Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

December 22, 2009

Finally sync’d my Phone to my Google Calender

Filed under: My Life,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 3:54 PM

After reading Vinit’s response to my post about Google Calender Notification (and talking to him) I finally went ahead and installed Mail for Exchange on my N95.

The configuration was easy, however the interface I got and the settings the system requested were different than what the Google Help site showed. Initially when I was setting up the profile it only asked for my username and password and the domain (which it didn’t let me leave blank as the Google site recommended).

After I saved this info and tried to exit from the configuration screen that’s when it told me that I hadn’t filled out all the required information and asked me for the remaining information (like the exchange server name etc)

Once all that was done, I initiated a sync. Even though I had told it to sync calender entries and included events up to two weeks ago it didn’t sync all my events. So I told the system to sync all calender events and that’s when it downloaded all my entries from the Google calender to my local phone.

The only problem I see is that the events that my phone got from the Google calender don’t have any alarm set for them even though I have an alert set up on the calender for them. Though this could be because I only have the SMS and email alerts configured on all my events but not the pop-up alert. Maybe setting that alarm also will give me a phone alarm. But its not that big a deal.

Now I have to sit and clean up all the double entries I have ended up on my phone and calender for the same events… Basically on my phone I had the alert configured for a different time than the alert on the calender so I have to sit and clean that out. Will do it when I have some spare time when I am not doing anything…

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

– Suramya

December 21, 2009

Watched Avatar yesterday night

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 10:20 PM

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

December 20, 2009

Audio Visual Exhibition

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 10:59 PM

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

December 18, 2009

Google adds Text to Speech capability to its translation service

Filed under: Interesting Sites,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 12:01 AM

While surfing the net I discovered that Google has a service that reads out text, converting it to speech so I tried it out and it works great, the voice doesn’t sound robotic at all like some of the other converters that are available today. The best part is that you can use it by passing it a sentence as part of a URL and it will return a mp3 file with the voice over.

For example, visiting the following link will cause it to read out “Hello and welcome”: http://www.google.com/translate_tts?q=Hello+and+welcome

Try it out. To have it read out a different text just change the text after ‘q=’ with your own text, replacing the spaces in the sentence with a + sign.

The only other Text To Speech service I have seen that does this good work is the AT&T Labs Natural Voices site.

The advantage of the Google service is that it can be automated and can be used within scripts and other programs to generate natural sounding voice responses.

Source: blogoscoped.com

– Suramya

December 17, 2009

I am now an Official RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer)

Filed under: Linux/Unix Related,My Life — Suramya @ 2:40 AM

I gave my RHCE exam yesterday morning and today I got the email confirming that I have cleared the exam and am now a Red Hat Certified Engineer. Go me 🙂

Now I can put this image next to my name and everything: red_hat_cert_eng_logo-clr

Next I am thinking about going for the Red Hat Certified Security Specialist (RHCSS) exam sometime early next month. Still have to plan it out though, ’cause I want to go scuba diving also. Lets see.

– Suramya

December 11, 2009

Google Calendar Notifications/Issues

Filed under: Computer Software,Tech Related — Suramya @ 4:12 AM

Google recently made a change to its Calender service that I had been waiting for a long time. Actually they might have launched it a while ago but I only noticed it recently.

You now have the ability to send the reminder for an event to a mobile phone as a SMS. The best part is that it even works with my cell phone in India. So now I get reminders even when I don’t have access to my email (which I admit is pretty rare).

The only issue I have found so far is that the reminder via SMS is set about a day before the event no matter what setting I put in the interface. I have set the system so that I get a reminder 15 mins before any appointment set in my calender but I keep getting the reminder a day before, i.e. if the event is on the 8th I get the reminder on my cell phone on the 7th. Hopefully they will fix it soon.

The other issue I hit on the calender is that it seems to be impossible to change the date for an existing event. I wanted to change the date and time for a reminder but it refused to let me change the date. It did change the time to the new time but kept the event on the old date. I finally had to delete the old event and create a new event.

Now if I can get it to sync with my Phone it would be great. I got the phone to sync with my system but still need to get Google to sync to evolution. (The connection keeps timing out for some reason).

Other than these minor issues I really like the Google Calender.

– Suramya

December 3, 2009

Cool Birthday Cake

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 12:01 AM


Source: eatliver.com

December 1, 2009

A Christmas tree

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 11:39 PM

If I am ever going to have a Christmas Tree at home its going to be this one:

Source: Mountain Dew Christmas tree

Update: (11th Dec 2009): Courtney mentioned in the comments that the tree was Originally created by people at the following site: mdewtree.com. Thanks for the heads up. The tree really is pretty impressive.

November 21, 2009

Another Hindi Book Scanned

Filed under: My Life — Tags: — Suramya @ 11:04 PM

After a long hiatus I have scanned another Hindi book. This one is called “Padho Samjho Aur Karo” (Read, Understand and do it). Its a 140 Page book which was missing 2 pages that look like they were torn out.

This book has been sitting on my desk for a while now along with the scanner but somehow didn’t get scanned. Anyways its scanned now and is available for download Here.

If you have some Hindi books that you would like to scan then I would be willing to provide the hosting for the book if you scan it and send it to me.

– Suramya

PS: In case you are wondering about copyright this book was originally owned by my mom’s grandfather… So I guess its safe to assume that its out of copyright by now.

Update (19th Jan 2014): Updated the download link.

November 19, 2009

World Toilet Day: 19th Nov

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 7:29 PM

Spent about 3 hours of my life driving around Delhi today and since I was in the Esteem which doesn’t have a CD player (It only has a tape player) I was stuck listening to radio as the other option was to listen to some random tape that mom/dad had left in the car.

Thats how I found out that today is the “World Toilet day”. I almost crashed the car the first time I heard it as I was laughing so hard… Then I realized that they were not joking and it was an actual day dedicated to toilets… Whats next? a day dedicated to the Kitchen Sink?

– Suramya

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