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ISP related issues. Reliance Communications WiMax problems solved

Rakesh — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:51:17 +0000

Recently a lot of issues have turned up with my ISP provider, Reliance Communications in this case. I happen to use multiple laptops and a router. They lock a system based on MAC address or a long duration dhcp lease file. There are various ways to get rid of this situation. A few which I could figure out and seem to work are

– Do neatly logout of their web application, before switching machines. As they keep the records, which would not let you login using a different machine till a session timeout which ranges from 0.5 to 6 hours.

– Spoof Your MAC Address, if you are using multiple laptops/desktops

use ifconfig utility:

MAC address can be changed very easily using ifconfig. Run the following command as root user.

#ifconfig eth0 down hw ether address

eth0 is the name of the interface/NIC which address is to be changed.

down means the NIC is to be shutdown before changing address.

hw ether means hardware address class is ether(which indicates ethernet).

address is the address which will used as the new mac.

After the successful execution of the command. start the NIC again using the command:

# /sbin/ifconfig eth0 up

– Release your IP after successful log out

# dhclient -r -pf < path to the current dhclient pid file >

The path of current dhclient pid file can be found using

# ps -eaf | grep dhclient

Path is usually /var/run/dhclient-eth0.pid or /var/run/dhclient-wlan0.pid

Obsession – How much is too much ?

Rakesh — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 07:17:37 +0000

Obsession: an unhealthy and compulsive preoccupation with something or someone

Everyone or say most of us or may be some of us would have definitely gone through the periods of intense obsession. It could be of diverse nature viz. career, love life, passion, religious sentiments etc. Obessions in a way can be a boon as they tend to keep you focussed and energised, if related to career/work etc. Although, if there is a result associated with that obsession, consequences may not always be pleasant.The human mind tends to believe the positive outcome of the obsession. You tend to seeing things fall in place in a way to fulfill your obsession. And offcourse, the famous quote from Paulo Coelho catches up more meaning and essence.

“When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”

Obsession can grip your mind so intensely, that those school of thoughts keep on running in mind while you are eating, sleeping, driving or even taking bath. Some people regard obsession as a quantity to measure seriousness and willingness on that obsession. It may not always be true. Obsession is usually coupled with retrospection. We may try to relate it to some unaccomplished tasks of the past. It can also be accentuated by superstitious beliefs, astrology etc. There are various factors that may trigger or enhance obsession like friends, family, society or even music.

Is obsession good? Well it’s a difficult one to answer. It all depends on what you are obsessed with, its feasibility, relevance and practicality to your life etc. A positive obsession is always good and a negative can have a bad impact on your life. It is good to be obsessed, but in a moderation. Sharing your obsession with loved ones, close friends etc can help to overcome or drive it in a new positive direction.

Video in ASCII using VLC, SSH and refine with ffmpeg

Rakesh — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:47:01 +0000

This is how a video looks in ASCII.

How did we achieve it ?

- Login to a remote machine using ssh

- play a video using cvlc ( command line vlc )

- record the video using istanbul session recorder ( if u are in linux )

- convert it to mp4 format using ffmpeg

ffmpeg -i file.ogg -sameq file.mp4

- Overlay the sound using ffmpeg and .mp3 of the same video. As in the sound would have played on remote machine and hence istanbul session recorder would not capture it.

ffmpeg -i file.mp4 -map 0.0 -i file.mp3 -map 1.0 -acodec copy -vcodec copy -ab 128k -ar 44100 file.mp4

- Crop the video, if you want to remove stuffs of your desktop before upload

ffmpeg -i output.mp4 -croptop 50 -cropbottom 50 output1.mp4

How to make Bhelpuri at home in few easy steps !

admin — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:57:18 +0000

Bhelpuri, the exotic Indian snacks can be prepared easily at home in the following easy steps.

=> Get a large packet of Haldiram Bhujia Sev

From Food

=> Get two tomatoes, two onion, 4 lemons, 1-2 green chillies, black pepper powder etc

From Food

=> Cut the tomatoes and onion in small pieces and lemon into 2 halves as shown below

From Food

=> Mix onion and tomatoes in a large bowl

From Food

=> Add black pepper ( don’t add too much of it, as it may upset the stomach)

From Food

=> Squeeze all the lemon in a different bowl and remove the seeds

From Food

=> Empty the haldiram bhujia sev pack in the bowl containing onion and tomatoes

From Food

=> Add the lemon juice in the mixture and mix well.

