My mom and bro gave me a Tata Indicom Plug2Surf for my last birthday (geeky gift, I know. What can I say? They know me too well). It’s only been with me for a couple of days but I’m already addicted to the sweet device. And as usual, set up is as Mac-ish as can be… if you know the proper settings.
Start by plugging in your Tata Indicom device. It’s a blocky ugly but functional device that takes up more than its share of USB ports on my Macbook. The small light should change from red to orange and then stay a pale green.
Open System Preferences and navigate to Network. A Qualcomm CDMA Technologies MSM device should already be detected. Select that and click Configure.
Fill up the settings as in the pic below. The number to dial is #777, the username and password are the same: ‘internet’ (lame!). Be sure to check Save Password to avoid nag screens.
Click on the Modem tab and from the list choose the ‘au CDMA 1x WINW01K’ modem. The default selection will not work. Navigate back to the PPP tab and click Dial Now…
You’ll be presented with Internet Connect, the general dialer application for the Mac. I use this for VPN connections as well. Check ‘Show modem status in the menu bar’ and click Connect. It should take under 5 seconds and the dialog will expand to show statistics for the connection.
The tariffs are reasonable. It’s Rs. 2500/- for the device and Rs. 350/ per month (paid like a postpaid bill) for 30 hours of net access a month (overcharges are 25ps for a minute). I have a BSNL plan otherwise, so this is for mobile net. It’s not entirely as plug2surf as the advertisement shows however since on Windows devices, you’ll have to install a driver (provided in a tiny CD). On a mac, you don’t, but you don’t know how much of tariff you’ve used either.
Welcome everybody to a new avatar of Vysnu. It’s still heavily in the works so stuff will be broken, but it should be a nice refresh from being blue all this while. The inspiration behind this is a hint of Kill Bill and a dash of love.
Notes and Plans
It’s been four years since I started this blog and the design remained constant, so it’s overdue for a change.
It’s made with Blueprint™. Relying on this very lovely framework means that this whole avatar (until now at least) is less than 60 lines of style. Rejoice! (Definite win for easy tweaking and playing around with things.)
Good typography, again courtesy the blueprint framework. These fonts are definitely easier on my eye.
I plan to move delicious links and miniposts (kewl) to the sidebar, leaving this main box filled only with ‘real’ posts. Done!
Striving for minimalism, so navigation by default will be hidden and only come up on a click.
Good white on black pretty colors for code.
Ashok’s suggestion: remove asides from main RSS feed.
A thorough overhaul of the comments template, it’s a relic from the old default WP theme still. Highlighting for self-made comments.
Tags display at the bottom of a post a la iPhoto, and a tag list in the sidebar. Done!
Switch to Wordpress 2.3 Done!
Support tags and a tag cloud in the theme. Done!
A search box.
Bake in widget support in the theme to use those newer plugins.
Have an ‘About this Post’ section in the sidebar for individual post displays, also display the previous and the next post for navigation.
Everything else is up for grabs, leave a comment if you need anything done. Later!
It’s the first time in a while that I’m writing about something Torque has done, and although I wasn’t involved in the making of the site, it’s a really good creation which you should know about.
Drumroll… Movieonline.in. It’s networked with good theaters in Thiruvananthapuram and Ernakulam and you can book tickets, choose seats, pay via credit card, and get your ticket delivered via email and sms. It’s a pretty cool creation all round and compared to the atrocity that is PVRCinemas (I tried two times to register only to give up), a joy to use.
Account creation is fast. Enter your name, email address and password and you are good to go instantly, there’s not even a page refresh. That really sets the tone of the site: choosing the movie as well as the date is a simple drop down. There was a bit of a delay when I selected my seat but it cleared up quickly and I was taken to a CCAvenue screen where I typed in my credit card details and booked the ticket. It’s Rs. 55/- per ticket so there is a bit of an overhead, but chalk it up to the petrol costs you spend if you drive there manually to book and it seems very reasonable.
All in all, a very good effort.
Btw, I’m going to see Ore Kadal this Saturday. Me, mom and bro. Have heard good things about the movie.
It took me the better part of six hours to get this running. I suspect if I’d done this with Ruby, I’d have completed an elegant, fast solution in less than a half hour. However I did make this harder for me (see below).
It uses the in-memory database that Erlang has: mnesia. There’s functions in there to populate the mnesia table with the csv file and then perform lookups on it.
Higher-order functions is the name of the game. For just about every useful thing from looping down to iteration, to mapping elements of a list. Coming from a non-functional background, I find this very hard to grasp still. Also: non-mutable state. Count +=1 doesn’t work. [So how do you implement a counter? Recurse with a parameter].
I miss the Ruby Standard Library very very badly. Of all the languages I’ve used, Ruby’s is the most concise and clear and manages to have just about every function you need in there. String manipulation in Erlang esp. is very cumbersome. Somebody probably should port over all the functions asap. lists:join, string:delete, string:delete_if etc. would be invaluable.
