Pondicherry is not a big city. It is more of a tourist spot, and a place wehre politicians fight for their superiority within their 1 KM zones in which they would be elected. I have never cared to learn what it is called in English, but in Tamil, they call it Toguthi. Well, so, the only standard ISP in Pondicherry just like in most parts of India is BSNL, and both at my home and at my office I am stuck with BSNL broadband, since the only other good one available is Airtel and it has a very very limited coverage here in Pondicherry.

Untill a few months ago, the connection at my home used to give problems every once in a while, and I used to get heavy bills for the usage though I doubt that I have used it much in those days, but right now, with the unlimited connections both at home and office, there is hardly any downtime.

Untill recently. At the office, for the past few days in the afternoon hours a strange phenomenon is occuring when the internet goes off every 150 seconds and comes back after every 150 seconds. This simply acts an an on off cycle with a frequency of 150 seconds. I got fed up with this today and went directl to the exchange, and they asked me to bring the modem stating that it si a modem problem. Bloody hell, a modem will not act like this, it is the problem of the bloody port to which our line is connected.

They are just refusing to check it, and when I came back to the office I found that net is working without the breaks, but with latency of upto 5 seconds per ping. I wonder how that works, there is a delay of 5 seconds or over 5000 ms for every request that is sent every second. Maybe the people programmed ubuntu know what they have been doing, and its correct.

Well, what is the best way to get connected to the internet? People these days do say that there will be satellite downlinks all over India in the next 2 years, and India would be the next server farm, and that you will find one in every home. If BSNL doesnt improve its service, people will start hosting their servers on BSNL, and that would come down as another black mark for India. The Land of Bad Servers.

What would I be doing wihout ubuntu?

I have rolledback completely from my ventures to find out about other versions of unix that are available, and have installed hardy heron on my laptop.

Guess how easy it was to get the wifi working. Real easy. Go to hardware driver manager, select broadcom wifi adapter, and you get your wifi up and running. No windows driver file required. Now thats what linux is about. Open source drivers for the closed source applications and drivers.

Changes and Improvements? Plenty. Graphics is great. System monitor rocks now, and the firefox 3 beta rocks like never before.

Will write more about it soon.

Godaddy is messing up my site for the past 2 days.  Unfortunately, I wanted to try out GoDaddy’s hostings, and how they claim to be World’s No. 1.

They have a beautiful control panel, but the name server that the control panel shows are ns51 and ns52.domaincontrol.com while the actual ones are supposed to be ns53 and ns54.domaincontrol.com, which they had updated thru a support ticket.

This resulted in some turbulance of my website, and I lost considerable money because of it.

Today, I somehow managed to point the domain back to godaddy’s hosting, and I now find that they are not offering free mail. Looks like i have to go for google apps.

Im yet to test it, if it doesnt work well, I might as well move to hostgator and give them a try.

I plan to spend $10 a month this way, and write reviews about the companies that I try out.

I have been using the same modem for about a year now, and for the past few days since I got my unlimited data transfer internet connection, I am surprised at the work that it is doing. Im downloading all sorts of stuff, and my computer is plugged to a 2 hour backup power supply as well, and Pondicherry not being a very bad place wehre power goes down for over 2 hours at a streatch, the computer and the modem have literally been running for over 2 months at a streatch now since july 1st when my plan changed to unlimited 512 kbps from 2 Mbps limited.

If you are outside India, you might laugh at this cos probably you might be on a 10 Mbps connection while reading this, but in India owning a 512 Kbps connection is like owning a Rolls Royce. I sit before this computer for about 6 hours a day, and therefore the AC runs here for 6 hours a day, and for the remaining 18 hours, the door is locked, and so are all windows, and the heat is almost unbearable when I enter the room in the evening after office. No AC, no ventilation, and all the heat that is released by the cpu and the modem have no means of getting out of the room.

Well, anyways, I am quite happy with the performance of the modem, as I know that the computer has to perform, after all it is a server quality cpu that I have got, and the monitor is always turned off, as I use it only when I am working on the PC. The modem is working in its full effecienty round the clock for the past 2 months, during which time it has not been turned off even once, and BSNL too has been able to supply data all this while (i think i am sure that there has been no downtime or anything), though at the office it is a different story.