I-BLOG

A HEART FELT WISHES

FOR A VERY WARM AND

HAPPENING NEW YEAR

2010

COME TRUE IN THIS YEAR

The first thing that caught my eyes today morning is the news of ‘rating new cars based off their fuel economy’. While everything goes the efficient way, this is one good movement I’d call.

Indian Roads are all for the personal cars buzz now, everyone seem to have a car and people seem to buy cars for a jazzy look than on the overall efficiency of the car itself. How do I know? Well, I myself like Honda’s latest design and want to buy but can’t afford   Read it from TOI;

NEW DELHI: It’s been more than two years in the pipeline but the ministry of power is now ready to rate cars for their fuel efficiency. So in the new year, when you go hunting for a new set of wheels, a star label on the car’s windshield could help you decide if you are getting your money’s worth.
To begin with, the labeling would be voluntary for manufacturers. But it would still be easy for consumers to make out why some manufacturers won’t want their products labeled. In a year’s time, labeling will become mandatory under a strict grading system.
The proposed label will not only suggest what mileage the new car could give ideally but also tell the buyer how the car performs when compared to other models in the same category. These categories would be created on the basis of the vehicle’s weight.
The best performer would be given 5 stars and the others would get lesser stars depending on their mileage. At the moment, sources in the government suggest not many cars are able to hit the top category.

Rest at {Here}

I often wondered about typical networking interview questions, there is a section of questions which is repeated no matter which company you prepare for and still found a lot of guys not sure about it. It does not mean you do not know networking, but then often an interview is conducted in a short interval and by no means someone is going to assess how good you’re in networking.

Still, the interview is used to measure how good/quick you think in a particular direction, there are other woes obviously like;

1. What is IPSEC?

I have seen questions like this, as I see it – this is just as absurd as it can get. The whole of interview is probably what ‘an hour thingy’?, I can go on answering for the above question for full one hour. That is to mean the question is not in quantifiable terms. I mean, do you think all the times, you’d be able to explain what exactly the interviewer has in his minds? that is a big Bull! If the question is posed at like “Explain the phases of an IPSEC VPN” – this is much easier to quantify answer-wise.

Coming back, couple of questions I have seen others keep asking and I myself have asked and haven’t gotten a satisfied answer many more times are like these;

1. Explain and differentiate Routed and Routing protocols?

2. Private IP addresses can’t be routed through internet, why?

3. What is ARP and how does it work?

4. Classful & Classless concepts?

5. TCP 4 way handshake – (this is best, as everyone seems to know the 3 way) ?

6. What is NAT-T ?

7. Different types of firewalls? (everyone knows ‘Stateful’ and ‘Stateless’, but nothing more – reason? they’ve studied it only once, not up to speed on the technology advances).

8. How does a device know that the destination is *not on the local network* ?

9. Can 2 VLAN’s have the same IP Subnet? – Most of them answer ‘NO, a BIG NO’ ?

10. Why/When a network loop happens in an L2 network?

These are pretty basic questions for Network/Security Engineer with 3 to 5 years experience as I see fit. So it kinda got into habit of me to shoot off from these and if majority is ‘no’ then the candidate is a big ‘no no’ for me!

Actually it even gets funny some times. I had a friend (who’ll read this as well ), he actually asked a guy to give some basic test cases for a cell phone/Mobile phone. So he gave some ‘not-so-satisfying’ test scenarios. So my friend asked him to write down a stress test case for this phone and the candidate mentioned that he will “Make a long distance call” and that was a stress test case for him. See the thinking has to be aligned if not exactly correct. Once a CCIE guy was just goofing around, since he only had teaching experience and never touched a live network in his life, so I was frustrated with this answers (C’mon if a router doesn’t respond, he’d just reboot it seems!) and so was my other fellows listening to it. So I asked him to subnet a network and asked him to use the white-board since he’d be more comfortable that way since he was a network teacher/instructor. He did something and came down on something silly as 90/2 is approximately 40. I was literally “DONE” with the candidate, went to my manager and asked him to just get this guy off the premises.

This post is not to insult anyone, see they all are equally working in this industry but then for everything there is a bench-mark. Hiring a candidate doesn’t stop there, the responsibilities to shoulder only starts from there –> To make him to full-fledged and productive on the project.

Yesterday, IETips.net folks have released IE Tweaker version 1.0 of the software. A lot of changes/fixes can be performed by the tool as advertised at their site; Over 90+ fixes are available for the software. I haven’t tested it and am downloading as I write this

Menu options:

Browsing Options - This menu option helps you to quickly turn off/on the following:

Smooth Scrolling, Clear type font, Animation, Sounds, Picture Display, Automatic Image resizing

Clear Junk Files – This option will help you to quickly remove all the temporary IE files, cookies, history, passwords, and AutoComplete data.

