November 27, 2002

Of friends and the past ..

All the testing on BlogMan yesterday meant that I made no post here at all but to find out all the techy junk, you’ll have to read the other blog :p I have found a new friend who is one of those select few who enter my "inner circle" :p I make friends easily but I don’t let most people know about the weird stuff that goes through my head – OK, you may beg to differ since I write about a lot of things here that are totally weird (or maybe not – depending on how you look at it <g>) but then again I don’t write about *everything* here. There are things I leave out – personal stuff, the weirdest theories I have about the world and reality etc.

I feel a bit of a duality here and also feel me going off at a tangent (and not talking about what I originally intended to talk about – but let me save that for another day and follow this thread of thought …) Now most of the time, I say my life is an open book and everybody is free to know anything about me. Heck, I write about almost everything in my life on this journal … but that’s not quite true because for the longest time I never spoke about my former marriage, my ex-wife or my son. The reason I carefully left those things out has nothing to do with how I feel about privacy at all but rather to do with Sri Lanka and how things are perceived here … basically it was to save my parents from heartache and embarrassment (though I can never understand why *they( should be embarrassed about something that I did) in case somebody from Sri Lanka or our family read this journal. I’ve decided to totally let go recently though and so am willing to talk about even the stuff that I didn’t talk about earlier.

Again, my comments need a little bit of explanation – at least about the Sri Lankan society bit. Here in Sri Lanka, everything is stratified and compartmentalized – you marry from your own class, own race, own religion and anybody who strays outside is an embarrassment and usually ostracized by their family. I have never cared for this kind of behaviour or this kind of society and didn’t really worry about how others felt when I got married but then it became evident that this was a source of great mental agony to my parents and to spare them any further anguish and embarrassment when dealing with our relatives, I refrained from talking about my marriage and later divorce on my journal. Then I came back to Sri Lanka and my parents wanted me to get married again and that made it an issue again because a person who has been married is sort of "devalued" in the marriage market. I have always had problems with the fact that my former marriage was not mentioned when my parents wanted to find a bride for me and I always intended to let the girl know before everything was finalized if it ever came to that because I wouldn’t have felt at all comfortable in getting married to a girl under false pretenses. However, that never came to be fortunately since I told my parents that I wasn’t interested in marriage at the moment :p

OK, I see I have really strayed now … But I guess what I was trying to get at was that these pages are an open window into my life and I talk about everything in my life (at least now) here but that does not mean that this is the sum total of my thoughts and experiences. There are still areas that I will not talk about here just because it involves other people and that’s the issue I really wanted to write about today but since I’ve already written at length, let me save that for tomorrow 🙂

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Posted by Fahim at 7:59 am  |  No Comments

Some of you who only visit www.farook.org or fahim.razorsys.com might have been surprised to find no new updates yesterday or to suddenly find a post for both today and yesterday when there was nothing yesterday :p What happened was that I did my e-mails and created my post for the day as usual before I left for work and then discovered that the RazorSys server was down and so I couldn’t update my blog nor retrieve/send my e-mail. So I updated the Nortiq mirror with my post but not RazorSys. Of course, I later revised the entry in the evening because I had forgotten to add something but that’s another story … Anyway, I updated in the evening when I got back from work and everything should be OK – unless, I can’t post again today :p

Most of yesterday’s coding time was spent struggling with BlogMan – as I mentioned yesterday, Greg found the solution to the proxy problem and I happily put it into effect thinking that I’d have a new build out within the hour but so much for the plans of mice and men :p The code revision would not work at all with my proxy server! The Indy HTTP component has a BasicAuthentication value in both the proxy parameters property and the request header property. I had thought (and so the documentation also seemed to imply) that the BasicAuthentication value on the request header referred to the actual server end of the transaction – whether to use authentication to process the request and not to verify whether to authentication on the proxy. But on my side of things at least, the proxy authentication would work only if I set the BasicAuthentication to true for the request property as well. This worked fine for a GET request, but a POST request was another matter …

I found that a POST request wouldn’t go through the proxy (the one I was using at least) with even the BasicAuthentication on the request property set. So then I set the user name and password for the request property to the proxy authentication user name and password and this got me through the proxy but the POST request failed at the server. This kind of confirms my fears because I had thought that the user name and password for the request property was again to be used only for authentication at the server end and not the proxy itself. So I’m left with three possibilities: 1) the proxy server that I use is buggy – which is possible since it’s a freeware one without much documentation or support 2) the Indy component has a bug – not quite so possible since it did seem to work for Greg 3) I don’t know what the heck I am doing and am botching a perfectly simple thing – which is absolutely possible :p Anyway, I am trying to find another free proxy server which supports authentication and is easy to use and configure so that I can test the BlogMan code again with it. I’ll keep you updated as to what happens …

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Posted by Fahim at 5:28 am  |  No Comments