This wednesday, working at Goldman Sachs, I got a call from Santa Fe. The guy asked me when I wanted him to bring my luggage to my house. I said Saturday (yesterday) around 10 am.

Yesterday, he reached here at 9:55. After everything was brought in and kept at the wanted places, he gave me a feedback form. And boy, the first question was :

Were we on time?

The options were :

a) on time b) 5 min late c) 10 min late d) 30 min late

and nothing after that. They DON’T HAVE a concept of getting late more than half an hour!!

Compare that to the Indian based relocation services. What options should their feedback forms have ?

How much late were we?

a) 1 day 2) 2 day 3) 1 week 4) 2 weeks 5) luggage lost in transit!

Hello Banagalore!!!

Anshu came here last week. We had a gr8 time!! He reached here last Saturday. We had an Italian brunch here at a great place named Casa Picolo on CMH road.

We asked Sriram where we could go. He told us about a great place to shop - Brigade road. Me and Anshu first went to MG road and set about searching for his memory card. We found a great lane there to shop which joined M.G. road at the middle from the left. We spent our time till the evening there going from shop to shop. From there, we went to meet one of Anshu’s friend Kriti, at Garuda mall. We took an auto to reach there. At Garuda mall, Anshu bought a few clothes for his interview. After that, she took us to Brigade road. We were walking that road, Anshu stopped suddenly and exclaimed, “I have come here before”. We were on Brigade road the whole afternoon and we didn’t know it!!. And we took an auto to Garuda mall, which was walking distance from there. I wonder which route he took us from. We went to cafe coffee day there, and them came back.

The next day, we went to a great place called Marathalli. It’s a great place for shopping. I got 50% off on my Rebook shoes! And Anshu found the memory card he was searching for the whole day on M.G. the whole day but had found only duplicate, China made cards !

Next Wednesday my mom is coming, and so now am making a list of places to take her to, and yes, all the above mentioned place are there in the list.

And ya, forgot to mention, I spent the weekend before Anshu’s visit in Google office in K.R. Puram, eating chocos and maggi, and playing pool and foosball.

This album basically summarizes what I did on that week’s Firday (the 13th)  : http://picasaweb.google.com/sahilahuja/ChennaiTripForVISAInterview

Time has flown by since I came to Bangalore. It’s already time for me to get ready for my New York trip!

And it rocks!!

The first thing you notice after fedora 9 is the blazing faaaast startup and shutdown times.

Now, before I say anything else about Fedora 9, here are a few screenshots :

Here’s Gnome  in F9 :

And here is KDE 4 (finally !!):

KDE 4 seems to be following the footsteps of some of its latest applications like Basket. The new start menu now acts like that of IPOD. And the inbuilt search as shown in the following video is simply amazing!. The whole desktop has been given a major revamp. And so has been the theme. The widgets on the desktop now act a bit like widgets on Vista.

Among the key features, the feature that i think will prove to be indispensable later in making fedora more famous is the windows fedora live usb creator.

A feature (a release method actually) that really helped me a lot in creating the live DVD is Jigdo. Here is what the official release notes say about Jigdo :

Fedora releases are also available via Jigdo. This distribution method can improve the speed of obtaining the installation ISO images. Instead of waiting for torrent downloads to complete, Jigdo seeks the fastest mirrors it can find via the Fedora Project Mirror Manager infrastructure, and downloads the bits it needs from these mirrors. To optimize seeking these bits, you can tell Jigdo to scan a DVD or CD you already have, and cut down on redundant downloads. This feature becomes particularly useful if you:

1. Download all the test releases and then get the final release, in which case you have 90% of the data already with each subsequent download.

2. Download both the DVD and the CD set, in which case the DVD holds 95% of the data needed for the CD sets.

3. Download any combination of the above.

Anaconda, the installer for fedora, now supports resizing of ntfs, ext3 and ext4 partitions during installation. This will be of great help to windows users. (yes, it supports ext4 now.) Also, it gives an option of installing encrypted partitions. Business users ought to try this, but with caution.
Here is a list of all the new features in fedora 9.

Here are a few pics and videos I took on the last day of college :

Last night at octa:

Really.

I mean, this is Faridabad.. in MAY!!! Last year this time, it was blazing hot with loo making it’s rounds all over India, with people dying of brain fever.

And now, when I come to Faridabad for 10 days, the last time before my job starts, the weather decides to become stormy, windy and rainy.

I caught a throat infection while coming home via Bhilai from NIT Trichy. I was hoping the heat here would cure the infection. But no, God makes sure the weather is such that it only gets worse.

Thank you, O Lord. (:oloo)

What Makes Married Men Want to Have Affairs? – New York Magazine

Consider the Website meet2cheat, in which married people find one another for recreational sex; it charges $59 for a man’s three-month entry fee, $9 for a woman. Cheating wives are harder to come by.
Wow. Nice article. Says men are more prone to infidelity (cheating on someone). Quite right.

Here’s the farewell cake we gave our juniors. It    was   DELICIOUS.

Here is a list of things I have done in the past three years. I have written for the sake of personal record.

