Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

March 18, 2021

Should you Text before calling someone?

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 8:49 AM

I saw this article over on Lifehacker.com, that talked about how You should Text Before Calling someone. According to the article:

That’s why—barring some exceptions—you should try sending a text prior to calling someone on the phone. Even if it seems like an indirect route for getting someone to pay attention, it’ll likely help your relationship with them over the long run.

Nothing screams “I demand you dedicate time to me” like an impromptu phone call. Even in this time of isolation, people are still busy, with a constant stream of digital notifications and Zoom meeting reminders vying for their attention. A phone call insinuates an immediate demand for another person’s time; a text message nudges the ball along just a little bit, using a polite suggestion to talk more when you get the chance.

I thought about this for a while, and for the most part I disagree with this. There are certain scenario’s where I would text someone before calling but those are usually when I know the person is super busy and I need to make sure I am not interrupting anything. (Think calling my manager for a question or someone senior who is very busy). Another scenario when I almost always text before calling is when the other person has a young child. Believe me, you don’t want to be the one who woke up a toddler who finally went to sleep after ages of effort.

Other than that, I just call people when I need to get in touch with them. If they are busy or unable to take a call then they can (and do) reject the call or don’t answer and then I just wait for them to call back. I follow the same pattern for when people call me. One rule that I do follow is that I rarely call people after 8pm unless it is urgent or we agreed to have a call post 8pm. This is because I was taught that it is not nice to disturb people after that time unless it is an emergency. Jani makes fun of me sometimes about this but I still find it hard to call folks after 8. I rarely call them before 10am either, but that is mostly because I am sleeping and don’t wake up before that time ;).

For me Text messages are good when I need an answer that can wait, however if I need to talk to someone I will call them without first prefacing with a text message. That is just wasted effort. I know there are a lot of people who don’t feel the same and maybe it is a generational thing as I see my parents generation and most folks in my age-group calling without texting first. Some of the younger folks I work with have the tendency of only texting, or texting and then calling.

There is no right or wrong way of looking at this, but I personally am comfortable with how I approach it and so far no one has complained about it so I am good :).

What do you think?

– Suramya

March 14, 2021

ACT Fibernet: Very happy with their service and support team

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:58 PM

In the past I have often posted about bad service or problems I have had with various companies so I thought I should also post about companies when I am happy with their services. This is because not everyone does it and then only the negative news is posted. Today I will talk about ACT Fibernet who I have been using as my primary internet provider for almost 3 years now. I have been very happy with their services and for the most part their network has been stable and I get the speeds that I am supposed to get. (I frequently check this because that wasn’t the case with Airtel).

What really wow’d me and prompted this post is that they frequently upgrade your plan to a faster speed without charging extra and without you asking for it. I got an email recently telling me that my plan had been auto upgraded to a 400Mbps plan with an Unlimited monthly FUP from the existing 300Mbps plan. All I had to do was log out from the portal and log back in (or just restart the router). I did that and immediately I had the faster speed available. This is the second time in the past year that I have been upgraded (last one was from 250Mbps to 300).

Another thing I really like about them is their support (once you get through to them) are perfectly willing to have their technical team call you if you have questions they can’t answer. I recently wanted details about their static IP option and the guy on support didn’t have the answer, within 4 hours I got a call from their technical team who answered all the questions I had and then helped me register a static IP. There have been multiple such cases when I have reached out with technical questions. The same is not the case with my other connection (and I will post about it in another blog post) where I have had people insist to me that the information I am asking for does not exist and they refuse to connect me to their technical team.

One slight quibble I have is that they don’t have a 24×7 support line but other than that things are great and I highly recommend them to others.

– Suramya

March 12, 2021

Jolene (Elemental Masters 15) by Mercedes Lackey

Filed under: Reviews-Fantasy — Suramya @ 6:47 AM


Jolene (Elemental Masters 15)
by Mercedes Lackey

Description:

The beloved Elemental Masters series moves to America for the first time in a rich retelling of The Queen of the Copper Mountain, set against the backdrop of Tennessee coal country.

