blog - jaidev.info

I Love Context Ads

Jaidev — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:50:37 +0000

How could one not?

Indian ISPs Technically Challenged?

Jaidev — Fri, 02 May 2008 03:02:17 +0000

I was glancing through the BGP Instability Report which is a measure of the number of updates from various ASes over the past month. For a stable network, the number of updates must be relatively low.

I don’t understand why five of the top twenty most active ASes must be Indian ISPs. For a country with 3.6% of the World’s internet users and 0.5174% of the World’s IP addresses, it does seem more than a bit unusual.

It does point to very incompetent ISPs.

Why MSFT and YHOO are MFEO

Jaidev — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 18:53:09 +0000

More genius:

[14:45:27 jaidev@~]$ host -t mx yahoogroups.com yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 10 mta2.grp.vip.scd.yahoo.com. yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 20 mta1.grp.vip.re1.yahoo.com. yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 30 mta12.grp.scd.yahoo.com. yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 30 mta13.grp.scd.yahoo.com. yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 30 mta14.grp.scd.yahoo.com. [14:45:31 jaidev@~]$ telnet mta2.grp.vip.scd.yahoo.com 25 Trying 66.218.67.194… Connected to mta2.grp.vip.scd.yahoo.com. Escape character is ‘^]’. 220 yahoogroups.com ESMTP helo 250 yahoogroups.com mail from: 250 ok rcpt to: @yahoogroups.com 250 ok data 354 go ahead Subject: Photos . 554 we cannot accept this message because it appears to contain virus (#5.7.1) quit 221 yahoogroups.com Connection closed by foreign host.

Yahoogroups just refuses to accept emails with a subject line containing just Photos. Wow, my spamassassin setup is better than that.

Buy Gold, All Your Money is … err … Debt!

Jaidev — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:32:39 +0000

I was planning to post this a couple of months ago, better late than never.

From what I remember from school, the value of currency was tied to the amount of gold held by central banks. Modern economy however relies on floated currencies which I always thought meant money is created or destroyed when a central bank steps in to keep the interbank call rates at target levels.

There is more to it of course, this video however explains everything in very simple terms. A must watch under the current situation.

GPL Violation

Jaidev — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 04:48:28 +0000

Dear Lazyweb,

Someone brought this to my attention recently. I don’t care much for attribution, but he’s stripped the original copyright message and even attached his own terms. I’m officially peeved.

Update: And now, another!

How would you deal with a GPL violation?

HOWTO Retrieve Nokia N75 Security Code

Jaidev — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:45:04 +0000

Okay, the Nokia N75 has a serious bug. When you change the default security code from 12345 to something else, it allows you to choose a security code with more than 5 digits. But when you’re required to enter the code, it accepts only 5. This bug and the time gap between when I changed the code to when I wanted to use it meant that I forgot what my code was.

I didn’t want to flash the phone, so I figured out a simpler way of reading the code off the phone. This may or may not work with other phones and may or may not hose it. Here goes (windoze based) -

Install Nemesis Service Suite (NSS).
Connect the phone through a USB cable.
In NSS, go to the Phone Info section and the Permanent Memory tab.
Read the permanent memory into a file.
Open this file in a text-editor, it is organised in numbered sections. Locate section [308] and the line starting with 5= within this section.
The 5 ASCII values (in hexadecimal) following 5= should be the security code. For instance, if the code was 12345, the line would be 5=3132333435 …

For older Nokia phones, just use this master security code generator.

Personal Data

Jaidev — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 00:47:11 +0000

In a landmark ruling in Europe, a privacy regulator has ruled that IP addresses constitute private data. This is very interesting and long overdue. These days before every Google search I fear the cookie that Google has on my computer. I’ve disabled Google Web History, but I know they’re still gathering data! I could set firefox to delete the cookie after every session as I do with most other cookies, but (a) I like to stay signed in to reader, gmail, etc. and (b) Google can still mine a lot of data from my searches while I’m signed in. (Aside: Perhaps I need to start using different browsers for searches)!.

Coming back to privacy, I talk of Google but its true of anyone. Even if someone doesn’t use private data right now, there’ll always be an evil project manager who’ll wonder why they never thought of using it - its an obvious gold mine. The amount of data someone can collect about you with just a cookie (and an IP Address) is freaky! Just look at the cookies stored by your browser (beyond the necessary authentication cookies) to know how many companies love to collect data!

The Vicious Circle

Jaidev — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 01:24:17 +0000

I’m not a geek of economics, neither am I a newbie. It seems to me that the current American economic principles are best represented by this circle -

The End is Nigh. Supermodels seem to think so too!

ATMs on Trains

Jaidev — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 01:11:00 +0000

Is it just me or does this seem like a badly thought out one? I’m not questioning its feasibility or anything - throw a billion people at any venture and it is bound to be a success or rather won’t be a miserable failure. But, given how crowded our trains are, and how unsafe they feel at most times, I wonder how many people would dare withdrawing any amount of money in full view of a hundred people with whom they’d have to spend the next few hours / days. The other ATMs are different as one isn’t obliged to stick around the ATM and with the people around the ATM.

My evil mind already has a game to spook the users. Hang around these ATMs, the moment somebody uses it, follow them back and note down their seat numbers. On a 48 hour train, its bound to give them a couple of sleepless nights!

Orkut Demographics

Jaidev — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 15:34:16 +0000

Ah, there’s so much to say …