Om Malik posted about the NSF website chronicling the birth of the Internet. What a cool site. I skimmed it briefly and found this entry for 1980s:

In the mid-1980s, NSF decided the time was right to try to link its regional university networks and its supercomputer centers together. This initial effort was called NSFNET. By 1987, participation in the new NSFNET project grew so rapidly that NSF knew it had to expand the capacity of this new network. In November of that year, it awarded a grant to a consortium of IBM, MCI, and a center at the University of Michigan called Merit to create a network or networks--or internet--capable of carrying data at speeds up to 56 kilobits a second. By July 1987, this new system was up and running. The modern Internet was born.

I came to the U.S. on Sept. 3, 1987 from India to begin my Bachelor's degree at Western Michigan University. I remember logging on to the Merit network that same month from the campus computer lab. Since, at the time, everything about computers was totally new to me (other than the Sinclair ZX Spectrum+, my home computer), I had no idea until today that this was a brand new network and more importantly, the first "network of networks."

I have been thinking on and off about Posterous since I first used it and decided to put my thoughts down in a post. Nischal asked the question "Would you stick to Posterous?" My answer today is "No" for the simple reason that it's difficult to make the commitment to use Posterous as my primary blog until custom domains are supported. Redirects just don't cut it.

Also, the brutally honest truth is that Posterous is on borrowed time. If the service does not start innovating rapidly, get huge user adoption and then create a significant reason for users to stay, it will soon become irrelevant. Its primary feature -- email to blog -- is not enough of a differentiator because technically it is not very difficult to implement and other blog engines will be quick to offer it to their users (some already do).

I think Posterous should be thinking about ways in which they can continue to stay relevant and even attractive to bloggers by doing the exact opposite of what they are doing right now. Instead of trying to be a blogging platform, they ought to focus on being an email publishing utility very much like FaceBook is positioned as a social utility. The AutoPosting capabilities available on the service are a great way to start, but they could be so much more. Instead of just supporting vanilla posts with title and body and hosting the photos/media here, they should go all out and implement email to MetaWebLog and other API's. Being able to use email to make a complete, detailed post to WordPress, DasBlog and other blogging engines would be great. Add template, tagging and categorization and it starts to get really interesting.

And while they are at it, they should do it for not just 10, but 100's of other services. Basically, email enable every ProgrammableWeb.com API for which email posting makes sense and that has any kind of traction. That would be killer and greatly increase the barriers for competition as users don't like changing habits unless there is a very good reason. Imagine "posterous" becoming a verb for "posting something to any web service using email." I think this would be a bigger opportunity for the company and allow it to become truly indispensable compared to where it is now -- a "me too" blogging platform which re-posts to other services.

Bottom line, forget the blogging and focus on the email.

I posted a comment on Rick Strahl's post on Server Errors when updating live Web applications online about a technique to update assemblies of live apps. I use the following approach:

1) I only keep the assemblies unlikely to change in bin (i.e. components, third-party libs etc.). I put my app's assemblies into a sub-folder of bin and name the folder according to the date (for example: bin\20080801)

2) My web.config has the following:

<runtime>
<assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
<probing privatePath="bin;bin\20080801;" />
</assemblyBinding>
</runtime>

When I need to update assemblies, I just upload them into a new sub-folder in bin, again with a name corresponding to the current date (bin\20080812). After the upload is complete, I upload web.config with a change to the sub-folder name. The app re-starts and picks up the new assemblies and forgets about the old sub-folder assemblies which I can leave or delete.

Seems to work and has the added benefit of speeding up the app start since the sub-folder assemblies are ignored until needed.

Last month, a few days before my birthday, I decided that I needed to acquire some new skills and do some new things, while broadening my knowledge of things I already know (i.e. software development). More importantly, I wanted to not spend as much time in front of the computer. Instead of posting about it and then hoping to follow through, I decided to do the opposite. I started the process and am now happy to report that I have made good progress in five areas:

1) Building Stuff: I love working with tools and making things. My first project was to build a swing set for my daughters. I got lumber from Lowe's and built one from scratch. My kids love it and it's great not having to drive down to the playground every day.

