Jamie and I had to pose for photos at her parents’ house the other day and we really liked one.  Given we don’t take too many photos, I decided to publish.

I’m not the most photogenic person so have to take advantage when they turn out okay. 

I visited iStock Photo today and it was inaccessible but their error message was pleasantly humorous.  I reckon if every system had error messages like this, people would be a much better mood when calling tech support.  Enjoy!

Ahhh… the application made a boo boo. 

Mine was fantastic, obviously!    Have a great day and remember, things could be worse.

I recently ran across an issue where emails were being rejected from one server as it did not resolve reverse DNS. It was sending email alerts for certain events and we had no way to tell if mails were failing as spam filters were dumping them into a black hole somewhere. The solution was to modify our system to publish alert emails to a database table instead, then have a separate application check for unsent mail in the database and send it using SMTP authentication from our standard mail server. This is likely a common need for various systems so I thought I’d share the design/source to help others.

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I always forget because it’s infrequent that I actually have to maintain servers but from time to time I have to match our in-house dev box with production environments. This is primarily for my recollection but hopefully it helps others too:

Checking if package exists:

rpm -q package-name

Downloading RPMs from remote site:

wget http://www.site.com/path/to/file-with-long.name.i386.rpm

Installing new package:

rpm -ivh file-with-long.name.i386.rpm

Removing package:

rpm -e file-with-long

Updating existing package:

rpm -UvH file-with-long.name.i386.rpm

My friends Sumit and Ana had their second child, a son named Shyan. See one of the photos they shared and the note about their new bundle of joy. CONGRATULATIONS!

Ashyana poking her little brother on the nose. “Is he real?”

Message from Sumit to Friends/Family:

Friends,
I am very happy to announce the birth of our baby boy, Shyan Callan Guha. He came into the world on Thursday August 16th at 3:21 am at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in San Francisco, weighing in at 6 lbs 9 oz and measuring 19 inches long. He is already very adept at mind-control and seems to be the only one able to calm down his big sister when everything else has failed. For those who are interested, the name Shyan (pronounced ‘s h a r n’) is an Indian name meaning ‘exhilaration’.

Mother and son are doing great. Father and daughter are ecstatic and running on adrenalin.

Here are a few pictures of the little one. More pics will be published on http://www.anaraja.com shortly, so stay tuned.
We would love to hear from you and, if in SF, please drop by.

Take care,
Ana, Sumit, and Ashyana

I wanted to vent about the silly high-definition DVD format wars as it’s a pain for consumers. I liken the HDDVD and BluRay battle to having 3-4 phone books in a city. Of course competition is supposed to be great for the consumer, but imagine how many titles will have to be replaced once the studios and manufacturers decide on a single format. In the end, the consumer loses so not all competition is good.

The BluRay disc holds 50 GB of data compared with the HDDVD’s 30 GB and it seems they are winning over more studios and titles. I had considered buying a BluRay player but then see press noting that the movie Bourne Ultimatum will only be available on HDDVD. My only recourse is to wait it all out, or buy a multi-player by LG. At $1200 retail (although reducing to $999 given Samsung will introduce their dual format player soon), this is a steep price to pay.

The reason I liken the war to having multiple phone books is because of how they hurt businesses and ultimately, consumers. For many years in my hometown, the USWest (now DEX) was the only phonebook. Businesses would advertise in the Yellow Pages and consumers knew how to find them. Then another publisher decides to come into town and dropping books on doorsteps. Now salesmen are hitting up businesses twice, spending twice the budget to reach the same amount of consumers. There are now 4 phone books in Missoula and if businesses choose to advertise in all 4, their prices will rise to cover the costs and this ultimately hurts the consumer. I personally advise consumers to throw out all other books and all businesses to advertise in only one.

Consumers should also take control in the high-definition DVD battle and only purchase one format of disc. This will end the war, bring the equipment prices down and ultimately benefit the consumers. It looks like Toshiba might lose this time (they beat Sony during their last format war).

One of our baby girls, Nikki, decided to take a cat nap and dream about Met Life’s new 9 lives insurance program - or she just likes Snoopy.