lastpass get mention in thegaurdian.co.uk . I reviewed a number oif password manager recently as i was worried about my password since the list of password to remember was running way too high and i agree with the gaurdian , i too found the utility good. But I am worried about trusting all my passwords into some unknown single entity where all will be gone in one single swoop. So i am yet to use it. But if i had to use one , i would choose lastpass.
Thursday 21 November 2013
Sunday 17 November 2013
chennai to kanchipuram and back
Posted on 08:54 by Unknown
I was looking to go from Thiruvanmiyur, Chennai to Varadar Perumal kovil, Kanchipuram. I took a 23c bus from beasant nagar to gandhi mandapam. At gandhi mandapam, i took a 47a bus (which is also from beasant nagar) i arrived at T Nagar bus stop. From T Nagar , i took the air conditioned bus 5xx that goes to kanchipuram as the last stop. It is not express and does stop at a few places more than you could expect from a express bus. It deviates from highway to go to Sriperambadur and one more place and then joins back to highway to reach kanchi. The cost of bus from T.Nagar to Kanchi is 100Rp.
I stared from my house at 2PM on Sunday and reached T Nagar at 2:50PM. The bus to Kanchi started at 3PM and reached Kanchi at 5PM. I took an auto to kovil, which he took 100Rp, which is a mistake. You should take a share auto to kovil which will cost you 10Rp, which is what i did on my way back to Kanchi bus stand. Another way to save is to get down at the closest point to kovil, which i am yet to figure out where the point is. But from what i here there is one. Maybe next trip i will find it out. Most of the divya desam kovil I saw were Thengalai temples. I am happy to note that Varadarajar kovil is a Vadakalai temple.
I suppose there are other ways to get to the temple. Like i saw there is a railway station in kanchi. So it should be possible to board the train from Guindy to reach Kanchi. But i guess such trains would be long wait and few. I also hear that there are buses from Tambaram which goto Kanchi, but i guess it would all be low class. Of course you can take a bus from CMBT (koyabedu) to Kanchi. This would be the best option in case you are near CMBT or once the metro rail work completes.
I stared from my house at 2PM on Sunday and reached T Nagar at 2:50PM. The bus to Kanchi started at 3PM and reached Kanchi at 5PM. I took an auto to kovil, which he took 100Rp, which is a mistake. You should take a share auto to kovil which will cost you 10Rp, which is what i did on my way back to Kanchi bus stand. Another way to save is to get down at the closest point to kovil, which i am yet to figure out where the point is. But from what i here there is one. Maybe next trip i will find it out. Most of the divya desam kovil I saw were Thengalai temples. I am happy to note that Varadarajar kovil is a Vadakalai temple.
I suppose there are other ways to get to the temple. Like i saw there is a railway station in kanchi. So it should be possible to board the train from Guindy to reach Kanchi. But i guess such trains would be long wait and few. I also hear that there are buses from Tambaram which goto Kanchi, but i guess it would all be low class. Of course you can take a bus from CMBT (koyabedu) to Kanchi. This would be the best option in case you are near CMBT or once the metro rail work completes.
Friday 15 November 2013
Nice article on why pacman -Sy is a bad thing
Posted on 09:52 by Unknown
The article http://gist.io/5660494 tell you in clear manner why pacman -Sy packagename is a bad thing. Also it points to other article which explains further on that topic.
Sunday 27 October 2013
Problems in life and Bhagawad gita
Posted on 08:57 by Unknown
Problem by nature are never ending. You solve one problem with lot of effort and thought and then in no time a unseen problem emerges and you work hard to solve that problem and this vicious cycle ends only when you die.
Solving problems in life is not going to make life any better. So instead of solving problem it would be much wiser to live with the problems and be able to see happiness even in these troubles.
