Deep Kapadia

tech — No comments
15
Aug 11

New look and new goals. We are cloud headed now.

I finally got some time to move away from the hosted ISP blog to Amazon EC2′s free tier. Couple of new things that I tried are:

EC2. Woot! Free for a year.
Using Amazon’s Linux AMI. Just a modified version of Fedora with EPEL
A Cleanr wordpress theme for which I have to thank my friend Anatoly. He used it on his blog and I really loved the clean UI
Using nginx instead of Apache. Just for kicks. I am liking nginx’s ease of use. It seems fast too but with the traffic that this site is used to, Apache would have sufficed but I learned something new and I also got to learn a bit about Fast CGI as a result.

Cloud whisps by turtlemom4bacon, on Flickr

Here are a few things I’d like to get working now (or working better):

Setup my backup and restore process for this site. Moving to a cloud based infrastructure comes with it’s challenges. This is one of them. I cannot rely upon Amazon at all times.
Get rid of all the flash galleries and hopefully replace them with a better non-flash solution. I currently use flickr so the flickr photo album plugin may be cool. While I am at it I’d like to evaluate other options for photos as well. Picasa’s pricing model a few years ago was not very attractive to me but it has changed now. I am a big fan of Smugmug too but they are expensive but you get what you pay for.

Uncategorized — No comments
09
Feb 11

Three years later, I am “Cool Nerd King”

Wow, this is what it took to get me to post on my blog?! Sad state of affairs indeed.

Uncategorized — No comments
05
Mar 08

Nerd God!!!

Just figured out that I am a Nerd God!

tech — No comments
13
Nov 07

vnc2swf is great for demos and presenations I think

I have been toying with the idea of giving a little Ruby/Ruby on Rails presentation at work. If I get around to it, I am thinking of giving vnc2swf a try to show how quick and easy it is to set up a working application or just to illustrate certain features of the language. Its easy to demo stuff when you have access to an interactive shell as is the case with Python and Ruby.

I feel it is great to have an interactive presentation but I have sat through many a presentation where the presenter was running commands, clicking on buttons and selecting options. It is awesome during the presentation to see and appreciate second hand as how easy or difficult a certain tool is. However, once I try to replicate same thing on my own, it takes me a while to replicate what the presenter did. I think having an interactive presentation recorded might aid an audience better post presentation. Will post if I ever get around to it. But if you have had good experiences with something similar, please feel free to comment.

philadelphia / wildlife / zoo — 2 comments
11
Nov 07

Philly Zoo Morning Stroll (and Web Browser trivia)

The Philly Zoo opened its doors for members only for an extra hour in the morning today. Benita took the opportunity. It was wonderful! Most of the animals were awake. We even saw tiger cubs playing with their mother and Lions mating (did not take a picture, Lions need their privacy too). I saw a Lynx for the first time. All I knew about the Lynx prior to this was that they are medium sized cats who happened to have a web browser named after them. Ah the good old days of text based browsing!

whale / wildlife — No comments
11
Nov 07

Whale watching photos and videos

Benita and I had taken my parents and a friend whale watching to Gloucester MA this summer but I never posted any pictures or videos. Better late than never I guess.
It seems like we might just make this an annual affair. It is wonderful watching these humongous mammals in the wild. In addition to a half a dozen humpbacks we saw what I thought were 50 Atlantic White Sided Dolphins. The Marine Biologist on board mentioned it was more like 150 to 200 dolphins.

The whale in the videos and pictures was going through its feeding routine creating a flurry of activity. It seems that is what attracted the dolphins.

I wish I had a steadier hand though. The new Panasonic Lumix Z-3 camera is a fairly good camera though both in it’s resolution and zoom. The pictures and videos came out good. Any bad pictures should be attributed to the photographer in my case.

apple / BSOD / Leopard / mac / OSX — 1 comment
30
Oct 07

Arrogant Apples

Yes, I have been seeing it for years and it is admittedly funny on many an occasion, I do feel Apple’s arrogance has peaked to a higher level.

