Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

February 5, 2010

Learn to use search effectively in Linux using grep

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

grep is a really powerful tool that allows you to search for specific string/data within a given text. This text can be a list of files or the content of a given file, even a list of programs running. Basically it allows you to filter the required text from background noise.

As you can imagine it is a very powerful tool but most people don’t really learn to use it well. Zahid Irfan wrote a very nice blog post on ‘Why grep almost never yields something productive‘ for new Linux users and has some great examples that explain grep usage quite well for all users both new and experienced

Check it out.

– Suramya

February 4, 2010

Amazon pulls all Macmillan books from its listings

Filed under: Books Related / Reviews,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:56 PM

Last weekend Amazon and Macmillan Publishing got into an argument about the correct pricing for ebooks. Amazon wanted to limit the cost to $9.99 while Macmillan was pushing for $15. If I was just looking at this portion of the debate then I am firmly on Amazon’s side because as I have said before pricing ebooks at hardback prices makes no sense.

However Amazon lost all my respect and future business when it decided to throw a tantrum and removed all books from Macmillan and its subsidiaries from its listing (about 1/6th of the books in its listing) without telling anyone about it. Basically one minute the books were there and the next they were gone.

By this move instead of being gaining support for its stand for reducing costs they gained a lot of bad publicity and really pissed off a lot of authors whose books were removed from the listing without any fault of theirs. A lot of these authors posted about this on their blogs/twitter feeds/Facebook pages (I came to know about it from Mercedes Lackey’s posting on FB) and their fans are calling for a boycott of Amazon and are asking people to buy their books from other online stores instead. A lot of them have removed the Amazon affiliate links from their sites because of this.

Amazon then made a statement on Sunday that they are putting the Macmillan books back but at the time of this writing (4th Feb 2010) you still can’t purchase their books from Amazon except for used copies for which the Authors don’t get any royalties but Amazon still makes money on the sales.

When Amazon started off I did buy a couple of books from them but over a period of time I stopped because I was getting better deals at other sites. Then when I moved back to India their shipping costs made it unfeasible for me to buy anything from them.

Since I don’t buy anything from them any more, I can’t really boycott them, but if you do then do consider one of the alternatives listed below (Suggested by Mercedes Lackey):

From my side I suggest the following additional stores:

  • flipkart.com/: A Good store but only delivers within India.
  • Barnes and Nobel: Used to be my Favorite store. Haven’t really tried to get them to ship to India but within US they are awesome.

Here are some posts that explain what is happening in a little more detail:

Support the authors. Don’t let amazon bully its way to the top.

– Suramya

February 2, 2010

Exorcising my Dad’s HP dv5000 Laptop by dismantling it

Filed under: Computer Hardware,My Life,Tech Related — Suramya @ 10:35 PM

A few days ago dad’s HP Pavilion dv5000 started acting funny. He had put the laptop in hibernation but all of a sudden it would start up on its own for a few seconds and then would shut down due to low battery. This woke him up so he brought the laptop to my room so that I could take a look at it. I looked at it but didn’t find anything funny so I shutdown the system and told him that I would take a look at it in the morning.

A few minutes later the laptop started up again even though I had shut it down completely. I then removed the battery and left the AC Adapter plugged in to see if the problem was caused due to a faulty battery. But the laptop still started up again without anyone touching it. So I decided to take the laptop apart to see if there was a loose connection or something that was triggering the boot.

This laptop is designed in a way to make it really hard to open without knowing exactly where all the screws are located. Some of them are hidden behind other items like the Harddrive and the DVD-ROM, some are on the other side so you only see them when you remove the DVD Drive and look under the laptop again. It took me a couple of hours to get it all open.

The photos posted by Chris Davis on his flicker account helped a lot in getting the stupid laptop open. Thanks Chris. I owe you a beer.

Compared to this my Sony Vaio had taken me about 1/2 hour to open. The worst part is even simple stuff like resetting the BIOS by removing the battery require you to dismantle pretty much the entire laptop. I think this is an issue with all HP systems because I remember trying to upgrade the RAM on a HP desktop and that took us most of the day (this was back in 2006 I think)

Anyways once I managed to open the laptop, I cleaned it and put it back together. Since then the laptop hasn’t started up on its own again (so far) so I guess we are good for now. Dad’s happy that the laptop stays shutdown when he turns it off and I don’t have to take it to a hardware repair shop to get it fixed which would have been a pain.

