Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

June 15, 2005

The Linux iPod

Filed under: Tech Related — Suramya @ 3:05 PM

Now this is really cool, the cool people at ipodlinux.org have figured out how to install Linux on an iPod. Once you install Linux on the iPod it opens up a whole lot of goodies up like the ability to record voice without needing extra hardware, more games etc.

For me the biggest advantage would be the recording feature. The best part however is that we can easilty revert back to the default iPod OS(?) by doing a softreset of the iPod.

Unfortunately the mini is not that well supported yet 🙁 so I guess I will have to wait till they get it to work on the Mini. I will definetly be keeping my eye on this one.:)

Complete Story: MacWorld

– Suramya

June 10, 2005

Mac OS X will not boot on regular PCs

Filed under: Computer Related — Suramya @ 3:54 PM

Even though Apple has decided to support the x86 architecture from now on they have decided that Mac OS X for Intel will not boot on machines sold by other PC manufactures (Story: MacNN.com).

Which in my opinion is stupid. A lot more people would buy Max OS X if they would allow it to run on a regular system (Yes I am refering to people like me). Why would I want to buy another computer just to run a new os when I have 2 machines just sitting there doing nothing?? Hopefully someone will figure out how to bypass this stupid restriction.

On a side note the following comic script says a lot about how likely everyone thought that something like this would happen.

– Suramya

June 8, 2005

Yes I am alive. Barely.

Filed under: My Life,Website Updates — Suramya @ 1:45 AM

Hi Everyone,

I guess I have been pretty irregular over the past few months in posting to the blog but life has been super busy for the past few weeks. The project I am working on right now is nearing completion and we are racing against a tight deadline so I have to work extremely long hours to make sure that the project gets done. Just to give you an idea of the hours, I have been getting to work at 9 am and leaving at around 1:30 – 2 am for most of last week. This week has been a bit easier; I get to leave by 8-9 pm 🙁

Other than that life is just peachy. The weather finally decided to warmup so instead of freezing to death in my room I am boiling to death.

Read the Time Odyssey by Arthur c clark and found it to be a lot poorer than his Space Odyssey series (The Time Odessey happens in parallel to the events in the Space Odessey).

Well this is all for now. Have to get up early tomorrow.

– Suramya

May 31, 2005

Whitewater rafting is fun.

Filed under: My Life,Travel/Trips — Suramya @ 3:02 AM

Today I went white water rafting with Vinit, Surabhi, Aish and Sameer. It was a lot fo fun. We drove for about 2 hours to get to this place called Narrowsburg in Pennsylvania. We got there at around 10:30 am and spent the next hour inflating the rafts (We had bought them at walmart earlier). The reason it took so long was that one of the rafts had a hole in in that we didn’t know about and it kept deflating. We finally saw the hole and figured out that it was causing the problem. Since we didn’t have anything else to fix it with we used a band-aid Vinit had in his wallet to tape the hole. Surprisingly it actually worked and held for the entire 5 hour trip. I am defenitely investing in the company that makes the adhesive for band-aids.:-)

Then when we were finally ready to launch this park ranger walked up to us and told us that we couldn’t launch if we didn’t have 5 life jackets on board with us. So we had to go and buy 5 life jackets even though all of us could swim 🙁 But then we finally launched for an awesome time in the water.

The best part was our lunch which we had while we were floating down the river in two rafts. It was one of the most peacefull moments of my life. Then once we had lunch we started rowing as it was getting kind of cold and it looked like it was about to rain. Unfortunately about 1/2 way through the ride it did start to rain and it was cold rain. Since we didn’t feel like going to shore and freezing over there we decided to continue rowing and braved the cold rain and the hard rocks. 🙂

The rain stopped for a little while after about an hour and the sun came out for about 15-20 mins to warm us. Then it was back to the stupid cold rain and freezing water. Thankfully we made it back to the car in one piece. The only casualty of the trip was Sameer’s Slippers which kind of floated away when none of us were paying attention to them.

Once we got dressed and picked up the other car from our starting point we drove back to NJ feeling really tired but awefully good about the trip. When we got home we ate great pavbhaji that Vinit had made and Surabhi reheated/served and now I am so full that I don’t want to move out of my really comfortable chair. Lets see how long it will take for me to motivate myself enough to move from the chair to the bed and fall asleep.

