All who know me, know that I like to work on hobby projects every now and then. And sometimes I somehow manage to create something nice. I always used to release things under open source license.

But lately, I have received an offer. An offer which is quite appealing. For last few weeks I have been working on another project I have been working on as a hobby. I showed it to one of my friend. And the first words that his vocal chords produced were

WOW dude … We should sell this stuff as SAAS and make money!

This is when my mind took a roller coaster ride. I never thought about my any project like this. I mean seriously? Should I sell stuff I create? Thee questions are bothering me because, I have always been a avid supporter of open source. And selling software has never been my cup of tea.

Now he’s constantly trying to sell is idea of selling stuff and maybe I will buy his idea. After all making some extra money isn’t bad

“Hello World!”

It’s been couple of weeks since I have joined a new company. Now,  since that I am working. It meanns that I’ll have less time for doing things that I love most. The descision was not easy but was a necessary one.

Anyways, some of you may be waiting for my post on getting free twitter followers. Well, that post is still lying around as a draft. I never got a chance to complete it. But, dont worry I’ll publish it soon and I guarantee you guys that it will help you!

Now coming to the real motive of this post. After working on WordPress for so many years, I have now decided to give back something to the community. For that, I am building a theme framework. There are plenty already in market, but this one will be awesome! I assure you of that. I won’t leak out the features yet just have some patience and you’ll see it yourself.

And yes, Only thing you can know right now about it is that I’ll be open source

Post title says it’s all… Following are the ten things that I hate about Ubuntu:

1. It’s Free – It’s free that means I don’t have to pay anything. And company is loosing millions of dollars by freely distributing it.
2. It’s Open Source – Being Open source, I can put my fucking name on the start-up screen. I love Windows which don’t let me change anything.
3. So many Free games – There are so many free games available on the Internet for Ubuntu, I only want to have Solitaire to be playable in Ubuntu.
4. Support is readily available – I hate the way I can post a message in support forums and get a solution within hours (sometimes in minutes).
5. Runs on everything – I can run Ubuntu on my netbook, laptop, PC, and everything thing else. Why?? I don’t need multi hardware support.
6. Faster than Windows – I don’t like it when I see Ubuntu booting up ten times quickly than Windows
7. That n-th level of customization – I can make my desktop look like anything by using easy to use apps.
8. It’s Easy – Ubuntu is so easy to use that I can even teach my grandma how to use it. Sick!!! I don’t want her to sneak up in my F drive

in this fast paced world, technology now days changes very frequently. this amazes me that back in those old days one was confined to it’s idiot box for entertainment. But now, everybody watches videos on youtube.

Anyways, I am not that good in writing stuff and articles, so I’ll skip the chitchat and come straight to the point.

Good Ol’ Microsoft

Many of you guys must be using Media Center from Microsoft. Media Center is a very good software that will convert your system into an entertainment hub. Only downside I know about it is it’s price!!! It’s costly and many of us don’t wanna spend that much fro a new software.

But thank god there is open source freaks out there. Lately, I was trying to ind a good alternative for Media Center and what I found changed my way of watching movies on computer and damn yes I’ll purchase a TV tuner card now.

Let’s Meet Boxee

Boxee is an open source initiative which allows you to watch movies on you PC or TV either from Internet or your local hard drive.

Boxee is the best way to enjoy entertainment from the Internet and computer on your PC or TV

What I like about Boxee is that It’s open source which means it’s completely free. It’s intuitive and has a very good GUI which most of the open source software lacks. It let’s you watch videos, movies and even listen to podcasts or music either from Internet or your PC.

Boxee Beta from boxee on Vimeo.

Also, It’s extensible, which means there are lots of plugins available for it. You can even use facebook on it. It runs on multiple platforms like Windows, linux, Debian and MAC.

Geeky Stuff

For all those geeks out there here’s little information about it for you:

• It’s open source, means you can change the name to your name
• It’s based on award winning XMBC. But it has more intuitive GUI
• It fetches subtitles and disc images fro movies from IMDB
• Has inbuilt media library
• Uses DirectX and OpenGL for rendering.

Give it a try, it’s worth.

I am glad to announce the release of Portraiture version 0.2

This version contains many bug fixes and other things from previous release.

Download link: http://github.com/codemastersnake/portraiture/downloads

Hi all,

Lately I have been searching Internet for a good minimalistic theme for wordpress. I was able to find some, but wasn’t that much satisfied. Reason? The only reason i could think of is that none of those themes were developed by me

So I started out developing my own theme for wordpress. This site is actually running on my new theme. It’s still in beta but don’t worry I’ll keep on updating it. Be sure to check back regularly.

Ciao!

Today I saw a commercial on TV. It said that there are only 1000+ tigers left in India. The first thought that came to my mind is that we will now be telling only bedtime stories to our children after 5 years about tigers!!!!

This is very depressing and should be given a very serious thought. If you think that nothing can be done or a single person can’t help, then this post is for you!

