Word cloud (wordle) of Obama’s speech after winning a second term.
admin
For loop in Windows command shell
For my records, syntax for running a simple for loop in command prompt
[code]for %i in (SERVER1 SERVER2) do nslookup %i [/code]
note :
- Looks like the variable can only be single characters. i.e you cannot name the variable %server
- For using the same syntax in a batch file, you have to add another % to the variable. i.e. %i becomes %%i
And she kicks my arse again
Jhanvi and I ran the 2012 Chicago Hot Chocolate 15K today. This was the first race in the city after we officially became “suburbanites” last week. And let me tell you, that one needs to be highly (HIGHLY) motivated to haul themselves all the way to the city to run a race. And the fact that it was freezing didn’t help.
While the race it self was fun, I think the organizers did a terrible job with the package pickup expo and the post race party. It looks like they didn’t know what 40K people getting together in one place looks like. The expo tent could barely fit a 1000 people and folks had to stand ~2 hours in line to pick up the package in cold weather. And let me not tell you about the post race snack!!. Hopefully they will learn from this and make it a better event next year. Chocolate seems to motivate a whole lot of people (including me 🙂 ).
And in other news, Jhanvi kicked my butt as usual and finished a whole 10 minutes earlier..
Jhanvi’s Results 
My results 
Us After the race 
The only thing that was abundant at the race 🙂 
SNL hacked
Screenshot of NBC’ hacked website (in particular the Saturday Night Live section). Link to Hacker News discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4740312
I found it interesting that the site was not fixed for several hours even after it was reported on major news outlets. Ironical that NBC itself is a major news outlet :). Â It would be great if NBC publishes a follow up on how the server(s) were compromised so that the rest of the world can learn from this incident.
p.s : Nice blog post by my one time colleague, Ed Bellis, on how the security industry should be sharing more information so that we can improve the state of security across the board.
Consequences of delivering early
$14B (yes, that is a Billion dollars!!)
That is the drop in Google’s market capitalization, when R.R.Donnelly released Google’s quarterly results earlier than intended 🙂
HOW TO : Download SSL certificate using openssl and importing it into a keystore
Following up on my earlier post about using keytool to import and export certificates into a keystore. Here is some more information on using openssl to download the certificate from a remote server and then using keytool to import it into the keystore.
keytool needs the certificate to be in X509 format, so we will use sed to format the certificate.
[code]echo -n | openssl s_client -connect HOST:PORTNUMBER | sed -ne ‘/-BEGIN CERTIFICATE-/,/-END CERTIFICATE-/p’ > /tmp/$SERVERNAME.cert [/code]
breaking down the command
[code]echo -n[/code]
send an end of line signal to openssl. This allows openssl (or rather the server it is trying to connect to) to disconnect the session
[code]openssl s_client -connect HOST:PORTNUMBER[/code]
asks openssl to act as a client and connect to the HOST on the specificed PORTNUMBER
[code]sed -ne ‘/-BEGIN CERTIFICATE-/,/-END CERTIFICATE-/p’ [/code]
asks sed to take the input from openssl and only output the content between BEGIN CERTIFICATE and END CERTIFICATE.
NOTE: If you get an error like “SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:sslv3 alert unexpected message”, it means the server doesn’t support SSL negotation. Using the command option -no_tls1 helps work around this error. This option will tell openssl to disable TLS1 negotiation.
2012 Half Marathons : An update
Quick update on the races Jhanvi and I ran so far this year. And yes, she kicked my butt in all of them as usual 🙂
2012 Rock and Roll Chicago Half Marathon
Showing off our medals in the train back home.. It was painful 🙂 
Endomondo’s view of how I ran 
2012 Northface Challenge : Madison
This is the third time, I am running this trail half marathon. And for the first time, I actually did better than the last race. And it was mainly due to Jhanvi encouraging me to practice. Not my best time, but better than last year 🙂
HOW TO : Compare two directories in Linux
Quick post on using diff to compare two directories in Linux. This will show the list of files and subdirectories that are different in either directories
[code]diff /PATH_TO_FIRST_DIRECTORY /PATH_TO_SECOND_DIRECTORY -r –brief  [/code]
Options used
- r : Searched recursively through the directory
- –brief : Only shows the names of the files that differ. If you want details of the content that differs, remove this option
HOW TO : grep for response codes in apache logs
If you want to grep for certain http response codes in a apache log file
- Look for all access requests with a 200 response code[code] grep -i "[: ]200[: ]" HTTP_ACCESS_LOG [/code]
- Look for all access requests that do NOT have a 200 response code[code] grep -i -v "[: ]200[: ]" HTTP_ACCESS_LOG [/code]
Details of the options
- [code]"[: ]"[/code]
tells grep to look for space or tab before the specified string, which in this case is 200.