Truth, Computing and Fail

Well, the LUG in my college was started last semester itself, in November but it is only now that we have swung into action and making our presence felt.

Soon after the college reopened we had a 2 day install fest and the meet over the last 2 days, at the time of writing this, was a follow up to help those who attended the install fest getting started on linux, like the basic directory structure, the different software alternatives, the power of the command line.

But still a lot needs to done to change the mindset of the students about linux in specific and the Open Source philosophy in general. I guess the first wouldn’t be so tough as they would be attending our meets and learning about the power of linux and how much it allows you to wield greater control over your system. Regarding the latter, those who attend the LUG meets have to change the way they view them, like a workshop or a ‘lecture’ by some guys where they would just be the silent audience. In a meet, you don’t listen to lectures, but ideas flow freely. Anyone is welcome to contribute anything (s)he assumes would be a better idea than the one being discussed. Its only by sharing that their knowledge would increase, not the opposite. There is nothing to be protective or guarded about what you know unless it is some world-altering hax0ring skills :p .

Here is the website of our LUG:
www.lugmanipal.org

We have a wiki too! wiki.lugmanipal.org/

Once again it is the start of a new year. Once again I resolve to be regular with blogging.

Happy new year to all the other worldly readers of my blog!

P.S: 25 years of TCP/IP too! Celebrating 2.5 decades of reliable packet delivery

With much hype and publicity, the wifi service of our university was launched 10 days ago. The service was christened I-ON (no idea what that has got to do with wireless networking) and large, beautiful posters greeted you on every step inside the campus: inside the hostels, the college, the lecture halls and all other places imaginable and within the reach of the human physique. It promised to Mobify ur world and according to the fkin fully techno illiterate helpdesk personnel, you would be getting speeds around 500 kbps. So, the first few days went fine, we were downloading and surfing merrily at speeds touching 50 KB/s. Anyways we were very well aware that a speed of 500 kbps is not feasible and possible for the size of the network and the backbone our university possesses. But still the speeds were simply great.
And then comes the shocker. Some 3 days back, suddenly everything drops and starts to suck, big time. Downloads drop to 6 KB/s. So what is it? As obvious it can get, its a nasty traffic shaper. The University gets back to its dirty tricks. You decide for yourself. 6 KB/s. Fucking hell. I would be getting the same speed on a dial up connection. For God’s sake, it is an internet service for the whole University. What can be more shameful that a University with 50+ years of history behind can’t offer a basic, decent internet connection to its students. Everything is simply wrong about the whole thing. To download even a small tool like Brutus, I’ve to wait 5 minutes and yes, that is if I stop whatever surfing I might be doing at that time. What purpose would this connection serve?

Agreed that traffic shapers are very much needed for maintaining the QoS of the network, but the University authorities have simply pulled off a cheap trick by misusing the powers of these tools.

In my next post, I’ll be posting some iperf results as evidence to my claims.

Sonicwall blocks a certain purely technical blog as Forbidden Category “Intimate Apparel/Swimsuit”. Yet the router is open to remote telnet connections, without any authentication required. So even if you aren’t an uber level 99 user, still you can watch over and monitor all the processes running on the router and maybe if a certain person decides to take the next step, there is nothing to stop him.

Coming back to my college, studies and life……there are still some persons who think pointers and references are the same thing.

My first attempt at writing a Haiku:

I’m a moth burning itself out
Running towards the flame
I’m the architect of my own destruction

Two hours from now I will be leaving my hostel and heading for my home. Finally the drudgery of end sem exam has come to an end. Keeping in mind I don’t have a broadband connection at home and linux is notorious for its support (or rather lack of it) for internal modems, I decided to run the scanModem tool and ask the experts at the linmodems mailing list about my type of chipset. So I came to know it was a Conexant HSF modem. But now came the biggest problem. The driver for this modem was not open source. This is provided by some 3rd party called Linuxant. The free version of the driver limits speeds to 14.4 kbps only. To get the modem working at full speed, you need to purchase a license for a fuckin US $20 or something like that. I mean wtf. Here we are working on an open source system, trying out open source software and there is this company taking advantage of the user’s helplessness as linux support for internal modems is so sparse. There does exist some ports of this paid driver, but I didn’t find one for Edgy. So there I say goodbye to my hopes on makng dialup work on linux.

You can follow the discussion here at linmodems mailing list.

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.

I busted a CD-RW disc while burning an Ubuntu image on to it. Instead of selecting the option to burn an image to the disc, I simply added the .iso file. After that, the disc simply can’t be read as if there was no disc in the drive. So I am stuck with a RW disc which can’t be erased!!

Goddamn, this thing beats me. Irrespective of what I had burnt to the disc in the previous session, I should be able to erase it. I am running out of options here. Tried everything. Nero, Alcohol, and even our very own cdrecord. I would be trying to figure this out for the next week.

Exams (9th-11th) are once again knocking on the door and I guess its not too late to realize that and start my preparation. For the time being it looks like I have to put my aircrack adventures on the backburner.