Aug 12 2010
The story of my life or marriage or whatever…
I fell in love with a girl quite late in my life. Till then my love affairs have been strictly restricted to computers, games and gadgets.
Archive for the 'Blogging' Category
Jan 08 2010
My Apostille Woes and Shashi Tharoor…
My book was published this July and I got my first royalty statement soon after. My contract with Galileo Press was executed in the US and hence this required me to apply for a TIN to get the actual payment as well as claim tax exemption from the Indian Government. The process, it seemed, was simple, fill a couple of forms and mail it with a notarized copy of my passport duly apostilled by the Ministry of External Affairs.
And this is where it all began. A visit to the MEA office in Kolkata got me the response that since my passport was issued in Trichy (It was issued while I was still in college), I would need to visit the passport office there and get it verified (?). Somewhat perplexed, I landed up in Trichy Passport office who told me that I would need to visit the Chennai MEA office to get my passport apostilled. At a loss for what to do I called up the MEA office in Kolkata again seeking for help and the response that I received floored me. It was not under their “jurisdiction” to get my passport, which was issued in Trichy, apostilled. I would need to go to the New Delhi office instead. All attempts to argue over the fact that that my passport was a central government issued document and not a state government issued one and hence should be verifiable from anywhere in the country only yielded curt and irritated replies and this was where I almost gave up.
Jul 07 2009
Prawn Malai Curry – With a Twist…
Prawns have always been a favourite with both me and my wife, Haimanti. So here’s how to make Prawn Malai Curry, an east indian cuisine and an all time favourite of mine 
Ingredients
- 500 gms fresh Large Prawns, de-shelled and de-veined.
- One-Half Coconut
- Coconut Milk, 1/2 of a tea-cup.
- Three small Onions.
- Three Green Chillies
- One Tablespoon Garlic Paste
- One Tablespoon Mustard (The Twist
) - Three Tablespoons of Cooking Oil
- Turmeric Powder, Sugar and Salt (per taste)
Jun 08 2009
The Wincy Code
And more…
Robert LongDan sat brooding over the naked body that lay spread eagled on the floor. His brows furrowed as he fixed his gaze on the nether regions of the body. His eyes glazed and he looked up at the glittering sky through the glass ceiling of the Loo’vre.
A poke in his ribs snapped him out of his reverie. He stood up at looked around at the painted urinals of Loo’vre. Considered by many as being a work of art unto themselves, the Loo’vre complex was highly protected with a multi layered security arrangement, the last line of defence being “The O”. Nobody knew where it was and what it was supposed to do but people feared it nonetheless and the thieves avoided the complex at night.
Jun 08 2009
The Alienation…
And one more…
Scene – I
“So what is the least distance the fly must travel to reach from one vertex of the cube to the one exactly opposite to it ? Remember that the cube is hollow and the fly cannot fly !” – Bang ! It was like getting shot point-blank with a dum-dum bullet straight in the stomach where one has to endure endless pain without dying !!! What is the use of a fly that cannot fly, was the first question that came to my mind ! Do we still call it a fly ? In the meantime the guy taking my interview was still looking at me expectantly, as if I was the only hope the fly had to go from one vertex of the cube to another….
Pfffffffttt….. the lights went out….. in my head…. Somebody blew out the only candle that had been showing me the way all along….
I looked up at him and muttered something about the fly doing some amazing stunt and landing at the other vertex of the cube…. He wasn’t amused…. And I guess neither would have been the fly….
Jun 08 2009
To Err… is Human…
Another one dug out from the depths of the old blog….
Err… The baton has been passed. The colors of space have faded into the sunset.
From the depths of Core Dumps the Error has risen… The slanting beam of highlight from the sole Breakpoint that was hanging beside a loop cast an eerie shadow on his face beneath the veil of darkness. The face that stared at him held fear, desperation and dejection. Soon the news will spread far and wide. He-Who-Should-Not-Be-Named has risen, at last, out of the infinite loop.
Apr 30 2009
Lighttpd + PHP + MySQL + eAccelerator = WordPress on steroids
Introduction
I recently shifted my blog from Dreamhost to Mosso. Dreamhost was constantly throwing up out of memory errors for my blog and there was no quick way to detect why other than disabling all my plugins and enabling them one by one. That is one route I did not want to take. I was on the lookout for a VPS and was on the verge of settling on Slicehost when Craig suggested I give Mosso a go as it provided a better value for me with their pay as you go bandwidth and secondly it was owned by the same company that owns Slicehost, Rackspace. I finally settled for a 256MB/10GB CloudServer from Mosso.
Apr 14 2009
The Ground Beneath My Feet…
This is a post I wrote 3 years back when I was trying my hand at creative writing… It was lost in cyberspace until recently when I chanced upon it… Hope you like it…
For the uninitiated, 15th of August is the Indian Independence Day…
Dec 29 2008
Thou shalt not fight with your wife over ice-cream…
… And especially when Craig is around with his camera…
Well, this happened at BarCon08 in Bangalore, the night before SAP TechED. After a round of drinks and Dinner at the 13th Floor, I wanted to have ice-cream and thus dragged the gang, including Craig, to a famous ice-cream parlour (Corner House) on Residency Road, which was roughly round a Kilometer from the venue of BarCon, on foot.
Nov 02 2008
Yay ! My WP plugins in the official WP repository…
It just needed some prodding from Craig Cmehil (as always) and I’ve just uploaded two of my plugins to the official wordpress repository. This blog also serves to be a shout out to my friend Oliver Kohl whom I’ve been constantly pestering to upload his fantastic SDN Contibutor plugin to the official wordpress repository. It’s a damn good plugin and he should upload it to the plugin directory to let everyone use his piece of work.
The submission process is a breeze which starts with the filling of a submission form and waiting for your submission to get approved. Once it does, (it usually takes about a day), you get access to a subversion repository where you upload your plugin files and a readme.txt and you are done.
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