The service is currently in beta and you can register your email address in their registration page to get an invite. The advantage of testing the service during the beta period is that you can use the service free right now and once the service is out of beta, you will get discount over the regular price and if you are lucky you can even get lifetime memberships.

I am still waiting for an invite and once I get to try this service, I will write a detailed review comparing its feature with slicehost, which is my current hosting service.

More details about Webbynode can be found below.

• Webbynode home page
• Webbynode Blog
• HostingFu’s writeup about Webbynode

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We all make mistakes and learn from it to become a better person. Won’t it be great to learn from other’s mistakes so that we don’t make the same ones!

The focus is really not about the failure. It’s about why we failed and what lessons we learnt from it. Let’s not be ashamed about failing. Let’s celebrate failure. Let’s look straight into its eyes.

If it sounds interesting, head over to FailCamp wiki and register yourself. Here are the details about the event.

Date

November 16 2008 - Sunday

Place

Tenth Planet Technologies Pvt., Ltd.,

#807, P.T.Lee Building, 6th Floor, Anna Salai, (Opposite LIC building)

Chennai-600 002

Driving directions and parking information are available in the wiki. You can also find some pictures of the venue here.

Unconference

Failcamp is also an unconference like BarCamp and everyone will be participating rather than just attending. Even you can help in organizing the event. In the wiki, you can find the list of items that needs to be done and you can pick any one of them that interest you.

I will be attending the event and if possible will talk about the lessons which I learned from one of my pet project King Ping. 

Let me know if you are coming and we can meet up and celebrate failures.

Possibly Related posts

• pipesCamp (Dec 21, 2007)
• BarCamp Hits Chennai (Mar 22, 2006)
• BarCamp Chennai 2nd Edition (Oct 17, 2008)
• BarCamp Chennai 2 (Oct 21, 2008)
• Yahoo Pipes Team writes about pipesCamp (Jan 5, 2008)

Photos

Photos tagged bcc2 in Flickr

Videos

Awesome video to explain what is Web 2.0

Presentations/Demos

AWS by Varun Balaji

Design of Programmer Spaces by Siddharta

OpenStreetMap

Twitter tweets

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=bcc2+OR+”barcamp+chennai”

Blogs

Barcamp Chennai 2 - Interesting By Aswin

BarCamp Chennai 2 By me

If I have missed any links, let me know and I will add them.

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• BarCamp Chennai 2 (Oct 21, 2008)
• Celebrating Failures - FailCamp (Nov 1, 2008)
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Dream Moment

I experienced a dream-come-true moment when I shook hands with Kiruba. I have been following him in the cyber space for nearly 2-3 years, but it was only now, I got a chance to talk to him in the physical world. 

Sessions

There were lot of talks which took place on day two. Almost all of them were very interesting and lively.  I will try to brief on some of them which I attended and found interesting.

First was the session titled “Indian Education System Sucks” by Viru. The session was very interactive, partly because of the title and partly because of how Viru handled it. There were lot of points which were discussed and towards the end almost everyone agreed that there are some major flaws in the system. Once the problem was identified and accepted the discussion shifted towards finding out the possible solutions to make it better.

Next was the session titled “Global Financial Meltdown and IT Industry” by Sukumar, Ganesh, Raj and Syed. Out of all the other sessions this was very informative and I personally learned a lot out of it.  Sukumar gave an insight about the core reasons behind the meltdown and how it might affect India. The following are some of the quotes which I noted during that talk.

The world nearly came to an end in 2008

If you borrow 5 lakhs, you will be afraid of the bank, but if you borrow 500 cores, the bank will be afraid of you.

There is one more time bomb which is waiting. US has around 1.6 trillion dollars in credit card balance.

The western press is misleading. They talk only about ideology and not about common man.

Aswin anand has a nice write-up about the other sessions, so I am not going to repeat them here. Thanks Aswin, you saved a couple of key strokes for me.

