self.machine

Wow, that was a long break. Lately not spent any time on writing or thinking, guess that is usually visible in the output ! Need to make it a real habit of writing more and more. Happy new year to anyone who reads this ! Looking forward to kick starting good stuff !

Guys after a long break, I have come out of my slumber to talk about my first publication with Packt publishing. In short the book is about tips and tricks around the upcoming Nginx web server. You can check it out using this link. This has been published by Packt publishing, a UK based technical publishing house.

It would not have been possible without the tremendous support of the people around me, and in specific the many people I have worked with. I will keep adding more stuff around the book on my blog going ahead.

Nginx 1 Web Server Implementation Cookbook

This is a cookbook full of illustrations and diagrams to help you implement your web needs with Nginx, with a focus on practical examples. If you are tired of Apache consuming all your server memory with little traffic and to overcome this, or for some other reason, you are looking for a high-performance load-balancing proxy server and have tried using Nginx, then this book is for you. You need some basic knowledge of Nginx. System administrators and web developers will benefit greatly from this book.

Comments inside comments ! That seems to be a basic issue in PHP. Lets say i am including a php file, and i comment it out using /* */ and it super freaks out when that file has comments. Simple things that can save developer pain and i am sure it is not a difficult patch

Spent sometime working with both over the last month, created 2 ecommerce sites around these and here are some observations which may help people decide what works for them

• FeinCMS was a pain to get started with, i had to base it all on the default example as the documentation was not enough to get it all started from scratch. I was using the trunk as it has goodies [like a blog] which the stable did not have.
• DjangoCMS was much easier to deal with, in hind sight it made it very easy to play with blocks modify them. I was impressed with the amount of flexibility it offered to the developer. The admin is not as simple as something like Drupal but its simple enough to be used without documentation.
• To be honest, both had their strengths and weaknesses, their common weakness is the under-developed CMS community aroun Django. Hardly any modules to play with, setting up a blog is a pain [well i did it twice over in 2 different setups].

Do message me at me@dipankar.name if you need to get started with any of these.

Must ask ! Are you “technically randy” ?

I definitely am , i just figured out that i must come out in the open for a change [as if the blog name is not a good indicator]. I love technology and apply it anywhere and everywhere there is an opportunity. Though this obviously has its pitfalls, well being randy has its pitfalls. Lets see some of the obvious ones [feel free to comment and fill in the non-obvious ones]

• Depending on what makes your day, you will end up spending up more time than the average joe on simple things ! I would call it the law of diminishing efficiency of the technically randy.
• Your boss for one will call you as the office hero, but your co-workers will call you the office pain in the arse. Get ready to be abused and bitched about !
• Mines and deep bore wells are your friends ! I mean it in the dual way, you will fall deep into pits of darkness only to emerge with solutions that could have been searched or massaged out of our friendly neighborhood search engines.
• You will want a pet ! Or let me rephrase it, you need a pet. Its not a reflection of anything negative, its and overt exploitation of man’s best friend after all. All the time spent in technology, will proportionally reflect in the relationship randiness … you my friend need error correction

Now that was a lot of fun ! Point is can the social and the nerd exist …. I think it can exist [well, no harm in trying], hopefully my nerd side will post something technically relevant. Until next time.