Sometimes you just can’t have enough reasons to like somebody’s blog no? Well here’s one more to read DM more often.

If you are a fan of rock music or like concerts and music dos in general then you might want to drop in at the JAMCAT concerts in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Pune. Four simultaneous concerts in these four cities with performances by awesome bands some as good as (Warning: Hype ahead) Dire Straits!

Dee-tayles:

On Sunday Nov 18 @ 6.30 pm in these cities:

Bangalore

St Joseph’s Boys School, Museum Rd

Bands playing: White Noiz, Junkyard Groove and Motherjane

Delhi

College of Vocational Studies, Sheikh Sarai (south campus)

Bands playing: Prithvi, Them Clones and Parikrama

Mumbai

SNDT college ground, Juhu

Bands playing: The Works, Gaurav Dagaonkar and Zero

Pune

Elysium, Koregaon Park

Bands playing: Black, Brute Force and Agni

Thanks to the people at Bindass and LG you can print out as many invits as you want and get all your friends to turn up as well. Feel free to post up in company noticeboards, insti lanboards, engg. colleges etc.

Also fancy going to space? Turn up early (3-ish) for Bindass Go to Space auditions.

Click on www.jammag.com for your ek dum muft invites.

p.s.: Actually it makes good sense to turn up. That way concert goes well. Sponsors like it. Rashmi makes money. She gives some to me. I donate half to a noble cause (Dominoes)  and the rest for my expenses. Which makes me need to freelance less and blog more. Which you like no? So really if you love yourself at all you have to turn up.

You owe it to yourself.

(Well yes there is an alternative. You can just send me money. But that strategy doesn’t seem to be working for me at all outside the family. Chalo, I am off. I need to donate blood for cash. Cough cough. Sigh sigh.)

Nowadays I seem to think about writing a post only when i am upset or irritated.



But i am not going to write about that scenario :)



I gave CAT in November 2004 and failed marginally by not getting any IIM Calls. I scored 98.28 percentile. But didn’t get any IIM Calls as my English score was around 89%



I think i have written a few posts regarding this in this blog way down in 2004 posts.



Then i never tried CAT again. One of my friend asked me to write GMAT at that time itself. But i was really not confident enough to write it.



After 3 years, i gave GMAT last week… ofcourse after preparing for around 2-3 months…

i got a score of 700 with Quant score of 50 and Verbal score of 35.



This hasn’t changed anything drastically in my life. But atleast one of the TODO activities is down in my list and i have regained a bit of confidence that i am not all that pathetic in scoring :)



Do i feel happy?

I am not sure.



Do i feel satisfied?

Yes. a lot.

I guess every GNU/Linux user must have sshed from one comp to another sometime or the other. We have different servers for various purposes in our college and ssh is a common thing. Most of the time, we end up typing some thing like

ssh -XCYP hari@spider.nitt.edu

Though not many knows what these options stands for, life will become very simple if you try to understand the command and create a configuration file for ssh and use it when you ssh from one box to another.

The ssh client takes the parameters from three places in the following order.

• Command line options
• User-specific configuration file
• System-wide configuration file

The command line options are the one you specify when connect to other system using the ssh command. For example ssh -X specifies that X11 forwarding should be enabled.

The User specific configuration file is ~/.ssh/config.

The System wide configuration file is /etc/ssh/ssh_config. Note that the configuration file for ssh server (sshd_server) is also found in this folder. The file ssh_config is the configuration file for the ssh client while sshd_config is the configuration file for the server.

Any configuration value is only changed the first time it is set. So if you run the ssh command with X option, X11 will be forwarded no matter what values ~/.ssh/config and /etc/ssh/ssh_config file has. The values are parsed in the order mentioned above.

The User config file gives users the choices to configure ssh client when you ssh often. A config file is explained with an example below.





Host codelabs


    hostname codelabs.nitt.edu


    user hari


    ForwardX11 yes


    port 22

In the above example, very few options were added to make the config file simple. I guess that will be enough for everyone.

The config file has Host blocks. The properties which come under a host are set when you connect to the given to any host. In this example i have used the host machine called codelabs.nitt.edu. You can also specify * to apply to any host or 10.1.39.* to apply to all machines which comes under 10.1.39. series. Remember that the configuration values are set only once. So if * appears in the beginning of your config file, then the configurations which come below that may not be used by the ssh client. For example consider the following configuration file.


