Announcing Chessific

I'm very excited to announce the launch of our first product at APP2 Technologies: Chessific

Chessific empowers chess players around the world with "fast", "deep" and "affordable" computer analysis. Think of it as "chess analysis meets cloud computing".

Please visit the site to learn more!

A new beginning

Something I've dreamed of since childhood is happening... I'm starting my own software company. I always knew this is what I would eventually do. A quote to mark the occasion:

"Its time to trust my instincts, close my eyes and leap" - Stephen Schwartz

Maker's schedule, Manager's schedule

This article explains very nicely why I've always hated long meetings and in general disliked short meetings too. Now that I'm a manager also doing development/programming, it gets even more tricky.

Switched over to OpenDNS

DNS lookups from my home network have been getting really slow lately, thanks to my ISP (BSNL). Switched over to the OpenDNS servers this morning and experienced an immediate increase in browsing speeds. Firefox no longer just waits at "Looking up ....".

Using GEdit as a Rails IDE

The thing I look for the most in an IDE is speed. Over the past few months, been trying out different options for Rails development. Eclipse + RadRails looked promising, but turned out to be quite slow. Then, shifted to using NetBeans 6.1, which turned out to be better than RadRails, but not as fast as I needed it to be. My search finally led me to customizing GEdit (yes, believe me) and so far been quite happy using it. It blazing fast (except the SnapOpen plugin), and the plugins are pretty cool too. The integration with Rails itself is nothing great, but who needs that when you can cook up a bunch of shell scripts.

Linux Tip: Give gedit the Power of TextMate
Pimp my Gedit (Was: Textmate for Linux) | Grigio
Thaumatocracy » Post Topic » Textmate for Linux
Gedit/ToolLauncherPlugin - GNOME Live!

How do they make money?

Every time I see a new Web 2.0 site, one of the first things that comes to my mind is "how do these guys make money?". Take TinyURL, for example. Or Twitter. Looks like many of these services follow the principle of "get big first, worry about business models later", or rely mostly on advertising revenue. Some related links:

• TinyURL.com - The next YouTube?
• Twitter's Monetization Conundrum
  

pypeek - peeking at a particular line in a log file

Announcing pypeek, a pretty straightforward Python script to print out a given line in a log file, with lines of context. While it works fine standalone, it's meant to be used in conjunction with grep. When I search for something interesting in a log file, I usually also want to see lines around the matching line, e.g. when I grep for NullPointerException, I also want to see the nearby lines to understand the problem better.

Usage: peek filename line_number [no. of context lines]

grep MyException -n big-file.log | cut -d":" -f1 | xargs -n1 peek big-file.log

P.S.: Don't try it with very huge log files just yet. It's painfully slow. Planning to work on a memory mapped I/O version later.