Solutions Unresolved

SE outage :(

2010-07-02T20:08:00.001+05:30

Cloud thinking

2010-04-28T15:26:00.001+05:30

Google maps

2010-04-27T19:30:00.001+05:30

The app always amaze me. And on a bigger screen it looks more better.

I'm back

2009-07-12T12:24:00.002+05:30

Again after a long break I am back to scribbling my piece of mind. And yes I am just trying. I have my presence in twitter as well.

Sigma 30mm f/1.4 HSM EX DC HSM

2008-05-18T20:33:00.001+05:30

Yummy. I finally got one in my wish list. The best thing I liked about the camera was its HSM motor. Its so freaking smooth. I wish it had a manual auto focus override switch considering that I use a D40X. But still a good investment for my street and portrait photography.

Hong Kong

2008-04-04T22:42:00.014+05:30

I had the fortune to visit Hongkong few months ago for 10 days. I had read and heard many a things about Hongkong and wanted to try out the best of the place when I was there. Hongkong is visual treat for photographers. The place is the most sought out business hubs and also a buzzing tourist destination. In order to promote all these the government provides a visa for 14 days on arrival.

Few places that I visited during my stay:
Stanley Market & Murray House
Repulse Bay
Temple Street Night Market
The Symphony of Lights at Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront in Kowloon and Golden Bauhinia Square in Wan Chai.
Victoria Peak
Victoria Harbour
Avenue of Stars

One of the thing that impressed me the most was the Symphony of Lights. The show happens all day for about 10 mins. It is said to be the world's largest permanent light and sound show. Each show is based on 5 themes talking about the heritage of Hongkong and many buildings from each island take part in this.

Few of the places are best visited at night. The Temple Street Night Market at Kowloon only opens after 6PM. The place is filled with vendors selling everything from souvenirs to electronics. The place has few good places to eat where you can try authentic chines seafood.

Share your mouse and keyboard using Synergy

2008-02-16T21:07:00.003+05:30

I finally got a desktop loaded with Windoze. This desktop is purely for running some proprietary softwares which I dont know why these cant be ported to open source. The problem of running two desktop is you are going to have two mouse and two keyboards. And that's when synergy comes to the rescue. The best part of synergy is that it is coded for multi-platform meaning it can run on Linux, Mac OS or Windoze. The site has details on how to configure it and also you can get it up within 10-15 minutes.
The best thing about synergy is that it allows you to copy text from one box to another. This is really helpful if you have to copy contents from one application running on one platform to another.

Wish list for lenses

2008-02-10T10:40:00.005+05:30

I feel it is the right time now to expand my lense collection. Currently I just have the kit lens i.e the standard Nikkor AF-S DX 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G ED II. Now I feel I have the budget to invest in two more lenses.

The two in my wish list are:
1. Nikkor AF-S DX VR 55-200mm f/4-5.6G IF-ED
2. Sigma 30mm F1.4 EX DC HSM

The Nikon Zoom is the most obvious choice for a D40x because it is the most affordable zoom lense from Nikon stable. It also has the VR also which make the deal more sweeter.
I came to know about the sigma lense from one of my friend and checked out few photos on flickr and have decided to be a must have.

Photography

2008-02-03T21:46:00.001+05:30

My new Toy
Originally uploaded by ztij0

After going through all the reviews and also weighing it out, finally I decided to buy an DSLR. Photography had always been more than a hobby for me. Still an amateur in this field, I believe that each photographer has his own uniqueness. I like shooting objects and portraits. And for a start I have bought a Nikon D40X and got a giottos tripod. I bought the camera on my recent trip to US and was lucky to capture a few snaps with my new toy. Next in my wish list is to get a AF-S DX VR Zoom-NIKKOR 55-200mm f/4-5.6G IF-ED. Hopefully during my next visit.

Tired

2007-08-15T21:40:00.000+05:30

Here I am sitting in office on a holiday doing especially nothing and the time is half past 10 PM. So why am I not going home? Is it b'coz I have a better bandwidth in office? Or is it due to the power outage that might happen at home. Nahh. I am too tired and lazy to move. I just wanna sit like this and sleep. Had a tough month so far at work and at home. And I am just half way through it. I am just to tired. Let me sleep.