Bengal Tiger

Tigers will get extinct someday, so what?

Let me first start of with what will happen if there will be no tigers left.

Think of those days of your school when your sciences teacher used to teach you about food chain. We all know that tigers are predators, they hunt herbivorous (vegetarian) animals. Now if there are no tigers left then herbivorous will grow in population. If there is  blast in there population, then there will be more animals feeding on vegetation (trees, plants, grass). And do keep in mind they eat like hell (try googling it if you want proof). Then obviously scarcity in vegetation will arise, as a result these animals will start dying.

So, In the end we are left with no forests (or very little forests) and no animals (or very few animals). This will lead to less tress and then eventually to less oxygen, more carbon dioxide. Planet will become more warmer. Now combine this with global warming, which is already happening.

End result? I won’t be surprised if our planet Earth converts into second Mars in our solar system. In practical sense, this won’t be happening overnight, but if negligence continues, then I am sure that in next 50 years we will have more deserts than Earth has ever seen before.

What Can a Single Person Do?

Obviously a single person can’t do it all by himself unless he is a superman. But still you can contribute and believe me, it helps.

You can do following to help Mother Nature:

• Stop using polybags
• Use recycled paper for rough work
• Don’t burn paper or wood items, rather give them to a recycling center
• Switch off your vehicle’s engines at red light
• Ask your wife not to buy things which are derived from tigers like tiger’s skin purse
• Be a very responsible tourist, don’t feed tigers or any other wild animal
• Don’t leave garbage in forest
• Ask your children, office staff to utilize paper efficiently. Don’t leave white spaces much.

Above points are not only related to tigers, but to environment also.

A Quick Fact

At the turn of the 20th century, according to sources, India had an estimated 40,000 tigers in the wild. In 2002, based on pug mark census, this number was 3,642. As per the monitoring exercise by Wildlife Institute of India in association with National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), Government of India using camera traps, in 2008 we were left with only 1,411 tigers. This number is so small that they will be gone soon if we don’t wake up to the crisis.

Source: http://www.wwfindia.org/about_wwf/what_we_do/tiger_wildlife/how_save_tiger/

In the end, may be you have heard these things everywhere, but merely listening to these things will solve nothing. Start acting now and I bet you, son’t take polythene bag next time and you will feel better.

How to redirect your domain to domain with www prefixed

redirection of your domain (domain.com) name to www.domain.com is very useful and must be done. Reason for this is that when you have a non redirected domain name then search engines will see domain.com and www.domain.com as two separate websites. Hence you will lose much of the website traffic due to this.

One of the simplest solution for this is to add a .htaccess file and permanently redirect your domain name to www prefiixed domain name. Here’s how to do it step by step:

1. Create a file with name ‘.htacess’
2. Add the following code to it:
   

   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteBase /
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.neerajkumar.name$ [NC]
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.neerajkumar.name/$1 [L,R=301]

3. replace the ‘www.neerajkumar.name’ with your domain name
4. upload this file to your web servers root folder

Thats it. You are done. You can check the redirection by typing your domain name in the browser without www prefix.

Note: Above told method only works for apache web servers. For IIS servers I recommend reading http://www.xoc.net/works/tips/domain.asp

Hope this tip will help you! cheers!

This post is related to my life. It’s a kind of experience I have gained in last few years.

Never trust anyone, not even your best friend

This one’s hard to digest but is a bitter truth about life. Money can make anybody crazy like a coo-koo If you are starting a business in a partnership then do remember to agree everything on papers not on words. It’s doesn’t take much time to make people crazy

Never start without money

Everyone talks about this, you must have read it over Internet. This one specifically applies for those who are not fully enthusiastic about their businesses. Everyone thinks that they are, but think again!

Never open your cards unless required

Never share what you have in your mind related to your business, You never know who may steal your idea. There’s a saying that says

anyone can copy your idea, but no one can copy your execution

This is true but only if you have launched your product. Don’t share it if you have not started developing it.

Get a MBA if it’s required

There are a lot of debates happening all the time on this. Not every body requires a MBA. Some are born leaders and some have support in many other ways. I would suggest if you are require MBA then go for it. It’s only two years that will be wasted on studies and it’s better to waste them on studies then rather repenting your whole life.

Few Examples of those whom I think should get an MBA

• A Person from a non business background or family
• A person who have less money and want to start a traditional business
• A person from a pure technical background without managerial experience
• A person who lacks managerial skills

These are some thing that I have learnt, hope will help you guys.

It seems that Hackers have fallen in love with twitter. This is the second time I am seeing twitter being down for more than 20 minutes. Twitter is really finding it hard to handle “Over Capacity”.

Yeah It’s been more than 20 minutes now. If you goto http://www.twitter.com/ you’ll see following image:

Twitter home page

I think twitter guys should take their system’s weaknesses more seriously now. On the other side, I was wondering whether Mr. Bill Gates has to do something with it He recently joined Twitter *grin*read about this news here http://mashable.com/2010/01/19/bill-gates-twitter/!