NewsGator for Free
January 10th, 2008 // 12:46 pm @ Amar
One of the biggest new announcements I have heard in a while. Newsgator which is the leader for RSS Clients, has recently announced that it is making it’s clients FREE. Yes, you heard it. They are free to download and use. Yipeeeee. This includes FeedDemon, NewsGator Inbox, NewsGator Go ( most exciting ), and also allows free sync with NewsGator online. NewsGator Go and my Windows mobile is the perfect combination. Head over to NewsGator and download the Free Clients today.
Happy New Year
January 2nd, 2008 // 1:38 pm @ Amar
Wishing all my readers a very Happy New Year. May this year bring lots of joys and happiness into your lives, cause after all, those are the things which matter most. I am not a person who religiously makes resolutions and tried to keep them, but this year, I will definitely keep one promise. That is to all of you. I will write more often and write stuff of better quality. As you all know, my blog migration story is over. This blog is up and running. Spent most part of the last year in getting all my things in order. Still have some organising to do ( I organise everything a lot ), before I can focus on newer things. Have set a target to organise and put in order most of my things ( pending projects, active projects, clothes, books, various mailers, photos, files etc… you get the picture ) and get ready for new tasks by 15th Jan. Hope to see you all more often in this new year.
Category : General
New laptop
October 30th, 2007 // 9:10 am @ Amar
As promised I am back. My development laptop has arrived. It is more like beauty and the beast put together. ( A real beauty to look at and work on while performing like a beast ). Many people have asked me more details about the laptop and I will try to review it later on sometime.
I finally decided to buy a Rock Xtreme 770 from Rock Direct. The configuration I went for is as follows :
- Intel Core 2 Duo T7500
- New Nvidia GeForce 8700M GT 512MB (DX10) Graphics Card
- Hi-res 17″ WUXGA+ Display
- 2GB DDR2 667MHz (single module)
- 100GB 7200rpm SATA HDD
- HD DVD
- Windows Vista Home Premium
I chose to go for a single module 2GB ram as I want to add another 2GB stick later on and migrate to Vista 64 as soon as all decent drivers are available. I do like gaming, and so far 8700 has been an absolute beauty. Running almost all games ( BioShock, Quake Wars, Lotro ) on high settings at full native resolution ( 1920 x 1280 ).
I will be setting this up next and I have decided to write a few posts on how I setup my laptop. May be helpful to people who want to get the most from their machine.
Category : General
Hello Everyone
October 2nd, 2007 // 9:10 am @ Amar
I know I have been unable to keep my promise to start writing to this blog again. There are several reasons for that. After so long on not updating my blog, I was thinking that I will hardly have any readers left but all your comments proved me wrong. Logged in after ages to see a lot of encouraging comments which did in fact motivate me to start writing again. One of the factors for not writing much about MOSS 2007 was unavailability of a decent machine at home to run MOSS. I am happy to said that I have finally managed to order the latest ROCK laptop ( Xtreme 770 – T7500 ) and am patiently waiting for delivery. Will be configuring it to start testing SharePoint 2007 code and will post my progress and any lessons I learn along the way.
One thing I was interested in doing was to give something back to the SharePoint community. I want to find out what annoyances people face the most with 2007. If I can figure out something which can help the majority of users, I may sit down and write some tool for it.
Anyways, bye for now. My new laptop will be arriving in 2 weeks time, and hence will be getting busy playing with WSS at home. Still have to figure out a way to get a SPS 2007 development license for my home PC. Will definitely plan to start updating this blog regularly in a couple of weeks from now.
Category : General
Still Here
February 6th, 2007 // 5:02 am @ Amar
For those who are wondering where I have been, and why my blog was down, there is some good news. I still exist and do plan to write again soon in around 15 days time. The blog was down due to some technical problems with migrating Wordpress to another server. On my personal side, I got married on January 25th and hence have not been in touch with the rest of the world for sometime. Will soon start writing again. Thanks for sticking by. Will focus on MOSS and SharePoint 2007 in the next few posts.
Category : General
Be careful of Domain Sharks
November 28th, 2006 // 4:11 pm @ Amar
I am recently dabbling more into live internet sites, and have been making some disturbing observances. Just want to warn you all to be very careful from where you search for the availability of a domain name. Certain observations have made me to believe that some of the sites which let you search for the availability of a domain, share this data with domain sharks. Why do I say so? Read on.
Since last 5 years I have been debating to register a domain or not. I wanted to turn it into a family site for our family members, and hence the name did not hold any value to any business or general site. It was very specific to our family and would have no value to people outside it. I recently after almost a year again thought that it would be a good idea to register it, and hence checked on the availability of the domain. As I expected, it was available. Hardly anyone would use such a name unless they are of my family. ( We have a very uncommon family name ). 2 days after, when I decide to go ahead and pay for it, I find that the domain has been taken. A similar thing happend to another domain which I had searched along with the previous one. Hence, it’s my gut feeling that some of the sites which allow you to check an availability of a domain ( including maybe some registrars, i am guessing here ) may be selling our search data, on what domains people are interested in, to domain sharks who will register these domains and see if they can make a profit out of it.
