www.change.gov – A good first step ?

May be I spoke too soon.  I see the transition team has a website up.  Looks like a positive step for the eager get connected generation. It also seems those dying to be in the new administration can even apply for jobs! May be time for that CTO job for somebody.

A Socially Networked White House ?

For me one of the most exciting takeaways of this election year is the hope that we may be finally having a president who understands the power of technology for engaging people, and possibly for applying it for the services of good, besides things like Project Echelon, FISA and black ops projects.

A New Beginning

I never wanted to discuss politics here. But this is too important of a day in our short lives to just let the moment go by without leaving a footprint in my little world.

Now I can come out and say every penny of my campaign contribution towards the new president elect’s run was worth it, and I have been proven wrong in my theory that this country has a long way to go before electing somebody other than a white man as a president. I never thought that would be possible.

IT@Home: Monitoring QNAP NAS with Nagios

Once I had a Nagios server set up running on my network, I was trying to figure what would be a good way to monitor the status of my QNAP TS-209 Pro NAS box. It seems there are two possibilities – one is to use the NRPE and Nagios plugins port available on Optware IPKG and the other is to go down the SNMP route using the net-snmp package available as a part of the same Optware system, and use it in combination with check_snmp Nagios plugin. Here is what I ended up doing.

IT@Home: Keeping an Eye on Things with Nagios

For a while I wanted to have a network management console to rule over my home PC dominion. It would be nice to be able to monitor all the status of scheduled jobs on my various PCs. Having used things like HP Openview, etc. in the past, I always wanted to set up something similar at home. So I finally started to investigate it few months ago and I was surprised to find the range of Open Source options available to home users like me. This wikipedia page has a nice comparison of options that are out there. Most of the open source ones seem to aim for Linux server deployments with monitoring agents available for windows and other OSs. The architecture for most of these solutions consist of a network monitoring server and bunch of agents or slave servers sitting on different boxes.

Sprint XOHM up yet in Boston area?

This morning when I fired up my N810 WiMAX device to connect to one of the local wifi networks looks like it managed to successfully connect to Sprint XOHM network. Have been listening to WBUR stream since then. The connection did drop a couple of times. But I was able to reconnect back in.

India’s Lunar age: Putting IT body shops to domestic use!

Earlier this week I have been trying to follow up on the launch of Chandrayaan, India’s first moon bound satellite. Being from the old country I had a natural interest specially since I think I have finally managed to overcome the cynicism of past and trade it in for a more hopeful future. So I started poking around the ISRO website to find a surprisingly dated  website design with hardly enough information that one would expect to accompany such a ground breaking event for India.

IT@Home: Personal Sitebar server integration with IE

Recently I started using Sitebar server on my Ubuntu box to centrally manage my bookmarks. I prefer this option over using my.sitebar.org hosted option. The server was fairly easy to deploy and install and setup of the extension for Firefox to use my personal Sitebar server instead of my.sitebar.org was quite straightforward. However when it came to IE on my XP laptop it seems the Sitebar addon for IE does not give you the option to change the Sitebar server location from my.sitebar.org. The easy way to get around that is to open up regedit, assuming you have registry modification privilege. Then search for the my.sitebar.org string in the registry parameter values. If your home Sitebar server is accessed as my.homeserver.org/sbar/ then replace the “my.sitebar.org” with this string in all of the occurrences.

Android G1: Google lock-in?

I don’t have the privilege to access a G1. But have been reading number of reviews of folks who have such as Walt Mossberg at WSJ. One thing that have caught my attention is that I need to have a Google ID and password to be able to use the phone in a meaningful manner. I don’t know the scope of that control but is this a precursor to a new trend?

The Kill switch: Device Management in action?

The kill switch discussion now includes the Android devices. Google in in their terms of service agreement for apps for the  Android Marketplace reserves the right to remotely remove a violating application from Android devices. This recent discussion of remote kill switch first emerged in the iPhone context, and now it has moved on to Android G1 devices. It reminded me of an area of technology called Mobile Device Management, that I once had to spend some time with. If it’s indeed Device Management that is in play here, it’s kind of interesting to see it directly affecting users and developers in such overt way. Often this technology operates behind the scene, and undercover with little awareness on the user’s part.