The next item on my repair list is my N95. I think I need to update the firmware on it but before that I will have to backup all the SMS’s, logs, etc etc on it. Plus all the programs I have installed. So that’s a task for another day.

– Suramya

February 1, 2010

Update on the Website update process

Filed under: Website Updates — Suramya @ 4:01 AM

A little while ago I posted that I was in the process of updating the actual content of the site along with the layout. The process is still going on and this is a quick status update on it. I am adding a lot new content to the site which is why its taking so long to complete.

Currently the following sections have been completed:

* Home
* About Me
* About India (all subsections)
* Hotlinks
* Misc Section

I am in the process of updating the Linux section and once that’s done the following sections will remain:

* Mirror
* Photogallery
* Scripts
* Tech Section

The Tech section will take the longest out of all the remaining because of all the sub-sections but the other sections shouldn’t take that long to update.

Will keep you posted on the status.

– Suramya

January 31, 2010

Books & Piracy. Yes, this is another post about it

Filed under: Books Related / Reviews,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:29 PM

I have talked about books and book piracy a lot of times earlier on this blog and this is yet another post about it, but it has some additional insights and comments on the phenomenon.

A couple of days ago I saw this article called Confessions of a Book Pirate. Check it out, its a really good read on what makes a book pirate tick.

On a personal note, a few days ago I made a comment in a forum suggesting that all members of the forum to purchase actual books in addition to downloading them. My idea was that if all the members purchased a book a month then it would help the authors and encourage them to write more, which is what all readers want.

Imagine my surprise when I received replies from the posters stating the no of books they purchase each month. The top two posters buy anywhere from 10-15 books a month. and most of the other members on the forum purchased between 3-10 books a month.

Imagine that. That’s a lot of sales!

Now some people might say that these people are robbing the authors by posting their books but they are one of the biggest purchasers of the same books that they post. I myself download a lot of books but then I purchase most of the books written by any author I like. I have ebook copies of most of the books I have because they are portable.

To give you an idea of the no of books I buy, I just shipped a container weighing 599.66 pounds from my storage area in US to India that mostly contains just books. (An average paperback weighs about 4-5 pounds) BTW this is in addition to the books I have purchased in India

Baen publishing, Tor books and others have embraced the trend by making non-DRM protected books available for a very reasonable prices ($5-$6 for a book at Baen) However other authors/publishers seem to miss the lessons that the Music industry is being taught. They are pushing for higher prices and delayed ebook releases to push up the physical book sales. Which makes no sense.

According to Amazon they sell 6 Kindle books for every 10 physical books when both copies are available for sale. Physical books cost money to sell, you need to print them, store them and ship them. For an ebook the only cost is the initial cost of creation which in any case negligible because the ebook can be created from the digital manuscript submitted by the author. However once an ebook is created, you never run out of copies. If you expected to sell 10 but end up selling 100, you still don’t have to worry about anything the same master copy can be copied a 100 times at no additional cost to the publisher.

eBooks are the future. Deal with it. If you (The publishers) don’t then you will go the way of the dinosaurs to make way for publishers who actually listen to what their customers what.

– Suramya

PS: For some reason I managed to get WordPress to loose this post the last time, so restoring it again from the DB.

January 30, 2010

Are you Unique on the Web? – An Update

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 9:38 PM

In my last post I spoke about the claim by EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) that your browser’s settings etc can be used as a fingerprint to identify you.

However since then I have been reading up on it a bit more and it seems like the test they use might be flawed and incorrectly identifying people as unique. I will be following up on it and will post any updates here when I have more information on it.

But personally I think the concept makes sense and is theoretically possible. Who know, it could be that the scenario is valid but there’s a bug in the EFF’s test code. Whatever the case may be, we will find out soon enough.

– Suramya

January 29, 2010

Are you unique on the Web?

Filed under: Interesting Sites,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:31 PM

Being unique is not always a good thing. Which is something best shown by this ‘Motivational’ poster. The same applies to being online. If you are unique then people can identify you based on your setup.

