After two years of using the previous theme, I just changed the theme to The Sundarbans. I started with a minimalist theme named ‘Simpla‘ and modified it. I chose the codename The Sundarbans for the greenery we now have on the site ;). Feel free to leave the feedback as comments below or the contact form.

My last post is about 5 1/2 months ago. You must be wondering what was keeping me silent since so long. Some people even sent me emails asking if I was still alive

Finally, today I decided to break the silence, for good.

Completed M.Tech.
I was initially busy with my M.Tech. project for a while. I successfully finished my M.Tech. in Computer Technology, IIT Delhi towards the end of May 2007. The convocation happened on August. You can see me and other students of my class receiving the degree below:

Moved to Bangalore, India. Started to work for AOL Labs
In June, I was basically busy interviewing with various companies and spent a lot of time traveling for interview purposes. This was because I was not particularly impressed with the kind of work being done by the company I got selected into during campus placements. They did not disclose much about the same during the interviews and I took the offer because of its name/ fame.

I finally decided to join AOL Labs in India, the R & D unit of AOL. I joined on July 5th at Bangalore. I was busy settling down for a while. Bharti Airtel gave me a tough life in getting a new post paid connection as I moved from New Delhi to Bangalore. They were not willing to transfer the credit limit I enjoyed in Delhi. Also, I had to give the proof of residence, ID, among other proofs again to get the connection. I was using their connection since over 4 years in Delhi and had paid all the bills on time as well. They kept disconnecting my connection for some or the other reason again and again. It was the most painful experience I ever had. I would actually opted to switch to Hutch or some other provider, but my cell phone is sim locked to Airtel for 2 years and they did not unlock the phone or refund me the money and take the cell phone back.

Bought a Bike
I bought myself a black colored Bajaj Pulsar 150 DTSi.

Went to Jog Falls
I’d save some time speaking about it. You can read about the trip at Rakesh’s blog. You can see the photos at my photo album on Picasa.

I’d try my best to answer your questions but you should remember I have a full time job and have limited spare time. I’d try my best to answer as many questions as possible.

Let me also remind you that the views presented here are strictly mine and do not have any influence of my present or previous employers.

You’re looking at my blog on new web host. The old host stopped doing the VPS business. I am currently using a shared hosting account right now and only plan move to the VPS/dedicated server when the popularity of the blog increases.

Added a custom field to the posts called ‘minipost’ and checked for that in the homepage code. (Yes mini posts will only appear as mini on the homepage, on other pages they will display as normal posts).

As you already know that I got digged and the result was that the WordPress brought the MySQL server to its knees on this VPS machine and I didn’t know about it for a few days as I was having exams and did not check my email/ blog.

I first thought of modifying WordPress’s bad queries/ DB design and optimize that, but given the amount of time it will take, its out of question right now. Maybe some time next month. The other option was to write a quick caching plugin for Wordpress. Before starting to code, I thought I’ll check if someone has already made it. I found WP-Cache 2. I just installed it. The installation was painless and the caching system was up in less than 2 minutes. I think I’ll stick to this plug-in for now rather than writing my own plugin. This makes the number of plugins in use 35.

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Yeah thats true, I got digged!!! The effect? Well the database server couldn’t handle the load and zonked out. This just tells how bad the query optimizations in Wordpress are. I guess its time I should install some caching plugins or some static publishing plugins. Another todo, Phew!

Its been only a few days since I have been posting stuff here and I am already getting a lot of trackback spam. I have just now installed the Trackback Validator plugin for Wordpress. It basically checks whether the trackback URL actually points to your blog or not, which spam sites atleast don’t do as of today. Nifty plugin!!

Creating a favicon is a pain. I somehow don’t like to work in that 16×16 area. It’s too small. More over they don’t serve much purpose however I was partially persuaded by friends to create one. After getting some more inspiration from Matt Cutts, it was time to find the easiest way out. After some research and reading stuff at ProBlogger, Photo Matt and Alex King, I decided to use the favicon generator at Dynamic Drive as it allowed me to create icon in multiple sizes.

I decided to do a portrait favicon as all I needed to do was upload the photo :D. I used IrfanView to crop my image, swapped the colors to make the image look blue, similar to the theme. Dynamic drive did the rest

If you are unable to see the favicon, try clearing your cache first then reload the page.

The contact me page has been created using the Custom Contact plugin. Other pages like About Me have also been published.

I really liked the theme named Ads Minded Theme made by Bryan and decided to use it here. I modified a lot of things, like removed all the Adsense/Chitika ad placeholders (I’d like to keep things advertisement free).