Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

November 30, 2005

Sed – An Introduction and Tutorial

Filed under: Tutorials — Suramya @ 8:47 AM

This is something I have been looking for a while. It is a really good tutorial on how to use sed.

Extract:

How to use sed, a special editor for modifying files automatically. If you want to write a program to make changes in a file, sed is the tool to use.

There are a few programs that are the real workhorse in the Unix toolbox. These programs are simple to use for simple applications, yet have a rich set of commands for performing complex actions. Don’t let the complex potential of a program keep you from making use of the simpler aspects. This chapter, like all of the rest, start with the simple concepts and introduces the advanced topics later on.

Complete Tutorial: Sed – An Introduction and Tutorial

– Suramya

November 29, 2005

A Quick Start for Lsof

Filed under: Tutorials — Suramya @ 8:27 PM

A well written guide to using lsof (list of open files). lsof is a very useful tool that lists all open files on the system and the processes that have them open.

Check it out at: A Quick Start for Lsof

– Suramya

My Thanksgiving Weekend

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 1:25 AM

This Thanksgiving was a lot of fun, I visited my cousin Ashish and his wife Sheng in Minneapolis. I left for their place on Thursday (24th) and got there in the evening after three hours of an unevenful flight. The best part was that this time I wasn’t selected for the ‘random’ special screening so the security check was quick.

After I got there we watched the movie Hercules which was fun especially since I was watching it with my niece (Lydia) and Nephew (Aryan). I caught the last half hour of the movie which wasn’t that big a deal as I have already seen the movie multiple times. After that we talked for a little while and then started another movie (Salam Namaste) which was surprisingly decent. As some of you might know I am not a big hindi movie fan but during this trip I watched more hindi movies than what I had watched in the past year. Since I watched so many of them I am a bit fuzzy on what day I watched what… but I did see: Satte pe Satta, Angoor, DDLJ, Banti Aur Babli, Hum Saath Saath Hai.

NEways, On friday went shopping with Sheng and the kids (I got a DVD Writer, an RC plane and a Music system for my car), talked a lot and I played with the kids. Bhaiya cooked an awesome lunch and Sheng made Naan for us. They tasted great as long as you didn’t let them cool, after which they turned into a rock hard rubbery substance that is great excersise for your teeth. 😉

Then at night I decorated my first Christmas tree. I have seen Christmas tree’s before and I have celebrated christmas before but this was the first time I got to decorate the tree. It was fun with both Lidya and Aryan helping me and Sheng. (Surabhi and Vinit watched… After Vinit found the 4th leg of the tree… and Surabhi ‘sorted’ the branches.) We did take pictures and I will post them here once I manage to get a copy of them from Vinit.

Vinit and Surabhi left on Saturday morning to come back to NJ while I stayed back. After breakfast all of us (Me, Bhaiya, Sheng, Lidya and Aryan) spent the morning sledding even though there was only about an inch of snow on the ground. Still it was a lot of fun and it would have been a lot better if I had snow boots instead of formal shoes. I fell too many times because of that. After me and Sheng froze our toes (Bhaiya, Lidya and Aryan were wearing propper snow boots) we came back inside and had ice-cream 🙂 [Yes I know its crazy but it sure tasted good 🙂 🙂 ]

At night Sheng’s brother’s came over to baby sit so that we could go to Jen’s (?) birthday party. It was held in a bar called the ‘The Wild Onion’ in downtown St Paul. It was fun though the crowd was a bit older than what you would find in a NY club/bar with most people in their late 20’s/early 30’s. They were playing some really good music and it was fun dancing. We left at about 1 am and then got a really early breakfast at some place (Can’t remember the name… I was a bit buzzed at the time), got home at 2:30 am and crashed.

None of us wanted to get out of the bed on Sunday as we had stayed up late but after we finally dragged ourselves out of bed and had breakfast, Sheng went to finish some work while me, Ashish bhaiya, Lidya and Aryan went to Chucky Cheese and spent most of the afternoon over there playing games and generally having fun. After we all we tired of video games we went to downtown Minneapolis to see the ‘Children’s Museum’. I must admit it was a lot different than what I was expecting it to be and it was a lot of fun.

Then at 5 we drove back home. Then Sheng and Bhaiya decided to take advantage of me being there and went off for a romantic dinner alone while I stayed home to baby sit the kids. It was an interesting experience… I was the first time I was baby sitting and it was fun. Me and Lidya cooked, (ok ok we made scrambled eggs but that still counts as cooking) and we had a lot of fun doing it. Lidya managed to put egg shell’s in my eggs and too much salt in her portion while I forgot to put salt in mine. Thankfully we didn’t set the house on fire while cooking. Aryan was a sweetheart and helped the both of us. We ate dinner while watching a movie and then went to sleep.

