise, I discovered that the guy who runs this small unique company happens to be the national winner of British Council's Young Communications Entrepreneur (YXE) award 2009 !Quite a Coincidence ! Update : I ended up quitting from this awesome advertising firm. This is the longest (just 3 months) I've lasted so far as a full-time employee. Back to job-hunting !
More About: Time , Finally , Full

Wolfram Alpha
2009-05-17 20:34:00
There is a lot of hype on Wolfram Alpha that launched on 15th - a brand new search engine, from the company famous for its Mathematica software. But this search engine is math based (no surprise) - which calculate 'answers' to your questions - or rather tries to figure out answers to the questions you are querying. They even posted their infrastructure details - having the 44th largest supercomputer, mirrored at 5 different locations and can handle 175+ million queries a day. I tried a little more than a couple of queries, most of which returned Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input. I tried queries based on my hometown, Trivandrum, Kerala which I keep track of on the net from time to time. Given "Where is Trivandrum", it showed the map of India with Trivandrum marked. But it doesn't seem to know anything about kerala - one of the top 50 tourist locations in the world (National Geographic). If this isn't in their current database of 10+ trillion of pieces of dat...

Bike Accident
2008-12-09 20:16:00
I had quite a major bike accident on Wednesday evening at around 5 P.M. A car hit me from the opposite direction while I was making a slow right turn. But luckily the injuries were few. My left arm is completely immobilized. For 2 months max my left arm will be non-functional - had surgery on left elbow for removal of glass pieces (that got entered from the car's side windows). I was EXTREMELY LUCKY to have no other injuries especially on my head considering the fact that I was thrown off my bike and landed on my back. I am typing this from my hospital bed. Hopefully I would be discharged next week. Here are some pics of the operation taken by the surgeon. WARNING ! Some of these photos contain very graphic images. Viewer Discretion is Strongly Advised. Click here to show the photos. The stitches after the operation. The X-Rays
More About: Bike , Accident

Yahoo! Kickstart already kicked out
2008-12-07 21:17:00
Its just over year since Yahoo ! launched Kickstart in beta but as of now (probably just a few hours back), its already closed.Kickstart was a Yahoo initiative to compete with Facebook, Linkedin etc but focused specifically on college students, alumni etc to connect them to jobs (professional networking space) to kickstart careers.Right now, Kickstart shows "Thanks for trying Kickstart ! Please check out Yahoo! HotJobs for your job search needs." and links to their hotjobs site.Given the economy slowdown, Microsoft-Yahoo acquisition disagreement, Facebook buyout failure and Y! 360 not catching up, they definitely seem to want to focus on revenue generating products instead.

Busy Dodging Bullets in Colaba
2008-11-29 04:47:00
So I've been real busy on Wednesday night. Believe it or not, on that night I was dodging bullets in colaba causeway at the bomb-blast site near Nariman House.I at my client's office which is right next to the Taj hotel and had left office at about 11pm with my client. We were trying to cross the blast site that happened an hour before when all of a sudden there was firing and was in the middle of crossfire. Apparently the bullets were originating from the 3rd or 4th floor of Nariman House. Though this could have been easily mistaken for police firing back. I was literally running for life !Q: And why was I trying to cross the blast site ? A: In order to reach my friend's house 1km down that lane for shelter as CST station was attacked too and there was no means to commute by train or taxi. Nor was any hotel taking in any new guests. Plus, the level of the intensity of the situation was underestimated at the time.I dont know how the hell it happened, but my phone's camera got dy...
More About: Bullets

Tech Contests
2008-11-11 19:13:00
The World Economy has taken a real hit. But this hasn't slowed down IT innovation especially in open-source. Jonathan of Sun has mentioned that this is the time when more of open-source would be adopted with the obvious reason of cutting down cost on proprietary software. Even though the gradual change to open-source software would be hard to gulp down so soon, it would be the only solution to keep their business from going out of business. The current crisis has not stopped IT giants from motivating tech enthusiasts from coding. A couple of contests are currently running which are worth mentioning : Cisco Developer Contest : http://www.cisco.com/web/solutions/axpdev /index.htmlNokia : http://www.callingallinnovators.com/enter .aspSun Code for Freedom Contest (for Indian Students only) : http://in.sun.com/communities/univ/codefo rfreedom/
More About: Contests , Tech

Uploading and Extracting files without Shell Access on a Shared Host
2008-09-28 20:10:00
The easiest way to upload a large number of files to your website hosting server is to zip the files first on your local PC, upload the zip file to your hosting account and then use a shell command like unzip to extract. Unfortunately, most shared hosting environments don't provide shell access due to security reasons. But from a business perspective, users who require shell access access would be really requiring a custom setup on a dedicated server.But if you have an entire directory of files to upload to your shared hosting account, there is still a way to extract the contents online using a simple PHP script. For this to work you got to have PHP 5.2 or later enabled.<?php if (isset($_GET['f'])) $file = $_GET['f']; else die("arg 1 required"); $zip = new ZipArchive; if ($zip->open($file) === FALSE) die("Failed to open $file"); if (!$zip->extractTo('.')) echo "Extract not successful"; else echo "Extract successful"; $zip->close(); ?>Zip the folder on your loca...
More About: Shell , Host , Access , Files , Uploading

Viagara Milkshake !
2008-08-18 20:56:00
At one particular restaurant in Tamil Nadu, I came across a Viagara Milkshake listed on the menu under the "Ice Creams" section !And no, I didn't order it !

