Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

August 6, 2005

Just some blabbering

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

This week has been interesting. It passed by way too fast. Not that I am complaining though.
Weekends are a lot more fun. I get to relax, read and generally catch up with life. This is the first weekend in while that I got to spend at home (Spent the last few meeting friends, having fun etc) so all I did all day was read books and watch old Dr Who episodes.

I think I have been working too hard lately. A few of you might know that I work in a company that creates software for phone networks and deals with call switching. My current project involves playing with phone switches and figuring out why calls failed by reading the logs generated and then fixing them. So any time a test call fails I get to read some long and boring log files…

A few days ago I was calling the 1and1 tech support line as I had a few questions for them and in the middle of the call I got disconnected and heard a SIT tone (Special Information Tone) (The one that goes something like tu-tuu-to) and my first reaction was to check the logs to see what happened and why I got disconnected. That was scary. My boss’s response when I told him about this was: “welcome to the club”, his wife on the other had said: “You need a vacation” and I agree…

Hate Javascript. Rewrote gWiFi from scratch for the 3rd time, so far it seems to be working ok. Hopefully I will release a fixed version by the end of the weekend.

Got some good feedback on IM2Email. Will be incorporating the changes suggested into the next version of IM2Email. Maybe this week or next week. Depends on how fast I can get gWifi to work.

Well this is all for now. Going back to my book…

– Suramya

August 4, 2005

Moved site to new Hosting service

Filed under: Website Updates — Suramya @ 11:17 PM

Hi Everyone,
After a lot of consideration and debate I have moved my site from my old hosting service (Redwoodvirtual) to 1and1.com. I was getting sick and tired of the site going down everyday for no apparant reason. When you are at a point when you write a special script that connects to your server every 5 mins and reboots it if it can’t connect then it’s time to switch hosts…

This entry is my first entry on the new host and so far everything looks good. I am slowly moving the mySql DB’s to the new server and hope to have most of them transfered today. (In case you are wondering why I can’t do a mysqldump then the symple reason is that it doesn’t work for some reason. I get a lot of errors when I try to import it so I have to do it manually)

Well this is all for now. Will keep you posted.

Update @1:30 am:
Finished transfering all the mysql data to the new server so now the site is completely on the new server. Let me know if you find any problems.

– Suramya

July 30, 2005

NY Get together with friends

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

Met up with Aditi, Karishma and Sachin in New York today. I had met Karishma a few months ago but it was the first time I was meeting Sachin and Aditi after high school so it was a lot of fun. We had decided to meetup in Union Square at 2 pm but by the time everyone got there it was 3 pm and we all were starving. So we went to this cafe and had a really late lunch and caught up with each other’s lives. We all talked a lot. Basically caughtup with each other’s lives, relived old memories etc.

After lunch we decided to go watch Devils Rejects as there were no other movies that we all could agree on. After the movie was done I was wishing that I had gone for Stealth instead inspite of the bad review’s it got. This movie was just plain bad. Do yourself a favor if you have to goto a movie goto any movie but this one. After the movie was done we all went to starbucks for a coffee and had a very interesting discussion there about how Indian culture is changing and how teens are adapting to the new culture.

Overall a fun day. Will definetly want to do it again. Didn’t have a camera so took photos with my camera phone. May post the pics here later.

This is all for now will post more later.

– Suramya

July 25, 2005

Website Backend Optimized

Filed under: My Life,Website Updates — Suramya @ 11:44 PM

Finally spent some time tweaking the website backend today. Now with the new settings hopefully the server won’t die as often as before.. (Crossed fingers…). Will know by tomorrow if it worked.

Now on to try getting that stupid Javascript on gWiFi to work…

– Suramya

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

July 1, 2005

Launched gWiFi Ver 0.1

Filed under: gWiFi,Software Releases,Website Updates — Suramya @ 3:35 AM

I have created a webbased application called gWiFi that uses the newly released Google Map API and merges it with data from nodesdb.com (which lists locations in US that offer free wireless internet access to the general public) and displays ithe result using the google map for ease of use/access.

The URL is: http://gwifi.suramya.com .

Currently the site only shows WiFi locations in New York but I will be adding other locations over the next few weeks. Check it out and let me know what you think.

– Suramya

June 29, 2005

Released Ver 0.2 of IM2Email

Filed under: Software Releases,Website Updates — Suramya @ 2:40 AM

Released IM2Email Ver 0.2 today.

ChangeLog:

* Added Config file support. Now the BOT can be controled using a config file
* Added logging support using Log4Perl. User can now control the logging level from a config file
* Added ability to reload the config file on the fly based on an IM message
* Added better help messages.

Also, have been talking to Brian Bittman who has created an Email2IM app like I was planning to and we both have decided to combine our programs and create a single program that does both. (This will be a modular program so you will be able to choose what modules you want to use). I am pretty excited about this oppportinity.

This shows why I like open source software, I created a program and posted it online for free download. Brian found it while surfing the net, realized that we both trying to do the same thing and could share code thus not have to re-invent the wheel. So he email’s me his program, which gives me a lot of good idea’s for stuff to add to my program. After talking agrees to work on a joint project and voila a new software is born. Time Frame: 3 days (Mostly ’cause I delayed in replying to his email)

If this was a propritary software it would have taken a lot longer for me to get permission to copy code and then it would have been full of restrictions telling me what I can and cannot do with that code and all the associated legal crap.

NEways, keep watching this space for updates, ’cause some really interesting things are going to be happening soon. I will keep you posted.

Thanks,
Suramya

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