Weekend which was problematic

Disclaimer : Old post. coming out of my drafts.

Yet another weekend,planning to go home on friday.This time 5 of us booked ticket.(Naanga onne sendhaale nalladhu nadakkathu)Till tuesday morning it was peacefull,it turned ugly when cinema halls were attacked in bangalore.From that day, i constantly kept watch in thatstamil to get updates.It became worser day by day.Thursday night it was clear that people had to suffer.All TN bound buses started from Hosur only.We were lucky to board a private bus in madiwala to hosur which went in some rural route and dint go via the Hosur road after electronic city and somehow reached hosur by 2100. But bus was rescheduled to 2330 so that people can reach hosur by that time.Heard from one my friend that buses are blocked on hosur road by ‘activists’ and that he had walked from Attibele to TN border.Had horrible time in hosur to find a decent hotel(All were worse than the muniyandi vilas types).I must say onward journey dint give much of discomfort for us though it would not have been the case for many. After MKs statement, one hoped everything came back to normal and i cancelled my KSRTC ticket on sunday(i repent now) and booked SETC on monday from my place.

Monday :

1930 : Bus started but the conductor gave tickets only till hosur and did not assure bus would goto bangalore.

0245 : Bus reached hosur and after 5 minutes conductor told buses wont go beyond hosur. S**t.Came to road there are hundreds and hundreds of people standing like us.None of the KSRTC bus stopped, no means of transportation.

0300 : Finally some auto drivers started cashing in.For a 6 km distance to the border the fare was 50 Per person.Got one by 0315 and reached border by 0345.Then started walking till Attibele bus stand which was roughly 3-4 km.

0400 : Got a city bus going to KR market and then got a bus to my place and reached room by 6 am.

Horrible journey from 0200 to 0600.

Well all this is experienced by lots of people who went home for 3 day holiday.Reason was the act by few morons who even reported that the problem is as related to power projects initially.

I am not supporting either side. Violence should be handled strictly  whoever is doing.Its like the little brother of terrorism.I dont know what is going to happen as now the elections are over.

One good outcome personally was that i learnt train is little comfortable for return journey starting 2315 at chennai and reaching at 0530 and can be booked (horribly) via irctc. I hope the APIs reach out soon and private websites give booking facilities.

Play tag!

Self tagging from Niranj after i couldnt write his previous tag.

Last movie seen in a theatre:
Vellithirai

What book are you reading?
Seldom read.While travelling i think it was “Fundamentals of Technical Analysis”

Favourite board game:
Chess (if that is considered as one)

Favourite magazine:
Thuglak (Tamil)

Favourite smells:
Petrol, Ghee

Favourite sound:
Few good horns

Worst feeling in the world:
Feeling alone in difficult times

What is the first thing you think of when you wake up?
What’s the time? and sleep again

Favourite fast food place:
Not very specific, more specific on what i have

Future child’s name:
Excuse me! ( Naa petha magane Excuse me!! LOL)

Finish this statement, “If I had a lot of money I’d…”
know how much is “lot of money” and probably ask for me

Do you drive fast?
I seldom drive(No bike)

Do you sleep with a stuffed animal?
Well, NO!

Storms - Cool or Scary?
Cool

Do you eat the stems on broccoli?
No

If you could dye your hair any colour, what would be your choice?
No colors please. Black or white(when i get aged)

Name all the different cities/towns you have lived in:
Kalpakkam, Bangalore

Favourite sports to watch:
Table tennis

One nice thing about the person who sent this to you:
Nice friend with a good guy image

What’s under your bed?
Carpet

Would you like to be born as yourself again?
Yes

Morning person or night owl?
More of night owl

Over easy or sunny side up?
I dont eat eggs (If its related to eggs–Thats what i got when i googled for the phrase)

Favourite place to relax:
Beach.. ( I have a long pending draft on beach.. hope one day it comes out)

Favourite pie:
Choco pie

Favourite ice cream flavour:
Butterscotch,Pista

You pass this tag to –
Alagu Jegadesh Ravikumar Revathi Sanjeev (If you can tag yourself that will be great too)

Of all the people you tagged this to, who’s most likely to respond first?
If i tell to my roomie, he will do it. But I wont, Lets wait and watch.

Blogpost

Crazy title, well im writing this for the sake of it,cant think of a better title.Im just thinking why i havent blogged for 2 months now.That too when i got internet connection a month back.Yes cable net provided by youtelecom,speeds are Okay,unlimited 192 kbps so just downloading movies.For a week i can excuse myself for being having a hectic schedule. i had “graduated” sometime back and am an ‘ingineer‘.Met few of my friends after a long time, dont know if i will be able to meet them next time.The next week after that went for travel as i travelled from Bangalore-Kalpakkam-Chennai-Kolkatta-Bangalore in 4 days. And Cleartrip had a great offer, 10 movie tickets free @ INOX!!(I never knew the offer existed when i booked, i just booked the cheapest ticket in cleartrip).

