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What Do Computers tell us about God?: A reflection of a Computer Scientist…

Pink Floyd has released a box set of all their classic 14 studio albums to celebrate the band’s 40th anniversary. It’s called “Oh By The Way”. Their official web site has a flash ad page for it and it’s a must visit. This is the best web ad I’ve ever seen in the internet, it’s just breath taking, and as stunning as their music!

GFI LANguard Network Security Scanner is a very easy to use yet powerful commercial Network vulnerability scanning, patch management and auditing tool. If you have a small network with few computers then it’s easy to keep track of the softwares installed and do the patching manually, but for larger networks it would be a nightmare to do everything manually. This is where tools like GFI LANguard NSS come in to help network/system admins. GFI LANguard NSS makes use of the vulnerability check databases based on OVAL and SANS Top 20, providing over 15,000 vulnerability assessments when your network is scanned. It is one of the best commercial network security scanner and patch management tool available.

I’ve installed and tested it in my WinXP SP2 running on my MacBook Pro Vmware Fusion, and this is what I found.

Continue reading GFI LANguard Network Security Scanner 8

I don’t know about other ISPs in UK but I can tell you that Orange is the worst I’ve encountered. I’ve been without the internet at home for 23 days. The broadband stopped working from 23rd of December 2007 (for unknown reasons) until yesterday, but I still don’t know what was the problem. I’ve made more than 10 calls to it’s customer support and they’re clueless about the cause of outage. The call gets redirected to it’s support center in India and the support staff absolutely have no idea about the problem. Every time you call them they’ll tell the same thing: “The case has been escalated and will be solved within 5 working days” and they’ll ask you to follow the Livebox (wireless router) reset procedure. It’s probably one of the worst customer service… no followups, no idea about the problem and the service goes on and off like magic. They sign you up for a 18 to 24 month contract and once you’re hooked who cares…

I’ll probably never join Orange again!

Thanks to the iPhone, I was able to keep up with the personal emails and relatively decent web browsing.

2007 has been an exciting year for me. I moved to a new place, changed jobs and am enjoying new environment, new culture and new opportunities… I’ve made some new friends and the life seems wonderful. I’m very content with what year 2007 has given me, and am looking forward to more challenges, fun, love, peace and spiritual development in 2008.

I would like to take this opportunity to wish all of my readers, friends and family a VERY HAPPY and PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR 2008!

After an email and a comment from Andy about Ram Bomjon – Palden Dorje Google Groups, I checked for recent news about him. There’re interesting discussions going on in Google Groups, I found Ram’s official web site where videos of his addresses are posted, here’s his First Address (August 2 2007), and the Second one (october 19 to 24, 2007). Someone has even created a myspace page for him (currently he has 1671 friends).

His first message was for peace to the world.

Murder, violence, greed, anger and temptation has made the human world a desperate place. A terrible storm has descended upon the human world, and this is carrying the world towards destruction. There is only one way to save the world and that is through ‘dharma” (religious practice.) When one doesn’t walk the righteous path of religious practice, this desperate world will surely be destroyed. Therefore, follow the path of religion and spread this message to your fellows.

when you read the translation of his message it is very powerful, but listening to his speech in Nepali was not that great. To me it sounded like a teenager trying to deliver a memorized speech. The second video was another attempt…, It was clear that either he was reading the speech or was another memorized one.

Having that said, I still think he’s very special and is up to something but the whole spectacle that organizers are trying to create around him and make him a great guru before he becomes one is just wrong and sad.

Let me know what you think!

It’s been interesting times for me here in London. Life has taken many turns and I’m enjoying the Journey. Just wanted to let you all know that I’ve joined ShipServ as a System Manager and will be looking after their network, infrastructure and Security.

ShipServ was founded in 1999 and is the world’s leading e-marketplace, helping buyers and sellers to easily find each other, connect cost effectively and trade efficiently. Whether a Supplier wants to attract new customers, a Buyer needs to source new Suppliers or existing purchasing relationships require internet-enabling, ShipServ is unique in helping businesses of all sizes in the areas of web based Commerce, Search and Advertising.

