Samsung ML-1640 on Linux
Aug 1st
TweetI got my self a shiny new laser printer because the old Lexmark X1110 was getting old and giving little too many paper jams. I went with Samsung ML-1640 mainly because of it’s initial lower price, lower running costs and good reviews online. I had also read that the printer comes with Linux driver, that was one of the first I have seen.
To much to my surprise as soon as I plugged the printer Ubuntu recognized the printer and installed it, with in few seconds without any clicks or key presses the printer was ready for printing. I never bothered testing on Windows 7 but I’m sure I would have had to install drivers (Samsung claims it takes only 4 clicks).
However I ran to some trouble sharing the printer with Snow Leopard as the driver selected by Ubuntu needed to be used as a raw printer queue and I could get around how to set it up on Snow Leopard. Instead I flipped around the setup, I shared the printer as a raw printer queue and used the built in driver on Snow Leopard for the printer. I had to do the same for my notebook as well. Everything was working perfectly, finally 
. In the process I also figured out that Generic GDI driver works as long as the print job fits the printer memory (8 MB), if you send a larger job it will fail with nothing printed (but the printer receives the job).
For anyone wondering, on Linux the driver used is (automatically selected by Ubuntu) is Samsung ML-1640, SpliX V. 2.0.0 , which covers all capabilities of the printer (may be except for toner level).
I’m really happy with the printer, I think it was a very good purchase. I really like the idea the cartridge comes with a handle to push it into place. Then the fact that I can print the demo page by pressing and holding the reset/cancel button on the printer to get the toner level and other printer details. Only thing I miss is fully duplex printing, but with the lower cost I don’t mind working upto the printer to feed the paper when the printer is done printing one side of the pages.
iKeyword – Free 1.0.1, iKeyword 1.0.2 and a busy week
Jul 29th
TweetiKeyword – Free, free iPhone App was released on Monday to help you whether it’s worthwhile to purchase the paid iPhone App iKeyword. iKeyword – Free is a huge success, if you haven’t already tried it you should head over to the App Store and download. 
On Thursday (29th July), an update to iKeyword was released enabling users fetch unlimited number of related keywords based on user feedback upping the version to 1.0.2 from 1.0.1 . If the number of related keywords returned was an issue that prevented you from using iKeyword; download to iKeyword 1.0.2 now on the iPhone App Store.
Whole of this week I have been working on an uber cool iPad application which will hopefully be released in August, it’s a biggie. Stay subscribed or follow me on Twitter to be the first to hear when it’s released.
Btw, system administrator appreciation day falls tomorrow; do not forget to throw a party for your SysAdmin, get him/her a gift or just say thanks
How to redeem iTunes App store coupons
Jul 14th
Tweet
When distributing iKeyword coupons everyone was having issues with figuring out where to enter the coupon. Apple did a good job to make sure unsuspecting users will end up buying the app instead of redeeming the coupon because there is no way to use the coupon from the iTunes on the iPhone and even with iTune for Mac or Windows you couldn’t redeem the coupon from the App details page, clever of you Apple.
For everyone’s benefit;
- Power up your PC or Mac
- Open iTunes
- Goto iTunes store home (Click the home icon once you get to iTunes store)
- Click “Redeem” under “Quick links” (highlighted in the screenshot above)
- Key in the redeem code and click the Redeem button
Enjoy your app free app
First iPhone app released
Jul 2nd
Tweet 
Last Wednesday first iPhone app was released under my account, iKeyword. iKeyword allows you to search for related keywords on your iPhone or iPod Touch. I use Google AdWords keyword suggestion API to discover/generate keywords. It was a fun project. I also need to give a shout out to Oliver Tani for giving me feedback on what Online Marketers really want.
To much to my surprise Apple’s approval process only took 7 days (5 working days), thank you Apple for speedy approval . See the screenshot of iTunes Connect bellow.
DFS
Jul 2nd
A breadth-first search makes a lot of sense for dating in general, actually; it suggests dating a bunch of people casually before getting serious, rather than having a series of five-year relationships one after the other.
How to use Huawei E1550 on Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6)
Jun 25th
TweetI recently upgraded to Snow Leopard and wanted to download iPhone SDK, since Dialog GSM has really cheap bandwidth, I got a 2 hours on my Kit Broadband package. I’m using a Huawei E1550 but unfortunately the Mobile partner that came with the dongle didn’t work on Snow Leopard. With a bit of Googling I came across Huwaei Device site and downloaded Dashboard for Mac OS X 10.6 and unzipped it and then unzipped MAC-V100R001B301D11SP00C03.zip (only zip file in the downloaded zip file). The ISO file needs to be mounted with Disk Utility and not the Disk Image mounter.
Then the familiar Mobile partner will open up, and follow the instructions on the screen.
Hope this helped someone in a similar situation
Interesting domains going on sale
Jun 25th
TweetWhile building R2G Tools I discovered some interesting and rare domains, I jumped at the opportunity and registered them. Now they are going on sale to raise funds to make R2G Tools better. Here are the domains.
direct-marketing.biz
Page rank 3 domain with a generic term. Rare opportunity no direct marketing firm should let go.
iaews.biz and iaews.us
Pair of page rank 7 domains. Not sure what iaews stands for but I’m sure what ever you host will make to the top of the Google index fast. Great SEO value.
meridianhealthcare.us
Page rank 5 domain. Great for a US based health care firm. If you are lucky New Jersey based Meridian Health will definitely be interested in this domain. Great opportunity for an experienced domainer.
Send me your offers, these domains are going fast as I need the cash fast to improve R2G Tools and I’m not very good at hard selling
Building R2G Tools
Jun 25th
TweetI started out building a tool to discover recently dropped domains and in the process domains search engine with a twist. You can check it out at R2G Tools . This was a extremely challenging project, with more than 120 million domains in the world and extremely tight budget. I finally pulled it off last week end. You would be surprised that whois.r2g.in is running off 3 commodity servers (mainly for redundancy, I could have squeezed it into 1 with only slight performance hit).
What’s behind
Database; MongoDB is the main database backend, with MySQL used to hold non domain records. MongoDB was chosen because of it’s ability to handle large amount of objects, schemaless and ability to index keys. Thanks to MongoDB I can search, count and even insert and update records in few seconds (most operations are few milliseconds).
Web application framework; whois.r2g.in is completely built with CodeIgniter. It’s my framework of choice. I like it’s clean and lean architecture.
Servers; I’m running Lighty behind Varnish HTTP accelerator. I also use eaccelerator to optimize PHP code. I also have a memcached instance on the web server to cache data from MySQL. Goal is to speed up whois.r2g.in as much as possible. There are 2 MongoDB instances sharing the load which the application connects. Everything is running off 3 Athlon X2 servers, 2 running MongoDB instances and one running the application.
Why use both MongoDB and MySQL?
That’s because I didn’t want to put all my eggs in one basket. Any data that doesn’t change much like WHOIS servers put into a MySQL table. Information such at WHOIS data were stored in a MongoDB collection.
What I gained?
Lot of experience about data mining, storing and analyzing. I learned a lot about how to optimize data mining, I managed to bring down the time it takes to analyze all the domains for drops to few hours from few days by just pre sorting the zone files. I also gained few rare domains and high page rank domains. I have become a domainer thanks to the project 
Please head over to R2G Tools and give it a try, you might discover a great domain while you are there and make a huge profit. Do not forget to send me some feed back
