Call of the wild

So after a month of nightmares and living in constant fear of escaping the orbit of earth(yeah.. I feared that the most.. weird).. I finally sky dived at Monterey. It was an experience I'll cherish for life. Big cheers to Bay Jump. The tandem masters and the photographers had made me super comfortable and were totally professional with 1000+ jumps under their belt.
Now that I did it, I find myself wondering why did I do it... I am definitely not an adrenaline junkie , nor was I "not scared" of jumping.. probably I was just arrogant about doing it.. more arrogant than I was scared.

The jump was from a height of 15000 ft and the chutes came up at 5000ft. Thats a free fall of 10000 ft. It took about 1.5 minutes to cover that distance, 15-20 secs of which were wasted in shouting, screaming and getting used to the fall. In the remaining few seconds I just felt numb, not scared.. just plain numb, and appreciated the beauty that engulfed my pshyche. The scenery was breathtaking.. mountain peaks rising from the clouds, birds flying below me, the bay with its extraordinarily sparkly water and just the visible curvature of the earth... neither words nor any photograph can do justice to that.
Check out this video.. I look scared to death(which is about 10% how I actually felt.. kudos to the videographer) and my vest got fluffed up giving my tummy an extraordinarily rotund appearance.

Email scam!

Many of you guys would have recieved spam mails by some rich guy in Nigeria (or some such place) wanting to offload money and asking your help in doing so. I was not sure of the consequences if I had gone with the scheme. What could the money transfer do to me anyway? I learnt it the hard way.. well I did not goof up.. instead it was my roommate who did it few months ago.

Few months ago, before moving out(after graduation), we decided to sublease our house. My room mate, lets call him XYZ, took the initiative of finding someone. He posted ads on craigslist, various user groups, mailing lists and what not. Finally one day he victoriously declared that he had found a hot blonde from London who wanted to move in a month early and was ready to pay $4000 (our rent was $810.. I smelled rat but who was I to dampen his spirit). Quite surprisingly, within a week or so he got a check for $4000. Since that was gonna be shared amongst us, I kept my suspicion under covers and joined the celebration.

(This part of the story was revealed to me after it happened).
A week later XYZ was contacted by the girl saying that the rent was not fair and that she had checked out various websites and wanted a fair deal. Being the "decent guy" XYZ is.. he agreed to pay $3000 back and since, supposedly the English blonde was low on cash, XYZ money ordered it to her. And then the inevitable happened.. the cheque bounced. XYZ got conned of $3000 which ended up eating up all his savings and cancellation of his credit cards connected with that account. The bank did not want to help in the case of an international fraud.. neither did the police. The school lawyer could only help so far as filing a report with the police and putting up a public notice letting students know that email scam threat is very real.

As sorry I was for XYZ, I was amused and curious as hell. I asked him to forward me few of the emails. Email scammers are not as high tech as spammers so analyzing the emails was quite easy. All I had to do was to do a geo lookup of the MTA ip address. The IP addresses pointed to some location in Mexico.. not London.

Generally these cases go unnoticed because people dont want others to know. I called XYZ yesterday and he told me that he saved 5 other friends from similar scams. These scams are not as uncommon as you think... so beware of trolls on various public lists.

New breed of crackers..

SQL injection at its best. (From XKCD)

Occupational hazards

If someone walks into your house with a gun how would you possibly react?
First reaction would be ,of course, panic (well.. in most of the cases). Hardly any of us would try to analyze the intention of the guy before panicking.. thats human nature. Why am I talking about this?

A week ago I asked my landlord to forward a port to my machine. He seemed hesitant. I thought he was tired and would sooner or later do it.. I asked him again this week and he seemed hesitant again. I looked at him inquiringly and he asked: "How would you react if a guy fresh out of college with a Masters degree in computer science, specializing in security, working as an anti-spam engineer, with a lock picking tutorial on his blog asks you to open a port on your network?". I had nothing to say to him.

Wrestling

Note :Do not try this at home without adult supervision

I have been using linux for the past 5 years and use it as my primary OS.. but once a while I have the "OOPS" moment. (No.. this does not mean that there is a problem with linux, just means that if it was any other OS I would have just done a boring clean install because there was nothing else I would be able to do).

I have got so used to larger disk space that when I installed Debian Etch on my "new" 900Mhz machine with 10 GB hard disk, I never put any forethought while partitioning the harddisk. I just went for the default 2G root partition and ~8 G /home partition. As expected, with my rampant abuse of the apt-get command, I pretty much filled the root partition. Now my 500G external disk was mounted on home folder and I did not need any space in there, so it made real sense to redistribute the space. Complication 1: The /root was on a primary hard disk partition and /home was an extended one so I could not use gparted and do any easy cut paste operation.

The right thing a sane person would have done was to cpio the whole disks, repartition and then cpio the stuff back and fix the tiny inconsistencies along the way..but no. I was crazed beyond imagination. I created two disk images with dd and tried to restore them after repartitioning. This wouldn't be a problem for the root partition as the size of the formatted drive was bigger than the disk image..not so with the /home partition. /home didn't have anything anyway, so I thought that even if the image got partially copied, I would be able to fix the number of blocks in the superblock. (Now you know the meaning of the phrase: Little knowledge is a dangerous thing). I had never used dd earlier and had no idea whether this would work.. but what the heck, its all about keeping the spirit of adventure alive.

So after copying the larger disk image onto the smaller /home partition. I ran mkefs2 -S to fix the superblocks and ran e2fsck -y to check the filesystem and fix the errors automatically. It cleaned out my /home directory.. by that I mean it deleted everything.(btw I also tried dls and foremost before performing the step.. these are industrial strength forensic tools.. courtesy of Debian repositories).

Finally I did a clean install but fell asleep half way while configuring it. After waking up I discovered that I had deleted the font files, X, gdm, and few other gnome packages while asleep. I couldn't figure out the packages I had deleted while asleep (may be I wanted to get rid of them at a sub-conscious level :) and no amount of apt-get seemed to startup gdm.. I gave up and did another clean install. Hopefully this should be the last install.. today. All the software mishaps predicted by Murphy's law have already happened.

This exercise made me realize how rusty my sysadmin skills have become since linux became all "user-friendly".. ah the good old rh6 days.