February 2004 Archives

Orkut invites which i sent almost a week back got delivered today. Apparently, its not only me who is having this problem.

Somebody stop these jokers. Apart from littering the walls with their posters and slogans(do they do that now?), these jokers are planning for SMS spam.

Manish, you are better off without your cellphone.

Its final now. The itinerary is out. India will play five one-dayers and three tests between March 10 and April 18. This will be one of the most watched test series, thanks to the political imbroglio between India and Pakistan. India relies a lot on its batting prowess and Pakistan has a great bowling line up. Also there is lots of interest generated due to the fact that these teams are playing in Pakistan after a long time(13 years?). TV Broadcasting rights has been sold out.

As Pratyush points out, it shouldn't matter who wins. It should be taken as a confidence / peace building measure. Though i have my doubts, I wish both the team all success and hope to the enjoy this toughly contested series.

Ref: Indian cricket team to head for Pakistan on March 10

I have spent the last six hours or so online. Chatting with friends / a couple of my cousins whom i havent spoken for years together, browsing, LJ'ing, ...

I have some problem with the power extension board and its not working properly. So, my DIAS modem is in the bathroom connected to the heater power socket and a hanging network cable comes out. Looks funny.

Need to get an electrician tomorrow morning to get it fixed first. And off to sleep now.

-balaji

ps: There was this show on Sun TV where cine artists performed somewhere in Singapore. Arjun sang "Malare! Mounama!" from the film Karna, orginally by SPB. Was fantastic.

Atlast i have DIAS at home. The guys from BSNL today came in the afternoon and set it up. All they did was to connect a modem to the telephone line and connect the telephone / LAN cable to it. They gave me a 10 series IP and I am on the net. The whole process took less than half an hour. In all, the whole process of getting the connection took me close to four hours. But i wasted almost an hour at the SBI, JP Nagar getting my DD, thanks to a dumb headed manager who did everything else other than signing those DD's which were lying on his table.

Now i have some questions which needs to be cleared. Need to check with fox2mike or nerdy.

Let me relax now and enjoy the always on connection. :-)

Eric Allman rants about spam in an article titled "The Economics of Spam" He says "How does this work in the real world? Well, sellers try to maximize profits by maximizing price and minimizing expense. Advertising is an expense, so keeping this cheap is a good thing. And there's the rub." and goes on to say that e-postage / challenge-response systems need to be implemented to increase the cost to the sender.

Else where, Bill Gates revealed his 'magic solution' to spam and Yahoo announces its innovative solution about the problem.

The amount of spam I receive these days is shooting up. Sometime back I read on Manish's journal that the Nigerian spammers have been caught. But still I receive them in addition to mail delivery failures for mails faked as sent from my domain. Around 25% of mails I receive at my domain and around 90% of mails I receive at my yahoo account is spam.

God save me.

Watched LOTR - TROTK yesterday at Symphony. Enjoyed the movie though i slept for sometime in between. :-) Also, i felt the movie was stretched a bit too long. It was a little over three hours i guess.

Other updates: Went to the BSNL customer care yesterday hoping to get my DIAS connection but was closed yesterday. Will need to get that done tomorrow.

As Manish points out, its Orkut Day today. Thanks to Vikrant, I joined Orkut.

dmesg was displaying message "ACPI: Interpreter disabled." there was no /proc/acpi directory and when i tried starting acpid, it was erroring out "cant find /proc/acpi/events". After a bit of fiddling and googling found that i need to pass the "acpi=on" option to the kernel to get ACPI working. And now poweroff command / the power button gives a clean shutdown. Need to check speedstep/cpufreq.

I need a break!

Ever mis-typed sl instead of ls on a Debian GNU/Linux box. Did that and was baffled to see a nice ASCII art on the screen.

Check it out if you have a Debian box around.

$ apt-cache show sl
Package: sl
Priority: optional
Section: games
Installed-Size: 70
Maintainer: Kenshi Muto
Architecture: i386
Version: 3.03-13
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.1-1), libncurses5 (>= 5.3.20021109-1)
Filename: pool/main/s/sl/sl_3.03-13_i386.deb
Size: 13804
MD5sum: 7cce44dbc0824d4ab97bc86f088524da
Description: Correct you if you type `sl' by mistake
.
Sl is a program that can display animations aimed to correct you
if you type 'sl' by mistake.

