Git and Trac - A Love Story. June 26, 2008
Posted by xk0der (aka Amit Singh) in : Miscellaneous, Programming and software development , 1 comment so farThis is a post I’ve written at my Company blog. Here’s a small excerpt and the link to the complete post.
Like this post?Git and Trac, both got married very recently (at our setup
), and the newlywed couple are quite a charm to work with. It all started with the search for a version control tool which could be used now, with just four of us using it, and that would scale beautifully to hundreds and thousands of users. The version control system would be the groom. Meanwhile we were also in search for a perfect partner (the bride), an issue tracking system, that would gel with our choice of version control seamlessly.
To begin with, we all (at Hidden Reflex) were leaning towards a central repository setup ….. more
Problems with Yahoo Mail June 3, 2008
Posted by xk0der (aka Amit Singh) in : Miscellaneous , 8commentsFor the past 3~4 days I’ve been experiencing problems with Yahoo! Mail. I’ve asked few of my friends and relatives and they all seem to be having the same problems. The problem is affecting both Yahoo Mail classic and the new ajaxian Yahoo mail.
Symptoms observed
1) Yahoo! Mail rejects your login credential straight away. You are not able to login, either using just your yahoo ID or the (recently added mechanism) your full yahoo mail address (yourid@yahoo.com).
2) You are able to login, but the page is not rendered properly. Yahoo mail classic displays your mails but clicking on them wouldn’t open them (only mail subject is show, the body is missing). New Yahoo Mail would render only partially, contents of folders (Inbox etc.) are not listed.
I’ve tested the problem on Linux (Fedora, Ubuntu) and Windows XP with variety of browsers. Here’s the complete list of browsers
Windows XP: IE7, Opera, Firefox 2
Linux (Ubuntu): Opera 9.27, Firefox 2, Firefox 3 beta, Epiphany
Linux (Fedora): Opera, Firefox 2, Firefox 3
On Epiphany, Yahoo Mail tends to behave properly most of the times, but on all other browsers it mis-behaves 100% of times. (This is my observation).
I dunno what the guys at Yahoo are doing but this is really p*ss*ng off their users. I am, for sure, really irritated. I use Yahoo Mail heavily and this is causing real inconvenience to me. It is not just a few minutes glitch, its been consistently happening for a long time now. Are there any other people experiencing the same?
Update: 4th June 2008
It seems Yahoo is finally aware of the problem(2) http://www.ymailblog.com/blog/2008/06/external-accounts/
Quoting from the Yahoo Mail Blog
We are still evaluating the reports of inconsistent html rendering, but I do have an update regarding reported issues with the retrieving of POP email from external accounts.
Our engineers have reviewed the issue, identified the root cause, and are already underway rolling out the fix. Some users should see improved performance immediately, while others may not notice it for a few days (as it hits each farm).
We are very sorry for any frustration you guys have experienced, and for not getting updates out to you sooner.
As for the problem (1) I guess it has been resolved. At least I haven’t faced any problems today logging into Yahoo mail.
Update: 10th June 2008
I guess the problems described in this post have been resolved by Yahoo, I haven’t had any problems for more than 24 hours now. A big thanks to Yahoo! team. Hopefully things wouldn’t break down again, and if they do, would be resolved quickly.
Cyber Wars : Revision3 vs MediaDefender May 30, 2008
Posted by xk0der (aka Amit Singh) in : Miscellaneous, Random musings , 1 comment so farA popular Internet Television network named Revision3 was brought to knees by a cyber attack from a company named MediaDefender, offering services to prevent copyright infringement using P2P distribution method. You can read the complete story here: Revision3 CEO: Blackout caused by MediaDefender attack.
The story seems to be straight out from a Scifi movie. An interesting read, but what’s more interesting are the tactics used by MediaDefender to achieve their goal. The tactics used could well be described as Guerrilla Warfare.
One of their primary tactics is to contaminate the P2P networks with fake and broken files. They create multiple sources for these decoy files and rate them high, so that they show up at the top of a search result, in a P2P client. Other commonly used method is Denial Of Service (DoS) attack.
Apart from this, MediaDefender has been accused of creating multimedia sharing websites to lure people into uploading copyrighted content. MiiVi is(was?) one such website. MiiVi was advertised as a place where you could get full length movies for downloads. MediaDefender, initially denied its involvement with MiiVi, but a major E-Mail leak found MediaDefender guilty. Wikipedia entry for MediaDefender provides more evidence (facts/stories), linking MiiVi to the MediaDefender company.
As the ars technica news entry points out, P2P is also being heavily used for legitimate file sharing. To give an example many of the Linux Distros are available for download over bit-torrent. I once used P2P to transfer (to my project mate) big documents and source-code and related-files of my college project, when you could only send like 1~2 MB of files as e-mail attachment.
Apart from this, what happened to Revision3 could happened to any other business. So where are we heading towards? A supposedly legitimate business is attacking other legitimate business. Crackers/Terror outfits are already using MediaDefender like tactics to attack governments/organisations across the globe. Virtual warfare is gaining momentum. Interesting!
Like this post?Ruby @ Yahoo Groups June 5, 2006
Posted by xk0der (aka Amit Singh) in : Miscellaneous , add a commentYou may join the Ruby group on Yahoo here!
Click to join ruby-central
xk0der ? January 16, 2005
Posted by xk0der (aka Amit Singh) in : Miscellaneous, Random musings , add a commentwhat the heck is this xk0der ? well I got this name when I started a programming club named Xtreme K0ding, I found it kind of funky and hence have been using it at quite some places now! Well about this blog: Since many now have started a blog of their own, I said to myself let’s start my very own Web Log, hence this space. Anyway, I *hope* to put up some usefull stuff in here but notice the stress on the word ‘hope’ 
That would be all in my inagural post
Signing off
- xk0der
