Place de la Concorde

After a long time I was able to capture the fountain of Place de la Concorde in a very beautiful sunny morning. It is so amazing that we still take pictures of Paris like tourist on their first day. When we left home it was cloudy and we were questioning ourselves why we are carrying the camera with us. But luckily it was worth to do so. Then from there we took a small promenade at the garden of Elysee.

While walking in 5th arrondissement we saw preparation for a big renovation is going on at Madame Curie University (Jussieu) as they used asbestos as insulator, But with high risk of cancer now government is trying to get rid of the same. It has unique architectural plan which resembles as a molecular matrix where each column is numbered. Looking at the same you can like it or hate it there can not be any middle opinion about the same.

Tibx Shoe Laces

Yes these are my dirty shoes. Not very sure about the origin of those shoe laces, I got them when my old office was getting closed. Missing the TIBX bus and shares I got those laces :( (People got nice race cars and big houses in Bay Area a dream come true in this materialistic world and what I got for boarding the train late. Well I have another pair of these laces…..

Unless any big shoot TIBX one day decide to run a charity marathon with these laces on his gizmo running shoes there is no real value to the other pair of laces I have. Any one out there …. You know I am sure it will not cost much.

Migrating rrd database between different architecture

This script you run on the source host from the same directory where all those rrd files are there. I found this very helpful while migrating between Linux and Solaris.

#/bin/csh

set all_files=`echo *.rrd`
echo $all_files
foreach file ( $all_files )
set base = `basename $file .rrd`
/bin/rrdtool dump $file > /tmp/new1/$base.xml
end

The do a `tar` with `gzip` as that will save lots of space and time while transferring data between machines.

And on the destination machine you uncompress and untar the file to an empty directory.

#/bin/csh

set all_files=`echo *.xml`
echo $all_files
foreach file ($all_files)
set base = `basename $file .xml`
/opt/local/bin/rrdtool restore $file /opt/local/htdocs/cacti/rra/$base.rrd
end

Hope this helps.

French class

After all these months, I prefer not to use years yet :) I started formal French class. I am not sure how it will end up as it keeps me reminding about my Spanish class which I dropped out after 2 months. But for those 2 months I went on time to Foothill community college every morning at 8AM. It was different as medium of instruction was English now everything is French. It is not difficult to understand what the teacher is saying but it is very hard to form a full sentence correctly in french.

I applied for beginner (level I) but after writing the test last week I found myself at level II yesterday evening. This must be due to my wife who made sure I do well in this test. May be I should not have answered so much as a beginner but I did not want to miss this chance as this class starts twice a year only. I would like to thank Daniel (my office teacher) as well. May be I could have learned better at first place paying more attention to him and secondly if those (office) classes were at regular interval.

I have to admit the class looks good with the dynamic and hard working teacher. She looks like going to make sure her students learn to speak and write proper French. The most of the students are from Asian origins female who are working as house maid in Paris.

Well I need to memorize a list of verbs and their conjugation now for tomorrow’s test.

Gallery2

Well I am having lots of trouble with a simple gallery2 installation with 15 pictures for my wife's hobby pictures. While I am running a 1600 picture gallery on the same server with out any problem touch wood. The back on the main one not there.

And i am having wonderful tech support from dot5 hosting to say the least. The guy does not even know what is Unix he replies it is FreeBSD.

A quick a dirty way to get around. Let's name the site as www.mysite.com Here the user name for your web server is not same as your account. So when you create a file ftp you see the owner/group as "joe/joe" and when web server creates it it is "web/web".

Connect via ftp create a gallery2 directory ; chmod 777 the same on the Top most Document root.
put this file in the same directory "gallery-2.0-full.tar.gz" make sure binary more
also FTP this php file foobar.php with these lines in it

<?
system ("tar -zxvf gallery-2.0-full.tar.gz") ;
?>

Now connect to this foobar.php via a web browser.

