lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

Executive summary - I fond the Sharma Transport people to be unfriendly, uncaring about their customers and plain out liars. Do not use their bus service.

On 21st December, I had made a trip to Pondicherry. I had booked a ticket in the Sharma Transports (Bangalore) bus for this journey. When the bus reached, we saw that the bus is a derelict piece of junk. Some of the seats were missing, there were holes in the roof and there were rats in the luggage cabinet. The passengers who were there in the bus told us that the driver was extremely rude. When one of the passengers had complained about the seats and the rats, the driver told him that the passenger was quite welcome to leave the bus.

All the passengers refused to board the bus and we called a policeman to the Sharma Transport's office. After around 2 hours of arguing, they arranged a different bus for us.

It looks like this is their common mode of operation. They oversell their buses and hope that the passengers would not create a fuss. If you are planning a trip, avoid Sharma Transport at all cost.

Links

• Reviews of Sharma Travels on mouthshut.com

Older editions of Scientic American are now available on Gutenberg.

Let me admit this openly - I am in awe of RRD. I am planning to use it in one of my marginal hacks. A very good introduction on RRDs can be found in the book Building a Monitoring Infrastructure with Nagios by David Josephsen (Print ISBN-13: 978-0-13-223693-5), Chapter 7. Visualization. If you have a safari account, you can read the chapter here

If you use kde and you want to start certain apps (like konsole/amarok/kmail) minimized to the tray instead of coming up on the desktop, you can use the ksystraycmd command. For example ksystraycmd --hidden kmail will start kmail and put it in the system tray.

Made rpms of amarok-1.4.7 on RHEL 4. It was a real pain to get all the dependencies and making correct rpms of them, but all the pain was worth it.

Came to know about rpmbuild --short-circuit while trying to get things working.

After messing around with spec files for the past two days, I think rpm is a solid packaging scheme. The reason why people are crazy about debian packaging scheme (.deb) might be because of the awesome apt-get that is built on top of it. yum seems like an amateur effort next to apt-get.

One nice goodness that I discovered in rpmbuild was when I ran across Installed (but unpackaged) file(s) found: error.

rpmbuild terminates a build if the RPM_BUILD_ROOT contains files that are not explicitly listed in a %files section of the spec file. See the links for a detailed explanation of this feature.

Links

• rpmbuild --short-circuit option
• Unpackaged files terminate a build

Seen in one of our internal mailing list

Untempered criticism has a devastating impact

Editor's note - I posted this entry on my older blog.

Befor going into the details, a bit of background first. Have you heard of the Nigerian Scam? Here it how it operates - you receives an unsolicited fax, email, or letter often concerning Nigeria or another African nation containing either a money laundering or other illegal proposal. A sample goes something like

FIRST, I MUST SOLICIT YOUR STRICTEST CONFIDENCE IN THIS TRANSACTION. THIS IS BY VIRTUE OF ITS NATURE AS BEING UTTERLY CONFIDENTIAL AND 'TOP SECRET'. I AM SURE AND HAVE CONFIDENCE OF YOUR ABILITY AND RELIABILITY.

So you get glittery eyed and start dreaming. You reply back and say "Yeah dude! i am in. Lets go and swindle gazillion dollars". Some more emails follow. At some point, you are asked to pay up front an Advance Fee of some sort or to extend credit. If you pay the money, there are often many Complications which require still more advance payments until you either quit, runs out of money, or both. Some times it may go further. You may be asked for your bank account numbers, copies of their passport and drivers licence and phone and fax numbers. What the scamsters are doing is the Identity theft. Your bank account is cleaned out once they have handed over all your details.

So after the gory details here is the story. Silicon.com decided to follow up on the offer and see where it leads to. Silicon.com's Will Sturgeon set up a Hotmail account under an assumed identity and contacted the scamster (a Mr. Madu Frank). You can read the rest of the story Silicon.com. Will Sturgeon made him run around in circles. Really good read. Enjoy!

Links

• archive.org page from silicon.com
• sample of nigerian scam emails