The Great Indian Developer Conference

I think for a developer community so vast as the Indian, an event like the Great Indian Developer Summit is an awesome idea. We should be spending some time at Indescon thinking on how our presence in Germany can contribute to it. Ideas welcome!

Twittering time-investments

I'm twittering my way into 3 accounts - Indescon, euroblaze and private/ashant. Seem to prefer it to Facebook. Yet to be seen how significant a distraction this will be!

Webpage Optimization Tools

For all of you trying to cope with having to manage sluggish website performance, this page-analysis tool could do you some help.

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Fastest Sales Closure

Today I closed my fastest deal ever doing sales in the German B2B market. The first pitch to his customer was on 15th May, with closure coming in on 4th June - my all time record.

For those of you wondering what the fuss is all about, B2B sales, especially in a recession time like the one we face now, take upward of 3 months to close, sometimes even 6, 9 or 12 months. So getting the customer signed in within 3 weeks is something of a wonder!

Unix Hard vs. Softlinks

Unix Hard vs. Softlinks - excellently explained by Lew Pitcher!

The First Austrian Cloud Computing Company - Netmonic - A Review

Netmonic is the first ever indigenous Austrian cloud computing company. I decided to give them a spin, since I'm in need of dedicating an FTP server for our projects being done in India.

Technically it's all been working good so far. No untoward failures (unlike my first days with serverpronto), the server has been up since I signed up online. Here's my review as I continue to use the server.

Sign Up & Payments

Signup was straight forward at netmonic.com - registration form. I automatically got a virtual server assigned with user/pass sent over by email. Our company did have a special requirement of payment by bank-transfer, since we don't use company CC', so a quick round of emails had to be exchanged with the support@ address listed on their site. The original account I setup had to be overwritten, and they provided new login details, within a few hours the same working day.

Netmonic currently supports their Registration workflow only with Credit Cards, which are unusual for corporate customers in Europe. Support for bank-transfer payments would be desirable.

Price to Performance

Space pricing is a tad higher than comparable US based services, for example ServerAxis (I use their 512MB/50GB metered server plan, $30 /month). This is likely because of the higher operating costs in Europe, and hopefully compensates itself in avoiding latencies of hosting in US for European traffic.

For this premium, it should also be said that Netmonic offers a great deal better management features for monitoring and managing all cloud servers you host with them. Most features can be managed over https://manage.netmonic.com. This is a boon to non-admin users, but also for the server-savvy, there's nothing like circumventing support and rebooting your machine on the click of a button on the web-interface.

One not-so-visible feature I think I am really going to like is the unlimited number of free DNS-Zones you can manage on your Netmonic Account. This will save me some 250$ per year that I currently shell out to for DNS at zoneedit.com, which charges a per-DNS-zone rate.

Support

Right now all issues have to be emailed to their support@ address. The response times have been anywhere between a few hours to 2 days.

Netmonic formally offers 2 levels of support - Basic and Extended. Basic is included to all customers free of cost. Extended support is offered on basis of per-hour billing or a fixed price. What's covered on each level is listed here (see to the left of page).

An ideal "to be" situation would be a ticketing-system where a standard work-flow can be followed, and response times of less than 2 hours during European work hours and less than 4 hours during non-work hours.

Operating Systems

List of currently supported Linux Operating Systems on the Netmonic Cloud.

Infact they did include support for Debian 5.0 (Lenny), both 62 and 64 bit, and a bunch of other OS's. I was able to select from 12 platforms in all when rebuilding the VS/cloud-server.

Some European Hosting Companies

I haven't studied these deals in depth, and certainly haven't tried any hands-on, but here are some other EU hosting/cloud-computing companies.

• Hosttech, Köln
• x|encon, Hannover
  

fixmbr - Repair Windows XP Master Boot Record

I happened to hose my MBR which pointed to a GRUB (boot loader for Linux) while uninstalling all Linux OS-es from a Laptop. In the process, the Windows boot records also got deleted, and the machine lay sans a valid boot-loader. Eventually the only OS that I was interested in having on this laptop was Win-XP.

To install a fresh new Win-XP (actually Win NT) boot-loader

1. B from the Win-XP installation
2. Enter the "Repair" mode and find your way to the DOS prompt
3. Type in the fixmbr command, and let it replace the MBR completely
4. Exit and reboot
   

Firefox Plug-in for KeepInTouch KIT

I'd love to have an FF plug-in that will allow adding email addresses of contacts, say when reading email, organizing CRM records or social-networking, to KeepInTouch (Google Code site).

It should be possible to

• select an account
• select a mailing list
• add f_name, l_name and email address

by selecting a string an right-clicking on FF pages.

Some Resources

• Eric Hamiter's Hello World! Tutorial
• Adding search plugins (tons of resources linked on left-menu)
• XUL / MDC Documentation
• Firefox Extension Development Tutorial
  

O2 UMTS/GPRS USB stick on Kubuntu 9.04

Here's how I got my O2 UMT/GPRS USB stick to work on my Kubuntu 9.04 Latitude X300.

German phrases

This will help with my weakness in German conversation - small talk!

http://www.phrasen.com/uebersetze,Das-hoert-sich-gut-an,88302,d.html

(to the right, an unrelated "touching moment")