My new Sony Ericsson

2007-07-03T23:15:00.001+05:30

My Phone
Originally uploaded by ztij0

I couldn't use a Nokia phone. Is it because I was using a SE phone for the past 3 years? No way. I was using a Nokia before that and had enjoyed using it. But now I feel it very difficult to use and I feel the UI compared to Nokia is better on a SE mobile. And also it takes care of lot of small things that you wished you had it in your mobile.

Advantage - Camera Phone

2007-06-28T12:09:00.000+05:30

As usual me and sahil (who is still figuring out where his blog is) was playing with Sandeep's pager. Its quite an unusual pager b'coz of it's bright yellow color and the size, of a thumb. And it so happens that we dropped it on the POP (Plaster of Paris) casting on the ceiling which had a gap. So what do we do get it out? We tried all possible way but since the gap was small we couldn't have a look inside the casting. That's when it clicked to use the camera on our phone and figure out the exact location of the pager. Check out the video

Monitoring

2007-05-13T22:00:00.000+05:30

An unavoidable part of an IT infrastructure is monitoring. But how important is monitoring. I dont think 80% of the IT firms in India are aware of such an aspect. They are bothered about uptime and only think about when something goes wrong. There is where monitoring becomes proactive.

How much man power is required for monitoring?
Yes we do need manpower to set up a base monitoring for the system and then a single person should be able to take up any alerts that are generated from it.

How much man hour should be spend doing it?
The answer to this should be NIL. Monitoring should not be an overhead for any department. Only when the system state is changed any attention would be required. The monitoring should be automatized in a way that it takes care of your systems and its running processes and also does a auto correction when ever there is a problem.

There are many tools that can help an organisation to achieve this. Nagios is one tool that I support. There are other tools that are built as a wrapper for this making it more powerful that many proprietary softwares. You can integrate your ticketing system as well to it with a little hack.

Finally............ :)

2007-04-03T22:18:00.000+05:30

Kaun Banega Crorepati

2007-01-24T13:28:00.000+05:30

I had to see it again to write this blog. And I saw it yesterday 9pm on Star Plus. The new Kaun Banega Crorepati is a serious joke. No offences to the new host Shah Rukh Khan but I don’t think he can replace Amitabh Bachan at all. When Big B used to host the show had some class and it was mainly because of his presence and presentation that people where glued to the TV sets. In the shows latest edition I think the King Khan is making a joke of the show. In no way he is eligible for comparison with Big B. I am not too an adherent fan of Bollywood. I have seen Shah Rukh movies and I believe he acts pretty well too. But for a game show like KBC he is not doing the justice. I feel the way he asks questions to the contestants are too artificial. I would have preferred if he had been in his natural style itself.

Update: SRK finally pulled it off. It was indeed a great showmanship.

CK Eternity

2007-01-12T20:02:00.000+05:30

Latest addition to my fragrance collection. It was gifted by my cousin who had traveled abroad.

Knowledge Sharing

2007-01-09T00:19:00.000+05:30

Sometime when people comes and asks you doubts do you tend to send them off or take trouble to clear it. I personally follow the rule of doing the latter to the best of my know how. The other day a friend of mine asked me whether it doesn't object you in any way when you educate your colleagues and sometime they might get ahead with people with the things we discussed. I don't see it in that perceptive. Knowledge sharing actually helps in many ways to both the parties. You will be more confident/learn on the subject when you try to explain and also depending on the inquirer sometimes he/she brings in additional information after you provided the base for him. This has proved true a lot of times for me. Finally you end up with more knowledge on the subject you had before.

Mysql multi instance with replication

2006-12-12T15:54:00.000+05:30

From mysql 5.0 onwards the the mysql_mutli has been depreciated and it is being taken care by mysqlmanager. The settings and everything is the same and it relies on the my.cnf entirely for the the setup of the instances. You can bind the instances to an IP address or to a different port. The multiple instances can be configured to act as a slave server to a master server. The problem I faced while configuring this setup was because of a route rule. I had given permission for a user from the multi slave server to access the master server. The mutli slave was bond to an IP. So what was happening actually was it would send a request from the default gateway which doesn't have permission to access the mysql server. This can be solved by adding a static route rule to the server from the mysql multi bond IP.

