The upgrade page at Amazon describes the process in very simple and easy to follow steps. The easiest option of course is to just do the over-the-air upgrade, but I was not sure if I wanted the extra charge on my Amazon account. I decided to go the route of downloading the upgrade file instead. The back of the Kindle shows which version you own. It turns out I own a  Global Wireless edition. Downloaded the file and transferred it to the Kindle and started the process.

The process was quite smooth really. The settings menu now showed an “update” option so I just clicked that and it did the rest all on its own.

The upgrade was successful and the device just rebooted itself. Very neat indeed, no tense moments of being “bricked”. Now to explore the new features.

Font: The first thing you notice, is the font, it suddenly looks a lot crisper and sharper and more readable. The font key (Aa) also shows more sizes available so you can go much smaller and much bigger than the earlier options.

Collections: Something I was missing on the Kindle. Since I use Calibre to manage most of my content, having an option to create a collection on the device was a feature I wanted. Easy to use, Menu -> Create Collection once you have a collection, just add the books to it. Select the book to add -> toggle right on book -> add to collection-> select collection -> Done.

The rest of the new stuff seems to be hidden in the “Settings” menu.

Popular Highlights: Turned on by default, this lets you browse what the rest of the Kindle community is saying about the book that you are currently reading. Since I am currently reading “What the Dog Saw: and Other Adventures” by Malcolm Gladwell the popular highlights for this were several and it was fun browsing through them. This feature came under some flak from a lot of users for they did not really want their highlights shared without permission. I don’t recall the last status of this, but with amount of noise on “privacy” issues on the net these days I am sure it will be dealt with appropriately.

Social Networks: Now this had to happen. The Kindle now lets you Twitter or connect with Facebook account. Once you link your accounts, you can highlight a passage from the book you are reading and it share via these networks. Pretty decent I thought.

Some of the features I have not yet bothered to check, but will in the next couple of days:

PDF Pan and zoom: PDFs on the Kindle have been something that has had a lot of people excited. I have not really bothered much with PDFs since I prefer stuff to be in either text, html or mobi formats. Much lighter and easier to read in any case. But now you can pan and zoom on a PDF, allowing you to easily view smaller text, tables or graphics.

Two of the other features from the update include, Annotations Backup and Device Password. As of now I am not interested in locking the device but it could be a useful feature. Annotations on the other hand were being stored in a text file which could be transferred to the PC in any case and edited or backed up there. Not in a hurry to use that either, but will certainly keep it in mind.

Now while Brazil scores two goals, I am back to watching the match and single-tasking. In the meantime, if you have a Kindle, I’d certainly recommend the upgrade. Well worth it.

Cheers…Kishore
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My recent problem however, is that there are some places where I manage to find myself and not find a LAN or any form of connectivity. Its rare but it does happen. One such place is our little apartment in Goa. No wired broadband in our area, so no wired connectivity. Its for situations like this that I have my data card. I have been using a Reliance Broadband Netconnect for quite a while and have generally been happy with it. The thing I dislike the most about it, is no “unlimited” scheme. At least, not an affordable one. On my last few visits to Goa, I used the older Reliance data card and cried at its performance, but when I was there recently, I was pleasantly surprised to find the new broadband ones working fine and fairly decent speed as well.

But this brings me back to why I have a router in my bag. Hmmm…let me see how many devices do I carry which have WiFi and need access to the Internet? My notebook, one sometimes two phones, a Nokia N810 Tablet and a Palm TX. Now thats just me, when I add Jyoti’s devices — a netbook, a smartphone and an iPod touch, and then add Kabir as well, fortunately at this stage only an iPod touch. It all adds up. A minimum of nine devices all wanting Internet access.

I could very easily share my connection from my notebook, but it creates a dependence on my machine having to be on and the router all the time. Not that it ever gets switched off, but all the same. I started the hunt for a router which would be small, allow a wired connection but more importantly allow a 3g (EVDO) modem to be used as well.

