The credit to my accomplishment goes to my girlfriend who never cooked in  her life but did it for me (chooo chweet jaanu). Yet, she managed to make food taste so wonderful that I always ended up eating like I was fasting for a month or so (yes her food tastes awesome).

As you can see, my cooking traits started thanks to her, and I am glad that people even eat stuff I cook, but in the end it all started with a Potato ka Sabji (Potato vegetable) cooked to perfection by my girlfriend (she even made me that dish when I was coming back to U.S. this time – so many hugs to you jaanu).

This potato ka Sabji is my favorite. It is dry but when I ate it with chappati, I could eat 7-8 of them (I usually ate only 3).

So here is the recipe of the Potato ka sabji, all jotted down on my iPod Touch. Well it is not hard to make for sure, try it out and thank you Jaanu for it :*. It is still my favorite sabji.

(Most of you might not understand this, but I want to keep it as I wrote. This is an epic start for me)

Dry Potato Recipe

Green Chili ko grind karna – put little salt aur paani 4-5 mirchi

Cut Potato Medium slices

Put oil in pan and let it heat, put cummin seeds, mustard seeds

Put hing (Asafoetida) – and then put potatoes and heat it for 5 minutes

Put Haldi and Salt and cover it again

After 5 minutes shake it

Put 2 spoons Corriander powder and mirchi paste before it fully cooks and shake and dhak it

Let me know when you cook it and how it tastes.

Love you Jaanu.

Copyright © 2011 Keith Dsouza

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I solely spent the last six months talking to several investors to invest in my "This is my next" project and have a handful of them with me. I also eventually turned down a big payday which would have not had me work for the next 10-20 years.

Reason, I was planning my next move. My next reason to love technology once again.

I could have done that sitting out here in the United States itself, but then I thought to myself how is the scene back in India. How many companies have grown beyond their initial level? I saw maybe 4-5 in the past 5 years? Wait, this meant we have 1 company grow a year?

No, I said to myself, this has to stop we need to have startup events in India find investment and all. But wait, don’t we have 2 of them already? How many of those companies demonstrating at those events have succeeded? How often has the investment been returned? You check for yourself.

This is why I am starting up "This is my Next". It is unlike what is being done in India right now. Something different and something unique. I have investors and I have a plan, which you will see in action by 2012.

Hey don’t ask me why not do it now. Well, I don’t arrange startup events for the sake of it. I do it because I want those startups to succeed not me. Stay tuned.

"My Future Project is Your Startup".

Cheers

Keith

Copyright © 2011 Keith Dsouza

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I always had a fun time with them, zipping them around in prams, carrying them around and giving them chocolates their parents wouldn’t. Other than my own family, I also had a lot of fun time with my neighbors kids who enjoyed my company and would cry but would shut up once I carried them.

However, it has been a long time since those things happened and I dearly miss it. Quite recently, I had the chance to relive those days again with my brother’s kid, who I love immensely and miss.

He is a brat and he is definitely been able to make me so happy. I am always happy to give my love to kids and he is definitely someone who rekindles my love. I also have another niece, she is the daughter of my girlfriend’s sister and I love bringing gifts to her and see how she enjoys it.

I am not a dad, but being around kids makes me happy. I can see the happiness on the face of my brother and her wife and wish that I had the same. There is time for that, but I know one thing for certain that I will always be a good dad to my daughter or son. I have the genes to make it work no matter how bad I am.

This is to all those dad’s and my friends who have kids and enjoy all the privileges of being a dad. Love your kids, after all they will be the one to decide where you end up once they grow up .

Have fun today.

Copyright © 2011 Keith Dsouza

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So here goes in screenshots, the traffic stats for Techie Buzz in May 2011 and June 2011 with some Google Analytics screenshots added in. The screenshots have been blurred to hide data I would not want to share.

May 2011 Stats (Click to enlarge)

June 2011 Stats (Click to enlarge)

Our search engine traffic remains at around 80% with Facebook and Twitter contributing towards the major chunk of the rest along with direct traffic. Hopefully, we will cross the 5 million per month mark soon.

Please note that I released these stats because I am already going to make them public for advertising reasons and did not do it to *brag* about it.

Copyright © 2011 Keith Dsouza

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In the initial days, LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) suited me well on the server but  over time Apache literally killed me. This is when I decided to move to a Nginx (pronounced Engine X) setup for my website.

