As you all know, recently I moved to SliceHost and these are some statistics about my site.
First is the response time graph from Site24x7, an excellent service to monitor your site’s uptime and response time.
Second is the graph from Google’s Webmaster tool, which shows the number of KB’s of data downloaded per day from my blog.
I have just 2 words to say – THANKYOU SLICEHOST
By the way I have also upgraded to a 512MB Slice 😉
Posted in Random/Personal Tagged Site24x7, slicehost, Web Hosting 2 Comments
During my days with dreamhost, in order to access MySQL from my local machine, I used to add my ip to the allowed host list. Even though security is compromised here, I really liked to use HeidiSQL for accessing MySQL database server instead of the built in MySQL console. But after my move to SliceHost, I found a little trick using which I can continue to use HeidiSQL from my local machine without adding my ip to the allowed host list.
This nice little trick is called port forwarding. Let me show you how I configured PuTTY so as to enable port forwarding.
First install MySQL and then configure SSH to use key based authentication and change the default port by following the articles at Slicehost. After installing MySQL and configuring SSH, download and install PuTTY from its download page. I recommend you to download the zip file containing all the files.
Then create a new session in PuTTY by entering the ip address and also the port. Then choose Connection -> SSH -> Tunnels. In the source port field enter a valid port number like 8600. In the destination field enter the value 127.0.0.1:3306. 3306 is the default port in which MySQL runs. The reason why I asked you to enter a different port in the source is that, in future if you run a MySQL server in your local machine for testing, it will clash with your port forwarding. Click the Add button and then start the session. Don’t forget to save the session.
Now open your favourite MySQL GUI client. Mine is HeidiSQL. In the connection settings, enter 127.0.0.1 as the Hostname and enter the port which you specified in the source field in PuTTY (8600) as port. Also enter your username, password, default database name and the click connect.
Now the request which goes to port 8600 of your local machine is forwarded to port 3600 of your MySQL server by PuTTY and you can safely use a GUI client for MySQL without adding any ip to the allowed host list. Note that it will work only when PuTTY is having the session opened.
I hope this is of help to you and let me know how it is working for you. Happy PuTTYing 😉
Posted in Database Programming, Unix/Server Stuff Tagged HeidiSQL, Linux/Unix, MySQL, PuTTY, slicehost, SSH 7 Comments
I was looking for a way to automatically backup my documents in Google Docs from my desktop. After a bit of googling, I found a great service called DocSyncer which worked exactly the same way I wanted it to work. So I thought of sharing the steps which I followed to back up my documents from desktop to Google Docs.
First sign up for the service from its home page.
Then allow DocSyncer access to your Google Docs, by clicking “Grant Access” in the next screen
After this download and install the DocSyncer program from the next screen
By default DocSyncer syncs all documents which are present in your desktop and in your Documents folder. I wanted only a few documents to be synced, so I created a new folder called InSync in my Documents folder and selected only that folder and unchecked all the other folders. If you want to sync all the documents which are present in your Documents folder then you don’t need to edit anything.
That’s it and now all the documents present in the folder that you have selected will be automatically synced. You can download the current version or the previous version of the document from the web interface.
You can also directly download the document from the Google Docs page.
You can also associate document files (.doc, .ppt, .xls etc) with DocSyncer so that they are automatically opened in Google Docs instead of opening them from the local desktop. This can be done by changing the file association from the Account Setting tab of the web interface.
I am using DocSyncer for the past one week and these are my findings based on my experience in the past week.
Posted in Google/Yahoo Tagged backup, DocSyncer, Google Apps, Google Docs 2 Comments
One of the organizers of pipesCamp, Prabhu, is organizing another unconference called WebCamp in Chennai. WebCamp is an unconference (like BarCamp) to discuss about the advantages, disadvantages and correct uses of various web frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Django etc. So if you are crazy about Web 2.0 and live in Chennai then be sure to attend. More over it is going to be a pure technical event without any non-technical people so as to concentrate on highly technical stuff.
I am planning to talk about Client side frameworks, mostly about jQuery. If you want to attend or give a presentation just add your name in the wiki and spread the word. You can add the tag WebCamp or WebCampChennai to your blog posts, Flickr photos, Slideshare slides etc.
Saturday, Feb 23 2008.
RailsFactory,
9/55, Karikalan Street,
Jafferkhanpet, Ashok Nagar,
Chennai, TN, India 600083
Phone: +91 44 43521306
http://webcamp.org/webframeworks
Hoping to meet you all there and I will keep you updated about my experience there.
Posted in Events/Conferences Tagged Chennai, Web Frameworks, WebCamp, WebCampChennai 1 Comment
Well, I have just turned from “early twenties” to “late twenties” a couple of minutes back. 🙂
Eagerly waiting to face the surprises which life has for me this year. 😉
Posted in Random/Personal Tagged BirthDay, wishes 2 Comments
Finally, I am out of Dreamhost. My annual plan expired last November and I changed to monthly plan and was searching for a reason to change. The incident which happened last week became the final nail in the coffin and I am out of it now.
