Categories
Personal

The BTTB Experience

My dad was insisting on trying out the BTTB internet service for a long time since some of his colleagues highly praised the internet connection from BTTB. So I finally agreed to try out the internet service from BTTB, the state owned telephony and internet service provider. There’s a nasty feeling in me about all state owned service providers. Still, to make dad happy about it, I agreed to buy a modem after he managed a telephone connection. I was a bit happy that we got a telephone connection within the 24 hours of submitting an application. I thought things have changed after the recent formation of BTCL from BTTB. My Dad and I went to the local computer market and purchased an internal modem for the purpose. I installed the modem successfully and dialed. Whoa? It worked!

I was wondering if it was the BTTB people knew years before. You had to wait hours, days, weeks and months to get a telephone connection. The service used to be very poor. The BTTB engineers used to demand bribe for their service. I see nothing today. I was glad and surfing the internet enthusiastically. My dream came to an end when I had a power cut after around 10 minutes into the browsing.

When the electricity returned, I turned on my PC and dialed. Damn. No response. Tried again and again. Nothing happened. Got frustrated enough to call the local Customer Service of BTTB Internet Section. They suggested my lack of expertise and keep trying. I said nothing and kept trying after dropping the call. I kept trying for about 30 minutes when I finally decided to give up. I called the Customer Care again and now they told me that there has to be at least one telephone line free for data connectivity. They suggested that I should call the dialup number from my telephone to see if it responds sending back a modem tone. I followed the instruction. A female voice let me know that there’s no line available at the moment. I kept trying when a single line would be free. I waited for 4 hours. No way!! No lines free. Now it’s around 5.45 PM in the afternoon when I found a line free and got connected to the internet. It’s true that BTTB has made fair progress in providing cheap services, but they need to scale. Being a GP Internet user from the beginning, I never knew that I had to wait for a telephone line to remain free before I could connect to the internet. And it’s the national ISP. The other day they blocked Youtube. I wish our internet was free from the clutches of the corrupted people working at the BTTB.

Categories
PHP

How Popular Apache and PHP are?

I have been using Apache and PHP together with mySQL for a long time. I just came across the following resources and got a brief idea about how popular they might be among other developers.

PHP:
php is one of the most popular interpreted programming languages of today. PHP was created as a Personal Home Page (php) tool by Rasmus for maintaining his personal web site. But the ease and flexibility of the language has won the hearts of millions. Now php is perhaps the most widely used language for web scripting.

Visit this link: http://www.php.net/usage.php to see a graph illustrating the popularity of php. The graph shows the continual increment in the usage of php over the years.

Apache:
The most popular web server of the present day. The following link shows you a graph from the web server survey conducted by netcraft in March, 2009.

Link: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/03/15/march_2009_web_server_survey.html

From the report, it is seen that 66.65% web servers run on Apache.

 

From the stats it is clear that Apache being free and open sourced, holds the largest share in the web server market. Though the php related chart doesn’t show relative comparison of php with other languages, I wonder if any other languages are used as widely as php is.

Categories
Python

Google App Engine Sample Apps

I recently found this URL: http://code.google.com/p/google-app-engine-samples/

It’s a Google Code project with links to some cool sample app source codes.

I haven’t yet checked them out. But I liked the online demo of the “Shell” app. It’s really nice: http://shell.appspot.com/

Take your time to have some real fun J with these projects.