All said and done, I had a great run with Nginx, but then my 2GB setup crapped out on traffic. I increased it to 4GB and things worked fine for a while too.

Then one fine day I had a lot of traffic, like 1000s of visitors a minute and the site crashed so often that I had to literally cry. I tried to upgrade the server to 8GB memory too but it didn’t hold up.

In my entire time of dealing with servers, I have helped several people to setup their own but never revealed my own. So here is the secret on how Techie Buzz runs.

There are some key ingredients on the server which make it a successful setup. I will list them out below.

• Nginx and PHP FastCGI
• Memcached (No point using this if you have one server only)
• NFS (One file system rules it all)
• W3 Cache

These four things (plus several other secret ingredients) are core to the setup at Techie Buzz as it allows for scalability without having to make a system cry. For starters, here is a diagram of how the servers at Techie Buzz are setup.

Though the configuration in the above picture is outdated, the technology we use is still the same. We have a multi-server setup which is basically made up of one host server; where all the requests come, and several other proxy servers which serve users.

When a user visits Techie Buzz, they first land on the host server. The host server then redirects the request to one of the proxy servers we have setup. We can add and remove as many proxy servers we want within minutes based on the traffic we get. However, currently we can deal with more than 3000+ users in a minute without adding new proxy web servers.

This makes the setup highly scalable and allows us to grow as the traffic goes.

We use memcached as a core component of our setup to store cached objects so that we don’t hit the database frequently. MySQL is not optimized for high traffic and without a cache the site would die.

An added advantage of using memcached is that it is a perfect fit for caching and sharing objects on a multi-tiered server setup. This means that, we cache an object in memcached and the same can be accessed by 100s of servers without the cache having to be present physically on any of them accessing it. Think of it as a centralized storage for objects.

Another important part of the setup is NFS (Network File System) which allows us to share the same files over multiple systems.

When you have multiple servers, it does not make sense for you to have multiple copies of the same files on all of them. The problem arises when you have to update even a single file. If you use the local file system on all the servers, you will have to update that single file across all the servers. Now imagine if you have 100 servers, this process simply becomes dreadful.

Thankfully, NFS allows us to share and use common files across multiple servers. This means that if we change one file it will reflect across multiple servers without having to deploy it separately. Bliss.

In addition to all those things, we also make use of an HTML Cache in the form of W3 Cache and of course WordPress.

Additionally I have written several shell scripts which run on individual servers to check server status every two minutes. If the script finds that the server is not responding well, it restarts the core processes automatically. Another script runs frequently to ensure that the CPU process and memory usage is under acceptable levels and reboots the server if required, however, this script has hardly rebooted the server thanks to the optimizations I have done.

There are several other shell scripts I have written to make sure that we have things running fine. One of them backs up the MySQL DB every 4 hours and emails several addresses with an attachment. Another script takes a snapshot of the WordPress directory every week and emails several email addresses a copy and so on.

Other than that, I use SVN for themes, plugins etc so that I have a copy in the cloud. This again is replicated to several online storage platforms like Dropbox, Windows Live and Sugarsync through my local PC.

The DB and Files are also mirrored to several other servers using rsync so that I have multiple copies of the same file everywhere. All in all it is almost a fool proof setup and backup.

Our servers have always been powered by Ubuntu. We have used all the available releases including Hardy, Karmic and Lucid, however our current setup is powered by Natty.

Our servers have been hosted on Dreamhost, Slicehost and currently Linode. Linode (Slicehost earlier) powers our non-static content, while our static content is served by Dreamhost and optimized by a CDN through MaxCDN (who are our sponsors).

Although there is nothing unique about our setup, I take pride in creating a highly scalable environment which is easy to setup and move across any network. I took only 10 hours to move from Slicehost to Linode and most of time spent was used to transfer files, so you can imagine how simple and easy the setup is.

Copyright © 2011 Keith Dsouza

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From January 2009 to December 2009 Techie Buzz did 3.58 million hits with an average of 300K hits per month. During the same period we did 500K page views on a average per month.

From January 2010 to December 2010 Techie Buzz did around 17 million hits on an average of 1.4 million hits per month. During the same period we did 1.92 million page views per month.

From January 2011 to March 2011 Techie Buzz did around 6.5 million hits on an average of 2.2 million hits per month. During the same period we did 2.75 million views per month.

