QIK is shutting down.

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Qik a video sharing & live broadcasting mobile app from Skype is closing its service. & You have no choice but see your videos being deleted.
In past, I had tested this app for performance, quality & lag. I livestreamed it on qik.com and uploaded directly on youtube without editing. (Switch captions-ON if you dont understand my accent)
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiiE0Pw40xM&w=360&h=250]
As you can see in above video, it doesnt have any noticeable time-lag, also it never crash on me. It had many features & ‘was’ pretty stable app. The app is no more available in the app-store & the service will be terminated by 30th April 2014.
This is very disappointing to hear the news. I was a fan of QIK because I found the app quite useful broadcasting quick messages and announcements & because there’s no better alternative to such service… you cannot livestream/broadcast your video directly from mobile. The mobile app from livestream.com is ridiculous & is only made for consuming the content.

qik-terminate

There’s no option to download on left side. nor you can upload the video on youtube.


Although they’ve suggested in FAQ, that you can download your files or upload to youtube directly. I do not see the option in my dashboard. I should download/move my video files before they discontinue the service. [click on the image for detailed view] There’s no download option nor share on ‘youtube’ option is active. Qik was acquired by Skype which is acquired by Microsoft. You can guess who to blame here. But must thank Skype as they brought qik on iOS app-store. But keeping all doors shut when house is burning is totally unfair. I wish I’m wrong, I should investigate further.

Announcing GMAT FAQ

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It’s been long since I declared about publishing GMAT FAQ -an easy Q&A list that covers most of the GMAT related questions. Creating ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ page was in my mind since I started this blog way back in 2006.
I scribed the list & answers, it must have been 4-5 years. A lot has changed since then, & I’ll make sure the information I publish is latest & correct. I’d post one question at a time. Twice a week. Every Monday & Thursday.
I’ve created FAQ specific feed so that all frequently asked questions covered, come under one category.

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid – Albert Einstein*

That sums the current state of the educational system of universal design for instruction and assessment.

einstein-quote

Assessing everyone using same test and scale proves totally unfair.

The examiner in pic says:

For fair selection everybody has to take the same exam: Please climb that tree.

I don’t want this measurement to be used in my company. We don’t have dedicated HR department for assessment and sometimes it’s convenient to use universal design. But that will unfair for some. #justsaying. I’m currently reading this thought-provoking book called Maverick
– related to HR and work culture.
*P.S. I cannot confirm whether the quote used above is Einstein’s or not but it conveys my point with the illustration below.

Blocked political campaing ads on my sites

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adsense-blockDuring the last loksabha campaign I see very aggressive online marketing by LKAdvani.in & team. It was so annoying that I had to block the site from my AdSense to prevent them from my sites, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t use The Indexer help instead. It’s that period again I can see these annoying ads. So I blocked Congress & BJP websites.

Deheradun Express burns near Gholvad Dahanu Station

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19019 Mumbai Bandra Terminus Deheradun Expres caught fire between Dahanu and Gholvad railway stations of western railway. The train was scheduled to halt at Dahanu Road on 2:17am in the morning.
I live in Gholvad, so I could get first hand information. I got up early in morning at 4:30 due to police siren. This is very unusual for small and calm village. I thought of police chase, but later came to know about the accident (the siren must be of ambulance). Three boogies caught fire, the train came to halt promptly, thanks to gateman’s on level-crossing between Dahanu & Gholvad who quickly reported this to driver.
All national news channels on TV are covering this incident. They should better know.
I may update this post, as I get more first hand information. Still, watch TV for latest news.

WindowsPhone 8 owners get 20GB more SkyDrive space

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The Windows Phone 8 owners have more to cheer for this Christmas. Today I received an email from Microsoft showing some love for me purchasing Windows Phone 8 device. They have offered 20GB extra space in SkyDrive storage for 1 year.  *something similar you get if you’re an MS Office 365 home premium subscriber.

skydrive

All WP8 device owners- claim additional 20GB SkyDrive storage space as Enthusiast bonus!


Unfortunately for me my Office 365 premium subscription neither gave me Skype world minutes nor 20GB+ SkyDrive space. The MS support rep suggested me to restart (cancel and start again) my 365 plan to rectify the error. Well, I didn’t restart my office 365 home premium service & stopped its service. To make it up, I got this email first thing in the morning! Thank you Microsoft. I hurried redeem the code & claimed the extra SkyDrive storage.
& what do I see? Oh yeah, baby! 45 GB of SKYDRIVE with 20GB as “Enthusiast bonus!” Now don’t be jealous, I’ve been a loyal member of SkyDrive & using it since 25GB era.

Moved

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We have moved our sites to a better server. Migrating to an un-managed private server is quite an experience, but you get to play with Linux distro of your choice and learn a lot in the process.  Plus, you get freedom, root access, and can make partitions, clone the system, can build OS & webserver of your choice from scratch. Although WordPress doesnt need a lot of freedom or root access, simple LAMP stack with mod_rewrite enabled apache would be adequate. I chose Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS & Apache 2.2. I must admit that complexity or freedom was not the reason for this move. I’ve few complex wordpress sites running with multisite or buddypress/bbpress  setup; & they’ve been running without trouble on shared hosting.

Linode Private Server, Japan datacenter


You should see significant performance improvement on our sites network now. I have been thinking of Amazon web services (AWS) & MediaTemple’s (+ve) hosting for couple of years. But then I found a better service & suitable servers. Name is Linode. Their servers are located all across the US, one in the UK & one in Japan. You get a choice of 6 locations & build your own CDN, setup load-balancing & make a highly scalable setup. You can increase RAM, disc space with a click of a button & get charged on a hourly basis. They’ve been doing cloud before cloud 😉 enough said.