Anna May Jones is the daughter of a coal miner, but a sickly constitution has kept her confined to the house for most of her life. Hoping to improve her daughter’s health—and lessen the burden on their family—Anna’s mother sends her to live with her Aunt Jinny, a witchy-woman and an Elemental Master, in a holler outside of Ducktown.

As she settles into her new life, Anna learns new skills at Aunt Jinny’s side and discovers that she, too, has a gift for Elemental magic that Jinny calls “the Glory”. She also receives lessons from a mysterious and bewitching woman named Jolene, who assures her that, with time, Anna could become even more powerful than her aunt.

But with Anna’s increasing power comes increasing notice. Billie McDaran, the foreman of the Ducktown mine, begins to take an interest in Anna and her abilities—even though Anna has already fallen in love with a young man with a talent for stonecarving.

If she wants to preserve the life she has come to love, Anna must use her newfound powers to oppose the foreman and protect those around her.

Buy From:

Rating: (5/5)

Review:

Mercedes Lackey is one of my all time favorite authors and I usually buy her books immediately when they are released but for some reason I missed the launch of this book. Thankfully I realized my mistake a few days ago and immediately set about rectifying it.

This is the 15th book in her Elemental Masters series and there are very few authors who can keep the stories interesting after so many entries in the series. The book is a standalone book and can be read even if you haven’t read any of the other books in the series, but the story will be much richer if you have read the other books in the series as there are subtle references to other books and organizations that would mean a lot more to someone who has read the other books.

The book is based in the America’s and is a retelling of The Queen of the Copper Mountain which is a Russian fairy tale who is the patroness of miners, the protector and owner of hidden underground riches, who can either permit or prevent the mining of stones and metals in certain places. What I really like about these stories is that it introduces you to folktales & stories from other parts of the world. After I read the book, I immediately did a little research on the folktale and found it to be fascinating.

The storyline is quite simple but the way it is told keeps you engrossed till the very end. I really liked how she made serious effort to depict how cruel a life of a miner was in the late 1800’s. The story also touches on the Trail of tears and the civil war but that is mostly tangential to the story. Her calling magic as glory was a bit distracting at first and it was surprising that none of the standard elementary creatures such as salamanders etc make any appearance. Although, we do have references to the Native American magic and creatures from their folklore do make an appearance. There is enough references to real events and folklore to make the story interesting and get people interested in learning more about them. I personally have gone on researching spree’s after reading one of the books in the series to get more details about some of the stuff that she mentions in the book.

Overall a great book, I highly recommend it.

March 7, 2021

Syncing data between my machines and phones using syncthing

Filed under: Computer Software,Computer Tips,Knowledgebase,Linux/Unix Related,Tech Related,Tutorials — Suramya @ 11:31 PM

I have talked about how my Backup strategy has evolved over the years. I am quite happy with the setup I explained in my previous post except for one minor point. I still had to manually sync the data from my laptop, Jani’s laptop and my phone to my desktop manually. Once it is there on the desktop the various backup processes make sure that it is backed up and secure. The issue is that I still had to manually sync the data between the devices.

For my laptop, I used Unison to manually check for changes and then sync them over which works great but I had to ensure that the sync happened in the correct direction. For Jani’s laptop I mounted my drive on her computer over ssh using these steps and then running robocopy to copy the files over. This worked intermittently well. For some reason the system would refuse to overwrite changed files randomly with permission denied errors even when the permission was set to 777. The only way to fix was to delete all the files on my computer and then do a fresh sync. This worked, but was not userfriendly and required me to manually kick off a backup which I did infrequently. My phone on the other hand was backed up manually to my computer using sftp. This was very crumbersome and I really disliked having to do it.

