Wrote an article yesterday in The Daily Mississippian on the current health care debate.

* Creative Commons image by lab2112

By Arvinder Singh Kang Special to The DM

For those who don’t know what a chupacabra is, let me tell you my friend, it is a “goat sucker”. And yes, you can call him that.

Whether it considers that nickname derogatory has not been determined yet, because it belongs to a group of animals called Cryptid, a creature whose existence has been suggested but lacks scientific support.

However, searching for “Fox News chupacabra” in Google, gave me proof that my friend chupacabra is no more a silly Cryptid than Big-foot and Yeti (http://bit.ly/27ufOl).

If I was to consider myself an American and not an alien, as U.S. Immigration Services refers to international students, I would be a 4-year-old toddler. That is the amount of American experience I have, so I’m still in the process of making sense of things, which most of you would find easy to understand.

I’m still trying to make sense of why my doctor’s billing office charged me once for an emergency visit to Baptist Memorial Hospital in 2007 and then sent a collections agency who threatened to “screw my credit” and made me pay twice.

Even after proving it was a mistake in their billing, they haven’t sent my $259 back to me. Baptist Memorial says it has nothing to do with the doctor’s billing office, the doctor herself seems to have moved and the billing company CEO seems to have spent my $259 on Friday night booze.

And that’s why my toddler mind wonders when it watches people yelling to the government, “Keep your hands off my health care!”

Do they seriously think U.S. health care is not broken?

I wonder if these people ever got a chance to watch the House subcommittee hearings where witnesses testified about the practice of “post-claims underwriting,” which occurs when insurance companies cancel individual health insurance policies after providers submit claims for medical services (http://bit.l/1tH0gJ).

I’m still a smart 4-year-old American. I have a 2-year-old American friend, who got mad when he had to shell out more than $100 to get a tetanus shot after getting hurt with a rusted iron nail on the road, while he can get the same shot in his home country for free.

Back in my home country if I’m sick, I have two options.

If I go to a government hospital, I pay 10 cents (yes, you heard it right), and wait anywhere between 10 – 30 minutes to see the doctor.

No appointment, no insurance, it is as simple as that.

The second option is to visit a private clinic, the cost of which is still quite less then visiting one in the U.S.

The chronic care options might be limited and expensive.

However, for primary care, I do not have to wait days for an appointment with a physician in a country with three times the population of U.S. and at least twice the corruption.

Until recently, the term medical insurance was unheard of in my home country of India.

The U.S. spends the most on health care, more than Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany and Canada. Ironically the Commonwealth Fund found U.S. health care consistently under-performed compared to the health care systems of these other countries.

The study found two major differences: The U.S. being the only country without universal health insurance coverage and the U.S. has the highest cost of malpractice insurance of any nation in the study (http://bit.ly/k1PsE).

A lot of time we associate universal health care with socialism. If caring for “the least of these My brethren” is socialism, then so are all-loved Medicare, disabled and veteran health care programs.

Caring for others who have the least are the signs of a healthy and sane nation.

Caring for “the least of these My brethren” has made America “a beacon of hope” for the suppressed and underdeveloped parts of the world.

Steps in that direction would not diminish, but bring back the glory of the old days to what we so proudly call the U.S.A.

Now back to coniguring the machine. I will be using the test server for Drupal websites, Rails projects and possibly Lift projects. Also, I love Punjabi and I love Unicode. So I’m going to try to make things as Unicode friendly as they can be.

Let’s start.

People love internet, internet loves images, and images love GD.

sudo aptitude search gd

It gave a numbers of options. I was confused between installing libgd or php5-gd. It turns out after giving

sudo aptitude install php5-gd

all other gd libraries were installed as dependencies.

