Another technology blog

This is another technology blog that brings up some really interesting upadtes for you if you live your life online (bolg)

Its been a while

Hi Guys... Its been a while since I wrote about Technology, been a bit busy. In the mean while visit Technology Nerd, this site has good Technology Articles as well.

Good Luck!

Mark Shuttleworth

Born on the same day as me (18th September), he is just 9 years older than me.


This South African entrepreneur has already acheived a lot in life. As the founder of Thawte, which he later sold to VeriSign for about 3 billion, he is now a Venture Capitalist, runs a philanthropic organization, is the head of the organization for Ubuntu. And if all this wasn't enough,he was the first African nationalist in Space. He is also the worlds second space tourist, paying about 20 million to spend about 8 days at the International Space Station. For this, he had to train for about 1 year.

Starting as a Debian developer, he choose to return to Linux. He funded the development of Ubuntu, one of the fastest growing Unix OS presently. He has invested 10 million dollars in Ubuntu.

At 32, he is exactly what I would love to be.

Post by: Sasidhar.

The not so widely known Opera

I was so sick of using firefox all this while that I went out in search for a really fast browser that satisfies my needs. Tested something called K-meleon which is another browser on the Gecko engine but found it to be the same. Have been trying Flock for sometime as I was impressed with the features and again found that the startup time was pretty too much. So what I had to do now was to search on Windows browser comparision. And found that the best browser of all would be Opera in all minimum requirements off a browser. The present release stable version is 9. I was surprised with the startup time which was less than a second. Firefox takes me close to 5 seconds for the same. Also the level of customizability is quite equeal. But I like the way Opera handles the tabs and the address bar. On the whole I would give Opera 9 a 9/10.

Posted by Nikhil Dev.

Amazon S3

"Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers."

aws.amazon.com/s3 says it all.

'Amazon S3' is the Simple Storage Service offered by Amazon.

Amazon hasn't really gone full steam with this product. You don't see any advertisements, any kind of fanfare, blogposts, reviews about it. Still very much in the inner-cirlces of industry tech freaks.

Although there are a lot of other sites providing similar funtionality, Amazon S3 has the advantage of scaling fast, reliability and speed. And if these factors weren't enough, its cheaper than any of its competetors.

I don't quite understand how Amazon will be able to keep the prices for its S3 offering as they presently are. The business model does not seem to favour scalability. We will just have to wait and watch.

Don MacAskill, CEO of online photo site SmugMug, says that S3 also has the advantage of freeing up capital."One of the other big cost issues is you don't have to front-load your capital costs," he explains. "So even if S3 were slightly more expensive in the long run, it makes utilizing your existing cash much easier. It also gets away from the silly
capital-expenses-amortized-over-five-years tax law, which basically
means that in your first year you have to pay 30% of the capital
expenses again to the government and you don't get it back for a few
years."


Some of the startups using Amazon's S3 services for their data storage are:
- SmugMug.com
- YouOS.com
- msdn
- Altexa
- Jungle Disk
- Elephant Drive

Digital media, banner ads, video content, are just examples of how S3 is currently being used.

Post by Sasidhar.

All in one media decoder

At office I have been seeing a lot of people who deal with so many formats of audio and video media that are available. The devices are capable of encoding into several formats but the problem comes with the decoding. There is not one place where you find all the codecs for decoding. I searched for this and found something that should satisfy all the media decoding needs. This codec packs supports close to a hundred formats. Almost every one in the world. A sure must download. And also while installation try using BS player cos it is smaller and easier to handle. Use this location for the download http://www.codecguide.com/download_mega.htm


by Nikhil Dev.

How to publish blogger to your site using FTP

I myself have had so much trouble so many time to try to figure out the settings for publishing my blogs to my domain and at last I thought that I would document this so that it would be useful to other people as well. So this is how we go about with it.

Before we start, make sure that you have your FTP username and password ready as well as create a directory something like "blog" at the root level of your webspace.
Next you need to go into the settings section of your blogger account and click on "Publishing". Click on the link called FTP. I have take a few examples of my site data to make things more understandable. Enter the following data into the given fields under "Publishing"

FTP server : nikhildev.com(your ftp server name)
Blog URL : http://nikhildev.com/blog
FTP Path : /blog/
Blog filename : index.htm
Username: "the username that you use to access your ftp account"
Password : "The password relevant to that FTP account"

Click on Save Changes.

Next go into the Archiving section of the settings and enter the following fields:-

Archive path :- /blog/archive/
Archive URL :- http://nikhildev.com/blog/archive/
Archive Filename : archive.html

And the last things that you need to do is specify the site feed settings as following:-

Site feed server path:/blog/
Site feed filename: atom.xml
Site feed url; http://nikhildev.com/blog/atom.xml

Remember to click on Save Changes every time. You would then get a Navy blue button called republish. Click on that. After that again click on another button called "Republish Entire Blog"(remember, this is very important)

And voila! you are done and all set. All the future posts will be on your server. You can get back to me if you need more information on this.

by Nikhil Dev.