Apple’s brand spankin’ new OS displays an old CRT monitor with a BSOD as an icon for a Windows PC connected to your network. Not to mention it uses the same icon for drives shared over Samba. I wonder who is looking more stupid here. The old Windows or the new OS X Leopard?

Anil Dash put it very aptly. But I am surprised to see how many people want to dismiss this as a joke. Yes, I understand that all the Mac vs PC ads are to sell Macs and to tell people how much cooler Macs are compared to PC. One however has to question the logic behind this one. Apple has grown in the last couple of years. It is high time they act grown up too.

Hey Mr. Jobs, the folks who bought this machine already know (or are about to find out) how cool your Mac is! Your ad campaign is working. You can stop with the PC bashing for folks who see your ads and buy your computers.

Engadget has some good instructions to make your brand new Mac be a little more politically correct.

verizon — 3 comments
22
Oct 07

Outage (and why Verizon FIOS sucks)

So, I do know for a fact that there are some people who read my blog prior to it being unceremoniously being taken down due to us moving to Philadelphia and choosing Verizon as our ISP. I have to apologize for being down for the last 7 months.

I was checking out ISP’s just before we moved from Rochester and realized that Verizon was offering FIOS Internet in my building. I quickly signed up for it with a one year contract.

I love the speed. It is awesome. I have never had an outage so far with respect to the internet connectivity. I do have to reboot the crappy Actiontec router that came with it once in a while. It just seems to hang when I try to download or stream copious amounts of data.

However, what I did not know was the fact that Verizon blocks incoming traffic to port 80 and port 25. C’mon now, are you kidding me? Such policies make me laugh and cringe at the same time. I can run bittorrent to dowload massive amounts of content, all of it legal BTW , run servers on all other ports but cannot have incoming traffic to these two ports. I just do not understand. I read some forums, Verizon lets you run servers only if you buy their business package.

I wish I were smart enough to realize what Verizon was thinking.

As a result however, I have had to transfer all my content from my trusty old AMD K6/2 to a managed ISP. I have had 1 and 1 as my domain registrar for the last couple of years and they have reasonable hosting plans. I have decided to move my domains over there till either Verizon changes its policy or I move to Comcast, the other ISP in Philadelphia. I am currently paying $4.99 a month to host this blog and my website. Do check it out. It has a nice slide show going now. The 1 and 1 package also comes with 2 blogs that can be set up through their control panel and use WordPress, something I am comfortable with and have used i the past. The only drawback is, with the cheap plan, I miss out on all the little customizations I had going on with the older version of the blog.

I was also able to hack the Kubrick template to suit my needs for the main page. I may change it later but I am happy with the way it looks now.

Well, all said and done, we are back online. Hope I can continue to post on a regular basis.

Uncategorized — 1 comment
10
Oct 07

We are back

After a long hiatus!!

Uncategorized — No comments
22
Mar 07

Windows Genuine dis-Advantage and DRM

WTH???!! I heard about Windows Genuine Advantage a while ago on TWiT but I never got a notification via Windows Update to install it on my windows box up until today.
Microsoft has now decided that it will tell me if I am running genuine Windows software. Nice!! What a wonderful idea. Wonder what difference does it make. I canceled the installation even though I have a genuine copy of XP professional running on my desktop. I am just vary of false positives that the folks on TWiT talked about. Let’s see if I am asked to install it again.

BTW, someone should tell M$ that things like thse piss off paying buyers of their products and does not effect pirates in any way. It is very similar to the DRM dilemma. DRM hurts people who actually purchase music. I cannot transfer a song that I bought off itunes to Benita’s creative Zen without undergoing some creative process. Wheras had I just downloaded it off a p2p software, I would not have to deal with this issue. Hey, I am willing to pay for the content but try don’t control what I do with it.

I should seriously consider joining some anti-DRM campaign.

Deep KapadiaI don't have a cool tagline :)

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