Restart Apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Tuning PHP/MySQL

cd /etc/php5/apache2/

By default the installations comes without a php.ini file. Rename it to php.ini-orignal.

sudo mv php.ini php.ini-orignal

Find recommended file

locate php.ini-recommended

Found it in /usr/share/doc/php5-common/examples/php.ini-recommended . Copy it to orignal php.ini localtion and rename it.

sudo cp /usr/share/doc/php5-common/examples/php.ini-recommended ./php.ini

For drupal to work properly, change session.save_handler = files to to session.save_handler = user

Restart Apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

MySQL fun

Login into mysql as root. By default, root mysql account has no password

mysql -u root

Lets change the mysql superuser using a hard to guess password.

mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR 'root'@'localhost' = PASSWORD('$a-hard-to-guess-password-here$');
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> flush privileges;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

Now lets look around

show databases;

+--------------------+
| Database           |
+--------------------+
| information_schema | 
| mysql              | 
+--------------------+
2 rows in set (0.01 sec)

mysql> use mysql;

mysql> show tables;

There is a table name user. Aha! This is the one with mysql user list.

mysql> desc user;

Amoung other things, it did show me three important fields – Host, User, Password

Lets look into it. Lets filter our view to just these three.

mysql> select Host,User, Password from user;

+------------------------+------------------+---------------------------------
| Host                   | User             | Password                                  
+------------------------+------------------+---------------------------------
| localhost              | root             | *6F50F9BB1F8C9DD174B66A8087FD4FA 
| xxx.xxxx.olemiss.edu   | root             | *6F50F9BB1F8C9DD174B66A8087FD4FA 
| 127.0.0.1              | root             | *6F50F9BB1F8C9DD174B66A8087FD4FA 
| localhost              |                  |                                 
| xxx.xxxx.olemiss.edu   |                  |                                  
| localhost              | debian-sys-maint | *C9D6F50F9B087D174B66A8FD4B1F8FA

What? No information in user column? Then what kind of user is it. Aha! Thats guest user also called anonymous user. Means any user while on the server can log into localhost. Guests should be served Tea and biscuits, not a mysql database. So from now “O mighty guest, I banish thee from my MySQL database.”

mysql> delete from user where User='';
Query OK, 2 rows affected (0.00 sec)

Much better. Now I have only two users(4 listed, although root is the same user using different hostnames) and debian-sys-maint. I refuse to get super-paranoid about security for now and this is good enough. (Remeber I did set my root password while installation. If you have not, I strongly recommend you to.) Other thing you can do is make another user and grant limited privilges. Keep root user as a backup only with a super secure password, and do not list it in any application code.

Now lets identify mysql database encoding. Wrong encoding can mess up non-Roman characters.

mysql> status;

Shows latin1. We want default to utf8. There might be other recommended changes too. Like PHP uses php.ini for configurations, MySQL uses my.cnf. Exit mysql.

mysql> exit
locate my-large.cnf
cp /usr/share/doc/mysql-server-5.0/examples/my-large.cnf /etc/mysql/my.cnf

Adding following to my.cnf

[client]
default-character-set = utf8

[mysqld]
skip-character-set-client-handshake
default-character-set = utf8
character-set-server = utf8
collation-server = utf8_general_ci
init-connect = SET NAMES utf8

[mysqldump]
default-character-set = utf8

[mysql]
default-character-set = utf8

Optimize my.cnf, but do not waste too much time here now. You can do it later. Keep moving. Save my.cnf and restart mysql.

Log back into mysql. Now lets create a test database and see how it goes.

mysql> create database dm_drupal;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER ON dm_drupal.* TO 'someuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'somepassword';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

Before leaving, you need to flush, otherwise changes will start stinking and fill the room.

flush privileges;

status;

The encoding is happily unicode.

Now a little MySQL benchmarking (Never fully trust benchmarks though. Remember there are lies, damned lies and benchmarks:)) Output shows 10000000 simple additions can be performed in 0.71 seconds

mysql> SELECT BENCHMARK(1000000,1+1);
+------------------------+
| BENCHMARK(1000000,1+1) |
+------------------------+
|                      0 | 
+------------------------+
1 row in set (0.08 sec)

mysql> SELECT BENCHMARK(10000000,1+1);
+-------------------------+
| BENCHMARK(10000000,1+1) |
+-------------------------+
|                       0 | 
+-------------------------+
1 row in set (0.71 sec)

I’m not a testing-for-a-living-guy, however what this seems to me is that my database is pretty decently configured.