Tweak IE – Tweak IE menu has the following tabs:

Basic Tweaks - Offers you the basic tweaks such as Turn off/on Menu bar, Favorite bar, Tabbed browsing, Full screen mode, Caret Browsing support etc.,

Browser Menus - Helps you to disable/enable the Browser Menus

Toolbars – Helps you to hide/unhide the various options on the bars and also the bars itself such as Status bar, command bar etc

Control Panel - Helps you to hide/unhide the various tabs in Tools -> Internet Options.

Advanced – Helps you to Turn off/on various options such as Compatibity view etc., and also allows you to change the IE Title, and Default download directory options.

Restrictions - This menu option has the following tabs:

- Restrictions – Provides you various restriction optionss such as Changing default search provider, Add-ons management, Autocomplete features etc.,

- Settings - Restricts the users to change various settings.

- Security - Allows you to enable/disable options such as InPrivate Browsing, Filtering etc.,

Repair - Repair menu option provides you various options to repair/fix various issues that you have with Internet Explorer.

In addition to it we have also provided desktop Shortcuts for various modes of Internet Explorer in Shortcuts Folder.

To download visit {Here}

      Traditionally it is believed to have birth-stone as a ring helps radiate positive energy, at least I know that is the case in India. Even the ‘Rishi’/Yogi’s used to wear the ‘Rudraksha’ – I think to some degree these are proven to at least keep aside the negative energy/light so that it does good to you.

Then it was an era of bangles/bracelets imported from China and other countries which apparently helps control Hyper Tension. I do not know the authenticity of this but I know for sure a lot of people definitely have bought this.

So coming to the my story I bought a stone worth 1 Lakh Indian Rupees (for non-Indian’s, understand that it is really a huge some of amount). For example, I bought a house worth 36 lakhs, so you can do the math! The only difference is that I bought this from a hospital, it is a gallstone measuring 1.4 CM calculus which was showing me the extent of “pain of death”.

Usual procedure, laparoscopy was done and discharged from the hospital in a day, a week’s rest put me back to speed and had my first Chicken Biriyani exactly on the 7th day

Well, the moral of the story is you can have Oily Chicken Biriyani even after you get your gallbladder removed – you’ll survive since the liver produces over a liter of bile a day, enough to help process and I live to tell this

The place I live in Bangalore is Kaggadasapura, and the 2 hospitals near-by are CMH Hospital and Manipal Hospital. People first go to CMH (since it is mission hospital, err?) and then to Manipal since your problem will be taken care for sure but so do they of your money as well. I suffered this severe pain and I attributed it to severe gastritis. The best thing is, the pain comes exactly at mid-night, pretty much paralyzing you from options. So I suffered this for 2 weeks and when the pain goes out of control, I rushed to near by 24/7 type clinic to get a pain shot. Then it came, even with the shot the pain wouldn’t drop. After a whole night pain I went to CMH hospital with one of my neighbor, they admitted me and said it is probably something pancreatic. Did the Ultrasound scan and they said everything is good except that my Spleen and Lever is a little bigger (usually caused by infection in less severe cases as I was diagnosed). I asked the radiologist specifically for gallstones since I know that I have one from a body checkup done an year back. But he said, there is nothing and I’m good to go. I was diagnosed as ‘Hepatosplenomegaly’ – sounds cool isn’t it and was given some medicine’s. I was asked to get admitted there since seems that on Sunday’s no discharge happens in the afternoon – Yeah…

Exactly after a week, the bloody pain started again and kept me up the whole night, so I called up one of my colleague and went to ER @ Manipal, they moved me to gastro dept. I underwent an endoscopy, X-ray and Ultrasound, in that order where they found the culprit is the gallbladder. The Doc explained the situation to me and asked me if I’d like to get it operated. Well, before the tests were done, I was going through the worst pain in my life I ever had, even with Tramacal (seems this is like Morphine) i was still struggling, pulling out my hair! So thinking of that I was quick to agree to an operation. They put me on PCA (Patient Controlled Anesthesia, pretty cool stuff, I could increase the dosage when I want with a switch). After the surgery, this is my first one in my life, I saw the stone and couldn’t believe my eyes. How the hell can a radiologist and a doctor at CMH miss something of this size man, it is just pathetic. The doc at Manipal told me that the gallbladder was infected more than he thought.

So it cost me a Lakh, of course my insurance paid it though.

  Based off the Glassdoor.com surveys from the employee’s themselves of each company, Juniper Networks’ ranks the first!

Got this snippet from { Here }

  One difference about glassdoor compared to all other predictions is that these are derived by anonymous input’s from the respective organizations itself.