Raam Dev

Hello, future.

Blue Skies

I was awoken this morning by a phone call from one of my tenants. There was a gas leak at one of my rental units; everything is OK and the problem is fixed. When they came to turn on the gas for the new tenants on the second floor, the stupid gas company didn't tighten the pipes connecting the gas meter to the main gas line. It was leaking out so badly that I could hear the gas hissing out! Idiots.

The weather is awesome this morning. Blue skies, 70 degrees, sunny. It cleared up yesterday around 6pm. There were some amazing cloud formations in the sky but my camera was out of battery and I can't seem to find the charger, so I wasn't able to take any more pictures. It was a strange feeling, seeing the sun again. It felt as if I'd been living in a cave for months and forgotten what the sun looked and felt like! I checked the weather this morning and today is the only day of the week there's going to be any sun. : (

I worked out last night, for the second time in 2 1/2 weeks. I did some lifting and ran 1.5 miles. I finally feel as if the sickness is gone. No more head aches or nausea. Stomach still feels a little upset, but I think that's because I haven't been eating enough.

Brief Synergy Review

I have three LCD monitor's on my desk. It was getting pretty crowded having two keyboards and two mice on my desk. So I downloaded and installed Synergy and I must say, it’s the coolest piece of software I've used in a long time. It allows me to use a single keyboard and mouse to control multiple computers on multiple monitors! So lets say I want to move my mouse from the screen in the middle, so the screen on the right. I just move my mouse to the right edge of the middle screen and suddenly the mouse starts moving on the left edge of the right screen! It also carries over anything I copy to my clipboard! Incredible!

It's all controlled via TCP/IP, so as long as the computers are on the same network, it will work. I have a Windows PC in the middle and my MacMini on the right. Synergy works on multiple platforms, including Windows, MacOSX, and of course Linux, to mention a few. It was incredibly easy to setup. The monitor on the left isn't on yet, but I'll be hooking it up to my Linux computer.

Yes, I'm a geek.

2006 Lowell Flood

The first couple of pictures were taken yesterday. You can see the same area today (with the big yellow arrow) has been flooded with water, and the road closed off. From what I heard, this isn't even the worst of it. Those houses under water are less than 1/2 a mile from my house. The Department of Water said they might shut the water off in the city today, and they said to be careful of possible sewerage leaking into the water supply. It's amazing how much is out of our control when it comes to Mother Nature.


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The never ending rain – State of Emergency declared

Watching the local news on TV this morning, I learn that the governor of Massachusetts has declared a state of emergency due to the seemingly endless amounts of rain we've been receiving. The places most at risk of flooding? Northern Massachusetts and Southern New Hampshire. Where do I live? On the border of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Then I hear them listing the places that have already started flooding: rivers, streets, and basements... wait, I'm living in a basement! Haha (not really), let's hope my foundation holds and no water leaks through!

Every time I hear the sound of dripping water, I look around to see if it's water dripping inside, or if its just the sound of the rain outside. I guess it does help that I am on a very slight hill, and most of the water from the streets flows down towards the Merrimack river. However, in the past I've had a few mystery problems with water leaking through my basement in times of heavy rain. Nothing yet though, and it's been raining heavy for days.

A smelly morning

I woke up this morning and for some strange reason, decided to brush my teeth before I took a shower (usually I head straight to the shower). That's when I noticed the silent hum of pump in the Qwik Jon System I use in my basement to overcome the problem of pumping waste from my shower, toilet, and bathroom/kitchen sinks up 3 feet into the main sewer drain. You may have read about the installation of it on my basement project pages.

Well anyhow, I hear the hum of the pump. It sounds as if it's about to turn on, but for some reason is stuck. When I've heard it in the past, I always assumed that the level of waste inside the tank was at just the right level to cause the pump to not know if it should turn on or off. So I turn on the kitchen sink for a few seconds to allow the level in the tank to rise, and boom, the pump turns on and flushes out the waste. No more humming.

Well this time, I turned on the bathroom sink. 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds. It's still humming. Being as stubborn as I am, I continued to try and fill the tank, hoping the pump would finally turn on. I even flushed the toilet (empties a few gallons of water into the tank). The toilet flushed. Still the pump was humming. So I tried flushing the toilet again. Bad idea. The toilet didn't flush properly because the level of the waste inside the tank was so high that there wasn't enough room for more water. The waste water started to leak out through the rings where the toilet attaches to the tank. My worse fear had come true.

