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The Inside Job

Saw excellent movie “The Inside Job” on 2008 market crash. It nicely explains that in fine details, people & companies who were involved, how it happened and finally what Govt. did. I was amazed by funny part of story where they let one to insure against things which you they did not own!

Movie Trailer

Have fun!

Host a RIPE Atlas probe!

RIPE NCC is running an excellent project called RIPE Atlas from few years. This is one of largest distributed network measurement projects where thousands of users host small devices called RIPE Atlas Probes on their networks, home connections, datacenters etc. These probes do measurement under both public and private category and make that data available publicly for use by network engineers and helps in optimizing routing. This page shows detailed coverage statistics of the probes.  

Letsencrypt - Free signed automated SSL

Last year a really good project Letsencrypt came up. They key objective of this project is to help in securing web by pushing SSL everywhere.  

Two key cool features

  1. It offer free signed SSL certs!
  2. It helps in setting up SSL via an agent seamlessly without having to deal with CSR, getting it signed & updating web server configuration.

At this stage Letsencrypt is itself a Certificate Authority and but it’s root certs are yet not in the browser. It’s probably going to take a while till all major browsers get their certificate. To help on that one of it’s sponsors IdenTrust has signed their intermediate certs. Hence certs signed by Letsencrypt are accepted by all browsers right away. All certs signed by Letsencypt are signed by Letencrypt Authority X1 which have signature from DST Root CA X3 which is accepted by pretty much all popular browsers. You can read more about How it works here.   Here’s an example of SSL setup for say “demo.anuragbhatia.com” test domain which is already up and working without SSL. http://demo.anuragbhatia.com shows a plain text page. This is Apache running on Ubuntu server. The Apache web config is pretty straightforward.

Two day trip to Paihia, Bay of Islands

I had a nice two day trip to Paihia over weekend. Paihia is one of key tourist towns far up in North. It took around 4 hrs via bus from Auckland. Travel was quite comfortable and place was excellent. I would say Paihia itself was quite a nice place but travel to it was one of best scenic travel I ever had. [gallery link=“file” ids=“3895,3896,3898,3897,3901,3902”]  

I travelled via Inter-city bus. Outside India it’s quite common that just one person takes care of everything on behalf of bus company. Same person works on loading stuff, verifying tickets, and of course driving bus. Most of societies outside India are extremely cool & calm which makes overall service quite doable. Not surprising - same person drove the bus back to Auckland next day and the way he kept on updating, greeting all passengers was just amazing. I never had Haryana roadways folks greeting like that. ;) And oh yes did I mentioned of free wifi in the bus? :)   Although I have yet to upload most of videos I took on the way, here’s a quick video showing way from Auckland to Paihia.

APRICOT 2016 - Auckland, New Zealand

First and foremost before talking about APRICOT, I must say I am deeply moved with impact Rohtak (and Haryana) as whole had because of recent Jat agitation. What I find extremely depressing is way current Govt. of Haryana completely failed to control it and the way previous Govt. ministers did best in their interest and completely against the interest of people of Haryana. For now quite hopeful with news that Mr Prakash Singh (one of my favorite IPS officers) who did quite well during his various terms is looking into failure of police. More details about the news here. I will write more on this later on, not good time right now since tensions have yet to get normal.