Geek with an attitude

I know, I know, it’s a bit of a cheesy title to promote my Open Source project but here me out - it really does work. Though I didn’t really write it to track my new year resolutions (I’ve never found them effective beyond a week), I did write it out of constant frustration with not finding a TODO productivity tool that stuck with me. Let me explain… I’ve tried EVERYTHING! Google Calendar & tasks Sending myself Emails Wiki (Dokuwiki, Mediwiki, Twiki etc.) Tomboy Tomboy with UbuntuOne & Android App EverNote Remember the Milk Gedit notes on my desktop Post-it notes widget Actual Post-it notes Old-skool diary Pieces of paper including backs of payment receipts From the above list, if anything came remotely to sticking as a habit, then it’d be the sticky notes & pieces of paper. I’m not suggesting the other methods suck, but I wouldn’t use it beyond a couple of weeks. Why was it that despite me spending hours on a computer, the best thing that had a chance of r...

The passing of Steve Jobs came in as an instant shock that morning as I was reading the news on my phone. While it wasn't as much of a surprise as when MJ passed away, mainly because I had seen that one photo of Steve wearing a black gown coming back from the hospital, something inside me felt empty. When many flooded the social media and TV with messages of condolences and looking back at his achievements, I just watched not sure how I should express the loss. So after about a week later, when I was asked if I can do a talk on Steve Jobs for Refresh Colombo , I immediately and almost impulsively said YES! But I still wasn't sure what I wanted to say. One thing I did know was that I didn't want to recap his life or accomplishments like I knew the guy. Soon after accepting the talk, the next thing I almost instantly realized was that I needed to get Chanux in as a co presenter, not because we've recorded so many episodes of a podcast together but due to his reactio...

Recently I've been looking for an alternative to docbook , which I've used for most of my tutorial handouts and internal developer documentation at Thinkcube . But the more I used it docbook the more I wanted a simpler solution which didn't require me to make sure my XML was in order. Naturally, at first I thought I'd try Latex since it had a pretty good wrap with geeks and has even surpassed usability expectations set forth by some of the mainstream wordprecessors :). What I loved about Latex was you could concentrate on the content first and formatting later. Its legendary ability to output desktop publishing quality documents and convert to a variety of formats such as html, pdf or odt was a killer. Just as I was about to dive into Latex, Chanux suggested Markdown as an alternative. Hmm, Markdown, I pondered... I even liked the sound of it. It turns out Markdown is even better! You could think of it as a simplified wiki syntax but a better description would...

So it's been a little over a month since I switched to MacOSX Lion as my primary desktop after running Ubuntu and before that Gentoo on this Macbook. So why'd I finally switch? Well I'm sure it comes at no surprise to existing mac owners who mostly run OSX anyways. I'm different! I owned two Mac's to date, first a MacMini G4 (PPC) since 2006 and now a Macbook Aluminum since 2009, both primarily ran some flavor of Linux. Sure I had OSX lying around in another partition, but I'd only boot into it once in a while, just to update or checkout an interesting app or two. Linux was what i used, not because OSX was bad (like Windows is) but because I was more comfortable with it, it was more flexible, had more innovation happening (pretty much every 6 months) and above all it was fun to use. Part of that fun was really the do-it-yourself attitude Linux has had for years but is somewhat fading away IMHO with distros such as Ubuntu. Its also no secret that I l...

There's an old quote, "Reading makes a full man". I'm not quite sure who said it but I know it's got to be at least a couple of years older than myself because I was introduced to the concept early on by my dad. Despite the early infusion of such words of wisdom, I really never turned out to be a good reader. For one, I could never read on a moving platform for more than 60 seconds without feeling nauseous. Forget about reading in bed either, for more than 40 - 60 minutes (my record might be about 90 minutes) before the book starts slapping my face multiple times as I loop over the same paragraph of text over and over before giving up and falling asleep! When I do get into the mood of reading, it still seems to take me much longer to finish a book when compared with, oh I don't know my sister! She's got a ton of books, almost all novels and I remember seeing her finish them fast. So early on as a kid, I realized, my reading time was precious and best spe...

Greeting fellow bloggers and no I'm not dead. Blogging for me has got to a point where its a post or two per year! So at this point it doesn't matter what I say because I doubt any of my old followers are going to read this any time soon. As usual, I would have blamed busyness (a result of %s/y/i/) and twitter but honestly speaking it was the absence of the mood which killed it. Lately I've been doing so much of writing at work, the last thing I want to do is come home and do more of it. So instead, I'd prefer to pretend to hack on some C/C++ or Ruby or PHP and play some PS3 and call it a day. Today was different, it was our celebration of the International Sysadmin's day . So unlike my typical day, I went to a bar and talked geek with fellow sysadmins, all the while munching away on bites and sipping on some free beer (free for now, IOU Deep). During our conversation, amidst the noisy band that was playing, one of the things, I came out and confessed is the topic...