Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

Hi everyone! As usual I have gotten busy with real life and not updated the blog. So here’s a summary of what I have been doing since my last update:

1. Working: Spent a lot of time at work. One of the project’s deadlines got preponed and had to pitch in on the project. Spent some time working on data migration issues also. It was an interesting experience. Got home at 8 – 8:30 am a couple of times. But I enjoy working over here.

2. Reading: Read a couple of interesting books: “Reserved for the Cat” by Mercedes Lackey. Its the 6th book in the Elemental mage series and it was an ok read. I liked the other books in the series more. Also read the entire Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell. Really like this series. Am really waiting for the next book in the series to come out.

3. Rafting: Went for a rafting trip with Surabhi, Vinit and Ridhi. It was an amazing trip. We got to Rishikesh late in the afternoon and immediately left for rafting. Since there have to be atleast 7-8 people in a raft our group was paired with another group which had three girls in it. I enjoyed the trip a lot. We got to do; rafting, cliff jumping, rock climbing, rappelling, crossing the Burma bridge and kayaking. The water was freezing.

The second night we got hit with a sandstorm and then it started raining so the next day the water level was a lot higher and the rapids were even better. The guide we had was fun and made us play some really cool games. The one I enjoyed the most was where we had to stand up during a rapid and try not to fall.

Yes I took photos (Obviously) however my camera was low on battery (don’t ask) so we used Shivani’s camera also to take photos. We have some really nice pics on her camera so I am waiting to get those pics before I upload photos to the website. I should have them by next weekend. Till then, all you got to do is wait…

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

– Suramya

Its late and I realized that I haven’t been posting on the site, but don’t feel like typing a complete blog entry so this post is just going to be some random thoughts I have been thinking about:

There’s an application in Linux called ‘kBluelock’ that allows you to setup your computer to monitor a particular bluetooth device and if that device goes out of range it automatically locks your computer. I have it set to watch my phone so whenever I leave the desk it locks my computer automatically as I always carry my phone in my pocket.

Looking to buy a new phone, this one is giving me a lot of issues. Keeps dropping my calls in the middle. Any recomendations? I need something with a good camera and a GPS. It should allow me connect to an email server and the web.

Seriously want to buy an automatic door opener or something. Its a pain to get out of the car to open the main doors so that I can park the car inside.

Giving out free samples increases your sales. Word of mouth is the best marketing strategy. Tor publishing has been emailing free copies of some of their books every 2 weeks and I have already found two authors that I really like and will buy their books in the future. i.e. if the shipping charges don’t bankrupt me first.

Amazon shipping kills you, $5 shipping + $5 per item additional. So a $18 book ends up costing me $28. Not going to buy from them.

Skype is a cool software, getting Skypein to work is a pain for some reason. It even works on linux. Need to figure out how to merge skype chat logs from two computers. Copying everything to one folder doesn’t work

At 4 am the roads are completely empty so its fun to drive

Delhi heat sucks

* Debian Unstable/Testing don’t like my laptop. Stable works great. Need to roll back to Stable. Will end up formatting again. Will do it over the weekend. Don’t want to end up without a laptop during the week if something goes wrong. (Will post a complete list of issues later)

* My post on setting up the wireless card ended up on Debian-news site. 🙂
* Delhi mosquitoes suck… literally.
* need to organize a get together for school friends
* ebooks are great. esp the no shipping part.

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

– Suramya

This past week have brought a lot of changes. I started the week with a new job. Thats right I just switched jobs. I am now working for a company called SourceFuse Technologies that’s based out of Noida and has offices in the US also. I have joined as a senior project manager for PHP.

The week started off pretty well, I got to work at 1pm (yeah, I still work US hours) and was back home at ~1:30 am. Wasn’t that bad. The next few days however were crazy we were here in the office till almost 5 am. On friday I got home at 6:30am. This was because we had a project deadline. Thankfully that is now deployed and confirmed as working.

The other major change was that I got a new laptop from work, its a Compaq presario v3000 with Dualcore processors (1.7 Ghz) and 2 GB of RAM, 160GB hdd. Its a great system. It had Vista installed on it and it was running really slowly. Plus I hate Vista anyways. BTW, do you know. The first time you start a computer running vista it takes it about 20mins-1 hour to configure the system? Saw this on a piece of paper that I found with my laptop in the bag.

I have installed Linux on it and it ran great except for the following issues:

1. Headphones weren’t working. When I plugged the headphones in the system sound was played on both the speakers and the headphones. – Fixed

2. Can’t get a resolution higher than 1024x – Still working on it. Had fixed it but that broke the touchpad. 🙁 Not really a major issue. Just irritating

3. Wireless not working – Fixed. Needed to install the drivers.

Other than that, everything worked out of the box. Including the bluetooth, builtin webcam, LAN etc.

