Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

A lot of you (or atleast some of you) must have heard people complaint about the Delhi Fog and how much trouble it causes for flights, trains and cars and atleast some percentage of you must be thinking: “Whats such a big deal about a little fog?”

I went to pickup Vinit from the Metro station today, which is about 2 min drive from my place. It took me about 10 mins to get there and this was how the roads looked when I left home.

Road to the Metro

BTW, this is not as bad as yesterday, so yeah the visibility gets even worse sometimes. This is why people from Delhi complain about the fog.

– Suramya

I read a lot and I buy a lot of books. Today I placed an order for limited edition copy of ‘VENGEANCE OF RAVANA’ which is Book #7 and ‘SONS OF SITA’ which is Book #8 in The Ramayana Series by Ashok Banker. Both of which won’t be out in market before the end of the year. Actually Book #8 is supposed to be published in 2011! 🙂 Yay Me!

I ordered the books directly from the author’s site and the process was painless. I just had to give my address, email & name and the books will be shipped to me directly. The best part was that the payment wasn’t made by credit-card during the purchase.

I got a separate email from the author with the payment instructions. The author prefers that the money be sent directly to his bank account and this can be done online or from a cash counter at his bank. The reason I like it is because this way all the money I am giving for the book is actually going to the author as the only cost to them is the cost of shipping and there are no payments to be made to the bank for maintaining a payment portal (Which can be expensive, depending on traffic etc).

BTW, Copies of Book #7 are still available as of the time of this writing so if you are interested check it out and international buyers can purchase the book using a credit card as usual.

In other news a lot of nice books are releasing soon and I can’t wait for them to come out. Here are a few along with their publication dates:

– Suramya

The past few days have been interesting, as they were spent rewiring the house so that the new UPS that we installed for the house would work and not have too much load on it. In addition we redistributed the load so that each of the three phases coming into the house from the electricity board have an equal amount of load on them. This involved cutting a lot of wires, some drilling and a lot of splicing and adding of new fuses etc.

We finally got the delivery for the new UPS 3 days ago but the batteries that were supposed to be delivered at the same time were only delivered yesterday as they took longer than expected to charge (That’s what the dealer told us). When the UPS arrived we had to remove the old Inverter ’cause of the deal we had made with the company (we got a discount if we gave them our old inverter) so we didn’t have any power backup for the house till yesterday night when all the work was finally done.

Thanks to all of this, my desktop was off for most of the past three days. I didn’t want to chance the power going off and my UPS (for the computer) running out of juice before it came back.

Once everything was installed and tested I booted up my system and got a Grub Rescue prompt instead of my normal boot screen. Normally the solution to this is booting up with a live CD and reinstalling Grub. But first I had to figure out what happened and why I was getting this error. I still don’t know what happened but I ‘think’ that the drive developed a bad sector/block and that sort of destroyed the bootloader.

The problem I faced then was that my DVD drive seemed to be having a lot of trouble reading any of the Live CD’s I have lying around. I first tried the Debian Testing Installation cd, followed by RHEL 5.1, Slackware, Kanotix, Kanoppix. None of them would work. Finally managed to boot using the Debian Test and convinced it to read from the CD. Once that was done told it to restore the Bootloader and was good to go.

But since I didn’t know what caused the crash I wanted to make sure that my Main drive was working ok (Its a 1 TB Segate) so I booted into single user and told the system to scan the 1st 500GB partition for badblocks and mark them as such. This scan took about 14 hours. Now I have another 500GB partition plus a 200GB drive and another 15 GB drive. Which by my guess will take the most of the next few days to scan. The 20 GB shouldn’t be an issue as I can scan it while booted in the GUI (Its a backup drive) but the rest have data on them that is used when I boot into Linux so I will have to do it from a single user mode.

I think I will copy most of my work/entertainment files to a thumb drive and work off that till this is done.

Well this is all for now. I am off to copy data to my thumb drive and then will start the scan on the other partitions. Will post more later.

– Suramya

Wishing all my readers a very Happy New Year, where ever you are located and whatever you do I hope you have a blast in the coming year. 🙂

The day (31st ) started off at 11 am for me, ’cause I had to drop off Sid and Ritika to Gurgoan(GG). They had stayed back at our place after they came over to watch Avatar with Vinit and Surabhi. We left home at about 1:30 so that we could have lunch before they left.

We had lunch at Sancho’s where I had Taco’s with grilled vegetables. Now I know that I should never order Taco’s with vegetables. Plain Beans and Rice are good enough for me. The rest of the group enjoyed the food and while mine wasn’t too bad, it wasn’t as good as I had expected.