Good Year for linux ?
2008-08-17 11:59:00
This year I'm slowly making a transition to Linux . Though I cannot leave Windows behind as I am too accustomed to it, I intend to spend a lot of time on Linux to be able to get a very good grip of it.I've started off with Ubuntu 8.04 64-bit edition and so far it has been pretty exciting. I've seen many linux users say that we should not think Windows when moving to GUI Linux like Ubuntu - but reality is, Windows GUI has more than 90% marketshare and most people don't like spending time finding alternatives. If Windows users could just seamlessly resume their work on Linux, it would be an ideal solution. So from a practical point of view, Windows users should be able to find most of their stuff on Linux desktops. For example, the "Windows key" is used on Windows PCs to access the Start menu. In Ubuntu this is not the default, but this can be changed in Keyboard Shortcuts (Windows Key is referred to as the "SuperKey" in Linux). On the other hand, to quickly access the desktop usin...
More About: Good , Year

IFSC Search
2008-03-08 10:42:00
Sometime in November 2007, PayPal added a new feature : Widthdraw funds to an Indian bank account. Theres a fee of Rs 50 for withdrawals less than Rs 7,000 , otherwise there is no fee. You'll need to provide the IFSC (Indian Financial System Code) number of your bank though to get this working.I've created a small form here to search for IFSC codes from 3 separate sources.Reason for 3 databases is that there isnt any official source that has all the banks' IFSC data - so its better off to compare all sources and check if they match. I'll add more database(s) if I find a different source. The most reliable source is, the bank-branch itself - obviously.Disclaimer: None of the information is guaranteed to be 100% accurate.
More About: Search

Injected JavaScript line : 222360.com & asdafdgfgf.com
2008-02-28 06:11:00
Im a guy who is pretty much cautious about computer security, though Im not a network or security guru. The last time I formatted my hard-disk & installed my OS was sometime in December 2004 when my old PC was no good anymore and had to get a new one in January 2005. It was a HP with Windows XP SP2 OEM pre-loaded. Based on my previous years of experience, I managed to stay away from all possible malicious worms entering my PC. I never login as Administrator except for installation and global configuration settings. I am always logged in under User mode. I guess a Linux user is probably laughing at this saying "thats the way it always was". In Linux, using a non-root user is a standard for two reasons :1. You can login as root in shell within a user environment to care of admin issues. (The same is possible in Windows XP using right-click > Run as)2. Most installations can be done to any location - unlike C:Program Files & C:Windows where many installers require to add ...
More About: Javascript , Line

MySQL Road Show India 2008!
2008-02-28 05:48:00
Last week, on Thursday, the 21st, I attended the MySQL Road Show India 2008 in Mumbai. The co-founder and the director of technologies gave their tech-talks. About 100+ database pros attended the seminar. The primary discussion was on their upcoming final release of MySQL 5.1 - new features and functionality : High Availability - stressed a lot on this Clustering Partioning Row-based replication XML : Native support for XML. This is becoming common is every aspect of a coder's life. Event scheduler - crons in MySQL ! Faster ALTER/DROP index Faster data import using threading --use-threads mysqlslap PBXT A bit was also said about MySQL 6.0 & its Falcon storage engine. And the day before yesterday, Jonathan Schwartz announced the acquisition of MySQL for $1 billion. A lot Java enthusiasts are hoping to witness a wave of low-budget Java shared-webhosting.
More About: Mysql

My first mobile phone
2008-02-14 06:18:00
A couple of days back, I bought a mobile phone for myself - finally ! (Though I add access to a mobile phone). I was hoping an Android based phone would be out by this year, but Google has a reputation of keeping projects in "beta" for just too long. So I got a Nokia N82 - a 3.5G Symbian 9.2 OS device with a 5MP camera and Xenon Flash ! These days, 5MP mobile-phones are rocketing, after Nokia's N95 launch and the recent launch of Sony Ericsson's K850i & Samsung's SCH-S250. The clarity is pretty good. Original : here. Im not sure if its an update in the latest Nokia PC Suite software or if its harware specific, (though I can't see how it can be the latter), but I now can compose and send text-messages directly from my PC via Nokia Text Message Editor (available as an icon in Explorer > Nokia Phone Browser). Now, this is surely a time saver ! Can we see a 10MP camera-phone in the consumer market by 2010 ?
More About: Mobile , Mobile Phone