I have faced the bad neighbour problem and have had some outages because of it occasionally, but to be fair to Dreamhost, the problems I faced with them were not as bad as the ones which I had with my previous web host.
The other reason for me to change the host is that I have got fed up with shared hosting and wanted to dive into VPS. I thought of going with MediaTemple, but they were expensive and then tried GoDaddy Linux Virtual Dedicated plan. It really sucked! I was not getting the kind of control which I was expecting. More over the control panel itself took too much memory of 256 MB and the server was always at its knees.
It was then I read the review about SliceHost from Hosting Fu. I was doing some research and the moment I found the excellent article repository, I immediately went and registered. Right from the OS, everything is in your control and you can configure or install any software which you want. This is the type of control I was looking for. I selected Ubuntu Gusty as OS and have so far installed and configured Apache, MySQL, PHP, Subversion and Ruby on Rails. Finally I can get my hands dirty with Ruby on Rails, (which was actually one of my resolutions for 2007 🙂 )
I will keep you guys posted about my experience with SliceHost and also will post the interesting code snippets or configuration tricks which saves me some time. I am back to slicing my slice from slicehost 🙂
Posted in Unix/Server Stuff Tagged hosting, Linux, slicehost, vps 14 Comments
I am one of the early adapters of Gmail and I simply love it. I could still remember how excited I was when I received an invite from my friend Sumod.
A couple of months back I signed up for Google Apps and have set it up in my domain. It’s really cool to have a personalized email address yourname@yourdomain.com which you can have control over instead of having a generic email address like yourname@gmail.com. If you are still not convinced then read this article from lifehacker.
But then I found it very difficult to maintain two different accounts. For some time I was redirecting the mail that I receive in my Google Apps account to my Gmail account and also setup a custom from address to my Google Apps email address. But it was not looking good in some email clients like outlook, which exposed the customized from address. This made me to search for ways to migrate all my emails from Gmail to Google Apps. I have been using my Gmail account for nearly three and half years and have accumulated nearly 2.5 GB of mail.
Finally I found gXFER which actually worked and now all my old emails are backed up in my Google Apps account. So even if you want to move your emails from one Gmail account to another or to a Google Apps account or vice versa then follow these steps.
First, you need to add the Google gadget which is available in gXFER homepage to your Google personalized home page.
Now click the “Start Migration Online” link which is present in the new gadget which you have added to your Google personalized homepage (iGoogle).
Enter your Gmail account information and Google Apps account information and then click start.
If you get this screen then you are done. The migration is started and all your emails from Gmail will start to appear in your Google Apps account, but it might take very long time depending upon your inbox size. For me it took around 3 days for the complete transfer. The transfer rate is around 100 messages per hour.
The following are some of the points which I noted when my emails were migrated.
Once you have set it up, you can enable mail notification in Google Talk and then sit back and watch it as your messages gets transferred to your Google Apps account.
Happy emailing 🙂
Posted in Google/Yahoo Tagged Gmail, Google Apps, Migration 17 Comments
Following the photos from pipesCamp, here are the videos which were taken during the event.
pipesCamp hackday competition in full action. Everyone is busy preparing their pipes to get their 3 minutes of fame ;). You can also find myself, Yuvi and Harish busy preparing the ego search.
Myself and Yuvi presenting ego search for the hackday competition.
Sid presenting his MTC bus mashup during the presentation.
Posted in Events/Conferences Tagged Events/Conferences, videos, Yahoo Pipes Leave a comment
As promised here are some of the photos taken during the pipesCamp event which I attended two weeks back. After failing to find a way to directly embed photos from Flickr, I am now hotlinking them.
Myself, Yuvi and Harish getting ready to present ego search. Photo by Bosky
Yuvi explaing ego search, while myself and Harish showing the demo. Photo by Bosky
Our ego search in action. Photo by Bosky
Panel Discussion. We were discussing about everything from blogging to pipes. I am the one on the extreme right. Photo by Yuvi.
Another photo taken during Panel Discussion. Photo by Bosky
It was really great event and there are plenty of other photos available in Flickr.
Posted in Events/Conferences, Photography Tagged Events/Conferences, Photos, Yahoo Pipes 1 Comment
I was really very surprised when I found that the Yahoo Pipes team has blogged about pipesCamp, which I attended two weeks back.
Even the Yahoo Developer Network carried an article about pipesCamp. The article also mentioned the Yahoo! Pipes hack – ego Search, which I built together with Yuvi and Harish. Very nice feeling to see something which you helped build was featured by big boys like Yahoo. 😉
It was really very nice to know that the event which was organized in less than a week was such a success. Imagine how it would have been if we had more time 😉
Posted in Events/Conferences, Google/Yahoo Tagged Events/Conferences, Pipes, Yahoo Leave a comment