Saturday, February 16, 2008

Taruns' arbitaps continue ...

* Shantanu and rathi are not here in bangalore today. and I am here left to face the full wrath of tarun's arbitaps. Let me list
  • Have to watch some shady hindi movie
  • have to watch some shady vandam movie - was so bollywoodish
  • He just now made coffee-tea - Yes both coffee and tea together !! On asking said - he just found the coffee can and then he added.
Ram bachayei mujhei aaj tarun kei prakop sei !

Monday, January 21, 2008

Mumbai Marathon!! & Bombay in general

* This weekend I went to Mumbai for the half marathon. Finished the marathon in a pathetic 3 hours 5 mins. which works to arounds 7 kmph. slightly faster than brisk walk :). It was slower pace for me than midnight marathon at banglore - so I did bad. have decided to finsh the next in under 2:30 hours.. so thats a goal .. start training this week itself. BTW shantanu did pretty neat and was able to finish off in under 2hours 15 minutes - sweet ..

* It was nice marathon - the route was pretty scenic. lots of it was alongside sea-shore (marine drive, hajji ali) - nice views; and thru some residential areas - seeing so many aam junta - uncle,aunties, moms, dads, kids was amazing.. And the runners - there were so many of them .. many 10 thousands in the half marathon, was pleasantly surprised at the numbers. saw anil ambani, tinisha, milind - the glamor factor was there.

* Liked bombay as a place in general . Traffic (on saturday/sunday) was better than bangalore. The worli sea front was nice. On to the next thing - The scale of money is amazing. It definitely has widened/increased my horizons on how and how much to earn. Met aman - my schoolhood friend, and got a good understanding of ad business and mumbai life in general. The people spoke hindi. There were porshe and rolls royce showrooms (did I spell them right - dont worry I would in some time for sure!). local trains were bad though :)..

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

psuedo intelluctuals rathi & shantanu

* somehow book reading bug has caught on to these guys, and they have become boring now .. rathi is reading some shitty puzo/cuzo novel ,and shantanu is reading some - veronica decides to die..

* On this note, I usually find books boring - unless they are technical in nature.. I am surprised at their slowness, lack of imagination (comparing it with hearsay,movies on them) etc- I tried reading harry potter - got bored in first 2 pages ..

* BTW I am following up on macworld .. lets see what rolls out of the apple bandwagon.. hope something neat/cheap macbook for rajaram :)

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Wordpress 5 minute installation becomes 5 hour one !

Last week I tried to setup a chakpak blog - I decided on wordpress. The famous 5 minute install became a gruesome 5 hour one ! As far as I remember these are the steps that created problems

Environment was a centos linux server on the planet with mysql 4.1.20, and httpd

* Location - Dont put the wordpress inside cgi-bin. It should be at the same level as cgi-bin.

* Php & MySQL - You got to install the php-mysql rpm - shell$ yum-install php-mysql. I just presumed it would be there. was dead wrong there ! I guess it gave the following error -Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL which is required for WordPress

* phpinfo.php was useful to check if the php is running fine under httpd. search the web for the actual file

* Permissions - Proper permissions on mysql . The mysql user should have proper permission + should have the password in OLD_PASSWORD form.

* Permissions - wordpress files should have executable permission, but shouldnt have write permissions.

Thursday, November 08, 2007

Movies this Diwali



Monday, June 05, 2006

async messaging from mysql to java ?

Is there a way to send a async message from mysql to the JVM. I want to execute a java method on a row insert in the mysql table. Is there a neat or a standard way to achieve this? I want to avoid polling the table. I think it should be doable using GET_LOCK, RELEASE_LOCK function calls and some application level logic, but there are side effects to this function and doesnt seem to me to be a cool solution :)

Trip to Munnar

We start. On Time.
This weekend we went to munnar. Munnar is a hill station in western ghats (kerela). We started at 9:30 PM on thursday. Before that I had to go to commercial street in druelling traffic to get some stuff for the trip. But by our standards we started off "on time".


Journey to Munnar - Amazing and long; very long
I dont know who proposed it but the first hop on our trip was mysore. As usual we didnt research the route in advance and paid for it :). We did reach mysore on time but noone knew the definitive route from mysore to munnar. Apparently there is no direct route to munnar from mysore. Anyway the best route from there seemed to be thru chamrajnagar. We got it from a lorry driver. There werent many people on the road to ask. So we blocked the road using our two cars and hoped that someone would stop. Definitely not a suggested way, but it worked. we headed toward chamrajnagar looking for the ever reclusive left turn after the railway crossing. After some 30 kms it turned out that we missed it.

We decided to continue and go thru ooty. The route to ooty was amazing - we stopped and enjoyed the scary lightless jungle night for some time. We saw some wild bisons too.

We had to stop at the entry point to ooty, since it was "locked". It was 2 AM in the morning and gates were locked till 6 AM. We bribed the guards and proceeded further. I slept afterwards in the car , but we went to ooty, then connoor and then reached coimbatore in the morning. Had a good breakfast there. Munnar was another 180 KMs from coimbatore. Saw a wind mill farm.

Finally finally reached munnar at around 1PM. Finally we reached, after a full 16+ hours.

Munnar and around- the town
Munnar turned out to be a lacklustre town. There was only one bar in the town :). Saravana bhavan was a good food place. All the chicks in the town seem to hang around there. Anyway we found a place for ourselves near the town and took rest for the rest of the day.

Munnar and around - waterfall and viewpoints
Next day we checked out attukal water fall. Took a bath. Had a great time over there.


We checked out some of the view points and the mattupeti dam. Went back to our hotel. It was already night by then.



Munnar and around - national park
Next day we just checked out the national park. Park had amazing cool view. We saw some wild life too - a snake and a goat :)


All done - The Journey back
We started our return journey. This time we decided to ask often and not to take the oooty route. We went to coimbatore and then took NH47 to salem. From salem took the route to hosur and then finally reached bangalore at 3:15 AM monday morning. Without any untoward incident. Awesome:).