This problem is not new. Though i realised only recently. Many great men had thought about and have given discourse at length on how to handle this situation. God Krishna in his famous discourse called bhagawad gita talks about all this to warrior Arjuna. Bhagawad gita is awesome for (though i haven't completed reading it yet) many reasons. One , i thought it would something out of this world conversation. But to my pleasant surprise, i found that arjuna talks about the real problems the commonly encountered humans. Arjuna in his conversation completely reflects my thoughts. Considering the ages it is old, i am surprised to see we are still solving the same problem. Technology has taken us no where. I feel like we are busy running at the same place.
Krishna has talks about 2 ways in specific order to come out of problems. One, do your duty to your best, without expecting it results and also without the thought that you did it, rather it was done through you with the help of so many people. This should not be interpreted as no ownership, but at the fact that world functions via interdependence. The 2nd way can be started only if you are successful in the 1st way above. which is devotion to god. Devotion to god means you are so god loving that other worldly things like money, fame, etc no longer interest you and only God interest you. You see god in everything and no longer differences matter to you as everybody are equal in your eyes as all are forms of god.
The first part i described is called karma yoga and part of first and whole second forms what is called bhakti yoga.
Some fools who wanted to make money have equated yoga to a form of physical exercises. But as far as i know in bhakthi yoga does not prescribe you any physical exercises. I am not a authority on this subject, but i know one thing for sure, yoga is not equal to exercise but much beyond that.
Sunday 20 October 2013
Is mainframe worth the money ?
Posted on 03:37 by Unknown
I am not even a beginner on mainframe. But recent announcement by the big blue (IBM) attracted my attention. Mainframe is not a great performance machine. Since a super computer out performs a mainframe in terms of computing powers. Mainframe seems to do well in high transaction processing. But i see that regular server grade Xeon based pc provides good performance for the money. While a regular mainframe costs 62 lacs INR (100K USD), a mid level xeon server can be bought at fraction of that price. If the redundancy and performance are its usp, then we can achieve the same via stacking together couple of more servers and still have huge savings. Further even if mainframe makes sense then hiring mainframe administrators may be costly affair. I do see that you would typically require minuscule number of administrators. So i am wondering is mainframe worth the money ? Is it still relevant in these days of cloud computing and virtualisation crazy.
arch linux, awesomewm, screensaver and lightdm
Posted on 03:28 by Unknown
I did extensive study on options available in arch linux in comination with awesome as my window manager under Xorg without any DE running. Usually linux users of Xorg run a DE like gnome or kde. My case is different in that I have decided to go without a DE. I am happy after removing gnome-shell. I see my apps are faster without the memory hogs of gnome and also i like the tiling option of awesome and also awesomewm allows you to use the old method of stacking window for the apps that dont work well on tiling. I read windows 8 also trying make users to switch to tiling window management. Tiling is great but web browser aren't made for tiling. For example some website wants to do pop-up with their definition of window measurement in pop up. Common example of where it happens is banking websites upon trying to login they throw a custom measured popup. One application that works fantastically in tiling is the terminal emulator. Some terminal emulator like terminator has this feature build in to them. So they act like tiling even without a tiling wm. But that is not perfect. A tiling wm handles perfectly , than a build in feature of terminator to split windows.