– Suramya

May 25, 2005

Tools for configuring iptables

Filed under: Computer Security,Security Tools,Security Tutorials,Tech Related — Suramya @ 8:20 PM

Configuring firewalls is not easy if you don’t know what you are doing and most of us don’t have the time of the paitience to spend hours figuring out internet security. But having a badly configured firewall is worse than having no firewall ’cause it gives you a false sense of security.

Thankfully there are tools out there that allow you to configure a decent firewall without needing a degree in rocket science. Chris Lynch has written an article on Newsforge which looks at Three tools to help you configure iptables.

Check it out.

– Suramya

May 17, 2005

My Article was plagarized

Filed under: My Life,Website Updates — Suramya @ 2:26 PM

Got this email from a Professor in a NY college today. Turns out that my paper on Hinduism through the ages was plagarized for his class. Cool right. 🙂 Knowing this certainly did wonders for my ego.

Original Email:

Be flattered: one of my students turned in your page on the history of Hinduism as his paper, claiming he had written it. It is word for word as on your website, but with no credit to you.

You get an A. He doesn’t.

The name of the prof and the college has been withheld on request. Oh, in case you are wondering my original paper is available here

– Suramya

CLI Magic: ldconfig and friends

Filed under: Tutorials — Suramya @ 1:56 PM

Another great article on how to harness the power of the Linux Command Line Interface. In this edition Joe Barr tells us how ldconfig is used.

– Suramya

May 16, 2005

Encrypting partitions using dm-crypt and the 2.6 series kernel

Filed under: Security Tutorials,Tech Related — Suramya @ 4:22 PM

Good article on how to Encrypt partitions using dm-crypt.

– Suramya

May 14, 2005

Should privacy end when you die?

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 3:14 AM

I was reading the archives on the GPG mailing list and saw this really interesting conversation going on about what all should you put in a safe to make life simpler for your loved ones in case you die. One of people suggested that you should always put your PGP/GPG key in a safe deposit box so that if anything happens to you your documents etc can be decrypted.

This started me thinking, do I really want people to be able to read my emails/personal correspondence etc when I die? I don’t mind them having access to my financial stuff/legal papers/programs etc but I am not that comfortable with anyone reading my email’s.

The reason is not ’cause I don’t trust my family or friends, its just that my emails/documents might have some stuff that I don’t want people to know about and this cover’s not just my secret’s but other people’s information also. You might ask, What other people’s information? Its your email isn’t it?

Go through your email archive, look for any correspondance you had with a friend that is supposed to be a secret. You might be discussing a person issue with a friend or giving them advice on how to deal with something that they don’t want to have publically known. Or just something thats embarrasing for them. In my case there is a good posibility that I have archives of emails where I discuss some friend’s personal issue with them and that issue is something they don’t want to disclose to anyone. Did you find anything? I sure did. There are a lot of things that you don’t want to tell, or more accurately there are a lot of things that your friends don’t want you to tell.

So what gives me the right to disclose all this information to my survivors when I die? Just because I am dead doesn’t de-classify the information. The person whose secret it is might still want to keep it that way. So what do you do in such a case? Do you remove the ability of your family to access your emails/diaries etc to protect the secrets, denying then the pleasure of remembering you by reading stuff you wrote, your thoughts etc, or do you go ahead and tell all?

What would you do? There is no one solution for this and I am sure people can argure about this both ways. If you have some time do post a comment and let me know what you think about this issue.

– Suramya

May 13, 2005

Had fun at Surabhi’s Birthday

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 6:45 AM

Yesterday (12th May) was my sister Surabhi’s 22nd birthday. Its hard to believe that she is 22 (Maybe ’cause she usually acts like a10 year old on a sugar high)…

We (Vinit, me and Surabhi) cut the first cake at 12 am on the 12th. Since it was late only the 3 of us were there for the first cake cutting. But we did celebrate her birthday properly by going for dinner at Olive Garden on Route 3. It is a great restaurant and the food there is amazing. We got there at 9:45 pm and were joined by Piet, Emily, Pranav, Reema, Sandeep, Hanny and his Girlfriend.

Spent a good 2 hours enjoying the food and the conversation. Then drove home to cut the second cake. After the cake was cut we all stayed up till 2 am talking. Then since everyone had work the next day they all decided to split. I did take a lot of pics and will post them sometime soon.

Now I am tired but can’t sleep. Let see what I can do to pass time till I fall asleep.

– Suramya

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