It was smelly waste water. I scrambled through my tools looking for something to cut the freshly painted closet wall open to gain access to the pump. I found a sheetrock saw and used that. Then I searched for a flash light. I realized it was outside in the shed, so I grabbed my camping headlamp and used that instead. After frantically cutting the wall open, I paused. What was I going to do now? The tank is secured closed with 16 bolts, some of which are in very hard to reach areas. I decided to try shaking the 2" up flush pipe in hopes that I would get the pump to realize it needs to turn on and flush the damn tank out. It worked.

After cleaning up all the smelly waste water that had leaked out of the tank (and trying to keep Debian out of the bathroom at the same time), I needed to conduct a test. Fill the tank up again and see if the pump turns on. As I sat there with the bathroom sink running and the toilet flushing, I realized I won't be able to take a shower in peace until this problem is fixed. I'm always going to be worried that the pump isn't flushing (I can barely hear the pump flushing when I'm in the shower, unless I listen carefully).

The tank filled up, and flushed as it should. I did the test a second time, and once again, it flushed without a problem. So I took a shower, and listened very carefully to make sure the pump flushed. It did. In a 5 minute shower, the pump flushes twice. I guess from now on I’ll have to take a 5 minute shower and listen carefully for the pump flushing. Or I can open up the tank, deal with the extreme smells of waste water, put some gloves on, and reset the pump so it flushes sooner than it does now. Even then, I’m not positive that will fix the problem. I think I'll wait awhile and see if the problem gets worse.

Ah the joys of owning your own house. 🙂

Don't use Wireless-G!

First a short history of wireless technologies:

The wireless technology standard is known as 802.11 with different versions appending a letter to the standard. The first version that became popular, and is still the most widely used standard, is known as 802.11b. It allows wireless transfer rates at 11Mbps. Common wired Ethernet networks (such as a home or office network) use CAT5 cables, which allow transmission speeds of 100Mbps (also known as Fast Ethernet). The next obvious step for wireless technology was to obtain faster speed. So 802.11a was born. It allowed transmission of speeds up to 54Mbps. Great. But the only problem was, it wasn't compatible with 802.11b! So all those wireless cards everyone owned, including the ones built into laptops, wouldn’t work with networks using 802.11a. That's the reason 802.11a never really caught on. Then 802.11g was developed. It allowed for transmission speeds of up to 54Mbps, but it was also compatible with 802.11b! Wireless networks that ran 802.11g hardware would still allow users with the older, and slower, 802.11b network cards to access the wireless network. Everyone was happy.

Now here is where my ranting comes in:

First of all, broadband connections (DSL and Cable Modem) installed in your home or office never reach even close to 11Mbps speeds! So if you have a Wireless-G router and a Wireless-G network card in your laptop, your access to the internet will be exactly the same as it would with Wireless-B! The bottleneck lies in your connection to the internet, not your wireless hardware! So what's Wireless-G good for? Well, let’s say you want to transfer files from your wireless laptop to your PC in the next room. In this case, there is no bottleneck. Wireless-G will allow for MUCH faster transfer speeds because the maximum speed on your home network is probably 100Mbps. Using an 11Mbps Wireless-B network connection to transfer files over a 100Mbps wired connection (home/office network) would obviously slow you down quite a bit. But how often do you transfer files between your laptop and your PC? And how often are those files really big? When I need to transfer really big files, I just connect my laptop to my wired network, which gives me full 100Mbps speeds.

OK, by now you might be wondering what the big deal is and why I'm so much against Wireless-G. Let me explain: All of the new wireless routers sold today allow you to put the router in one of three different modes. Wireless B, Wireless G, and Mixed. The latter, as you may have guessed, allows network cards of both types (Wireless-B and Wireless-G) to access the wireless network. It doesn't discriminate. If you choose Wireless-G, then only Wireless-G connections will be allowed. The same goes for Wireless-B. Choosing the Mixed mode however, can cause problems. Why? Because the router has to figure out which mode you're using to connect. If it's wrong, or if it gets confused, you can suddenly be dropped from the network for no apparent reason.

I have seen this behavior on both Windows and Linux platforms, with a wide range of network cards. What a headache! And for what? Extra speed that rarely gets used? Now you might see why I strongly suggest changing your wireless router's mode to Wireless-B. That way, it has the most compatibility with wireless cards and is least likely to drop users from the network. It also means fewer things to worry about if you're already having issues getting your wireless network to work properly.

My Text Editor of Choice

First a little history:

I first started programming using the MS-DOS Edit program while programming QBasic (I know, I should have learned C first, and I regret it!). Edit was the first text editor I ever used.