Setting up Virtual Hosts

I’m going to test the setting using a test installation of Drupal. First I’m going to create a virtual named host for drupal.

cd  /etc/apache2/sites-available/
cp default drupal

Modify drupal to point to where you want to keep your installs (by default in /var/www/). I am keeping my sites in my home directory in ~/Sites directory

NameVirtualHost *
<VirtualHost *>
    ServerAdmin me@myself.com 

    DocumentRoot /home/myname/Sites/drupal/ 

    <Directory /home/myname/Sites/drupal>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        # AllowOverride None
        AllowOverride All 
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
    </Directory>

    ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log

    # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
    # alert, emerg.
    LogLevel warn

    CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
    ServerSignature On

</VirtualHost>

Save and restart Apache.

To start with, I’m going to test a Drupal installation. Download drupal in your Sites folder

cd ~/Sites
wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-6.10.tar.gz
tar -xvzf drupal-6.10.tar.gz
mv drupal-6.10 to drupal

Copy settings.php in director

cp drupal/sites/default.settings.php drupal/sites/settings.php

chmod a+w drupal/sites/settings.php

We are ready. Point your browser to http://localhost to start the install process.

Enabling clean URLs

Okay now I found out apache was missing the mod-rewrite, required for clean URL’s. To enable I typed

sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload
apache2ctl -M

The last command showed mod-rewrite was enables, however the drupal installation still could not make clean URLs. After some Googling and reading the forums, I found the solution.

Disable the site by

sudo a2dissite drupal 
vi /etc/apache2/sties-available/thedmonline

find AllowOverride and change AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All at four places.

Now enable site again sudo a2ensite drupal sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Turn on the clean URL option in drupal.

Ruby 1.9

Ruby1.9 is out of beta. So is the Pragmatic Ruby book (kind of).

So I rolled my sleeves up (That was a lie my friend, added to give drama… I was wearing a half sleeve t-shirt).

wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.1-p0.tar.gz
tar xvzf ruby-1.9.1-p0.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.9.1-p0
sudo aptitude install build-essential libssl-dev libreadline5-dev
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make && make install

Okay I rolled my (virtual)sleeves down. Lets test

ruby -v # ruby 1.9.1p0 (2009-01-30 revision 21907) [powerpc64-linux]

The post has gone too long(Who cares, its for my own documentation). In the next post, we get to managing development using new content versioning kid around the block, git. We’ll probe how to install multiple Drupal and Ruby sites using Git and how it can co-exist and interact with CVS/SVN.

I hardly get enough time away from my Mac machines, so I planned to get back in touch with the penguin, and to build a test server.

My plan was to install Xen, and then run a Linux instance on top of it. However the only spare machine was a G5 Xserve, I could not find any information of Xen on ppc processor.

Choosing Linux flavour for ppc wasn’t easy either. Most of the open source linux flavours have stopped supporting ppc, as it seems like a dying platform. Red Hat and Suse seem to support the architecture in their enterprise versions. I did’nt wanted to run YDL, the only flavour I could find truely supporting ppc architecture.

Finally, I decided to go ahead with the Ubuntu 8.04 Server community version for ppc.

Once decided, the install was pretty much a breeze. Popped in the CD, and followed GUI to install. Chose ssh-server and Lamp Server during install option.

After the server restart, configured the network interface /etc/network/interfaces to provide a static address.Restarted the network.

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Update the installation. I prefer aptitude over apt-get.

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude safe-upgrade

It is a good idea to synchronize the system clock with an NTP (network time protocol) server over the internet.

sudo aptitude install ntp ntpdate

Check hostname and hostname -f return the same value. It matched our specified domain name in the file /etc/hosts to FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) of the machine.

