Desinerd

“I AM AN INDIAN, I AM A MUSLIM” - Omar Abdullah

We need more politicians like him, ready to say the right thing. Willing to make a choice for the nation first, then their religion. I can understand all the things we say about Kashmir, the truth is that in pure financial terms nation building is a costly exercise …. splitting into a separate state may look like the best but it will take tremendous amounts of help from its 2 warring neighbors.

I do hope we learn things and not make short-term stupid decisions that hurt our nations future. I don’t understand the nuclear deal properly, (there is so much in the fine print which we *commoners* never get to read) but faith is needed , mistakes will be made …. but its not easy to become a super-power

“sab kuch nahi chalega”

http://wiki.linux-delhi.org/twiki/pub/Main/InderprasthaWorkshop/ip-june7.ppt

Today i participated in ILUG-Delhi’s workshop, it was interesting to the end that i figured out how important it is to break down information into chewy bits.  I was supposed to give a presentation on  “building social networking applications using python”, i made the wrong assumption about the people present there.

But then one has to learn the hard way to do better the next time. I do look forward to taking part in more such events, ILUG-Delhi does require some more technical talks though tad bit more basic to start off with. For more information about ILUG Delhi hit

http://wiki.linux-delhi.org/

Its quite a quiet community right now, hopefully it can grow in the future to challenge the bengaluru group … jokes apart … Indian Open Source needs a lot more work, the current state is too individualistic (i can be easily accused of being one here). People should not be required to know / be chacha,bhatija to take part in such events in my view, the community feeling is missing i feel. Thats the only reason OSS has not taken off exponentially in India, the formation of an elite brahminical class it seems was inevitable like any other of our systems. It seems they are unable recruit the right kind of foot soldiers to carry on the torch into the bright bright Indian future …..

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My friend Supreet started this meme of writing a story based on this picture. He had given me 100 words. I have taken my artistic license a lil far beyond. And I am writing it as a parable. More posts from supreet and kaa
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Once upon a time in a land far far away existed a magical creature called meme, it had wings it could fly and all the jazz. But but there was a problem, he was the only one of its kind to have survived one of the many ice ages on its planet … turns out the only way he could ensure his potential survival was to exist as a small bug or a bacterium in other *animals* stomach.

It was a compromise as he was one fierce individual who would burn up all the living things around himself by spitting fire … but life has to go on … meme still survives in all of us today. Take for example the story of janet and her so called boy-friend Bob …ohh they so love each other … but then on Friday the 13th stirkes MEME …. ouch

Janet was taking in the beer like a bear … and yes, it was a bad idea … she vomited out all her food. But MEME inside was not satisfied, he wanted more more … Bob managed to incite her and she took some of her vomit and threw it at him (thus infecting him wit meme for the rest of his life) Shocked Bob took to reading xkcd , phdcomics and decided to his PhD thus continuing meme’s legacy.

Lately desinerd.com has been under some tremendous bandwidth leeching from anonymous proxies. I am getting tired banning multiple IPs because they managed to eat up my monthly bandwidth quota in less than a week. Here are the public IPs which have hit me pretty hard

89.149.242.226
67.202.58.232
89.122.29.40
85.91.82.38
89.149.241.126
203.162.2.135

Time to use public IP ban lists, so that these leechers can’t attack me like this. All this has forced me to upgrade my setup and think a bit more about my content, so thanks to the guys who were using their brains so hard to pull my site down. Three cheers to IP blocking for now … hic hic hurrah

So congrats to the slieshare team who just got funding, three cheers to my mates there. So after a long wait they have finally found a match for their funding needs. Hopefully they will keep up the good work at http://slideshare.net.

In other news, i started using EC2 seriously and have found it to be an awesome service. My virtual machine was up for about 8 days before i finally pulled it down (bad choice it was as i ended up losing a lot of data). So this was a good exercise to learn from.

A lots of companies getting money now-a-days … wonder how many will come out on tops giving rich dividends to their investors. Time shall play all the moves out till then i shall keep quiet and keep chugging along …….

I used to think that i am pretty smart when it comes to managing time, turns out it aint the case most times. At any given point of time , my management(or lack of it) ;) invariably leads to wierd complexities (which obviously cannot be disclosed). So here goes list of things i want done asap

• Upgrade the wordpress, apparently the new admin GUI is uber-coool.
• Change my current theme, because it sucks and i want to rebuild it using bluecss
• Finish work on the projects i have started, coz they are blocking available bandwidth
• Make http://kwippy.com bigger than anything in the micro-blogging space
• Sleep a bit leeser (which never seems to happen)

On this lazy note, i choose to continue life and hopefully make something out of it. Please cut out the underlying philosophy in the post, it aint that deep after all.

Now that i do *part-time* design work for my projects, i decided it was time to get all the free fonts available. As i am using ubuntu here are some awesome packages and links for fonts.

Packages : (command to install on ubuntu)

sudo apt-get install ttf-gentium ttf-dustin ttf-georgewilliams ttf-sjfonts sun-java6-fonts ttf-larabie-deco ttf-larabie-straight ttf-larabie-uncommon

Another cool site:

http://crunchbang.org/archives/2007/10/13/465-free-fonts-for-ubuntu/

So i have been working on fixing my internet stuff, so here are my *new new* things.

• http://www.kwippy.com - This is an awesome *twitter* replacement
• http://www.dipankar.name - A little bit of self promotion, uses blueprintcss (i am still learning he he)
• http://apps.facebook.com/dipankar - A test facebook application which demonstrates minifb.py

More later, i am working on some more interesting things …. will write more soon

Recently, i went to gaffar(New Delhi) and got 2 cell phones to muck around with it ….

One is a sony ericksson another a nokia

Turns out i needed a CA42 cable(Nokia), but it still does not work. The sony Ericksson rocks …..

Wierd title for a blog post , but its truly the start of the second phase in my rather short career. This week I have decided to move on from slideshare.net , to some other stuff. Lately I have started realizing how badly i needed to give time to my own ideas (and there are lots of them), with such short product life spans on the internet and the boom taking place interms of web valuations how can I possibly miss out on trying……

The internet is an awesome place to learn and create new things, to this end i must give a lot of credit to the last 8 months at slideshare.net where the team has done some pretty interesting stuff.  The systems team rocks, even if its pushed beyond its capacity ….. A big thanks is in order to my team mates (in random order)

• Lalit …. JS guru
• Saurabh …. Systems guru
• Kapil …. best tech lead for sure
• Mayank …. c00l dev. and stock player
• Kaa …. creative creative n more
• Yats …. the zen master
• Golak …. “bhalo” dev.
• Abhishek(*) …. one of the most motivated guys ever
• Praveen(*) …. guilt free dev. guru
• Gaurav …. n00b domain sitter
• Mohit …. thinking and analytical dev.
• bhups …. abhi mile hai, aur kya likhoon

(*) these guys left slideshare coupla months back

Had a lot of fun, should not have missed out on the trips …. I am missing in nearly all the group photographs ….. time to photoshop some of the kodak moments he he. A big thanks to Amit Ranjan and the management team for giving me an opportunity to work with one of the best teams ever …. May the slideshare alexa rank keep on rising

Note:

Frequency of blogging will resume , as i just figured the problem of my upload speed was because of the MTU size (it needed to be 1492 on the WiFi router not 1500) …..  3 cheers to that  (AIRTEL BROADBAND)