Due to worst mistake done by dear pal sanjeev (he read reviews of all movies for 2 hours and booked the worst rated,he says its the problem with the site) during online booking,first movie was worst one “Thotta” on Mar 2.Then back to work and had the “hectic” 10 days release period.Since i had to exhaust remaining 8 tickets, went to 10000 BC and “Black and White” with colleagues in bangalore.Yes the second one being a hindi movie,but now able to understand normal conversions,so movie wasnt so hard to understand.Last week back to chennai for cousin’s marriage and went to movie called Vantage point.It was interesting in first half,then it was more like Gaptain’s movie with all sort of unimaginable stunts.Met few friends on sunday and went to a good movie atlast in the 10 tickets.Vellithirai was a good flick.

Travelling to and fro to chennai by bus on weekends is pathetic.I wonder why trains are always full.There will be 10 buses lined up and you never know which one you booked for.For 11 clock bus, i came to know that my bus is cancelled and i had to board another bus(1045) only at 1050 and the bus left at 1055 though i was in bus stand at 930 itself and whenever asked about my bus,got a casual reply,it will come and even the conductor doesnt know properly what is the timing.When asked my friend that is it the case only with SETC,he said its with every bus service(even the private fellows).

Meantime i started my hands at cooking also,starting from milk,noodles to ready to eat are now common things.Once a week ‘trying’ to cook rice also But washing vessels is a major pain.

Meanwhile me using windoz, as im unable to(not finding time to) configure my cable internet in ubuntu.Initial googling gave very little results.So if any of you know to connect cable modem in ubuntu,please ping.Expecting some change in Ubuntu 8.04 due next month.Its nice to internet at home.Am almost back to college days, catching up online with friends,(now started blogging also :P),orkutting,watching lollu sabha by downloading,browsing freely.

I have started liking this game tribalwars and playing it for 2 weeks like mad. I dont know when my next post will be, Untill then keep visiting

Regex

Bought this book last week and its fascinating.Revisiting NFA, DFA etc. Had i learnt the concepts properly in college, this book wouldnt be needed.Unfortunately that dint happen,so now this helps. Enoying reading it.

How To : Setting up few productivity tools

I just made my hands dirty on these tiny but useful productivity tools and made them working on Ubuntu Server.

Environment : LAMP

Tools

• OpenFire - Chat Server based on XMPP (Jabber)
• PHPBB3 - Php based forum software
• Trac - Web based Project management Software  and Issue Tracker
• SVN - Subversion repository system
• OpenGrok - Source Searching utility

Openfire

• Download the tar.gz from igniterealtime ,untar and put the directory into /usr/bin
• Give Execute permissions to the openfire script file in bin using chmod
• Start the server using /usr/bin/openfire/bin/openfire start
• Run http://localhost:9090/ from browser
• Select EmbeddedDB & Give LDAP auth info.Create groups and add all users in one LDAP Group as mutual friends

      Troubleshooting

• /usr/bin/openfire/bin/openfire start | stop | status for checking the status/starting/stoping the server
• Check the permissions of the openfire.xml file
• view the stack trace in nohup.out

PHPBB3

• Download PHPBB3 tar.gz from web.
• Extract into /var/www folder and give write permissions for others so installer can write the config file
• Create database in mysql
• Give MySql settings while installing,login to ACP and create the forum.
• Use LDAP settings for making it LDAP and chose auth type as LDAP
• For migration give the old database name and table prefix name and migrate

Trac

• Use Easy_install and install from the latest svn source.
• Create environment using tracadmin command.
• On a standalone trac system user the createUser Python script to generate the user.passwd file.

  $python trac-digest.py -u username -p password >> /path/to/users.passwd

• And edit the trac.ini file with path info and Source control locations

SVN

• Do an apt-get installation of SVN
• edit the apache.conf and make a alias for svn and give auth info
•  Create the password file using htpasswd

  $htpasswd /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwd -n username

• Give write permissions for the SVN Parent Dir

OpenGrok

• Download the tar from here
• Untar, Host on tomcat
• Edit the SRC_ROOT attribute in the web.xml
• Run the indexer periodically.

Things i learnt from this excercise :

• Brushed back my mysql basics
• Learnt CronTab and wrote few shell scripts  to do daily backup.
• Learnt little bit of Python.(Still learning!)And am finding it more and more interesting.
• Shell access is way to heaven. cPanel,Webmin is for kids

And a great news is my system is up and gotto install Ubuntu Gutsy today after having installed Windoz yesterday(for my TV Tuner) and try learning some python daily.Got to have some form of internet(Have relaxed this from Broadband) as its getting difficult to have a system without net and feeling the pain.