Krishnan's Blog

I read a few blog posts on people describing the content of their wallets. I was pretty impressed by it and wanted to do the same. Well here it is, the contents of my wallet. Money Some coins for  Election ID Card Postal ID Card Driving Licence PAN Card Apollo Advantage Card My Business Card Debit Card Lord Vinayagar's Photo My Wife's Photo (want to replace include a full family pic) Hospital ID Card Eye Hospital ID Card My lucky Re1 coin So what do you have in your wallet? ;)

Bought this book today through Flipkart. WIll write a review once I finish reading it.  Blead for me by Michael Robotham .

What is Zabbix? Zabbix is a network management system created by Alexei Vladishev. It is designed to monitor and track the status of various network services, servers, and other network hardware. (Courtesy Wikipedia). I wanted to learn Zabbix as it is a very important tool to monitor servers and hence decided to install it and practice. To install and use Zabbix you must first install LAMP on your machine. I followed the following steps to install Zabbix on my machine. Install the server: sudo apt-get install zabbix-server-mysql Install the agent   sudo apt-get install zabbix-agent Install the front end   sudo apt-get install zabbix-frontend-php Browse to http://localhost/zabbix Login as admin with a password of zabbix Change your password immediately by clicking on the profile link to the top right and clicking the Change Password button. Follow the Zabbix QuickStart Guide .

Will post soon.

I decided to write a blog post today. Clicked on the new blog post link and for a moment I was thinking on what the title should be. I then decided to concentrate less on the title and more on the post. This post is about what happened to me on 29-Sep-2011. 6:45 a.m: Quick wake up! A lady shouted and shaking me violently.  I woke up to find my wife waking me up. Before I could open my mouth she said that my sister has met with an accident. I jumped out of bed grabbed my wallet and rushed to the Government hospital in an auto. The auto had just entered the hospital premises and it started raining.As I entered the emergency room I could see my one and a half year old niece bleeding from the mouth and both my brother-in-law and sister unconscious. That particular moment I felt a pain in my heart which numbed my senses and my feelings, but I had to do something and the doctors in the GH did not start the treatment and where waiting for the Police to come. We blasted the docs and picked m

I have just installed Virtualbox on my desktop running Ubuntu 10.04. I will using Virtualbox to try and study Fedora and Ubuntu server edition.

I have just read a few chapters in Jeff Jarvis' book "What Would Google Do?" and I have already started to love him. Will write a detailed post once I finish the entire book and I think I am going to buy his new book too. 

Today there was no power supply at my home due to which my wife was not able to cook. She cooks using electronic appliances. Hence we decided to order Pizza. We since mid 2010 regularly order Pizza at Dominos  and did the same this afternoon too. Today the pizza was delivered very hot and tasted the better than our previous orders. In short I can say that today I had the best dominos pizza. I was extremely excited and decided to blog about the same in my free time. After finishing the Pizzas I fed my dog took her out for a walk. I then got a call from the Dominos customer support team asking about my experience and any suggestions I had. Man! I was surprised and felt like a king. This does not happen to Indian customers every day. There is a company out there which really cares about its customers. I don't know if they called me out of the blue or if this is a new practice but any way it felt good. I am currently reading Jeff Jarvis' book "What Would Google Do?"

I tried using Puppy Linux for quite some time. I was pretty much impressed by it. It enabled me to work with Linux without the need to install. I need Windows XP to test a lot of software and also to duplicate and troubleshoot client problems. Puppy Linux is a very thin software and it was fun to use it from USB stick. I used the 4GB HP drive for the purpose. However the version of puppy linux that I was using had some serious bugs. I was using puppy linux 5.2. It recognized my laptop's wlan card but the drive was not good. With WPA connection type I faced frequent disconnections. My laptop has Broadcom 802.11b/g WLAN card. Connecting to wi-fi during meetings and all was becoming very difficult and hence I had two choices. 1. Moving to WIndows XP. 2. Moving to a stabler version of Linux. I decided to go with the later. As Ubuntu is my favorite Linux distro and I have been using Ubuntu from 2008 on my home PC I decided to go with it. I had a Ubuntu 10.10 CD but I needed a USB stick

