open source « TechNayak(mirror)

How easy is it to build web properties?

December 5, 2007 at 12:24 pm | In Web 2.0, open source | 1 Comment

You may think building a web property needs not just code but scalable hardware, but you will be surprised to know you don’t need anything but a browser. Thanks to hosted infrastructure you can run and control your online business from the realms of a browser. Even the former, code, is something that is sparingly used in today’s businesses. That’s the flexibility the web offers.

Lets see some specifics and understand what I am really talking about. You will say the first thing a web based venture needs are servers and collocation centres, WRONG!! You have EC2 for computing, or EDGE grids, S3 or other similar services for storage and even if you do require the pleasures of your own server, try one of the virtualization technologies of the web hosts. That should just about cover your hardware part of things, except if you are trying to break the record for calculating largest number of decimals found in Pi ( which stands frighteningly close to a trillion digits when I last checked).

Now comes the software part of things. Most web businesses thrive on prebuilt, read to deploy open source software. Be it blogs, wikis, forums, bug tracking tools, there is always an open source software for whatever that is that you want to do. What’s even better, is that some of these software’s are self hosted and all you need is to include some paths and you are up and running with the latest and most stable version of the software. The advantage with this scheme is that you don’t need to manually upgrade your installations; they are done by the provider.

Supposing you do require the luxury of your own server, then invest in one of the upcoming virtualization technologies provided by many top hosts. They give you shell access and the comforts of your own server complete with install privileges and best of all, you don’t maintain it.

So since the hardware and software parts of the company are done, all you have to do is think of an innovative idea and get the ball rolling.

Creative Commons India

July 3, 2007 at 3:43 pm | In gyaan, open source | Leave a Comment

Creative commons is generating a lot of buzz amongst bloggers, photographers and other individuals who quote, ping, use, plagiarize others contents. Well its not just that, Open source enthusiasts are also lining up to learn about the Creative Commons licensing and how it affects or benefits them.

The Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that encourages people to share their creativity and make it available for others to legally build upon and share.

I found this great Podcast from Indian Podguru Kiruba Shankar ( podcasts from the realm of technology to business and entrepreneurial experiences) about Creative Commons India initiative. Speaking to Lawrence Liang, the head of the CCI initiative, Kiruba dwells into the specifics of CC and other topics. Lend me your ear

Click here to listen to the Podcast.

Ubuntu – it rules

July 3, 2007 at 3:38 pm | In open source | Leave a Comment

Note : I blog on my personal space at riteshnayak.com/blog . This is a mirror of the content.

Yes, this weekend I indulged myself in some good old fashioned open source installations and it was really nice. I got myself a copy of Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn and wanted to try it out and boy, am I glad that I did.

For quite sometime I have been contemplating going open with my OS. Though I have legitimate copy of XP, I was tired of all the malware and spyware, plus there was the costs involved in buying other software required for the same. So I made a check list of the things that I used on an everyday basis, heres the list

Internet Connection, Browsers , media players ( audio, video), Office , Eclipse, Resin, Adobe Photoshop and acrobat, messengers, skype. I had heard of ubuntu a lot and wanted to try it out – I had heard it was really good with the system hardware. I got Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn release.

Booted with the CD and the first attraction was awaiting me. The OS boots from the CD and gives u a choice between installing the OS or exploring it. This was really nice considering that you can get a glimpse of the OS without actually installing it. I chose to install and trust me linux installations are a pain considering you need to diskpart and stuff, but ubuntu gave a nifty little utility which selects the install drive by itself. Within 20 mins my basic installation was done and I was on. My first criteria for survival was an Internet Connection, coz without it , there is no point to Linux on your desktop. Gave it my network settings and I was on . Plus my settings from XP had been imported – the users, bookmarks, pictures, documents etc which is very nifty considering you have to run mount commands to make your windows drive visible. Ubuntu went on to auto mount my drives and showed it on my desktop…now how cool is that ?

Next in the agenda was to tick my checklist of things that I needed :

Internet Connection :done
Browsers: Firefox 2 was by default shipped – but I also installed Flock just in case.
Media players (audio, video): Now this was the funny part. Almost all the times I wanted to go Open , I was forced to come back due to the different media types m4a, aac, avi, divx etc etc. Windows codecs were life savers. My last experience with three flavors of Linux namely Red Hat 8, Fedora Core 3 and Suse has proven to be painstaking experiences. So I fire up Totem Music player and try an MP3, it doesn’t play but wait, there is a message saying we can look for things that could help you play this and I click yes. The utility searches through the user maintained repositories and gives me three plugins to install, I do so in like 20 seconds and what do you know all my songs and videos play. Hooray – one of the most important hurdles passed.
Office: Open Office 2.2 packaged with Ubuntu comes with spreadsheets, presentations and also database (access). There is also Evolution mail client to substitute your outlook or you can use Thunderbird from mozilla.
Eclipse : download the linux distros from hereÂ
Â Resin /Tomcat – MySql – all have linux origins so that shouldnt be a problem
Â Adobe Photoshop and Acrobat : the Adobe pdf reader comes packagedÂ and for photoshop functionalities you have Gimp the Gnome equivalent, again packaged with ubuntu
Messengers : now there is the packaged Gaim which can connect to almost all known messenger servers including MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk through Jabber, ICQ etc. Even if you dont have this then you can use pidgin client which essentially does the same.
Skype : download the debian installer from here.Â