admin

Virat Kudithipudi

New year… new addition to the family :).

Virat Kudithipudi, was born on 1/9/2012 at 22:22.

We went through a lot at the end of the pregnancy. First Jhanvi got shingles and then I contracted chickenpox from her. At one point, I didn’t even know if I would be able to be at his delivery. But thankfully everything worked out and I was cured by the time, Virat decided to arrive on planet earth. When the pediatrician checked him the day after his birth and announced that he was perfectly “healthy”, I chocked up. I understand you better now mom :)..

BTW.. if you didn’t get chickenpox as a kid.. run to the drugstore and get vaccinated for it. You don’t want to go through what I went 🙂

Welcome to the world kiddo..

Virat Kudithipudi

Collection of pictures of the first few days..

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kudithipudi/collections/72157628830321025/

January 15, 2012 by Family Uncategorized 5

Goodbye 2011 and Welcome 2012

 

Happy New Year!!

Wishing all of you and your families a healthy and loving 2012. If there is one thing I learnt in 2011, it is that if you are healthy rest of the things in life will follow.

I haven’t posted any updates on my 2011 resolutions in the last few months. So here is a final recap

  • Lose the gut
    • I really didn’t accomplish the goal of losing the gut. But I gained some good habits (eating breakfast, eating consistently throughout the day, keeping track of my weight)
    • I have collected some interesting data as part of tracking my weight through the year. Plan to do some analysis on it later on.
    • Final chart of my weight in 2011
  • Increase traffic to Kudithipudi.org
    • I wrote a bit more in 2011 than in 2010, but not as much as needed.
    • Snapshot of 2011 traffic compared to 2010. As you can see, the traffic has increased nearly 80%.. 
  • CISSP Certification
    • Didn’t attempt this at all.
    • Wanted to do this in the last quarter, but things got a bit hectic :).
  • Take a Vacation
    • Successfully went on a vacation to India.

Overall, 50% of the goals were accomplished. As they say, the glass is half full :). Not bad.

And yes, I am going back to my old habit of not making resolutions :).

January 2, 2012 by Resolutions Uncategorized 0

HOW TO : Modify iptables rules

Quick how to for my personal records. iptables is an open source firewall (and it does a lot more) included with most linux distributions.

Steps to add new rule to existing configuration

  • Check the list of rules and their corresponding sequence

[code]sudo iptables -vL –line-numbers [/code]

  • Add the new rule at the required location/sequence

[code] sudo iptables -I INPUT LINE_NUMBER RULE [/code]

Example :

[code]iptables -I INPUT 8 -s X.X.X.X/24 -p tcp -m state –state NEW -m tcp –dport 3128 -j ACCEPT[/code]

  • Save the configuration

[code] sudo serivce iptables save [/code]

Thx to Sijis for helping with the commands.

December 12, 2011 by HOWTO Linux Networking security Uncategorized 0

HOW TO : Fix Jboss startup script for CentOS

Quick note for myself on fixing the default startup script provided by Jboss to work on CentOS. Thx to Shankar to finding the solution.

The default startup script (/$JBOSS_HOME/bin/jboss_init_redhat.sh) that Jboss provides does not work properly in CentOS. The start option works fine, but when you try to stop Jboss, it gives you a “No JBossas is currently running” message and quits.

Here’s a quick way to fix it. Edit the jboss_init_redhat.sh file and replace

[code]JBOSSSCRIPT=$(echo $JBOSSSH | awk ‘{print $1}’ | sed ‘s/\//\\\//g’) [/code]

with

[code]JBOSSSCRIPT=$(echo $JBOSSSH | awk ‘{print $1}’)[/code]

November 28, 2011 by HOWTO Linux Technology Uncategorized 1

HOW TO : Move your life into the cloud – Part 2

Following up on my previous post (https://kudithipudi.org/2011/11/13/how-to-move-your-life-into-the-cloud/) on the journey to using online services to maintain your productivity, here are some services that I use on a regular basis

BOOKMARKING :

  • SERVICE : Every switched your computer and were frustrated of having to remember and bookmark all the links you saved up on your old computer? I use delicious, to save me from this frustration. Delicious is the grand daddy of online bookmarking services and even though there are several competing services with more social networking capabilities, delicious works well for me. It allows you to store all of your bookmarks in an easily accessible URL (for example, all my bookmarks are at http://delicious.com/kudithipudi) and annotate them with tags
  • COST : free
  • OTHER CHOICES : pinboard, StumbleUpon, Google Bookmarks (being discontinued from Dec 2011), Firefox Sync, EverNote
November 28, 2011 by Technology Uncategorized 0

Introducing the Indian Samurai

Have you ever seen an Indian Samurai? No, I don’t think so :). I have been fascinated by Samurai ever since I was a kid. So I asked my friend, Buffy (awesome artist) to create a personal profile of me in Samurai attire :). And what do you get? An Indian Samurai :). Moving forward, this is going to become my profile on all online services (other than LinkedIn, because I like my job 🙂 ). Everyone can put up a picture, but very few can put up their own personalized icon :).

