Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

5 Things investors are looking for in seed/idea stage ventures

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

Presented the embedded slides to the students of IFIM, Bangalore at their final business plan presentation on 28th 29th Sept, 2009.

Arthur C. Clarke (1917 – 2008)

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

— Arthur C. Clarke

Amazon EC2 Disk Speeds of m1.small and m1.large

Thursday, January 24th, 2008

I have been running a two node cluster on EC2 and for the past week or so my database writes have been totally bogged down. After some tests it looked like we’re hitting the disk I/0 bottleneck. To my surprise Disk I/0 was 5-6 times faster on the m1.large instance type.

I ran a cheap command to time the creation of a 1GB file. Here are the results. In both the situations the small test was run on /mnt which is considered to be a dedicated spindle.

On m1.small

[root@]# time dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile count=1 bs=1024M
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
real 0m11.298s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m3.390s

On m1.large


[root@]# time dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile count=1 bs=1024M
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
real 0m2.982s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m2.350s

Read about the various EC2 instance types here

Hello WordPress!

Saturday, January 19th, 2008

For the past 4 years I have been blogging using MovableType — It is a fantastic product with fantastic set of features. I have been thinking of migrating to WordPress due to the 500 Internal Server Errors, which have reduced my ability to blog. MT was solid, stable platform until their 2.4.x release. Things started going south since then. Another reason for the migration was my lack of PERL knowledge (I have tried, but can’t fathom the depth the language has to offer). The hacker in me has already tinkered around with WordPress, which allowed me to complete my import from MT to WP (esp. preserving the numerical IDs for .htaccess forward from MT).

9/11 Cover Up Video

Tuesday, August 15th, 2006

Just saw the entire video. Shocking! Gasping!

Look Ma Delete Buttons!

Friday, January 27th, 2006

Google finally ships the supply of delete buttons for GMail.
del_buts.gif
Though, I had the button unoffically for a long time, thanks to the greasemonkey script, it was a brash move in the first place to not have a delete button — I mean it does not make sense to archive that expired 10% discount coupon.
What’s next? Read receipts for web e-mails? Guess, why nobody is doing that feature…