Really enjoying playing with it. In the process of installing windows on it in a virtual machine. I will make a separate post on how I got everything to work.

This is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

This weekend was fun. Surabhi & Vinit had come over from Bangalore for a meeting/conference. So I got to go receive them at the airport. Surabhi came at 7:20 pm and I had reached the airport at 6:55 so I got to spend 30 mins sitting in the car waiting for her to arrive. Good thing that now I can read books on my phone, otherwise it would have been painful.

Vinit arrived at 1:20 am but thanks to Surabhi being impatient we reached the airport at 12:15am. So we got to spend one hour in the car. Thankfully there was a Narula’s express counter in the gas station where we were waiting so the wait wasn’t that bad. By the time Vinit arrived it had started raining so we got back pretty late.

On Sunday we went for a late dinner at this restaurant called Panjabi Pindi. Where the food was excellent and the prices were reasonable. Would have also watched a movie but nothing good was playing so we came back home and they both crashed as they have to get up early in the morning.

I watched the First episode of the new season of Dr. Who. I Loved it. The new companion is a lot better than Martha and thankfully they won’t have that stupid love interest this time with the new companion like they tried last time. So far I like this companion, though Rose was a good companion too… When I was reading the comments on the latest episode I saw this comment made by a user:

drewmit: But, by not being in DW, Billie Piper can instead do season 2 of Secret Diary of
a Call Girl. A series in which she appears nude. I think she should keep her
current job, don’t you?

It made me laugh.

The Second season of Torchwood has ended. Liked this season a lot better than the 1st one. Lot of good storylines this time. Actually make that: they actually had story lines this time… Too bad it ended.

Now I am off to bed. Long day tomorrow…

– Suramya

Today I finally decided to install Linux on my Laptop. Though I have been running Linux on my desktop since 2000. I have never installed it on my Laptop, primarily because I needed to run Windows for work. So for the past year I have been using Windows as my primary OS with Linux serving as a storage server and used for tasks where I needed to do some scripting/automating.

I used the Kanotix LiveLinux Cd to install Kanotix on the laptop, primarily because I wanted to see if all the components would be detected without issues. So far everything seems to work great. I didn’t allocate enough space for the Linux partition (I had only given 2 GB) so I will try to resize the partitions. Hopefully that will work ok. Obviously I need to backup the system before I try it. So I will not be doing it immediately.

Almost every component of the Laptop was detected without issues and they all are working without me having to manually configure anything.

The sad part is that since its been so long since I have used KDE (I used the command line for working on the desktop) that I have to relearn a lot of the workings, esp the configuration screens etc. Ah well, atleast I am learning some new and interesting stuff.

Other than that life has been fun. Busy but fun.

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

– Suramya

My laptop has decided that it has had enough of the Internet and started to boycott it. Basically what that means is that my network connection has stopped working on the laptop. Initially I thought that it was a software issue so I reinstalled Windows on the system (which is something I wanted to do anyways). Unfortunately that didn’t fix the problem. 🙁 So I booted into Linux using a Live Linux CD and had the same issue over there.

Now the wireless card probably works but I don’t have a wireless router at home. I am currently debating weather I should just get the laptop fixed or go buy a wireless router. In anycase I would like to have the LAN port working so I can use the net where there is no Wireless. So I am leaning towards getting the port fixed.

Currently I am using my desktop to access the web and its a pain. Oh it works fine and all that, its just that the stupid monitor has gone whacko since I last used it. Now half my screen has a purple tinge to it, so working on it for too long gives me a headache.

Ah well. Lets see when I can get the thing fixed. Then I will have to install all the software on it again. Re-installing windows is a pain. Applying all the patches etc takes so much time and you can’t just start the update and leave it unattended. In Linux you can perform an update and install all patches with a single command (In Debian its apt-get dist-upgrade).

I might just put linux on it. Dad probably won’t like it, as he is used to of windows but I think I can convince him that its not that hard to learn.

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

– Suramya

A few of you might have been wondering where I have disappeared to these last few days.

Well I have been here struggling to identify why I couldn’t get to the net from my laptop. First I thought it was a network cable issue so I replaced all the cables with new ones (yeah I have a lot of them lying around). That didn’t solve the problem. The funny part was that my vonage was able to connect to the web and computers in the server room seemed to be able to connect to the web sometimes. I thought that it could be an issue with the Vonage router, as the rest of the house was going through it to get to the web. So I took out a linksys switch I had which was gathering dust and took the Vonage router out of the picture (The DSL modem was now acting as the router).