From Food

=> Add topping of coriander leaves and nicely cut green chillies, mix well and it is ready to serve

From Food

The chef can be reached here

Huntplace – The idea, reason and future

Rakesh — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:07:30 +0000

Travelling, excursions, adventures who doesn’t like them . A vast chunk of population likes to freak out on small adventurous trips on weekends. The reason for this drive is to get rid of the mundane and mechanical cycle of office-home-offce and destress oneself. But the major question that arises is where to go? why this one and why not that one ? what kind of place is it ( historic, nature, modern etc). How do we decide on this, googling and talking to colleagues. After all this exercise of mining tonnes of pages and talking to bunch of friends, the decision becomes more difficult. Differences of opinion starts among the group.

Huntplace as the name suggests let’s you hunt for the place where you want to go . It basically aggregates/mines the data from resourceful and rich web applications like Flickr, Youtube, Wiki, etc. and makes your life easier. Instead of stumbling upon those stale and old sites, get the data from the popular and reliable sources. It is a mashup that calls the pulic APIs and let’s u explore your travel destination based on the content received.

The whole idea is in a very early phase and has been implemented. There are bunch of enhancements and ramifications that can be done.

When it rains in Bangalore

admin — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:34:38 +0000

9:30 PM – 20 K.Ms – Shutdown the system. Lappy goes in the bag, lights off. Door locked. Into the parking, hit the road.

9:45PM – 12 K.Ms - Old Madras Road signal. Lights, red. Gigantic water drops started falling. Being on a two wheeler, had no option but to stop. Parked in Indira Nagar on the juice shop. Had an awesome mango shake. Rain pouring in at gushing speed. Roads started submerging , water everywhere. All traffic rules violated, everyone rushing here and there. No option , but to wait, cosy and dry under the shop.

10:15PM – 12K.Ms – Making calls to friends to kill boredom

10:20PM – 12K.Ms – More calls !!! geez, I am bored.

10:30PM – 12K.Ms – More calls !!! geez, I am bored.

10:40PM – 12K.Ms – Rain seemed to reduce in intensity. Made an attempt to proceed further, drenched slighlty. But bearable. Heading south.

10:50PM – 10K.Ms – Whoa, what’s that? Never seen so many vehicles and jam on a flyover (Domlur flyover). Cars coming in from all the directions. What’s happening. Rainfall intensified.

11:00PM – 10K.Ms – Managed to get down from the flyover, swerving in between car spaces. Drenched badly. Roads submerged in water till knee length. Parked the vehicle and hid under the big stationary shop.

11:00PM – 10K.Ms - Waiting for rain to reduce. Cars, trucks , buses all stuck up on the road. Honking honking ! Jam packed. No one goes anywhere. No movement on other side of the road. Looks like the other end is witnessing a phoenix, ganges in south !!! World came to standstill. People trying to manoeuvre their bikes across the water logged gaps, pavements. People falling in water logged ditches, heading in some direction. Total chaos. Power went off. Street lights off. Can see big shiny blue DELL on the far end.

11:30PM – 10K.Ms No traffic movement ahead. Looks like the inner ring roads are submerged totally under water for a stretch of 4KMs. No one goes ahead. The mob broke the divider to let the water flow out.

12:00 AM – 10K.Ms Still waiting under the shop. A noble voice shouted: The inner ring road is totally submerged and vehicle movement is impossible. Cars take a reverse and follow Old Airport Road, Old Madras Road, MG Road etc. Slight movement in vehicle began.

12:15 AM – 10K.Ms The traffic reduced. All vehicles headed in reverse direction. Drizzling. I too took the reverse route .

12:30AM – 8K.Ms. Brigade Road . Roads damp, but not flooded.

12:30AM – 6K.Ms. Bannerghatta Road. I am an idiot that i did not take this route. May be I would have escaped that Domlur inner ring road crisis.

12:45AM – 2K.Ms Outer Ring Road. Whoa, I am reaching home finally . Hurray.

12:50 AM – 0K.Ms Alas ! Reached home. Drenched. Took a shower to freshen. Had dinner. Did some tweeting and finally slept at 2:00AM . It was a tiring day .

Epilogue

Wallet got drenched badly. It took two full days to dry. Luckily, the two 500 notes managed to stay off from getting biologically recycled owing to excessive hydration.

Catastrophes bring people closer. They seamlessly start helping each other without thinking as otherwise they would.

Voila, it was an amazing experience

Solution to the 23 pages puzzle.