Host *.edu


    ForwardX11 yes

Now in the above case when you connect to any server which ends with .edu (spider.nitt.edu, codelabs.nitt.edu …) then the X is forwarded. But if you want to diasable X11 forwarding for spider.nitt.edu, then the following won’ t work

Host *.edu


    ForwardX11 yes


Host spider


    hostname spider.nitt.edu


    ForwardX11 no





This is because in the first block, ForwardX11 is set to yes for all hosts ending with .edu and then it can’t be changed. The correct way to block X11 forwarding for spider is to have a config file as shown below.


Host spider


    hostname spider.nitt.edu


    ForwardX11 no


Host *.edu


    ForwardX11 yes

You can tweak almost everything you need from the public key file, port, number of passwords prompts, compression, ciphers, compression level, user, tunnel, tunnel device and lots more. :) Happy sshing :-)

All I need is to be free,

Soaring through the worlds on a flying spree

Flapping my tiny little wings

Facing all the winds’ mood swings

Hiding between the green and yellow

Grasslands and forests, both deep and shallow

And swiftly brush against the wet moss dew

Be happy being one of those few

To know what is true and real

To know how it would feel

All I need is to be me

Not the tiniest of dirt to see

Feel myself, feel true, feel pure

Treasure every smile, for sure

Disregard and fight every tear

Move over the moments i fear

Feel safe, feel firm, feel strong

Do no bad, no wrong

And let the good flow through me

Let myself be what i’d be

Hola peeples!

Back from a most exhilarating trip to the Dilli to meet the in-laws, play cards, eat copious sweets and so on.

And not to forget the drive around the city after midnight on Diwali when I had a great chance to take in all that atmosphere. By which I mean suspended particulate matter that now covers the inside of my lungs to a depth of several microns and has aggravated my minor asthma. And let’s not even start about my nose. Let me not get all picky. (Hah!)

Sniff. Gasp. Gurgle. Blow. Ooh barfi!

But I get ahead of myself. All details of the Diwali trip will appear in a friendly blog avatar very soon.

Today I need to get back to work and have only just about enough time to post this frolicsome image from a website I was browsing recently. It is an advertisement for Sharekhan doled out by Google Adsense exhorting novice investors to sign up with them:

Now I like the format. It is quite lively and engaging because of the comic book look and feel. The guy on top looks suitably bamboozled by forwards, options, blue chip, P/E and such like.

But observe the guy at the bottom. The man from Sharekhan.

The friendly face of reliable wealth management he is NOT. In fact he has a look of someone who is just waiting to lay his hands on your money (among other things) before disappearing forever from the face of the earth.

FirstStep - A unique program for those who have never invested before! And will never ever invest again! Unless they sold a kidney! Ha!

Would you give your hard earned money to that man with that sneer?

On the other hand would you give it to a freelance writer who needs it?

Sigh. Thought so.

Searching through myriad of information in the Internet is a tedious task. Sometimes we spend hours to get what we require. Today I read about social search engines. If you want a single line definition, it’s a trend that is introducing human element into Internet searches. If search engines are technology’s gift to knowledge seeking and sifting, using spiders and bots which retrieve information in a split second, they are now turning populist, literally, using people to rate sites and thereby influence their ranking.



Certainly results based on BOT+HUMAN is better than results by BOT. And now comes the fun part. Why would anyone bother to rate the websites???. Because they offer us incentives. TRUE!!!.

For each search you do on their website you earn points which can be redeemed for prizes. Now you naturally think about the quality of the search result !!!! The results are the real time compilation of the search results from other top search engines. So the real purpose is never compromised.



One such site I found is irazoo.com and I registered for it. They gave me a referral banner through which if anyone register i earn some points. As the concept is really good I really recommend it. I hate spam mails so I won’t send one. I also request people not to import your address book simply and send loads of mails and make a mess.



If you want to register through my referral link then click,



Karthik’s Link



Or else if you feel why you should go through my link when you can directly register yourself, please check out www.irazoo.com . The look and feel is not that great as google’s but still give it a try.

A few fotos clicked during Festember 2007….



Click Here to view the remaining fotos…

A few pics taken during the event Tour de NITT conducted by us (Wisdom Club) exclusively for the Second Years… Click here to view the remaining…