The world is my backyard.

While bringing up firewalls for my test server, I thought of doing a little check on my machine. The logs raised both my eyebrows. Dear Google told me, I was not the only one.

Leopard introduced application based firewall, while the old ipfw still exists with just one default rule (Accept everything from everything!)

65535 allow ip from any to any

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Once your OS is grown enough to play (I mean installed), you have to sit down with it and do the SECURITY TALK.

A little on the philosophical side of it, I think sense of security is just a fad and a perception. You are secure when you start feeling it, or we can keep on going paranoid tweaking it deeper and deeper, there will always exploits to to be known, more tools to be learnt, more WMDs to be discovered!

Always have a second plan- backup your data.

Lets get back to our Linux Box.

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Moving ahead on the new project, I decided to install a versioning system. I kinda have a crush on Git, however have not been using it regularly. So what better time to rekindle the old fire?

I have used SVN in the past, however CVS is still the old faithful dog hosting Drupal repositories. I wanted to concentrate on using Git, while wanted easy way to update drupal installations.

After a number of blog reads, here is my workflow (atleast planned one…)

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In the last post, I mentioned meeting my old pal Tux.

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.

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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.

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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