Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

November 8, 2004

Made another trip to Washington

Filed under: My Life,Travel/Trips — Suramya @ 3:52 AM

Made another trip to Washington over the weekend.

Me and Vivek left at about 11:30 am and drove to washington in about 3 1/2 hours reaching there at 2:00 pm where we picked up Ruth and started on the drive back to her place so that she could cook Lunch for us.

Since she needed to borrow some utensiles we had to go by Liji’s house to pickup stuff. On the way we were also supposed to pickup Chetan from the trainstation. Inspite of being warned Ruth told Chetan that we would pick him up at around 3:00 pm and sure enough we got caught in traffic and then got lost and then got stuck in traffic again before we finally picked him up around 4:15 pm.

Since we were in a hurry we only spent 10 mins at Liji’s place and then drove to Ruth’s place. There we cooked food and surprisingly it actually turned out to be edible. And we finally had our lunch at around 6:30 pm. Then Ruth had to goto her Aunts place for Dinner so we drove her there and while she was enjoying dinner we picked up a movie from Blockbuster. After driving around for about an hour we pickedup Ruth and went back home. At this time Vinit and Surabhi had also joined us at her place.

Unfortunately her landlords were back at this time and were asleep so we couldn’t play foosball as we had planned so we took the TV and the VCR down to the basement so that we could watch movie. Since its a lot more fun to talk than to watch a movie we spent the next 3 hours talking and having fun. Then we started the movie but since it was 4 am and all of us were tired we stopped halfway through the movie and went to sleep.

Next day, Ruth woke us up at 8 am again so that we could go on a morning walk with her, as I have had the pleasure of this during my last trip I wisely declined and went back to sleep. Vivek wasn’t that lucky and got stuck with her. This time they only took 2 hours to get back. Then we got ready and left after dropping Ruth off at the Church as Vivek had to be back at work in the afternoon.

Overall it was a nice trip and I really enjoyed myself. We took a couple of photos and I will put them up sometime over the course of this week. (No really, I will….)

– Suramya

November 5, 2004

Playboy has a mirror for CPAN

Filed under: Funny News,Tech Related — Suramya @ 5:56 AM

Ok this is something I really didn’t expect to find. Today when downloading perl modules from CPAN I noticed that the file I was downloading was being served on mirror.playboy.com. I took a screenshot of the window as proof

Playboy Mirror

you know you are getting old when…

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 12:01 AM

You know you are getting old when your friends start getting engaged.

Got an email from an old friend Neelam, who got engaged last weekend. The marrige is sometime next year. Congrats Neelam! Hope you have a great life, I wish you and your Fiance all the best in your future.

Lets see if I can make it to the wedding or not. I would have posted the pic she sent me but somehow I don’t think she will like that.

– Suramya

November 4, 2004

After Flash mobbing comes mobile clubbing

Filed under: Funny News,News/Articles — Suramya @ 8:01 PM

First came Flash mobbing where a bunch of strangers would get together at a random spot and do something stupid and then leave. Now comes Mobile Clubbing where a group of people turnup at a pre-arranged public place on mass where they begin to dance to the sound of their own personal stereo.

The events are organised on the Internet, informally among groups of friends and the word passes via chat rooms and news forums.

I guess people just liek doing stuff together… I don’t think any have been organized in NY yet, but when they do I think I just might go check it out..

Full Story: Here

Mobile Clubbing Site: MobileClubbing

– Suramya

November 3, 2004

Its official: Programmers get wierd when bored

Filed under: Funny News — Suramya @ 7:23 PM

These programmers actually take the time to printout old source code and then bury it on a hill. They must have been seriously bored to think of something like this..

Story:
Programmers Hold Funerals for Old Code
Wed Nov 3, 7:29 AM ET

DAYTON, Ohio – Among the tiny graves on Blocker Hill, the wind echoes with the tortured cries of computer programmers. Beneath the eight grave markers, and perhaps in a rumored unmarked grave nearby, lie reams of paper printouts of code for software that has left this mortal operating system.