Want to get your own personalized profile icon? Send a note to Buffy at http://www.handmadebybuffy.com/. You won’t regret it.

November 21, 2011 by Fun Uncategorized 0

HOW TO : Move your life into the cloud

Nope… I am not too late to get on the “cloud” bandwagon :). I started writing this post in Dec 2009 and here’s a screenshot of my drafts to prove it 

And I have finally decided that it is time to complete the post and publish it.

I change laptops every 6 months or so and a lot of my friends ask me how I manage to swap them so quickly and yet stay productive. I am sure a lot of you can relate to this. It usually take a month or so to get your workstation to a “state” that you feel comfortable with and are productive. Here are the tricks/tools I use to make the switching of a laptop/desktop to be a no-brainer activity. And I utilize the “cloud” heavily for this.

I adhere to a couple of simple rules to make sure I can be productive anywhere, even in situations, where I don’t have my workstation with me.

  • Everything I produce should be searchable
  • Everything I produce should be available on the web
  • Everything I produce should be easy to share

With these principles in mind, here are the services I use..

PHOTOS :

  • SERVICE : I use flickr to store all my pictures. I have taken ~40 thousand pictures since 2003 and everyone of them is online at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kudithipudi. I wish, flickr was around when I was a kid, so that I had a place to store all the pictures from my childhood instead of rotting away in some old cardboard box. I like Flickr for it’s simplicity and ease of use. There are other sites that offer a lot more features, but the features offered by Flickr are are more than enough for me.
  • COST : $24.95/year to upload/store unlimited number of pictures
  • OTHER CHOICES : There are plenty of photo storing/sharing sites. Some of the popular ones are picasa, photobucket, facebook

ON-LINE STORAGE :

  • SERVICE : I use dropbox to store any digital content I create. This overlaps a bit with the service I use to store documents I create. Dropbox is a service that allows you to synchronize files between different computers you have the agent installed on and at the same time stores them online for you. They offer 2GB of free space by default and you can earn more space by referring people to the service. (note : the links to dropbox are my referral links. If you sign up for the service, I get 250Mb of free space. If you don’t want to use the referral links, you can sign up for the service directly at www.dropbox.com).You would think 2GB is not a lot of space. But once you remove the music, movies and photos, you really don’t need a lot of space :). For example, I haven’t crossed 1.8 GB, even though I have an electronic record of all my important files all the way from 2006. All I do, when I switch to a new laptop is install the dropbox agent and voila all my files are downloaded and synced with the latest copies.
  • COST : free. If you need more space, dropbox offers it for a cost.
  • OTHER CHOICES : There’s plenty of competition for dropbox, but I don’t think anyone of them have come close to making the sharing/storage work as seamless as dropbox. Some of the popular ones are box.net, SugarSync,wuala, Amazon Cloud Drive

DOCUMENTS :

  • SERVICE : I use Google Docs to create and store documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Since it’s inception in 2006 as a simple online editor and spreadsheets service, Google Docs has come a long way. There are few things you cannot do in Google Docs, that you can do in a full fledged productivity suite like Microsoft Office. Plus it gives you the capability to collaborate with other people when creating documents.
  • COST : free.
  • OTHER CHOICES : The only other service that comes close to Google Docs is Zoho Suites. Microsoft has a competing product, Office Live, but I think they are confused on how to market it because it will eat into their most profitable franchise (Microsoft Office)

EMAIL :

  • SERVICE : I use Gmail for my email. Although there is a standalone version,  I use it as part of the services provided by Google Apps for my domain (kudithipudi.org). It offers free spam protection, 7GB of space and super fast search. What else can one ask for? 🙂
  • COST : free
  • OTHER CHOICES : There are several free email hosting providers. Some of the popular ones are hotmail, yahoo, aol

ONLINE PRESENCE :

  • SERVICE : I strongly believe that all of us have to manage our online presence. And I don’t mean just for the folks that work in technology, but everyone that uses the Internet. And that is pretty much most of the people living on planet earth :). There are several ways to do this (and I think that is for a another blog post), but the simplest way is to ensure you have a place where you can broadcast your presence. I use this blog as a way to document my thoughts, share ideas and in general manage  my on-line presence. I host this blog on a virtual server that I lease from Rackspace.
  • COST : $11/month
  • OTHER CHOICES : I would not recommend what I am doing for most people. There are several free platforms that you can host your blog on. I just do it this way, because I like to tinker with technology. Some of the popular blogging platforms are tumblr, blogspot, wordpress, squarespace.
November 13, 2011 by HOWTO Management Technology Uncategorized Web 7

Happy 11/11/11

Other than a bunch of movies being released on this date.. everything seems to be normal :). Stock market is volatie, Europe seems confused, Revolutions going on in middle east.. I keep gaining weight :).. yep.. things are normal..

November 11, 2011 by Fun Uncategorized 0