My Technophilic Musings

I’m going to be bespectacled and have been advised to reduce and limit my computer usage considerably. A bit of nostalgia set in on hearing this and I thought about my short journey so far in this wonderland of solid-state and otherwise.

First time I touched a computer.
> 1989, at school in 2nd standard

First command I typed on a computer.
> “dir”, 1990, 3rd standard

First game I played on a computer.
> “bricks”, 1991, 4th standard

First Colored game I played on a computer.
> “Dangerous Dave”, 1991, 4th standard

First program I wrote on a computer.
> “Hello, Ankit!” in basic, 1992, 5th standard(The pre-teenage rebel in me substituted the “world” by “Ankit”. Why “Ankit”? That’s a mystery )

First time I held a mouse.
>1992, 5th standard, Windows 3.0

First Windows Program I used
>PaintBrush (MSPaint today), 1992, 5th standard

First “3d” game I played
> Wolfenstein 3D (or Wolf), 1993, 6th standard Continue reading »

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: commands, Computers, corporate, games, history, linux, nostalgia, Programming

It’s amazing, isn’t it? Even a sneeze at google makes the headlines. Well, it’s not the sneeze today but the new favicon I just got. So, are you also seeing the all new, re-designed, artisticly polished “g” as the new favicon?

In other news, my Twitter-Webcam integration post has bypassed my earlier lifehacked post about Remote File Access Through E-mail by more than a few thousands, even though the time difference between the two posts is more than 3 months. Thanks Stumble Upon

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: e-mail, favicon, google, lifehacker, news, remote access, stumble upon, Twitter, webcam

If you think that all geeks do is walk around wearing thick glasses, code in unreadable languages and make weird gizmos from parts scrapped out of your junkyard, well you think wrong. We do like to have our share of fun. And what better to begin the day with a nice hot cuppa along with some geeky humour. Folks, here it is, the 5 comic strips that I love the most (in no particular order):

1. Dilbert: Our friendly neighbourhood engineer is in town. Have fun reading through his daily life’s traumas. Of course, his tragedies couldn’t be as funny without the able support of the likes of Wally, Asok, dogbert, catbert, and yeah the “pointy haired manager”.

2. XKCD: Don’t know if this is the abbreviated form of something but the author calls it a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. You’d be frowning at your monitor screen right now, trying to understand the relation between these things but you know the saying, There is the biggest order behind the biggest chaos (or something, I just made up that saying just now )

3. Userfriendly: This is a story about a small ISP with your regular, average joe, sys-admins having a fun time at the expense of their unsuspecting management and, of course, about Pitr who has bigger plans for world domination than even google.

4. Ctrl+Alt+Del: Your last resort on Windows is now your daily appetite in the form of this little story about (mis)adventures of a group of nerdy friends who just love to get into trouble, all while playing that game of Halo with one hand (and that too tied behind their backs).

5. Penny Arcade: If you are a gamer, you can’t miss this. Even “Jack Thomson” couldn’t, so you know, this one is a keeper ;-).

So, go and have a nice time and yeah, don’t forget to tell me about what are your favourite tech comics.

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: Comics, ctrl+alt+del, dilbert, fun, geeks, humour, penny arcade, tech comics, userfriendly, xkcd

Just a small tip. If you want to view a pdf and you don’t have adobe acrobat (or any other pdf reader) installed, e.g., you are sitting in a cyber cage or at a friend’s place, you can still view it.
Only thing you have to do is, just prefix the url to the online pdf with “http://www.scribd.com/vacuum?url=” and you’ll see a nice web interface rendering your pdf without having to install anything on your PC.

e.g.: url to pdf: http://abc.com/readme.pdf

So final url: “http://www.scribd.com/vacuum?url=http://abc.com/readme.pdf“

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: Adobe Acrobat, online PDF reader, PDF, scribd, tips

For the past many years, I’ve seen a trend that has been on a meteoric rise. Whatever new service you sign on for on the internet (especially the web2.0–oh-so-cool-you-have-to-tell-everyone-about-it ones), it gives you an option to fill in your e-mail ID and password and makes a generous offer of letting all your friends know about your new avatar and let them all join in the fun. Most of the people around me, it seems, don’t think twice before gladly accepting the offer, as is made apparent from the increasing amount of automated mails I’m getting with subjects like “Hey, don’t be left out! Join me on X” or “Hi SG, Why don’t you follow me on Y”.

I just wanted to “remind” you all (because you already know it) how important your password is. You keep it safe from everyone, suspect even your friends of trying to hack into your e-mail, and then you give it away to an “unknown” entity with so much of ease, laying so much trust onto it that you won’t even put in your biological parents.

While many of these services are genuine, but many might not be. I’m certainly against handing out your passwords to a third-party web service until it is something like google that won’t just sell you off one fine day and run off somewhere you can’t find it. But if you are compelled to do so because of some reason, I’d recommend atleast checking out what it has to say about the data it’s collecting.

Let me take an example of a new IM service that I recently came across. It’s called IMO (or imo or whatever) and is apparently quite popular because of its multiple IM service connections through a single interface. I thought of checking out its terms etc and making a mental image of how respectable / trustworthy I found it. I had listed the following things on the blog where I had found about this site. Listing them here again for you.

