My long road to the Mountain

Today, finally, I have a working laptop. What happened? It’s anybody’s guess. I recently upgraded from Lion to Mountain Lion on my Mac. In doing so, large parts of the OS stopped working, specifically, apps such as Safari, System Preferences and the App Store. Needless to say, work cannot continue without accessing the settings.

So, I began the long and arduous journey to re-installing my OS from scratch. Initially, it was pretty painless, I quickly setup Time Machine and took multiple backups and I booted my Mac into it’s recovery partition. The recovery partition is a good feature, albeit inspired, and allowed me to test my main hard disk, to wipe it clean and start over. Continue reading →

Was just reading Dalton Caldwell’s scathing remarks about Facebook and Twitter and his angst towards ad-based platforms. The whole point will be tested when the deadline for app.net comes by. If he’s able to garner enough money to start executing his idea, he’ll have proved himself right. But then again, there are so many ideas that are underfunded even though they are brilliant… LT itself is a good example. Others are all those kickstarter concepts that do not reach full funding. Is Dalton not advertising enough? Is he taking a very emotional route to solving the problem with today’s social networks? Who knows. What’s clear is that if he’s able to succeed, he’ll have shown all the twitters and disaporas of the world that being free and open is not the only way to create quality platforms.

App Review: Cooliris

I have close to 130 apps on my phone. Recently, I filled up a folder of apps I’ve been testing out and decided to review one as soon as the folder is full and needs movement.

Today is that day and the app that I’ll be reviewing is – Cooliris.

Cooliris first started out as a web app and a browser extension to look at Google Image searches in a fancy way. The app, long time in the making, also does that. Plus, the app lets you look at your facebook feed pics and your phone or iPad’s photo roll too. Continue reading →

Google-

I have practically no use of Google+. My common friends are sticking with Facebook and twitter, my tech follow ups happen mostly on twitter and rss feeds and I’ve not joined a single hangout ever. Instead, a lot of strangers keep adding me to their lists.

I am not saying GP isn’t growing. It certainly has good numbers on its side. But somehow, it all doesn’t make any sense to me.

Hopefully, in the future, I’ll see more on GP, else I’ll just let it stagnate.

So, what happened??

Bad stuff happens. I loved HelioHost. They have some really good services. I specially liked them because I like playing with software and they gave me a big play ground.

But, they had frequent downtimes. Their servers were always crashing. But, and I thank them for their smarts, they always recovered all the data. So, I felt secure.

Bad idea.

I did not login to my CPanel in a long time. Hey, if everything is running and everyone is happy, why mess with it? But that was a mistake. A bigger mistake? Not taking a backup. CPanel has this great feature that you can back up your entire site, databases and all, to a file on your hard disk. Good for them. HelioHost has this amazing feature that if a person doesn’t log into their CPanel for more than 30 days, their response is – “This person is wasting our resources, destroy all their data and account info without sending them a warning email!”

Wow.

So, where am I now? Serversfree.com
I like this site. 5 MySQL databases for free, lots of features and close to 100% uptime. Good idea indeed. I just have to verify their “didn’t login to CPanel for 30 days” policy and if that works out, I’m happy! 🙂

I will be covering more about serversfree and some things I’m doing on this site in the coming months. Hopefully, this blog will not have been deleted by then!

Update: A lot of people have been coming to this blog post looking to find out if serversfree is a good idea for hosting your site. All I have to say is that I am no longer with ServersFree. They have a great service, but as soon as my blog had any kind of traction, they started complaining that I was using too many MySQL resources. I tried using a variety of caching services, but to no avail. If you want to host a static website or a blog that you believe will be for yourself only, ServersFree is a great place to be. But anything beyond that and they’ll start pressing you for paid hosting. When that happens, come and join me on NearlyFreeSpeech. It’s a great paid hoster that’s giving me really good service for a really low price. In case you decide to host your blog on ServersFree, do make sure you use the WordPress Backup to Dropbox plugin.

Welcome Back!

