Date: 01/21/08     Keywords: google

Google had a well known proxy facility. You could use an url like http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=http://blog.taragana.com to access http://blog.taragana.com using Google as proxy. Unfortunately that doesn’t work anymore. Google comes back with a message - “Translation from English into English is not supported.”. Everything is not lost yet, there is still a way though not as pretty. You can [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/google-proxy-unhacked/

Date: 01/20/08     Keywords: no keywords

Last Sunday I went to IIT Alumni picnic in Ibiza resort in Kolkata. Check the slideshow (thanks to Sid). Can you spot me? You can find me below in a serious discussion possibly thinking of saving the world before dinner. The food was great. The best part was that when I went in I knew nobody. When I [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/iit-picnic-photos/

Date: 01/20/08     Keywords: no keywords

I am just back from a Bengali wedding and I am writing this post after gulping some super strong antacid. I had a bad experience. My tips for groom’s guardians: 1. Please spend sometime to greet people and do that sincerely. We all know it is just courtesy and you may not even like to do [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/8-tips-for-grooms-guardians-in-arranging-bengali-boubhat/

Date: 01/20/08     Keywords: database, spam

SplogSpot is service that keeps track of spam blogs or Splogs. The splogspot spam database can be queried by using the SplogSpot API. A nice idea. Is the service appears to be dead since March 2007? The recently updated splog dump from SplogSpot has the latest entry from 20th March 2007: Casino Club Las Vegas - 07:45 [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/is-splogsplot-splog-detection-site-dead-i-hope-not/

Date: 01/10/08     Keywords: software, security, web

You never worry about your site security until after your site has been hacked for the first time. It is always a moment of truth, when you first realize how vulnerable you (your site & your data) truly are. You have probably dozens of scripts running on your server ranging from weblog software, comment form, [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/understanding-intrusion-detection-system-samhain/

Date: 01/09/08     Keywords: no keywords

So Bay Area Rapid Transit is BART and Dallas Area Rapid Transit is DART. I wonder what will be the name of future Fairbanks / Fairbury / Fairfields Area Rapid Transit & Washington Area Rapid Transit? Why can’t we be more innovative in naming? Share This

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/help-me-with-us-rapid-transit-authority-names-please/

Date: 01/09/08     Keywords: spam, google

Google dutifully provides a forum for each product / API they launch. They also graciously decided to display 3 recent articles from their forum on their highly ranked product page. It appears that the forums are not actively monitored by Google staff as they are already being abused for spamming. Here is an example (click [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-google-product-api-pages-can-be-spammed/

Date: 01/09/08     Keywords: no keywords

Of the 20,000 to 30,000 genes now thought to be in the human genome, most cells express only a very small part - which makes sense, a liver cell has little need for the DNA code that makes neurons. But as almost all cells carry around a full copy (’distribution’) of the genome, a system is [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/why-are-stem-cells-so-hot/

Date: 01/08/08     Keywords: google

It has been several hours since Google search went down. Google services on google.com domain, including but not limited to GMail or Google Analytics, Google Adsense etc., are down too while blogsearch.google.com is up and running. Google country search sites like google.co.in and google.co.uk are down too. I don’t know what affected Google, but whatever it [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/google-down/

Date: 01/07/08     Keywords: google

In response to Google AdSense teams resolutions for us here are 5 AdSense resolutions I have taken for 2008 wrt. AdSense: 1. Get out of AdSense AdSense is flaky. I want my business to minimally depend, if at all, upon Google AdSense. I have enough reasons for heartburns without adding AdSense to the mix. 2. Compare it with [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/my-5-adsense-resolutions-for-2008/

Date: 01/07/08     Keywords: no keywords

You can safely delete any messages contains with: “correspondence may come to you as a surprise due to the fact that we have not met“ This appears to be an often repeated phrase of nigerian scammers these days and is worth searching for in content of your emails for direct deletion (nuke). Share This

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/calling-card-of-nigerian-scammers/

Date: 01/04/08     Keywords: no keywords

I will be away on vacation this January 4-5 & partly on 6th too (Saturday through Monday) to Digha sea beach. Share This

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/away-on-vacation/

Date: 12/30/07     Keywords: no keywords

Second Life is 3-dimensional online digital world mostly created by its residents. You can buy and sell land and artifacts of this virtual world with Linden dollars. However Linden dollars isn’t virtual. It can be traded for real dollars. There are several online exchanges for trading Linden dollars with the current going rate of around [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/second-life-enables-vibrant-virtual-economy-with-linden-dollars/

Date: 12/30/07     Keywords: no keywords

PayPal provides an API to automate transaction processing. This is great for businesses selling electronic products. Automated transaction processing speeds up order processing and is somewhat expected from a large section of internet savvy buyers. However it has some caveats as we found yesterday. We sell Translator Plugin Pro for 30$ using a simple online PayPal [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/gotchas-of-automating-paypal-transaction-processing/

Date: 12/30/07     Keywords: no keywords

Use the command below as root after replacing new-login-name and old-login-name appropriately: usermod -l new-login-name old-login-name For NIS accounts don’t forget to run: cd /var/yp make Share This

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-change-username-in-linux/

Date: 12/27/07     Keywords: spam

My first Facebook spam: Subject: Mi Chai invited you to join the group “I’M A CHRISTIAN..AND I’M PROUD TO SAY IT!!”… Mi invited you to join the Facebook group “I’M A CHRISTIAN..AND I’M PROUD TO SAY IT!!”. Mi says, “Join this group! See www . patientking . blogspot . com and leave me a msg on whether u [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/my-first-facebook-spam/

Date: 12/26/07     Keywords: web, apache

This WordPress blog was hacked for few hours on 24th December (nice Christmas present!) from Russia. The hacker exploited several WordPress vulnerabilities in administrative scripts to gain full access to the website (as permitted to apache user), including the ability to upload & run scripts, delete any file owned by apache user, view the file [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/detailed-post-mortem-of-a-website-hack-through-wordpress-how-to-protect-your-wordpress-blog-from-hacking/

Date: 12/25/07     Keywords: database

First of I didn’t ask postfix to do NIS lookups. These warning messages started showing up when I commented out alias_maps and decided to only use alias_database instead. The fix was simple. alias_maps when commented, uses the default settings: alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases, nis:mail.aliases This allows postfix to work even without explicit alias_maps settings. However the default also encumbers [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-fix-postfix-warning-dict_nis_init-nis-domain-name-not-set-nis-lookups-disabled/

Date: 12/21/07     Keywords: spam

I’ve got mail is a witty take on spam from Richter Scales. It is a 2007 CARA Nominee in Best Humor Song category. Listen to find how spam gives meaning in life, not to mention three additional inches and more. Share This

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/song-witty-take-on-spam-ive-got-mail/

Date: 12/21/07     Keywords: no keywords

A beautiful educative musical video based on Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Stop the Fire”, explaining the process from conception to childbirth. It is made for MU med school class of 2010. The lyrics is below. The video is educational and yet very entertaining. Mom and dad, empty pad, there’s time, prophylactic’s bad Sperm are swimming, egg is going, [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/musical-video-explaining-conception-to-child-birth/