I have in the past looked into various technologies that allow multiple devices to sync data with each other. Unfortunately, all of them required an external connection with a copy of the data being stored in the cloud. Since that was a show-stopper for me, I never got around to setting up my systems to automatically sync with each other. Then a few weeks ago, I came across this great article on how to create A Simple, Delay-Tolerant, Offline-Capable Mesh Network with Syncthing (+ optional NNCP). In the article John talked about Syncthing, which allowed him to create a local serverless, peer-to-peer, open source alternative to Dropbox that allowed his machines sync directly with each other without a server. In other words a perfect fit for what I wanted and needed to do. So I spent a little bit of time researching syncthing and then decided to take the plunge and setup my laptop and desktop to sync with each other. Before starting the setup I backed up all my data so that in case something went wrong I still had a backup. Thankfully nothing did, but it is always good to have a backup.

Syncthing’s installation is pretty simple for all major operating systems, except for iPhones which are not supported. In Debian, installation just required the following steps

  • Run the following commands to add the “stable” channel to your APT sources:
    • echo "deb https://apt.syncthing.net/ syncthing stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/syncthing.list
curl -s https://syncthing.net/release-key.txt | sudo apt-key add -
  • Once you have added it, run the following command to install syncthing
    • sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install syncthing

    Once the software is installed execute the syncthing binary. On my computer it is installed in /usr/bin/syncthing. Once the software starts, it will start the web interface automatically. There is also a Desktop application, but I prefer the web-ui. Instructions on how to configure the folders and nodes are available at the Getting Started Guide over on the project website so I am not going to repeat them here. Basically, you need to define the nodes and connect them to each other, if the devices are not added on both sites then the folders will not sync.

    The software has a cool feature of discovery, which makes it easy to add devices on a given node. As soon as you connect to the same network they detect each other and give you the option of connecting both. After the devices are connected, you configure the folder you want to sync and select the devices you want it synced with. The best part is as soon as you configure one node, the other nodes will get a message stating that Node 1 is attempting to share a folder with them. Clicking on accept, allows you to configure the folder path etc on the node and that’s it. The system will detect the files which need to get synced over and will copy them quickly. You can configure the sync to be bi-directional or one way. Most of the folders in my setup are set as that, the only exception are Jani’s files which is a one-way sync because I know that I am not going to modify the files on the server.

    Below is what the setup looks on my desktop, as you can see I am syncing data from 3 different computers/phones to it and the sync’s are really fast. I have copied files over to the folder on one computer and within minutes (depending on the size) they were replicated on the other computers/phone.


    My Syncthing setup

    I have the android client running on my phone as well, and it instantly syncs any new photos etc from my phone to the desktop. All I need to do is connect to the same LAN network (can be over wired or wireless) and the devices connect and sync automagically. There is an option to do so even over the WAN using relay server but since I didn’t want that I disabled it in the setup.

    Now all my data is synced to the desktop machine without me having to worry about anything or manually copying files around. Check it out if you want to sync your devices without using an external server.

    – Suramya

March 6, 2021

How Facebook lies in notifications to get you to interact with it

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 9:58 PM

As some of you know, I don’t usually check Facebook very often. I recently logged in to FB after a while and while I was browsing, I got a little pop up on the bottom left corner of the screen telling me that someone had shared a photo in a group that I follow 6 mins ago. So I clicked on the pop-up and it took me to the group. There I immediately noticed that the post that Facebook had told me about had actually been made 5 hours ago. I had noticed this in the past in my notifications but never had a pop-up about it before.

This basically shows how much Facebook’s algorithms and UX trick you into engaging more on the site and stay there, by showing a message about a new post 6 mins ago they made me click over to check it out. However, this was posted over 5 hours ago and I might have already seen it. This is not a one time event, looking at my notifications, I see this happening very frequently…


Screen shot of the notification and the actual post. Note the time in each.

Are others seeing this as well? At least with Twitter, I don’t see a message that someone has just tweeted something and then find out that that was sent hours ago. This along with all the other nonsense that Facebook is doing is why I don’t use it very often. I am on it mostly because others are there and they share pics etc from our trips & travels on it. I am planning to do a full download of my entire Facebook account activity so that I have a record of it. I don’t think I will delete my account as of yet, but this is bordering on pushing me into deactivating the account.

– Suramya

February 22, 2021

Should software be “classified” if it is used by government agencies?