When I started writing HTML web pages, I used Microsoft's Notepad. It wasn't until many years later that WYSIWYG editors came out and made creating HTML pages as simple as writing a letter in Microsoft Word. I learned to use Macromedia's Dreamweaver when I started to manage hundreds of separate HTML files (Microsoft's FrontPage is crap!). A WYSIWYG editor is a godsend if you have lots of tables to work with. However, I've learned to use CSS styling in place of tables, so that doesn't even apply to me. Continue reading →

Apartment Finally Rented

Well, the three bedroom apartment I've been trying to rent on Bowers ST for the past few months has finally been rented. I put an ad in the Lowell Sun and had it run for two weeks. Since then, I've received at least 40 calls inquiring about it, but now that it's rented, I can't wait until the ad expires! I'm lucky to have a good tenant on the first floor who did the majority of the repair work in return for a decrease in his rent. Of course I still had to pay for, and buy, all the materials required. I also rented the rug cleaner. Total spent on repairs including $300 rental reduction: ~$1500.

Today I had to fix an issue with the kitchen sink drain in the unit. The problem: it wouldn't drain. The tenant doing the work said he poured a whole bottle of the drain clearing gel, but that it didn't work. So, I went in with my snake (a machine used to clear drains, resembles a snake) and even that wouldn't go down the drain more than 8 inches. So after poking and prodding for a good 20 minutes, I finally got something out: a spoon. No joke, it was a spoon. I turned on the water hoping the drain was clear, but it drained very slowly. There was tons of rotted crap in the drain. Sticky, smelly, moldy crap. I was wearing gloves, but I soon learned that they would need to come off. I eventually pulled apart the pipes underneath the sink and discovered a total of six spoons and forks stuck inside the drain. Who in their right mind sticks that many spoons and forks down a kitchen drain? Brainless idiots.

So anyway, all that's left to do are a few minor things, which I'm going to do tomorrow morning before I go into Cambridge. The new tenants came by tonight, signed the rental agreement, and gave me the deposit.

I started my workout routine again today. I took a week off to allow my body to recover from a lingering illness. It seems to have passed now, so I'm back on track with my workouts. I seem to have sprained or pulled a muscle in my hand. I feel a sharp pain when I move it a particular way. I've had it happen before, and icing is usually the best remedy, however I have no ice pack.

Overwhelming Organizing

Don’t let things get to the stage where you need to catch up. The more behind you fall, the less likely you are to have the motivation to catch up. After that, things just snowball. That’s what happen with my bills. I have a habit of keeping everything organized in Quicken, and I’m very religious about it. Down to the penny religious. Everything is categorized so I know exactly where my money is going. I keep things reconciled on a monthly, sometimes even weekly, basis. OK, so that’s what I had been doing.

During the last few months of last year, I spent endless days working on building my shed and basement. During that time, I decided to let the organization and reconciling slip. I told myself I’d catch up in January. Well now it’s May and I have 6 months of reconciling and catching up to do. It’s overwhelming because I have so many different things going on; 4 credit cards, 2 bank accounts, 2 savings accounts, 1 brokerage account, 2 life insurance policies, 3 houses (bills), 10 tenants (invoices), a web hosting business with 18 clients (invoices), and 5 consulting clients (invoices) that I need to bill on a regular basis.

As you can see, things can get out of hand pretty quickly. Once everything is caught up with, it takes maybe 20 – 30 minutes a day to keep things organized and running smoothly. On the other hand, since I let things fall so far behind, it’s going to take me days to get things organized again.

Learn my lesson: stay organized and don’t let things fall far behind. If you are falling behind, keep in mind, the sooner you start, the less work you’ll have later. This applies to many things. Keeping up with your workout schedule/diet, and saving money come to mind.

HOWTO: Email Forwarding with Procmail using formail

Introduction
This was something I needed to do for Aerva and I spent quite awhile on it; a lot longer than I expected. I searched the web a million times looking for solutions and trying to get everything working properly. I decided to create this HOWTO in hopes that someone in the same situation won't have as much trouble.

Problem / Scenario
Reports from several computers are emailed to a single email address. Depending on which computer the report was sent from, I need to forward a copy of that email to a specific email address (the admin for that computer). The server receiving the email uses QMail as an MTA. I added the following line to the .qmail file for the email account (usually located in /var/qmail/mailnames/*domain*/*email-acct*/) to pass all incoming email along to procmail using the specified procmail config file: Continue reading →

Speaking of backups…

Wow, that was close. I checked my blog this morning and for some reason everything after the "Continued..." link on my last post, The melody of life, was gone! I mean, it wasn't even in the database! I thought maybe it had something to do with the quotes in the comments for that post, but I tried creating a test post and posting comments with quotes, and nothing happen!

