(TL note: nareshov's diary)

Archive for the ‘Navya’ Category

IITK Homepage hacked, yet again

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Hackety hack hack.

It happens again.

The last time it happened was on 5th June morning of 2007. Although the site was soon restored, it occurred again the next morning. The ones involved were “caught” and happened to be insiders. That was fun. This time around, it doesn’t like it’s the same insiders or even insiders for that matter.

Here are the screenshots:
On 5th June, 2007.
Hacked on 5th June, 2007

On 6th June, 2007.
Hacked on 6th June, 2007

Hacked on 26th April, 2008
Hacked on 26th April, 2008. PageDown
Hacked on 26th April, 2008. PageDown

Written by Naresh

April 26, 2008 at 4:46 pm

So… what’s been happening?

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Yes, it’s true – I did sleep for over 27 hours at one go.
I remember closing my eyes at 4 am on 14th of August only open them at 7:55 am of 15th.

I’ve been attending classes, trying my best not to miss any. LT601 – Introduction to Lasers, by H. Wanare is an interesting course. The course outline says:

You will be penalized 1% of the total for a missed lecture below the 80% gross attendance with a maximum of 15 %. Any absence can be condoned only when you have obtained official leave from the DUGC/DPGC.

Well, not a bad deal given that the classes are at 10 am (thank god it isn’t 8)

PSY458 – Organisational and Administrative Psychology. The professor is a cool one. Lectures are mostly interesting.
CS455 – Introduction to Software Engineering, by TVP. A lot of talk happens in the one-and-a-half hour lectures. The professor is easily derailed and it isn’t a good thing.

As part of the CCCC in the campus, we had a meeting yesterday and the CC would like to get hold of around 20 students who’ll need to make themselves useful for managing various issues in the CC after the recent Gymkhana decisions on LAN ban and stuff.
Did I mention that Navya will be getting a /new/ server with 8GB ram and a dual core AMD64 with somewhere around 350GB storage? 😀 Server class!

Later in the evening we had a Navya meet and spread the good news. Kapil Shukla, an alumni showed up. He was delighted to see the state of Navya. A lot of things have been happening – LDAP, Jabber, and so on. We’ve not publicised them well enough to get a sizeable user-base yet. That should happen soon.

Written by Naresh

August 18, 2007 at 11:40 am

Posted in College Life, Navya

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Gentoo, KDE, amd64!?

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Not so long ago, I gave LG3D liveCD a shot only to end up losing a partition 😐 The included file-manager was at fault here. All I did was try browsing the contents of that partition and it’s gone!
I lost another partition. This was when I was trying out the pirated copy of MacOSX86 freely available on LAN. The Partition Utility on the installation DVD only looked good, but very deadly to actually use. Ah well.
All this activity was on the Seagate 160GB HDD. A faithful old chap from one of the best HD makers out there who sell in India. The other ill-fated hard drive is my infamous Samsung 160GB SATA HDD. My Gentoo installation on it got screwed when I was trying to rebuild the reiserfs partition’s trees. Apparently, it was filled with bad-blocks 😦
So, made use of the other hard drive which recently suffered partition losses 😛
Installed gentoo-amd64 as usual. Emerged gnome-light and a few essentiall apps. Was happy for a few days until one day we had to test out our LAN TV setup for the upcoming cricket matches. VLC was our friend. Had to recompile the kernel with v4l support and stuff and VLC was ready to go. It picked up stuff pretty well from the TV card we had. The CPU usage was however, heavy compared to a similar setup on a neighbour’s 32-bit windows installation.

All that stuff for a month or so ago. Before the earlier post on LDFLAGS.

Now coming to the title of this post. I emerged KDE out of boredom after seeing a lower-end comp showing very good startup speeds for KDE apps on openSUSE. Surprised as I was, I quickly went to #gentoo-kde on freenode and asked around a bit on how to go about this KDE business. There are a lot of split ebuilds and takes a lot of time to go through. I began with one of those overlays which had a
“kde-lite” ebuild which was neat and just what I wanted 🙂
KDE is good. I usually prefer running a desktop with all-Qt/KDE or all GTK+/Gnome. I didn’t want to use Firefox or Linuxdcpp on KDE. So I had to get opera whose flashplugin wrapper never plays youtube or googlevideo :|. It too, like mozilla’s firefox binary, doesn’t render indic-fonts properly. Konqueror does it fine. But it seems to be unsupported by many websites even though Konqueror claims standards compliance.
Yestereve, we had a meeting to discuss MEMP’s current development status and plans for the future. Arun asked us if we are going to support amd64 and asked us “will we be able to convince that plain x86 installation is better than amd64”? Suprised as U was, on asking him the howcomes, he logged into my comp and fired up firefox and mplayer and did the same on his 32-bit gentoo Os and compared the ‘htop’ monitor. Firefox and mplayer on my comp was unusually, strangely, using up too much memory. Is the 64-bit OS at fault here? Is it worth all the trouble? Or should I just install a 32-bit Os and be happy with it?
(this post is kind of written in a hurry)

Written by Naresh

March 20, 2007 at 5:03 pm

Posted in College Life, Linux/BSD, Navya, Software

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