Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

January 30, 2005

MSNBot Sucks

Filed under: My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 10:03 PM

Really pissed of at the stupid MSNBot and its stupid webcrawling allgorithim right now. In the past one month it has hit my site 34,892 times and has transfered 1.2 GB of data from my site. I have no idea what on my site it thinks has changed and needs to be reindexed, it did the same thing last month where the traffic from all the other Bots combined was less than the traffic from it.

The funny part is that in the past one month the only thing that changed on my site was the Blog, addition of one new article and an update to my resume. I have no idea how this could translate to 1.2 GB of data. Below is a snapsot showing the amount of data transfered by each web crawler.

NEway’s I have emailed Microsoft about it, lets see if I actually get a response to my mail.

– Suramya

December 20, 2004

Solar Powered backpack

Filed under: Tech Related — Suramya @ 4:13 PM

Now this is something cool. Voltaic Systems just released a backpack with integrated solar panels. This allows the user to charge most electronics (excluding laptops unfortunately) using solar energy without having to setup the solar panels.

The price is a bit on the high side at $229 + Shipping. But for regular travellers it should be a great help. It even has pockets for most electronic gear (ipod’s, PDA’s etc). Check out the site for the pics.

Would like to buy this when I get some cash and go travelling.

– Suramya
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December 16, 2004

X-10 Releases new home automation software

Filed under: Tech Related — Suramya @ 4:28 PM

X10 which was known for its pop up ads for wireless camera’s has released a new package which makes it easier for people to ‘give your home a brain’, meaning you can now use the software to create a smart house.

I was looking into this last year and when my house in India is nearing completion I will be buying the package and automating the entire house. The new kit costs about $100 with new modules costing ~$15. I am thinking I will add biometric scanners to the mix to allow me to unlock the door without needing keys. Although I will be adding manual overrides in case the power goes out and I will use Linux to control the system instead of windows. I will be adding UPS backup to the server incase of power outages and stuff. Another cool thing to add to this would be voice recognition software.

One of the neat things about this new system is that it doesn’t need the computer to be on after you have programmed it. Meaning once you are done programing the controller you can pug it into any electric supply and shut down the computer and still enjoy the benefits of home automation.

I will keep post updates when I actually start working on this.

Original Story: Wired News

December 1, 2004

Cool Search Engines

Filed under: Computer Related,Tech Related — Suramya @ 7:15 AM

Found two really cool search engines today. Each of them caters to a specific kind of search unlike Google which is a generic search engine.

Koders.com:
This cool website allows you to search through existing source code that solves many common development problems with our vast index of working source code from a variety of open source projects. In many cases you may find code that solves the exact problem you are working on, and in other cases, you can find an 80% solution – where existing code can be suited to your needs with minor modifications.

SingingFish.com:
Singingfish is the premier audio/video search engine. Unlike traditional search engines, Singingfish only indexes multimedia formats, including Windows Media, Real, QuickTime, and mp3s.

Hope you find these as usefull as I do.

– Suramya

November 27, 2004

Text editor for Linux

Filed under: Tech Related — Suramya @ 12:29 AM

While looking for a good document editor for Linux I came across TextMaker created by SoftMaker Software ltd. Its is a very light weight program and requires no configuration, all you have to do if unzip it and run it.

TextMaker launches lightning-fast, needs little memory, does not require complicated setup and still has the full feature set of a modern high-end word processor. It reads and writes Microsoft Word 6/95/97/2000/XP/2003 files without losing formatting or content.

Unfortunately its not free or open source ($49 to buy) bu I think its worth the price. The site offers a 30 day free trial version so check it out if you are looking for a wordprocessor for linux.

URL: http://www.softmaker.de/tml_en.htm

– Suramya

November 5, 2004

Playboy has a mirror for CPAN

Filed under: Funny News,Tech Related — Suramya @ 5:56 AM

Ok this is something I really didn’t expect to find. Today when downloading perl modules from CPAN I noticed that the file I was downloading was being served on mirror.playboy.com. I took a screenshot of the window as proof

Playboy Mirror

October 5, 2004

Magic Bike

Filed under: My Life,Tech Related — Suramya @ 3:51 AM

Magicbike is a mobile WiFi (wireless Internet) hotspot that gives free Internet connectivity wherever its ridden or parked. Read more at: http://www.magicbike.net/

Here’s a picture I found of it:

Linux based Live CD’s

Filed under: Linux/Unix Related,Tech Related — Suramya @ 2:56 AM

As you probably know I a big fan of the Linux OS and find it a lot more useful and stable than Windows. Linux has a unique property that it can be installed on and run from the most unlikely systems/devices.

One of the most useful installs are the Linux Live CD’s. These are compressed CD images of a complete linux OS and are available for free with almost no restrictions. A lot of the live distro’s are created with a specific purpose and are fine-tuned for it.

Below is a list of the various Linux Distro’s and what they specialize in:

  • Knoppix: This is one of the most famous Live Linux distro’s. It is based on Debian and contains over 2 GB of software on one CD.
  • Kanotix: This is a Linux Live CD based on KNOPPIX technology using mostly pure Debian/sid. Contains more updated packages than Knoppix.
  • F.I.R.E: FIRE is a portable bootable cdrom based distribution with the goal of providing an immediate environment to perform forensic analysis, incident response, data recovery, virus scanning and vulnerability assessment. Very Useful
  • Penguin Sleuth Kit Bootable CD: A GUI based Bootable CD based on KNOPPIX for forensic previewing of live systems with some security and sys admin tools.
  • War Linux: This distro is dedicated to War Drivers. Officially It’s main intended use is for systems administrators that want to audit and evaluate their wireless network installations but it works great for wardriving also.
  • Ultimate Boot CD: Not exactly a Live Linux distro but still a pretty useful disk to have in your collection. It allows you to run floppy-based diagnostic tools from CDROM drives. It has loads of tools and has saved my backside a couple of times.

A more complete list of Distro’s is available at: http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=cd

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask. I might not reply immediately but I will try to answer your questions or point you in the right direction (I hope)

– Suramya

Bootable live windows CD/DVD is now available

Filed under: Tech Related — Suramya @ 12:42 AM

Found out today that a guy named Bart has created a free version of the Windows Preinstalled Environment and made it available for free at his website. So if you have a valid windows xp/2003 license you should head over there now and grab a copy.

This CD will give you a complete Win32 environment with network support, a graphical user interface (800×600) and FAT/NTFS/CDFS filesystem support. Very handy for burn-in testing systems with no OS, rescuing files to a network share, virus scan and so on.

The CD does have some major licensing issues: You can’t legally create more than one copy unless you have more than one Windows license. on the other hand there are plenty of Linux Live CD distributions available which don’t have any such restrictions so I would suggest that you check them out.

Will post links for them a little later today.

– Suramya

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