After Lunch we left Surabhi and Vinit at South-Ex and the rest of us drove to GG. I dropped them at their place and drove to Aditya’s place. Since we had time to kill and had to get dinner we drove to the Mall road and walked around in a couple of malls. Did some shopping at Spencers for some of the stuff that I used to use in the US and missed over here in India.

Then Sakhi also joined us and we went to dinner at Punjabi by Nature. The food was decent and the portions were pretty big. After dinner we went back home and watched TV. Basically we saw the dance performances of a few dance troupes till midnight while making fun of everyone. After midnight we started watching B4U which was doing a marathon song session on various Actors and Actresses. We had so much fun commenting on everything and anything in the dance/lyrics etc. I have not laughed so much in a long time. We were up till about 4:30 am and I had a blast.

My new years resolution:

1. Finish updating suramya.com content and push the new interface out. Its way beyond time to finish this.

What are your resolutions?

– Suramya

As I have posted earlier I have been using Ubuntu for the past few months and was reasonably satisfied with 9.04. When 9.10 came out in Oct I upgraded to it using the built in upgrade and since then I have been having issues with the install. (Most of them caused by the upgrade process according to forums)

The first issue I got hit with (which I never really solved) was that my desktop no longer allowed me to put icons on it. Basically the Desktop work area (or whatever they are calling it in KDE4) disappeared. It wasn’t that big a deal because I hardly use the desktop icons anyway (I use the ‘quick bar’ to start most programs) but still irritating.

The main issue I found really irritating was that the fonts on Gnome applications (X-Chat, Thunderbird, Synaptic) were not controlled by the KDE control panel, plus every time I rebooted the fonts would reset to the default settings (size 6 for the gnome apps) and I would have to run the gnome-control-panel and then click on the Appearance link and then close the application (without making any changes) to set the fonts to a normal size.

Then I guess I made some changes to the system before my last reboot. The reboot was after 5 days and I had been fiddling with the settings, so I don’t know exactly what I changed but the end result was the the entire display would dance around everytime I moved my mouse (or tried typing). Now since I had been meaning to do a clean install of 9.10 since I had upgraded I took this chance to backup my system and do a clean install instead of troubleshooting.

However the problem with the fonts is still there. Another irritating thing is the way all the tools/programs (like vim, gcc, ssh server) that I have come to expect to be pre-installed on a system are not installed. So instead of installing all these packages again, then fighting with the fonts issue and then removing all the eye candy and special effects I am going to remove Ubuntu from my system and go back to a plain Debian install. I will be installing the Testing or Unstable version but it will be a plain install.

I am not saying that Ubuntu is a bad system. Its just not the right system for me because I happen to find a lot of eye candy to be very distracting when I am working. I don’t want the entire window to show when I am tabbing through them, just the name and the icon are fine. Plus the wiggly window border is really annoying for me.

You might have a different criteria than me and might like it better. Although, for a new user Ubuntu is certainly the easiest to setup.

– Suramya

Watched Avatar yesterday night in 3d. Went for the 10:45 pm show and it was worth the wait to watch the movie in 3D. The effects were really good and the fact that the movie was in 3D made it even better.

In the future when going for 3D movies I think I will try to sit closer to the screen, that way I believe that the immersion into the movie will be more complete. This time I was about 1/2 way up from the screen and I could still see the theater which kind of spoilt the illusion. If I am closer to the screen then it would take up more of the viewing space thus make everything more real.

They should release more movies in 3D in India. This was the 1st 3D movie that I have seen in India, and it was a good experience. For a change even the Nacho’s were good (For some reason the Nacho’s at the Big Cinema’s in TGIP have been pretty bad the last few times I have been there)

If you have the time, watch this movie in the theater. Its worth it, just to see the effects.

– Suramya

Went to an Audio Visual Exhibition with Tarini yesterday. Atleast that’s how it was explained to me. I was an interesting experience, ’cause I am no artist and this exhibition was all about art. To an untrained eye (me) it looked like a guy playing a guitar with a screensaver running on the projector. The music was decent and some of the abstracts were great.

The part I really liked was the show before the one we had gone to see, where they were showing short movies about various topics. There was this movie about the road access issue in Palestine. Basically they showed this woman who gets hit by a car and the guy is trying to get her to the hospital but is unable to do so because he is not allowed to go through any of the roadblocks set up by the military. Quite an interesting movie.

The one before that one I didn’t really get, but it showed this pair of drinking glasses being kicked around a subway station. I guess it was supposed to have a deep meaning but it kind of went over my head. What can I say… I am no art person.

Overall the show was interesting and I enjoyed it. Might do it again some time.

– Suramya