Buddha Boy reappears

by niranjanPosted on Posted in Body, Mind & Spirit, Buddha Boy, Life, Nepal

Buddha

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

Wp-hashcash — an excellent comment SPAM plugin

by niranjanPosted on Posted in Admin, Blogging, Technology

Wp-Hashcash-3-Banner

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.
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Going mobile

by niranjanPosted on Posted in Reviews, Technology, Windows

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.

Dopod1
Browsing with my dopod

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What do you think about Buddha Boy?

by niranjanPosted on Posted in Body, Mind & Spirit, Buddha Boy, Life, Nepal

Palden Dorje In Grove-1UWB 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?

Is the Internet Security failing?

by niranjanPosted on Posted in Admin, Links, Network, Security, Technology

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.

Images from Hindu Temples

by niranjanPosted on Posted in Body, Mind & Spirit, Life, Nepal

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
Bindabashini Temple, Pokhara.

Young-Priest
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.

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Email is 35

by niranjanPosted on Posted in Admin, Email, Network, Technology

Email has just turned 35 and it’s very difficult to imagine working without the emails today. Here are few interesting links to Email and it’s history.

IT programmer Ray Tomlinson sent the first message in late 1971.

The test messages were entirely forgettable and I have, therefore, forgotten them. Most likely the first message was QUERTYIOP or something similar.

Josh Burt of The Sun is reminding us of the top 5 embarrassing emails of last 35 years.

And a list of very useful tips from IT Security; Hacking Email: 99 tips to make you more secure and productive. The article include Etiquette, Communicating & Effectiveness, Mobile Email, Productivity, Folders, Filtering, Email Attachments, Tricks, Hacks, Backup, Software specific tips, Privacy and Security.

Peace at the top of the world

by niranjanPosted on Posted in Life, Nepal

This is the news that I and millions of other Nepalese were waiting for. War is officially over in Nepal. The government of Nepal and Maoist rebels have signed a historic peace accord, which ends the 10 years of fighting that killed more than 13 thousand people. This brings an end to the politics of bloodshed and starts a new peaceful era for Nepal.

Here is the full text of the Comprehensive Peace Accord (English)

This is what Prime-minister Koirala had said after signing the peace deal.

“Beginning today, the politics of killing, violence and terror will be replaced by the politics of reconciliation,” declared the 85-year-old PM Koirala who said he had put his entire political career at risk by venturing on this path of peace and democracy. “Being a democrat, I wanted to bring non-democrats into the framework of democracy. I was warned by many friends about the hazards of dealing with terrorists but I thought that bringing all under democratic framework was the duty of a democrat.”

Photo blogger Rajesh KC has put together the sequence of signing the peace accord; from preparation to the signing and the celebration in his blog entry The end of the war.
Celebrating Peace1-1

Here is an emotional blog entry from from Dinesh Wagle, where he describes how it feels to see the end of the bloody war.

Staying away from home, I never had the first hand experience of how it was to live under the Maoist insurgency, but my heart always cried when I had to hear the news of bloody conflict claiming innocent lives and hindering the development of the country. I cannot describe in words the overly joyous feeling that I’m having right now. I can feel the invisible power that peace is bringing to Nepal. I join the millions of people at home and abroad who feel the same way and celebrate the peace at the top of the world.

Free Hugs

by niranjanPosted on Posted in Body, Mind & Spirit, Life, Links, Random

It’s an amazing experiment. I was touched by it, this just demonstrates what a difference one single human being can make.

OpenVPN Implementation

by niranjanPosted on Posted in Admin, Apple, HowTo, Linux/Unix, Network, Security, Technology, VPN, Windows

This guide describes how to install and configure the OpenVPN Server in Linux and clients in Windows XP and Mac OSX. There are many advanced features in OpenVPN and if you’re interested in those advanced stuff, there’s a more detailed HowTo for you. This guide was created from my successful installation, so it works for me. If you find any problems or have suggestions please leave a comment. I’ll try my best to help. I’m sure, you know that you’re using this at your own risk 😉

In our scenario, a small office network is protected by Linux firewall and we’ll implement the secure OpenVPN to access the internal office network (File Server, Database Server and Desktop PCs) securely from anywhere in the Internet.

openvpn

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