Following are the nuggets I found:

1. They have a blogspot blog. It takes hardly a few minutes to host ur own blog on ur own domain. Maybe they have some existing google connection but yet to discover it.(I read somewhere that some of these people worked at google in the past but that’s no reason to keep your blog on such a platform)

2. Shady privacy agreement.
2a They mention that not only will they save ur username and pwd but may also save ur chats/messages etc.
2b They might also share info with 3rd parties (written in a manner that they can do it on their own will)
2c Transparency: They might not even tell u whats going on if they so decide.

Please don’t mention about the eliteness of their “advisor panel”. This is the biggest marketing gimmick that everyone pulls off. Many times the “advisors” don’t even know the “advised” company exists.

IMP: If a site doesn’t say anything or says all goody things in its terms, that doesn’t make it clean, but if you find suspiciousness in the terms, that definitely makes a negative mark. In Short, when your password is concerned, treat everyone guilty until proven innocent.

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: e-mail, hacking, IM, Internet, password, privacy, security, web, web 2.0

If you have ever had these errors or just want to be prepared in case they pop up somtime (and they surely will), then read on as I discuss various situations that lead to them and also their solutions.

I generally use desktop clients (mostly blogjet, but also Windows Live Writer and Scribe Fire sometimes) to blog to my WordPress based blogs. Some months ago, I started getting "Http 406: Not Acceptable" error while posting a particular post. Tried posting through the WordPress inbuilt TinyMCE editor, but got the same result. A little bit of research told me that this was because the post contained some words that were considered harmful by the "mod_security" plugin for apache that had been installed by my host to prevent hacking attempts. The quick resolution was to include the following lines in my .htaccess:

Sure enough, I put them in, published the post, and it worked. But since this meant opening up my site to the real hacking attempts, I commented them out and went about my work, occassionally turning them on as and when required.

But, a few days ago, after a server upgrade, the problem reared its head again, and in a more vicious manner. I started getting the dreaded 406 error again, and this time for any post, even a blank post, and through all clients. But this time, TinyMCE was working without issues. A little bit of looking around my site told me that the problem was that my desktop clients were not able to connect to my "x mlrpc.php" file which is responsible for taking care of all the remote api provided by WordPress. Trying to access it through any means provided the 406 error. My site's error log was filled with:

An appropriate representation of the requested resource /x mlrpc.php could not be found on this server.

Now, the xml rpc methods are used not just by WordPress but many other CMS's (like drupal, joomla, etc) and sure enough a quick search resulted in many similar reports for all the platforms. Enabling my previous mod_security options resulted in "503: Server misconfiguration" errors, complicating things further.

On seeing the error logs, I found that the server could not understand the options, and then I discovered that the mod_security had been upgraded to and it wasn't backward compatible with old options. Modifying the options to their latest counterparts also didn't work, as further wading through mod_security manual told me that now, its options cannot be overridden through .htaccess and can only be changed by the web admin.

I found that my host has basically blocked the x mlrpc.php file from being accessed at all instead of using proper rules for blocking only the attacks while allowing valid accesses. This was the problem that a huge number of people are also having and moreover they (like me) are not able to convince their hosts to switch to proper rules.

However, not all hope is lost. I have "fixed" this issue with a workaround for now. It is pretty simple really. Just rename your x mlrpc.php to something else (e.g. myrpc123.php) and also replace all references to it in your CMS with your new file name. You can use sed to automate this task. I used perl however:

Now, the 406 errors should be gone. If this worked for you, or you had any issues let me know. Also, if you have any other workarounds/fixes of your own, do drop me a word.

Note: In the above article, please ignore the space between "x" and "mlrpc" as the mod_security rules prevent them from being in content also. Moreover, use some unique name for rpc file.

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: Drupal, Hack, http 406 error, Joomla, not acceptable, wordpress

I installed google toolbar (linux version) today in firefox and for this blog, it says that its page rank is 7. I can't believe my eyes. I suppose it's a google glitch may be (but have a wishful thinking at the back of mind that its true ).

Are you getting the same result for this blog (or weird page rank results for other places that you frequent?)

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: firefox, glitch, google, google toolbar, linux, page rank 7

For the past couple of days I have been unable to send any mails to any of my yahoo groups through my gmail account. All my message are returned back with a “Message Rejected” failure. What I get back is a link to this support answer: Sector 5 Bounces. Anyone else seen this?

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: blocking mails, gmail, Sector 5 Bounces, yahoo groups

Trey and Matt had talked about it a few days ago, that they were tired of downloding their own show South Park illegally. So, here it is folks. A fully revamped South Park Studios that, among other things, features full streaming of ALL the southpark episodes so far, yes that includes the latest season as well. Whats even better is that I find the quality of these even better than the ones that I downloaded earlier. Way to go, Trey and Matt. I had always thought of you as really cool guys because of your show, now you are my heroes cuz you do what you preach.

Oh My God! They killed Kenny.

Aww, you sweet little kids.

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: Eric Cartman, Kenny, Kyle, Matt Stone, South Park, SouthPark, Stan, Trey Parker

Microsoft is doling out a lot of free stuff today. If you have a Live ID, or have the patience of 5 minutes to fill up a small form to create a new one, you can get free domain name as well as free webhosting from then for one complete year. Cool, huh? All you need to do is click here.

A word of caution: Unless you are creating a new website just for kicks, you might want to check out the terms and conditions properly because I’m not sure whether you can transfer the domain name to some other provider after the one year is over.

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: Free Domain Name, Free Webhosting, Live ID, Microsoft, Microsoft Office Live