Filed under: My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 10:25 PM

Software should not be classified when used in government agencies except in some very rare exceptional cases. For example, software used to launch nuclear missiles and ensure they hit their targets might be an exception however, these should be an exception rather than the rule in my opinion. The reason I say that is because when a software is classified it means that a limited no of people are using it and that means only a limited no of developers are working on it as any given time. Plus, when something is classified it can not be security tested by external entities without having to sign multiple Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA’s) and other similar hoops whereas regular software is used and tested by lots of people like corporate’s who test the solution before they implement it in their environment. This gives us multiple groups of people testing the software in various ways making it easier to identify security issues making it more secure.

Secondly, making classified versions of existing software doesn’t seem like a good use of resources to me. Why spend extra money creating a classified ‘Word’ when the commercial version (with some modification) would work perfectly well?

Coming to open source, I don’t think government should be prohibited from using Open Source. There are two ways government’s can be blocked from using opensource software. Firstly, the software license might prohibit government use. If this is the case, then the license no longer meets the requirement to be called open source since the Open Source Definition specifies that Open Source licenses may not discriminate against persons or groups. In-fact there was an attempt back in 2006 by GPU which is a Gnutella client to create a license that disallowed the use of their software by the military. It didn’t go anywhere because of strong opposition by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to calling the license open source. Second, The government might not allow its use due to internal policy: This is primarily because they are worried about one or all of the following: Security, Cost, or licensing.

There is a misconception that opensource software is less secure than commercial software and even though majority of the servers worldwide run on opensource software (Linux, Apache etc) the detractors still persist. In every large company I have worked with so far, whenever I try promoting opensource software this point invariably comes up and I have to spend time explaining why this is not the case.

Another reason why companies might not allow OSS is because of the license the software might be under. If the software is licensed under the GPL they need to be extra careful when using it within their setup because the GPL is what is known as a viral license. It requires the source code of the entire “derived work” – i.e. the combination of GPL code and proprietary code – to be made available under the terms of the GPL publicly. Due to this most companies do not allow software licensed under the GPL to be used inside them. (Libraries licensed under GPL are fine because they don’t trigger the ‘viral’ clause). However, there are other licenses that do not have this clause and can be safely used.

Ultimately, I feel it is better if they use opensource software rather than pay ridiculous amounts of money as software licensing fees.

February 21, 2021

All Your Base Are Belong To Us: Turns 20

Filed under: Humor,My Life,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 12:05 AM

‘All Your Base Are Belong To Us’ is a phrase that is very familiar to anyone who was active on the internet in 2000’s as this was pretty much the first meme which took the entire net by storm. I remember someone posting a giant version of it in our college dorm windows using A4 paper. Unfortunately I don’t have a pic of it, but there were plenty of other places this popped up over the weeks really confusing a lot of people.

The first version showed up online on February 16, 2001 when a robo-voiced music video went live at Newgrounds.com. The video was a capture from a 90’s video game called Zero Wing with some hilariously bad English translation from the original Japanese. It contained phrases like “How are you gentlemen!!”, “Somebody set up us the bomb” and the infamous “All Your Base Are Belong To Us!”. The video presented the original Sega Genesis graphics, dubbed over with monotone, machine-generated speech reading each phrase. The video is shown below, click on play to view the original video with the awesome soundtrack:


All Your Base Are Belong to Us

The transcript of the video is as follows:

Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It’s you !!
CATS: How are you gentlemen !!
CATS: All your base are belong to us.
CATS: You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say !!
CATS: You have no chance to survive make your time.
CATS: Ha ha ha ha …
Operator: Captain !!
Captain: Take off every ‘ZIG’!!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Move ‘ZIG’.
Captain: For great justice.

After the original video from the game it moves on to show the phrase photoshopped into all sorts of images and photos from actual locations where it was inserted really confusing most folks because they had no idea what it meant.

It was extremely silly but great fun. Watching it again has really brought back memories of the great times from college. Here’s to the next 20 years, ’cause remember “All Your Base Are Belong To Us!”

