jump to navigation

So You Watched Slumdog Millionaire… January 23, 2009

Posted by atharkhan in : Personal , add a comment

If you were affected by this movie, and you’d like to do something about children like this in Pakistan, please consider making a small, one-time donation to TCF at www.tcfusa.org.

Inauguration Video Streams Failed to Live Up to Expectations January 21, 2009

Posted by atharkhan in : Personal, Tech , add a comment

If there was ever a day that the Internet would face a stress-test, the Obama inauguration would have been it. Countless individuals logged on websites such as CNN, MSNBC, and Hulu to watch the live video streams. Unfortunately, every single one of these feeds was unable to keep up with the demand. What I can’t understand is this: Why didn’t networks use P2P technologies to distribute the video? As far as I know, it is possible to do this with a live feed in a manner similar to how Bittorrent operates. Why did media companies believe that it would be more cost effective or preferable to do a one-to-many broadcast? Wouldn’t this have worked better via a P2P-enabled stream? Am I missing something here?

MobileMe & Hosted Exchange January 14, 2009

Posted by atharkhan in : Personal, Tech , add a comment

In search of the perfect email (as well as contact and task management) solution, I tried out MobileMe. I found MobileMe to be incredibly slow — even with no email in a folder, it would take at least 5 seconds to refresh a page. Plainly unacceptable. Another huge drawback to MobileMe was that it can sync a few commonly used Contacts fields from Outlook rather than all fields.

So, I tried out Hosted Exchange. GoDaddy’s Hosted Exchange solution was nice but it turns out that I wont be able to use that either. First, the service was incredibly slow. It took anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes for a Send/Receive operation to complete on an *empty* folder! I can only imagine what the performance will be like when the folders start getting populated with emails. Another issue was that the iPhone can only handle one Exchange account and I already have my work account set up for that. I tried to access Hosted Exchange via IMAP but then found out that any changes made via IMAP are not propagated to the Exchange Mailbox. For example, if you delete an item via IMAP, it remains as is if you view the account from Exchange.

So, it’s back to a convoluted setup of Gmail via POP and IMAP synchronizing between computers via Plaxo.