Simple Life

A sad truth

2008-07-23T20:15:03Z

This is serious people. We can talk all we want about our developing country, India. But someone needs to act to make that happen. And clearly, the one's with the power to do something are incompetent, immoral, corrupted criminals.

Do read this for further details: http://www.deeshaa.org/2008/07/19/data-on-criminals-in-the-indian-parliament/

u r doin it wrong !!

2008-07-11T20:57:17Z

Image via Wikipedia

Their mandate is to maintain a market for mortgages - buying loans from banks, repackaging them as bonds, and selling those securities to investors with a guarantee that they will be paid. - CNN

I am not eco wiz but this right here just doesn't sound right. This pretty much sums up how, why and now of the current housing market and greases up the wheels of the roller coaster ride to follow soon. hold on to your pants !!

mod_xmlrpc on ejabberd

2008-07-11T00:53:36Z

A side note before we start, I think the best way to earn money and still have your software product open sourced is to have no documentation or very little documentation of how it works. That seems to be case with process one, the company behind ejabberd. To be fair, I am just being a bit harsh. If something is not documented in the official documentation, there is always forums and online chatrooms you can join in and if you are patient enough someone will help you. But I think after spending good enough time with ejabberd setup and writing a custom module for it, I will say the documentation is definetly scant. Also, I don't understand why for any question I have about some part of the ejabberd server, it gets answered by someone starting with "look at the source code.....". What if I don't know how to read Erlang? What if I am just plain dumb? Its not that these things are difficult to do but they do cause a lot of waste of developer's time and even worse cause frustation (coming from personal experience).

anyways, so this is how you setup mod_xmlrpc on ejabberd. First, this module does not come packaged with the ejabberd installation. So you need to download it and build it yourself (no big deal though). svn check out the community contributed modules as per the instructions here. Before you can build the module you will also need to download and build xmlrpc app for erlang which is patched to work with ejabberd (I dont know what that means). Also get xmerl app which you will already have if you have installed Erlang/OTP. The thing with xmerl app or any other app which comes packaged with OTP is that there is no other way to download the app other than installing the whole of the OTP system. You cannot just download xmerl app if you want to. Atleast, I could not find a way to do it. This also means that you have to very careful which version of OTP you download. Ejabberd installation includes Erlang runtime. Thus files packaged with the latest OTP compiled for the latest erl VM may not work with erl VM in ejabberd. For my setup, ejabberd 2.0 comes with Erlang shell 5.5.5 which means I had to install OTP R11B-5.

now that you have all the required files, start off.
- build mod_xmlrpc: run build.sh and you should have mod_xmlrpc.beam file in ebin directory.
- I generally deploy all the module beam files in \lib\ejabberd-2.0.1\ebin.
- copy xmerl app folder from you OTP installation (erlx.x.x\lib\xmerl-x.x.x)to \lib directory
- build xmlrpc: run build.sh and you should have a bunch of .beam files in ebin directory. Create directory for xmlrpc app in \lib and copy the ebin directory to this folder.
- Finally, update ejabberd.cfg file to include the mod_xmlrpc entry.

That should do it for you. By default, the rpc service runs on 4560 port which can be changed if needed.

but i really need it !!

2008-07-03T00:54:00Z

i have been thinking about this since last couple a days. actually i haven't. But I have seen so many blog post start this way and always thought it kinda makes you sound more genuine about the post and shows that you have put in serious time and effort, even though what is going to follow is a post of how twitter is next big thing or how some new service is the twitter killer (latest wanna be killer being http://identi.ca/).

anyhoo. so this is what happened the last weekend, my friends in san jose wanted me to join them for the weekend. there were two cars going back to san jose, so i had no reason to take my own. fair enough. But somewhere deep down I had a feeling this was not a good idea. I was feeling uncomfortable. After I got my car, I had never been to any place without my car. I always had my car. This was so huge for me that my friend suggested that such a "big event" in my life deserves a blog post. Why I am so attached to my car. Well for one, I really like my car, so lets get that out of the way. But more importantly, its that if I have my car with me, I feel like I am in control or to put it differently makes me less dependent on anybody else. Which is big for me. Its like one of those things you really need to have with you when you are out of your house. With these things with you, you know you will be able to handle worst of the days. Same is for my wallet and my phone. I need to have my wallet and I need to my phone. With these two with me I feel I can overcome any extraordinary situations that may arise in the day. I just feels like I am in control of what can happen to me (ya..right..). And so true, the whole of my weekend, I kept feeling nervous uneasiness. As if something is missing, as if I was not guarded, as if i was vulnerable to sudden driving related emergencies. May be its just me and may be not. I like to think that there are people out there equally eccentric as me on this. May be, just may be.

how does Exxon do its groceries?