– Suramya

February 20, 2021

Fixing boinc (code=exited, status=108) error

Filed under: Computer Tips,Knowledgebase,Linux/Unix Related,Tech Related — Suramya @ 2:01 AM

Earlier today I noticed that my CPU was not as active as usual and the boinc (World Community Grid) processes were no longer active on my computer. This has happened in the past when the client crashed so I restarted the client using the following command as usual:

/etc/init.d/boinc-client restart

Unfortunately, that didn’t resolve the problem and I thought that it could be because of the recent OS update that I did to my Debian system. In the past there have been rare cases when libraries were updated that some programs act strangely till the computer is rebooted, so I restarted the machine expecting to see the process start up without issues. Sadly, that didn’t happen so I had to debug the problem and I tried all sorts of things to resolve.

First, I tried starting the program manually as the root user and that worked. So I knew it was something to do with the startup script. Then I searched for and removed all the lock files in the boinc and the boinc-client directory. That should have resolved the problem but it didn’t and then I tried running the status command which gave the following output:

root@StarKnight:/var/lib/boinc-client# /etc/init.d/boinc-client status
boinc-client.service – Berkeley Open Infrastructure Network Computing Client
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/boinc-client.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Sat 2021-02-20 01:26:50 IST; 9s ago
Docs: man:boinc(1)
Process: 7420 ExecStart=/usr/bin/boinc (code=exited, status=108)
Process: 7455 ExecStopPost=/bin/rm -f lockfile (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Main PID: 7420 (code=exited, status=108)
CPU: 19ms

Feb 20 01:26:40 StarKnight systemd[1]: Started Berkeley Open Infrastructure Network Computing Client.
Feb 20 01:26:50 StarKnight boinc[7420]: 20-Feb-2021 01:26:50 Another instance of BOINC is running.
Feb 20 01:26:50 StarKnight systemd[1]: boinc-client.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=108/n/a
Feb 20 01:26:50 StarKnight systemd[1]: boinc-client.service: Failed with result ‘exit-code’.

This meant that the system thought that another instance of the software was running but that wasn’t the case as I verified it using ps. A search for the status=108 code on the internet returned a few results but nothing that resolved my problem. One user who faced this issue resolved it by uninstalling everything and installing back but that wasn’t a step I wanted to take without trying everything else first so I kept researching. Then I saw a post where a user was facing the same issue after they had moved the data directory to another partition and symlinked it to the original location. I had done the same thing a few weeks ago so I moved the directory back to it’s original location but that didn’t resolve anything either.

Then I thought about checking the file ownerships of the directory and they were owned by my user (suramya) and a post on the internet said that they should be owned by root. I checked on my laptop as I have the same setup there and found that the directories were owned by the ‘boinc‘ on the laptop. Then I remembered changing the ownership of all files in one of my drive partitions last night to suramya. What I didn’t realize at that time was that the boinc-client directory was also located on that partition (after I had moved it there to recover space on my root partition).

I immediately changed the ownership of both directories back to boinc:boinc using the following command 

chown boinc:boinc /var/lib/boinc* -R

Then I restarted the daemon and that fixed the problem. I then moved the directory back to it’s original location (on the other partition), symlinked it to the original location and the software still worked after I restarted the process.

I am documenting this in case others hit the same issue.

– Suramya

February 17, 2021

The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry by C M Waggoner

Filed under: Reviews-Fantasy — Suramya @ 2:01 AM

The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry

by C M Waggoner

Description:

Sparks fly in this enchanting fantasy novel from the author of Unnatural Magic when a down-and-out fire witch and a young gentlewoman join forces against a deadly conspiracy.

Dellaria Wells, petty con artist, occasional thief, and partly educated fire witch, is behind on her rent in the city of Leiscourt—again. Then she sees the “wanted” sign, seeking Female Persons, of Martial or Magical ability, to guard a Lady of some Importance, prior to the celebration of her Marriage. Delly fast-talks her way into the job and joins a team of highly peculiar women tasked with protecting their wealthy charge from unknown assassins.

Delly quickly sets her sights on one of her companions, the confident and well-bred Winn Cynallum. The job looks like nothing but romance and easy money until things take a deadly (and undead) turn. With the help of a bird-loving necromancer, a shapeshifting schoolgirl, and an ill-tempered reanimated mouse named Buttons, Delly and Winn are determined to get the best of an adversary who wields a twisted magic and has friends in the highest of places.

