Did my first heavy address mapping. Had very few streets. The got WMS plugin to get sat view. Drew as many streets as visible. Already had the information map from the sector. Job started. Have mapped 25% of the sector in about 3 hours. No clue why I “wasted” so much of my sunday evening but was enjoying every bit of it. Specially when mapnik has these days started rendering so quickly. Adjusted the spacing a few times for a few lines. Finally got the job done. Actually since the another 3 quaters still remain, will be spending another few days in completing them too.

Seems like OSM has more new things faster than you can get mapping your neighbourhood. Had mapped most of the streets around where I live and it was beconing either a power=tower or a POI flooding, and then came the JOSM with address tool. fan-tas-tic! Even better is the pic layer plugin. The only problem is sector maps are most often not to scale so overlay does not always help so much. Anyway, piclayer can atleast help in address mapping nevertheless.

Have spend this saturday evening in collecting such sector maps (6 pictures total using a 12mp cam handheld cam) from their enterances. The maps for new sectors are though drawn but are without any actuall streets. So those maps can’t be used at all. While other maps are merely just streets without plot numbers so they help in mere mapping the blocks in the sector. From all the maps I have seen till date, only one was digitally map (Nirvana Country). Every map seen is always hand oil-painted. The times when these boards get made are many years before the first house comes up on these sectors. So, they loose their accuracy after about 3 years. All HUDA sectors never change the map for more than a decade and are outdated by more than 10 percent. Have not located errors on them yet. Will take time for OSM users here to use the map and then later find problems.

The show was yesterday evening – Ice Age 3 – 3D at PVR Ambience Mall on NH8. I booked the tix on Wednesday for this show and got relaxed. Its always very comfortable to book tix on the net and reach the theatre seats directly from the parking lot.

So I reach the theatre 10n minutes before the showtime and hunt for that kiosk machine which swipes my card to print my booked tickets. there were six tickets and to be printed. I reported that I cannot print tickets here, please use the counter. WHAT! I just managed to walked pass that counter crowd and now its telling me to go back there! Ok ok.. not the first time. I go to the Gold members counter and ask for tix. They say, since its not Gol tix, get back in line of other counters! Dude! show starts in 4 mins, and I have to get in the line!!!? Ans :- I can’t help you in this. Nightmare is started already! I wait for the line to crawl and watch my clock tick every second! Damm! Firstly they are selling 3D tix at 250 each! is already a huge premium and now this queue!

By the time I reach the counter, Im already aware that most of the people are debating with the counter guy for why the had to stand in the queue though they did an advance booking. Ok, so im not the only one. So now I get the 6 tickets and rush for the entrance as its already T-1 minute left!

Oh boy! The counter is a No-Entry. The counter guy says the show will start after 15 mins. And there are like a hundred people standing outside just to enter PVR lobby. such a crowd was only for the spidey flicks I remember. But not like this! after another 10 mins they allow entry to the lobby and now, even a dozen of people are expressing anger to any one with a PVR batch! Same point. How come is this a online booking or a convenience charge that you tag along to your tickets when people are to wait standing for 10 minutes outside and another 15 mins in the small lobby! Showtime was 1805 while it was 1820 when entry to the theatre started. It takes another 10 mins before you reach your seats though.

Anyway, now everyone is seated and pain in a let-go mode just as we see the first 3D. Disaster! They even screwed up here! The whole movie has started and its still blurred with the polarised glasses! This is nuts! Its not like I enjoyed my last flick in this same 3D theatre but now I’m pretty sure I WILL NOT WATCH ANY OTHER 3D MOVIE AT PVR – EVER!. Half an hour is gone and eyes are painting. You can’t make sense without the polarised glasses and with then you can’t understand much. this was the peak of my chaos theory.
After 15 mins the projector staff probably realized a projection blunder so they do their first adjustments on a running movie. No change after they try aligning 3 times. At about 30mins on the movie the screen is blacked and the hall light glow. Everyone wondering how come its a intermission already! It wasn’t. The alignment exercise is tried again but off-screen and now, finally, I can see 3D. Its looks lot better and now its definitely 3D.

I’m a regular to PVR theatres. I always enjoy the movie, the cleanliness, the generous staff. When bookmyshow started and with PVR tickets, I use that site. But 2 months and PVR come out of that alliance . Their site those days was completely hopeless. Very complicated for me. I tried movies on other theatres then and finally when the latest version of their site came, I was back being a regular. They always charged a convenience charge to tickets.

So makes me I wonder. Probably the crowd was far too much for them to be prepared for -  a weekend 3D flick. Probably a primary staff member was MIA – these were answers given by a staff members to the angry crowd. Probably this hall has a history with chaos – no clue. Anyway, movie did go fine after that and there were no more troubles.

PVR is known to learn from their mistakes and therefore they should make sure they have better planning and handling in place.

There was once when we needed a LAN chat server. After hunting located Openfire which is an XMPP implementation. I did have the knowledge of it being an Open stardard but thats all i knew then. That was more then a year back. Now we have a dozen servers across the city and all running OSS software on a medium grade desktop machine hardware. We use the same server to chat with all the staff and archive messages.

After installing the second server, I knew, it needed a self health reporting system so we sitting in the moon can see if a problem is developing or even the reason for a problem. There are all sorts of problems that come on servers that are not in a protected space and without a stable internet or network connections. The first idea was simply to make a webpage and dump vital stats. But who the hell will go to a dozen IPs for checking if it is fine. Thats where I knew, my Openfire XMPP was the key for a fantastic new way of realtime monitoring and much more.

