August 2008 Archives

It was our group's offsite last week and this week. Since we do on call coverage and operations support, we split the entire group into two and go to the same place in consecutive weeks. We had been to Guhantara off Kanakpura road. The idea was to do some team building sessions in the first half and spend the rest of the day playing games and partying. The sessions in the first half weren't too much fun and was over by around 11:30am. Rest of the day was spent playing volleyball, cricket, swimming, dancing and partying and having fun.

But in the end, I doubt if the goal of the offiste was achieved. The idea of such excercises is to get know people and network with them. I was surprised when I heard people asking if it was compulsory to attend the offsite. It was sad to hear people saying I am on-call, I have work or I am going home. The offsite happens on a work day and we split and do it to avoid such reasons. And even if people get there, they roam around with the same gang as in office. I doubt if people understand the power of networking and knowing new contacts.

The best excuse that I heard today. I am new and the only two people I know are not going to the offiste.

I finally watched this movie last night. And I enjoyed this movie. The movie is an ordinary college love story, repackaged and delivered a little bit differently. Some of the dialogs are amazing. Jai has pulled of nicely. Aditi looks good but she has overacted and the accent she has put up is crap. I liked Shaleen. The rest of the gang is also good. Nasrudeen Shah tries to be funny. Worth a watch, especially when the company is good. /me starts singing "Jaaaaaaane Tu... Ya Jaaaane Naaaa".

The gem:

Aditi - Pata hi nahin chala college ke paanch saal kahan gaye.
Jai's Mom - Phone pe Beta, Phone pe

Jai - Baarah baj gaya, mujhe nikhalna hoga.
His cousin - Kyu, tu cindrella hai?

Last Monday I was trying to pay my Cellone bill via the BSNL portal. Everything went fine, the payment was done at the payment gateway and when I clicked on the confirmation, the BSNL site conked off with a "unique constraint violated error". I was worried since I was thinking that I will now need to run between my credit card provider and BSNL. I checked with Sandip and he said that he had a tough time convincing Airtel when a similar problem occurred to him. The BSNL website said that if an error has occurred after the transaction was completed, they received details via "alternate backup channel" and the site would be updated after a day. I was a bit skeptical and decided to wait a day. I was really surprised when I got an email confirmation the next day saying my payment has been received. While I was wondering the state of online commerce, this is indeed a pleasant experience. And that is one of the reason why Cellone has remained my favourite service provider for the past couple of years. Even though I have had connection issues with Cellone, specifically at office, I am happy with the service. I have also taken a Vodafone subscription last month since my usage is going to increase a lot in the next few months and I have enough gripes with Vodafone already. Cellone rocks :-)

I received a message from Airtel about best way to secure the PC, copied to some 100 other folks. I replied back with a stinker to those morons to stop spamming me and my mail bounced back. So they dont receive /read emails?

Reporting-MTA: dns;spmail03.bharti.com

Final-Recipient: rfc822;Marketing.South@Airtel.in

Action: failed

Status: 5.0.0

Diagnostic-Code: X-Notes; Error delivering to Marketing South/Sales&Mkt

 /Telemedia/Airtel; Router: Database disk quota exceeded

 Subject: Re: Best way to Secure your PCFrom: Balaji Narayanan Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2008 11:17:36 +0530To: Airtel Telemedia Services 

I have one other ticket opened with them for issues with their website. Their website does not show up the tariff plan and I think it is most probably because the page is not standards compliant. They have been telling me to check my router and firewall and keep saying it could be a problem with my network. I am pissed off with these jokers. Any tips on dealing with these idiots?

I found sometime to upgrade to Hardy on my home laptop yesterday. I had two different partitions of 4GB each running two versions of Ubuntu and I wanted to do away with it since, over a period of time I run out of space on the root partition. So I moved /home to the end of the disk, deleted all other partitions and created a 7GB one for root. The whole process took almost 4 hours thanks to 250MB odd updates.

Steps done after upgrading to Hardy:

• Fix /home partition.
  

  rm -rf /home/balajin
  
  sudo vol_id -u /dev/sda5
  
  deb73237-6b76-4bb3-ab1a-cf335e034315
  
  
  Add to /etc/fstab
  
  # /dev/sda5
  
  UUID=deb73237-6b76-4bb3-ab1a-cf335e034315 /home  reiserfs  defaults  0  1



• Add user narayanant and add to corresponding groups.


• Run Update manager to sync with latest packages


• Install courier-imap, fetchmail, procmail, msmtp, postfix.


• Restore configurations for postfix, courier-imap and crontab.


• Install vlc, mplayer, mozilla-mplayer, codecs, vim, emacs, thunderbird, xchat

After reading a book, if it makes me think about what I have read atleast for a day, then I consider it "Paisa Vasool". I just finished reading Go Kiss the World by Subroto Bagchi and it is worth a read. I first read about his speech to IIMB on Rajshekhar's blog a while ago. When I was wandering at the Hyderbad airport last month, I saw this book and picked it up.

I have been spending most of the day upgrading my laptop from Gutsy to Hardy. When I logged into my blog today, I saw an announcement about MT4.2 and MT4.2 Pro. I have been planning an upgrade for months and I thought why not today. So after about 30 minutes of fiddling with perl modules, this post comes from MT 4.2. :-)

I got my voter identification card done at last. This is the process in gist.

• Fill out Form 6. Submit at your local CMC / BMP office and get an acknowledgment.
• Check newspapers when they are publishing electoral rolls. Check that your name is in the electoral roles published by visiting the CMC office where you submitted the form. Use this link to check the status online. However I have had problems finding my name on the list even though it exists in the rolls. This link used to work sometime back but is no longer working.
• Show up at advertised venue when they call for the issue of photo id cards and get it done.

In short, the time required is about 15 minutes each for the first and the last steps. But you will spend most of the time in following up to see when the rolls are published and when you need to go for the photo session.

Rishi has a more detailed post on the process of submitting the form and the necessary documents. bangalorevoterid.org site has more information including FAQs, forms and the schedule for issuing the id card.

Go and get your voter id card done today!