Life as I find it

If you have a test server installed on your machine at home (or elsewhere) to do web development work, you may run into this common problem. You try to do something that writes to your server (wordpress plugin upgrades, for example) and it wants ftp information!

What ftp? Its already running on the same machine. The thing is, your wordpress has not been installed by the same user as your apache. The easiest way to sort this out is to change ownership of the wordpress folder to the same user as apache, and the thing will no longer want ftp passwords, because it can write to the directories and uses its regular ‘get’ thing.

How do you go about doing it? You tried changing ownership, and it refused. You are sure you own the wordpress, but are not able to transfer it. This happens because this ownership can only be changed by the root. So what you have to do it:

sudo -i <-- This makes you root (as different from running stuff as root, which you probably tried while changing permissions)
Then you go into your wordpress directory:
cd /var/www/wordpress <-- This has to be whatever your path is
Now to change the permissions:
find wp-content | xargs chown www-data:www-data <-- Here, wp-content can be any folder you want the software to be able to write to.

That's it. Done. Now try to upgrade those plugins, and it should be smooth as silk - no questions asked that you can't answer.

Its been a long time since I posted here.

Much has been happening. As you guys probably know, I’m busy with my son, Nisarga these days. I do write about him, but its on his own blog.

He just 3 months old, so I’m still at home and have not started working yet. Honestly, I’m enjoying motherhood so much, that I don’t know if I want to start working again.

In the meanwhile, to remain occupied, I’m doing a lot of redesign work for my websites – Wide Aware and here, designing some themes, maybe and in general living more with softwares than society, so be prepared for a change in direction on this blog, which essentially follows my life. Over the coming period, its likely I may share my learnings and discoveries in the web design part of my life, as well as share any code I may write.

Also stay tuned for a new look that may suddenly turn up here any time after a couple of weeks.

If you have suggestions as to what you would find attractive, or something you find irritating here, let me know.

MTNL Triband is cheap, easy to set up, and reasonably reliable when all you do is surf. When you end up downloading a lot of data, you find that there is much to discover on the front of getting what you pay for. I just tested the regular speed I get on my modem, and it turned out to be 100kbps. No wonder my MTNL connection always seemed slow. And no, it wasn’t any slower than usual when I tested. Was running normally for it.

Now, the thing is, I have never paid for a slow connection as such. One of the main reasons for signing up for Triband was MTNL’s clear statement that cable internet providers provide speeds less than 256kbps, and speeds under 256kbps don’t qualify as broadband.

SO I signed up for 512kbps, and when it still seemed slow, upgraded to 1mbps Still, no change in performance. At which point, I tested the speeds I was actually getting. My modem shows 256kbps, while any online test shows around 100 +/- 5. So where is all this money I’ve paid MTNL for 4 years gone?

Apparently, I’m not the only one. Almost every person, regardless of what plan they choose seems to begin from slow speeds and it takes complaints about slow speeds to get them to raise your limits to what you paid for. Out of 17 people I spoke with, only 3 began their internet connections with the speeds they paid for. 4 of them complained about slow speeds a couple of times, and it was increased. 1 has a recurring problem with speed on a connection that should give him 512kbps. He complains, it goes up, and is slow again after some days. 6 others with the 512kbps night unlimited plan had never checked the speeds they got since they mostly used them for surfing and downloading when they were sleeping, but on my insistence checked and were angry to discover that they were not even getting half the speed the plan charges them for. The others were miscellaneous cases with complicated stories of plan changes/problems and not much relevant to speed.

My husband thinks I should go to the consumer courts. However, the problem with this is that consumer courts would like you to first approach MTNL, at which point they readily increase your speed – so then you don’t really have a complaint left for the court.

What I am looking at is this default “setting” that cheats people on a regular basis till they complain. If their billing system can refer to their records of my plan and bill according to that, why can’t their speed system refer to the same plan and provide according to that?

In MTNL’s own words, they are not providing a broadband service, since their speeds are not exceeding 256kbps.

Oh, they have the capacity – I’ve seen lightening fast MTNL connections. Incredible speeds, and real value for money. The thing is, you have to not just pay for it, but make sure that you test the speed you get and insist that they give you what you paid for.

What would be the electricity bill for the additional usage of the computer when my downloads took over 5 times the time they should for over 3 years? Who compensates me for this? Maybe we need a PIL.