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I signed up with ThrustVPS on Jul 27, 2010. Sounded like a good company although I read a lot of bad review about Rus Foster who is now leading this new venture previously known as DamnVPS. There were lots of issues in the start and not to mention so many down times that went unaccounted for.

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If you are seeing this in your bash (SSH), It makes it tough to navigate through SSH since it doesn’t give you much information.

-bash-3.2#

To fix that, you can simply type this in your SSH when logged in:

PS1="[\u@\h \W]\$ "

I asked my client to buy a Linode for some testing purposes and I tried it for the first time. I must say, Linode is blazzing fast. Downloads are touching 8M/sec and speed, performance is as if its running on a VM on my local system.

Update: Now its been almost a month running Linode and I strongly recommend this VPS company.
Update 2: If you plan to signup for LINODE, use my referral link, it will give you the same price but it will help me a lil http://www.linode.com/?r=587d6a71720a4606811a5710431462642c56bc21

I got this in my mailbox today (since I am a Wateen consumer since Dec 2007)

Dear Valued Customer,

Wateen Telecom is a group company of Abu Dhabi group. Abu Dhabi Group is one of the largest business groups in the Middle East and the one of the largest foreign investor in Pakistan. Abu Dhabi group owns Wateen through Warid Telecom International and Bank Alfalah Limited which hold 79.8% and 20.0% shares respectively.

Wateen’s successful four years of operations in the telecom industry of Pakistan speak for itself, as it successfully deployed the largest commercial and first nationwide 3.5 GHz WiMax network rollout in the world covering 22 cities and 1,100 sites with over 160,000 wireless broadband customers (60% of wireless Broadband market), 12,000 Broadband customers over fiber and 2,700 corporate links (including 26 commercial banks) as well as major GSM and telecom operators as its customers. Wateen Telecom is also the largest operator of satellite services in the country and now offering services to a few telecom operators in Afghanistan. Additionally, optic fiber network spanning over 10,000 KM (7,000 KM deployed and 3,000 KM under deployment) across Pakistan and in all major cities provides a solid backbone for Wateen’s offerings. Wateen also has been acknowledged as the largest alternative LDI operator in Pakistan (with over 1 billion minutes of traffic volume) duly acknowledged by the regulating authority PTA.

Wateen Telecom Limited is now offering 110m shares with an additional Green-shoe option of 90m shares amounting to PKR 2 bn. The IPO will be offered to institutional investors and general public at par value of PKR 10 per share and subscription will be open on 20th & 21st April 2010.

To subscribe, fill the IPO form and submit it to designated banks along with Cheque/PO/Demand Draft in favor of “Initial Public Offering of Wateen Telecom Limited”. Subscription can be made in PKR 5,000 or multiples of it.

Forms and details are available at www.wateen.com, all Wateen Business Centers and Franchise in addition to designated banks or call us at 111-365-365

Best Regards,

Wateen Telecom Limited

The first thought that comes to my mind is … is Wateen really wrapping up?

Just 6 hours ago, I was using Godaddy.com to manage some of my domain names and register new ones and just now it says

I never heard / saw any notice of such maintenance :S It also begs the question about the availability and reliability of GoDaddy.com services

All my technical life, I knew and followed this simple rule

New updates to any application or component are meant to improve and fix the bugs present in it. Downloading new updates ensures that you system is up-to-update, has fixes to all those bugs you have been getting annoyed with and more stable.

Unfortunately not every IT department thinks that, especially the one I am facing at work. According to them, the new updates should only be applied IF and only IF they offer some new functionality (duhh!). Hello! what happened to the bug-fixes that are promised with these updates?

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Many of you might be aware of this for months, like me, about the issues with WordPress‘s upgrade automatically feature. It fails sometimes and then it starts working perfect sometimes, its an annoying little bit*h.

I tried googling to no success and I still do not know whats going on. Does anyone else face the same issue? what is the fix, if any? HELP!

Brett from OnWired has written a very nice blog entry on Kohana and it is exactly what I have found Kohana to be. Hence I am sharing it here for the rest of the people to read. To view the blog entry please go here.

I am going to start on a small system for internal use and I wanted to re-think my choice of CodeIgniter because it does not have templates or ORM. Guess what, I landed with KohanaPHP. It sounds very tempting that a new MVC Framework based on CodeIgniter with new features (especially ORM) is here but the documentation is really really poor.

I tried googling for a book or tutorial and I was really disappointed to have found none. I tried Amazon.com for a book but no books. Looks like I have landed in some weird space that might be good looking but I need to get my hands dirty in the code to learn it and at the end of the day, it may seem that I have lost a lot of hours on this new Framework. Lets give it a try!

Update: As of today (28th July, 2010), I am working on YII, its good, powerful and blazing fast. It has all the feature of CakePHP too.

Well, my initial estimates were wrong. I thought I could retweet the posts and Twitter would give me accurate results. The problem is with twitter results. They are giving me wrong and irrelevant results.

Also, when I ask Twitter to only send me “positive” tweets, it sometimes does not mark most of the positive tweets as “positive”, in fact they are not marked at all. So there are the “positive” tweets, “negative” tweets, “questions” and “unknown” (or “unrated”) tweets. A quick look at these tweets and I can see many of them as good ones that should have been retweeted but they were not.

To get over this situation, I need to have an admin panel where I can see statistics and possibly “approve” the negative / unrated tweets.

Having previous experience working in Zend Framework, CakePHP and CodeIgniter, I would prefer to build it in Code Igniter. I will keep this page updated with more info.