We developers love it when people use our applications on social networks, but sometimes it can go a little too far, one of my friend’s profile looks something like this:
Archive for March, 2008
Dreamhost – Out of Space?
Saturday, March 29th, 2008So things were looking bleak with Dreamhost’s latest troubles, but it now seems they want me to switch to another host earlier than I want to. Sure, shared hosts oversell, but they normally do it in a managed way, but something’s gone seriously wrong with Dreamhost’s probability calculations. I tried downloading a file and it told me I was out of space. Now, I am using about 2% of my allocation, so it isn’t me that’s the cause here, have a look:
Houston , we a problem!
PlotKit and Flotr – JavaScript Graphing Solutions
Thursday, March 27th, 2008I’m pretty happy with the Google Charts API but in case you’re looking for even more graphing solutions for your website, there are two that are more advanced:
PlotKit is a Chart and Graph Plotting Library for Javascript. It has support for HTML Canvas and also SVG via Adobe SVG Viewer and native browser support.
Flotr comes from Plotr, which itself was derived from Plotkit, here’s the official description:
Flotr is a javascript plotting library based on the Prototype Javascript Framework (version 1.6.0.2 at the moment) and inspired by Flot (written by Ole Laursen).
Flotr enables you to draw appealing graphs in most modern browsers with an easy to learn syntax. It comes with great features like legend support, negative value support, mouse tracking, selection support, zoom support, event hooks, CSS styling support and much more.
Both are nice solutions, PlotKit itself derived from an older library called CanvasGraph. If you know others, do mention them in the comments.
Why are there so few India-centric web applications?
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
Here’s your answer! Internet penetration in India is just plain lousy, so where’s the incentive for us developers?
Airtel shares its wisdom
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
… and I thought all along it was the other way round! Either this is invasion of the nerds (hint: IT ISN’T) or its horrible advertising.
Google Apps gets upgraded Gmail
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008Regular Gmail uses got the upgraded Gmail ages ago, but Google Apps users were made to wait for ages. I was checking my mail this morning, and I see this:
Looks like its finally here!
Virgin Mobile India – Playing the Probability Game
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008As much as I’d like to ramble about how evil Virgin are and how much they want to suck out your money, I wont, because some good people are already doing that. Instead, I wanted to talk about a very clever and deceptive marketing trick they’ve employed in India in recent times – yes I’m talking about the “Get Paid for Incoming” scheme, so yeah, I am rambling about how evil they are!
So, the deal is that you get paid Rs. 0.10 for every minute of incoming calls. For a crude analysis, lets assume the average cost of an outgoing call is Re. 1 per minute (local), and averaging that with STD, which is around Rs. 2.40 a minute on Virgin and something similar on other operator, so doing another rough weighted average, lets assume that the average cost of a call in India is about Rs. 1.50 per minute.
It all boils down to this, for every Rs. 1.50 somebody spends, a Virgin customer gets Rs. 0.10. That, not considering VAS and other factors, looks like this:
That’s about the 6% market share Virgin needs to break even based on just calls alone. Now, there are…
Other reasons why Virgin thinks they’ll screw the customers
- They’re targeting the youth segment, and that is one segment which does a lot of texting, so that’s basically free money for Virgin.
- Virgin is pretending to be VAS rich, again free money (for the most part).
- What am I forgetting? Oh yeah, remember all the fees required to keep your connection alive and working. There was so much terminology (top-up, refill, recharge, validity extension, bla. bla.) that I got fed up and got a postpaid. That’s how they mint money.
Based on the above, that 6% might as well drop to well below even 1% if they get the customers they want, and if there’s anything Richard Branson does well, its getting a “certain kind” of customer.
And finally… How to screw Virgin Back
Give up and go back to the days of good old post, it cannot be done. But seriously, do exactly what they show in the ads, you earn, but somebody’s money is most probably going to Virgin.
Oh wait, not to mention losing all of your pride. Wait again, if you’re doing this, you probably never had any.
Facebook IM Preview Video
Monday, March 24th, 2008I had talked about Facebook coming up with their integrated IM client soon. Here is a video preview of what it might look like. This is official, but they’ve said that the final product might be very different.
Dreamhost – Patience Running Out
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008This is the third consecutive year that one of my websites has been hosted with Dreamhost. Despite reading a lot of negative comments about Dreamhost, my experience with them has been positive overall, so I decided to hang in there for a third year, but this year has been anything but happy, and with the last outage of the Blingy cluster, I almost signed up for MediaTemple that same day, and probably would have, has I not read some comments about their basic (gs) package having huge latency issues and other problems.
The next day Dreamhost looked like it was seeking revenge, churning out pages faster than I’d seen it do in months, but good things are never meant to last, Dreamhost is so slow today that even the Visual editor for Wordpress isn’t able to work properly. Come June, I’m anticipating some serious traffic, and at this rate, Dreamhost just wont cope (hell, it cant even cope with a Facebook application with just 115 daily active users right now), so I’m going to the pros. I see two low-cost options stacked up – MediaTemple and SliceHost. SliceHost gives root access on their $20 a month VPS while MediaTemple uses a grid service that is somewhat better than shared services but reportedly not as good VPS, no matter what their marketing hoopla says, but they are trying to correct it with their upcoming (cs) package, which I might consider if its out in time.
Create an iPhone compatible website with iUI
Saturday, March 22nd, 2008Joe Hewitt has created a user interface library for Safari web applications of the iPhone.
Put simply, its a way to create websites that are compatible with the iPhone look. Vladimir Olexa of CNET has already put together a rather neat looking adaptation.
Get the source code here and start tinkering away.