Posts tagged blogs
Site outage: How to handle?
Mar 30th
I recently shifted out of my IIS setup in to a LAMP account. The site’s up time was much better, until yesterday, when suddenly my site was sucked in to the Internet black hole. Repeated help-desk queries pointed me to a routing issue in their end. Finally it got resolved after nearly 7 hours. If you were disappointed (dream on!) to find my site down, I apologize; My site is up again and hopefully will remain so for sometime to come.Due to my site downtime, I got to do other (positive) things.
- Computer offtime: I didn’t get to check my email (my site’s) for the entire black out. I found it actually refreshing! Believe me, it suddenly makes you feel you have more hours per day than usual.
- Got to read some books:
- I got to read the 4 Tamil magazines I bought one month back. No, I am not kidding. I hadn’t even touched those magazines since I bought them last month. I was able to catch up with whats hot (or warm, or cold!) in Gollywood (Tamil film industry) finally.
- Read couple of chapters from the excellent Advanced Windows Debugging (Addison Wesley). Nothing can beat the smell of paper and the feeling of the book in your hand! Kindle won’t be there in my wishlist ever, I guess.
- Sleep: I wouldn’t have believed how refreshing a 3 hours nap could be, if I hadn’t experienced it personally. I woke up fully charged, but soon felt deflated when I found out the site was not up yet. Damn, this site is too much interwoven with my day-to-day activities, more than I’d admit actually.
- TV: Watched Roadies 5.0. Interesting reality show. I wanted Ankita to come in again, but she lost…Hmm, Shambavi being there is also good in a way, as her absence could have reduced the masala in the show.
- Movies: I watched Fargo. I am a big fan of Coen brothers; I am collecting their films, still 5 more to go
Now that the site is up, I am back to my usual blogging self, but I’d surely miss all those other things that I like to do. Computers **do** eat up your time like anything.
Bottomline: Stay away from blogging (and computers) at least a day every week. Enjoy the other good things in life! And, come back to blogging with full josh
Coolcode.cn (Wordpress plugin) site down!
Mar 16th
Today morning I was surprised to see a couple of mails complaining that the videos I posted earlier here and here are not working! I checked them last night (ok…at 1am..technically it is today morning!) and they were fine. I use the excellent coolplayer 9.3 plugin in my Wordpress blog. I logged in to my account and checked the coolplayer options. They looked fine, anyway I didn’t change any of these things and they were working fine yesterday. So, what’s wrong?
Then, I noticed that the RPC server ping was not working. As you can see from the picture (click to enlarge, the RED ones are the errors), the coolcode.cn is returning a 503. My page just gets blocked for 19-20seconds, trying to get the rpc.php in coolcode to work! The site is obviously down and has taken all my videos down with it, I wonder how many more sites are also affected by this!
Man, how I wish I had installed the RPC server in my machine 
I couldn’t find a mirror with that zip anywhere. Till I setup my own RPC server, please do bear with the slow loading speed. Thanks.
Update (Mar 16,07 02:07pm IST): Hooray….the site is up and I have downloaded the needed zips
Update (Mar 16,07 03:00pm IST): Ok, I have the RPC setup in my machine now. No more worries.
WP-Mollio comment_form hook fix – HowTo?
Mar 10th
If you are using WP-Mollio theme in your Wordpress site, I’d suggest adding the comment_form hook in to your comments.php. Only if you have this statement, the plugins like “Subscribe-to-comments” will work.
How to add this hook?
- Open comments.php
- Find the lines of code shown below. You will find it near the end of the file.
<p><input name="submit" type="submit" id="submit" tabindex="5" value="Submit Comment" /></p>
</form>
<?php // if you delete this the sky will fall on your head
endif; ?>
- Add <?php do_action('comment_form', $post->ID); ?> just above </form> ending tag. Save the file.
This will allow all the plugins that depend on comment_form hook to work properly.
Found a permanent location!!
Feb 16th
Welcome back! I have finally found a hosting service and took time to move my blog out of Blogspot. Also, I have moved to Wordpress 2.1. I have to say, it is the best personal blogging solution I have ever worked with (Not that I am a web/blog expert 
). The extensability options provided by WP are, simply, amazing!! Do check it out for your hosted blog, if you are in search of a blogging solution.
