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Squid

I use linux very frequently these days. And I did not have a proxy server running on linux. Due to this no one could use the internet on the other PC. Today atlast all those problems have been put to an end. Thanks to squid!!

It is a real nice proxy server. I knew nothing about a proxy server or how to setup one. The online help for squid is good enough. If you plan to setup squid for your network, I would suggest that you take a look at these sites:
1. The Squid quick configuration guide that you get from the squid site itself
2. A short article on setting up squid.

Squid has several options. It is supposed to speedup your internet connection by caching data... but I have yet to explore that!

Gaim 2 can doodle :D

I recently downloaded gaim2. It comes with a lot of improvements. I really liked it. There is this feature in gaim "doodling", that lets two ppl draw an image. May come handy in some technical conversation... but I found it really entertaining. It can be fun to draw images... nice how two ppl can complete an image.

whiteboard7.jpg (image/jpeg) 84kb


This is the first time I am mailing images to my blog... wonder how it will display them. I would like to write about each of the image... but again I am not sure about where the comments would be put. May be I will just edit the post later.

I am alive

No, I am not dead... for all of you who thought that you had got rid of me; you are wrong! I had just been taking a long vacation. There are a lot of things to write about. A lot of thoughts.

I missed Christmas, missed New Year! But I celeberated those well. Hope you enjoyed a lot too. No new year resolutions on my blog. 2005 was great! It was fun, it rocked and roared. 2006 seems to have brought a lot of things for me to do. The main reason that there is so little on my blog.

But then I remembered, this is where I am documenting my life. If I am doing a lot of things, and don't write about them, a lot may get lost in time... Now you surely do not expect me to remember everything do you?!

That is why I am back to writing...

For all those who asked me if I stopped blogging... No, I will never do that. Sorry, that I kept you waiting all these days.

Earlier I would not write sometimes, cause there was nothing significant to write. And the last few days I did not, cause there was too much to write.

But I am back and you can expect a lot of new posts soon.

Sandy's new PC

Sandy got a new PC yesterday. An AMD athlon 3000+ machine, with 1GB of RAM(I would love to have RAM like that). And a 200GB harddrive... do you even need that much space? But then if the price differences are not too much, a little extra space has never hurt anyone!! If you want a more details about the config you can ask Sandy.  Then why am I so exicted about it? Cause Sandy and I assembled it ourselves!! Yes, totally from scratch.

All the hardware was picked up from lamington road by Dhruv, Sandy and me. I did very little over there infact. The dealers did a nice job of packing most of the components into the cabinet. I have no clue how good it is for the hardware... but that meant I would walk with the keyboard and mouse... while sandy hauled all the other stuff.

Most of the assembly was hassle free. accept that we were not sure how to insert the CDrom into the cabinet... and that lead me to taking off the entire front panel. It was really nice to see it run for the first time. The joy of creation to something like that is simple great!

The first time that I assembled a PC
A really nice memory!!!

eGovernance

The Governament of India has been playing about with the idea of eGovernance for some time now. I used to be a person who would laugh at the quality of government web-sites, and how stupidly useless they were. But things are changing. Both the user friendlyness of these sites as well as the services they offer are improving.

I recently came across this site Indian Government Portal, that links to many government sites. It has a good interface, and is useful. Infact more than any other site it was this one that has made me write this post. It has web directories, maps, greetings... its a long list. Yes, it does provide eGreetings too. I never expected to find that.

You can track the progress of various documents like passports. This recently helped me find how far the work on my mom's passport had progressed.

Want to find someone's phone number?
Need to find the address of someone and all you have is the phone number?
Check out this BSNL site. Now this works for Vasai, and many other town in Thane to the north of mumbai. To find numbers in mumbai, you will need to go to the MTNL site. I could not get this one to give me results.

Need to travel to some part of the city you are not familiar with? No problem! Take a look at this BEST site that will give you the buses, I mean bus numbers... and the route you need to take.

There are many such services available...and I see many more will some come up.

Vivas done at last!

I am feeling elated today! I might as well be in the 7th heaven... or floating on cloud nine. It feels that nice to be done with the vivas. What adds to this state of pure bliss is that, we have such a long PL(supposed to be preparation leave... for the exams), and the fact that our 5 exams are scheduled over a period from 29th november to 17th december, does not leave me in any mood to study. This PL is nothing short of a vacation. And I plan to enjoy myself just like it is a vacation. Atleast thats the plan for the next few days... lets see the way things go. And yes I do plan to blog...

I have to improve the template too... got a lot of suggestion about that... Most of you did not post your criticisms as comments, but that is perfectly alright. I will agree that keeping the sidebar hidden can confuse many. Will surely improve to design so that it is always visible.