Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

October 10, 2011

SSR 1.1: Students Empowering Students

Filed under: Interesting Sites,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 4:55 PM

According to some estimates, there are 200 million children in India between the ages of 6 and 14 years who have not even completed basic eight years of elementary education.

My friend Tarini Mukherji is trying to change this. In her words:

—-
This is why with the project SSR 1.1, we wish to rise and change this. Please vote for our idea and help us bring a change.

I have been teaching in a street school for more than a year now and if I do qualify in this competition, the trust would be entitled for a grant that can help my students and many other underprivileged children to get an education. All you guys need to do is vote and if possible put the link on your Facebook status / links to share with your friends. I need a mammoth 5000-6000 votes to be in the lead. Any help would be great.

SSR 1.1

Please vote, and spread the word.
——

Do vote for this. I have known Tarini for over a decade now (doesn’t that make you feel old) and would urge you guys to help her in this.

– Suramya

October 5, 2011

Facebook does not like my Blog

Filed under: Website Updates — Suramya @ 12:21 AM

Looks like the integration between Facebook (FB) and my blog is broken once again. There is a plugin for WordPress that pushes your posts to Facebook but that requires you to setup an App in Facebook. However since I am not a Developer on FB so far I need to authenticate myself by giving FB either my Credit card # (So not happening) or my cell number (not working).

I have tried both my numbers but so far haven’t received any SMS’s from FB yet. Will try some other plugins while I am waiting but am not too hopeful that I will succeed in the integrating the two today. Lets see…

Update: Looks like all of the plugins require a Facebook app to be created in order to connect. 🙁 Although the problem with me not receiving the SMS could be because Facebook is having issues. At present all profile images on Facebook are showing up as broken for me.

– Suramya

September 26, 2011

Stuff I want + Stuff I need

Filed under: Humor,My Life — Suramya @ 4:52 PM

Stuff I want:
ThinkGeek :: Wi-Fi Detector Shirt: Just for the coolness factor I would get this. A shirt with a built-in Wi-Fi signal detector How cool is that? Yes, I know… What can I say, I am a geek.

Stuff I need:

Sonic Bomb Alarm Clock with Bed Shaker: As you all know I hate getting up in the morning and have a tendency to sleep through alarms. However I don’t think even I can sleep through a 113 decibels of alarm in the morning. (Don’t think my neighbors will like it but… )

Just so that you all know, my birthday is in December 😉

– Suramya

September 25, 2011

Encyclopedia Mythica: mythology, folklore, and religion.

Filed under: Interesting Sites — Suramya @ 4:36 PM

Found this while surfing the web, basically a central location to check when you want to look up something on mythology but don’t require too much details. Think of it as fast food for research.

I think I will be using it when reading books that refer to unfamiliar religions as a basis. (e.g. Hammered by Kevin Hearne which is based on Druidism)

Source: Encyclopedia Mythica: mythology, folklore, and religion..

– Suramya

September 20, 2011

New Script Web2Email Released

Filed under: Linux/Unix Related,Software Releases,Tech Related — Suramya @ 2:47 AM

Just released Ver 0.1 of Web2Email. Web2Email is a Perl Script that allows the user to send a message with a list of URL’s to a special mail account and get back a snapshot of the websites as PDF files.

You can download it from Scripts.Suramya.com: Web2Email.

If you want a demo, send an email to: web2email@suramya.com with website URL’s in the email body (one per line) and after about 5 mins you will get an email with the snapshots of the sites listed as PDF files.

Update: The cron job running this on my machine is having issues, will fix it once I get back home and this should be back up again tonight.

Update (22nd Sep 2011): The project wasn’t the cron job, there is an issue with the version of wkhtmltopdf that is available in the Debian repo. Basically if you have both http & https images in a site it goes for a toss. The static built version should fix this issue but haven’t got the time to install and test. Till that is done the demo version will be on hold.

As always I would appreciated any feedback/suggestions you might have.

– Suramya

September 19, 2011

Trouble-Maker: Learn to fix computer issues

Filed under: Computer Software,Linux/Unix Related,Tech Related — Suramya @ 2:38 AM

This interesting app randomly breaks your system so you can learn how to fix it.

Haven’t tried it yet because as of now I only have one working Linux system at home, but as soon as I fix that I will be installing this on my secondary system. Once I do that I will log my experiences here.

You can download it from Trouble-Maker‘s site.

– Suramya

September 18, 2011

How to set different backgrounds for each desktop in KDE 4.6.5

Filed under: Computer Tips,Linux/Unix Related,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:59 PM

I have talked about How to set different backgrounds for each desktop in KDE4 in a previous post. However in KDE 4.6.5 the previous steps no longer work, so posting the new steps to get different backgrounds in KDE:

  • Click on the ‘Start Menu’ (The K at the bottom Right of the screen)
  • Click on ‘System Settings’ under the Settings menu
  • Double Click on the ‘Workspace Behavior’ under the “Workspace Appearance and Behavior” section
  • Check the “Different widgets for each desktop”
  • Click Apply

That’s it. Now you can change the wallpaper by Right clicking on the desktop and selecting ‘Desktop Settings’. Its good to know that the KDE Developers paid attention to complaints that the users made about their software and addressed it.

– Suramya

September 17, 2011

All of suramya.com now migrated to new layout

Filed under: Website Updates — Suramya @ 5:24 AM

As promised, I have updated the entire Suramya.com site except the Photogallery to use the new website layout/theme. This will make life simpler for me when I update (and yes I will be added new content semi-regularly once again) and make the site look a lot better.

For the Photogallery I might use the Gallery software to host the photos, but haven’t decided yet. Since that will take some work on my side to integrate and migrate data, it will be a while before the new Photogallery is live. Till that happens don’t expect any new posts to the Photogallery.

I will also be adding some more website optimizations etc once I get some sleep and am thinking clearly again. That should speed up the site a lot more. Take a look around and let me know if you find any issues.

– Suramya

September 15, 2011

Exporting Blog feed to Facebook

Filed under: Website Updates — Suramya @ 3:09 AM

I thought I had done this earlier but I guess Facebook changed its protocols so the import stopped working at some point in time. *shrug* No big deal, I have once again configured up my Facebook account to read and post any blog posts I make to my Facebook Wall.

If all goes well and nothing breaks, people on Facebook will be able to see this post on Facebook instead of having to visit the blog. Although I would rather that people visit the blog directly instead of viewing on FB because I don’t know if the comments (if any) made on Facebook for a post will be synced to the Blog or not. I guess I should try and figure out a two way sync between the two. Or maybe not. Lets see.

Let me know if you hit any errors or issues.

– Suramya

September 14, 2011

Updating the website

Filed under: Website Updates — Suramya @ 11:09 PM

Just realized that the suramya.com site is a mess right now. Parts of it are version 5 (the latest), parts are v4 and there are even a couple of v3’s scattered around. So what I will be doing over the next few days is taking the content from the v3 &v4 pages and moving them to the new version 5.1. This new layout should be a lot nicer, faster to load and easy to maintain.

This time to prevent me from getting distracted, I will not be updating the content while updating the layout, which is what I did previously and when I ran out of time the update/migration stopped. However once the new layout is live I will start updating the content as well, mainly the About Me, Tech, Linux and Photogallery sections really need to be updated.

I will be updating the site on my local system first before pushing it out to the webserver, so look for a new version of the site by the end of the month.

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

– Suramya

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