rohitj's domain » Bluehost

This site is up again

admin — Thu, 22 May 2008 23:39:10 +0000

Finally Bluehost guys didn’t listen to any logic. I sent them a complete list of all songs and their source and license. They still weren’t ready to listen. Of course I didn’t remove the songs. So, my site was pulled down. 1 day before the given deadline. I hope I didn’t loose any important email. The mailing list I made on my account are still working .

Anyways, I now plan to run my own server. Where (yes, this is the first question)? Not sure. When? Not sure. Will decide very soon. Till then I am using NearlyFreeSpeech.net . Because of the tight schedule, I couldn’t do this before. NearlyFreeSpeech ’s services are rather impressive. Leave emails, for which they don’t provide any near decent solution, rest of the things are quite good. I will be charged for what I use. I think if I remove my photo section (which I have as I don’t have enough net speed) my cost would be pretty low as compared to Bl(oody)uehost. Also, they didn’t ask for passport copy or license copy for ssh access. That was nice. The concept of “site” is pretty nice. You can make as many “site”s as you want, and you can ssh to the site individually. I had some glitches with php file write permissions, but it was settled soon. Their control panel is way too decent. They have put the neccessary things only. Not like cPanel where you find lot of random stuff which you never use. I hope to have happy time here.

There might be some broken links in this site now. Please excuse me for that, I am in process of fixing some broken links that I could find.

Copyright and Bluehost

rohitj — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 10:17:04 +0000

So, yesterday I got a mail from bluehost saying that there are some copyrighted material on my site. I bought an account with bluehost in June/July 2007. I share it with some of my friends. One of them is bheekling who hates US copyright laws and the way they use it to exploit people. If you talk in favor of RIAA, he will probably kill you. . And he also prefers to play with these laws. … so anyways, when we bought the hosting space, we decided that we will not put any pirated material on the site. It so seems that initially we were in doubt that japanese animes are not copyrighted. But it so seems they are. Its not copyrighted in US though. So, US law can not make me remove them from my site. Anyways Bluehost guys said that I have the following thing on site, which I must remove. (they use the word “copy written material”. I have no idea what that means )

Anime: /public_html/anime/

Movies: /public_html/bheekling/files/Pans.Labyrinth.2006.720p.HDDVD.x264-SEPTiC

TV Shows: /public_html/bheekling/files/TV/Nodame Cantabile/
Music: ~/rohitj_music/*

Now, “Movie” is surely copyrighted. bheekling uploaded that temporarily by mistake. He has removed.
This is my response to bluehost. Let us see what happens. :

Movie : The movie has been removed. Thanks for informing me.

TV Shows and Anime: These are not “copy written” material. For Anime and TV Show you can check the site http://www.sars-fansubs.com/index.php?cont=btpage . These are not a US product, it’s a Japanese product, and it’s not copyrighted in the US. So, I think you understand that I need not remove these items.

Music : All the music is downloaded from the site http://jamendo.com. The music is licensed under Creative Commons license, and hence I am allowed to store it in my account. And hence, I need not remove them.

Also, in the term and conditions of bluehost it says :
Violations of Intellectual Property Rights
Any violation of any person’s intellectual property rights, rights of privacy, rights of publicity or other personal rights is prohibited. Bluehost.com is required by law to remove or block access to content appearing on or through the Services upon receipt of proper notice of copyright infringement (see “Copyright Infringement Notice Information” below).

Which means that someone needs to issue a notice to *BlueHost* for you to take this action. Can you tell if you have got any such notice. If yes, can I see it?

If you still want me to remove any of the files, you should tell me why you think these are “copy written material”.

2007, you were great. 2008, I hope best from you too

admin — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 07:44:49 +0000

2007 was overall good. I got to learn lots of things, and got to do lots of things. Got to talk to lot of cool people. Though I wouldn’t forget that it also brought 7th semester which was like the most difficult semester I ever had. This semester probably took my anxiety level to top. Some of the highlights of 2007 are below:

Got a job at Microsoft, India. I am excited about it.
Got involved into Free Culture activities.
Shifted 99% to open source softwares. (flash )
Shifted 100% to free songs. (though, this is true.)
Shifted to wonderful KDE. I will write an entry for it.
No more Gentoo, it takes time. Ubuntu on other hand is wonderful. (Apologies to all those who are on Gentoo or are thinking of shifting to Gentoo because I asked them to do so. )
Hiking
Another hobby now is Photography …. need money to buy DSLR.
Bought a new web space to play with different things. Its been wonderful till now.
Zeropage removed restrictions from their songs.
Kelly Allyn sent me her autograph, need to go home to get it.
Met some wonderful people during internship at Virginia Tech.
<compressed because its personal>

Hopes from 2008 :

Grad School or a good job (or a startup?)
DSLR
Free Culture Club at IITK
Passing IITK
openmoko / android
make IITK music club release an album under CC ( www.tempostand.com should help us)
Finish talk with Vox Populi guys

Latex on wordpress

rohitj — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 17:55:39 +0000

So, you are a geek. You want to write lot of technical things on your wordpress blog. And since you are a geek you want to write technical things in Latex. How do you do? One way is that you write latex code, make pdf, take screenshot, pick the desirable part, and use that image on blog. Ofcourse thats inconvenient and surely doesn’t go with your nerd personality. You want to write Latex code in your blog post. Here are 2 solutions. One is that you use wp-latex plugin. Using this plugin you will be able to write proper Latex code in your blog using tags. But the problem is that this plugin uses Latex, which is not usually supported by web hosts, including Bluehost. And installing tetex locally is painful. So, here comes the second solution. Use mimetex. Checkout http://www.forkosh.dreamhost.com/mimetex.cgi?l_2 . Similarly you can get other latex output by replacing l_2. One guy used this property and made a plugin. Using this plugin you can use latex code, basically mimetex (which is a bit different from Latex) with tags. I couldn’t get it working. Another guy changed this script and made it working with \[tex\]\[\/tex\] tags. It didn’t work as well. This new plugin downloads this image and stores in wp-content/cache folder. But it downloads this image every time someone opens the post. Of course it consumes lot of server and bandwidth. So, I made a small tweak in it. I replaced it’s 15 lines with 1 line. Basically, now instead of downloading the image, it puts src as http://www.forkosh.dreamhost.com/mimetex.cgi? blah blah. And see I am able to use latex code.

Enjoy

Update : You can download the plugin (after my modification) from Plugin for using Latex

Update2 : The plugin is under GPL.

Update3 : So, the code I changed was suggested by Nitin Munjal. You can find him here