Today is teacher's day. I do not go to school anymore and hence cannot wish my teachers. Yet I wish them in my heart and they are very much with me in my memories. I wish all my teachers a very happy teacher's day. To the ones who made me what I am today and also to the assholes who made tried to make my life a hell. I shall leave the assholes as they do not deserve a mention on my blog. I would love to mention the teachers who like angels in my life, made me what I am today. Ms.Susan - English teacher, K.V Gill nagar, Chennai. Ms. Alamelu - Science teacher, K.V Gill nagar, Chennai. Ms. Nowshad Feroz - Hindi teacher, K.V Gill nagar, Chennai. Mr. Palanivelu - English teacher, Amalorpavam HSS, Pondicherry. Mr. Paneerselvam - French teacher, Amalorpavam HSS, Pondicherry. Ms.Deepa George - Physics lecturer, RGCET, Pondicherry. Ms. Punitha Devi - System software, RGCET, Pondicherry. Ms. Vasanthi - RDBMS, RGCET, Pondicherry. Mr. Venkatesh - HOD CSE Dept, RGCET, Pondicherr

My dog has now crossed the age of 5. 5 years in a dog's life cycle is like 50years in human life cycle. It recently all of a stopped eating food. I took it to the doctor and the doctor informed that there is a mild infection and gave some antibiotics. We also performed deworming. She still did not eat even some of her favorite food. I started worrying because this kind of a behavior will only make her a lot more week. After further analyzing the situation the doctor confirmed that she is becoming old and is getting bored with her regular food. She needs more variety in her daily food. Well after much trial and error I derived at the best food plan that my dog will enjoy eating. The list is mentioned below. Morning: 50gm pedigree with chicken flavor Mid day snack: Chew bone Afternoon: Chicken rice / Beaf rice Evening snack: Beaf flavored chew sticks Dinner: 100gm to 150gm of Pedigree mixed with beaf liver and eggs. With all this food I can see my dog's health picking up

Linux operating systems come in different flavors and size. Every linux distro that is available or comes out into the market are unique and are accepted by a wide variety of people. I basically love Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu is robust and at the same time is light and easy to use. It is also a very stable operating system and doesn't crash or hang. In the past I have used Fedora 2 and Knoppix 3.2. I felt that Fedora is a very very heavy operating system. Knoppix was a revolution as it brought the live CD concept into the market. Still it was not up to the mark for me. It has been years since I have started using Ubuntu. Recently I came into a situation where I had to have windows on my laptop to test windows based softwares. But I wanted to have Linux as my operating system. The only option was to have a live USB stick. Hence I did a google search to see which Linux OS would be suitable for me. I came across, DSL(Damn Small Linux), Puppy Linux and a few more. Some time in the past I ha

I was placed in one of the leading MNCs in India and I was totally excited. I was told that I would have to undergo a two month training (damn the boring part of work). The training hall had a big auditorium kind of a setup and it could easily accommodate 100+ plus people. As usual I chose to sit at the last, a habit I had right from my school days. After settling myself down I had a look around and I noticed a very energetic girl towards the extreme right side of the hall. She had occupied the first row. I thought boy she must be really some egoistic nerdy girl. Please do not ask me why I thought so, but if you are a person who falls into my category then you might understand. The training started. We all were immersed in it. Some slept, some listened, some acted as they listened. This girl that I previously noticed was indeed listening. She was also actively participating in all the question and answering session. This went on for a couple of days in a row. By this time the entire

When I was kid, summers lasted forever. After school ended, we had days and days, weeks and weeks, whole long stretches of time to play kickball, pick wildflowers, or just lie on the grass staring at the clouds. Everyday, my mother took us to the local used book store and bought some books and made it compulsory that we read it. I at times hated that. :) But reading these books was much more fun than reading the school prescribed books. In the evenings we played all the time, and those days were filled with cricket, police and thief and sitting by the campfire. “How come summers go by so much faster now?” I complained to my close friend one night. He took my question seriously. “I think it’s because as adults we have too much awareness of time,” he said. “I mean, when you were a kid, you didn't know it was the beginning of July. You just lived for the moment, enjoyed everyday, and then suddenly, your mother would take you to the store to buy school shoes, and you’d find out th

