• Fotia@Blitzschlag

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    Fotia, a workshop on some of the coolest open source technologies, is happening at MNIT-Jaipur on the 7th of February, 2009 during our techno-cultural fest, Blitzschlag '09! The agenda for the day is as follows:

    1) 0800-0900 Hours: Registration

    2) 0900-1000 Hours: 'OpenSolaris and it's exciting features' by Ajay Ahuja, General Manager (Systems Engineering)

    3) 1000-1100 Hours: 'Open High Availability Cluster' by Lalith Suresh, Sun Campus Ambassador, MNIT-Jaipur

    4) 1100-1200 Hours: FOSS Quiz; prizes include one iPOD Shuffle, two 4GB Pendrives and three Headphones!

    Apart from this, we're distributing OpenSolaris Starter Kits, Netbeans DVDs and we're giving away OpenSolaris t-shirts to the sharper among the audience members!

    So what are you waiting for? Come on over!

  • Setting up MRTG for BSNL, Jaipur... again!

    Well, going by what actually happened at the National Internet Backbone's nodal center in Jaipur, a more apt title would have been something like:

    "Attempt at Setting up MRTG for BSNL, Jaipur, Swiftly Denied by a Network Problem"

    Like I mentioned before, we had some serious network related issues when we were trying to configure the (really old) server they'd given us to setup MRTG on. We were to configure the network interface settings on the Red Hat server according to a hand book they'd given me. After setting the IP and the subnet mask, I went on to add the default gateway route. And heck, the gateway wasn't visible from the LAN! I thought that perhaps, the hand book had older details and they'd probably reconfigured their routers in the server room we were in. But when Mr S.C Gupta, the head of the nodal office, told me that all other hosts in the same network are using the gateway that was specified in the manual (which was Rajasthan's gateway to the internet backbone), I was taken aback. Not once in my system administration experience had I encountered a situation where a router was visible to all hosts but one within the same VLAN (assuming no one went through the trouble of setting a port block in the switch)! Furthermore, I was able to ping all these hosts from the server in question and vice versa, but the router still stood defiant (when I get my hands on it...grrr). My suspicion about the router having disabled incoming pings were also put to waste when I saw that it's working with the other devices on the same LAN. Just to be sure, I checked and double checked the configuration of all other systems on the network, and they all seemed green. How queer. To make matters worse, no one really knew how these devices were networked. After tackling the problem for about 4 hours, me and my junior Nitin, decided to leave and come back some other time because the station was to go on a power maintenance shutdown. Man was I glad I left that place!

  • Next Generation of Gaming?

    Believe it or not, this is real. The surface is known as the reactable and this work involves developing a role playing game (RPG) which involves you moving around your character through a virtual world. Let the video do the explaining for you.

  • I Squished Two Bugs in OHAC

    At last, I've managed to contribute code to open source! Although they're just two very trivial and super easy oss-bite-sized bugs, something's better than nothing. What say? One bug fix was in the GDS coding template where I corrected a minor mistake with the local_zone_zsh() function. I stumbled upon it while developing HA-Cron, one of my Code For Freedom projects. The other bug involved me correcting some improper cluster boot messages.

    Both this fixes are coming out with the next release of OHAC. w00t! ^^

  • Atheist bus? What's wrong with you people?

    An atheist campaign?

    Absolutely despicable. What else can I say? Even though I'm an atheist and I do agree that religion is doing as much harm as good, I'm totally against the idea of atheists trying to propagate their thoughts by putting up banners everywhere. If you're going to express your atheism in an in-your-face manner, you have no moral right to blame missionaries from the Church (or whatever) for what they're doing (this statement has been made with reference to a comment on one such 'Atheist bus' blog). Talk about hypocrisy! I pride in being an atheist and I like keeping quiet about it. I only react when I'm provoked or when someone tries to stuff their beliefs down my throat. Come to me and tell me something like, "Hey, I wonder how you survive without any faith... Don't you ever feel like visiting a temple?... How do you appear for an exam without asking for God's support?... etc", and I will definitely give you an overdose of what I think and a few more things (a kick in the nuts perhaps) as a token of my appreciation. I don't know what this is about people trying to tell the entire world about their faith in God (or lack thereof). Can't we all keep quiet about this? Isn't it inevitable that no one's ever going to agree on religion, especially in a country like India where everything seems to revolve around it.

    Religion is something that you can't prove right or wrong, but that which you choose to believe is right. If you know you're right, why the heck do you care about those around you? Just get on with your own lives...