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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Released IM2Email Ver 0.2 today.
ChangeLog:
* Added Config file support. Now the BOT can be controled using a config file
* Added logging support using Log4Perl. User can now control the logging level from a config file
* Added ability to reload the config file on the fly based on an IM message
* Added better help messages.
Also, have been talking to Brian Bittman who has created an Email2IM app like I was planning to and we both have decided to combine our programs and create a single program that does both. (This will be a modular program so you will be able to choose what modules you want to use). I am pretty excited about this oppportinity.
This shows why I like open source software, I created a program and posted it online for free download. Brian found it while surfing the net, realized that we both trying to do the same thing and could share code thus not have to re-invent the wheel. So he email’s me his program, which gives me a lot of good idea’s for stuff to add to my program. After talking agrees to work on a joint project and voila a new software is born. Time Frame: 3 days (Mostly ’cause I delayed in replying to his email)
If this was a propritary software it would have taken a lot longer for me to get permission to copy code and then it would have been full of restrictions telling me what I can and cannot do with that code and all the associated legal crap.
NEways, keep watching this space for updates, ’cause some really interesting things are going to be happening soon. I will keep you posted.
Thanks,
Suramya
My blog is now being hosted using WordPress. It was defiently very easy to setup and it also imported all my old entries nicely. Unfortunately for some reason it decided that all the html in the old entries has to be shown as is so I now have to edit each entry *again* and fix the formating errors and make them look normal again. The second issue is that the comments wern’t imported so I will have to do that manually.
So far I like WordPress and I think it’s a lot more powerful than Serendipity and is defiently less resource intensive. Will be fixing the remaining entries over the next few days so the blog should be fixed by the end of the week.
Well this is all for now. Will keep you posted.
– Suramya
Released Version 0.1.1 of IM2EMail. This version has a more error checks and the ability to change the email address where the email is sent to on the fly.
To Do for the next version:
* Allow the email address to be set per session (For each conversation)
* Improve the help
* Add more feedback from the BOT about what its doing
Try it out and let me know what you think.
Thanks,
Suramya
Ok Everyone, After spending a couple of hours messing around with my Blog software I have finally managed to get everything working again.:-). Comments are working, posting is working and now all I have to do is finish recategorizing the content (I created some new subcategories and have to move the content to them)
Now the next item in my list is to fix the wierd problems I have been having with Apache & MySQL where suddenly they start using 100% of the CPU & memory and then when they run out of RAM they crash.
If you have any idea’s why this could be happening let me know. Now its time for me to relax and watch a movie or something. Fixing this stupid problem gave me a headache.
– Suramya
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