I enjoyed an impressive service of that of slicehost for hosting xpressmark. But the annual cost of hosting it (a 256MB slice) comes at a price tag of 240 USD (-20 USD for an annual membership) which is a bit on the expensive side considering the fact that I don’t get any revenue out of it. Nevertheless I didnt want to bring it down either. The number of visitors to the site was always on the rise and I felt that people enjoy the service.
So I was looking for an alternative hosting solution (a VDS ofcourse). I came across another solution provider prgmr.com who provided the same solution at 40% of the price.That was pretty cool. And their tag We don’t assume you are stupid means you are on your own once you are given your slice. Though the same applies to slicehost, they have a pretty good console that helps you out in setting up your slice unlike prgmr.com. Rightly so they dont assume you are stupid.
I was successfully able to set it up, was able to setup the environment, bring the server up and migrate the data. But unfortunately couldn’t access the service outside the server, blame it on iptables, had to shut it down and then bingo… Xpressmark back to life in a brand new server (Yes, Luke and his team were in the process of configuring the box and the links to buy the slice werent even made public and I was lucky to get the slice pretty quickly after shooting a mail to them). I will post my experience with prgmr.com in the coming days. Hope it will be as good as slicehost.

I was trying my hands for the first time on RoR (Ruby on Rails).
(Netbeans 6.7 , Windows XP).

In the process, I got the following (misleading error)

126: The specified module could not be found – ../mysql_api.so

But mysql_api.so was in the path where ruby was looking for.
Solution:
Make sure your MySql bin path is in your PATH variable.

I have been using the AVAudioRecorder class to record the audio. But it wasnt allowing me to play it back. I had to restart the application to play it. I had to toil hard with it for a few hours before I found the culprit.

Thanks to this link. The problem was in my AVAudioSession Category which was set to AVAudioSessionCategoryRecord while it should have been AVAudioSessionCategoryPlayAndRecord.

Pomegranate | NS08 – The Phone that has it all

Air traffic in 24 hours

Four Perfectly Round Circles – Neatorama

One primary reason for using the @class is to avoid multiple inclusion of a same header file.
It is clear explained in the Objective-C 2.0 Language guide

The @class directive minimizes the amount of code seen by the compiler and linker, and is therefore the simplest way to give a forward declaration of a class name. Being simple, it avoids potential problems that may come with importing files that import still other files. For example, if one class declares a statically typed instance variable of another class, and their two interface files import each other, neither class may compile correctly.

I was trying to parse an xml response using jquery.
Following is the xml content:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<rows>
     <row>
        <cell>lib</cell>
        <cell>19-06-2009 10:01:55</cell>
     </row>
     <row>
        <cell>usr</cell>
        <cell>19-06-2009 10:01:55</cell>
     </row>
</rows>

This is a valid xml.

Following is the jquery ajax request:

function loadXML() {
    $.ajax({
          url: ‘xml.jsp’,   //assume that the url parses the server directory and gives us the above shown xml    
          type: “GET”,                 
          dataType: “xml”,
          success: function(data) {
          console.debug(“success”);
            var rows = $(data).find(‘rows’);
            //now parse each of the row in rows
            $(rows).find(‘row’).each (
                     function() {
                          //now parse each of the cell in row
                          $(this).find(‘cell’).each (
                               function() {
                                    var cellValue = $(this).text();
                               }
                         );
                     }
             );
          },
          error: function(data) {
               console.debug(data.status);
          }
    });

Everything seems so good until the program enters the error block of the ajax request.
The status displayed was 200.
It looks like some parser error when digged deep into the XMLResponse using firebug.
So what could be wrong?
It is actually the inclusion of header that was the problem.
If you have set the content-type as ‘text/xml’ then there is no need for a xml header.
Hope this could solve someone banging their head with this issue.

Quite a funny video that was released as part of the Microsoft jingle/video contest

Song A Day #202: Bing Goes The Internet

Everyone sees the sponsored ads on right side of their gmail mail box. Now adding the following text to their mail seems to kill those ads.

I enjoy the massacre of ads. This sentence will slaughter ads without a messy bloodbath.

Pretty smart!!!