Nik Kalyani's Irrationally Exuberant Musings on Technology
When I first started blogging in 2004, I had to decide which platform to use. There were some hosted blog sites available, but my rule of thumb #1 is that if it’s important to me, then I need to have full control over it and not be at the mercy of some other provider. I need to have unfettered access to make changes, enhancements and backups. At the time, the best .NET-based Open Source blogging... 
Today is a big day for me for two reasons:
1) One year ago today, I moved with my family to Silicon Valley from Washington, DC, a city we love and miss very much.
2) Also today, DotNetNuke Corp., the company I co-founded, announced that we have closed on our Series A round of venture funding.
Adjusting to Silicon Valley has had its challenges. Having to drive everywhere after getting around mostly on...
This is a defining moment for America and I am proud that my country has chosen such a transformational figure as Obama to be its next President.
I was moved and inspired by his speech tonight and look forward to doing my part in moving the country forward. As a father of two little girls, I found his future-looking questions most inspiring:
“So tonight, let us ask
ourselves – if our children...
In trying to use an existing VS2008 Project as a WebRole in a Windows Azure Solution, I discovered that the project did not appear as a candidate for selection from the Roles > Add > Web Role Project in solution menu. All the Azure documentation indicates that there is no special requirement for a web project to be a candidate for Azure, so I found this to be odd. The solution, as it turns out, is... 
The only thing missing from my BlackBerry Curve 8310 (service with AT&T) has been video. It did not make much sense since there is a 2MP camera on the device. Posts on the CrackBerry forums pointed to availability of this feature in v4.3.1 of the device OS (now called v4.5.0). Here is a list of all the new features in BB OS 4.5.
Since AT&T takes an ungodly amount of time to release new software...
Joe Brinkman posted a technique to pass parameters to Javascript script files. The approach is simple — append a standard querystring to the script URL and obtain the parameters by locating the script element using the ID attribute, and parsing the key-value pairs from the “src” attribute. A sample usage is like this:
<script id="MyScript"...
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...
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,...
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:...
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... 