The cemetery is a quirky tradition among the programmers at LexisNexis, which provides online legal and business information. Rather than simply delete programs that are retired or replaced, they print them out for a proper send-off not always with fond regards.

Full Story: Here

Microsoft claims that Spoofing is not a security flaw

Filed under: Computer Related,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 6:51 PM

MS is claiming that the recent bug report in Bugtraq which explains in detail how to create a link which allows scamers to spoof a link so that it takes the user to a site different than the one shown in the taskbar is not a security flaw…

I mean come on, a flaw that allows hackers/crackers to fool people into going to a untrusted site when the browser is telling them thats is a trusted site is a serious security flaw in my books. Think about it, I can claim to be microsoft.com and tell people via email to download a new patch for their windows machines. Since the target is slightly computer savey they look at the link destination in the taskbar to confirm that its taking them to microsoft.com and then they happily download the ‘patch’ and proceed to install it thereby infecting their machine with my virus.

It does take some social eng but even the so called experts might fall for this one as who has the time to right click and verify each link before going to it? I don’t… but then again I use FireFox which doesn’t fall for this trick.. 🙂

MS seriously needs to think before making such statements…

Story URL: Here

– Suramya

November 2, 2004

New Method of posting website news

Filed under: Website Updates — Suramya @ 5:22 AM

Hi Everyone,
I have changed the way the Website News gets its information to make it more efficient. Now the site news on the Suramya.com main page pulls the information from my blog automatically.

The main advantage of this change is that I don’t have to edit the PHP pages to post a new item, I can just post an item on my blog and its posted on the site instantly. This means that you will see a lot more frequent news updates on the site.

More changes like this are in the works, along with a couple of new articles so make sure you revisit soon to check out the changes.

Thanks,
Suramya

Website now back to normal

Filed under: Website Updates — Suramya @ 1:05 AM

Hi,

DDOS on the site seems to be over so the access at the website is back to normal. Updated the site to fix the errors in pulling up the stats. So now everything seems to be working.

If you find something that doesn’t seem to be working let me know.

– Suramya

October 31, 2004

Vivek’s Birthday

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 6:55 PM

Its Vivek’s birthday today so we took him out in NY for a drink at this place called Tonic.

It was a lot of fun. Unfortunately everyone other than me had to work today for some reason (Wierd people) so we didn’t stay out that late. Surprisingly all of us were pretty sober when we got back.

We also stopped by in a club near 14th and 7th Ave for a drink before we got home. Most of the people there were dressed for halloween. Some of the costumes were very nice. Took some pics, planning on putting them on the site. Don’t know when thats going to happen.

Vivek’s back at work. I am planning on spending the day reading or updating my site.:)

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

Cya,
Suramya

October 29, 2004

Website Down due to a DDOS

Filed under: Website Updates — Suramya @ 1:39 AM

Hi Everyone,
These past few days have been pretty interesting.

Some idiot decided that it would be funny to do a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack on my IP range. So for the past 2 days all the IP’s we have are getting flooded with packets from about 100 – 150 hosts at a time. This obviously stopped our internet access.

At first we thought that it was an infected computer in our building network that was using up all the bandwidth (This has happened before) but then our ISP told me that it was our IP causing the problem so we started shuting down all the computers not being used. After about 2 hours of troubleshooting we found out that most of the traffic was incoming and wasn’t our fault. Our router was dropping all the packets.

So we called CNG Internet again and told them what was going on. Instead of helping us fix the problem the tech over there started yelling at us saying that we must have done something to be a target of a DDOS. Then the entire staff at CNG just disappeared, we tried calling them, sent them emails but got no response from them till today afternoon.

I noticed that the attack was focusing on our primary IP address so we started playing musical chairs with the IP addresses to give us net access (We kept routing the traffic to an IP different than the one under attack). This finally gave us network access back.

But I left my webserver offline for a while and used this time to replace the server with a new one that doesn’t crash so often. 🙂 I am slowly reinstalling all the software required on the server and until thats done some parts of the site won’t work.

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

– Suramya

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