Wifi

If you ask me, one thing which really sucked was wifi. It was very slow and most of the time it timed out. I was planning to do live tweeting during the event, but because of wifi and my laptop battery, I only managed a few.

Photos

I took a couple of photos during the event with my amazing Powershot S5 and you can view them in Flickr. You can also do a search in Flickr with the term bcc2 to get other photos.

Verdict

Overall, it was a very nice event, well planned and executed. Without any doubt I could say that it was a huge success. The credit goes to the organizers for taking extra effort to make the event a success. Thanks guys and eagerly waiting for BarCamp Chennai 3

Possibly Related posts

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• Links to BarCamp Chennai 2 presentations (Oct 22, 2008)
• Celebrating Failures - FailCamp (Nov 1, 2008)
• BarCamp Hits Chennai (Mar 22, 2006)
• WebCamp - An unconference about web frameworks (Feb 3, 2008)

The first edition which happened in April 2006 and was a great success and I hope it will the same this year too. It has already started to get some press coverage and you can find the article from Decaan Chronicle here, kudos to the organizing team.

I will be attending the sessions scheduled for the second day and let me know if you are coming and we can meet up.

More details about the BarCamp can you found at the official BarCamp Chennai Website.

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• WebCamp - An unconference about web frameworks (Feb 3, 2008)

First jQuery is going to be supported by Microsoft and is going to be shipped with Visual Studio, which is great news for people who are addicted to intellisense (like Yuvi ). 

Second Nokia is going to support it and jQuery will be used to develop applications on the new WebKit-based Web Run-Time which will be distributed with Nokia phones.

I think this is great news for jQuery and it is time for me to start hacking it again.

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• Free ASP.NET training from Microsoft eLearning (Aug 22, 2005)

Special thanks to Cmiper and Phill Price for reporting the bug. FriendFeed community really rocks!

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• No Browse Happy Plugin (Mar 15, 2008)

Now there is a new option to specify the number of images that needs to be posted to FriendFeed. Earlier, it was taking all the images, but now you can control the number of images that needs to be posted by specifying it in the options page.

post2ff WordPress Plugin Options page

You can download the new version from the Plugin page. Don’t forget to reactivate the Plugin after uploading.

As always let me know if you have any feedback/issues.

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There were lot of comments for that message and some felt that removing the blog from FriendFeed profile could result in identity loss.

I looked into FriendFeed API and found it to be very powerful and easy to use. So, using it I have created a WordPress Plugin, which will automatically post a message to your FriendFeed account with all the images in the post, every time you publish a new post in WordPress.

You can download the Plugin file from my Plugin page and then upload it to your wp-contents directory. Once activated, you have to enter your nickname and remote key in the settings page. You can get the remote key from FriendFeed API page.

Please note that currently it is only in the beta stage right now. I am planning to add more features to this Plugin, so if you have a nice feature in mind, let me know and I will try to implement it. Also let me know if you are facing any issues/bugs with the Plugin.

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It is less than two years back that I bought a new Olympus cam. But during my last Photowalk, I realized that I have hit the limitations of the cam. Since then I was looking to buy a new cam. Initially I was looking to buy a DSLR but the price factor kept it away from my reach. I was looking for other options and Yuvi suggested S5. I read some reviews and then immediately I made up my mind.

The following are the specifications

• 8.0 MegaPixels
• 12X Optical Zoom
• 2.5 Inch LCD
• 6.0-72.0 mm focal length
• f/2.7-3.5 Aperture
• Variable Aperture and Shutter speed.

You can read the full specification in the official page.

In addition to the Cam, I also bought two 2 GB cards and two sets of rechargeable batteries (again Yuvi’s recommendation)

PS: Leaving to Ooty for a small vacation over the weekend and hoping to be back with some real good photos.

