siddhartha saha dot net

It is a shame that I hardly read anything these days. For the last couple of days I was trying to look into the plagiarism charges on the now famous Harvard sophomore, Kaavya Viswanathan, write of “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life”. While doing so, I realized that I haven’t read any good book over the last year. The only books that I read were some cheesy thriller novel on my flight back from India this January. I had bought quite a few books over the last summer – but I still haven’t touched them.
To get a kickstart, I decided I will start with Da Vinci Code, which has been with me for more than a year now.
Worthwhile to mention here, I also installed a neat plugin called Amazon Media Manager and did some adjustments to show which books I am recently read or currently reading on the frontpage. Pretty cool.

Now I need to see how many days it takes me to finish that book.

Last December, when I went back to India, I took up this massive project of collecting all the phtographs from all my old albums and scan them and bring the scanned version with me and organize them and put them up in my web gallery. The scanning part was done back in December/January and I had all the digitized photos with me. But after coming back to US, the second part of the plan didn’t quite work out. Mainly because I didn’t have a laptop for a long time, and my site was somewhat broken – a lot of things were not working. On top of that, I exhausted my web quota (only 5GB) with my previous host.

Now as I have moved to new host, and these days have some time on my hand – I decided to continue with the second part. I spend about two hours today organizing the photos and now the photos are being uploaded to the site as I type.

… now I am feeling a little bit good about myself

Even though a ping does not mean anything – but this made me happy:

Siddhartha@neiges ~
$ ping siddharthasaha.net

Pinging siddharthasaha.net [207.210.67.163] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 207.210.67.163: bytes=32 time=154ms TTL=47
Reply from 207.210.67.163: bytes=32 time=173ms TTL=47
Reply from 207.210.67.163: bytes=32 time=92ms TTL=47
Reply from 207.210.67.163: bytes=32 time=102ms TTL=47

Ping statistics for 207.210.67.163:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 92ms, Maximum = 173ms, Average = 130ms
Siddhartha@neiges ~
$ ping siddharthasa.temp.powweb.com

Pinging siddharthasa.temp.powweb.com [66.152.98.210] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 66.152.98.210: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=54
Reply from 66.152.98.210: bytes=32 time=23ms TTL=54
Reply from 66.152.98.210: bytes=32 time=21ms TTL=54
Reply from 66.152.98.210: bytes=32 time=20ms TTL=54

Ping statistics for 66.152.98.210:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 20ms, Maximum = 27ms, Average = 22ms
Siddhartha@neiges ~

Today I finally moved to a new host. I haven’t still switched the DNS – will do that soon. The new host is PowWeb. I think I got a really good deal. The site manager of the previous host Ace-Host was cPanel and it was really good. The only problem was that they were sometimes slow. The primary reason that I switched was that I ran out of space there. I had only 5gb, and I have way too many photos in my photo album.
The transition experience to this new host was good. In between these two hosts, I tried one more: StartLogic, and they were the worst. I had a tough time transferring the database. The site manager software is a little lame as compared to cPanel (they use vDeck). I couldn’t find any straightforward method to import an sql database dump. Something would always be messed up.
Anwyasy… I need to tweak this host and this installation of wordpress and gallery. I will switch the DNS sometime tomorrow.