As a member of Delta :
Created a “PC Based Oscilloscope“ in IIT Bombay, as a summer project. Used java servlets on the server side and a java applet on the client side. Was responsible for the whole of the software side - 2006 Summers
Worked in Pragyan CMS V1, which finally got implemented in our college website - 2005-2007
Made Dalal Street, a stock market simulator using java servlets on the server side and using eclipse to make a java based ui compiled using gcj to eliminate the need of jvm to run the final executable - 2006 Dec - 2007 Jan
Used CVS for the development of Dalal Street, understood the importance of a code versioning system.

As being a part of Delta Core (Technology Changes) :
Implemented LDAP using openldap, in Delta, allowing everyone to have a central authentication server, with a common login everywhere, where everywhere includes :
system login in Sun Lab comps
Implemented NFS on Delta, which gets mounted on all Sun Lab comps, using the default nfs service provided by default on fedora, so everyone has the same home irrespective of the comp they login to, which they do through their ldap accounts.
Implemented pure-ftpd on Delta, configured it to work through ldap, allowing everyone to access their home drives even from “outside” (the user labs).
Setup, and advocated use of Doku for information keeping, made it work through LDAP.
Implemented and introduced SVN on Delta, setup three repositories : pragyan, delta and dalal, delta for the use of all delta projects.
Implemented and introduced trac on delta, setup three repositories : pragyan, delta and dalal. Customized all of these three. Learned how to customize through .egg files.
Made svn and trac work through httpd authentication, which used LDAP to get authentication details. (this was hell)
Revived delta as a student group - meaning, made sure many meetings were held, made sure everyone knew each other, everyone contributed something to delta and felt a part of the group, made sure many treats were held, and chucked a few inactive members out of delta.
Created Pragyan CMS V2, from scratch.

As being Pragyan’08 Systems head :
Implemented mail system through postfix, made its authentication work through ldap. Implemented mailman like features using contact attribute in ldap and aliases in postfix.
Made dovecot work through ldap too.
Learned what SSL certificates are, how they work, created a self signed ssl certificate for pragyan.org, using tinyCA2 provided in Fedora, and made it use it. (basically, allowed the use of https://pragyan.org/…)
Implemented FDS (Fedora Directory Server) as a much better alternative to LDAP on Pragyan Server.

Apache can be used as an access method for things like svn, trac, and even a whole file system through webdav. And apache also supports authentication through LDAP. Hence Apache can be used to authenticate the services that it provides through LDAP.

Here is how it is done :

For SVN :

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName                          repos.nitt.edu
DocumentRoot                        "/var/www/svn/DocumentRoot/"
ErrorLog logs/repos.nitt.edu-error_log
CustomLog logs/repos.nitt.edu-access_log combined


<Location /pragyan>
DAV svn
SVNPath /var/www/svn/pragyan
<LimitExcept OPTIONS REPORTGET>
AuthType Basic
AuthBasicProvider ldap
AuthzLDAPAuthoritative off
AuthName "Pragyan SVN LDAP Authentication"
AuthLDAPURL ldap://localhost:389/ou=Pragyan,dc=www,dc=nitt,dc=edu?cn?sub?(objectClass=*)
AuthLDAPGroupAttribute contact
require valid-user
require ldap-group listName=coding,ou=Groups,ou=Pragyan,dc=www,dc=nitt,dc=edu
</LimitExcept>
</Location>
</VirtualHost>

For trac :

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

<Location "/trac/delta/login">
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Delta Trac LDAP Authentication"
AuthBasicProvider ldap
AuthzLDAPAuthoritative off
AuthLDAPURL ldap://delta.nitt.edu:389/ou=Webteam,dc=delta,dc=nitt.edu?uid?sub?(objectClass=*)
AuthLDAPGroupAttribute memberUid
require valid-user
require ldap-group cn=webteam,ou=Groups,ou=Webteam,dc=delta,dc=nitt.edu
</Location>

Yup.

SVN IS MAD.

Sorry, SVN and HTTPD team up to drive people crazy.

I just came across two (or maybe three) of their misdoing in my effort to setup SVN on http://repos.nitt.edu

1. First, with this nitt.edu.conf in /etc/httpd/conf.d directory :

   1 2 3 4 5 6 7

   <VirtualHost *:80>     ServerName                          repos.nitt.edu     DocumentRoot            "/var/www/html"</pre> I got an error <pre><span style="color:#ff0000;">RA layer request failed svn: PROPFIND request failed on '/pragyan' svn: PROPFIND of '/pragyan': 302 Found (http://repos.nitt.edu)</span>

   I found this article : http://ynniv.com/blog/2005/12/troubling-svn-error.html

It said that the error occurs when some cms meddles with the way non existent file message (404) is shown. This,… was my case. (Thanks to my Praygan CMS). So then I changed my document root to /var/www/svn.

Then with

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName                          repos.nitt.edu
DocumentRoot            "/var/www/svn"</pre>
I got an error
<pre><span style="color:#ff0000;">RA layer request failed
svn: PROPFIND request failed on '/pragyan'
svn: PROPFIND of '/pragyan': 301 Moved Permanently (http://repos.nitt.edu)
</span>

Article that helped me in this grave time of need was : http://subversion.tigris.org/faq.html#http-301-error

It said that the error occurs because, when configuring SVN to work with httpd, the virtualhost document root shouldn’t contain the repository location (or httpd gets confused or something). My repos location was /var/www/svn/pragyan (which was within Document root). I simply changed the DocumentRoot to /var/www/svn/DocumentRoot and all started working well again.