This is NOT intended to add to the pointless debate between vim / emacs / textmate …etc. However, I really like using Vim as my primary text editor. So, whenever possible, I try to port all my text editing tasks to Vim. Chatting is one of those tasks and hence the birth of VimChat. ironcamel, throughnothing, and myself started this project a while back for fun because we all just wanted to spend more time using Vim.

VimChat is a vim plugin for instant messaging. At its core, it simply uses XMPP python module. Because of that, it can be configured to connect to multiple jabber servers such as Google Talk, AIM, ICQ, MSN, and even IRC. It also supports OTR (Off The Record).

Recently, I’ve noticed that the project has been picked up by a couple other developers that are working on it actively to make it a lot more awesome than when we were working on it. So, I wanted to give it another push as I’ll be adding more enhancements in the near future. Stay Tuned :).

I obviously encourage you to try it out. If you did, please let me know if you have any feedback :).

Recently, I decided to migrate my blog and my whole personal website from WordPress to Jekyll. The experience was really good and I wanted to share it with you. However, while I am writing my post, I came across a couple others that talk about the exact same thing. So, since I don’t like duplicating information for no reason, I am going to link to those posts instead.

Here is Vito’s experience with Jekyll in part1 and part2

Let me know if you have any questions, thoughts, comments …etc. Also, if you have experience using Jekyll, I would love to get your feedback on it and specially, any pain points that you are facing.

I have attended the OpenStack design summit last week in Santa Clara, CA. It was an amazing experience seeing the significant increase of interest. The attendance was almost double than it was last time. And we’ve discussed a lot of topics including Authentication and Authorization.

This topic is highly important for OpenStack and it is critical to get it right. While there are a number of reasons why it is important, let me share with you a couple that I care most about.

I am really excited and proud to see an extremely fast adoption rate for OpenStack in the cloud-based industries. It only makes me wonder what we could do to make it even better, and encourage more vendors to take a look at OpenStack. Talking to our customers and OpenStack service operators, Identity Management always comes up in conversation. So, this is my take on it.

From Wikipedia emotion is “the complex psychophysiological experience of an individual’s state of mind as interacting with biochemical (internal) and environmental (external) influences”, which means that there is a direct correlation between the state of mind (internal), emotional state, and physiological state (external).

Everyday we experience a number of emotions that just sort of “happen” without really controlling when they occur. For instance, if you get a big raise for your hard work, you may automatically feel so happy and excited. The scary part is that we live so deep in these emotional states that we start reacting without consciously thinking about the fact that our current emotional state might be driving our reactions. But does the emotional state really change our reactions? We can find out very easily.

Rackspace Notes is a very simple and easy to use notes repository. It is a product that Rackspace provides to its Email customers. As a customer, you get to access Rackspace Notes through Rackspace Apps as shown below:

Recently, Rackspace released open source Chrome extension, Racknotes, that allows Rackspace Email customers to use Rackspace Notes right  from the browser.

One of the coolest features provided by this extension is the ability to capture text from any web-page into a new Rackspace Note. For more information about how it works and the other features supported, please check out Racknotes.

Command-line folks, there is an open source Racknotes command-line utitily that allows you to use Rackspace Notes right  from your terminal. So for whatever it is worth, this means that you can use Vim to write your notes and save them to your Rackspace account on the cloud :), which I like a lot.

Rackspace Notes provide a set of Restful APIs, which allow developers to easily write tolls such as the ones mentioned above. I am really excited to see what other tools and mash-ups developers are going to create that leverage the APIs provided by not only Rackspace Notes, but also all of Rackspace products.

We love open source and we support it wholeheartedly :).

I hope you guys like it. Let me know if you have any questions, thoughts, feedback, …etc.

How many times have you heard of a startup idea, checked them out, thought that it won’t go anywhere, then a few months or years later you hear about it growing tremendously? I know that I have done that many times before. So, I started tracing what different startups do in order to succeed. The short answer is that they never give up, but instead they follow a process.

An event is something that happens or occurs in a certain place and time. It usually gets us excited and ready to do something. But this is entirely different than a process which is a serious of continuous actions targeted towards an end goal. For example starting a business is a process that includes fine tuning, funding, expanding, innovating, supporting, building a community, …etc. A long process isn’t as easy as an event. In fact, a process is more continuous, it takes a lot more motivation and passion, and it is more rewarding.

Great ideas aren’t enough because I believe that an idea is an event that takes place due to a number of driving factors such as needs and inspiration. However, incubating this idea and making it a successful business is a process. Following through this process and overcoming the obstacles is what will take your business to the next steps.

Seth Godin did something brilliant, again. Basically, he sent an email to 70+ of the most popular authors, editors, bloggers, and entrepreneurs asking them to pick a theme of “what matters now” and write one page with no more than 200 words about it. You can download the ebook for free here.

The goal of the book is to inspire and motivate us to take actions, be creative, and lead the future. It is a collection of thoughts, concepts, and principles that we should live with, think about, and consider in every action we take in our lives. It is what matters not only now, but also tomorrow.

I hope you enjoy the book as I did. Let me know what do you think about it.

This book is based on some of the major Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) principles. Although you don’t need to know what NLP is, it would be useful. For me, it was a good refresher to NLP that sparked flashbacks and helped me get back on track.

It is very easy to read. The exercises are very simple and you can do them whilst you are reading.

1. google.com
2. yahoo.com
3. facebook.com
4. msn.com
5. youtube.com
6. live.com
7. microsoft.com
8. wikipedia.com
9. ebay.com
10. weather.com

This list is compiled from quantcast. Seth Godin listed it as well as compete as resources for website traffic statistics.

I am glad to know that there are millions of people that check the weather on weather.com every morning ;).