The Hacker Lifecycle.

Came an interesting post titled The Hacker Lifecycle on SlashDot. Thought the best way to bookmark the link is to blog about it.

Brooks’s law

“Nine women can’t make a baby in one month”. – Fred Brooks.

Brook’s Law on Wikipedia

My website http://www.vivekcherian.com now has a new home at Linode.

Moved my website http://www.vivekcherian.com from Super Dimension Fortress to my own VPS at Linode after the recent repeated cracker attacks on my websites and home workstation.

Hosting multiple websites with Apache2 on Debian

I am going to cover the basics of Name Based Virtual Hosting using Apache2 running on a Debian GNU/Linux Server.

The advantage of Name Based Virtual hosting is that you can host multiple websites from an Apache2 Web server and all these websites only require one static I.P Address and also the requirement that your domain name should resolve to the I.P Address of your server.

Steps
——-
Step 1:First let us create the document root directories for the virtual domains example.com,example.org and example.net

————————————————–
root@zion:~# mkdir /home/www

root@zion:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.com
root@zion:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.com/htdocs
root@zion:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.com/cgi-bin
root@zion:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.com/logs

root@zion:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.net
root@zion:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.net/htdocs
root@zion:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.net/logs
root@zion:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.net/cgi-bin

root@zion:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.org
root@zion:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.org/htdocs
root@zion:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.org/logs
root@zion:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.org/cgi-bin
——————————————————-
Please note that I have created separate directories for
htdocs,logs,cgi-bin

Step 2: To enable virtual hosts in your Apache 2 Configuration.

For this let us create a file called /etc/apache2/conf.d/virtual.conf and the following content in it.
——————————————
#
# We’re running multiple virtual hosts.
#
NameVirtualHost *
——————————————

3) Create host files in /etc/init.d/sites-available in the following format for example.com

——————————————————–

ServerAdmin webmaster@example.com
ServerName http://www.example.com
ServerAlias example.com

# Indexes + Directory Root.
DirectoryIndex index.html
DocumentRoot /home/www/www.example.com/htdocs/

# CGI Directory
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /home/www/www.example.com/cgi-bin/

Options +ExecCGI

# Logfiles
ErrorLog /home/www/www.example.com/logs/error.log
CustomLog /home/www/www.example.com/logs/access.log combined

——————————————————–

Create similar virtual host files for example.net and example.org

4) Now enable the sites by running the command a2ensite

———————————————————

root@zion:~# a2ensite http://www.example.com
Site http://www.example.com installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 reload to enable.

root@zion:~# a2ensite http://www.example.net
Site http://www.example.net installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 reload to enable.

root@zion:~# a2ensite http://www.example.org
Site http://www.example.org installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 reload to enable.
———————————————————–

This will create a symbolic link between the files for the domains from /etc/init.d/sites-available to /etc/init.d/sites-enabled.

5) Restart apache2 with the command /etc/init.d/apache2 restart.

Red Hat Certified System Administrator

I received an email early today morning from The Red Hat Certification Central informing me that I have been awarded a new certification named Red Hat Certified System Administrator.

My new RHCSA certificate number is 100-173-327

Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation in standing up against Internet censorship

I support the Electronic Frontier Foundation in their stand against Internet Censorship.

Associate Membership of the Free Software Foundation

I Joined The Free Software Foundation today as an associate member #9193.

Nice to be associated with an organization that has long worked for the principle of software freedom. A strong Free Software Foundation will undoubtedly determine to a very large extend what freedoms the next generation of computer users will enjoy.

Upgraded my Super Dimension Fortress *nix Shell Account to the MetaARPA: Sustaining Membership Level

After a bit of thought, I decided to upgrade my ARPA: Patron Lifetime Membership Level on Super Dimension Fortress to the MetaARPA: Sustaining Membership Level.

Now I can avail of the following features of Super Dimension Fortress for $36 a year.

* 1000MB disk quota / 60,000 files divided into 4 areas
* access to private MetaARPA server
* SSL encryption on personal web site
* cron jobs managed via ‘mkcron’, screen, OpenLISP
* Proxying via bouncers like irssi, psybnc
* ssh tunnel/forwarding with alt port
* access to svn, git, rsync and java
* may write tutorials and system software
* dynamic domain name service (mdns.org)
* MOTD source code contrib access (no DBA)

Wikipedia meetup Mumbai 2010

The Wikimedia Mumbai meet up 2010 happened at the Sophia College,Breach Candy,Mumbai.on Sunday (31/10/2010) and this is a first person narrative as a citizen journalist of the event.