On Monday we decided to goto the Mall of America after having lunch at the cheese cake factory and it was an interesting experience. That place is huge, unfortunately we didn’t have a lot of time to explore it because I had a flight to catch but still it was fun. Then I had to say goodbye and catch my flight back to NJ and I got here at 10 pm. Couldn’t sleep after I got back so watched a couple of movies then crashed.

So that was my thanksgiving weekend. Wish I could do it again soon.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

November 21, 2005

How to simulate fake connections

Filed under: Tutorials — Suramya @ 9:04 PM

Nice set of instructions on how to simulate fake connections using wget and/or Curl.

Extract from website:
In order to test one’s rulesets against all sort of user agents and – possibly – referrers or other HTTP headers, a quick and dirty simulation may be helpful. Wget and Curl are two applications that ship as default with most Linux distributions so they can be used in shell scripts for any sort of automation.

Complete Article: Know your enemy: How to simulate fake connections

– Suramya

November 16, 2005

An Overview of Cryptography

Filed under: Tutorials — Suramya @ 4:27 PM

Interesting and Long overview of Cryptography. Has some really good info on it and explains a lot of details in that field.

An Overview of Cryptography

– Suramya

November 14, 2005

How to fix your Monitor refresh rate in Debian

Filed under: Computer Tips,Linux/Unix Related — Suramya @ 12:00 AM

The easiest way I have found is to use the ‘gtf’ command. The syntax of the command is:

gtf Horizontal Vertical RefreshRate

so if you wanted a screen resolution of 1024×768 with a 100 hz refresh rate the command would be:

gtf 1024 768 100

and the command will show you a line something like this:

# 1024×768 @ 100.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 81.40 kHz; pclk: 113.31 MHz
Modeline “1024×768_100.00″ 113.31 1024 1096 1208 1392 768 769 772 814 -HSync +Vsync

Now you need to copy this to the monitor section of the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4

so that it would look something like:

Section “Monitor”
Identifier “Generic Monitor”
Option “DPMS”

# 1024×768 @ 100.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 81.40 kHz; pclk: 113.31 MHz
Modeline “1024×768_100.00″ 113.31 1024 1096 1208 1392 768 769 772 814 -HSync +Vsync

EndSection

Save the changes and restart the xserver for the changes to take effect.

Hope this helps.

– Suramya

November 9, 2005

Building extra secure Web applications

Filed under: Security Tutorials,Tech Related — Suramya @ 4:30 PM

Interesting article from IBM that offers a new security design framework that covers two common types of vulnerability: action tampering and parameter manipulation (also known as data tampering).

Check it out: Build extra secure Web applications

– Suramya

Proposed Legislation in NY Addresses Wireless Security concerns

Filed under: Computer Related — Suramya @ 1:06 PM

Interesting new policy is in works in the Westchester County (NY). It actually makes sense as long as they don’t extend it to include all WiFi access points instead of just ones run by comercial businesses. (Check out gWiFi.net for a list of free and open access points.).

Westchester County (NY) executive Andy Spano is sponsoring legislation that would require commercial businesses that offer wireless hot spots to have firewalls and other security measures in place if they also collect sensitive customer information. The legislation would require companies to separate the confidential data they hold from the networks
that offer wireless access. One analyst has observed that whether a network is wireless or wired, organizations should keep sensitive data secure. The proposed legislation is believed to be the first of its kind in the United States.

Original Source: Sans.org NewsBytes

Additional Info:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0%2C1895%2C1882081%2C00.asp
http://software.silicon.com/security/0,39024655,39153963,00.htm
http://www.fcw.com/article91313-11-04-05-Web
http://www.westchestergov.com/whatsnew/pressfr.htm

November 8, 2005

Reducing browser privileges for a user

Filed under: Security Tutorials,Tech Related — Suramya @ 10:31 PM

This article shows a simple approach of reducing privileges for Internet-facing applications on such as IE, Firefox, IM and email clients when the user must operate as a Windows administrator.

Reducing browser privileges

November 7, 2005

Top 21 PHP progamming mistakes – Part I: Seven Textbook Mistakes

Filed under: Tutorials — Suramya @ 3:39 PM

A really interesting series of Articles that talk about common mistakes made by inexperienced PHP Programmers and how to avoid them.

Top 21 PHP progamming mistakes

– Suramya

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