Lets bring the walls up

Ubuntu comes with a iptables-wrapper known as UFW.

sudo aptitude install ufw

Turn firewall on.

sudo ufw enable

Turn firewall logging on.

sudo ufw logging on

Display status of firewall and ports in the listening state

sudo ufw status

I changed the rules so that the output of above command was

Firewall loaded

To                         Action  From
--                         ------  ----
Anywhere                   ALLOW   xx.xx.xx.0/24
22:tcp                     ALLOW   xx.xx.xx.0/24
80:tcp                     ALLOW   Anywhere
80:udp                     ALLOW   Anywhere

Therefore only port 80 was open to outside world, for serving web pages, and ssh port for local network. The rest of the requests were dropped.

To make sure, use nmap from another machine to do a port scan of your server. Only port 80 should be open from outside your lan.

As the result of port scan delivered expected results, I paused for a while and looked at my old friend, penguin. I flashed-forward to years of our friendship, of growing up churrning big-a$$ web apps, becoming millionaires, and the taking a vacation to Mars, our children going to the same schools, and becoming friends and fighting amoung themselves all the time. Ah! It was such a touching moment! I’m glad on our renewed friendship.

Next time we’ll bring in PHP and MySQL, the Indian tribe some Jewels and another Dutch-looking friend.

This party is gonna rock!

Image credits: Tux by Daniele Florio shared under CC Share Alike licence

To send this ecard to an orkut friend, copy and paste following code

<table style="width:auto;"><tr><td><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/_q-vdlJ8PXvUPXLtaGy5sw"><img src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/askang/SQavwqjbBXI/AAAAAAAAA2Q/QuKIbtE_ang/s800/diwaliraat.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td style="font-family:arial,sans-serif; font-size:11px; text-align:right">Wishing a very Happy Diwali to you and your family.</td></tr></table>

I am back from a trip to Toronto, Canada after attending Spinning Wheel Film Festival. I was there on the invitation of Mr T. Sher Singh of SWFF International.

I first got aquatinted with Mr T Sher Singh, when I submitted one of my post-debate articles to SikhChic.com.

I’ll post more on the details of my journey later. However, I have put up a web album of the pictures I took while traveling to Toronto.

A post-debate article, on my take on the experience of being the only turban wearing Sikh at the first US presidential debate, has been published at Sikhchic.com. If the front page link is not working anymore, here is the permanent link.

The US presidential debate was the best thing that happened to the University of Mississippi in quite a while. OleMiss is still recovering from the best hangover a university can ever have. My friend James Church has posted student account of the debate here. (By the way, we also beat Gators this weekend. Woohoo!)

I was in and around the media tent and “spin alley” for most of the debate. Instead of writing a long and boring narration, here is a picture blog of the debate that my flickr feed has posted. I did not have enough time to tag each picture; if you follow American politics, you’ll see some big names in there. Feels like a match puzzle? Lets write a program to solve it!:)

Senator John McCain’s announcement on suspending his debate is drawing looks of shock in Oxford.

This small town in northern Mississippi seems to be all painted red, white and blue in the wake of Friday’s Presidential debate. Within an hour of the Senator John McCain’s announcement, a petition website is up.

The The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) has released a statement a while ago that it is moving forward with its plan for the first presidential debate at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Miss. this Friday, September 26.

Photo Credits: Jessica Miller

The University did a press release of the event, which is already on youtube.

The university also posted the audio podcast of the whole event here.

Last month I travelled to San Jose, California to see my younger brother. California is beautiful. Went around the Silicon Valley campuses, enjoyed the California beaches,

drove around San Francisco,

saw the famous Golden Gate Bridge,

went for a game of beach-ball at Half Moon bay,

and went on 17 Mile Drive.

And yes! I forgot to tell you, I was there for just a day and a half:).