Hmm... that was scary. I thought I had totally lost the entire post. I usually don't save copies of my posts anywhere else, so I panicked when even the database lost the post information. I tried downloading a backup of the database, but that only generated a backup for the current database content, which did not include the entire missing post!

My next thought was to see if I could some how get a cached version of the post from my browser. As I Googled for Firefox's cache location, I prayed that I did not turn off caching on my browser. I browsed to the following directory:

C:Documents and Settings*your username*Local SettingsApplication DataMozillaFirefoxProfiles*your profile*Cache

I then sorted all the files by date. I knew I had looked at that post yesterday, so I scrolled to all the files for yesterday's date. I then opened Notepad (actually, I used gVIM, but Notepad works) and dragged each file into Notepad looking for the page that contained that post. Finally I found it, copied it to my Desktop, added a .htm extension, opened the file in Dreamweaver, and then copied the entire post from that file and recreated the post on my blog.

In that post I spoke about how I always backup my MP3s. Well, now I'm going to always backup my blog database! I think I'll write a cron job to email a daily gzip backup of the database to myself every night.

EDIT: I just realized that I keep an RSS feed of all my posts in my email client (Thunderbird), so I could have just opened the RSS article for the post that was messed up and I would have had the entire contents of the post. I guess those RSS feeds really are useful!

The melody of life

I have had music in my life for as long as I can remember. My entire life, even before I was born, I have been surrounded by music. My dad is a musician (even though he'd probably argue otherwise), and he used to play the flute while I was still in my mothers womb. I would listen to music going to sleep, while driving in my dad's car, everywhere. When I was young, my parents forbid me to listen to "American" music because they did not agree with things in the lyrics. They worried I would be influenced in a negative way by the music. They allowed me to listen to anything instrumental, as well as most music in any language I (or they) did not understand.

My mom would generally listen to classical music in the car and in the retail stores she owned while I was growing up. My dad usually listened to some form of Indian music (that's India Indian, not Native American Indian, a distinction I feel I must always make clear). I remember when I was about 13 or 14 years old, I bought (or was probably given, I can't recall) my own cassette player (yes, I had one of those). I bought Indian music tapes, and then Native American Indian tapes, and Inca music with pan flutes (my favorite). Continue reading →

Crackling sound in my ears

For the past few days I've noticed a crackling sound in my left ear. It isn't constant. It comes and goes. I tried Googling about it while I was at a client's site today waiting for Service Pack 2 to finish installing. I searched for "crackling sound in my ear" and the results turned up references to different semi-serious disorders. Hmm, I was starting to worry. My ear has slowly started to ache more and more all day.

Tonight I decided to Google it again, but this time, entirely by accident, I left out one word, "my". This time the results looked better and the very first link told me everything I needed. It also explained the extreme pain I have experienced in the past while flying. Sometimes when I fall asleep on the plane, I wake up with the worst head ache in the world. It felt like a big needle going right through the middle of my head.

Ah, killed two questions with one Google query! : )

Midnight Crisis

Well I awoke last night to the sound of someone pounding on my door. I rarely awake to such noises, so I was a bit surprised. I paused and listened. Yup, it was someone banging on my door for sure. I jumped out of bed, ran to the door, and asked who it was. It was Thea, and he said the fire alarm went off at the factory. I panicked for a moment and asked if everything was alright. He said it was and that he needs me to come to the factory to shut off the alarm and make sure everything is OK. So I did.

By the time I arrived at the factory, it was already 2:30am. After checking everywhere in the factory with my flashlight, I confirmed there was no fire. One room, above the furnace room, smelled weird, like cereal (?), but I checked above the ceiling tiles, in the furnace room, and everywhere around it. Everything looked OK. I turned off the furnace just to be safe.

Well, thats one way to start the week.

Weekend Activities

Today I went mountain biking in the Lowell-Dracut-Tyngsboro State Forest. It's amazing how far away from everything you can feel when you're there. It's barely 10 minutes from my house and yet I feel as if I'm in the middle of the white mountains. There's over 1,000 acres of national forest 10 minutes from my house!

It was really nice outside today, around 70 degrees. I needed to do 30 minutes of steady-state cardio and I really didn't want to run like usual, so the biking was a great change. When I decided to stop and stare out into one of the swamps I saw a bullfrog peek his head out of the water. It was so peaceful and calm. Then all of a sudden a huge crane took off from the middle of the swamp. It must have had at least a 7 ft wing span! Then another crane! The two of them flew around for a few minutes. It was incredible. I only wish I had my camera with me. I've been trying to figure out exactly what kind of crane it was, but surprisingly, it's been difficult. I'll have to remember to look at a bird book next time I'm in Barns and Noble.

