By amit, 13 June, 2006

My backup solution

I have been hosting my web site since Dec 2000. I have a huge collection of photos. Photos scanned from film before 2002 and photos from digital camera since September 2002. I also have a huge collection of MP3s ripped from my collection of CDs (3500+ songs). All this data is stored on my home file server. With such a large amount of data (and not-so-infrequent disk failures) over the years I have built a nice data storage solution for myself.

By amit, 6 June, 2006

My new Mac mini

I got a new Mac mini last week. This is an amazing computer. It's a 6.5 sq. in. 2 inch tall box packed with everything you would need in a computer at home. Intel Core Solo 1.5 GHz processor, 1 GB DDR RAM, 60 GB hard disk. The external interfaces include 4 USB 2.0 ports, 1 firewire, 1 DVI (with DVI->VGA adapter), analog and optical digital audio in/out, bluetooth, WiFi. It comes loaded with Mac OS X. It also comes with the remote.
By amit, 21 May, 2006

Media Monkey

I found a new media player/manager today. MediaMonkey. For a few years MusicMatch has been my media player of choice. But Media Monkey is far superior with far more features and performance than MusicMatch. Sometime around MusicMatch 8, I had bought MusicMatch Plus (with all future versions for life time). But Media Monkey offers all the features and then some for free! In just one day of playing with Media Monkey I'm completely sold!
By amit, 28 December, 2005

My new gadget wishlist

This is an update to my older blog entry about my gadget wishlist.

Now there is one more model available from Canon that is placed right in the middle of 20D and 1D Mark II. It is 5D which also has a full frame CCD and other goodness of 1D except for some cut corners (like resolution of 12 megapixels) to reduce cost. This one is available for about $3300 which doesn't look so bad. I just might get this one :-)
By amit, 20 December, 2005

Photos of our Dec 2005 Trip

Photos of our Dec 2005 trip have been posted to Photo Gallery.

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This was a nice trip. I met two of my friends, one in Chattanooga, TN and one in Melbourne, FL (about 50 miles south-east of Orlando, FL).
We also visited Atlanta, Disney World, Kennedy Space Center. Shraddha has also shot some video which I'm planning to edit and create a movie. I'll add it to the Photo Gallery when I get time.

By amit, 6 December, 2005

Orlando, FL

We are in Orlando, FL. Yesterday's drive was really tiring.
Throughout the I-75 drive in Georgia, we had rain. And at times it was so heavy we could not see much farther than 100-200 feet. I could barely see the tail lights of the vehicle in front of me. About 25 miles into Florida there was no rain, very little clouds and the roads were dry. We reached the hotel at about 7:30pm.
By amit, 4 December, 2005

Chattanooga, TN

We arrived in Chattanooga, TN taking a long circuitous route from Portland to Seattle, Seattle to Chicago, Chicago to Atlanta by plane and then from Atlanta to Chattanooga by road. My friend had come to Atlanta airport to receive us. The journey was uneventful and boring except for a glitch on Atlanta airport when one of my checked-in bag didn't show up. But it turned up a few minutes later (being small it got lost in a pile of luggage). All my cameras, PDA and GPS were in this bag. So it would have made me real upset without my cameras and GPS.
By amit, 19 October, 2005

AJAX

AJAX stands for Asynchronus Javascript and XML.
It's a web application development technique. Traditional web applications had many limitations because of restrictions of the browser capabilities. Today however browsers like IE5 and FireFox can run Javascript natively and fetch arbitrary data through XMLRPC interface (which is not supported by all browers). This allows a web application to update only certain parts of the web page wihout the need to refresh the whole page again and again when something changes.