Things are looking up for connectivity hungry, bandwidth crazed Bangaloreans (myself included) greatly. Here I am, posting this article from my laptop while waiting at the Bangalore airport for dad’s flight to land.

And its not just being connected with sluggish speeds!! Tests with speedtest.net have shown upto 512kbps speeds at different points on the airport.

BSNL EVDO is a step forward in the right direction and I must say I’m pleasantly surprised by BSNL’s ability to churn out great products, albeit a little clandestinely! They need a good marketing person on board who can change their image. I’ve been on this view ever since I got the BSNL DataOne broadband connection from them almost a year ago.

BSNL has left the competition far behind in technology and prices too! I’ve bought EVDO from BSNL by paying 1000/- refundable security deposit and pay 750/- a month for unlimited data plan!! Whereas no other private provider has any unlimited plans (atleast not that I know of). Same goes for the EDGE data plan on my mobile from BSNL. 200/- a month for unlimited, whereas 499/- a month for 500 meg from Vodafone that I used to pay until a few months ago!

Now, I’m eagerly waiting for 3G to be commercially launched in Bangalore, as I’m sure a lot of others are too.

Go BSNL, connect india, faster

UPDATE:Did I mention that the EVDO connection was activated within hours of my purchasing?

Each Friday night after work, Santa Singh would fire up his outdoor grill and cook a tandoori chicken and some meat kebabs. But, all of his neighbors were strict Catholics … and since it was Lent, they were forbidden from eating chicken and meat on a Friday.

The delicious aroma from the grilled meats was causing such a problem for the Catholic faithful that they finally talked to their Priest. The Priest came to visit Santa, and suggested that he become a Catholic. After several classes and much study, Santa attended Mass … and as the priest sprinkled holy water over him, he said, “You were born a Sikh, and raised a Sikh, but now, you are a Catholic.”

Santa’s neighbors were greatly relieved, until Friday night arrived. The wonderful aroma of tandoori chicken and meat kebabs filled the neighborhood. The Priest was called immediately by the neighbors and, as he rushed into Santa’s backyard, clutching a rosary and prepared to scold him, he stopped and watched in amazement.

There stood Santa, holding a small bottle of holy water which he carefully sprinkled over the grilling meats and chanted: “Oye, you was born a chicken, and you was born a lamb, you was raised a chicken, and you was raised a lamb but now yaar, you are a potato and tomato”!

Today I was helping out a friend in debugging a web application deployed on his web server. The problem we ran into was monitoring the log files generated by the application. Providing SSH access to me was too cumbersome task for us to embark on and I am glad we didn’t.

So, how do I get access to the log files? First thing we did was to ensure that the files are generated on a web directory, which is accessible to me from a web browser. For sometime I kept downloading the log file to analyze. This fast became a problem as the file size grew and I had to wait for the file to download completely before I could view it!

A quick google search for webtail took me to WebTail. A simple to use WebTail application which allows you to tail a file kept on a web server at regular intervals.

Just download and execute java -jar WebTail.jar <url> [update_interval]

That’s it!! If you provide the update_interval value of 0, and have a stable connection to the server, WebTail works just like the local tail command!!!

Thank you Paul, my next beer is dedicated to you

Who says laziness and impatience are bad? If we weren’t lazy enough (to configure SSH access) and impatient (to wait for the file to download completely to view it), we wouldn’t have found WebTail