I was exited to hear about the Wikipedia Mumbai Meet up at the Sophia College when I initially read a post about the event in the ILUG Bombay list a few days back.

I was even more exited when I heard that Jimmy Donal “Jimbo” Wales himself would be attending the event and would give a talk after brief interaction with the community.

I wanted to always contribute to the Wikipedia in one way or the other, but life always used to over take me. This time though, I decided that I would attend this event well in advance, and planned accordingly, and decided to use this event as a starting point to contribute to the Wikipedia community, a contribution that was long overdue from my side, as I have always consumed from Wikipedia and never given back.

I attended my church in the morning and reached home at Lower Parel around 2.00 PM and decided to take a nap. I was woken up at around 5.30 PM by my wife for evening tea. A look at the watch and I was a bit disappointed, I felt I would be very late for the meet up which was scheduled to start at 6.00 PM with a community interaction section followed by Jimmy’s talk.

I dressed up rather quickly and got a taxi from Lower Parel and reached the Venue at around 6.15 PM expecting to be late for the community meet up session.

On reaching the venue, I was greeted by Ashwin Baindur who requested me to enter my name and contact details so that the organizers could keep in touch me in the future.

On entering the Sophia Babha hall, I saw a fairly large crowd of around 250-300 people which is fairly large for a Wikipedia meet up. Many had simply come to hear Jimmy Wales who was supposed to give a talk titled “Meet the Movement”.

I slowly moved to the front rows, expecting to catch at least one if not some familiar faces. I met Alpesh Gajbe and a few faces from my HBCE,TIFR days, and exchanged a few pleasantries and decide to settle down some where in the third row, so that I could take some photos of Jimmy and the Crowd.

Jimmy started the talk a bit later than schedule, i.e, around 7.00 PM or so, and introduced the Wikipedia and the it’s model to the audience.

Jmmy divided his talk into 2 sections, the first part focused on on what Wikipedia was all about, and the second part would be based on how he envisioned Wikipedia for India.

He stated that the Wikipedia was based on ‘The Dream of Free Knowledge for all’ .

He asked the audience to imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge, and he stated that is exactly what the Wikipedia community is doing.

According to Jimmy Wales , some interesting facts about the Wikipedia is as follows,

1) The Wikipedia is the Largest, Free Online Encyclopedia entirely created by the Wikipedia community volunteers.

2) The Wikipedia currently boasts of 16 million articles.

3) The Wikipedia is now now available in 270 different languages.

4) The Wikipedia has 402 Million Unique Visitors.

5) 87% of Wikipedia contributors are male with the average age of 26.

Jimmy also stated that all information on the Wikipedia should be taken with a pinch of salt, when it come to the authenticity of the articles. According to him, the whole Wikipedia can be considered as a community of intelligent, amateur encyclopaedists who contribute as a passion out of their free time.

Jimmy then moved into the second part of this talk, which was about the role of the Wikimedia Foundation Office which was to be setup in India (the city where the office will be based is yet undecided) in catalyzing the growth of the Wikipedia community in India.

He began the second part of this talk by stating that there were 402,000,000 people who read Wikipedia every month in 250 different languages word wide.

He stated that Wikipedia is close to achieving his vision in the Global North, and that Global South which also includes India would the next great challenge.

According to him, in the global north, the Wikipedia Penetration was more than 30 % with Canada, Germany, UK and France belonging to the top bracket.

The second bracket with around 16-30% includes Australia, United States, Russia and some South East Asian Countries like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

The third bracket includes the countries with up to a maximum penetration of 15% includes Brazil, India, China, the Middle East and the whole of Africa.

He then presented the Wikipedia statistics as he sees it in India, which is as follows,

1) India has 81 Million Internet Users.

2) India has a 4.7% share of Global Internet Users.

3) India has 191 Million Page Views.

4) India’s has a 1.5 % Page views in a day.

5) Indians perform around 91,000 edits in a month on Wikipedia.

6) India’s Share of Wikipedia page edits in July 2010 was 1.3% of the total edits on the Wikipedia.