2008-06-13T23:48:00Z

Image via Wikipedia

I genuinely have a question here. But I am going to have some phun putting it out there.

So lets think about how we do our groceries. I buy my groceries every sunday for the coming week. Say, I spend some 100 bucks on it. Now, lets assume the cost of general food products sky rocket on monday because....well...now every farmer is after corn and other "fuel-friendly" crops. anyway i digress. I panic. My cost of groceries is going to go high too. I start looking for a night job. "will code for food" u guys. But on thursday of that week i read the papers and the story reads, the food crisis is now over as scientist have found a way to cultivate in Alaska. and that too in a organic way. oh my.

so humble readers of my blog can you tell what was my actual cost of groceries for the week of this mayhem. I am no math wiz but my answer came to 100 bucks. and I tried it out on a calculator. now adding some economic (?) analysis to it, I come to a conclusion that if I buy something in advance and that this is going to last me for X number of days, no matter how the much the prices fluctuate during this X days, my cost of the the item is not going to change. It will increase when I buy it the next time but can never mathematically and accountingly( i like coining new words, someday somebody may use it) increase for the stuff I have already paid for.

Standing on the fact that my above theory stands true, what I dont understand is why does the price at the gas station next to my house changes on daily basis in proportion to the price per barrel for that day. Its more real time than the nasdaq ticker at times square. I am sure there are so many intermediary companies in between this gas station and the OPEC people. I am also sure, of these companies almost all of them should be importing oil in advance and in bulk. Doesn't that mean that any changes in the prices up there should at least take some reasonable amount of time (weeks ?) to affect prices at my local gas station. right? Either I am terrible at math, accounting, economics and how the world around me works or there is something terribly wrong with the system (I like using phrases like "wrong with the system"). can someone smart help me explain whats going on here?

State of indian newspaper websites

2008-06-12T02:01:39Z

ts bad. substandard. stuck in 19, i dont know, 20's.

Well i was on a lookout for a good website for getting my daily dose of india's news. I figured I should checkout the website of the major indian news papers. I use google reader to follow all my feeds. The places I looked were Times of India, Indian Express, Hindu, Rediff. This is what I found, none of these sites provide full content feeds. The news feeds just contains a line or two and then you have to jump to there crappy, ever slowing, GIF ridden website to read the full story. The Hindu is even worse, its feed just contains the title of the story. Just the title !!

The way this site support news feeds is as if they are trying to discourage the users from using it. Furthermore, the "summary" content is not even a summary of the full story. At times its just the first line of the story from the actual article truncate abruptly. This doesn't help. If the reason this sites do not provide full content in the feed is to drive traffic to there website than at least they should provide enough information in the summary to make me interested so that I follow thru on the actual article. With almost no useful information, it completely defeats the purpose of subscribing to feed.

The problem is even worse for the people who are used to reading there news on there mobile devices (like me). As, for any news story you want to read, you will have to go to the actual site on your cell phone. and THAT IS A FAIL. These sites are loaded with images and other moving things. GIFs, Flash animations, popups. Anything and everything which will distract you from reading the actual story. I mean what's the point of all this. Are this newspaper companies so much in need for ad money that they are have to resort to this kind of things? I am not against ads on web pages. I am not. I cannot be coz everybody knows that is the only way people know to make money on the internet (oh no i dint). But there are definitely better ways to do this. Please, there are people who specialize in such things. People, please, bring down the bling level on your website. We are there to look at the news and not the pretty graphics.

end note: have a look at all the news site listed above, they look SO much similar. That is not a good sign.

Bluehost blues

2008-05-31T06:07:30Z

some of you may have noticed my site was not accessible for a good span of two weeks, yes the two people sitting in the corner right there, i am talking to you. Turns out blueshost, my hosting service provider, was in the process of moving the server on which my site was hosted to some other machine. In the process the IP address of the machine changed, so they SHOULD have updated all the DNS records for the same. But they didn't. When I called to inquire why my domain was giving a "blue" bluehost page, they said they are in process of updating the DNS and it will be done in ~4 hours. No, it din't take 4 hours, it took them 2 weeks and me reminding them again to do there job to get the job done. In all fairness, they could have got it done earlier if only I had reminded them earlier. Also, whatever they did to restore my site, it had removed all (well only one) redirects I had setup, so I had to do that.

