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I’ll be in Nepal for next 2 weeks with my family for Dashain. I’m going home after 3 years and this will be my Dashain at home after 7 years. My son is very exited about the trip, he was too little to remember his previous visits. I think this one is going to be a memorable one to him (he’s 6 now). When I talk about the himalayas, rivers, lakes and the natural beauty of Nepal he’s so interested and has more and more to ask. Let’s see what kind of impression he’ll have about Nepal. I’m not sure whether I’ll be posting anything to the blog while I’m there but I’ll try to upload some photos from there.

Most of the modern Ethernet networks use LAN switches and for the Network Admins it’s very essential to understand how this basic, yet very important component of the network operates. I came across an excellent document in cisco site about How LAN Switches Work. The document explains what a LAN switch is, how transparent bridging works, what are VLANs, trunking, and spanning trees.

Switching allows a network to maintain full-duplex Ethernet. Before switching existed, Ethernet was half duplex. Half duplex means that only one device on the network can transmit at any given time. In a fully switched network, nodes only communicate with the switch and never directly with each other. In the road analogy, half duplex is similar to the problem of a single lane, when road construction closes one lane of a two-lane road. Traffic attempts to use the same lane in both directions. Traffic that comes one way must wait until traffic from the other direction stops in order to avoid collision.

eKatnipur.com is reporting that a girl in far western Nepal emits ‘glass pieces’ from forhead. A team of doctors are researching on 12-year-old girl, who has been excreting glass pieces from the side of her forehead for the last three years.

“The CT scan report indicates that she has some kind of problem in her forehead skin,” said Dr M Kiduwai who is involved in the research, “The pieces do not seem to be coming out from the bone. But we can give more details only after further investigation.”

Here are some other mysterious phenomena reported by media:

Lekhnath School girls continue to suffer from “mass hysteria” - The students shouted, cried and fell unconscious in fear uttering that they saw an enormous snake that was about to pounce on them, according to the teachers.

World’s shortest boy - 14 years old and 20-inch tall Nepali boy. He’s probably the shortest boy in the world, but to qualify for the Guinness World Records he’ll have to wait for 4 more years until he reaches 18.

Bizarre baby born in Dolakha (WARNING! you might find the images disturbing) - A neck-less baby was born with extraordinarily large eyeballs. Died within half an hour.

The Buddha Boy of Nepal - Ram Bahadur Bomjon, who meditated under a pipal tree for 10-months before he went missing on March 2006. He’s said he’ll be back after 6 years.

Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters show that anyone can become expert in almost anything. It indicates that experts are made, not born.

But how do the experts in these various subjects acquire their extraordinary skills? How much can be credited to innate talent and how much to intensive training? Psychologists have sought answers in studies of chess masters. The collected results of a century of such research have led to new theories explaining how the mind organizes and retrieves information. What is more, this research may have important implications for educators. Perhaps the same techniques used by chess players to hone their skills could be applied in the classroom to teach reading, writing and arithmetic.

The TCP/IP Guide is the most comprehensive and easy to understand TCP/IP reference material available online. The 1600+ pages long guide is also available as a print book at amazon. This is absolutely one of the most useful resources for Network Admins. It is a perfect reference guide for experts, as well as an excellent learning aid for beginners. It includes full coverage of PPP, ARP, IP, IPv6, IP NAT, IPSec, Mobile IP, ICMP, RIP, BGP, TCP, UDP, DNS, DHCP, SNMP, FTP, SMTP, NNTP, HTTP, Telnet and much more

I went to HK Disneyland last weekend with my family. My son was very excited to meet and take photos with his favorite Goofy, Buzz, Tigger, Mickey, Mini and many more. It was a fun place to be, but also was too crowded and had to queue up for everything up to half an hour. Anyway, what mattered most was that my son was very happy and we had a great time. I have taken some photos, enjoy…

The entrance, right after getting off the Disney train. We knew it would be crowded.
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I always recommend to run Linux on Servers in our office and also for our customers. When asked why, among other things I say Linux is stable, popular, have more community support, and I’m familiar and comfortable with it. But when asked why not BSD, I say it’s similar to Linux because both are Unix-style OSes but also there’re many differences… and one of them is that I’m not so familiar with the BSD . A BSD user has put together everything you need to know about BSD vs Linux. Recently I’ve installed a FreeBSD server for an e-commerce system and agree with the author that "The differences between BSD and Linux all derive from basic philosophical differences. Once you understand those, everything else falls into place pretty neatly."

While there’s overwhelming similarity between the operating systems in most cases, there are also a lot of differences. As you probe more into the differences, you find that they emerge from deep-seated disagreements. Some are disagreements over development methodology, some over deployment and usage, some about what’s important, some about who’s important, and some about which flavor of ice cream is superior. Just comparing the surface differences doesn’t tell you anything; it’s the deeper differences that both explain and justify why each group does things the way they do.

I’m very happy with my Mac and I think there’s no turning back now. The elegance, simplicity, stability and security of OS X can never be compared with Windows. I still have a Windows pc and a notebook with some windows only applications installed. Also one thing to note is that the corporate world is full of windows, so I think a system and network admin cannot completely ignore windows. Anyway, if you’re planning to switch to a Mac, the good news is that there’re enough Mac application for productive system and network administration. Here are the applications I find useful for my daily system and network administration.
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A newly published book, "The Great Sons of the Tharus: Sakyamuni Buddha and Emperor Asoka", written by Subodh Kumar Singh claims that Buddha did not come from a royal family but a "Tharu" community that today is at the bottom of the social hierarchy in Nepal, living as bonded labourers.

Singh, himself is a Tharu and says ‘The word Tharu comes from Sthabir in Sanskrit, meaning monk or the Buddha. The Tharus are therefore the Buddha’s people.’

In his book, Singh claims that when Buddha came back to his kingdom after attaining enlightenment so many people joined him as followers. But he selected only a few of them and told others to be Buddhists after being indoctrinated by these chosen leaders. These people who became Buddhists were called Stharu, which ‘perverted’ into Tharu, in due course of time. Singh says, Tharus are originally Kshetriyas.