I went on a 10 day trip to the Big Island and Maui with a bunch of friends recently. I have been wanting to get a good digital camera for a long time and this was the perfect excuse :). So off I run to Circuit City and buy a Canon Digital Rebel. I can list all the mouthwatering features :). But if interested please read this review at dpreview.com. The first picture I took with this camera….
I received the official time of my Great Aloha run yesterday. I was wrong when I stated that I might have finished the run in < 75 minutes. My official time is 1 hour 19 minutes and 23 seconds. Still a lot better than I anticipated. I put in 1 hour 45 minutes as my expected finish time in my application :).
Official Result Postcard
Only bad thing is that I haven’t run much since the race. I guess one needs a target to be motivated :).
I wanted to install Gallery so that I can easily share some of the “art” that I shoot :). The server I was on did not have some settings (it has php – safe_mode on) that stopped me from installing Gallery. The good people at 3-95.com , where I host this site, offered to move me to a new server that would allow me to install Gallery. So here we are on a brand new server. I will be posting some new pictures soon.
Have been pretty bad lately with the updates on the website. I was preparing hard for the Aloha Run. I finally finished it today :). I completed the race in < 75 minutes. I was expecting that I will finish it in ~2 hours. But what do you know.. :). Running with 22 thousand people seems to have given me some extra energy. I will add some pictures soon.
I was helping a friend with some E-mail problems he was having. Here is the scenario. He is getting a “Cannot authenticate to server” when using his Outlook 2000 to get mail from his Cobalt Qube server. According to him..”Everything was working fine, but the computer crashed. So I had to rebuild the machine and now mail doesn’t work”. Pretty easy right.. So I troubleshoot it in the following way
1) Check account settings in Outlook and make sure that he has the correct “username”, “password” and “server” properties. Everything checks okay. But client still cannot authenticate to the server.
2) Alright.. Lets see if the service is running on the client. Since I didn’t have access to the server, I had to walk my friend through the process. Again, required daemons are running, but cannot authenticate.
3) Now.. I am getting all excited frustrated. I run nmap on the server remotely and see that SMTP is filtered.. Hmm.. Is that a problem.
4) Finally.. I give up and make my friend change the rules on this firewall so that I can log into the server remotely. First thing I do is check the logs (/var/log/maillog) and Bingo!!! I instantly see the error
“Feb 9 21:00:10 www in.qpopper[2269]: Karen at 192.168.1.102 (192.168.1.102): -ERR [AUTH] Password supplied for “Karen” is incorrect.“. My friend was using “Karen” instead of “karen” as the username.
If only I had asked my friend to meticulously check his settings 🙂 in the first place.
Moral of the story: Unix usernames are case sensitive. And never believe the user when they say that all the settings are correct :).
Ever install MySQL and wondered what to do next? Well, the first thing is to secure the root user (Note: The MySQL root user is different from the OS root user). These three simple steps should deal with it.
shell> mysql -u root mysql
mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR root@localhost=PASSWORD(‘new_password’);
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
MySQL has really good documentation on their website. It is can be accessed here.
I purchased a server from Dell recently. Want to use it as a test server to play with at home. I have a small LAN at home setup using a Dlink 614+ router. I forwarded some services to the server, so that I can access it remotely. Since the IP address on my cable modem changes every so often, how do I access it remotely? Dynamic DNS from dyndns.org to the rescue :).
Register for an account over here.
Create a Dynamic DNS host on Dyndns.org
Log into the 614+ router
Go to Tools –> Misc.
Enable DDNS
Use members.dyndns.org as the server address
Enter the complete hostname (ex. Samurai.kicks-ass.net)
Enter the username and password that you have registered at dyndns.org
Click on “Apply” and you are all set.
This was the first day of swimming lessons that I didn’t manage to drink half the water in the pool :). I was not even planning on going to the lesson this week. I was pretty tired after a 12 hour shift a 3 hour Japanese lesson (more on that later). I come home and lay down. I came with the lame excuse of “1 week of missing lessons won’t matter :)”. But luckily for me, one of my colleagues woke me up regarding an issue at work. Although I am not a firm believer in God, this just seemed too much of a coincidence. So off I went to the lesson. The only new thing we learnt in this lesson was “frog kick“.
Frog Kick
1) Kick with your legs in a frog like fashion. Pull in legs and bend knees. Then kick out both the legs spread out. Click the legs together and then pull them in. Repeat..
2) The same time that you are doing the above with your legs, push your self forward with both the arms.
While browsing through the forums at ArsTechnica, I came across this posting. One of the poster had a pretty cool prompt on his terminal login screen. Here is the command he used to get that effect
| export PS1=”\n\[\e[30;1m\][\[\e[35;1m\]0\[\e[30;1m\]] \[\e[0m\]\[\e[36m\]\h\[\e[37m\]:\[\e[34;1m\]\w\[\e[30;1m\]$ \[\e[0m\e7\e[1G\e[1H\e[1K\e[30;1m[\e[33m\j\e[30;1m] [\e[32;1m\!\e[30;1m] [\e[36m\u\e[30;1m] [\e[31;1m\d\e[30;1m] [\e[35m\@\e[30;1m] [\e[0m\e[36m`uname -sr`\e[30;1m]\e8\]” |
Or if you are using Redhat, you can just edit the /etc/profile file and place the above command in it. So each time you log in to the system, you get this pretty cool prompt. I keep saying that it is cool :), but don’t give any explanation. I think a picture is due here…
For the initiated..you can come up with your own neat tricks by reading this.