Anindya Roy, ex PC-Quest told me he was using such a device, in fact, he even mentioned that he was able to listen to Internet Radio while driving around. On checking what he had, I found he was using a HAME – HM433R+ I promptly went out looking for it and managed to get one very efficiently delivered home.

EK Wireless seems to have several products that do stuff like what I wanted and dealing with Elliot Stechman has been a real pleasure. Two quick messages exchanged, bank information was provided, money transferred and device delivered. Came in from Mumbai to Gurgaon with no issues at all.

Setup of the device was trivial, took less than 2 minutes to have the device up and running and connected to the Net. Simple web-interface the only additional information it needed was my Reliance number/password. I am yet to test the router out with my Airtel wired broadband.  Sadly, I do know that it is an either or. It will not bond and balance both a wired and 3G connection. However, Elliot did mention that some of the other products they have do support multiple connections. Including, multiple 3G modems.

In the meantime, I know my next holiday in Goa is not going to be a complete holiday! With connectivity easily available its going to be a shift from home base Gurgaon to home base Goa! As a quick test this afternoon I had at least five devices connected and happily using the Net in no time at all.

Happy Surfing!

Cheers…Kishore
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PS: Did I mention, they shipped a car adapter as well as a USB power adapter.

We ended with some family joining in for a short burst of colour.

Overall, it was fun.

Here are some photos:

http://kishorebhargava.com/v/Friends/holi2009/

Cheers…Kishore

Under normal circumstances, watching cricket while having a few beers with friends, is not an issue at all. In fact, it can be quite enjoyable. But put together a bunch of opensource geeks, add some good old classic rock and some good beer, then the last thing you want is to be constantly distracted by the cricket. If you can hear yourself, you’d rather be talking tech than watching cricket.

So maybe the venue needed to be reconsidered, except all of us are ardent beer-drinkers and very definitely wanted to check the place out.

The beer was not just good it was great, the only issue and a real disappointment was the fact that they only had one brew for most of the evening. Something they called “Yorker” which was a light lager. Fresh and light is how I would describe it. The pitchers disappeared at a rapid rate, I guess everyone found the beer light. Our server appeared with a sample of the other beer (don’t remember the name) for the evening, but the difference in taste was so subtle that we just stuck with Yorker. The big disappointment was also in the fact that there were no dark beers. We were assured that this was essentially due to the cricket season and the fact that the dark beers are so popular that they were just completely sold out. A brew called “Bouncer” was mentioned a few times but was not available.

I guess thats a good reason to go back sometime. A few more critical details, a pitcher of beer (1.5 ltrs) is just under Rs.300/- plus taxes, food is good but expensive and we mainly stuck with snacks. We also got a free tour of the place which was quite nice, we got to see the beer making process though rather briefly, some avid cricket fans were getting quite irritated at people blocking their screens at critical moments talking about beer and how its made!

In all if you are in or around Gurgaon, then do drop in to Howzatt!

Cheers…Kishore
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But before I did all that, I did a few searches and found that the problem seems to be quite common and there were lots of tips out there.

Click the mouse button as you power on the machine and it is supposed to eject the disc, tried that, did not work. Similarly, I came across many suggestions.

The one that finally worked, was a really odd one. Hold up the machine at a 45 degrees angle and then turn it on while pressing the eject key or the mouse click but with a difference, use a stiff card and slip it into the drive slot that it sort of goes over the CD. Somehow, it seems to make the disc spin and on the next boot it came out happily, saving me the trip to Apple care.

This site seems to have helped a lot of people. Interestingly, enough the original post is from some time in 2006, so two years later this tip still works! Absolutely fantastic. Many thanks to Mike.

For now its back to work.

Cheers…Kishore
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Firstly, FOSS.IN/2008 happened. And it went off well, which was really a relief for all of us, those who participated and those who manage it. Lots of stuff happened there and the final report should be out on the site “real soon now”.

