Not long ago, in a charming dream,
I saw myself — a king with crown’s treasure;
I was in love with you, it seemed,
And heart was beating with a pleasure.
I sang my passion’s song by your enchanting knees.
Why, dreams, you didn’t prolong my happiness forever?
But gods deprived me not of whole their favor:
I only lost the kingdom of my dreams.
Today, when I logged onto the webserver where my domain is hosted, I got a pleasant surprise
—
NOTE: We have UPGRADED to debisn Sarge, also to a much faster
machine. So if you were prompted about your SSH key, that is
OK and to be expected. Thanks for acepting it. 
—
Over the years, Symonds.net has been more than sufficient for my hosting needs, and the support has been quick and efficient. However, with the recent server loads being high - I have been looking at other webhosts. And in fact, towards the end of last week, I had been researching on some good deals in hosting - and had shortlisted Dreamhost.com, and Site 5. I am particularly tempted to go with Site 5, they look pretty good, and have had some good things said about it by a few fellas at the Wordpress IRC channel on Freenode. Have’nt got down to registering with them yet, but let’s see.
Making this post with w.bloggar for the first time in ages. It looks pretty nice now, and has support for a LOT more blog-cms es and websites than before.
The weekend was pretty boring - the good stuff was watching soccer in the evening where the Chelsea - Arsenal match ended 1-0. The match was pretty lively, and Arsenal made some slick passing moves, but could’nt cap it off with good finishing. Chelsea created lot more chances, but the quality of their play was not close to the potential of a team which starts out with close to 90 million pounds sitting on the substitute bench. Though I am not exactly an Arsenal supporter, I liked their new signing Hleb - he’s good and creative. In other good news, Kimi Raikkonen won the inaugural F-1 race at Turkey. He should be happy, but prolly angry that Juan Pablo Montoya messed it up towards the end and allowed Fernando Alonso to squeak through to second place. Raikkonen still trails Alonso by 24 championship points.
This is not remotely funny.
The folks at CRIT have finally released a nice map of Mumbai, which is pretty nifty. All it needs now is regular inputs from lots of people to name the buildings, landmarks, roads, etc. With a little more GPS help from everyone, the map can become a real treasure trove.
I hate spambots. One of the reasons I went with a popular CMS like Wordpress is because there are bound to be spam block tools integrated with it, or other nice people will create good blockers And so far, most of the blocking by Wordpress and plugins has relied on IP blocks, captchas, etc. The scourge of the Texas-Holdem-Online-Poker nonsense has been contained very effectively - especially with SpamKarma and ReferrerKarma.
However, one problem that existed earlier, and has worsened are spambot-spiders. Seems a lot of the user-agent strings that crawl the websites these days are random bots. If you look at the logs, the way they behave makes you feel they are trying to get around the throttling checks, etc. And the way they land up right in the middle of the website, without following links or from a web-search makes you wonder where they got the link database from..
So, after looking around a bit, I got this nice link Stopping Spambots: A Spambot Trap. Most of the stuff there is easy to setup, so will implement. Makes sense too. No point giving bandwidth to unknown crawlers that dont follow robots.txt.
Generated this India - travelled states map.. there are so many places I’ve gone to, but have’nt travelled well. North East India and Lakshadweep are among the top places to be going to.
Have been using this little Flickr Flickr World Map Firefox extension by allthegoodness, which is pretty nifty. This in turn uses the GeoURL extension from splintered to locate geographically "near" people, grab images from their Flickr galleries and show them in a neat format.
Geoff ’s updated the wp-gallery plugin, and it works great now. Have to start using it more actively now. You can either download and use it from his site, or use the great plugin manager by drDave
Something I read over the weekend…
Where Everything Is Music
Don’t worry about saving these songs!
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn’t matter.
We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.
The strumming and the flute notes
rise into the atmosphere,
and even if the whole world’s harp
should burn up, there will still be
hidden instruments playing.
So the candle flickers and goes out.
We have a piece of flint, and a spark.
This singing art is sea foam.
The graceful movements come from a pearl
somewhere on the ocean floor.
Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge
of driftwood along the beach, wanting!
They derive
from a slow and powerful root
that we can’t see.
Stop the words now.
Open the window in the center of your chest,
and let the spirits fly in and out.
Been a really really long time since i posted .. all i seem to be doing is CVS uping the code for WordPress and Gallery. I am sticking to Gallery 1.x series right now - even though I use the new 2.x alpha on the laptop for testing, because it is so slow and confusing right now.
Had real fun yesterday. Left work at 2pm. And went shopping with 2 mates. Later in the evening, went to a Ghulam Ali concert at Taj Land’s End, Bandra.
Was a UTI Mutual Fund sponsored event, and it was fairly chilly with the wind blowing in from the sea. After a short intoduction by Tom Alter, and a ugly smoke - light show, the singer walked in to entertain with about 10 Ghazals. It was the first Ghulam Ali concert I’ve attended, and although he was off-key a few times, and the tabla player was sorta pathetic, it was good overall. Cannot really expect CD quality music at a concert, can we?
Sunday - with FA Cup matches lined up, should be fun