I was using xautolock and slock combination to lock screen. It worked fine (but not perfect). I had a keybinding in awesomewm to trigger a screen lock. That also worked. It worked till I had xdm as display manager. xdm is not very pretty and lacks many basic features like passwordless account login, autologin. I am not a fan of auto login, but i strongly feel, you should be allowed to login with a account that has no password. So i decided the xdm is a legacy software and i ditched it in favour of lightdm. As far as i can see lightdm has more features than xdm, like passwordless account login , autologin and also it has the xdm feature of XDMCP . But the bad thing is , it no longer invokes ~/.xinitrc . So my xautolock failed to invoke. Since xautolock is not running, keybinding in awesomewm to lock screen fails (as expected). So i tried write a service unit file for running xautolock via systemd. I wrote xautolock.service and the service almost worked. It failed becuase it tried to connect to X display as root and I was running the display as ashwin. So it failed to connect and it exited with failure error code. Workaround would be disable the auth check for X. But it is a ugly solution , possible brining in host of other problems. So I dont want to do that. I dont want to run it as ashwin user , since i am looking for a generic solution that will work for any user. The other solution also shares the same problem being this incident specific. The other solution is to write a xautolock.desktop file in /home/ashwin/.config/autostart/xautolock.desktop. This solution is user specific. If I put the file in global path then it would invoked as root and wont be able to connect to display and fail as in the systemd problem. So the best solution is to invoke it via lightdm configuration file to autostart when greeter starts and have the locking mechanism in my old way as keybinding. Since the xautolock is invoked in greeter level , it will work for all user. Then i hit upon another problem, which is similar to xdm problem. I haven't found if my suspect is true. My suspect is slock invoked via xautolock wont unlock for passwordless account and it will keep prompting for password which does not exists. So the passwordless user in my PC is again in a bad problem. I found a better way. Instead of screenlocking after a period of inactivity, i realised the better way would be turn off the display after a period of inactivity.There are many benefits to it. Like saving on power consumption and no hacks, simply works. the setting i am trying to implement is like sleep 5;xset dpms force off.
I was using xautolock and slock combination to lock screen. It worked fine (but not perfect). I had a keybinding in awesomewm to trigger a screen lock. That also worked. It worked till I had xdm as display manager. xdm is not very pretty and lacks many basic features like passwordless account login, autologin. I am not a fan of auto login, but i strongly feel, you should be allowed to login with a account that has no password. So i decided the xdm is a legacy software and i ditched it in favour of lightdm. As far as i can see lightdm has more features than xdm, like passwordless account login , autologin and also it has the xdm feature of XDMCP . But the bad thing is , it no longer invokes ~/.xinitrc . So my xautolock failed to invoke. Since xautolock is not running, keybinding in awesomewm to lock screen fails (as expected). So i tried write a service unit file for running xautolock via systemd. I wrote xautolock.service and the service almost worked. It failed becuase it tried to connect to X display as root and I was running the display as ashwin. So it failed to connect and it exited with failure error code. Workaround would be disable the auth check for X. But it is a ugly solution , possible brining in host of other problems. So I dont want to do that. I dont want to run it as ashwin user , since i am looking for a generic solution that will work for any user. The other solution also shares the same problem being this incident specific. The other solution is to write a xautolock.desktop file in /home/ashwin/.config/autostart/xautolock.desktop. This solution is user specific. If I put the file in global path then it would invoked as root and wont be able to connect to display and fail as in the systemd problem. So the best solution is to invoke it via lightdm configuration file to autostart when greeter starts and have the locking mechanism in my old way as keybinding. Since the xautolock is invoked in greeter level , it will work for all user. Then i hit upon another problem, which is similar to xdm problem. I haven't found if my suspect is true. My suspect is slock invoked via xautolock wont unlock for passwordless account and it will keep prompting for password which does not exists. So the passwordless user in my PC is again in a bad problem. I found a better way. Instead of screenlocking after a period of inactivity, i realised the better way would be turn off the display after a period of inactivity.There are many benefits to it. Like saving on power consumption and no hacks, simply works. the setting i am trying to implement is like sleep 5;xset dpms force off.
Saturday 14 September 2013
connecting as with cisco anyconnect
Posted on 03:40 by Unknown
Quote from cisoc.com on anyconnect:
It does not connect with a PIX device nor with a VPN 3000 Series Concentrator.Quote from vpnc official site:
vpnc is supposed to work with:
- Cisco VPN concentrator 3000 Series
- Cisco IOS routers
- Cisco PIX / ASA Zecurity Appliances
- Juniper/Netscreen
So i learnt that i should not use vpnc as cisco anyconnect replacement. The alternative would be:
Quote from openconnect:
OpenConnect is a client for Cisco's AnyConnect SSL VPN, .....
I tried openconnect and it works great.
The best part is, it works without or minimal configuration , especially i didn't import any certificate. I have been using it for more than a month and it works flawlessly.
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