During FOSS.IN however, I had a disaster! My laptop which also happens to be my main and only machine decided to die on me. It had been giving the signs for a while but there was not much that I could do about it. The CPU was overheating and despite the fact that I got the fan checked and cleaned, the machine eventually died. I used it for the rest of that trip as a netbook. In fact, I will post a summary of what I did on the laptop separately.

Well, with a dead laptop I was not going to survive for long, I had to get a new machine and I had to get it soon. I looked at all possible variations, since for the last 10 years I have been using ThinkPads, my natural first-choice would have been a ThinkPad. The first shock that I got was that none of the manufacturers now make machines with non-widescreen formats the good old 4:3 screens do not exist anymore.

Quite sad really, I like a nice sharp screen with a minimum resolution 1400×1050, but all I see around me is a maximum resolution of 1280×800 (Ugh!). So the hunt for a new notebook was not easy. It finally boiled down to three machines, a ThinkPad T-61, A Dell E6400 and a MacBook Pro.

Well, the MacBook Pro won!

The story from here on, gets to be even more exciting and certainly demands a few additional posts. I am now running Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) on my MacBook along with Mac OSX. Setting things up has not been all that easy, but I think for now I have a reasonably stable environment again. Hopefully, I can get back to some serious blogging

Keep a look out for some additional posts.

Cheers…Kishore
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PS: I should mention that the site was updated to WordPress 2.7 with its super-slick admin interface, not sure what changes for readers, but manging the site is a pleasant experience!

Stupidity is not yet a criminal offence, but I’m sorry to say that people who feel they are safe or they have no data that can be of use to anyone else are sadly affected by this. Just because you feel you have nothing worthwhile on your computer it does not mean you don’t protect it. And the same goes for your WiFi router! Please for god’s sake admin/admin and admin/password do not make your router inaccessible. A few months ago, I was at my office after a long trip and was surprised to see that my router which has a hidden ESSID (extended service set identification or in simple words my routers name) seemed to have changed. For some strange reason it was showing up as “Netgear”. Assuming that my router had been reset after such a long period of neglect, I happily went about reconfiguring it. I changed the password, set encryption, set up an access list, blah blah blah and then went on to start using it.

When I came back to the administrator interface, I noticed a nice bright red logo stating 54G, although my router is a 54G, I don’t remember seeing this logo before. I have a slightly older version of firmware which does not display this logo. It got me wondering, and I turned around to take a physical look at the router. What I saw, shocked me! I had not even turned my router on. Question is, what happened here, who’s router did I just finish configuring?? As it turns out, the router belongs to a neighbouring office, I have not as yet gone out looking for it but somebody needs to tell them to change their passwords and provide some protection. Otherwise, face the consequences of being called upon by the police!

It is rumoured that legally a service provider (like an ISP) is to maintain a detailed log of all access via their services and network which can be used as evidence. What happens, if I have an open router and my entire neighbourhood can use it? Whether I realise it or not, I guess the same laws would be applicable!

So if you don’t wish to get into any trouble, at least take a few basic precautions to secure things or at least provide some kind of deterrence to avoid abuse of your resources.

Passwords

I could probably go on for a few days about the importance of passwords, but am just going to make a few quick recommendations and suggestions. First of all, try and use a slightly cryptic password which would be considered strong. A good example of this, is a password with a minimum of 8 characters, with at least 1 upper-case letter, 1 numeric character, 1 special symbol so believe it or not pass@Word1 is actually considered to be a strong password.

Please avoid using your own name, initials, your spouse’s name, kids name, pets name, car number etc etc. Also, those little yellow sticky notes are not really a good idea for you to use to write your password on and stick on the monitor! I’m serous, I have seen this happen often enough, not just at homes but in the corporate environment as well. And then when things go wrong, one just sits back and wonders, “…how did they get my password? …” These hackers are dangerous people! I don’t know about dangerous, but I do know if I find an open access point, I normally land up using it. If nothing else to at least test what kind of speeds one can achieve on a large download.