The language wise breakup of Wikipedia articles contributed in Indian Languages is as follows,

Hindi – 57,823 Articles
Telegu – 45,963 Articles
Marathi – 31,400 Articles.
Tamil – 25,623 Articles.
Gujarati – 17,142 Articles.
Malayalam – 14,830 Articles.

Jimmy also noted that in the percentage of edits coming from India, the percentage of edits on the English Wikipedia was reducing and the number of contributions to the local Indian Languages was increasing, which according to him was a healthy sign, which indicated that more localized content is being created by Indian users on the Wikipedia these days.

Some of the goals of the Wikimedia Foundation in India which aims to build stong and healthy India-based projects is as follows ,

1) Top 10 Indian languages have mature Wikipedia (more than 10,000 substantial articles ) and Wiktionary available enabling potential reach to 80% of Indian population.

2) 100 Million unique visitors monthly to Wikimedia projects.

3) 75% of schools in India have access to a Wikipedia and Wiktionary either via the Internet or offline.

4) Top ten projects sustain positive monthly growth in active editors

Jimmy also put forward the Seven(Plus one) Wikimedia Foundation ideas which are as follows.

1) Contributor outreach and training: Create resources and campaigns to increase the knowledge about how Wikimedia works and help attract and retain editors

2) University clubs: Support students and faculty to create contributor clubs on university campuses across the country

3) Schools: Work with the education system to integrate Wikipedia as a reference resource for schools; offline Wikipedias where needed

4) Knowledge sharing: Support regular meetups across the country and periodic Wikimedia India conferences.

5) Technology support: Work with the community and developers on solutions to technical barriers faced by projects

6) Mobile products: Work with the community and the Indian mobile sector to create compelling mobile products for Wikimedia projects.

7) National article writing contests: Support volunteers to run regular contests to write quality articles for any language project.

+1 Fund and/or provide logistical support for community initiatives that are aligned with the mission and India goals

According to Jimmy the WMF’s (WikiMedia Foundation’s) Principles for working with the community in India will be as follows.

1) WMF’s goal is to help grow the Wikimedia community and projects in India; all our actions should align with this goal.

2) WMF is here to support the community: Wherever possible, the community should lead and the WMF team should support.

3) WMF seeks to facilitate growth across the country and a range of languages, not any single area.

5) WMF’s direct investment in staff and an office in India is temporary in nature; as the community and chapter build capacity, WMF will adjust our capacity.

6) WMF will be open and transparent with the community; we’ll communicate openly about our investments, progress and results.

7) Regardless of the location of the WMF office, the activities of the team will serve national goals and our team will not differentially support one locale over others.

8 ) All actions of the WMF will be evaluated for their impact on our goal. Successful initiatives will be expanded. Failed initiatives will be terminated.

He concluded his speech by quoting Daniel Pin from the article “The Book Stops here” which appeared in the Wired Magazine dated 13/03/2005 which is as follows,

“Wikipedia represents a belief in the supremacy of reason and the goodness of others.”

Once his speech was over, there was a question answer session, during which Jimmy Wales, Bishaka Dutta, Arun Ram and Hari Prasad Nadig answered questions raised by the audience.

Once the question answer session was over, Jimmy was very keen to interact with us, the actual contributors to the Wikipedia, but the main stream corporate media which latter provided a very shoddy coverage of the whole event, almost locked Jimmy Wales in a room and interviewed him.

Bishaka Datta and the other organizers had a hard time getting Jimmy out in time, so that he could have a dinner with the Wikipedia community and over which he could obtain feed backs from our side on the actual ground realities faced by the Wikipedia India Community.

We decided to go to Hotel Khyber at Kala Ghoda, where a few members of the Wikipedia India community shared our concerns with Jimmy, and he in turn was very keen to listen to us and offer us suggestions on how we could contribute better.

Ashwin, Kundan, Karthik Mistry, Bishaka, Hari Prasad Nadig, Arun Ram, Pradeep and myself had a nice evening with Jimmy after which he retired to his room at Hotel Taj for the evening.

My photos of the event can be viewed at: http://vivekvc.freeshell.org/photos/wikipedia-mumbai-meetup-2010/

Down Memory Lane – The BBC Micro

I still remember the first computer I’ve ever used, the BBC Micro Computer when I was 10 years old.

Back then (in 1988), they used to teach computer science in school as a subject called S.U.P.W (Socially Useful Productive Work).

Today thanks to Wikipedia, I am able to relive some of my memories of the BBC Micro.