I have found my long lost love. It is nothing but Linux. I have again started to work completely on Linux and I am enjoying every bit of it. I also want to post a lot of stuff on Linux over here, but I then felt that it would affect my personal space. People coming to this blog would be confused on what the is the theme of this blog. So I made up my mind to start a separate blog for Linux. Though at times I feel that it is difficult to maintain two blogs, still I wanted to keep two blogs for few reasons. First my personal blog should always remain my personal blog. Though has and will have some technology related stuff, it will not be a full fledged tech blog or to be precise it will not be a full fledged Linux blog. My new Linux blog will be called Linux Jockey and can be found at  http://linuxjockey.blogspot.com/ . I will update a lot of stuff about Linux that I have worked on. - Krishnan urf Linux Jockey !

I have used Ubuntu 10.10 to install virtual box and to write this tutorial. Copy paste the below mentioned command in the Linux shell command prompt. echo "deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian maverick non-free #VirtualBox" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add - The above command would have modified the /etc/apt-get/sources.list file. To install virtual box type the below mentioned commands. # sudo apt-get update # sudo apt-get install virtualbox-3.2 Related Screenshots: (please refer the below highlighted lines)

Sorry the video was shot with a VGA camera and hence is not very clear! The song in the background is sheela ki javani ! :)

Job loss is relatively a new terminology unknown to our parents and our ancestors. Since the liberalization of the Indian economy, this term has come into a common usage (ask the current generation of Indians) . Everyday we read in the newspapers that people loose the job and the company sites various reasons for the same. People working in MNCs also often encounter someone or the other being fired right in front of their eyes. The reason behind being fired or loosing the job might be numerous, but the consequence is the person being fired undergoes severe trauma and his finance goes for a toss. In a capitalist economy loosing a job or getting fired and finding a new one is very common but the previous generation of Indians have experienced only a socialist economy and hence they could not and cannot teach us how to survive in a capitalist economy. The experience learned by living in socialist economy is useless to survive in a capitalist economy. Got this tweet minutes after I s

This is my second restaurant review. The restaurant that I went this time was Subway at Shanthi Colony, Anna Nagar . This is time I did not go to the place for writing a review. I needed some good lunch and hence chose Subway to have some. Well my lunch session also gave me good tips to write a review.  Location of Subway at Anna Nagar: The Subway Anna Nagar branch is located in the commercial complex of Shanthi Colony in Anna Nagar. There is not enough parking space for cars and two-wheelers, still one can manage to park. Its a bit of a challenge to get a parking space.  Outer look and appearance: Subway from the outside portrays the picture of a very small joint. It has a glass door which gives a inside view and you can see a very narrow seating arrangement. In a nutshell other than the sign board the restaurant is not too impressive from the outside. But that does not mean it is a shack. It is portrays a decent look. But this notion changes while you open the glass door and w

LAMP = Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (at times also Perl 7 Python). LAMP is the most preferred environment for creating web applications. With increasing popularity of Linux operating systems this environment is widely being chosen for creating amazing web applications. Installing LAMP on your computer or server is very simple. I use Ubuntu Linux 10.10 and hence this post is about installing LAMP on a Ubuntu machine. But this remains the same for almost all versions of Linux. Prerequisites: Linux desktop or server version.  Process of installing LAMP: # sudo apt-get install apache2 # sudo apt-get install php5-mysql # sudo apt-get install mysql-server # sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin # sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-auth-mysql # sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart Testing: Open a browser and type http://localhost in the address bar. You should be getting a page similar to the below displayed image. Done! 

