Cloud Drives – a comparison

With the mushrooming of cloud drives as a reliable backup for digital assets I thought I should compare some of the most popular ones. I have signed up for the free plans in all of the ones mentioned below and used them for a few months before putting together this table. You can see the winner right away is Amazon with their elastic capacity and pricing. But the others do offer some interesting features, Box.net offer several applications to go with your account, while dropbox offers 250MB as a referral bonus if the people you refer signup and install dropbox on their laptops/PC’s. This referral bonus however allows you to accumulate upto a maximum of 8GB. Opera on the other hand doesn’t store anything on the cloud, it allows you to share your photos, video and audio using a technology similar to P2P.

	FREE	PLAN 1	PLAN 2	PLAN 3	PLAN4	PLAN 5	PLAN 6
AMAZON CLOUD DRIVE	5GB	20GB $1.75/m	50GB $4.25/m	100GB $8.5/m	200GB $16.75/m	500GB $41.75/m	1000GB $83.5/m
BOX.NET	5GB	25GB $9.99/m				500GB $15/user/m
DROP BOX	2GB		50GB $9.99/m	100GB $19.99/m
OPERA UNITE	Depens on your Hard Disk Capacity
UBUNTU ONE	2GB	20GB $2.99/m

Bye 2010 – Yearly review

2010 was rather quick to pass by. Its been a new life for me. And taking stock to see what I have done for the second half of 2010.  (For the first half of 2010 read my earlier post)

Projects

At Sastra we have been able to deliver solutions with really awesome user experience to our clients. Visit the project portfolio page to take a look at the heady combination of aesthetics and engineering.

Gadgets

My thirst for gadgets has never waned. After my Acer’s HDD crashed (it was 6 years old) I got myself a Acer Aspire 5745 with an I5, 3GB RAM, 320GB HDD. I also added a 27 inch LED monitor and a pair of creative speakers with an accompanying woofer. Not very impressive sound when compared to the Celestion, Denon, Onkyo rig that I possess.

Personal Productivity

GnuCash remains an all time favourite for maintaining personal finances.

Technology

I bought my first server on the cloud and hosted one of Sastra’s application’s on it.

Reads

I have been very slow reader in the last few months. I have several books lying beside my desk, some of them in various stages of completion.

Travel

Regular trips to Pondycherry once a month. I also made trips to Bangalore, Palani, Rameswaram and Yercaud

Architecture of an application for Customer Loyalty

I am working on the architecture for a Customer Loyalty Management System. I am using XP for the process and plan to have three iterations. The alpha version should be out in the first iteration. The architecture will  be documented using UML. I have attached the use case diagram to give you an idea of what to expect for in the first iteration.

OSI Days

Three days of intense technical sessions followed by cocktails and dinner with the speakers. Great talks and workshops from the best in the industry. If you have missed it keep your eyes open for the OSI Days 2011

Are you a Copywriter?

Looking for a web copywriter to help me put up the content of a website. Would prefer students of advertising / journalism. Strong proficiency in English language required.

Chennai Drupal Meet

Its been a really longtime for me to have attended any tech group meets. The last one was “Sun Techdays” (2002). The Chennai Drupal Meet this past Saturday (14th Aug 2010) at Coffee World was like “fresh mint”, mild in the beginning but curiously strong later!

Its amazing to see so much geekism in a world void of even basic technical skills. Fellow Drupal builders, coders, themers and oth..ers! (pun intended) lets help grow the community. Register at Chennai Drupal Group.

Devour | Awesome Hand-Picked Videos

I love cool stuff and my daily dose comes from Uncrate | The buyers guide for men. I am pleasantly surprised by what these guys have been upto. Check out for yourself.

Devour | Awesome Hand-Picked Videos.

Mid Year Review – 2010 Progress

Thanks to David Allen’s GTD I have been able to bring more order and meaning to what I do in life. As part of the planning exercise I have included a half-yearly review to track my progress against yearly goals. So here is my progress for the first half of 2010.

Projects

After giving up my regular salaried job in April 2010 I am now a proud co-owner of Sastra Technologies Pvt. Ltd, where I am the Director Engineering. Sastra Technologies is aiming to be a significant player in SA(A)S area.

Gadgets

I got myself a Brother P-2700 label printer and a Transcend 1 Tera Byte external Hard Disk.

