Nik Kalyani's Irrationally Exuberant Musings on Technology
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...
I have been learning how to create apps for Google AppEngine, relying mostly on videos. I figured other people might be interested in the same thing so I setup a Ning site that aggregates AppEngine videos.
Here it is:...
On the LinkedInBloggers group, there is an interesting discussion on how to prevent blog harvesting. Turning off RSS feeds and subscription feeds seemed to be the suggested solution. I think this is an impractical solution and makes your blog harder to find and harder to consume with RSS readers.
I wonder if disabling RSS/subscription widgets is the only way? What if there was a simple way to ensure that...
As I go through the process of getting familiar with Google AppEngine, I’ll post interesting things I learn (mostly so I can find them later). Here’s a quick note on GQL query syntax:
Assuming a model called Customer, you can use:
1) customers = db.GqlQuery(“SELECT * FROM Customer ORDER BY name LIMIT 10″)
2) And since GQL queries always return data objects, you can skip the SELECT *... 
Found this little gem on my Facebook feed today. Glad that Shaun has finally come around and become a fan of DotNetNuke. ...
Got word today that I have received the Microsoft MVP Award for the third time. Of course it is April 1, so it could all be a big joke. I am hoping not.
Dear Nik Kalyani,
Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2008
Microsoft® MVP Award! The MVP Award is our way to say thank you for
promoting the spirit of community and improving people’s lives and the
industry’s success every day....
This is turning out to be my rant on crappy service by companies week.
Today, after almost four years or mediocre voice quality, I finally decided to ditch my Vonage line. As required by them, I called in to cancel my account.
For 20 mins. straight, despite my increasingly urgent pleas to just cancel my account, the rep kept insisting that I stay for two additional months free and they would have a tech...
Guy Kawasaki has a good interview with Mickos here.
My favorite:
Question: Have you had any kind of concerns that MySQL will be run like a “big company”?
Answer: I had those concerns even when we were a small startup!
Complacency and arrogance can creep in without your noticing in any
sort of organisation. To avoid it, we have taken some specific steps.
We have released our software under the... 
I want my daughters to grow up having good fundamental knowledge of things like basic electronics, plumbing, mechanical stuff, construction etc. I recognize that more and more analog things will be digital in her future, but it never hurts to know the basics.
To that end, I recently bought Gia, my three-year-old, her first electronics project kit. I researched this quite a bit — I did not want... 
Tried to log into my Comcast account to check my account this weekend and discovered that I had forgotten my password. No problem…click the forgot password link and go through the email password reset drill, right?
Wrong! Comcast’s site suggests re-creating my user profile instead. And when I do try to re-create the profile, it complains that the profile already exists. Well, DUH!
I cannot... 
