Swap’s Blog

After 22 hours of tiring (on air) journey, I am here in Baytown, Texas. So my experience in the first week.

1. I will not recommend Lufthansa to anyone, at least not on the route (Bangalore-Frankfurt-Houston) I came.

2. It’s a whole new world outside your country and it’s fun.

3. Driving in India is really hard!

4. Broadband means 8mbps

5. It’s much safer back home and I miss it

During the weekend, I visited the Moody Gardens in Galveston Island with my family and other relatives. I must say the aquarium (albeit small) is wonderful. We didn’t have much time but we managed to see the aquarium and get on the Colonel Paddle Boat cruise; you need at least a whole day or two. I’ve uploaded some pictures to my photo album on flickr.

Alright, I am off to Houston for the cPanel conference which starts in 8 hours from now. I’ll be covering it on my blog and twitter (provided it’s up).

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Swap

I almost broke my new year resolution. A long gap since my last blog post. Although I did have a draft pending since a week, this one’s written from scratch So, my vacation has begun. Although I have not taken any work leave at RH or phpFoX, I will still be taking time off other things, especially college! It’s a much needed break, something I haven’t taken in years. My first destination is Bangalore, not that it’s a vacation spot but I’m warming up before the actual tour begins.

It’s hard to remember everything that has happened since a month, best I can say is getting the copy of GTA4 for my Xbox. I only wish I had time to play it over summer but it’ll have to wait. I got my UK visa as well but it took way more time than expected.

Over the summer, I will be visiting my parents in Houston (flight leaves in less than 2 days). The most prominent part of the US trip is the cPanel conference 08. Although we did have a plan of setting up a booth for RH, we had to drop the idea after Christian foud out he has urgent business to attend to during those 3 days. However, I will still have fun attending conference, finding about the next cPanel version and the much talked about, cPanel for Windows. It’ll also give me a great opportunity to meet fellow hosting company owners and administrators. I will be covering each day’s events on my blog.

Although I will be living in Baytown, it seem more convenient to stay in Westin Oaks for the conference. Thanks to cPanel, it’s going to cost only $204/night. I will be visiting our Datacenter as much as possible during the 3 weeks of stay there. It’s just 40 miles from home.

My next destination is the United Kingdom which is purely a vacation (no business there yet!). Thanks to my wonderful brother who stays in London, I’m going to have one hell of a time there.

It’s very sad that Sony still hasn’t fixed my camera and my Samsung G600 is broken as well. It’s impossible to imagine a vacation without it. My Macbook has been syncronized and I am carrying an extrernal drive as a backup. The Mighty Mouse (forgot to review it) is neat and works out of box on both Windows and Mac. The reliance wireless is decent and fairly better than Airtel GPRS.

My next post will be from USA, so long then!

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Swap

I got my US Visa; I’ll be probably leaving to the States within a month.

The 2 day trip to Chennai (via Bengaluru) was really hectic. Chennai is extremely hot and the wait in the VFS office was a nightmare. I couldn’t even use my MacBook let alone a cellphone. All I could do is stare at the two plasma TVs showing disgusting stuff on Animal Planet. On the brighter side, I was hardly asked for any additional documentation during my interview and it went quite smoothly in contrary to all the horrific stories I had heard prior to the interview. All I now need is the UK visa so that I can finalize my itinerary.

And like Borat would say, US ‘n’ A, here I come!

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Swap

Well, I too loaded with work to write a decent blog entry on my God’s birthday. Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar, the greatest batsman I will ever see, turns 35 today. He’s dedicated more than half his life to Cricket. Thank you, Sachin for giving us countless hour of entertainment and making our country proud.

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Swap

P.S. Please don’t retire soon

Hello all,

It’s been one of the busiest weeks of my life. I haven’t slept for 4 nights in a row and am near complete exhaustion! On a happier note, it also had a day April 17th which will henceforth be called a red letter day in the history of RH and my career.

Let me go back in time 2 years ago when we first saw SCPanel. At that time, there were hardly any shoutcast hosting control panels; SCPanel being the first (commercially). Most of our shoutcast hosting clients were asking us for a control panel and we used to spend unnecessary time and resources to cater to the shoutcast services. The answer was right there, SCPanel. I had a hard time believing we only had to pay $14.99/server (it still costs the same) and there was no limit to the number of streams we installed on it. Barring few load problems due to stats polling, it was the perfect product we could ask for.

So, it’s been two years since then. I’ve personally been in touch with the core developer to strengthen the API as it’s an essential part of automation behind RHNOC. In May last year, I had finished with the shoutcast module with complete automation. It reduced the order processing time to only 5 minutes. Moreover, billing was integrated with it as well; upon non-payment it would suspend the shoutcast stream and on payment, it would immediately bring it back. Our customers absolutely love it!

But I had seen a decline in the product’s popularity due to some management issues. I offered to be a voluntary moderator on the forums but I could still sense SCPanel was losing market share. It was not until some time ago that I proposed an offer to them and they gladly accepted. We acquired them on 17th and I worked for 14 hours non-stop through the night (my timezone) moving servers, emails and contacting SCPanel clients.

The job has only begun but like they say well begun is half done. More updates on SCPanel next week.

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Swap

P.S. I would like to congratulate my batchmate and ex-RH staff, Manish Sinha for securing an internship (job convertible) in Microsoft Inc.