A Successful Running Week

It’s been a long time since I had a week like this week. I make excuses for

It’s been a long time since I had a week like this week. I make excuses for delaying my workouts and eventually not doing them. This week, I managed to have a break through, run 3 days of the week, and hit my modest weekly goal of 10 km. This is a spectacular feeling!

I haven’t run a 5K in such a long time that I’ve decided to start the C25K program yet again. I keep going to somewhere around 4 weeks and break it for one reason or the other. This time too, I see travel scheduled right around then. I hoping to beat it this time.

No space left on device

I got paged a bit ago because one of our sites was down. This site does go down occasionally because of an issue with Solr. Usually, it just needs a restart of Solr…

I got paged a bit ago because one of our sites was down. This site does go down occasionally because of an issue with Solr. Usually, it just needs a restart of Solr and a restart of background queues. Obviously, that didn’t work this time around. I had a sneaky suspicion this was not the case since we didn’t have any Solr related alerts.

This looked more like a problem with the frontend server and it was indeed. The logs said it was out of space, and df -h reported plenty of free space. Having been in this situation before, I knew it was likely to be inodes. df -i is handy to debug in these situations.

I narrowed down the problem thanks to this great answer on Stack Overflow by simon. Essentially, go to your root folder and run this command:

sudo find . -xdev -type f | cut -d "/" -f 2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

You may need to edit it to the following form to get it to actually work (thanks to Frederick Nord’s comment):

sudo find . -xdev -type f | cut -d "/" -f 2 | sort --buffer=1G | uniq -c | sort -n --buffer=1G

Now find the folder with the largest number of inodes and start digging deeper. In my case it was a cache folder that created tmp files for sessions, which wasn’t ever cleared.

Image Credit: Crowd by James Cridland on Flickr.

A review of 2014 and plans for 2015

Success

  • Writing: I’ve written 30 posts this year compared to 15 in 2012. I’m not great at writing, but it’s getting better. This blog got 7,904 visits this year compared to 3,271 last year. I think it’s a bit of a fluke due to one high-traffic post. I’ve started writing 750 words a day, a lot of which turns into blog posts. This explains why I’ve been posting more often lately.
  • Focus: I’ve cut down on a lot of online life to focus on pretty much 2 things: Work and my contribution to Mozilla. Burnout is real and I’ve gone through it. Not doing that again 🙂 This year’s daily focus is going add an hour or two of studying to that list.
  • Read more non-fiction: I read at least 7 non-fiction books and they were all a great read. I fully recommend following The Farnam Street if you’d like recommendations.
  • Travel: I’ve been to Tanzania, Germany, UK, and the US this year. Here’s to more travels in 2015!
  • Accounting. For the last 2 years, my accounts have been a mess. I caught up this year and fixed them all up and I’ve paid back taxes until now and filed returns to date. This year’s challenge is going to be tracking my spending more tightly and budgeting a bit better.

Not quite success:

  • An exercise habit. I love running now, though, I’m nowhere close to consistent. It didn’t help that I had quite a bit of travel and moved cities this year. I’m hoping the somewhat better stability this year will help. Since July, I’ve only had 15 workouts. I’m hoping to have about 120 work outs this year. That’s 3 workouts a week with a 20{13371f13f0bf161e7595c2ac5df92e005bed3de1d132ef646d0a44f3a1a9ee62} leeway.
  • Learn C. Going to try this one again. I tried unsuccessfully to learn Scala and Haskell. In retrospect, I should have focused on just C. That’s what I’ll try this year.
  • Learn JavaScript. I still don’t understand large swaths of it, but I built a thing with backbone! This is definitely on my goals for this year after C.
  • Cut down on the unnecessary from my online life. I’ve stopped committing to things I can’t finish, and given up commitments that I knew I couldn’t manage. My move from Google also went pretty well. Right now, I’m stuck with a bit too many servers. That’s a project to tackle this year.

New Challenges

  • Work on my bachelor’s degree. For those of who don’t know me well enough, I’ve still not finished a bachelor’s degree. I enrolled in a course in June last year and I’ve been lazy about it till December. I’ve started working on it strongly lately. My goal is to set a habit of spending at least 1 hour every day for studies.
  • Build more things. I completely enjoyed building the Salary Converter in 2012 and hgstats this year. In 2015, I want to build more things and play with new technology for some time. The alternative is to improve the existing projects with some new technology. I’ve been wanting to convert the Salary Converter into a fully JS app.

The Address Proof Nightmare

If you move from one city to another and you don’t have any document proving your residence at your new address, have you really moved? After all, you doesn’t exist unless you’re documented, right?

If you move from one city to another and you don’t have any document proving your residence at your new address, have you really moved? After all, you doesn’t exist unless you’re documented, right? Perhaps that’s why someone got an Adhaar card for Hanuman. Getting this sorted has been a saga. In retrospect, I have learned lessons to get this right the next time.

My first attempt was to talk to my banks to see what form of address proof they would require. They wanted a rent agreement and a utility bill in my landlord’s name, a registered rent agreement, or one of the other accepted “safe documents”, which are government issued. My landlord hasn’t ever talked to me. He owns a few houses in the area and prefers to delegate all the work to a broker. On a good day, the broker is drunk by 11 am. He has a tiny office in the neighbourhood and you can smell the fumes when you pass by the office. I had to nag him for a week to get a rent agreement, but it was not registered. He even tried to convince me that nobody in Delhi registers their rent agreement. I’m guessing the landlord didn’t want to go to the trouble or pay the government the fee. Oh and the utility bills at my apartment aren’t in my landlord’s name. It’s in the name of the previous owner of the house. Fun, fun fun!

The only way to get my bank’s address changed is to work from weak ones to strong ones, slowly. I got a postpaid cellphone connection with Airtel on the basis of my rental agreement. My bank changed the address for my credit card bill on the basis of in-person verification, so now I have two documents pointing to this address. Both of which are considered weak compared to a document issued by the government. I wasn’t depending on my credit bill at that point though, because the only way I can get one is by calling customer care and having them courier one to me. I tried that twice and it didn’t work.

My next attempt was to get an account at a government bank. The passbook or a statement are both considered as address proof. I walked into the nearest SBI Branch and the gentleman who looked like a school teacher told me in a stern voice that he finds it risky to give me an account since I don’t have any government issued address proof for my address in Delhi. What he didn’t tell me is that RBI changed the rules and you only need government-issued address proof for either your permanent or communication address. I walked into an SBI InTouch branch and asked to open a new account. They helped me open an account in 20 minutes and I select the branch I was originally refused just out of spite. (Side note: InTouch is very cool and somewhat futuristic)

This saga is nearly coming to a close. All my bank accounts now point to my new address. I have a postpaid phone connection and my credit card bills regularly come to this address. I’ve just applied for an LPG connection. I tried to get an MTNL connection, though that was denied because they don’t have feasibility for this area 🙁

Moving is hard work just because of craziness like this. If I didn’t have flexible work hours, I’m sure I would have struggled to make this work. I’m mostly all set for now, until I move from my current apartment. And then it begins again 🙂