Just like any chat servers, it also supports making rooms. These rooms can be joined by anybody and can simply see the activity going within. Thats the key. I created a health-check room. I developed by entire stats gathering core and piped it using XMPPHP library into the targetted room. Then scheduled a script to run every 5 minute. Now the result is that my room can be joined by any person who wants to monitor the current stats. The stats gathering core has been scheduled in every installation with a gap of 30 seconds. Therefore, all servers send their reports in a gap of 30 seconds ina  continous stream within the room.

The above practise was used perfectly till I realized something more. Openfire has inbuilt support to archive messages. Therefore the stats was not parsed with details instead left as is within its Mysql DB. The same DB later was later also the point where remote comman output stream was sent to. Today we have 3 rooms for realtime stats, health stats and one exclusive realtime room for test cases, runtime errors in PHP/Mysql server. This is far better than RSS fees since it refreshes itself automatically in a stream and sourced from the servers itself. Far easier to use. An RSS feed was also made just for my mobile which parsed data from XMPP archive DB.

My favorite XMPP client is PSI. Its sleek, java-less (which means loads faster with less RAM) and with better UI. XMPPHP is a great library to access and conduct all operations using the standard. It happens that its docs don’t have everything it is capable of. I can share some of my code on request, specially the groupchat code which was not easy to locate.

This party includes only me. Accidentally went over Calcutta OSM map today and realized that it is totally missing! Where are the mappers? Really, some cities get totally lost like nobody in that town is a G33K! Anyway, just some standard streets were visible authored mostly by non-locals. So took this as the next mission. Myself not a local from Kolkata, West Bengal, IN. But having lived in Southern Part of that city for 7 years, I think my memory can supply enough POIs.

Me using Potlatch for many days now. Anyway, since i don’t have any trails, thats the only way I can map that town sitting a thousand kilometres away. Just mapped my first home beside the Golf Course to start with – The Golf Greens. Then Jodhpur Park where I lived for the second part. Noticed that Google Earth on Ubuntu won’t load this area. Strange, I was at 50 km altitude but still getting hopeless tiles. Anyway, since potlatch runs on Yahoo Ariel Maps, I was kinda lucky. Finally concluded todays session with Gariahat Road and Gol Park. The tile links may not show much if your calender shows June 13. It’ll take a day for renderers to finish painting these tiles. Try changing to T@H and  you might just see it faster.

The ride through the virtual world activated lots of memories of my school days. Have not POIed any of my homes or college or school or that cinema hall where I watched my first Hollywood flick – The Jurasic Park. Ah, those days. Will keep mapping for next few days till as long I get find it interesting. central areas like Esplanade or Park Street would most definately be mapped I think. Also noticed that India’s First real underground metro railway is totally missing! Shame! I would be able to help there cause I only know the first six stations. So its done for tonight.

The experiment as of now is a failure just so you would want to before you read this. I here share how I did do what I did to try to succeed.

I have been running a Windows 2003 Server  on a real machine past few months. Since its on the internet, virus attacks attacks are far too common. Eventually got very irritated and had to start on this experiment. Read docs of VirtualBox and locate on trick on creating a VKDK image from a disk itself. So physically connected my win2k3 disk on a existing ubuntu 9 with latest VirtualBox. Collected some disk clonning utilities include an ISO of ultimate boot CD.

Fired the commands and made a VMDK. Then, created a new Virtual Machine and made a new virtual disk on 100GB. Also hooked my VMDK on the same machine. started the machine using XXCopy Cloner and asked it to clone the real disk on a virtual disk. That took a some half hour and got done.

Then unplugged the vmdk and iso from the machine, restarted it and tried to boot. That is the problem. I have set the disk type to SATA and allowed also options on Virtualbox machine config. The best I can do is get a OS selector menu (pressing F8) and also getting a Windows 2003 Server starting logo screen. It never goes past this point after all efforts. Even  tried safe mode or VGA mode boot but all in vain.

I doubt there is any VirtualMachine detector to halt the system. I have repaird the system with a Windows 2003 ISO too. Done fixboot and fixmbr on the disk. But have not been able to go beyond this.

Sharing this blog so someone can go past this point and share on the fix.

Tata Sky has recently launched its Plus service which allows recording and replaying live TV. That is very nice sounding feature and I was almost going to upgrade my regular subscription connection to a Plus. What stopped me was that there is no information of when will HDTV be available in India. Since HDTV will anyway require a new set-top box so therefore, I hesited to upgrade to Plus and waste the money on this midway box. Im also aware that HDTV will least take least 5 years for indian release. My perspective.

Now the technology of Plus is to record TV as save in a proprietory format on its Hard drive. All that kit is part of the new set-top box. Hard disk will always have a space contrain. Therefore, to get maximum length of recording, the quality has to be low. Regular TV runs on 320×240 with 25fps. Transmissions are always analogue therefore, you won’t ever notice rough endges. Now since, Tata Sky wanted to offer Plus service with good recording duration, it certainly would reduce its transmission quality or bandwidth. Transmission of Tata Sky uses some MPEG like encoding protocol since its being transmitted on a digital connection.

What I have noticed in past about 3 months is that I see small patches similar to those you notice when watching low quality MPEG or a you-tube movie on a large resolution. These patches definately won’t be visible on a Cable TV type analougue connection. These patches destroy least 25% of the original quality of any channel that wish to see. Since there is no talk around about this topic, I assume the reduction is negligible. Nevertheless, the reduction is TV quality is not what a TV subscriber asked to pay 300Rs. a month would accept. I will be digging more about this issue and would update this web log in next few days.

Feb 26: When it launched it was just as any other TV broadcast so I could not have been a DVD Quality TV even though they keep claiming so. Now, with their reduced quality its worse than a standard MPEG VCD quality.