Here’s to another start for the nitinkhanna.com domain and associated blogs and paraphernalia.

What happened?

Well, My site hoster – heliohost.net killed my account because I did not log into CPanel for 30 days. I did not receive any warning emails or support after my account was killed. So, my databases, uploaded files, URLs and blogposts were all, well, to simply put it, destroyed. And let’s not even get me started on the setup I did to post to Facebook et al from my blogs!

But, all of that comes later in another blog post. Right now, I’m excited to be back! I’m rebuilding my site and have learned the eternal lesson – Backup, Backup,BACKUP!!! 🙂

See you all, right here, pretty soon! 🙂

VMware buys Nicira for $1.26 Billion

The big news for today is VMware’s acquisition of Nicira for $1.26 Billion. For those who don’t know, Nicira is a pioneer in Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Openflow. SDN is a technology that allows the virtualization of the network, thus abstracting the network and allowing a company to create multiple virtual networks based on their needs.

This is big news because of two reasons –

1. This opens doors for VMware into the networking world. Traditionally dominated by Cisco, Juniper, Brocade and a few others, the networking industry is now ripe for major disruption. There is a lot of buzz with the Cloud and SDN and now these buzz words are becoming a reality. By buying Nicira, VMware, traditionally a server virtualization company has stepped into the networking world, allowing them to take their expertise of virtualization and apply it to data centers. This way, VMware controls major portions of the data center world, from servers to the networking itself. The acquisition seems befitting too, considering that Nicira is often called the VMware of the networking world.

2. Nicira is not just an Openflow/SDN company concentrating on networking. It is a backbone to another project called OpenStack. OpenStack is a complete data center solution that has components that help a datacenter control the servers that store information, that do large computations and those that provide networking. By acquiring Nicira, VMware has enabled itself to be an end-to-end solution for datacenters and thus expanding their presence in that market.

This news comes at a time when the entire tech industry is in a flux, with many companies taking on new roles that are not traditionally theirs. If anything, this proves that the future of the networking industry is big and led by companies you wouldn’t expect to take the lead.

In the Tech: Evil 3D printing and Instagram Anniversary

I’ve often talked about 3D printers and how they can and will take an ugly turn some day. It seems that day is going to come sooner than later. A hacker has created a key that can be printed by a 3D printer and opens the doors for criminals, literally. The key, which still needs to be cut with a laser cutter after being printed, can open handcuffs made by German and English handcuff manufacturers. What’s worse? He is open sourcing the design and uploading CAD files to let anyone produce these keys. This doesn’t just spell bad for business but also for law enforcement agencies who’ll now have fake keys floating around, just like the government has to deal with fake notes.

Hacker Opens High Security Handcuffs With 3D-Printed And Laser-Cut Keys – ForbesTwo 3D-printed and one laser-cut copy of restricted handcuff keys. (Click to enlarge.) The security of high-end handcuffs depends on a detainee not having access to certain small, precisely-shaped objects. In the age of easy 3D printing and other DIY innovations, that assumption may no longer apply. In a workshop Friday at […]

via Forbes

The second interesting link I came across today was about Instagram’s second year anniversary. Open it to check out the photo that began a wave that continues today with 50 million users and 1 Billion photos…

2 Years Later: The First Instagram PhotoTwo years ago today, we tested the first photo upload to an app we called Codename. Three months later, in October 2010, Instagram launched to the public. Today, 1 year and 9 months later, over 50 million people have shared more than 1 billion photos on Instagram.

via Tumblr

Note: I tried a different tone today – that of a news report. Hope you liked it. If not, leave a comment in the comments section.

Chrome Web Store – Undirect

Undirect

Removes redirection tracking of clicks on search results in google.

Just wanted to highlight a great tool in Google Chrome. When you do a google search, each search link is a weird long link that Google generates to track what you’re doing.

This tool simply replaces that long link with the original link, making your life easier. Redirection is an issue because in countries like India where the Internet is already slow, redirection Google-style wastes your time.

Next up, I’m looking for a similar tool to fix Facebook links…