This article will tell you a simple way to login automatically to beam cable (Beam-Telecom) internet connection instead of using the web login manually. Not only that, I’ll also tell you how to do this auto-login through your router if you have one with a custom linux firmware. I took a beam cable connection a few days ago. The price is excellent and speeds are good but the only thing that bothered me was the web based login. You need to open up a browser and login through their online portal before you can access the internet. Now, if you don’t log off, then the login may persist even across PC/router reboots but many times it doesn’t. But in these times, it becomes a pain in the wrong place when I am just looking to play online on my PS3 or one of my various net-capable devices, scattered around the house, are trying to pull data and this forces me to open up my laptop just to login. Even for people who use the internet only on their PC, they might not be using the browser all the time and find it a hassle, minor one but still a hassle, to open a browser and login. Hence, I set out to find a way to do this automatically. (BTW, I’ll also be listing out how I came onto the solution in case you are in interested. If you are not, feel free to skip some paragraphs below to move to the solution)

I wrote this script a few days ago to plot real-time / streaming data with gnuplot. The motivation was that I needed to test a piece of code for a touchscreen driver that I had written at work. The issue was that the UI wasn’t quite ready yet, so I wanted to test just the driver to be working fine. Now, the very first thought for the software to use that came to me was “gnuplot” but I found that it can’t really do this in an easy way. A colleague suggested me to use “replot” command with gnuplot. I whipped out my perl hat and a few hours later, voila!! my very own real time data plotter was ready. Now, I can stream data from any program to this script or provide the data on STDIN and can see the data being plotted continuously. BTW, it was awesome to see all the shapes that I drew on my target board’s LCD touchscreen to come alive on my PC monitor almost instantaneously.

This is a script to plot streaming / real-time data (i.e. plot the points as the data comes in) with gnuplot. The script is written in perl and works in windows as well as linux. Please read on to see the requirements, installation, usage and download link. I should also thank my colleague Rabindra Mandal, who gave me the initial idea and Thanassis Tsiodras, whose script I looked at before creating mine (though mine is quite different in nature. Tsiodras’ script is for “moving” data like things with limitless ranges, while mine is more for data that has limitless occurences within a limited range as my main motivation behind it was to plot touchscreen data)

If you can’t get tail command to continuously monitor a file, then read on. I was working on a script yesterday, a part of which depended on continuous monitoring of a text file. I had used our trusty old “tail” command for this but while testing by manually putting in some data into the file, it was failing but curiously it was working fine when used in actual scenario. Befuddled, I did a simple test. I created a simple text file “a.txt” with a few lines of data and then ran the following command.

This is just to let you know that a few of my friends have started Overclocked, a haven for PC enthusiasts in India. Overclocked is an online store for the people who like to stretch the performance of their machines to the maximum. They store a lot of high end computer stuff that isn’t easy to find in India and that too for a reasonable price. They also assemble mean gaming machines while giving you quite a bang for your buck with gauranteed satisfaction, shipped anywhere in India, and that’s not all, they can personalize it too with a variety of custom modifications (I really like their laser engravings).