So the moral of the story is, if you like a domain and find it available, register it immediately. And be very careful from where you search for your domain. Always search from a site you trust will not leak your searches to anybody.
Category : General
GoDaddy Problems – stay away if you can
November 27th, 2006 // 5:11 pm @ Amar
I recently had a very very strange problem with godaddy for registering my domain. Never going to use them for anything and will never recommend them. Just want to share it with all of you so that you guys don’t face it.
I registered a domain name from godaddy after hearing about them from various recommendations and websites. Firstly the registration process if full of adverts, coaxing you to spend more on their special plans and trying to trick you into paying more at some places. So be very careful on what you click and review the order very carefully in case you ever purchase a domain from them. Anyways after all complexities I finally managed to register a domain name successfully from them and paid out of my paypal account. Pointed the domain to my hosting site, and after a few hours everything was up and working fine.
Two days passed without any problems. The site was absolutely fine, the domain was working as it should, and I was the registrar of the domain according to the whois records for the domain. Then suddenly, I receive 2 emails from godaddy. One, stating that my cancellation request has been processed and they are cancelling the registration of my domain. The second email status that the refund for my registration has been issued and I received the refund in my paypal account immediately. I had never asked for cancellation and as such, never wanted to cancel my domain.
I know when you cancel a domain or it expires, it will go into a 90 day freeze period. But strangely, when I checked the status of the domain, it was showing available. When browsing to the domain, it was working fine and taking me to my site. So the DNS servers had not been updated yet with this info. This was all so shocking. I suddenly find that I have lost control of my domain and it is again in the open market for anyone to register. It was as if the godaddy system just rolled back all my transactions.
An email to godaddy got me a response that due to the complex nature of this problem it has been submitted to their advanced technology group ( or something like that ) for investigation. After that it has been 2 days and I have not heard anything. Anyways, I did not wait that long for it. I quickly re-registered my domain from namecheap.com and thankfully am now again the owner of my domain. Namecheap is cheaper than godaddy, their registration process is simple, not riddled with advertising and additional packages, and does not try to trick you into paying more as godaddy does. Really impressed with them. The control panel is great and allows for all kinds of domain control. One limitation is to get the auth code or EPP code of the domain it will take 24/48 hours. Other companies provide it instantly, but I guess I can live with 24/48 hour wait as long as they are giving it. I can always request the auth code and save it beforehand so that in case I ever want to transfer away from them.
So that’s the story. After a lot of research, I think what might have happened is that godaddy initiated the clause for domain tasting which allows anyone to refund a domain within 5 days or registration. But I never asked for it, nor did I find any option which stated that, or to confirm my purchase and not have it refunded. So it was very strange and upsetting to see that they suddenly released my domain without my permission into the open market. Anyways, I guess their advanced technology group ( or whatever ) may still be investigating into the issue, but I don’t care. They can go on investigating, but have lost this customer for good and all my clients and friends will never get my recommendation for buying any of godaddy’s services.
I would recommend you all to stay away from them, but if you do decide to go ahead, do be careful and vigilant so that you can act the very instant you find you are no longer in control of your domain.
Category : General
Fun Thing
November 24th, 2006 // 1:11 am @ Amar
I got this forward today, and it was real cool. I was surprised to see how human mind read things. Try to read the paragraph below and see for yourself.
“i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it.”
Category : General
Server Move
November 23rd, 2006 // 6:11 pm @ Amar
I will mostly be shifting this blog to its new home next week. So there will a bit of downtime while the actual domain transfer and a server shift happens. If this blog disappears for a bit, don’t worry, I am very much around, and will be back online as soon as the domain names gets transfers from yahoo and gets setup on the new hosting server.
Category : General
A new milestone for the Web
November 2nd, 2006 // 1:11 pm @ Amar
Just started the day with Techmeme and was plesantly surprised and nostalgic with this article over at CNN. The Web reached 100 million domain name sites. I built my first website in 1995 when the internet first came to India in a mass scale. Have gone thru various websites and projects during this time and it is really nice to see that the web has grown to 100 million. But sadly, most of them are registered by link popularity and domain name sellers. There seems to be 50% active sites out of them, and the rest are all owned by people who either want to get rich quick by selling good domain names at a premium, or fool google into making their active site popular. Somehow all these have made the web experience a bit painful. Has anyone tried to register a domain name and found that it is near to impossible to get a decent domain name free. And most of the names do not have active websites under them. It takes me less time to ready a small website than to find a good active domain name for my website. It took me over a month to find www.reviewlibrary.com and i can tell you that the experience is not at all very pleasant.
Anyways, congrats to each and everyone who participated in making the web a phenomenal success, and bring it from 1200 bauds to super fast broadbands.
Category : General