Moi back

2006-12-05T17:08:00.000+05:30

It's been a while since I have written anything. Lot of things happened in between like got married, moved to a new address, project got postponed, couldn't attend the seminar which I was waiting for, etc. Now I am back very much in sync with the world and hands deep at work. The photo was taken by my cousin Subin at my marriage function. Of the lots I like this image the best.

Migrating tables

2006-09-29T21:38:00.000+05:30

There are different ways to migrate huge amount of data (tables) in MySQL. The most common approach everyone follows is to create a new table with the same structure as the old one and then insert the records using a select on the old table. Eg:

create table new_tbl_name like old_db_name.tbl_name;
insert into new_tbl_name select * from old_db_name.tbl_name;

But a little googling helped me to find a very good alternative to this.

alter table old_db_name.tbl_name rename new_db_name.tbl_name;

It’s a very good method compared to all others. It doesn’t create a temporary table but just moves the data definition file and the data file to the new DB location. It works well for MyISAM and InnoDB

Documentation

2006-09-18T08:34:00.000+05:30

What is Documentation? As webster would put it in relavance to the IT industry it would be the usually printed instructions, comments, and information for using a particular piece or system of computer software or hardware. Literally there are many types of documentation pertaining to the purpose. As you climb up the ladder you would be doing more of that and less of technical job.
So what is the use of such documentation? In the beginning I was not too much inclined to document all the activities. But now I feel that it is actually a very good practise. The preparation is like always a very tedious/lame process. You would have dug more than what you require for the document. Still it helps in a way if you want to do it again without any glinches and also quicker.

My point and shoot camera

2006-09-04T01:34:00.000+05:30

Finally got my hands on the latest point and shoot camera into my collection. It is the Canon Powershot SD500. Deciding on the camera was a very tough choice. My main criteria for the search were that it should be small and very easy to use. After going through lot of review sites like dpreview, I zoomed in on this one. Got my hands on it last week though. So now there is going to be more pics on flickr.

Pocket Mod

2006-08-19T18:28:00.000+05:30

Found this while searching for a PDA !!!

Mysql Replication check for Nagios

2006-08-05T19:12:00.000+05:30

Many a times I had faced issues with MySQL replication breaking off due to network problem or system related problem. And most of the time by the time I get to know of these kind of problems it would be late. So I had developed a piece of code for Nagios to alert me when ever the replication has any trouble. Below is the code snippet from the check_repl script I developed for monitoring the replication check on a single master single slave setup.

#!/bin/sh
###################################################################
# The script is a plugin for nagios. The script is used to check
# the replication status between the Master and Slave. The script
# has to be executed from the master.
# Written by : Jithesh M K
# Created on : July, 2006
# Updates on : ###################################################################

# Nagios alert status
STATE_OK=0
STATE_WARNING=1
STATE_CRITICAL=2
STATE_UNKNOWN=3
STATE_DEPENDENT=4

# Script Variables
SLAVEIP_1= # IP Address of the slave
REPLUSERNAME=nagios # User who has power to query 'show master status' and 'show slave status'
REPLPASSWD=nagios
CRITICAL_VALUE=1000
WARNING_VALUE=500

iSlave_1=`mysql -h $SLAVEIP_1 -u $REPLUSERNAME -p$REPLPASSWD -e "show slave status" | grep bin | cut -f7`
iMaster=`mysql -u $REPLUSERNAME -p$REPLPASSWD -e "show master status" | grep bin | cut -f2`
iDiff_1=`expr $iMaster - $iSlave_1`
echo "Master Log Position : "$iMaster" 1st Slave Log Position : "$iSlave_1 " Difference : "$iDiff_1
if [ $iDiff_1 -gt $CRITICAL_VALUE ]
then
exit $STATE_CRITICAL
elif [ $iDiff_1 -gt $WARNING_VALUE ]
then
exit $STATE_WARNING
else
exit $STATE_OK
fi

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

2006-08-05T17:27:00.000+05:30

I saw the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest at Inox. As usual Johnny Deep as Capt. Jack Sparrow was amazing in the sequel. I strongly believe that they have filmed back-to-back with Pirates of the Caribbean 3. The film is pretty good but I prefered the first one.