Ipad2 is a great device for reading and it gives a mind blowing experince especially with apps like Flipboard and The daily.

I was very tempted to start reading my rss feeds which I read through Google reader and set up my google account.  The reading experience was not very bad but when you compare to flipboard and The daily, you would hate it.

So I started looking for an app which could use my existing google account and give me a great reading exp. I was able to find MobileRSS which pulled feeds from my google account including my bookmarked posts.

It has been great reading experience on mobile rss and I would definitely recommend it. The best part is price : Free.

Amazon has entered into app store market by launching its own App store. This morning  Amazon AppStore Developer program . Yes it will be android apps only . But this gives another platform for developers to create and sell their app.

amazon-android-App-Store

This is close to on heels of Launching Kindle development Kit , which was in limited beta.

They are waiving $99 program fees for the first year which is a very welcome move.

What is the criteria for approving apps ?

Nothing has been said in this regard but my guess is that they will stay away from pornographic and controversial apps. Of course they would not block apps like google voice !!

This could be more beneficial to developers because Read more…

Ever wondered how to convert all of your blog posts into an ebook ?

Look at BookBrewer.

How it Works: Import posts from your site or blog, or copy/paste from a manuscript. Edit content and drag it into chapters and boom…the boom is ready.

You can start selling your ebooks with them as well. Pay $89.99 to send your eBook to online stores with your ISBN or one we assign for free, or $199.99 to get an ePub file to do with as you wish.

An amazing hot deal !  Beginning Nov 1 , Amazon will offer 1 year of free usage to its web services in cloud to all new customers. The free stuff includes

AWS Free Usage Tier (Per Month):

• 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
• 750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing*
• 10 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 1 million I/Os, 1 GB of snapshot storage, 10,000 snapshot Get Requests and 1,000 snapshot Put Requests*
• 5 GB of Amazon S3 storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests*
• 30 GB per of internet data transfer (15 GB of data transfer “in” and 15 GB of data transfer “out” across all services except Amazon CloudFront)*
• 25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage**
• 100,000 Requests of Amazon Simple Queue Service**
• 100,000 Requests, 100,000 HTTP notifications and 1,000 email notifications for Amazon Simple Notification Service

  **
  

In addition to these services, the AWS Management Console is available at no charge to help you build and manage your application on AWS. Read more…

To a newcomer, it is not always clear if he should use wordpress , one of the most popular blogging platforms , or use Drupal content management.

Here is quick comparison between two and which one suits you best.

WordPress

This is one the most popular blogging platform and you should use if you satisfy the following conditions:
1. You want to “just blog”, and don’t want to mess around with programming code, website design and the like.
2. You are satisfied either with the default theme (appearance) provided by WordPress, or can find a WordPress theme from a third party that suits your requirements.
3. You are a solitary blogger – you don’t need support for separate blogs on one website, where there are different people posting to different blogs.
4. There are literally thousands of free plugins and themes for wordpress. The community surrounding Wordpress really does an outstanding job with this. Drupal doesn’t quite have as many plugins (called modules in Drupal) and themes to go around.

In fact you have a plugin for every functionality you might wish like integrating with flickr, job listings , traffic estimate. You just name it.

5. Out of the box installation. Nearly all hosting providers provide support for wordpress.

Personally, I feel that WordPress is probably a good choice for most casual bloggers. It particularly excels if you are a newcomer to web development, since the default setup is perfectly usable if you are not too fussy.

And best part , wordPress is free.

Drupal

Designing your site to look and behave the way you want it to with Drupal, however, will probably be a daunting task for many people. Don’t undertake it unless: Read more…

When starting with a new project , first question which would come to your mind is which VCS to chose. Given a  lot of options in market like CVS,  SVN ,  Mercurial  and Microsoft VSS  , you have to look at you requirements.

If you are looking for something popular , easy to use , low cost and working with distributed teams, you should go either with CVS or SVN.

Here is quick comparison of various VCS used . This is a result of survey done in 2008 by finalbuilder.

Soucre control surver

Looking at the results, you would surely go with SVN but one should look at why SVN is getting more popular and is taking over CVS.  SVN was created to fix some problems in CVS.   Read more…

We have heard a lot about HTML5 in last couple of weeks. Apple does not want to go with flash technology and are adopting HTML5 as the new standard.  Scribd has ditched flash in favor of HTML5.

Sounds pretty exciting huh !!

So let us dump what we have and start developing in HTML5.

Nope not so fast . Hold on to your hour horses. Yes it is true that HTML5 is becoming the new standard . But at this stage neither all the browsers are ready for HTML5 , nor the clients would be ready with new browsers. So you might have a new website/application built in HTML 5 , using new tags but the clients are still with IE6 !!

You do not want to land in this situation.

Aditya Yadav’s  interview on Info q Deploying HTML 5, talks about some of issues around this new standard and he has put together an excellent table detailing compatibility level of each browser with HTML5 features.

Over 250,000  students take the prestigious CAT exam every year in India . The test was conducted using pencil and paper.  Indian Institutes of Management, a network of India’s top business schools in India which conducts CAT had a  $40 million deal to computerize IIM’s Common Admission Test. This deal was bagged by none other than Prometric.

For $40 million , Prometric has done a very lousy job.  When students went in to take the exam on 28 Nov, the servers crashed. And not all of the 250,000 students were taking the test. It was only 20% of them.

The students who took the online Common Admission Test, some of them were not quite convinced about the new format of the examination. And their fears had come true.

Well 50,000 stduents concurrently taking test should not be a rocket science . Compare to ebay , Amazon and twitter which handle multiples of traffic every minute. Looks like prometric did not even bothered to conduct a pilot run.

No update on when the service will be restored and if IIM can afford to have this kind of glitch again.