Injected JavaScript line : 222360.com & asdafdgfgf.com
2008-01-29 09:31:00
Im a guy who is pretty much cautious about computer security, though Im not a network or security guru. The last time I formatted my hard-disk & installed my OS was sometime in December 2004 when my old PC was no good anymore and had to get a new one in January 2005. It was a HP with Windows XP SP2 OEM pre-loaded. Based on my previous years of experience, I managed to stay away from all possible malicious worms entering my PC. I never login as Administrator except for installation and global configuration settings. I am always logged in under User mode. I guess a Linux user is probably laughing at this saying "thats the way it always was". In Linux, using a non-root user is a standard for two reasons :1. You can login as root in shell within a user environment to care of admin issues. (The same is possible in Windows XP using right-click > Run as)2. Most installations can be done to any location - unlike C:Program Files & C:Windows where many installers require to add ...
More About: Javascript , Line

NIIT's new Adobe Courses
2007-12-14 09:16:00
In today's Mumbai Mirror, I was surprised too see a nicely designed ad showcasing NIIT's new Adobe Web 2.0 courses. Apparently, NIIT & Adobe have joined forces to provide training programmes on Adobe's latest version of their products : Flash CS3, Dreamweaver CS3, Flex 2 and ColdFusion 8. I called them up (main center located at Delhi), to enquire about these courses (my interest being in Flex alone), I was told that Flex is currently not available ! When I asked about the Flash CS3 course, they asked me if I knew C# and I replied no since I'm mainly into Linux based stuff, they insisted that I take a C# course which is a prerequisite for learning Flash CS3 ! I guessed this included ActionScript 3 too, but C# being a prerequisite is a pretty high demand. Knowledge of JavaScript with OOP concepts should be more than enough in my opinion. Basic C# : ~ Rs 6,200 Flash CS3 : ~ Rs 9,000 Flex : ~ Rs 7,000 Entire Web 2.0 Course (including Dreamweaver & ColdFusio...

Sony DRX-S70U
2007-10-29 13:23:00
After several attempts in trying to figure out what went wrong with my 1.5 year old HP DVD Writer, I could come to no other conclusion than a hardware failure. In a desperate need for a burner, I recently decided to get an external one instead, powered by USB so that I don't have to depend on a single PC incase of internal PC malfunction. Among the very few available to choose from, I got a Sony DRX-S70U external slim DVD Writer for Rs. 7,000 (~$175). Its the notebook type of drive, so it writes at pretty low speeds (HP disks at 2x). Better off to use the cheapest internal writer to be replaced every one year or two, rather than getting an expensive branded one for this purpose. There was drive that was really mouth-watering : Sony Blue-Ray BWU-100A. Unfortunately, its costs a whopping Rs 38,000 (~$950) !

GMail Unbeatable
2007-10-24 17:13:00
When Gmail was first launched in 2004, its most attractive features were fast AJAX interface and POP+SMTP ! Though Microsoft Email clients like Outlook & Express managed to emulate POP & SMTP for Hotmail accounts, POP+SMTP was not really available. But above all, it was Gmail's initial 1GB and growing storage capacity what really lured people to using it. By 2007, with space of almost 3GB and 10GB for the paid versions, Google has recently increased their capacity to 4GB (targetted to 6GB by Jan '08) and 25GB for paid versions. And now for the most anticipated feature of all - IMAP. Thats right. Google has just started rolling out IMAP for gmail accounts. This may not come as a very big excitement for most users, but it definitely does for developers who can now access gmail accounts directly via the IMAP protocol. The only other free service that was providing this so far, was AOL. There may have been a lack of new services by Google this year, but if definitely seems t...

ConText out of Eden's Garden
2007-10-24 17:12:00
ConText, a fairly popular light-weight syntax text editor for Windows, developed and maintained solely by a Croatian named Eden Kirin, is out for sale ! Since the lastest release v0.98.5 in December 2006, there has been no activity in its development and Eden was hardly on the forums. Ever since he decided to revamp the entire thing for version 1.0, there was a lot of eagerness from his fans. After almost a year, he has finally posted on the main page : Due to various engagements which cause lack of my full attention and continuous further development of the ConTEXT project, I'm officially announcing that the ConTEXT project is offered FOR SALE and starting the bid. Buyer will get: Full source code of ConTEXT Programmers Editor's last three releases. Full source code of unfinished ConTEXT v1.0. Full source code of ConTEXT Programmers Editor's dependent units and libraries. Fully functional ConTEXT web site located at www.context.cx with ...
More About: Garden , Context

Why Python Rocks
2007-09-28 06:34:00
I was checking out the Python programming language, and I must say, this reminded my a lot on the basic set theory I learnt when I was in the 11th grade. Its like as if, Python (Py for short) is made for math geeks. Its not about the math or any other library that has a load of math functions - its the way the language is designed - where the language is itself very much like writing 'math code'.Calculator : Has a direct interpreter-cum-IDE that doesn't require you to store any code in a file first. All executed statements are stored temporarily in RAM. This something like the Immediate Window Microsoft QuickBasic offered.Exponentiation : To find the value of xn in Java, .NET, PHP, JavaScript etc, built-in pow function is to be used. In Py, this function call is saved by an arithmetic operation **. x ** n. ( Though pow() function does exist in the math library )Functions can return more than one value : def foo(a, b): return (a + b, a - b)x, y = foo(5, 3)print x, y(5, 3) is ca...
More About: Programming , Rocks

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