We are on course to do 100,000 views per day and 4.5 million page views in near future and hopefully grow to 6 million views per month by the end of this year. All in all it’s pretty exciting except for the fact that Panda kicked in.

I don’t plan to make this a monthly update and will make it a point to update within next 3-6 months.

For the record, I don’t post screenshots. You either believe me or not, it is not my prerogative to convince you about it.

Copyright © 2011 Keith Dsouza

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However, will it really change our nation? Will it really make us become non-corrupt people or a nation? Can a bill change what we have been doing all our lives?

This put me into deep thought on what I have done all my life and I wanted to set the record straight that I have been part of the corruption that he is fighting against, a real part that we should do away with and acknowledge so that we can really move ahead in life.

To be very frank, India is not the most corrupt nation in the world. Fortunately, there are many above us who can take that honors, and so that you should know, no country in this world is without corruption.

Since money was invented or rather created, it has been a bane for human being in many ways. We can’t live with what we have and neither can’t we live without having more. No matter how happy our situation will be, we will always want more of it.

I want to take you on a little journey on how we are all corrupted and how we are not fighting the right battle. Many of you will relate to me and many would call me as the most corrupt person you have met, rest assured this is not a single journey.

Corruption and Me

I want to talk about few things from my childhood. When I was young, my parents used to earn around 3000-4000 rupees per month, this was not really enough at that time because we were two brothers, had a house to run, school fees, expenses et all.

However, me and my brother liked to eat the exotic (yes we called it exotic back then) food from outdoors at that time called Vada Pav, Samosa and Pani Puri.

Me and my brother really used to want to have it, it cost about 15 Rupees a day to get us that and it was a huge amount (HUGE). My brother was very understanding about it, but not me. I wanted it every day and I would try and do everything to make sure my mother gave me 5-7Rs to have my favorite Pani puri or Sev Puri or Samosa no matter what our financial condition was. I used to do all the household work et all and be really nice, that was a start of bribing someone. A healthy way of doing things though the opposite way.

Corruption and Our Washing Lady

Over the years our family started earning some money so we didn’t feel the pinch much so we also had a washing lady who would come and wash out clothes every day.

Now we had a ration card and so did she, but we only bought sugar from it and never the kerosene. However, she only had a stove and we had a cylinder, so we always gave her ration card so that she could buy the kerosene allotted to us.

This was really fine, but I used to walk through an alley which sold Kerosene for 3 times the market price. And Kerosene was never sold in the open market.

Thinking of it right now, I feel in a sense it was a bribe. Why? Because she always thought good of us and did her job really well, whereas other’s who employed her complained about her.

Corruption and My Passport

When I went to get my passport done, everything went really fine. I got my papers right, I did everything right but I still wanted my passport to come on time. However, I did not believe in the system.

When the cop came to my house and said that everything was fine, he didn’t budge. I had to place a Rs 50 note in his hands before he said goodbye to us. The next day I went to the police station, had to wait a while before we saw the cop. He saw our papers and sat there looking at my papers as if I had a criminal record.

I got frustrated, but my dad slipped him a crisp bundles of notes which was Rs 100 in total and he quietly put it in his drawers, after that he put his head deep into my papers and said, your papers are perfect, no problem.

He waited a minute and said that since we used some of our copies to create your record you have to get us Xerox copies of it.

He only used 2 papers from his office and asked me to get 5 copies each of 7 documents. That goes into police quota. I paid 25 paise per copy, he would charge 1 Rupees to the government.

Corruptions and Night Clubs

When we were young and not allowed, we did manage to get into nightclubs by paying the bouncers a decent sum of money. This wasn’t right, but it happened and it does happen even now.

Corruptions and Customs

There is a saying, Customs mein pehchaan hai to kuch bhi mil sakta hai, and as far as I have seen it is true. Most of our customs are a part of a joke, they don’t let through narcotics, but they might still be doing it. But if you want to get some device and know a custom agent, that will be a piece of cake. Right?

Corruption and Cops

I was going to have a farewell party with my friends in a restaurant. We were on bikes when a cop pulled a Rickshaw and our bike up. Not that we were speeding or anything.

As you all might be aware you know when a signal kicks in we prepare for it before it goes green, so did the Rickshaw guy in front of us and we just went behind him thinking it went green (it was only 1 millisecond before it went green, we didn’t see the signal since we were behind and were talking).

