Truth, Computing and Fail

The wi-fi connection in our hostels is controlled and billed through a login and authentication procedure using RADIUS(Remote Authentication Dial In User Service) on the CISCO IOS. Recently I happened to notice something. Suppose I log out of my account but have a program that keeps me connected to the net like Google Talk or any P2P program. Now someone else on another machine can login with the same ID and there you go, two machines on the network authenticated with the same ID. No, I don’t lose my connection.

If any experts are reading this, is it a flaw in the IOS RADIUS itself or something is wrong with its implementation on our network?

Its that time of the year again, night-outs, sore, red eyes, aching bodies and gulping down cups of coffee that tastes like engine oil (guess?). Three of the exams are already over, and I won’t have to meet two of them again in my career, Engineering Chemistry and Strength of Materials. Yes, I am almost a jack of all trades specialising in analysing all kinds of stresses and their effects on beams . Height of stupidity, you would say! Anyways, there is no use in bitching about how f***ed up the system is. I am just happy with the fact that I am past this stage. It was like hell.

Just downloaded the latest stable release of the linux kernel. I will finally compile a vanilla one when I get back home. Looking forward to it!

On a side note, I was just randomly visiting some blogs over the past two weeks, and one common recurring theme was ‘Oh, I am so confused. I don’t find any aim of my life. Why is this world so “something something blah blah”, “staring down at me” blah blah….’

A piece of advice for you. Go see some claustrophobic or cult films like Cube, Donnie Darko. Those suit you people well. Or:

1. Apply for the position of lyricist in Linkin Park. They need losers and depressed guys like you. (Disclaimer: I have nothing against LP and still feel that “Leave out all the Rest” would have been better off in a Westlife album!)
2. Go get some other dawgs/bitches and blog the hell out of how life sucks. Now thats called recurrence. Euclid would be proud.

Finally, after lot of speculation the trailer for the movie War has been released. This movie, previously titled Rogue stars Jet Li and Jason Statham as the main protagonists along with Devon Aoki of Sin City fame.

Jet Li plays an assassin who goes by the name Rogue and kills the partner and family of FBI agent Jason Statham. Jason Statham embarks on a mission of revenge to settle personal scores and most probably there are some other aspects to the story as the Japanese crime gang Yakuza is also involved in the plot. Devon Aoki is the daughter of the Yakuza boss incidentally.

Going by the trailer this promises high octane action with Jet Li’s martial arts prowess and the staple Hollywood chase sequences thrown in. Jet Li looks sharper in this one as he seems to have finally got rid of the stupid spiky hairstyle he was having in the ‘Yo Dawg’ kinda movies with DMX and the hip-hop gang.

Get the trailer here at movie-list.

UPDATE: Also got a link at IGN.

For those of you on a free hosting and managing their own wordpress installation, you must be lacking mail server support.Now suppose you lose your login password, the one that WordPress supplies you after the installation, what do you do? You can’t reset your password through e-mail as you don’t have a SMTP server configured for you. No need to panic. However basic your plan maybe, you must have phpMyAdmin installed on the server. Fire it up from the cpanel (depends on the hosting provider) and browse the wordpress database (oni_wordpress in my case). Now browse the wp_users table by clicking on the browse icon.

Now, edit the given entry by clicking on the pen icon and then you see a few fields. See the user_pass field? Thats where the MD5 hashed password is stored. To put in your new password, just type the plaintext password in value and from the Function dropdown list, choose MD5 and then click on Go. Note that you can change your login name from here also.

The last 4-5 days have been quite hard for me. The hard disk got a sudden shock and this lead to some bad sectors on a partition and Windows as dumb as it is, compounded the woes. It was simply unable to start and for some reasons unknown the HDD kept on operating at peak capacity without further progress. I tried running chkdsk in safe mode and according to it, the errors were fixed which was in now way even close to the reality.

Now a format seemed inevitable and I tried to copy all the movies and songs from it. Windows sucked once again and wasn’t able to copy even one file all the time showing cyclic redundancy errors. Edgy was able to copy 3 of the movies, that was all the capacity left in the linux partition. I wish I had set aside some more space for edgy.

Coming to the formatting part, Windows failed in this aspect too. The formatting was stuck at 8% for what it seemed an eternity. On the other hand, formatting the partition and changing the filesystem took some 5 mins using gparted on Ubuntu.

In the meanwhile switching over to Ubuntu meant that I had to find some packages to have the same functionalities as I had on Windows. First on the list was an IDE for C++. Though some suggested emacs, I finally opted for Anjuta. Install it using the usual apt-get install routine. Now to make it work you need some more packages: autoconf, automake and glib. While the first two were available from the universal repos, a apt-cache search on glib returned a lot of results with the closest being:

libglib1.2-dev - Development files for GLib library

The reason for choosing the dev package being this one.
Anyways, installing this didn’t help and I had to download glib from here.

Came across a nice tutorial on restoring grub when it was screwed due to the change in order of partitions.