Do you believe in Stars ?

Do you believe in stars ?
Do you listen to what stars tell ?
Do you think predictions can be very close to reality ?
Do you believe a few lines under Horoscope could be correct ?

Well, I do. In fact, yahoo astrology has made me believe so over the course of time. As a matter of fact, I have been humbled by Yahoo astrology numerous times before also.

Its been really a "bad couple of days" for me, and the fact is that we always try to look for things like God, Predictions, whenever we are in a bad shape.

Thats what I did today. I opened up yahoo astrology to see what stars have to say about my condition. I clicked on Libra and found something relevant.

The stars give you a much needed center to operate from, especially when it comes to making decisions. Sometimes you can get stuck on being fair. Now it's time to let your critical faculties take over and do the job. Holding on is holding you back right now, so let go of the past and move forward.

A hard time with WebSense

A formal introduction to websense.

Websense, Inc. is the global leader of internet filtering and a premier provider of internet security software trusted by organizations worldwide with over 24 million seats under subscription. Websense products increase web security and employee productivity ( ?? ) through internet policy enforcement.

I think, its a good and pretty effective way to block access to lots of explicit sites either at workplace or an institution, and its certainly a lot better than simply restricting sites on the basis of keyword match in the urls.Kshitij is the annual Techno-Management fest at IIT Kharagpur, and two years back access to Kshitij site was blocked to IIT Kharagpur students because of the url keyword filter which was then recently added.

Websense outperforms all other blocking methods available till date but I was really pained to see my company being one among those worried institutions to install websense. On my first day at job, almost 90 percent of all my typed in urls were blocked by websense. And my daily surfing which includes Orkut, Netvibes, Orkut, Gmail, Orkut, Gtalk was reduced to Netvibes only.

For some days I kept track of my gmail messages through gmail feed , where I could see people scrapping me on orkut but still not able to do anything about it :-( .

I googled a lot for list of anonymous proxies and ways to access gmail and orkut, but access to kproxy, phpproxy blah blah all came under the websense category "Anonymous Proxies". A day later my manager called me up and showed me the list of all the blocked sites I was trying to access. This was a real bouncer for me and a realization as how much strict my company is over such policies.

Luckily, I had an access to a global ip and a webserver, where I can install stuff and well to my joy it dint fell under any websense category :) . I later installed PHProxy over there and did get access to my 80 % of websense categorized urls. Though its a very clean script and ready to run, but it does not support ssl/https connections. So still no gmails and orkuts for me.

My second try was a quite successful one but not the most convenient. I installed lynx ( its a command line http browser)on my global server and for a next few days I was all over orkut and gmail through ssh. SSL support is disabled by default in lynx, so as to enable https/SSL you will have to configure it with "./configure --with-ssl' flag.

Lynx was the most successful way till then but still very annonying sometimes, when the remote server is down or the bandwidth is all screwed up due to rain or clouds .

Next breakthrough was when I came across CGIProxy . No installation is required, its an amazing piece of work. All you need is configuring your webserver to allow execution of cgi scripts. Or simply put this in your cgi-bin and for most of the servers no configuration is required. CGIProxy does support https/ssl connections but you need a couple of packages on your system.

1. OpenSSL ( well most of the machines have this installed )
2. Net::SSLeay - A Perl module to interface with OpenSSL

As soon as you install Net::SSLeay, cgiproxy picks it up automatically and you can start browsing all kind of pages over the net.

Word of Caution: SSL/https is a way to secure your information over the internet, passwords and user information sent over the wire through https is encrypted at browser end and can be understood only by the server for whom it is meant.
So if you are using any kind of proxy scripts to access sites which require https or user/password login, you are risking your privacy to a great extent. Your username and passwords would be sent to the proxy server as a plain text and it would be encrypted only after that.

Gtalk, Yahoo IM can be accessed through the following sites, for those who are struck by websense, I would suggest them to go the IP way. ;-)

www.meebo.com
meebo.netvibes.com
www.radiusim.com
www.koolim.com

Problem in Installing NS 2.29.2-allinone

And I started my project work after a long break with a hope that this time I will get it done, well last time the excuse I made ( for not being able to do it ) was the older version of NS ( ver. 2.28 ). So I began with downloading NS 2.29.2-allinone pack and ran ./install. It stopped in between with a configure error and it was in the tcl module :

"checking system version (for dynamic loading)... ./configure: line
7624: syntax error near unexpected token ')'
./configure: line 7624: ' OSF*)'
tcl8.3.2 configuration failed! Exiting ...
Tcl is not part of the ns project. Please see www.Scriptics.com to see
if they have a fix for your problem."

So after analyzing the configure files in the following directories I could find the culprit and the solution:

• tcl: file tcl8.x.x/unix/tcl.m4.
• tk: file tk8.x.x/unix/tcl.m4.
• otcl: file otcl-1.x/configure.in.

The line generating the problem was :

system=MP-RAS-`awk ' { print $3 } '/etc/.relid'`

The problem lies in how bash 3.1.x and 4.x.x parse the configure file. This will simply pass through bash 3.0.x and lower versions. So in order to make things work I changed the above line to:

system=MP-RAS-`awk ' { print $3 } '/etc/.relid`

You will have to take following steps in order to bring the changes into effect:
Remove the second last character ( ' ) from the line and do this for all the three files above. Now after changing the configuration files you will have to delete older configure file and any cache if it exists in the respective folders. After that do not forget to run autoconf from command line in the respective folders to generate a fresh configure file.

Now all I had to do was hit ./install again and I just hope with this new installation I could make some progress in my project.

:)