I've decided to go camping every other weekend this year. I'd like to say "rain or shine", but I don't know if that will happen. If I go when it's raining, I can at least spend tons of time programming and working on the projects that seem to be taking forever. You're probably thinking "What's camping if you're using a computer!?". Well, some people like to read at night. Some people like to drink beer and smoke around the fire. Some like to tell stories. After enjoying the fire, and drinking lots of coffee, I like to use my laptop. It's an odd combination, but I find when I'm in the middle of no where, with nothing but nature around me, programming can be so peaceful.

Bowers Street Insurance Claim From Hell

Following is a letter I wrote and mailed to the Massachusetts Insurance Complaint Department. It's a chronological account of the events that occurred between January 24th and February 3rd, 2005. The end result? I received a letter 13 months later (this March) stating that I wasn't covered, so I was responsible for paying all $16,000 worth of bills. I learned my lesson: read your insurance policies and know what’s covered. And what isn't. Trust no one, unless it's in writing. Continue reading →

Review: Belkin Wireless PDA Keyboard

I wrote this review awhile ago, when I was trying several differnet PDA's and attempting to choose between a PDA and a smart phone. I finally decided on a smart phone (a Blackberry 7520 from Nextel (now Sprint)). The Blackberry is awesome. Now that I think of it, maybe I'll get around to writing a review for it. Anyway, enjoy the review. Continue reading →

StatHound.com bug gives away free stats

I discovered a bug in StatHound that allows you to get full featured access for any domain on your account, so long as you're paying for at least one domain. How? I’ll explain in a moment, but first, a little about StatHound.

I use StatHound.com to monitor this, and several other websites. It's an awesome tool, with ton's of useful information. Beautiful graphs to see exactly how many visitors have visited your site (both regular and unique hits), entry pages, IP addresses, Time Zones of the visitors, and even their screen resolutions and type of browser they're using! There is a tiny snippet of code that needs to be placed on the entry page to your site. This snippet of code sends information to StatHound about the person visiting your site, which is then stored in a database. Continue reading →

A new record

I woke up early, drove to my parents house to get something for my sister, drove back to Lowell, dropped off the thing at the factory (the nickname for the building my family's business runs out of), gave Sid a laptop and Cisco console cable to complete a work order, and then rushed to catch the 10:07 train only to find out they changed the departure time to 10:15.

In Boston, I had to meet one of my consulting clients (who's also located on Massachusetts Ave, a 10 minute walk from Porter Square, two subway stops from my usual stop in Central Square). I had never got off that stop before and I was amazed at the 100+ steps to get to street level. As drones of people opted for the escalator ride to the top, I didn’t think twice about taking the stairs. I still beat everyone to the top!

I came home on the 6:25 train, by 7:45 I was running on the treadmill at the factory. I set a new record for myself. 12 minutes, 1.5 miles. That's an 8 minute mile! After doing a bunch of abdominal workouts, I ran for a total of 16 minutes, totaling 2 miles.

April 1st: 171 LBS, 17.5% body fat.
April 25th: 169.5 LBS, 13.5 % body fat!

That means I lost 7 LBS of fat and packed on 5.5 LBS of muscle in 25 days! Woohoo!

I have been extremely consistent with my workouts and my diet. I am going to continue being as consistent so I can finally achieve those washboard abs and be in the best physical condition of my life (and maintain that condition for the rest of my life!). : )

Gas, damnit

I've been trying to avoid blogging about the rising gas prices because I don't like to complain. So gas prices rise and fall, big deal. Well now it really is becoming a big deal. I drive approximately 1500 miles a month (I don't know how, but that's how many it actually works out to!).

Gas is around $2.90 a gallon for regular unleaded right now.

The truck I drive (1999 Chevy Silverado 1500) gets about 12 MPG on average.

My gas tank holds 32 gallons of fuel, however I usually fill it up when it's on the red empty line. That works out to about 28 gallons of fuel each time I fill it up.

$2.90 * 28 = $81 to fill up my truck

28 * 12 MPG = 336 miles I can travel per tank of gas

1500 / 336 = 4 times per month I need to fill my tank

4 * $81 = $324 is how much I spend on gas every month

$324! That's a whole car payment! I can see why hybrid cars that get 50 MPG are sold out for the next 6 - 8 months!