Rakesh — Sun, 10 May 2009 19:40:44 +0000

Hi,

Just came across this awesome 23 pages puzzle via a forward chain mail.

http://www.freestuffhotdeals.com/hacker/1.html

I could crack it .

Give it a try before looking at the solution.

Pages in sequence are

A strikingly odd web application exposure

Rakesh — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 19:06:39 +0000

Without having to expose your backend stuff to the internet, how do you service a WAP/WEB request. The blog below discusses a typical method of achieving the same. Assuming that whole web system is being developed in a intranet and not hosted outside. Let us call the internal unexposed server as A. We need a server hosted on internet to fetch the WAP/WEB requests from the mobile or computer. This server is called as B. The request is being fired on the server B, the request is written to a flat file called request file. Server A runs a shell program viz fetchrequest.sh which reads the request file every second for any new requests coming using the curl unix utility. Meanwhile, the server B sleeps off and waits for a response from server A. Server A will read the request and if its new (newness of a request is determined by saving the previous request number in a global shell environment variable) server A processes it and shoots back the response to server B in the form of a file via FTP. Server B, in its sleeping state waits for the this FTP response file. Once recieved, it pushes back the response to the user. The whole wait process is scheduled for a fixed period of time, after which a dummy response is send like server is down, request failed, bla bla etc . Let us see how the same is achieved in fetchreques.sh running on server A.

File fetchrequest.sh

#!/bin/bash
while [ 10 -eq 10 ]

#Runs in a infinite loop checking request file at server B every second
do
if [ `env | grep -c lastCounter` = 1 ];then
newCounter=`curl -s http://serverB/requestFile.txt | tail -1 | cut -d: -f1`

#Reading request file at server B
param=`curl -s serverB/requestFile.txt | tail -1 | cut -d: -f2` #Extracting the request parameters
echo newCounter : $newCounter lastCounter : $lastCounter

#If there is a new request, sending a response back to the server B
if [ "$newCounter" != "$lastCounter" ]; then
echo "Need to send a response"
echo "Response URL : http://serverA/something.pl?action=something¶m1¶m2"

#Trimming of the response that needs to be send to serverB and storing it in a variable
output=`curl -s "http://serverA/something.pl?action=something¶m1¶m2" | grep 'cap\\|img' |
sed \ 's/.*<\/src>//g;s//\:/g;s/<\/cap>//g;s//\:/g;s/<\/img>//g'`
echo "Response received : $output"

#writing the response to a flat file to be FTPed to server B
`echo $output>"rp_$newCounter.txt"`
`export filename==rp_$newCounter.txt`
`echo ls -l "rp_$newCounter.txt"`
typeset -i responseSize=`wc -c rp_$newCounter.txt | cut -d" " -f1`
echo "Response size $responseSize"

#If the process response is garbled, small or null, sending a dummy error in FTP file
if [ $responseSize = 1 ];then
`echo "We are working , try later" > "rp_$newCounter.txt"`
fi

#making an FTP connection to serverB and launching the response file
`curl -s -T "rp_$newCounter.txt" -u username:password"ftp://serverB/rp_$newCounter.txt"`
echo "Uploaded the FTP file for $newCounter request"
`rm -f rp_$newCounter.txt`
echo "Deleting rp_$newCounter.txt after upload"

#Updating the request environment variable
lastCounter=$newCounter
export lastCounter
fi
else
lastCounter=`curl -s http://serverB/mobRequests.txt | tail -1 | cut -d: -f1`
export lastCounter
fi
done

The whole system works very well, and the requests are processed and response send to user. There are however limitations to this model.

Last Day @First Company .. few last words

Rakesh — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:10:00 +0000

The last day at my first job, few noticeable last words.

Delivery Manager : All the best, come back to $%$^% !

HR ( at exit interview ) : Had you told this in the interview, you could have asserted even to the head of the company, that I will work only with that profile. (It’s a good learning, you have full rights to claim what was promised to you in the interview)

Security Guard (at final exit, I don’t have the ID card, but the relieving letter)

(me) : I have the relieving letter

(sg) : Ok. That’s fine. But it’s my duty, show the letter. (Opens up the letter and takes a glance). Kisi acchi jagah ja rahe honge (you must be going to some good working place)

(me) : Yes. Kaam accha hoga wahan (Work will be good there)

(sg) : Laughs. Waise mujhe kehna to nahin chaiye, ^&^&%& aane se pehle main bhi sochta tha yahan bahut accha kaam hota hai ( Before joining here as security, I had an impression that work is great at this company, all because of the big name)

(me) : India main naam bade and darshan chote ( Bigger and branded name, but the work profile is low )

(sg) : Bilkul sahi (That’s perfect)

My first job, excitement turned otherwise !

admin — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:39:00 +0000

17th June 2006 :
No. 72. Rakesh Gupta
No. 73. ….. and so on.
Hurray ! I was floating on cloud nine . I had made in to the company . The on campus drive at my college hyped as arduous process had been a cake walk for me. The faculty member read loud the list of the students who had made in. Celebrations were inevitable .