Follow the instruction from gallery2 installation when you point your browser to this location

http://www.mysite.com/gallery2/

Need to create the g2data directory and chmod 777 via ftp again .

to finish the same Gallery will ask you chmod 755 gallery2 directory.

Running Paris Versailles

Almost after one and half year I was running in any event. The weather was very grey but it was very pleasant for running. Temperature was around 16 degree Celsius. The race was 17KM long starting from bottom of Eiffel Tower to Château de Versailles.

For the first time, Pamela accompanied me to the starting point of the course so as to take a photo of mine with Eiffel Tower. The first part of the run was along River Seine and then it goes to Forest of Meudon; this was the most crucial part as it has a steep climb (approx.2kms).

Well, the water stops were quite nicely spaced and I did not felt like a trash any time during the whole course. There were around seventeen thousands people in total but at a time only 350 runners departs so when I started it was almost 30 minutes after the first group started.Anyway, the route was quite scenic as the main part was bit away from the city in the forest & I finished by 1h 29mn 59s which is not that bad :D

New look to web site

Migrated to Wordpress along with Gallery2, the choice for the same was not easy. As for a long time Mambo and custom home grown Photo Album was doing the job fine. In fact the template I used for the same was appreciated by friends. But as days passed and numbers of pictures are growing it was getting difficult to manage the same with custom gallery. But the idea to grab Wordpress and dropping Mambo is a personal one. I will not compare the two. The fact is they two are different and just I felt like blog software will be a better choice for a personal website compared to a CMS

Well there is lots of lots work left to organize the pictures now after this migration as there was no tool or script that I could use to automate the same :(  Hope to finish this by end of September.

banner with imagemgick convert

To create a banner with mirror effect!!

convert -size 600x130 xc:transparent -font forte -pointsize 72 -fill "#cccccc" -annotate 0x180+12+80 "Pamela's Gallery" -gaussian 0x2 -stroke black -strokewidth 1 -fill "#ff3600" -stroke black -strokewidth 1 -annotate 0x0+12+55 "Pamela's Gallery" -draw "line 0,68 570,68" banner.png

ssh and scp

Via tunnel

scp -P 2222 font_slewed.gif santm@localhost:/tmp/banner.gif
ssh -p 2222 santm@localhost

nomally :

[How To] Puttygen Puttssh for ssh

1. Run PuttyKeyGen
1.a Make sure you choose SSH2DSA at the bottom
1.b Click on Generate
1.c Move Mouse as mentioned.

2. Once the key is generated
2.a Put proper comment for Key username and hostname
2.b Type your Password please try to choose a proper password i.e. with number, special character, upper case hard to guess
2.c Save the public and private key I saved in
C:\Documents and Settings\santanu.misra

3. Now add pageant.exe to your startup programs as shortcut.

4. In the property box modify these
4.a In “Target” Box add the Private-key file name
4.b In “Start in’’ Box put the directory where you stored the public key ; look at step 2.c
4.c Make “Run” to minimized

5. Right click on pageant and you will see there is an option for adding the key.
5.a Choose your private key file that was generated with “PuttyKeyGen” and it will ask for the “Passphrase” enter the password you entered in step 2.b
5.b You can see your key with “view key” option. There is a option to delete your key as well.

6. Now we need to configure putty to work with our public and private key. The screen shoots are quite self explanatory.

How ever I did modified “ScrollbackLines” for putty with regedit as I like to have more scroll back line; default is only 200. The ket is located in
MyComputer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuttY\Sessions\Default%20Settings
For quick access to known servers you can do this to automate login via (ssh)
ssh-add -L >> .ssh/authorized_keys

Back to Work

When I was on my vacation last week in Spain and Portugal, was thinking about to write down all that we had experienced there - the places we visted and food we tasted and others. But back to work it is such a Dilbert place that I can not explain with my logic.

Also I need to find a cheap solution to restore pictures from Smart Media. It looks like there is a well suited option commercial for 40 Euros. But I am still looking around for a free one if I can as I am not going to use the same again.

Stay tuned for experiences from Madrid, Granada, Seville and Lisbon.