I am trying to learn about the various plug-ins available and the various customization options provided by WP, pretty time consuming, I’d say. Also, seeing so many plugins is kinda motivating, in a way; who knows I may write one over this weekend! Actually, I am looking for some mass-DB editor kinda plugin. If I dont find one, I will try to put together my own. This will be a good learning experience for me, in WP/PHP.
Next step is to move my Tamil Chess blog (Chathurangam) in Blogspot over here. Ohh, I am pretty excited!!
Am back!
Jan 19th
Its been a long time! Too many things have happened since my last post. My to-blog list is threatening to become a monstrous file in my HDD, my married life has permanently caused a dent in my day-to-day routines, my responsiblities in my workplace increased (read that as “I am being tortured more!”), I have got a new neighbour, a new year has started (BTW, Happy new year to you all!), Visual Studio 2005 is officially out (Yeah!!), I learnt about some really cool technologies, I bought a 802.11g router….Whew! Onething that hasn’t changed is my bank balance, deciding to stay at the nadir comfortably for ever!
Yesterday I came across this Yahoo offer. Yahoo is finally allowing dots in email addresses. Good thing is you dont have to create a new account, instead Yahoo allows you to assosicate another e-mail Id with your existing one. You can get an extra email address here.
Tidbits
Nov 23rd
Here are some things that caught my attention lately. Since I don’t think these things deserve separate posts, here we go.
1) First, this Science-based story by Jeyamohan. I didn’t know Jeyamohan writes these kinda stories too!! The basic story is about how different our Siddha Medicinal system is from Alopathy and how the system that we practise now is not the true Siddha. I got to know (learnt!?) a lot of things. Interesting read. But, after having read the story, I feel as if I went through a dense medical journal (“Siddha for dummies” !?)
2) When I was looking for some interesting blogs to read (as if I didn’t have enuf already!) I stumbled on Sriram Krishnan’s blog, He is a student (Wow!) in Chennai, a nerd & more importantly, has excellent coding skills! Good to see such motivated talents. He is really in to search technologies. Though, directly not related to my current work, I got kinda motivated reading all his articles. No denying that his “How to write a search engine in 16 hours” post brought back sweet memories of how I had only an evening to make our OS, which we did as our final year project, understand Tamil Good old days. I doubt I enjoyed doing anything so strenuous lately. Professional life, for sure, takes out that enthusiasm and, sometimes, that curiosity to learn more, out of you. This is my personal opinion, of course. Let’s hope Sriram doesn’t feel like me after 5 yrs of being in the field. Microsoft/Google, if you are looking for a talent, with enuf enthusiasm/motivation & technical know-how, you’ve got the right candidate here!
PS: Rama/Prem, this fellow is good, do have a look at his postings.
3) Latest *big* thing (& here’s a going-to-be-a-big-thing! 
) in Gollywood: Dhanush got married to Aishwarya, super-star’s daughter.
Don’t you think Rajini looks more like one of those ADMK ministers?? I can’t believe this is the same person who attacked Jeyalalitha so ferocioulsy back in 1996!! More >
Problemsss!
Oct 7th
Today I found the excellant TamizManam website. I have been thinking of starting a Tamil blog for quite sometime now, so naturally, when I saw this site, I got excited. As per the instructions given there, I installed e-Kalappai, pressed alt-2 and typed happily in Tamil in Notepad!! Not everything was smooth with IE, which ofcourse, I use for blogging in blogger. Blogger’s “New Post” edit field refused to accept the TSC fonts…I saw only junk, like this – «õá «ôÀ¡
In Word, If I choose one of the TSC fonts then everything looks fine…but how do I do that in Blogger? Should I specifically mention the font directive everytime?? What to do if I use of the blogger software available, like w.bloggar? What does Murasu’s “Convert to Unicode” feature do? I guess I will lose interest in Tamil blogging by the time I make this work!
w.blogger or TonesNotes?
Sep 16th
I installed TonesNotes to use with my corporate dotText blogger, but unable to post using that. Have to see why it is failing !! No error msgs even :-/ Though w.blogger looks good, I’d feel more comfortable with the Word interface that I am quite used to ! Have to make TonesNotes work, somehow!
