Nirlog.com

I was greeted with several New Year SMS Greetings early this morning. Nepali New Year provides a nice opportunity to connect with friends and relatives while away from home. I would like to take this opportunity to wish all of my readers a Happy and Prosperous New Year 2064. I truly hope and wish that this year will bring peace, prosperity and development to Nepal and it’s people. For non-nepali readers here’s a good description of Nepali Calendar.

Recently I haven’t been able to commit as much time as I would have wanted to on this blog. Currently I’m very busy with other projects and hopefully I’ll be free soon to start regular posting here.

Allan Leinwand at GigaOM has an interesting post about Web 2.0 & Death of the Network Engineer.

I was recently meeting with a Web 2.0 company discussing their network infrastructure plans. As I started asking questions about their racks of servers, their storage area network (SAN), their plans for routing, load-balancing and network security, the CTO of the company stopped me and made a bold statement.

He said, “The Internet is like electricity. We plug into it and all of the things that you mention are already there for us. We don’t spend any time at all on network or server infrastructure plans.”

To this CTO, knowing the details of his network and server infrastructure was like knowing the details of the local utility electricity grid – not required. Is this a bad thing, or proof that networking technologies have succeeded?

I think for Web 2.0 startups the network infrastructure and the internet is really like electricity in the beginning, but once you start to grow and need to scale, you can’t afford the black box approach. Then you’ll need to have a very detailed understanding of everything.

Today it’s impossible to think business and personal communications without email. Sending and receiving emails costs you and me nothing. It’s free! The zero cost (for users), the efficiency of delivery, and ease of use has made it so popular. But now email has become a victim of it’s own success. Just my quick test with one email server for 4 days showed that 96% of the emails received were abusive.

The email protocol (SMTP) was designed at a time when very few people were using emails and everyone basically knew each other. So, security was not a concern, but today the world has changed and that trust isn’t there anymore, but the SMTP protocol we’re using remains the same.

So, how is today’s technology dealing with this problem?

Read the rest of this entry »

When I read the news about Bomjan’s plan to start the ‘patal samadhi’ (underground meditation), it appeared to me that he’ll go under the trench and they’ll literally bury him alive. I was very worried about his safety and wished that he knew what he’s doing. But I feel better after reading eKantipur’s report that he’s meditating in a bunker, which is cemented from all sides and has a roof of tiles. Now that’s not a live burial, I guess.

According to Inspector Rameshwor Yadav of the Area Police Post Nijgadh, Bomjon was inside the bunker-like square ditch of seven feet.

“We call it bunker,” he said, adding, ” Although it’s seven feet deep, there is no lack of oxygen inside,” said Yadav, who claimed to have seen him going inside it from close range Monday.

A police team, under the command of Yadav, had gone to the place after word of Bomjon being on underground meditation spread in the area.

“His face was clean and hair was combed well,” Yadav said. According to him, “the bunker” has been cemented from all sides with roof of tiles.

So, some people think he’s looking for a peaceful place to meditate while others think he’s doing this for popularity and more money. I think he’s doing this for the same reason Buddha did 2600 years ago. Of course it’s a different matter whether he’ll be able to attain enlightenment or not. I’m not sure about his followers, but I’m quite sure about him, that he neither cares about money nor fame.

Ram Bahadur Bomjoan, the Buddha Boy is back in the news with reports that he plans to be buried alive while meditating.

Bomjan now plans to begin ‘patal samadhi’ (underground meditation), a private TV channel reported Monday, quoting a local journalist.

According to reports, his followers have already dug up an eight-feet deep trench in which Bomjan plans to descend. The trench will be then filled.

Asian religious traditions narrate tales of holy men being buried alive, braving extreme heat or cold and subjecting the body to other torments in order to master the senses and attain salvation.

A question is being asked whether the district administration will allow Bomjan’s followers to bury him. There has been no official response.

I’ve no idea what this means or will lead to if it’s true. I just hope that he knows what he’s doing. Searched Google to see if anyone has attempted this before and found this interesting overview of Scientific Studies of Contemplative Experience by Michael Murphy.

Like heart stopping, the live burial of yogis has excited the interest of several researchers. A physician, Rustom Jal Vakil, published an account in the British journal Lancet of such a confinement that was witnessed by some 10,000 people near Bombay in February 1950. According to Vakil, an emaciated sadhu named Ramdasji sat cross-legged in a subterranean 216-cubic-foot cubicle and remained there for sixty-two hours. His pulse remained steady at eighty beats per minute; his blood pressure was 112/78; and his respiratory rate fluctuated from eight to ten breaths per minute. Though he had some scratches and cuts, Vakil wrote, Ramdasji appeared “none the worse for his grueling experience.'’

I was lucky to get my hand on the AppleTV early enough. I’ve taken some photos, enjoy…

Click on the photo for larger image.

Read the rest of this entry »

Few years ago I was looking for a virtual host management system, that’s when I came across Virtualmin. The features satisfied my requirements and of course you can’t beat the free, price wise . I’ve been using it in an environment with 100+ virtual hosts since then, and don’t have any regret on my choice. It’s running all these years without any problem.

What is Virtualmin

Virtualmin is a free and open-source virtual hosting management system designed to make virtual hosting quick, reliable, and secure. It’s a Webmin module, which supports the creation and management of Apache virtual hosts, BIND DNS domains, MySQL/PostgresSQL databases, and mailboxes and aliases with Sendmail, Postfix or Qmail. It utilizes existing Webmin modules for these servers, and works with any existing system configuration, rather than needing it’s own mail server, web server and so on. There’s also a commercial version of Virtualmin that you’ve to pay for, called Virtualmin Pro, which includes some extra features and support.

Read the rest of this entry »

Strange and unusual deaths…

Austrian Hans Steininger was famous for having the world’s longest beard (it was 4.5 feet or nearly 1.4 m long) and for dying because of it.

One day in 1567, there was a fire in town and in his haste Hans forgot to roll up his beard. He accidentally stepped on his beard, lost balance, stumbled, broke his neck and died!

Go here for more

Update 13 March 2007: He’s been found safe and is meditating in a new place.

All Headline News is reporting that the Buddha Boy (Ram Bahadur Bomjan) has gone missing again after he re-appeared in December last year on Christmas day. He’s been meditating near Halkhoriya pond in Bara, since his re-appearance in December. Locals in the district said he left his meditating place Thursday midnight.

Officials of Namo Buddha Service Committee searched for him throughout the day on Friday. Inspector Rameshwor Yadav of the Area Police Office in Nijgadh said the police have not been able to reach the spot though they were reported about his missing.

I’m planning to buy a new laptop (MacBook or MacBook Pro) after the Leopard is released, and have been wondering which one of the new apple laptops provide a better value. Here is a nice break down of different components of MB and MBP.

First of all, both the MacBook and the MacBook Pro come in three models. I’m assuming that for people who are considering both the MB and MBP lines, the $1099 MB model is too underpowered and the $2499 and $2799 MBP models are too expensive, so the models they’ll consider are the $1299 and $1499 MB models and the $1999 MBP model. I’ll ignore the $1499 MB as well as it’s just the $1299 model with a 120 GB hard drive and in black. The bigger drive is a $150 option for the $1299 model.

There’s no doubt that both the MacBook and the MacBook Pro are excellent laptops, but I think I’ll go for MacBook Pro, for it’s bigger screen (just 0.4 pound heavier than MB), faster performance and discrete graphics processor (vista aero compatible). Probably it’s worth the extra money.