Image Credit dpreview.com

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• My best shot ever (Jun 28, 2007)
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• 3:11 PM - Defining a moment in Chennai (Nov 3, 2007)

DropBox is currently in private beta and I have some invites left. If you need an invite just drop a comment here with your email address. Thanks Jigar for the invites.

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Today (July 1^st ) is known as the unofficial WordPress day, where fans from all over the world can thank the people behind WordPress and also can express their love for WordPress. They are also running an event and have some nice giveaways. All you have to do is to let everyone know why you love WordPress by leaving a comment at WPCandy or write a blog post about WordPress.

So instead of writing a post explaining why and how I love WordPress (which I have already done), I thought of sharing some information which will be useful for people who are interested in WordPress. So here we go..

Sometime ago Weblog Tools Collection published a list of Twitter users whom you can follow to get updated information about WordPress.

Nowdays I use FriendFeed more than Twitter (I have to confess this sometime). So I tried to find their corresponding FriendFeed usernames so that I can subscribe to them. The following is the list with their real names first, followed by their Twitter user names and then followed by their FriendFeed usernames.

• Matt Mullenweg - photomatt - No FriendFeed Account
• WordPress - WordPress This is the user account tied into the WordPress.org RSS Feed - No FriendFeed Account
• Lloyd Budd - lloydbudd - lloydbudd
• Donncha O Caoimh - donncha - donncha
• Mark Jaquith - markjaquith - markjaquith
• Lisa Sabin Wilson - LisaSabin - lisasabinwilson
• Brian Gardner - bgardner - No FriendFeed Account
• David Peralty - davidcubed - davidperalty
• Cory Miller - corymiller303 - No FriendFeed Account
• Steven Milne - wordpressguy - No FriendFeed Account
• Ozh - ozh - ozh
• Andrew Rickmann - arickmann - arickmann
• Ryan McCue - rmccue - No FriendFeed Account
• Joost de Valk - jdevalk - jdevalk
• Warwick Poole - warwickp - linuxinternet
• Ptah Dunbar - ptahdunbar - ptahdunbar
• Charles Stricklin - cstricklin - No FriendFeed Account
• Nathan Rice - nathanrice - No FriendFeed Account
• John Kolbert - johnkolbert - johnkolbert (private feed)
• 1catbiz - onecatbiz - No FriendFeed Account
• Hans Engel - hans_engel - hansengel
• Leland - themelab - No FriendFeed Account
• Ronald Huereca - ronalfy - No FriendFeed Account
• Ryan - ryanhellyer - No FriendFeed Account
• Ian Stewart - iandstewart - No FriendFeed Account
• BuddyPress - buddypressdev - No FriendFeed Account
• Mark Ghosh - laughinglizard - laughinglizard
• Jeff Chandler - jeffr0 - No FriendFeed Account
• Andy Peatling - apeatling - No FriendFeed Account
• Andy Skelton - skeltoac - No FriendFeed Account
• Michael Castilla - wpcandy - No FriendFeed Account

The following are some of my additions to the list which was not originally published by Weblog Tools Collection.

• Alex King - alexkingorg - alexkingorg
• Sudar - SudarMuthu - Sudar - Yeah, that’s me

I will try to keep the list updated and let me know if you feel I need to add someone else to this list. Till then happy FriendFeeding and my heart felt thanks to Matt and the team for an excellent product without which this site may never exist

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The way in which they have shut down has shocked me more than the fact that they have shut down the service.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not here to criticize or accuse them for shutting down. After all they were still in beta, (which means, use at your own risk). But I was rather annoyed that they didn’t even bother to send an email to the users, so that they can be prepared. It seems that they have posted a message in their website, but the users will visit the website only when they have to recover some documents which were already synced. The majority of the work was done by the desktop client and it is still running in my system tray, without giving any clue that the service was already shutdown.