If its not Adam Gilchrist or Ricky Ponting, it is Mathew Hayden and Andrew Symonds. The ball has seen all corners of SCG. Indian's have been intimidated by the hard hitting Australians. Last ten overs produced 110 runs.

359/5 in 50 overs.India needs 360 to win. Same target as in the World Cup finals and its gonna be a repeat of that match. India is going to crumble under pressure.

Now guys. Go and get some sleep or do something useful. And dont tell that this is the best Indian team and has the strength to upset number 1 Australia. The whole world will laugh at you!

Found this in my web server access log.

213.52.200.140 - - [05/Feb/2004:12:58:26 -0800] "GET /cgi-bin/formmail.pl HTTP/1.0" 404 213 "http://www.balajin.net/" "-" 213.52.200.140 - - [05/Feb/2004:12:58:27 -0800] "GET /cgi-bin/formmail.cgi HTTP/1.0" 404 214 "http://www.balajin.net/" "-" 213.52.200.140 - - [05/Feb/2004:12:58:28 -0800] "GET /cgi-bin/FormMail.pl HTTP/1.0" 404 213 "http://www.balajin.net/" "-" 213.52.200.140 - - [05/Feb/2004:12:58:28 -0800] "GET /cgi-bin/FormMail.cgi HTTP/1.0" 404 214 "http://www.balajin.net/" "-" 213.52.200.140 - - [05/Feb/2004:12:58:29 -0800] "GET /cgi-sys/formmail.pl HTTP/1.0" 404 213 "http://www.balajin.net/" "-" 213.52.200.140 - - [05/Feb/2004:12:58:30 -0800] "GET /cgi-sys/formmail.cgi HTTP/1.0" 404 214 "http://www.balajin.net/" "-" 213.52.200.140 - - [05/Feb/2004:12:58:30 -0800] "GET /cgi-sys/FormMail.pl HTTP/1.0" 404 213 "http://www.balajin.net/" "-" 213.52.200.140 - - [05/Feb/2004:12:58:31 -0800] "GET /cgi-bin/Formmail.pl HTTP/1.0" 404 213 "http://www.balajin.net/" "-" 213.52.200.140 - - [05/Feb/2004:12:58:31 -0800] "GET /cgi-bin/mail.pl HTTP/1.0" 404 209 "http://www.balajin.net/" "-" 213.52.200.140 - - [05/Feb/2004:12:58:32 -0800] "GET /cgi-bin/FORMMAIL.PL HTTP/1.0" 404 213 "http://www.balajin.net/" "-"

Read this why? And the source IP is from UK.

$ whois 213.52.200.140 % This is the RIPE Whois server. % The objects are in RPSL format. % % Rights restricted by copyright. % See http://www.ripe.net/ripencc/pub-services/db/copyright.html

inetnum: 213.52.200.128 - 213.52.200.255
netname: GL-LLGH-HACKNEYEDUCATIONDEPT
descr: London Borough of Hackney
country: GB
admin-c: JV402-RIPE
tech-c: JV402-RIPE
status: ASSIGNED PA
mnt-by: GBIX-RIPE-MNT
changed: ppaul@globix.net 20020318
source: RIPE

route: 213.52.192.0/20
descr: Globix
origin: AS4513
notify: radb@globix.net
mnt-by: GBIX-RIPE-MNT
changed: cliendo@globix.net 20020110
source: RIPE

person: Julian Vennis
address: London Borough of Hackney
address: Edith Cavell Building
address: Enfield Road
address: London
address: N1 5BA
address: UK
phone: +44 20 8356 7556
fax-no: +44 20 8356 7235
e-mail: jvennis@hackney.gov.uk
nic-hdl: JV402-RIPE
mnt-by: GBIX-RIPE-MNT
changed: ppaul@globix.net 20020318
source: RIPE

Comments?

After a blissful long weekend, you get fscked royally in the morning traffic. Shit! What a way to start the week.

Anyhow, Its going to be a short week for me. I am travelling to Tanjavore tonight for a friends marriage and will be back on Thursday.

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