Now finally ma website is back up. I am wondering how bad is it when your domain IP address changes. What all services may go bad? I know in theory it shouldn't but you know there is always something...

Just 7 people

2008-03-20T17:23:16Z

Created by OnePlusYou
I wish i could be of a bit more useful, at least when dead.

Yes we can !!

2008-03-04T08:13:57Z

This is what i think about the election campaign. All the candidates, good or bad, right now are just making promises. They can only make promises for now. Campaign process is there best efforts to explain to you why they have decide to make certain promises and more importantly there only chance to prove to you how sincere they are when it comes to keeping these promises. So to me what this all means is I have to pick someone who I think has made the right promises and again, more importantly, whom I trust to be the one who will KEEP the promises. The later part is way more important than the first part because to me it feels like execution is where most of the politician have either lacked or plain simply forgot. And if you think about it, all politicians, in theory, are working towards the greater good of the country. So they are actually promising the same thing, by taking slightly different routes, ofcourse. So imho we should pick someone whom we can trust to be the one who would keep his promises. But see that's the scary part, this is like deciding to get married to someone, except in case of presidential candidates you are not going to meet them in person and you can't hold them and see if it feels right (well i see this as a good thing :-)). On a serious note, how can you decide you can trust a person basing your decision solely on one way communication. In this sense, its even more scarier than a marriage proposal, dnt you think ? But still we do play our fates. Sometimes we are right, sometimes we are not. People claim they based there decision on reasoning but I beg to differ. p.s. just for the record if I could vote, it be for Obama.

FriendFeed, me on it..

2008-02-28T20:53:42Z

But with no friends on it though..sucks..i guess it just reminds me not everyone joins every new social thingy out there in space the first week it is released. well atleast not my friends..or may be i dont have enough friends..hmmm..sad realization...i wonder how many users of such social networking sites are there to make new friends (i.e. "i dont have enough friends offline, let me find new friends online" types people) as opposed to keeping in touch with old friends. I know one someone for your sure ;-). follow me here.

oh my eyes !!

2008-02-21T03:28:37Z

Seriously people, whts up with those big ass glasses ??? Did you people spend all of the fashion budget on sun glasses. I know sun glasses are cool and all but see, you just over did it..:-)
The song is amazing though.

Martin Luther King Jr.

2008-02-20T07:55:58Z

I don't think i have words which can describe how i feel listening to MLK Jr. in this video. Such strong emotions and passion for his fellowmen. Do you think today's world is the Promise Land such great leader fought for ?

ScribeFire as a blogging tool

2008-02-16T00:58:33Z

I am trying out the ScribeFire firefox addon as my blogging client. I like the idea of the client embedded in the browser itself. or may be not. Actually, to put it right I like the idea of lightweight blogging tool. And thus it seems like to having it as a plugin to the browser. Extending this further, I really need to figure out if movable type supports atom and get meself a atom client.

Neways, about ScribeFire. I cannot open in new window. Not cool, it takes half of my browser area. RTF editor is a good. Oh wait, i cannot create new tags with the plugin. This will be a deal breaker. Oh nice, i can even post this to delicious automagically. Lets post this one and see how it goes.

Update : It did work :-)

Financial works !!

2007-10-29T19:57:08Z

via: blog.pmarca.com

Shinnny New Toy

2007-10-25T18:26:00Z

It really is shinny. Glossy is the more apt term. Got a PS3 the day Sony announced the price cut. I was planning to buy a 40 Gigs version but dint . Why?

i am a sucker for more HDD space.
Know that bluray stuff (saving game data) requires more space.
Given the limited games available for PS3, it helps to have some backward compatibility. so I can buy PS2 games.
I DINT WANT TO BUY A DISCONTINUED MODEL (referring to 60G model)

So there, I bought the biggest baddest model on the market. BTW, it took me going to 3 stores to get my hands on the a console.

CompUsa - right across my office has PS3 listed as available in stock in store, but dint
EB Games - a few blocks up, still had it for the old price, apparently it takes a couple of days for the price to be updated in there system (I am dont think if it makes any sense.)
Circuit City on van ness - After long walk from van ness muni subway station to post street, i finally got it.

And do I like it or what. I will write a detail review later as I haven't got much time to play with it (literally).

Also, any recommendations for games on the PS3. I have already got Fall of man.

Also, this venn diagram can help you decided on which PS3 fits you the most.