Default passwords on routers are normally setup by the manufacturers to help you get started. They are meant to be changed instantly. If for some reason you have to reset your hardware back to factory settings the default password is what will be set again. So keep that in mind and as soon as you set up your access, please please change your password. In many cases it is also possible to change the default administrator name, if so please change that too. No “root” is not a good idea, just call it something else a little less obvious!

With passwords out of the way, lets move on to some basic WiFi security.

WEP and WPA

WEP (wired equivalent privacy) is the simplest form of encryption/protection that you can provide on your WiFi router. It is by no means the most secure, in fact its not really very secure at all and can be broken into easily. However, remember that every little deterrent that you provide, pushes your intruder away by one step. Its like the gear lock on your car, its crude its ugly and it really does little to protect the car. But you’ll be surprised that the action of putting that gear lock on, actually keeps those burglars at bay. Besides, the big advantage of WEP, first its better than none at all and secondly it encrypts all traffic on the network so a sniffer will no longer be able to grab your passwords.

WEP was deprecated as an algorithm in 2004 and devices started to support the more popular WPA (WiFi Protected Access) and WPA2. While both WEP and WPA are a pain to implement on public networks and at a larger scale, at the level of your home router, they are neither resource intensive nor a very daunting task to implement. In fact, its as trivial as marking a checkbox and selecting a passphrase or a key.

Add to this an access list based on MAC (Media Access Control) addresses or the hardware address of your network card and your system is at least safe from the casual access leach. Now only a hacker serious enough to gain access will work on breaking in but it will no longer be that easy.

Secure Protocols and Safer Surfing

Now that you have some form of protection on your home/office router the next thing to worry about is what is safe in a public place. The rules of the game or no different, open a wallet with lots of money in it and the guy next to you is bound to be tempted to swipe it. So if at a public place you start surfing your bank account, don’t be surprised to find some money missing.

Its a bad world out there, just practise safer surfing and you will be fine. Along with that of course it would help greatly if you paid attention to the sites that you access providing secure versions. If you need to check your Gmail account, its good to know that the site is SSL enabled (the URL changes from http to https). Many sites also provide different URLs for the secure versions versus the plain text ones, most of the Cpanel hosted sites let you select the plain http webmail and along with that also the https webmail as well. Make sure that if you are in a public place or even if you are using a computer at a cyber cafe, then firstly try and avoid using sites that have information that you do not wish to have shared or compromised and if its unavoidable then definitely use secure protocols.

In today’s day and age everyone wants their email all the time. Be it on their laptops, phones or PDAs. But few actually pay attention to whether their collection of mail in a public place can result in somebody else reading their mail with them at the same time. All it needs is a sniffer, and such software is easy to find. Protocols like POP3 and IMAP are fine if you are on a secure network. But in a public place you want make sure you are using the secure versions of these, POP3S or IMAPS, both exist. Providers are aware that customers want it but not all customers are aware that they can get such services. Make sure you can.

A harmless chat on your instant messenger can also very easily be snooped, unless there too you use the secure versions. I use pidgin as my IM program and when in a public area I turn on the “Off-the-record” plugin.

A few simple steps and you can be a safer surfer in a public hotspot. don’t shun them, by all means use them but just take care!

Here’s hoping to see more access points closed and secured and yet more WiFi usage.

Cheers…Kishore
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Next big wave was Google’s Chrome! I enjoyed reading the comic but thats where it ended. No linux version and though it is now reported to run on wine I have not yet bothered with it. I’ll stick with Firefox for now and revisit this at some point of time. I do have access to a windows desktop, but have not yet tried Chrome or IE8 on that as yet. There are more important things to do.

