Links to some cool projects around the web
Yahoo : Time Capsule : http://timecapsule.yahoo.com/capsule.php
Ms. Dewey : Search Engine with a beatuful host 🙂 : http://www.msdewey.com/ (Hint: As her what her age is 🙂 ).
admin
Microsoft Excel : How to repair "Opening blank file when double clicking on an excel file"
Ran into an interesting problem with troubleshooting an Excel issue. Double clicking on an excel file opened a blank file on the affected machine. I thought it might be something related to the associations and checked them from “Tools -> Folder Options -> File Types” in the Windows Explorer menu. Everything was in order there. I then tried a reinstall of Office (note : would not do this in the future without additional troubleshooting 🙂 ). That didn’t help either. Finally, I gave up and did a Google search, which returned this URL
Did the following according to the post and everything returned to default settings
1) Run Excel with “/safe” option.
2) Click on “help -> Detect and Repair” from the Excel menu
3) Close Excel for repair
Thx Google.
New cuisine..
We went to Ros Dashen, an Ethiopian restaurant to celebrate a friends upcoming birthday. For those that haven’t tried Ethiopian food and like spicy cuisine, I would highly recommend trying it. In addition to the tasty food, the whole experience of sharing the same plate is very interesting. The food is served on top of pancacke like sour bread that you end tearing up and dipping/wiping the food in along with the rest of the folks at the table. Here are two pictures that show, how much we appreciated the food..
This is what we got…
This is what it ended up as… 🙂
nmap : how to scan a network
If you want to scan a network or range of IPs for hosts that are on a network, you can use nmap with the following option
nmap -sL NETWORK/MASK (ex: nmap -sL 192.168.1.0/24)
or
nmap -sL NETWORKRANGE (ex: nmap -sL 192.168.1.0-50)
For a complete reference of nmap capabilities, go to http://insecure.org/nmap/man/.
HOW TO : Blackberry : How to use it as a modem
On popular demand..A lot of people asked me how you can use the BB as a modem, the way I specified in this post. Here’s the link with detailed instructions on how to do this..
Note: Make sure you have an unlimited data plan from your service provider or you can get dinged with a large bill :).
Yet another site powered by the masses
www.soapboxit.com is a website where anyone can write/search reviews about anything. I came across it when I learnt that one of my old colleagues is going (looks like I got the wrong company. The company he is going to work at is www.soapboxreviews.com) to work at this company. I think it is an interesting idea. As with all social networks, the challenge will be to gain momentum.. As I was browsing the site, I noticed that each new user is given a ID. At this point, the ID seems to just be an increasing integer. I found that my ID is 212 🙂
RDP over SSH tunnel
Necessity is the mother of invention.. Or so goes the old saying. I was on-call this weekend for off hour IT support. We usually provide our on-call engineers a wireless broadband card in case they need to get connected to the corporate network to troubleshoot/fix issues. This week, I was not able to get the wireless card, since we had to loan it to an exec. The only method to get onto the Internet was using my new 8700 blackberry. We have the EDGE service from T-mobile, which is not as fast as the Verizon BroadbandAccess.. We typically get ~128kbps with the EDGE connection and is enough to get our work done.. The problem with using the BB as a modem is that T-mobile blocks PPTP/IPSec traffic with this plan. Not to be outdone, I came up with a way to use the BB to connect to our internal network. Most of our support work is done on Windows, so we need to remote console into one of our servers to provide support. I did the following to get this working using our corporate SSH gateway to tunnel RDP traffic.
1) Download Putty (SSH Client).
2) Create a new session on Putty to the SSH gateway. In the “Tunnels” option, add the following options
Note: Replace the REMOTE_HOST with the IP address or hostname of your Windows server.
3) Click on ADD
4) Click on Open and connect to the SSH server with your credentials
5) Log into the remote serve by running the following command “mstsc /v:127.0.01:3390”
Note: You can change the local port to any number you want. Make sure not to use 3389 as the local port, since it is already used by the remote desktop service on your windows workstation.
Labour day weekend : Good Beer, Good Friends.. Good times :)
It’s amazing how fast holidays zip by :). Wish, it was the same with work days…. Lakshmi and I didn’t get a chance to travel during this long weekend, but we caught up with some sightseeing in Chicago. We visited the Field museum, using the free family pass you can get at the Chicago Public Library. For those of you who are not aware, you can get free passes to most of the attractions in Chicago. All you need is a membership at the library. Each library has limited quantities of the passes and it is given out on a first come first serve basis. A great way to explore the city without breaking your bank :). It was great day to visit the museum. I took some snaps from the trip and posted them on Flickr
We also got a chance to catch up with old friends..Sudheer and his charming wife, Neelima flew down to Chicago for the weekend and all of us got together at Ravi’s place for a night of fun, beer and food :). It was great to catch up on life and fondly remember our days at school. As usual, me and my camera were busy snapping pictures of the night…
[Left to Right: Back Row: Shekar, Achi, Ravi, Byna, Sudheer Front Row: Nirmala, Pallavi, Madhavi, Deepthi, Lakshmi, Neelima]
Picture your website
I ran across Aharef’s blog while I was browsing the net. Was pretty impressed by a applet he wrote to visually represent a website, using the HTML tags as a source. Here’s a picture of my website
You can get a graph of your website using the URL below
http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/.
Disaster strikes Kudithipudi.Org – Part II
One makes mistakes in haste, or so goes the ancient saying :). As soon as I discovered that my hosting company for the past few years did not store backups for longer than a day, I switched to 1and1.com, but little did I know that 1an1.com doesn’t provide web site logs (statistics) with their basic package. Well, serves me right for not doing my research right. Now I am with the third hosting provider in as many days. While the admin interface is not as polished as 1and1.com, I like that hostrocket provides all the features that I want for a relatively inexpensive price and the fact that it has a 20-something CEO.Hopefully I am going to be here for a while.. 🙂
One a side note, I am working on restoring all my old posts. Expect to see them up in a few days. Need to engage my uber-database-guru friend for help with the restore :).