My second project is to build earth boxes, five to be precise. Savi wants to grow vegetables and the earth boxes are the perfect solution. It's labor intensive to build one, but not very difficult. I have completed one and am working on the rest.

2) Baking: I love bread but rarely find bread I like at the store. Solution -- bake my own. Savi got me a bread-maker for my birthday and I love it. So far I have baked a loaf of plain, white bread and yesterday, I baked a walnut-raisin loaf. I am not much of a cook and making eggs is the extent of my culinary expertise. But after baking this bread, I am beginning to see why so many people love to cook. It is quite relaxing and to have an end product that family and friends can enjoy is quite rewarding.

3) Mixing: As I have mentioned on this blog before, I am an avid fan of A/V. Until about 2003, one of my favorite things to do was to V.J. parties and weddings for friends. I never did it for money as then it would become work and stop being fun. After moving to DC in 2003, I never did any gigs until last week. Friday (8/8/08), my friends Todd and Diana got married in Napa. My daughter Gia was the flower girl and I had the honor of providing the entertainment for the wedding. Since I did not want to abandon the wife and kids during the reception, I did something novel (for me) -- I created a video mix on DVD for the entire evening's entertainment. Everything from the bride/groom dances to the various dance sets were all on DVD and all I had to do was press Play. I used an 80's theme and mixed lots of music videos from the decade along with an intro scene from "Back to the Future," Todd's favorite movie. I enjoyed making the mix so much, that I am now motivated to create more DVD mixes of my kids photos/videos for family back in India.

4) Software: This item is more about broadening my skills beyond ASP.Net and DotNetNuke. I have been an avid fan of Google AppEngine since the day it went live. Since I had no prior knowledge of Python or Django, I had to come up to speed fast. I attended a few meet-ups at Google and picked-up a copy of Python Power. Between the book and the meet-ups and just tinkering with code, I now have progressed far enough to create fairly advanced apps on AppEngine in Python. I plan on continuing to learn more advanced concepts and focus on developing a single application that will also be the basis of my AppEngine presentation at the DotNetNuke OpenForce / SDN Conference in Amsterdam this October. More about this application in a future post.

5) Teaching: I love to teach kids. It doesn't matter what the subject matter is, it's just fun to be able to share and help them learn. This summer, I have undertaken to teach my 12-year-old nephew how to program, continuing indefinitely. After researching the topic, I settled on Phrogram as the language to use for instruction. So far, I am quite impressed with everything about the IDE and the language. I setup a virtual machine, put it on a DVD and mailed it to him (he is not allowed to use the Internet other than for class assignments). He was able to install VPC, get the virtual machine up and running and write his first Phrogram. I will have some detailed blog posts about my experience on this in the near future also.

Yes, it's true that three of the five things require time in front of the computer. But they still represent a shift and have helped me achieve my goals.

 

At the height of the dot-com boom, I founded a venture-funded startup called iWidgets.com. My vision was to have mini-apps called "widgets" that you could plug into web portals that were all the rage at the time. Unfortunately, the market was not ready for widgets back in 1999, and when the stock market took a dive a couple of years later, so did my company.

Fast-forward to present day and there is a new iWidgets.com site created by someone else. Here's how eHub describes it:

Create custom widgets for your website or your brand with iWidget. Using their online wizard, you can easily create widgets that your website visitors or customers can add to their iGoogle start page, Facebook profile, or their own blog. Your widget is customizable by your users so that it fits right in with their design.

It felt very strange seeing the site...sort of like seeing someone else wearing your favorite shirt. I spent some time on the site playing with their tools and was very, very impressed. Great job iWidgets.com team, wish you much success.