What am I talking about? Basically EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) did a bit of research and found out it is possible to finger-print someone’s browser based on their settings and plugins by the information each browser shares with the sites it visits even when you have turned off cookies. This can theoretically be used to track the sites you visit on the web. So if you use some plugin’s that not everyone uses or you use a rare browser then that makes you unique and thus identifiable on the web.

In my case my browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 215,353 users tested so far so I guess my visits can be accurately tracked.

The following information sent by the browser is used to fingerprint it: User Agent, HTTP_ACCEPT Headers, Browser Plugin Details, System Time Zone, Screen Size & Color Depth and System Fonts installed. More information on the methodology used to identify the browser is available here.

Check out how unique you are on the Panopticlick site run by EFF. They also have some hints on how to prevent browser finger printing which you definitely should check out.

– Suramya

January 28, 2010

Is the Earth slowly becoming invisible to aliens?

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:36 PM

While surfing the net, I found this article on the Telegraph by Martin Evans where he talks about a theory by Dr Frank Drake that the phasing out of analogue transmissions from television, radio and radar is making our planet electronically invisible from outer space.

In all an interesting theory and if its true then the risk of having an Alien armada drop in on us to destroy us after they see our broadcasts is slowly going down. Which is a good thing 🙂

But I don’t agree with the theory. I mean, yeah we have replaced old fashioned TV and Radio transmitters with digital transmitters but how does that reduce the strength of the signal? I would think that we are slowly becoming more and more visible as everything is getting linked to the each other and more and more stuff is transmitting some sort of electronic signal.

For example, 20 years ago the only things that communicated wirelessly in my house were the TV and Radio. Today I have: TV, Radio, Cellphone, Wireless modem, Laptop, remote access keys etc etc. There are appliances out there that connect wirelessly to the web. There are wireless video camera’s in some houses and offices. A lot of cities are launching wireless internet access for the whole city. The list goes on and on…

In a couple of years everything we have will be accessible over a wireless connection. Even today there are coffee machines out there that send an email when the coffee is done.

What do you think? Are we becoming ‘safer’ from the alien invasion?

– Suramya

Source: Earth becoming invisible to aliens – Telegraph.

January 27, 2010

Posthumous Hosting and making yourself heard after you die

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

I was reading this blog post on Posthumous Hosting and it started me thinking (Yeah, I know… dangerous stuff). Once a person dies then their contribution to the online world sort of fades away unless someone picks up the banner and goes on with it. I am not talking about the comments you make on other sites, or the articles you have written, I am talking about the blog or personal website that you maintain.

For example if I die then the suramya.com domain and hosting will only continue to run till my credit card works and depending on the time of death it would stay up for a max period of 3 months after the CC’s expire or the payment is stopped. Once that happens all the data I have posted on the site will disappear. Now, my writings are probably not the world’s most interesting items for future generations but they do give a glimpse of the world I live in from my perspective.

In earlier times, people kept physical journals and even after a person died the journals stayed and they give a real glimpse of the world at that particular instant of time. In the digital world this doesn’t happen, at least not fully. The Internet Archive‘s snapshots of the web do give the future generations ability to go back and look at a site after it disappeared. But at present the snapshot is not complete and not all sites are archived. Another option would be to have a long term hosting plan for people who want to be heard even after they die.

Actually this reminds me of a book that I recently read called ‘Daemon’ by Daniel Suarez. In this book a brilliant programmer decides to create a program that activates on his death by reading the news article on a news site feed about it to slowly take over the tech world. Quite an interesting book. The main idea was that the person was effecting the real world even after he had died.

Sort of made me wonder if I could create a program to do stuff after I passed away. Not to take over the world, but to play practical jokes or just freak people out. I mean how would you feel if you got an email from a dead person congratulating you on your promotion or wishing you Happy Birthday? hmm… Maybe I should design something like it. Should be a fun thing to do. Will have to do a lot of natural language processing though. Plus have a server to run it on. Neat idea though. Don’t you think?

– Suramya

January 23, 2010

ACME College of Engineering

Filed under: Humor — Suramya @ 8:13 PM

Saw this on the way to Delhi from Muzaffarnagar, UP. I wonder what they teach students over here… Do they teach them how to use/create the products sold by the Acme Corporation?

ACME College of Engineering
ACME College of Engineering

The photo quality is not the best as it was taken with a camera phone in a moving car…

– Suramya

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