Seven Across

Something I wrote for SimpleHelp.net:

Have you ever forgotten your MySQL root password? It’s one of those things that just happens despite the numerous precautions one might take. As a result, you are locked out of your database server. You can’t create new databases and are left with little control over the state of your database server. In such situations knowing how to regain root access to your database server comes in handy. So here’s what you can do to reset the password for the root user in MySQL on both Windows and Linux. [click to continue...]

an article I wrote for SimpleHelp.net :

Apart from video games one of the great advantages of using computers is that they don’t seem to mind doing boring and repetitive tasks that we would rather not do. For monotonous tasks such as running daily backups we are better off scheduling them to run at a certain time every day, and do more interesting stuff with our time. Linux and UNIX usually come with the utility “crontab” by default. This very useful command allows you to schedule tasks to run at a specified time and repeat as configured. A task scheduled using “crontab” is called a “cron job”.

Another article I wrote for SimpleHelp.net. An excerpt:

“A stitch in time saves nine”, goes an old saying. In the world of computers we refer to that stitch as backups. When running a production IT infrastructure, it is imperative that we achieve an uptime on our servers and applications of as close to a hundred percent as possible. While there are a number of ways to make an IT infrastructure solid, it is impossible to make it failure proof. So we make a plan B.

For the Mac users out there, here’s a cool application I recently discovered - stattoo, by Panic Software. It’s a rather simple app that adds mini apps to your desktop to show interesting information (i.e. weather, latest email, upcoming appointments, etc). It’s a little faster than using the Dashboard, looks wonderful, and unobtrusive enough not to interfere with other things you’re doing.

Nov08 music

This November is a pretty big month in terms of music history as we finally see the release of the almost mythical Guns n Roses album, Chinese Democracy. Its also a big month in Hip Hop with Kanye releasing 808s and Heartbreak and Q-Tip making a much welcome comeback with The Renaissance. This month also sees a big release from former Audioslave lead singer, Chris Cornell with the Timbaland-produced, Scream. Other notable releases this month include The Killers Day & Age, Shiny Toy Guns Season of Poison, and Travis’s Ode to J. Smith.

Here’s an article I recently wrote for SimpleHelp.net:

“If you have a Linux server running at your office or at a data center for which you are responsible, you want to maintain an uptime of as close to a hundred percent. In such a case you want to make sure you keep an eye on how the system is running. To be precise you want to monitor all the system resources that contribute to the system running fine which then results in a high uptime. Memory, CPU, disk usage… are some of the things you want to observe. We would usually use a combination of the tools that come with a Linux or UNIX installation, such as “free”, “top”, “vmstat”… I’ll introduce you to a tool that gives you just about all the info that the other tools combined give you, all under one roof – Dstat. The developer of this command line tool, Dag Wieers, calls it “a versatile replacement for vmstat, iostat, netstat and ifstat”. He adds that “Dstat overcomes some of their limitations and adds some extra features…” To me Dstat is the mother of all command line system monitoring tools. It’s simple to install, easy to use, can be tweaked with ease, and it generates reports that you can plot as a graph to impress your boss.”

Read the complete article here.

The Economic Times printed a piece in today’s papers about AskLaila’s partnership with Airtel for local search services on mobile phones, SMS, WAP, and DTH. Here is an excerpt from the the press release:

asklaila, India’s first local information service, today announced a strategic partnership with India’s largest private telecom service provider, Airtel, to power all of its city search services. The partnership enables Airtel customers to get up-to-date information about their city, free of cost, through asklaila’s extensive city information database. The asklaila-powered ‘Airtel City Search’ will reach more than 30 million users across the six cities where asklaila is available, including Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Bangalore.

Airtel is the first telecom company in the world to deploy a multi-mode, multi-platform local search service; the service is available across 3 screens – the mobile (Airtel’s mobile service), the PC (Airtel’s broadband service) and TV (Airtel DTH); and within the mobile service, across 4 modes – SMS, USSD, Airtel Live and WAP.

Airtel’s dominance in the mobile market is of special significance in this deployment since local search is a natural application on the mobile platform besides communication and entertainment. The search service will be supported by targeted, relevant advertising, based on the users’ intent identified through the search query. Sanjay Gupta, Chief Marketing Officer, Mobile Services, Bharti Airtel added, “It is Airtel and asklaila’s joint belief that a non-intrusive, intent-driven advertising model, with the consumer in mind, is the way forward on the mobile platform. This partnership has the potential to revolutionize the market dynamics in mobile advertising.”

Kiran Konduri, co-founder, asklaila said, “We have seen tremendous growth in the usage of our service and having telecom leader Airtel as our partner will help us reach many more users, besides giving a significant fillip to mobile advertising and the use of mobile devices to search for city information.”

The multi-mode mobile version of Airtel city search, powered by asklaila, effectively addresses two major challenges –providing accurate, credible and actionable local information; and ground-up mobile-specific enhancements to leverage the advantage of multiple mobile modes. This partnership will enable users’ to access the service from any device starting from an entry level Rs. 2K handset to a high-end, feature rich Rs. 40K+ smart phone. The user experience is designed to be consistent and simple across all 4 modes, giving the user freedom to select an appropriate mode based on need and context.

asklaila’s service will be tightly integrated with key Airtel mobile modes such as:

·         SMS: Airtel users can text the keyword to get accurate city information. For example, ‘locate pizza gurgaon’ and SMS it to 54321 to get relevant local information free of cost.

·         USSD: USSD is a faster channel than the text-messaging platform and GPRS. This is an instant messaging type phone service and can be used in even basic phone models. The USSD portal can be accessed by dialing *321# and Airtel City Search can be directly accessed by dialing *321*99#

·         Airtel Live: Airtel City Search is integrated on deck on Airtel Live and is available under services for you.

·         WAP: The service can also be accessed by any GPRS enabled phone from any operator at www.airtelcitysearch.com

Asklaila – Airtel City Search features an industry-first built for mobile search technology that takes the onus of understanding what users mean and providing relevant local information, instead of guiding them to enter keywords in specific ways.

·         proximity search – Results include not only the searched-for locality but also the locality nearby.

·         syntax-free search option – ‘Haircut Lajpat Nagar’ and ‘Lajpat Nagar Haircut’ will give the same results

·         support for Indian SMS lexicon (ex. nr – Near, Nxt – Next, CCD – Café Coffee Day)

·         address compression that enables users to see more results in less SMSs

·         understands locality short forms (GK – Greater Kailash)

·         enables users to choose the level of details they want to see

·         landmark information that provides last mile locators 

·         allows attribute-tagged search like ‘24 hours pharmacy’, ‘Roof top restaurant’

·         Hyperlinks to help navigate quicker within result sets

I recently ran into this post about Touchtype, a pretty nifty little application for the iPhone that allows users to use a landscape keyboard instead of the portrait one.

The default keyboard only switches into landscape mode for the web browser. This utility can’t quite add that facility to other apps, but it creates a separate application into which you can enter larger quantities of text and then tap a button to fire them into the main mail program. If you rotate your phone and then put it down on the desk, you can just about type with two fingers. It would be so much cooler if this were integrated into the iPhone interface and be available directly from all applications.