Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

July 30, 2005

NY Get together with friends

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 10:20 PM

Met up with Aditi, Karishma and Sachin in New York today. I had met Karishma a few months ago but it was the first time I was meeting Sachin and Aditi after high school so it was a lot of fun. We had decided to meetup in Union Square at 2 pm but by the time everyone got there it was 3 pm and we all were starving. So we went to this cafe and had a really late lunch and caught up with each other’s lives. We all talked a lot. Basically caughtup with each other’s lives, relived old memories etc.

After lunch we decided to go watch Devils Rejects as there were no other movies that we all could agree on. After the movie was done I was wishing that I had gone for Stealth instead inspite of the bad review’s it got. This movie was just plain bad. Do yourself a favor if you have to goto a movie goto any movie but this one. After the movie was done we all went to starbucks for a coffee and had a very interesting discussion there about how Indian culture is changing and how teens are adapting to the new culture.

Overall a fun day. Will definetly want to do it again. Didn’t have a camera so took photos with my camera phone. May post the pics here later.

This is all for now will post more later.

– Suramya

July 25, 2005

Website Backend Optimized

Filed under: My Life,Website Updates — Suramya @ 11:44 PM

Finally spent some time tweaking the website backend today. Now with the new settings hopefully the server won’t die as often as before.. (Crossed fingers…). Will know by tomorrow if it worked.

Now on to try getting that stupid Javascript on gWiFi to work…

– Suramya

July 22, 2005

Website was down for a day

Filed under: My Life,Website Updates — Suramya @ 9:38 PM

As some of you might have noticed suramya.com was completely down since Wednesday. It wasn’t a technical problem, what happened was that somehow when I used the control panel to reboot the LVS somehow it decided to reset itself to the default settings instead. So my webserver was set to factory default and I lost all data on it.

Not surprisingly I was pissed and left the techsupport at Redwood Virtual a pretty bad VoiceMail. Thankfully the guys there didn’t decide to ignore me due to that email and Matt from Redwood Virtual Tech support contacted me and told me that when a switch is reset they save a backup copy of it just in case. So I asked him to go ahead and restore it from backup which took a while so the site was down till they restored it.

Now that it is back up the first thing I did was backup the mysql DB and the log files. Also since its the weekend and I finally have some time I will be recompiling MySQL on the server to make it more light weight and less resource intensive. Having the MySQL server die every couple of hours is not funny or fun.

Will keep you posted.

– Suramya

July 18, 2005

Life is good

Filed under: My Life,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:21 PM

Life is good. The weekend was fun. Read a lot of books. relaxed.

1. Finished Harry Potter 6. Its a good book. Surabhi actally went to the store to buy it at 12:00am. I was too lazy to do so, luckily for me shw wasn’t.

2. Re-read Elvenborn by Mercedes Lackey. Its an awesome book. This lady knows how to write a good story.

Read an interesting article about street photographers somewhere. (Don’t remember where or I would link to it) In it the article basically talked about how it was becoming more difficult for street photographers to take photos of everyday life without getting in trouble. Its illegal to take photos at most highrise places and bridges.

This is really depressing for photographers. I know ’cause I myself like taking a lot of pics and most of them are totally natural pics of people or friends going about with their everyday life. Now its illegal for me to take a photo of a friend doing something stupid so that I can Blackmail them tease them later just because some genius decided that terrorists could take photos can use it to plan an attack. A terrorist is not going to be walking about in broad daylight with a huge camera in their hand openly taking photos of their target. They would use hidden camera’s that are a lot higer resolution than my pathetic 3 pega pixel camera. And this is if they actually decided to take photos from site. A good telephoto lense would give them enough resolution to take the required pics from a long way off.

NEway its not like the stupid bridge has changed a lot in the past 10 years. If someone really wanted to they could goto a library and get a photograph of it from there. All the ban on photography does is makes it inconvenient for tourists and photographers from collecting memories.

On the same note I was in CVS a couple of days ago and was looking at their copying service. And noticed something really funny. Its illegal for me to copy my *own* passport or immigration docs using their service. Now can some one please explain to me what on earth is the logic behind this? I understand the restriction from copying currency but my own docs? Thats just being plain stupid. I would have taken a pic but was scared that I would probably end up getting arrested because I took a picture that puts the national security in such high danger…

If I was going to forge a passport I wouldn’t use a CVS to make a copy, I would go out and buy my own copying machine and do it from the privacy of my house. This is another one of the rules that is *supposed* to make the world safer but all it does it make life more difficult for law abiding people.

Any comments?

– Suramya

July 15, 2005

Can’t think of a good title

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 10:38 PM

This past week was interesting. Did a couple of interesting things:

1. Watched the Fantastic Four. It was a good movie. A lot of people didn’t like it but I loved it. People expected it to be serious like the x-men and with more action but even in the comics the 4 are never serious. If you read the new MarvelKnights 4 or the Ultimate Fantastic Four you will see that the movie is pretty faithful to the comics.

2. Worked on gWifi. I am officially starting to hate Javascript. For some reason the global variables in my script refuse to become global. I can’t access them from any other function unless I declare it in the function. (Yes I declared the variable outside all functions, in the begining of the script). So now my script works but it refuses to change the the boundry variables so everytime I refresh the map populates the hotspots in the same area. Once I fix this I will launch the new version with a lot more hotspots.

3. Waiting for Harry Potter. Surabhi has pre-ordered it online so it should be here in the next couple of days. Then I will have to wait till she finishes reading it before I will get it.

4. Missed the season premier of StarGate Atlantis. 🙁

5. Working on a new article. (Won’t tell you whats its about until I am done)

6. My article on Jabber Installation is being translated to Italian and will be published in a hardcopy magazine in Oct 2005

7. Got a new blackberry from work. Cool toy to play with. Have a few app idea’s for it. Lets see how much time I get to work on them.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

July 10, 2005

Got a good response to gWiFi

Filed under: gWiFi,My Life,Software Releases,Website Updates — Suramya @ 2:24 AM

This past week has been pretty cool. Its the first time that a program I have written has gotten so much publicity. A day after I launched it the site got so popular that it brought down my webserver. Since I was out all weekend with friends I didn’t find out about it till monday (4th July) at which time I restarted the server and brought everything back up. The popularity of the site hadn’t gone down so the server went down again. So I moved gWiFi to another system and its been pretty stable so far. It did go down once yesterday but that was due to a scheduled system downtime that I didn’t know about.

Got some pretty interesting reviews on gWiFi and some pretty nice emails too. Thanks for the great feedback and reviews everyone.

Next Steps:

* Fix the map so that it doesn’t crash when a lot of points are mapped (Almost done with this. Have a few more javascript bugs to take care of and then I am done)
* Import the remaining data from Yahoo Mobile to the gWiFi DB (Yes I finished the scrapper for Yahoo Mobile)
* Create a submission page for people to submit more nodes
* Maybe move the gWifi page to a new server.

Well this is all for now. Will keep everyone posted about the status of gWiFi.

– Suramya

July 1, 2005

Launched gWiFi Ver 0.1

Filed under: gWiFi,Software Releases,Website Updates — Suramya @ 3:35 AM

I have created a webbased application called gWiFi that uses the newly released Google Map API and merges it with data from nodesdb.com (which lists locations in US that offer free wireless internet access to the general public) and displays ithe result using the google map for ease of use/access.

The URL is: http://gwifi.suramya.com .

Currently the site only shows WiFi locations in New York but I will be adding other locations over the next few weeks. Check it out and let me know what you think.

– Suramya

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