• 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

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.

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.

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!!

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.

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!!

4) Mr. Duraipandi is strongly arguing that the number of characters alloted to Tamil in Unicode is not enough. I found this article quite interesting; Mr.Duraipandi gives a no-nonsense introduction to what makes Unicode tick, especially the Tamil part of it. He complains that if only Indian government had given a proper set of characters to be included in the Unicode, we’d have been typing much easier in Tamil. As a Tamil blogger now for close to 2 months, I have to agree! If not for the excellent software, e-kalappai, I’d have given up by now. One small grumble though: Mr.Duraipandi could’ve avoided the usual “Tamil is not given proper recognition, we are always the losers, blah blah blah” whining!

5) Saw some 10 – 12 movies since my last [movie] post here. Nowadays, I see so much *junk* that I keep forgetting the good films I see, along with those junk. Some films that I wanted to mention were “7/G Rainbow colony“, “Bose” & “Bride & Prejudice“. For those who haven’t heard about these films, the first two are Tamil films and the last one is an Hinglish film. “Bride & Prejudice” (B&P) is directed by Gurinder Chadha (Bend it like Beckham fame). This film portrays a Punjabi family, literally preparing their daughters to be given in marriage to desis & only Desis! I didn’t like the movie. Aishwarya was charming & beautiful as usual, the songs were great (except for the last duet song), some of the dialogues were good & sharp, so why I didn’t like this?! I don’t know; It simply is not the best effort by Ms.Gurinder. I have a detailed review of this ready somewhere in my HDD, might come around to post that sometime later (BTW, here are some Desi jokes). I think “7/G Rainbow colony” (7/G) is an excellent film by Selvaraghavan, director of “Thulluvatho Illamai” & “Kadhal kondaen”. If you haven’t seen this film yet, thinking that all Selvaragavan films are are always cheap and vulgar, you are missing a good movie; you have to see this film. The film was so captivating that I could not stop thinking about it for 2 days. If you think the songs are so good to hear, just see them in the movie in proper context, you will love them! I think Ravikrishna (hero) is a talented actor, but it is too early to say that. Sonia Agarwal has acted excellently. Yuvan shankar raja is fast becoming my favorite music director. I heard Karthik Raja, his brother, did the BGM for the movie, but who cares?! BGM is the backbone of this movie. It brings the emotions in every scene to life. Excellent work, again. Do not miss this movie. I read some reviews saying that only if you are/were in love, you’ll like this movie, *shrug*, probably true! “Bose”, I think, is one of those good movies that go unnoticed. It sucked for the first 15 or so minutes, but after that the screenplay really picked up pace. Srikanth copies Surya’s mannerisms to show himself as a tough commando [sic!]. Sneha is charming & beautiful, as usu…Oops, I said the same for Aishwarya, right?! quick, think of something! Ok, “As usual, Sneha is beautiful & charming” I have a biiig review written for this too. I will post it one of these days.

Some movies I have a review written and stashed (lost?!) somewhere in my HDD: “Mr. 3000″, “Beg!”, “Herold & Kumar go to White castle”, “The Forgotten”, “Office space” & some more I don’t remember now!!

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!