The comma, semi-colons and fullstop craze (along with proper indentation) is sometimes very confusing. The rules are actually easy to remember, but when I nest functions using funs, I find I lose track of where I am and what’s supposed to happen. I started programming this using Aquamacs but it crashed on me midway while using the inbuilt shell. I hate stuff which crashes so I switched to Textmate’s erlang mode which isn’t as functional but does a decent job of parenthesis matching and auto-indent.
Mnesia is a joy to use. I spent a lot of time just playing around with many examples because it’s fun to make a record, dump it and use list comprehensions to perform selects. It’s way more intuitive than using SQL. Witness this fragment:
That actually just says: get the country code for all X where X is an mnesia table of type ip_address_map and where X’s ip_ranges are within range_from and range_to. No SQL and exactly as you’d do within the language.
It feels very awkward to get Erlang to be a shell scripting language. I’m not sure escript is even supported anymore but it does work. Erlang is not for scripting.
The whole exercise reminded me of my extreme newbiness. I’ve been dabbling off and on in Erlang for over four months now and still I’m not at a stage where I can code in it off the top of my head (this hasn’t happened before with any language, but admittedly all the others were just procedural ones). The problem is I’m not using it for anything big. That should hopefully change someday. [Not much hope, but does somebody want to hire me to work on erlang or lisp? :-)]
The erlang mailing lists help a lot. Just being there you soak up a lot of info.
Concurrent erlang is another ball game altogether.
So here’s a SlideShare/Twitter Mashup (command-line ruby code) that does these things:
Gets buzzwords from Twitter. It does this by analyzing tweets and getting popular words (filtering out common ones) with the Twitter API.
Gets the most popular buzz word and searches the SlideShare tag database with it (using the SlideShare API).
Prints out the buzzword and the slideshows that’s associated with it.
The source code might not be a great example of filtering and getting popular words, but it’s a good demo of how simple the Twitter and SlideShare APIs are (REST yay) and how easy Hpricot makes parsing XML docs.
There’s a zip (with the source code, common_words.txt, twitter_words.txt) here: slideshare_twitter.zip. Enjoy.
The advantage of learning Erlang (albeit very slowly, with lots of interruptions) is that it directly introduces a lot of concepts I’ve been marginally aware of before. For instance, the second example implements factorial using tail recursion. The advantage is that a compiler doesn’t have to implement a call-stack when playing with arguments. See wikipedia entry.
Twitter: Performing surgery to get Kannel to install on OSX. Every other program seems to choke on a nonstandard MySQL location ala Macports. 5 days ago
Sunday, September 30, 2007
What’s missing from Amazon’s suite of web services? Two things: SimpleDB which provides database-like persistence and SimpleBalancer, which load balances “services” on multiple EC2 clusters. While it’s possible to emulate both using S3 and EC2 right now, it’s hard to do, and feels really clumsy. When Amazon does engineer these things, expect Google to take a peek in as well. Oh, we live in interesting times.
Put one of these drives in its enclosure on your desk. Name it something clever like “Backup”. If you are using a Mac, the command you use to back up is this:
sudo rsync -vaxE / /Volumes/Backup/
If you’re using Linux, it’s something a lot like that.
I’ve started a new tumblelog to keep track of the snippets that pop into my head. It’s all about a sequel to Harry Potter now (set way way in the future), but that’ll change soon. None of it is probably going to take a coherent form anytime soon, but I find that nowadays I don’t have the energy to finish up a work, so at least this will scratch that itch.
Think this Vysnu design is getting to be a bit long in the tooth. I’ve been tweaking the layout a bit and every time I look at the code it leaves me disgusted. A rewrite takes such a long time tho. If I should do it, multiple WP loops to arrange content d
I’ve just debuted a new way to stop comment spam on this site (#5 on this list). It’s inaccessible for people with Javascript turned off, but even Akismet wasn’t helping enough for me.
Seems very interesting. Can use this to define “roles” for spawned instances. Say a self-contained instance can multi-task between a db/web/app instance, and a load balancer instance can spawn new ones depending on where the load is more…
Just an observation. If my bittorrent goes flat out, I can download a movie in ten hours. In a day, I can download two movies, which is about what a healthy adult should watch in a day. I wonder what’ll happen when my bandwidth doubles. (Oh, and people who only go by DVD-rips - or worse - can… wait.) So what did I watch recently? Bourne Ultimatum, Bridge to Terabithia, and Transformers. In reverse chronological order.
So now my delicious links don’t look like shit rolled over and match the kewlness all around. CSS magic made this happen. It’d be great if the default styling wasn’t so barebones, but for a feature who’s UI still looks like this, I guess it’s acceptable (the password field I blanked out because it’s just right there in plain text).
The new orkut look is frankly amazing. It’s got the Google sense of simplicity finally and looks much less crowded than even Facebook! (if it hasn’t rolled into your account yet, it will).