I was one of the early adopters of the service and was so pleased with the service that I even wrote some tutorials about it. I have some critical documents which I update on daily basics. I wanted a simple solution to backup these documents and retrieve them based on date. DocSyncer was the perfect solution for me. I installed and pointed it to the directory in which I kept these documents and the client automatically backed up the documents to my Google Docs account.

A couple of day’s back I wanted to retrieve the document and tried to access the DocSyncer website but found that it was down. After a quick search in Google, I found that DocSyncer was dead. Last time I received an email from them was on April 22^nd, when they announced pro account. This is not the first time I was affected because a service which I was using shutdown its doors, but I would have really appreciated if they could have sent a simple email saying that the service is going to be shut down.

Anyways, thank you Cliff Shaw and DocSyncer team for an excellent service which I was using for the past couple of months and my best wishes for your next startup.

If anyone from DocSyncer is reading this, then can you please let me know whether it is possible to opensource DocSyncer, at least the client alone?

Meanwhile my search for an online backup system continues and I am planning to have a look at Windows Mesh and Dropbox. If anyone knows a better solution, then do let me know.

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This is the eighth edition of the Chennai Photowalk which is going to be on both June 15th and 22nd. We will start at Panagal Park in T.Nagar and proceed in an easterly direction down Thyagaraya road, and end the walk at Residency towers. The initiative is by Chandrachoodan Gopalakrishnan and you can get more information from his blog. You can also browse photos of the previous photowalks in Flickr.

For me, this is the first time to be part of a photowalk and so I am really excited. If you are in Chennai and ready to sacrifice a Sunday evening, then please do come. You don’t need to have an expensive camera; there are people who are going to shoot using their mobile cameras itself.

Update: You can find the photos which I took during the PhotoWalk in Flickr. There are lot of teddies out there

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• pipesCamp (Dec 21, 2007)

His stat’s blog - thestatbot which he started last month is currently at position 76 in the Techmeme Leaderboard (as I am writing this blog entry) and has already been mentioned by TechCrunch. It is a remarkable achievement for a blog which is less than 2 months old. Congrats Yuvi and all the best with thestatbot.

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PS: Frequent readers of my blog would have noticed that I am not very active these days; things are going fast in my personal life and the posting frequency will soon be normal.

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I am writing it down here so that all I have to remember is that I just need to search my blog if I need to do it again in future.

Okay the command you have to use is (I am assuming that you are not logged in as root, which is the recommended approach)

sudo update-alternatives --config editor

And then press the number corresponding to the editor which you want to use. Below is the screenshot of how it looked in my slice.

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If you are wondering what is CSS Naked day, then this is the definition from the official site

The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words. It’s time to show off your <body>.

If even you want to participate then register your site in the official site and then strip the CSS from your site. If you are on WordPress then you can use this plugin.

Happy stripping

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I am going to update my installation now and this blog might appear clunky while I am doing that. I have installed WordPress using svn so it is just a single shell command for me to update. Thanks to Joost, I converted my installation into a svn installation when WordPress 2.2.2 was released.

By the way this will be my last post using the old admin screens, I will post my experience with the new admin screens in a couple of days. Meanwhile if you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, then I highly recommend you to update to WordPress 2.5. Happy upgrading

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Table of contents for iPod Tips

1. Uploading Videos into iPod
2. First aid advice on your iPod
3. Copy files from iPod to any computer without iTunes
4. Convert MP3 audio books to iPod audio books file format

Recently I got some MP3 audio books from a magazine CD. I wanted to upload them to my iPod so that I can listen to them during my compute to office. But then I found that these were in MP3 format and not in iPod audio book format.

The main feature of the iPod audio book format is that the iPod can remember the last listening position and also we can adjust the reading speed in case, which is not possible if it is in MP3 format.

I started looking for a program to convert MP3 files to iPod audio book format and found an excellent program MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter. It is free, opensource and the best part is that it works.

Download the program and install it. Once installed start the program from start menu and then click the Add button.

Select the MP3 files and then click the Open button. (You can also press shift to select multiple files)