24th September 2006 :
Hey, did you collect the offer letter ? No, have they come? Cool. Having an offer letter in your hands of a big shot MNC, with a year more still left to complete your engineering degree, sounds fantastic. I had made my mind, I will join it. Become a fundoo coder shoder !! All things seemed to be so perfect. My future path was decided. But, I failed to realise that heavenly signal. As they say in literature, when you desire something, universe conspires to let you have the best. But, I was blinded by the charm and glamor and was not able to see that I had something better to achieve.

10th May 2007 – 25th June 2007:
Desperate wait for the receiving the joining letter at the company. As the history says, it should be something in the middle of June. Perhaps, this was one of the firsts of heavenly signal which I failed to realise. The signal that I am destined for something better and I should seek or continue with some other opportunity.

1st July 2007:
For the first time on the college’s history, a database giant had arrived interviewing our batch. The coll was over and everyone was relaxing at home. But the offering and name of the database giant tempted everyone to rush back to the campus from even their remotest abodes and try their knowledge and luck. The selection process was strenuous and I was pleased to make into top 18 out of the 500 people appeared. But unfortunately, they needed only 12 folks. Hence, had a narrow setback. I was disappointed, but this was another heavenly indicator that destiny has something else in store for me and I should realize my potential.

10th July 2007:
The joining date of the company came(23rd July). As expected, it was in their huge training campus. I had mixed feelings. But, I had made my mind and was careless to hunt for any other opportunities.

17th July 2007:
The company had altered the joining date and location to 6th August, to a place where I had never been too. Perhaps, this was the biggest heavenly indicator. Again, I could not sense it. What could I do ? I was not seeing things beyond joining this company, which eventually turned out to be a big mistake of my life. I have been avid passionate about Java and Open Source technologies since my college days. With an expectation of getting similar kind of work/training, I joined the company at the new location

6th August 2007:
Lush green campus and huge glassy buildings, good enough to dupe anyone. I was joyous. The training process started and things went on smoothly. Till one fine day, we had the catastrophic event …. MAINFRAMES, yes your batch has been identified for the mainframes stream. Happy hunting folks, Its gonna be a wonderful time. Man, I was shattered, I never desired to study those outdated legacy systems. The company was not willing to cater to your personal interests.

10th October 2007:
I started pumping my resume like anything. I wanted to get out and do anything but not mainframes. Ill-fated, nothing much happened. Only ray of hope was to complete training and expect to get a different technology project. Chances are meager, but you never now.

1st Feb 2008:
After successful completion of training, off to production. Seems, a whole new world is going to start. Fortunately, I managed to sneak into a non mainframe project after persuading one of the managers at the company. New energy and enthusiasm started to reverberate again in me.

10th April 2008:
All that glitters is not gold. I could perfectly understand that. This one was the biggest and best heavenly indicators, you need to work hard, you are destined for something else. Now I started feeling it hard. The project, they call it support and maintenance barely requires you to be smart, logically and technically sound. There was nothing much crucial I was playing. It started striking me that I am losing, losing rapidly; everything, my knowledge, my analytical and logical skills. What would my future be ? A dumb box. Oh no ! I won’t let that happen. Job hunt began with more fierce efforts. I needed to move out. No kidding this time. It’s a high priority to give justice to my career life.

15th July 2008:
Filed the resignation, a sense of relief or moksha.

20th August 2008:
I walkout like a free bird. With lesser apprehensions about my next venture.

Summary : Always listen to your heart and understand those heavenly signals, because if you have an intent desire and willingness for something, then universe will definitely conspire and let you get the best. And in DJ (Rang De Basanti) style, I would say Zindagi jeene ke do hi tarike hote hain, ek kisi Indian IT company join kar lo, aur jeete raho, appraisal ki cycle chalne do, doosra, jimmedaari uthao ise badalne ki aur startup join karo