Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

August 16, 2009

Software/OS Irritations

Filed under: My Life,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 2:20 AM

Today I reinstalled Windows XP on my system because Vinit/Surabhi needed a XP PC for some work. I had it installed till yesterday but it was giving me issues (I had tried to boot to it from within VMWare) so I formatted the partition yesterday night. Install was ok, Most of my hardware wasn’t detected as I need to download and install the drivers for them, but the mouse, keyboard and the screen work which is good enough for what I need it for. I still have to install all the updates and patches etc.

The annoying thing was that the stupid installer overwrote the Bootloader so I couldn’t boot into Linux anymore. I had to boot to Linux using a Live Linux CD and reinstall the grub boot manager. To do it all I had to do was run 3 commands. Now my system is back to normal. 🙂

I am going to look into a creating Windows Live CD. I have read about it on the web. Lets see if I can actually find it and get it to work.

The other thing I was trying to get to work was syncing my Phone Contacts/Calender with my computer/Google. I managed to back up the contacts and calender as files but the sync to Google didn’t work. I guess it might be that I was too impatient and canceled the sync after 5 mins but I don’t know… Will try it again tomorrow. Or I guess I will just install Horde on my system and sync to its LDAP server. That way I will be able to manage/access them using thunderbird. I will just have to see what I feel like tomorrow when I actually start playing with it again.

I installed Opera today on my system, because I needed another browser for streaming music via a proxy. I didn’t want to use firefox because I don’t want all my traffic to go though the proxy. My feelings about the browser can be summed up by two words: It sucks.

The flash file upload at mediafire froze the browser. Then I tried to configure the browser to use a SOCKS proxy and was really surprised to find that Opera doesn’t have support for it. Even IE has support for it… (I think) Not near a windows message so can’t check it. So I am back to using Firefox for everything and will uninstall Opera shortly.

Having said all of that, Opera Mobile is really good. It works for what I need it for. So until Mozilla releases a browser for the mobile I will be using Opera on my phone.

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

– Suramya

August 15, 2009

Posting to WordPress Blogs from Lifeblog on Nokia Phones

Filed under: Computer Software,Software Releases,Tech Related — Suramya @ 4:45 AM

I have been wanting to have the option to make blog posts directly from lifeblog on my N95 for a while now but so far was unsuccessful because no plugin existed that worked with the latest version of WordPress.

So I downloaded the latest available copy of the plugin from this blog post and modified it to work with the latest version of WordPress.

You can download the latest version of the plugin from the Scripts Directory. This version works with WordPress 2.8.x (I tested it with 2.8.2 and 2.8.4).

Changelog :
Ver 3.5: (15th Aug 2009):

* Plugin is now compatible with WordPress 2.8.x (Tested upto 2.8.4)
* Replaced the SQL queries for categories creation/check with WordPress Functions
* Replaced the SQL queries for user checks with WordPress functions
* Added ability to Enable/Disable Debug Logging by changing one variable

Let me know if you have any questions/issues.

– Suramya

Post from Lifeblog

Filed under: Lifeblog — Suramya @ 3:48 AM
Screenshot

This entry has been posted from lifeblog on my Nokia N95

August 14, 2009

Have faith

Filed under: Humor — Suramya @ 11:08 PM


Faith

Have faith

And then people ask me why I don’t like religious nuts. *roll eyes*

– Suramya

August 11, 2009

Blah blah about my life.

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 11:21 PM

As I said in my last post Rakhi was last week and it was fun. Lots of relatives came over to our place and we all really enjoyed. I was planning on posting some of the photos taken then but the cable that connects my camera to the computer has gone MIA (Missing In Action) and the card reader that I have is not working any more… 🙁 So till I get one or the other working you will have to wait for the photos.

I finally transferred my games and pics from my old phone to the current one. I thought I had copied everything using the Nokia Sync but that didn’t copy any of the extra stuff I had installed manually. So first I copied all of it to the memory card and tried copying it to the computer. Unfortunately that didn’t work because the reader was broken. Then I realized that I could talk to the phone using bluetooth, so copied about 40 MB of applications/games to the N95. Yay Me..

The new wireless AP is working great as it gives me wireless access throughout the house instead of just 1/2 of it.

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

– Suramya

August 4, 2009

General Update on Life

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 11:24 PM

On the 26th of June I attended Arundhati’s wedding in Gurguan. It was a nice wedding. Really quite. Not like the usual wedding you see up here in the north with the loud music and fire crackers etc. I guess it makes sense as both of them are Bengali’s. Got to meet with a few friends while we were there so that was good. Lately it seems like we all only meet when there’s a wedding or something going on. I guess I should plan a get together or something.

Over the last few weeks the Electricity department here has been digging holes in the ground so that all the overhead power lines here in Sector 44 will be moved underground. They are using a mole machine for it (Don’t know the official name so calling it that). What this does is that they dig a hole at one place and point this machine to where they want it to go and it digs a tunnel underground till it reaches the destination. Which sounds really good in theory but the implimentation sucks as usual.

So far they have managed to cut the Phone lines (Airtel and Reliance) for 1/2 the sector, cut a water pipe in half, mess up other wires. The water pipe was cut right in front of our house so the street in front of the house was completely flooded and they had to cut the water supply for the sector while they repaired it, which took almost 2 days. For the phone lines both Airtel and Reliance have laid down temporary cables and got the phones running. Thankfully our Airtel line wasn’t affected and my net connection still works.