Personal Productivity

On the personal productivity front I now use GTD Inbox with Gmail, Remember The Milk and Box.net. I use GnuCash to maintain my finances.

Technology

I have moved my blogs from Blogger to WordPress.

Experimenting with GoogleGears

With the help of some O’reilly books and online resources like W3Schools I am now adept in the following technologies.

• HTML 4.01, XHTML and HTML DOM
• CSS
• JavaScript
• JQuery
• Ajax
• PHP
• Drupal
• XML, XML DTD
• XML DOM
• XML Schema
• XPath
• XML Namespaces
• XLink and XPointer
• XSLT
• XSLFO
• Xforms

Reads

Though a bit slow I have managed to read the following

Blue Ocean Strategy

Drupal 6

Travel

I have travelled to Milan, Rome, Venice and Florence apart from my regular once-a-month trip to Pondycherry.

Google Command Line

The guys at Google never fail to surprise people especially with the output spewed by their lab experiments, this time its googlecl. Access to Google services through the command line -Terminal in Unix & Linux / Command Prompt if you are more inclined to Windows.

sridhar@sridhar:~$ google calendar add “House Warming Ceremony on Thursday at 7:30am”
Please specify user: sri***r***du
Error using browser “[FF]“: [Errno 2] No such file or directory
Please log in and/or grant access via your browser at https://www.google.com/accounts/OAuthAuthorizeToken?oauth_token=4%2Fj84vLIl_HV5po0LgkAPfQcs7QLW5 then hit enter.

You can specify the browser to launch in the config file. I tried [firefox], [FF] etc but then I still get the error and googlecl expects me to copy and paste the URL in my browser, grant access and then come back to the terminal and hit the enter key. Any ideas on what should be mentioned as the browser name?

MAA-DXB-MXP

Red eye without a shot of espresso, managed to transfer DXB-MXP without hitches but with an increased level of security checks common in transit airports like DXB.

Onboard EK093 watched 2012 and Bug’s life. 2012! what an irony considering that I’ll be in the Vatican this coming Wednesday.

Very impressed with articles in the FT of London. The piece “Scourge of God” by Amanda Mitchison who interviewed 62 year Philip Pullman, a lesser known writer in this part of the world, author of “His Dark Materials”, a trilogy that features Adam and Eve recast as children and death of God! Its been made into a movie “The Golden Compass” starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. When it comes to writing on semiotics or biblical stuff my favourite has been Umberto Eco whose place I am to land in a few hours. “In the name of the Rose” and “Foucault’s Pendulum” are two of his masterpieces. But here is a new author I’ve discovered, Pullman, his next book “The Goodman Jesus and Scoundrel Christ” was the one that Amanda Mitchison discussed with him over lunch at a fine London restaurant. Free flowing prose describing in detail the person, the lunch, the author and his works .

The author article that caught my eye was “Green Eggs and Ham” by Madur Jaffrey. I thought that she only wrote cookbooks and hosted cookery shows on TV. I was surprised that she wrote a piece for the FT. Savouring the seasonal cooking of San Francisco. The anticlimax was “..Would we like a pizza. She wants to know. Of course it is not any Pizza, it is carpeted with the smallest smokiest fresh morel mushrooms I have ever beheld.” Maam with due respect you should visit Napoli. While in Italy I have eaten Pizza in all cities that I have visited and though haven’t been to the restaurant yo mentioned in SFO, I can bet the ones in this European country are far better than ones in the rest of the world especially the ones that come from Napoli.

The third article “A lot in the bottle” was about a new entrant to the Tennessee Whiskey, Benjamin Prichard who’s cocoction of Corn Whiskey and Single Malts is likely to give the established players Jack Daniels and George Dickel (sour marsh corn whiskey) a run for their bottle!

The last article was “Practical Stress Relief” on creating a work life balance and how amateurs are now running business by sheer passion . The article highlights a a few things that we fail to notice in our busy lives. The 20th century was shaped by the rise of professionals while in the 21st century highly educated and networked amateurs who work to professional standards in areas as diverse as Astronomy, Banking, politics and Technology will have a revolutionary effect on society especially around innovations. That explains the success of TV shows like “Super Singer” in our channels. Check out Life Hacker for your daily dose of DIY.