Showing headlines posted by shantanugoel

The “bug” existed back in the old times of the floppy drives. These drives seemed to fail very quickly on linux systems compared to MS DOS/Windows. Now, a normal observer would say linux had bad handling of the drives or was doing something messy that made these drives crap out ever so often. But as it turned out, the issue was the complete opposite.

Ever since Apple announced the iPhone 4S having “A5? processor, everyone has been pointing to the below image from a test run by Anandtech and saying that the iPhone 4S will be twice as strong as the Samsung Galaxy S2. I beg to differ.

This is a solution to the issue that I faced today while installing a javascript file from userscripts.org as an extension into google chrome (Yes, Chrome supports installing greasemonkey javascripts as extensions). I had already installed this script once into my browser earlier but when I tried installing it again today, it started giving me a weird error “Could not read source file”. I tried all possible means, like putting it on a different server, installing from local disk, changing versions, deleting all cache, etc but still the issue persisted.

Swype just released their latest beta version 3.25 for Android phones but most of the folks are facing a “parse error” while trying to update to the latest version. If you are one of such folks, there is a simple solution that I just tried and got working.

This post is about my open source remote bandwidth usage stats logger project. I have multiple devices at home that access the internet so it is not feasible to install a bandwidth monitor individually on all these devices as I’d still need to add up all logs and many of such devices don’t even have a way to install a monitoring software installed (e.g. my PS3, my TV, my media players, etc). So, I thought of monitoring the usage at my router. It is a smart one (Asus wl-500w) and I can install various linux software on it but then it requires a hard disk to run most of them which I don’t turn on all the time. Moreover, even if I could run the software directly from router flash, it doesn’t have enough space to store the logs (neither is it a good idea to keep writing to the flash often). Hence I came up with the idea of a light weight remote bandwidth usage logger where in the router has to do the bare minimum possible (here, it just has to make a GET call to a webpage with current status of received and transmitted bytes, accomplished by a single line of wget command). The system is completely open source. The logging and parsing is all done on server side and provides various useful things.

Google just launched an encrypted search portal which is a Godsend for people on public networks since there is a lot that can be gleaned from your search queries. For doing your protected searches, however, you have to go to a different portal which I linked to above. Now, the omnibar (the address bar in Google Chrome) also serves as a search box but searches on the normal google portal by default. Here is a simple, few seconds process to switch it over to encrypted search.