Speaking of the net connection, I had Airtel take a look at it because for some reason my modem was dropping 7-15% of the incoming packets which meant that I couldn’t download a large file or stay connected to FTP/SSH for more than 5-10 mins at a time. They replaced the modem and the phone cable and so far it works great.

Needed to do some work over wireless on my phone so I set up the spare wireless router I had sitting in the closet as a wireless AP, now I get a full wireless signal in most of the house. Earlier I barely got a signal in my room.

What else have I been upto? hmm.. nothing too exciting, just general life.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later. Tomorrow is Rakhi so I have to go sleep early today.

– Suramya

July 25, 2009

1st Mountain Dew Commercial

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 10:21 PM

Check out this really old commercial for Mountain Dew: 1st Mountain Dew Commercial with Willie the Hillbilly

I love this drink. Pretty funny advertisement too..

– Suramya

July 24, 2009

A tool to make online personal data vanish

Filed under: Interesting Sites,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 9:13 PM

As most of you know, once anything is posted on the web its literally impossible to get rid of. Lets say you post a picture on your blog, it will get archived by any number of sites like the Way Back machine, Google Cache etc etc or anyone can copy it to their system and repost it. So even if you remove it from the blog someone with time and patience can find it again.

To counteract this University of Washington has developed a system called Vanish, which will (according to them) will allow users to create a self-destruct system for information posted online. According to the site:

The Vanish prototype washes away data using the natural turnover, called “churn,” on large file-sharing systems known as peer-to-peer networks. For each message that it sends, Vanish creates a secret key, which it never reveals to the user, and then encrypts the message with that key. It then divides the key into dozens of pieces and sprinkles those pieces on random computers that belong to worldwide file-sharing networks, the same ones often used to share music or movie files. The file-sharing system constantly changes as computers join or leave the network, meaning that over time parts of the key become permanently inaccessible. Once enough key parts are lost, the original message can no longer be deciphered.

Ok, so according to them the data at the original source will get deleted. What I don’t get is how they are planning on getting rid of data copies that were made by caching services (Google etc) and archive sites (Wayback machine etc).

Lets say I have encrypted the data and a little later the archive spider runs and creates an image of the post. Now if I access the site image I will see the encrypted data which should expire correct? Nope. These spiders usually function like a normal webbrowser i.e. they will do a normal http call to get the information. So if the creator of the spider adds the code to decrypt the data using whatever logic Vanish uses (keep in mind that this info will be available so as to allow people to create plugin’s etc for regular browsers) they will have a snapshot of the clear text message/image/whatever as long as the spider runs before the message degrades to much.

In all its a pretty cool concept but I wouldn’t be using it for any really secure communications.

Source: A tool to make online personal data vanish
Vanish Details and Paper: http://vanish.cs.washington.edu

– Suramya

July 23, 2009

Celebrated Mom’s Birthday today

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 11:59 PM

It was mon’s birthday today so me and dad decided to get cake in the morning when coming back from a doctors appointment. Unfortunately we were too early so the shop was closed. The drive was fun, I got to enjoy the heat and the humidity as the AC in the Esteem wasn’t working; actually it does work but only when you drive at more than 50 km/h, which thanks to the traffic we weren’t able to do a lot…

So we got home without the cake, which was a good thing because mom didn’t want to have cake. She wanted to have Ghavar (Its an Indian sweet) so I will be getting that for her tomorrow. In the evening we were planning on going for Mexican food but that also was postponed to later because it was raining and mom had the craving for Garlic bread. So we then ordered food from Papa John’s with lots of extra garlic sticks. Now I am full and we still have 1/2 a pizza left along with some garlic bread. I guess no vampires are going to be coming near us anytime soon.

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

– Suramya

July 22, 2009

Beau Pal Water : a product of bhopal gas tragedy

Filed under: Interesting Sites,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:38 PM

A friend emailed this to me a couple of days ago (Thanks Manjari) and I have been meaning to share this since I got it. Finally sharing it now…

bottle

This new, beautifully-designed line of bottled water – this time not from the melting Alps, nor from faraway, clean-water-deprived Fiji, but rather from the contaminated ground near the site of the 1984 Bhopal catastrophe was launched recently in London.

The unique qualities of this water come from 25 years of slow-leaching toxins at the site of the world’s largest industrial accident.

Here’s a close-up of the label:

logo

The Bhopal gas tragedy was one of the biggest industrial accidents in history. For those of you who are not aware of the story here’s a brief synopsis:

On the night of Dec. 2nd and 3rd, 1984, a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, began leaking 27 tons of the deadly gas methyl isocyanate. None of the six safety systems designed to contain such a leak were operational, allowing the gas to spread throughout the city of Bhopal. Half a million people were exposed to the gas and 20,000 have died to date as a result of their exposure. More than 120,000 people still suffer from ailments caused by the accident and the subsequent pollution at the plant site.

Till date Dow Chemical – who bought Union Carbide – has refused to clean up and thousands of people are still suffering because of their callousness.

Source: B’eau-pal: Our Story…
Learn more about the Bhopal gas Tragedy

– Suramya

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