This morning I woke up to discover yet another WordPress update. my last upgrade was excessively smooth and painless, not that I have ever had an issue on the upgrade before. But last time I used a neat plugin which deserves a special mention – WordPress Automatic Upgrade its just brilliant. It forces you to take a backup, deactivates all plugins, upgrades from the latest WordPress and then reinstates everything. Literally, a few clicks and you are done. I just love it, since I somehow seem to be volunteered into maintaining a bunch of WordPress sites.

Finally, only 76 days to go for FOSS.IN/2008. Thats one of the things that is keeping me a bit busy and awake at night. Do keep a look out for announcements and other happenings on FOSS.IN.

In the meantime, back to work…

Cheers…Kishore
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Anyways, while waiting for some things to happen, I kept wondering if there was an easier way to manage the three servers in question. In particular, I needed an easy way to type the same command on all three machines at the same time. They are identical servers, just that they are in three different locations. Google to the rescue and a few minutes later I was installing ClusterSSH on my notebook. Now that I have seen and used it, I really wonder how I’ve survived all these years without it.

As the name suggests, its essentially meant for cluster administration, where the need for issuing the same command on all nodes is a very common requirement. The good thing is that its not limited to clusters. If you add a bunch of hosts either on the command line or in the config files, fire up cssh and you get a separate Xterm for each host you add, except that you also get a little box in which whatever you type is echoed on all the terminals. Just what the doctor ordered. Very nifty indeed.

I was then able to check the mail queues, configure the SMTP servers, restart the mail services, all from one place simultaneously on all three servers. A real time saver.

So what kept me up till 0330 hrs, was one of the servers not clearing its queue. Once everything was working, I just couldn’t enough of ClusterSSH and stayed up playing with it till Jyoti came in search for me and dragged me away from it.

With that as a start of the Independence day for me, I finally got some rest, but clearly not enough. I was woken up at 0830 hrs to fix yet another mail server. Why, oh why do these servers have to misbehave on a National holiday. The issue turned out to be minor and got solved rapidly. Now to actually get back to holidaying.

Kabir wanted to fly some kites so we went out in search for some kite flying experts. Jyoti’s brother Navin is quite an ustaad at it and with his help we managed to get three of our kites up and rather high at that. Some of the kids from a neighbouring village watched in amusement as we tried to get some more kites up and finally came to our rescue.

We ended the day with a long awaited annoucement – FOSS.IN/2008 dates and venue. November 25-29, 2008 at the National Science Symposium Centre, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India.

Hope you had a good Independence day too!

Cheers…Kishore
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PS: Some important info on ClusterSSH that I left out:

I use Fedora 9 on my laptop and found ClusterSSH in the repositories, a simple “sudo yum install clusterssh” worked great for me.

Use cssh -u > $HOME/.csshrc to create your default config file.

Adding the cluster and server tags to .csshrc did not work for me, I finally used /etc/clusters for that, the syntax is simple:

clusters = myboxen

myboxen = username@hostname1:port username@hostname2:port

It helps to have your SSH keys already copied on the target hosts.

We started by going to North Goa and stayed in Baga for a few days and then into the more dense forest area at Molem and ended with the calm and serenity of South Goa at Sernabetim. Trip report is on Jyoti’s blog.

One of the things that was also planned, was to look at the possibility of buying a small apartment, which we could use as a get-away home.

We did get a little bit of a break here, when our neighbour from Gurgaon told us about a friend wanting to sell his apartment. From that initial meeting to almost three months, several emails and phone calls we finally managed to get the place.

We are now the proud owners of apartment 211at Las Palmas, Arpora, Goa.

There were a lot of anxious and tense moments for all involved, with the lawyers and banks asking for all kinds of papers, but it finally concluded.

I was too tired to take photos and Jürgen who was carrying a new camera was very willing to use both his own and my camera so we got some shots of the place.

Photos are in the gallery:

As Jyoti put it, we are now Bhargoans

Cheers…Kishore
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