Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

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 14, 2004

New Guestbook script now live

Filed under: Website Updates — Suramya @ 9:21 PM

After a while of procastination I have finally finished the new guestbook script and its now live. Check it out at: http://feedback.suramya.com

New Features:

  • More efficient database storage
  • Better protection against SQL Data Injection attacks
  • Gives the visitor more options
  • Sorts the entries in reverse chronological order and limits the no of displayed entries to 15 per page.
  • Ability to screen comments before they go live.
  • and other various small fixes.

Check it out and let me know what you think of it.

Thanks,
Suramya

Google to scan library books

Filed under: News/Articles — Suramya @ 6:56 PM

According to BetaNews Google has started a new project where it will scan an index millions of books from libraries around the country and add them to its catalog. This doesn’t mean that the books will be available for free though, the search results will only show the bibliographies and excerpts from copyrighted books while giving complete access to the books whose copyrights have expired.

This will make it easier for people to search for specific items by centerlizing the knowledge into a easily accessed repository. This comes to us after the Google Scholar which allowed us to search through scholarly literature.

I think that google is doing a good job and this is a really cool addition to its formidable collection of tools.

Original Story: BetaNews

No I am not dead (Yet…)

Filed under: My Life,Website Updates — Suramya @ 4:38 AM

No I am not dead. I know I said that I would post more updates soon but didn’t.

There were two problems preventing me from posting. First: I was sick with a bad cold and a sore throat from hell. The cold made my eyes water a lot which made working on the computer pretty hard. (You can imagine how much I enjoyed that…). When I finally started getting better I found that the server hosting suramya.com was having problems. This was the same server which has been having problems all this year and this time I think the RAM and HDD both were failing. To make things interesting mysql kept segfaulting on certain queries, perl segfaulted everytime you ran it. apache refused to run for a long time.

So I built a new machine to replace this one. To make things fun, the cpu fan died on the first system I built. Since I had another spare system available I rebuilt the distro on the second one, but guess what the cpu fan on the second one also died. By this time I was pretty mad so I dissected another computer and put the fan from that one in the new one. Then the machine actually worked.

So After making a mirror of suramya.com on the new server I had to drive to the NY office to replace the old server with the new one. I finally did this about 2 hours ago so as of now suramya.com is back up completely. I did do some work on the new feedback script so expect to see some changes by the end of the week.

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

– Suramya

December 6, 2004

My Birthday updates

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 3:02 AM

First of all a big thanks to everyone who emailed/sms’d/called/IMed me to wish me on the 3rd. I am not ignoring you, I fell sick on the 3rd and am still feeling pretty down 🙁 I will most prob reply to all the emails today, latest by tomorrow.

For my birthday we went to Macaroni Grill for dinner. The food was awesome. We were then supposed to goto a club but since I was sick we decided to postpone that to the next weekend.

I got an Ipod Mini as a birthday gift. Now I can finally get rid of my Rio-600 with its 32 mb of RAM. 32 MB – 4GB, now thats what I call an upgrade. 🙂

Now its time for me to crawl back into bed. More updates later.

– Sur

December 3, 2004

Finally became a full Network admin

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 3:24 AM

Today I finally graduated as a full fledged Network Administrator: I got to crawl through the opehead tiles and run a cable from the network closet to the office. I spent a wonderfull 2 hours getting dust in my hair, jacket, eyes, clothes etc. But on a more positive note, We finally have a business DSL line in the office. This allows me to access the internet using the DSL while the CNG internet only supports the tunnels to the NY office and csr sites.

The DSL is a lot more stable than the T1, I was getting a sustained download of 500 kbs and wasn’t getting kicked off every few mins from my home system due to dropped packets. We might upgrade it to a 1.5 mbps line and run VOIP lines in to the office… lets see how that works out.

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

– Suramya

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 30, 2004

Cool tools for sysadmins

Filed under: Computer Tips — Suramya @ 2:03 AM

Here’s todays list of software I like/recomend for sysadmins.

Dameware This software allows you to connect remotely to a windows machine and work on it as if you are sitting in front of it. Has two modes: Visible and invisible. In the visible mode the used sees a popup box letting him know that someone is connected to them. In the invisible mode you won’t even know that I am connected. The best part is that even if you remove the service from your system, I can install it remotely without your permission on the system if I have admin rights on the system (Domain Admins). You can also start and stop services/programs from the handy interface without the other person knowing.

Driftnet: Really cool program. This program listens to network traffic and picks out images/mpg video’s from TCP streams it observes. It has some serious privacy implications and must be used with care. One cool application is that it can pipe its output to xscreensaver and display those images as a screensaver. Useful for identifying what kind of sites people are visitng on a coporate network.

Well this is all for now. More later.

– Suramya

November 29, 2004

Cool tools for sysadmins and how they can be used

Filed under: Computer Tips — Suramya @ 1:48 AM

Was getting bored and thought you might like to know what kind of tools a system administrator/network administrator has in his disposal to monitor his network and systems and what stuff we sometimes find while using them. Most of the tools I will talk about are Linux based although some of them do have windows ports.

One program I really like called iftop. It tells you how much bandwidth is being used by what connection on a given interface. The main advantage of this compared to Etherape is that this is a text program so it can be run over a ssh connection (Secure Shell, lot more secure than telnet). Helps you identify what program is using up your bandwidth and who is running it.

If you want to be notified every time a new machine comes on the network then you should check out arpwatch. It lets an admin know whenever a new machine requests an ip address from his dhcp server. Very useful on a small network where not a lot of new computers are added each day. This helped me plug a hole in my wireless network.

This is all for starters. I will be posting more links as and when I get the chance but I plan on making this a semi-regular feature so check back often.

– Suramya

November 28, 2004

PPTP VPN Server problems

Filed under: Computer Tips,Knowledgebase — Suramya @ 3:07 AM

I was trying to get ppp based vpn working on one of my servers and it wasn’t working.

I was getting the following error message:

pppd[5019]: Failed to open /dev/pts/2: No such file or directory
pptpd[5575]: GRE: read(fd=4,buffer=804de20,len=8196) from PTY failed: status = -1 error = Input/output error, usually caused by unexpected termination of pppd, check option syntax and pppd logs

After spending a couple fo hours I finally fixed the problem. The steps I followed were as below:

  • Recompiled the kernel with ppp support (The first time I forgot to add this) and GRE support
  • Installed the latest stable version of PoPToP (1.1.4-b4) and PPPd (2.4.3)
    • When Installing PoPToP make sure that you don’t configure ppptp to give out IP addresses. This causes dhcpd to fail when attempting to give out IP’s
  • Re-started the services
  • Grin like an Idiot when it actually worked.

Hope this helps someone.

– Suramya

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