Buy From:

Rating:

Review:
This is the first book I have read by Waggoner, and I really liked it overall. The main character (Dellaria Wells) or Delly was interesting and likeable for the most part. I enjoyed her outlook on life and how she described her previous jobs. The remaining characters other than Winn were a bit two dimensional but mostly didn’t matter much because the antics of the two main characters were enough to keep you occupied and the story was simple and easy to follow for the most part.

One issue I had with the book was that the subject of Buttons was not fully explained and it just kept bugging me. I won’t go into details because ‘spoilers’ but it was a bit of a letdown how his character was handled.

I think there might be more books in the series or in the same universe so I am looking forward to reading them.

– Suramya

February 7, 2021

Travel in 2021: 3294kms driven as of date

Filed under: My Life,Travel/Trips — Suramya @ 8:25 PM

I complained a lot about not being able to travel in 2020, mostly to my wife who suffered through my complaints heroically. So the universe decided that I would get to travel a lot in 2021 as compensation. Jan 2021 has been a marathon session of driving all over south India, primarily because of Covid as we only wanted to go places within drivable distance from Bangalore as we normally would try to drive directly to the location without having to stop on the way. Plus we also ensured that we were only going to places with very limited crowds and mostly ended up staying in places where we were the only people (apart from the staff).

The first trip of the year was to Dindigul where we had gone for New Years. It was a lot of fun and we enjoyed it quite a bit. The second trip was to Kannur, Kerala (not to be confused with Coonoor, Tamil Nadu), which we did with Jani’s friends from IBM with whom we had been talking about going on a trip for over 4 years (almost 5). The drive to the place was quite nice and we made good time. I had planned on writing a trip summary as I normally do but didn’t get the time as I was swamped with classes and assignments. In any case, Jani has now started writing about all the trips so that reduces the pressure on me :). Her writeup on the trip is available here.

The next trip was to Kotagiri, Tamil Nadu with Anil, Manisha, Suprita , Vinit and the kids. We drove down from Bangalore to Kotagiri but thankfully I wasn’t driving because by this time I had already driven almost 1.8k kms in 2021. Anil, Manisha & Vinit drove for the trip and I got to relax and spend time with the kids for a bit. A big surprise was that I bumped into Gaurang in Ooty, as he had driven down for some work. We both stay in Bangalore but hadn’t seen each other for months because of Covid. So he came over and we spent some time together there and then he drove back with us which gave me a chance to spend some quality time with him during the drive.

Finally the last trip of the month was to visit Jani’s hometown, Colachel in Kanyakumari District for some work (plus spend time with family). It was a 14 hour+ drive from Bangalore and initially I had planned to do it in one shot. However, then we decided to break it up into two with a halt in Dindigul which is almost exactly half-way between the start and finish. This was the first time we were stopping on the way during a trip but in hindsight it was a great idea. It allowed me to take a break and rest as I was also up on night for my classes. If we hadn’t stopped on the way I would have been exhausted by the time we reached and this way I got to rest on the way. The drive down was fantastic, and I really loved the NH44. The road was well maintained and an absolute pleasure to drive. I had to consciously restrict myself from driving too fast and I really enjoyed it. The traffic also was minimal so I could really relax and enjoy the drive.

In all I have driven 3294 kms so far in 2021 and now that I am home I absolutely refuse to drive anywhere else for the month of Feb. We will see how I feel in March, but most probably we won’t be going anywhere till at-least the end of March as we both have exams in March. But based on our past experience, I will not say that we absolutely will not travel anywhere for the next two months.

I am eagerly waiting for the Covid vaccine to be generally available so that we don’t have to worry about Covid when traveling. Looking at the current status I have a feeling that it will be Q3, 2021 by the time we get vaccinated. Hopefully by the end of the year things might be back to normal so here’s hoping for that.

Well this is all for now. Will write more later, now that I am back home and not driving all over south India.

– Suramya

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