Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

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

June 8, 2005

Yes I am alive. Barely.

Filed under: My Life,Website Updates — Suramya @ 1:45 AM

Hi Everyone,

I guess I have been pretty irregular over the past few months in posting to the blog but life has been super busy for the past few weeks. The project I am working on right now is nearing completion and we are racing against a tight deadline so I have to work extremely long hours to make sure that the project gets done. Just to give you an idea of the hours, I have been getting to work at 9 am and leaving at around 1:30 – 2 am for most of last week. This week has been a bit easier; I get to leave by 8-9 pm 🙁

Other than that life is just peachy. The weather finally decided to warmup so instead of freezing to death in my room I am boiling to death.

Read the Time Odyssey by Arthur c clark and found it to be a lot poorer than his Space Odyssey series (The Time Odessey happens in parallel to the events in the Space Odessey).

Well this is all for now. Have to get up early tomorrow.

– Suramya

May 31, 2005

Whitewater rafting is fun.

Filed under: My Life,Travel/Trips — Suramya @ 3:02 AM

Today I went white water rafting with Vinit, Surabhi, Aish and Sameer. It was a lot fo fun. We drove for about 2 hours to get to this place called Narrowsburg in Pennsylvania. We got there at around 10:30 am and spent the next hour inflating the rafts (We had bought them at walmart earlier). The reason it took so long was that one of the rafts had a hole in in that we didn’t know about and it kept deflating. We finally saw the hole and figured out that it was causing the problem. Since we didn’t have anything else to fix it with we used a band-aid Vinit had in his wallet to tape the hole. Surprisingly it actually worked and held for the entire 5 hour trip. I am defenitely investing in the company that makes the adhesive for band-aids.:-)

Then when we were finally ready to launch this park ranger walked up to us and told us that we couldn’t launch if we didn’t have 5 life jackets on board with us. So we had to go and buy 5 life jackets even though all of us could swim 🙁 But then we finally launched for an awesome time in the water.

The best part was our lunch which we had while we were floating down the river in two rafts. It was one of the most peacefull moments of my life. Then once we had lunch we started rowing as it was getting kind of cold and it looked like it was about to rain. Unfortunately about 1/2 way through the ride it did start to rain and it was cold rain. Since we didn’t feel like going to shore and freezing over there we decided to continue rowing and braved the cold rain and the hard rocks. 🙂

The rain stopped for a little while after about an hour and the sun came out for about 15-20 mins to warm us. Then it was back to the stupid cold rain and freezing water. Thankfully we made it back to the car in one piece. The only casualty of the trip was Sameer’s Slippers which kind of floated away when none of us were paying attention to them.

Once we got dressed and picked up the other car from our starting point we drove back to NJ feeling really tired but awefully good about the trip. When we got home we ate great pavbhaji that Vinit had made and Surabhi reheated/served and now I am so full that I don’t want to move out of my really comfortable chair. Lets see how long it will take for me to motivate myself enough to move from the chair to the bed and fall asleep.

– Suramya

May 17, 2005

My Article was plagarized

Filed under: My Life,Website Updates — Suramya @ 2:26 PM

Got this email from a Professor in a NY college today. Turns out that my paper on Hinduism through the ages was plagarized for his class. Cool right. 🙂 Knowing this certainly did wonders for my ego.

Original Email:

Be flattered: one of my students turned in your page on the history of Hinduism as his paper, claiming he had written it. It is word for word as on your website, but with no credit to you.

You get an A. He doesn’t.

The name of the prof and the college has been withheld on request. Oh, in case you are wondering my original paper is available here

– Suramya

May 13, 2005

Had fun at Surabhi’s Birthday

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 6:45 AM

Yesterday (12th May) was my sister Surabhi’s 22nd birthday. Its hard to believe that she is 22 (Maybe ’cause she usually acts like a10 year old on a sugar high)…

We (Vinit, me and Surabhi) cut the first cake at 12 am on the 12th. Since it was late only the 3 of us were there for the first cake cutting. But we did celebrate her birthday properly by going for dinner at Olive Garden on Route 3. It is a great restaurant and the food there is amazing. We got there at 9:45 pm and were joined by Piet, Emily, Pranav, Reema, Sandeep, Hanny and his Girlfriend.

Spent a good 2 hours enjoying the food and the conversation. Then drove home to cut the second cake. After the cake was cut we all stayed up till 2 am talking. Then since everyone had work the next day they all decided to split. I did take a lot of pics and will post them sometime soon.

Now I am tired but can’t sleep. Let see what I can do to pass time till I fall asleep.

– Suramya

May 12, 2005

General update of my life

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 3:22 AM

Hi Everyone,
As some of you probably have noticed I havn’t been posting stuff on my blog for the past few weeks. It has been a crazy couple of weeks and I blame: Lazyness -> Lack of time -> Lack of sleep (In that order) for the delay in posting stuff on the site.

Site Update:

Site is back to normal. Working on the new versions of the various scripts I wrote (IM2Email, Collage Generator) and should have the new versions up soon.

Life Update:

These past few weeks have been especially good as I have gotten back in touch with friends I hadn’t talked to in over 5-7 years. first I met-up with Karishma (We were in 11th & 12th together) for lunch 2 weeks ago as she is also working in NY right now. The funny part was that we have both been in NY or the tristate area for the past 2 years(5 years for me) but neither of us knew about the other person being in NY. We had a awesome time catching up with each other’s lives. I did take a camera with me to the meeting but got so caught up in talking that forgot to take any pics. 🙁

The got in touch with Shashank (we were in 9th and 10th grade together) on Yahoo Messenger. It was nice chatting with him after such a long time. Wish I could have met him Face 2 face also but he is in India right now so unfortunately that isn’t possible right now.

Weekend Update (7th May – 8th May):

Drove to DC for Ruth’s graduation. Me and Vivek left NY at 3:45 am on Sunday and got to DC at 7:15 am after driving nonstop the entire way. Attended the graduation, had lunch roamed the city, had dinner and slept for a few hours and then left from DC at 4:00 am to arrive in NY at 7:30 am. Unfortunately both of us had work so we left for work almost immediately. (I will post a more detailed version of the trip in the Photogallery when I post the graduation pics)

As you can guess a lot more happened during this time but I don’t feel like typing it all out. If you are very curious email me and I might tell you about it.

– Suramya

April 3, 2005

Dinner and a Movie

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 6:17 AM

Today was a fun night, one of my friends Priya had come over from Syracuse, NY for the weekend. Unfortunately the weather was pretty horrible all day so we couln’t goto the city. We decided to meet at Newport mall and hangout over there. But when we got there Priya remembered that she hadn’t booked her return flight so we (Me, Priya and Bhagyashri) came back to my place so that she could book her flight.

Then Vinit, Surabhi, Vatsa and his friend Ravi (Who is one of the coders who wrote the mono compiler) came over and we all went to dinner at Rasoi where we had great Indian food. After we were done eating we decided to go watch ‘Guess Who’ at Jersey Gardens Mall. It was a decent movie, actually it was a lot better than what I had expected it to be.

Once we were done with the Movie we dropped everyone home as it was getting late and everyone was tired. Now I can’t sleep for some reason so lets see what I can do to kill time…

– Suramya

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