Now this cop pulls us up while our destination is two steps ahead of us. We stopped. He challaned the Rickshaw guy and asked him to pay Rs 100. While our turn came, he asked us to pay Rs 500, we meekly argued and paid Rs 50, which he meekly asked us to deposit it in his briefcase.

Corruption Is In Everyone

My examples are aimed at showing that what Anna Hazare is doing is correct, but we do not pay attention to these small things that lead to those bigger problems we all are trying to deal with.

Fasting to death so that government can bring down corruption is a really noble cause, but how can it bring it down when we are corrupt in every which way? How can we say that we support bringing down corruption when we contribute towards it.

How can it make a change in our life when nothing can change our behavior towards getting things done? Do you think passing of a bill will really make everyone a non-corrupt person.

Even Anna Hazare said that if Sharad Pawar steps down another corrupt minister will take his place, how can we believe that once the bill is passed that everyone will not be corrupt?

Well, we can determine that. We have the power along with this bill to do it, however, the bill alone cannot do it. If that was the case we would never fight amongst ourselves. After all Mahatma Gandhi died teaching it.

Copyright © 2011 Keith Dsouza

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However, I am little bit apprehensive about posting earnings that I earn to the world. First of all, I am not comfortable with it. Secondly, I seriously don’t want to look good posting how much I earn.

Earlier, I had posted that I was a six figure blogger and earn this income from a single blog and not from a network of parked or keywords based domains, just from Techie Buzz itself.

I wanted to give a little bit more breakup on how much we earn in this post, so here goes. I won’t be posting any screenshots or anything else, you either trust me or you don’t.

I am not going to make you any money if you do and neither are you going to make me any if you don’t. So take it with whatever you have and believe what you want to.

• In the past year, I have made more than 6 figures from Google AdSense (way more).
• In the past two years I have made more than six figures from two advertising networks (these are only two of them, I use many).
• I have charged $1000 or more on more than 10 occasions for a review on my site in the past 8 months (we say the post is sponsored).
• I have charged $500 or more on more than 50 occasions for a review on my site in the past 2 years.
• I sell direct ads on the site at a minimum of $500 for a month and I have sold quite a few of them.
• I make money through 8 other ad networks.
• In the past 6 months I have declined as many as 30 sponsors between $500-$2000 which wanted us to do sponsored reviews or post links on our site (not counting the hundreds of others under this). I did it because I did not believe in the product or there were really unrelated to what we do or were asking me to sell links which I do not do.
• You will probably faint if you were given the job to manage my advertising specific email address for TB based on the sheer number of emails it receives.

Based on this you can easily figure out how much I earn every month and can put an end to this once and for all.

P.S. Happy April Fool’s Day, believe only what you can.

Copyright © 2011 Keith Dsouza

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• I have a great Alexa ranking – All I can say is huh
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• I was linked by Engadget and Gizmodo – Hey don’t blame me, I have been linked and quoted by 1000s of websites, but I still fell it’s silly to delve upon this except for bragging rights.

I know that many people don’t like my blog (and me) and I am fine with it, but the thing is I am experienced  and whoever reads this would basically be a blogger. The thing is that in all this we forget what we set to do and tend to really focus on non-important things. I have known people who run blogs and write articles just to be noticed by LifeHacker. If you really want to do that, just turn off your RSS subscription and screw yourself.

To be continued..

Copyright © 2011 Keith Dsouza

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Few of the first friends I made Nirmal TV, Ashish Mohta, John TP, Abhishek Bhatnagaar, Shivaranjan and Thilak Raj Rao. I also hold a special place for Deep Ganatra who was the person who introduced me to blogging. In fact my first domain keithdsouza.com was purchased through his company.

Of course, I have made a lot of friends since then and it would be a really long post if I mention all the names, but I still hold the same respect for everyone of my friends as much as I hold for the old-timers.

Blogging has definitely given me a nice way to express myself in words that I choose. Over a period of time there have been lot of changes, but those are things I believe in. I understand that many people have disliked those changes, and I am sad about it. But the only thing that is constant in this world is change, and it is always inevitable.

I hope to continue blogging for another five years or even more, hopefully it shouldn’t be as tiring and keeps me enticed. I wanted to take this opportunity to thank each and every one who I have interacted for making these 5 years really wonderful. I hope that I continue to get the warmth of your friendship in future too.

Here’s signing off on the past 5 years.

Copyright © 2010 Keith Dsouza

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