From left, Ashwin Bharambe, Amit Manjhi,and Shashank Pandit, co-founders of Buxfer. (A 2006 photo from Post-Gazette by Lake Fong)

Buxfer was launched in 2007, but due to unknown reasons (may be loosing popularity) the founders abandoned the project and left to work for Facebook. When this news got public I emailed one of the founders Shashank Pandit, and asked about the fate of Buxfer. His reply was,

From: Shashank Pandit
Date: Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 4:41 PM
Subject: Re: Buxfer Closing Down
To: Nimal

Hi Nimal,

Rest assured, we will notify you if we were to shut the service down and give you the chance to download your entire data. For now, we don’t have any plans to shut down. Curious: where did you hear this from?

Cheers,
Shashank.

It was not until late 2010, I started having major problems with Buxfer. Random short outages were happening time to time, but it was acceptable until that point. But during the last week of 2010 things got messy and the website went down for more that two days. I thought this is my time to move on, and switched to a simpler Google Spreadsheet. I tried other similar websites, but only a few of them support non-US accounts and non of them have proper IOUs as Buxfer has. Managing too many transactions on a spreadsheet can be a pain, but it can be more reliable and in control than these cloud services.

Buxfer suffered another long outage during last week for four days, and even lost some of their data. They posted an update on my account that some transaction details were lost as a result of this. I checked my account to find that all my transactions after December 26th were lost. Luckily I downloaded all transactions on December 31st and started using Spreadsheets to manage my transactions from 2011.

Buxfer was offline for the last four days. Our hosting provider had severe availability issues because of which our servers were down. We had to migrate our service to new servers in order to get the site back up. In the process, some data might have been lost and we sincerely regret that.

One would not expect this from a finance software, but it’s explained by the following statement, which shows the current state of Buxfer as a company. For the first time they have accepted (even though it was already known) that this is now a part-time project for them.

Since the past year, Buxfer is being maintained part-time by one of its original founders. The goal of Buxfer is no longer to make a profit, but to continue to serve its users the best way it can. The membership fees we charge are barely sufficient to cover the costs of running this service. Many of you have written to us saying that it might be better to shut down the service instead of providing a service with lack of proper support. If that’s what most of our users feel, we are planning to shut down Buxfer in the near future.

I guess its time for another great service to part from the Internet. I believe this project could be open-sourced and live long as a personal hosted service. It’s unfortunate that a useful product like this is going to die, but its the way things are on the Internet, and we learn to live with it.

Fate of Buxfer: The Expected is a post from: Nimal's Weblog

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I have been blogging with Blogger for the last 3 years in this blog, and also in my Tamil blog. It has been a wonderful experience for me with Blogger, (though I prefer WordPress these days).

Congratulations to Google on 10 years for Blogger.

Happy Birthday Blogger is a post from: Nimal's Weblog

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We can help in this effort by suggesting know Goecities sites, which are no more maintained, but have useful content of value or even your own historical Geocities page!

See details or submit your site for indexing!

Geocities web sites to Internet Archive – An Effort to Save the History of Personal Web is a post from: Nimal's Weblog

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Saint Patrick’s Day is celebrated worldwide by the those of Irish descent and increasingly by non-Irish people (usually in New Zealand, Australia, and North America). Celebrations are generally themed around all things Irish and, by association, the colour green. - Wikipedia

YouTube goes green for Saint Patrick’s Day…! So I am with making this post in green font…

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day to all…!

Why the YouTube logo changed to Green? is a post from: Nimal's Weblog

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Now the Entrée package is Rs.500 (+VAT) which was Rs.1,000 (+VAT), and the Home package is Rs.1,600 (+VAT) from the early Rs.2,250 (+VAT). Both these packages have 128kbps upload speed and 512kbps download speed with dynamic IP, while the Entrée package has a monthly usage limit of 1024MB/1GB.

SLT has also added some new packages. The Xcite package which has 256kbps upload and 1024kbps download speeds with dynamic IP is priced at a montly rental of Rs.2,900 (+VAT). They have also added Office, Office 1IP (512k Up / 2048k Down) and Xcel, Xcel 1IP (512k Up / 4096k Down) packages, in which 1IP packages have an additional Static IP with DNS Hosting, Virtual Mail Service and Web Hosting.

Anyway I’m happy with my Home package with its reduced rental rate. Just checkout the SLT website for more details….!

SLT Slashes Down ADSL Rentals, Adds New Packages is a post from: Nimal's Weblog

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The leaflets in Tamil and Sinhala leaked from some internal sources show some details about these new “reduced charge” packages. But when I tried to get a confirmation from SLT they denied any such offer being given out. May be they will announce it in a day or two. So just check with them…!

Also I’m not gonna get any advantage out of this as this is only for the new connections purchased at the exhibition. So can I just disconnect the present one and get a new connection…?!!

Special SLT Broadband ADSL Package at Deyata Kirula Exhibition is a post from: Nimal's Weblog

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renjus blog reports that,

If you are a VLC addict then you will have noticed this change as of Midnight 18 December.It seems as the developers from VLC decided to included this Easter egg on their later version 0.9+.

Image source: jb [Kinnda lazy to take a screenshot ]

VLC Media Player says Merry Christmas is a post from: Nimal's Weblog

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"Microsoft is continuing its investigation of public reports of attacks against a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer," said the firm in a security advisory alert about the flaw.

So be in the safer side, don't use IE…
Use Open Source alternatives…!

(Thanks Ramanan)

IE users, Be Careful is a post from: Nimal's Weblog

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LIFEBOOK’4′LIFE – Get free laptop replacement every 3 years! is a post from: Nimal's Weblog

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“The Matrix Runs on Windows” is a hilarious video that describes some of the “great featues” we get with Windows and other Microsoft products.

The video ends with a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death ) and finally saying “Ubuntu, I’m going to learn Ubuntu“.

Video by: http://www.collegehumor.com/chtv

The Matrix Runs on Windows is a post from: Nimal's Weblog

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