Nirlog.com

The earthquakes that shook Taiwan yesterday, killed 2 when a building collapsed, and injured at least 40. The quake also damaged undersea cables that disrupted Telecommunications and Internet connections around Asia.

When I went to office this morning, after 3 days Christmas holiday, the phone was constantly ringing, with customers query about Internet and Email service. Our servers were inaccessible from Overseas and we couldn’t reach sites outside of Hong Kong.

Yesterday, I’d noticed an upsurge in traffic to my blog after the news of Buddha Boy’s reappearance, but unfortunately today most of the visitors from US cannot access my site. Hopefully the the damaged cables will be repaired soon and we’ll have an access to the wider world.

This is the notice from my ISP (looks like it’ll take several days to fix):

News: Quake disrupt Asia communication

Ram Bahadur Bomjon, popularly known as Buddha Boy, who disapperead in March this year has been spotted near a dense forest in Pathlaiya nijgadh, on Sunday night. Local hunters, who had been out hunting in the jungle spotted Bomjon first.

Few things we know from media after his reappearance:

He looked slender than before, was in grimy cloths and had long hair flowing down his shoulder.

He was carrying a sharp sword with him and when asked why he needed it, he said he’s carrying it for his own protection.

He claims that he still hadn’t eaten any food, but eats herbs. He wandered around the jungles in Bara, Parsa and Rautahat districts.

His pervious handlers, the members of the Tapaswi Sewa Samiti, are settling up a place for his meditation nearby the Halkhori Lake in Ratanpuri.

“I am engaged in devotion which will continue for six years,” the boy told reporters.

He doesn’t want the new meditation site to be noisy and wants his followers to keep 10 meters distance.

When asked what to do with the donations that his followers and visitors would make, he urged to do anything with the donations, but keep from engaging in business or misuse.

More news about his reappearance:
‘Buddha Boy’ Bomjon found in Bara jungle
Missing ‘Buddha boy’ found
Mystery “Buddha boy” reappears

The comment and trackback spams had been a headache for me. Every blogger understands how annoying they are and how unproductive they can make you. Besides from being a blogger, I maintain systems that hosts many wordpress blogs. The good news for a normal blogger who uses wordpress is that the built-in Akismet anti-spam in wordpress 2 is already very mature and can catch most of the spams. The spam comments are caught by the mighty Akismet but from system’s perspective, it’ll still have to process and classify it as spam or good comments. When there’re robots and scripts commenting in thousands, it makes MySql consume a lot of system resources (Memory, CPU and connections), making the whole system unavailable at times.
Read the rest of this entry »

I switched from Microsoft to Apple on desktop, but on mobile I’m jumping (trying) from Palm to Microsoft. I’ve bought a Dopod 720w, which runs windows mobile 5 smartphone edition. It’s gorgeous and slim, with bright screen, Wi-Fi, Edge, Gprs, push e-mail, excellent call quality and long talk time battery life. You can listen to the music or watch videos with it’s windows media player 10 mobile (supports AAC, MP3, WAV, WMA, MPEG-4 , and WMV files). I’ve been mobile surfing web for a while and discovered that my blog is not so mobile friendly. I found a neat script, with step-by-step instruction that converts your blog or web site mobile friendly in just 2 minutes.

So, here is my mobile friendly blog — http://mobile.nirlog.com, created in 2 minutes.

Browsing with my dopod

Read the rest of this entry »

UWB has posted a recently taken photo of Ram’s mother and sister in No News of Buddha boy but the life goes on…

A significant number of users land in my blog searching for the keywords “buddha boy”, “meditating boy”, “boy with extraordinary powers”, “the boy with divine powers”, “buddha boy update”, “ram bahadur bomjon” and so on… The recent airing of My Shocking Story: The Boy With Divine Powers by Discovery Channel has taken this story to the wider audience. Now more people know about him and are curious about where he might be. Looking at the comments of visitors and emails that I received, I can see there are 4 types of people following his story.

The first type of people are confident that this was/is a hoax. They say it is scientifically impossible for anyone to sit in one place without eating and drinking for such a long time. This was a well planned hoax to deceive innocent people and get their money.

The second group of people believe that he’s holy and divine. One guy reasoned it like this — “You see he has been meditating for 10 months without food and water, and is immune to fire and snake bites. Who do you think he is?”

There’s a third group, who think he’s the reincarnation of Buddha. This reincarnation thought was implanted and made popular by captivating headlines that many mainstream media choose, while Ram was meditating, and after he went missing.

The final fourth group of people are open minded, curious and not exactly sure what’s going on.

I’m one from the fourth group. I’m very deeply interested in this story. I feel something significant is going on here. I think all the attention he got was something he never asked for. I hope he’s safe, in a peaceful place and progressing with his meditation. Like the critics and believers I’m waiting for his appearance after 6 years to see what he has to say.

By the way, what do you think about Buddha boy?

Security Absurdity: The Complete, Unquestionable, And Total Failure of Information Security. Noam Eppel writes how the Internet security is failing and what can be done about it. He compares the current state of security industry with a boiling frog:

They say if you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will, of course, frantically try to scramble out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, it will float there quite complacently. As you turn up the heat, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death. The security industry is much like that frog; completely and uncontrollably in disarray - yet we tolerate it since we are used to it.

The article lists out attacks that made the headlines recently and points out that failure can be seen everywhere — spyware, phishing, trojans, viruses, worms, spam, botnets, web application vulnerabilities, DoS attacks, Active-X, passwords, patch management, zero-days, wireless access points, internal attacks, vulnerabilities in security software, mobile viruses and encryption.

Recently Noam Eppel has published an update to the failure article with Community Comments & Feedback, where he highlights the Good, the Bad and the Ugly comments generated by his article.

I think both articles are very useful, with loads of data and insights, specially for Information Security Professionals.

I wanted to upload these photos for a long time and now finally after a long procrastination I’ve managed to post them. Enjoy…

Bindabashini Temple, Pokhara.

A young priest in Shiva Temple. It was an amazing and peaceful experience to receive a tika from him. His mantra chanting is very professional.

Read the rest of this entry »