I’m really honored and delighted to accept the new challenge and start this new phase of my career.

After upgrading to Leopard I’m experiencing random keyboard freezes in my MacBook Pro. It’s very annoying! After a quick Google I found many people having the same problem.

Leopard is sleek and polished with some great new features, but it’s not as stable as Tiger. Besides the keyboard issue, it fails to shutdown or reboot time to time. The finder hangs and need to shutdown pressing the power button.

Hopefully Apple will acknowledge and address these issues soon.

Update: Apple finally released this Software Update to fix the freezing keyboards.

If you’re running a web site and have come to a point where a single web server cannot handle the traffic, then it’s time to get multiple web servers and share the loading. To do that you’ll need a load balancer which distributes the web traffic among multiple web servers.

Basically you’ve two choice — go for the hardware solutions (expensive with many nice features) or software solutions (possibly free but with limited features). If you want a free and open source solution then Pound is the choice.

Pound is a Free Open Source reverse-proxy, load balancer, SSL wrapper, http/https sanitizer, fail over server and a request redirector:

1. a reverse-proxy: it passes requests from client browsers to one or more back-end servers.
2. a load balancer: it will distribute the requests from the client browsers among several back-end servers, while keeping session information.
3. an SSL wrapper: Pound will decrypt HTTPS requests from client browsers and pass them as plain HTTP to the back-end servers.
4. an HTTP/HTTPS sanitizer: Pound will verify requests for correctness and accept only well-formed ones.
5. a fail over-server: should a back-end server fail, Pound will take note of the fact and stop passing requests to it until it recovers.
6. a request redirector: requests may be distributed among servers according to the requested URL.

Pound is built with security in mind, it can run as setuid/setgid and/or in a chroot jail. It’s a very small, robust and efficient program.

It’s very easy to install and configure.

Continue reading Load balancing web servers with Pound

Finally got my hands on the iPhone today!

We’ve all watched/read so much about the iphone and it’s coolness that expectations were quite high. And I’ve to say that I was not disappointed. It’s really cool, slim and gorgeous. Most of the things work perfect. I think the keyboard is not an issue.

iPhone was launched today at 6:02pm in UK and could be bought in Apple Stores, O2 stores or Carphone Warehouse stores. You’ll have to sign 18 months contract with O2, which is the exclusive carrier in UK.

There’s one Carphone Warehouse store few blocks away from my house, so I went to check out at 6pm. Surprisingly there were just around 20 people queuing up. The store opened at 6:02 and everybody was let in. But there was a problem with carphone warehouse’s payment system. I’m not sure if the system was flooded by iPhone transaction or other technical issues. Anyway, it took more than half an hour just for the payment authorization. I was the first one to walk out of that store with the iPhone. They authorized the payment manually, bypassing the chip and pin (security system in UK’s bank cards).

Activating iPhone with iTunes was a smooth and painless process. I am currently using Vodafone, and got the PAC code from them few days ago. PAC code is a special code to transfer your mobile number from one provider to another. My existing mobile number will be automatically transferred to my iPhone after 7 days, until then O2 has assigned me a temporary number. That was clever.

Played with most of its features, made several calls (quality is quite good) and tested the visual voice mail (which should be very useful). Synced my address book, music, podcasts, some photos and videos. iPod is excellent. Gmail and IMAP mails are easy to configure and work without any problem. Photos are very cool, flipping them, zooming in/out, resizing was fun. Google Maps will be very useful for me finding places in London, it loads pretty fast even on EDGE Network.

Only problems are the Wi-Fi connection and YouTube. I use a 128bit WEP HEX Key at home and couldn’t establish connection with my Access Point. Quick Google gave me this (seems to be a known issue) but using $ in front doesn’t solve the problem for me. For the YouTube Videos It says that it requires an EDGE or Wi-Fi connection.

I think these two problems can be fixed easily.

I’m just having a good time playing with it. You’ve to hold it and use it to really appreciate it. It was a nice Deepawali gift for myself!