Unfortunately that didn’t fix the problem either. So I decided to move the entire system (router, modem and switch) to my room so that I could get net access there. Unfortunately over there even the vonage system lost net access. I couldn’t even ping the modem from my system. So I called Airtel and they sent a guy over to replace the modem. After they replaced the system it worked for a little while then something went wrong with its powesupply. It kept restarting randomly and ofcourse I couldn’t browse the web without frequent disconnects. So I called them again and they replaced both the router and the power adapter. So far it looks like its working.

In the mean time I found out that the network jack on my laptop is acting up… I could browse the web if I used the USB network jack I have but the net kept going down if I was using the built in network port. It might be a problem with Windows or it might be a hardware issue. I will probably be re-installing windows soon and if that doesn’t solve the issue I will get a wireless router.

Now I seem to be able to connect to the web. Lets hope it stays that way. *Crossed fingers*

– Suramya

Attended Sandeep’s wedding in Jhalandar on the 20th. Jhalandar is about 400 Kms from Noida and we had decided to drive there. Vinit, Surabhi and Pranav arrived in Delhi on the 18th at ~10:30 pm. As usual I had to go pick them up from the airport, by the time Pranav got out of the airport it was almost 11:30. On the way back we stopped over at Umang’s place and chatted till almost 5 am. Then also we only left because we had to leave for the wedding and Umang had to go to work.

We got home by 6am, had breakfast and crashed for a little while. Originally the plan was that we would leave after a few hours of sleep but by the time we got up it was almost 12:30. So we ended up leaving at 1pm. Then we got stuck in traffic while trying to get out of Delhi on the NH-1. That part took us almost 2 hours. After we got out of that the road was pretty good and the speed limit was a sensible 90 kms/hr. So we were driving at ~90-110 (with peaks of 120). Got to Jhalander at about 8:30 pm (we did take a 45 min break for a late lunch in the middle)

The wedding itself was fun. We first had the sangeet on the 19th night. All of us danced a bit, had dinner and then met everyone from Sandeep’s family. After that we all were tired so we crashed. The wedding day itself was nice and warm. The event was decent. The dance group they had organized was good. The wedding did go on till very late. The phera’s started at 12:30 and don’t know till how long they went on.

The next day we left our room at 6:00 am. The roads were empty so drove pretty fast. (Topped off at 160). Wanted to eat break-fast at macdonalds but all the ones on the road were closed. One for renovation, one opened at 9 am, and the third we have no idea about. Finally ended up having sandwiches for breakfast with Ilachi flavored milk. Plus Uncle Chips. What can I say… breakfast is the most important meal of the day. 🙂

Got home by 1pm. So the total drive took us 7 hrs. This included multiple stops, plus one hour of Delhi traffic. Over all a fun trip. Had been wanting to go on a road trip again for a while. So the wedding was a good excuse.

Well this is all for now. Having some internet issues (The home LAN is flaky for some reason) so more updates will be delayed till I fix that.

– Suramya

Yesterday was a ‘fun’ day. I got to attend three weddings on the same day. The day started off with me, mom and dad driving almost to Gurguan to give Bhaat at my cousin’s place. It took us almost 1 1/2 to get there thanks to the traffic and we got there about 12:00 pm. The function took till about 2 pm and once we were done we left to attend another wedding clear across town near Gaziabad. It took us a bit more than a hour to get to that wedding. Had lunch over there then left for the second wedding which was another hour’s drive from this place. Got there at 4:30 pm and stayed till 5:30.

Then we drove back home to rest and change so that we could drive back to Gurguan for the third wedding. Unfortunately (or fortunately) by this time the mild cold I had been nursing for the past day had blown up into a major cold with a slight fever so I got out of attending the third wedding. I am sort of glad about that. Mom and dad were there till 5 am. If I had gone for the wedding I know I would have fallen sick big time.

As it is, my head hurts and my eyes keep watering. Though I am feeling a lot better than yesterday after a full day of rest.

Well this is all for now. I am going to go listen to some music now. Will write more later.

– Suramya

Went to the International book fair being held in Pragati Maidan, Delhi. It is a huge setup with stalls setup in ~17 halls. I visited about 7-8 of them before leaving for the day. I was not wearing the most comfortable shoes so my feet were killing me.

Bought 7 books for Rs. 490. Which is a little more than the price of a new paper back (~Rs 300 – 350) Will definitely go there again. The fair will go on till the 10th so I still have some time. This time though I will wear sneakers. The best part was since I went on a weekday not a lot of people were there so I got to talk to a lot of the stall staff and they helped me locate some really good stuff.

Also got the addresses and locations for a couple of the shops which had the best books and now after the show is over I will visit them and see if I can get some good deals/stuff there.

Well this is all for now. I am off to enjoy my bounty 🙂

– Suramya