{ :from => Delhi, :about => everything }

Bloglines has announced some cool new features. Managing feeds will become a lot easier. And with drag and drop, it would save me a lot of clicks and page reloads.

This man hasn’t slept once in the last 33 years

I wish i could sleep 1 hour less every night.

Don’t wait to get invited to the FooCamp, signup for the barcamp today.

BarCamp, the open source version of Orielly’s FooCamp has finally arrived in Delhi.
All thanks to Jon, Amit and Gaurav for making it happen.

BarCampDelhi will be held on 4th March 2006 at Adobe’s campus in Noida.
The theme of BarCampDelhi will be “Next Generation Internet: Web 2.0, mobile computing, and other cool stuff”.
You can read more about it at the barcamp wiki.

I have volunteered for these sessions

• Ruby on Rails : Rapid web application development
• Simple Sharing Extensions : The two way RSS

If you would be interested in partnering with me on these, please drop me a mail.

I have been a TiE member for many years, it is a great community of entrepreneurs and I have learnt a lot from them.

Similarly, I hope the barcamp will help us create an NCR tech community.

So please spread the word around, this is a must attend event for all software enthusiasts in NCR.

I have been using Writely a lot lately. It is gradually becoming my default word processor.
It makes very easy for me to write documents and share them with my team. I can send mails to my team members with link to the doc from within writely and that’s it.

While writing my last blog article, I found another reason to use writely. I was writing the post and in between I needed to lookup a word at dictionary.com, so i did a ctrl-k in firefox and entered the word. I got the meaning but the page overwrote my post. ( Normally I do a ctrl-t, ctrl-k so that the meaning comes up in a new tab) Anyways I used the browser back button, the page was reloaded and all that I had written was gone.

Learning :

1) From now on, I will write my blog posts on writely. Writely has an autosave feature. Also ctrl-s works on writely. I need not scroll down to press the “save and continue editing” button as I have to do in wordpress.

2) Autosave posts, could be an idea for a wordpress plugin that I could write. Now that wordpress admin has been so ajaxified ;-)

On *nix systems, there are certain tasks such as running servers, editing sensitive resource or configuration files that only privileged users can do.

During software development phase, many such tasks need to be repeated often, and the application developer needs to request the system administrator each time. Sudo is a perfect tool for such times. ( atleast that is how I came across it)

The root user can specify users or group, and command which they can execute in the /etc/sudoers file. The non previliged user can then use sudo to run commands as previliged users, without loggin in as one. (without the need to know the previliged user’s password that is). Root users should use visudo to edit the /etc/sudoers file. Visudo parses the file for any syntax error.

An additional benefit of using sudo is that it logs each time a user tries to run a sudo command.

You can read more about sudo here or do a man sudo.

Rajesh Setty’s post on Time and Money got me thinking about situations when I squander time to save money.

• I do it when i fix things at home, while I have the option of hiring outside help, which is cheap in India and does better work that me. I do not enjoy the fixing job either, certainly not after the first ten minutes.
• Not hiring another programmer and continuing to code, while I know I have to focus on other larger things. I love to code… but i know my ego also plays a role here.
• When i spend more time looking for bargains, than the amount of money I save at the end of the whole “evaluating offers” exercise.

Some of my thoughts on time and money relation.

• Money is more finite than time. I used to count money and enter into the “assets” column of my balance sheet. I did not do it with time.
• Money can be converted into other forms at my will. Converting time into money or other forms is not dependent on me alone. [ though i can sharpen the saw when i am not cutting the wood]
• Bcos I have been taught only half the equation. “Money saved = money earned” … and now Rajesh has added the time variable to this equation ummmm. But I have learnt “time is money” also. Now this becomes an issue of conversion rate… how much time is equal to how much money. My mentor always tells me “There are good savings and there are bad savings”. Probably the answer lies somewhere in these words.
• Cash flow and Time flow. How much of my cash can i spend to buy other people’s time. As a result of which I have more cash and time than I had at the beginning. Balance is important. Otherwise I might have to choose between bankruptcy and (divorce|stroke|burnout|all of these).

Will keep on adding to these two lists. Cos I have to Distinguish Myself.

Thanks Rajesh for the triggers.