For the first time in my life I have went to a dentist today. Though the experience was good, the reason I went there was not good. I have some problems. A month ago I started getting tooth ache and it was obviously because of tooth decay. Now I curse myself for not brushing my teeth properly and taking good care of my teeth. Then the pain was mild and hence I did not think too much about it. This tooth decay has now increased and has made my teeth too sensitive. I can no longer chew ice and drink ice cold water. At worst I am not able to open my mouth and talk freely. There is no more ignoring and I rushed to the dentist for a checkup. The dentist advised for a tooth cleanup and polish and tooth filling. Thank god, my condition was not too worse and the dentist said that my problem can be solved without pulling any tooth off. I then fixed an appointment for tooth cleaning and polishing on 8-July-2011. I entered the theater and was asked to lie down on the inclining chair. The doctor

Photo taken in 2007 Till recently death was a distant affair for me. When I used to hear the news of someone dying I would pass on my condolences and move on with my life. But unfortunately this time its not the same. This time the news of someone dying did hurt me a lot. This time this someone was my grandfather. My grandfather Mr.Ayemperumal was born on 10-Aug-1928. He was born to a rich indian bureaucrat in the French occupied India (now Pondicherry). He did his schooling from  Lycée Francaise . As the name suggests his medium of education was in French. He could easily read, write and converse in french. He was an outstanding student, but his active part in the freedom fight ensured his failure in examinations and hence was not awarded any degree by the french govt and the french university. He also refused to take french citizenship (he should have) , because he did not want to swear  allegiance to the french govt or France. He was a voracious reader and had a good collecti

Media is one of the most happening and important inventions of man kind. With the advent of time and tec hnology, there was advancement in the media field. A lot of media tools started coming up. Before going into the comparison between the traditional media and social media, it would be wise to define them first. Traditional Media: It comprises of newspaper, television, radio and banners or ads in public places. This of course costs a lot. For example to advertise on the velachery bus terminus would cost Rs14,000 per month. The traditional media is a static way of communication, where the communication is just one sided. When we watch a T.V or read a newspaper or listen to radio, we just listen to what they say. It is just push information, where the information is pushed on to us. We do not get to express our views or discuss with the host/presenter or the reporter. The traditional media has been in existence for a long time and hence has managed to earn a large user base. A c

Blogs are one of the revolutionary inventions in the digital world. Since the introduction of blogs there has been lots of blogging tools like Blogger and Wordpress, which enable user to publish their contents easily. These blogging tools have given the power of blogging to an average individual. Since then the number of blogs have increased. Almost everyone has a blog or had a blog in the past. Even companies have a blog these days, as it has become a basic necessity in today's digital world. However, an average reader spends very little time on a blog. A novice might ask, if an average reader spends very little time on a blog, what is the use of banging our head and writing articles for our blog. Well to answer in a single sentence, one can say making a visitor of your blog, turn into a reader is an art. This art cannot be mastered or acquired over night. It is a slow and a steady process and if somethings are done in the right way, your blog will slowly get a long list of loyal

I have been longing to start my own restaurant reviews for quite some time along with my wife who loves to try different cuisines and had recently developed a fetish for kerala cuisine. Hence we decided to go to Kumarakom – A Kerala restaurant near to our home. I had a hidden agenda and it was to write my first restaurant review. With lots of expectations we rode on our bike towards the restaurant. Location of Kumarakom: The Kumarakom Anna Nagar branch is located in a very posh neighborhood and has ample parking space for cars and two-wheelers. We did not have any problem finding a parking space for our vehicle. Outer look and appearance: After parking my vehicle we walked towards the entrance and the first sight simply took my breath away. The outer look and appearance of the restaurant gave me a american style sensation and I checked my wallet if I really had enough cash to run us through. Well I had both my debit cards and ample cash with so feeling confident we wal

You have a business plan ready with you and now is the time to choose a name for your business. One might think on why am I writing a blog post on choosing a name for the company. Choosing a name for your company is indeed not an easy job and is very important in building the foundation for your dream company. While choosing a name a lot of factors has to be considered. I have mentioned some of the important factors below. The name of the company should be relevant to the operations of the company. short and catchy and easy to remember. should reflect the culture of the company. not used by any other company. (will help you during the incorporation of your company) Entrepreneurs should have quite a few brain storming sessions before forming a company. Choosing the name is usually an art and can only be derived by trial and error. Also you need to consider that the domain name for the chosen company name is available. For eg.: You have chosen FoodPunch as yo