Showers

The first rains in many months has come to manipal, at night. The same night I would come back home to see the message from her on msn.
I had missed her by 2 hours.

At least I know now that she's safe at home in Malaysia.

Been a while, hasn't it?  No prizes for guessing why though.

There are so many things that have happened, that it's almost shuddering to think about how much a few months can mean. To think that I've to spend so many more months more here before I can return.

There's only one thing on my mind over the last few days though. She's not here. She's left for Malaysia. The apartment is empty. And she is the only thing I've thought about since she left. She's the only thing I've been thinking about since I woke up on the morning the day after her flight.

It broke my heart to close the apartment door that one last time the day after she left. I turned back before I closed the door,  and walked around. Everywhere I looked, memories will come back to me like in this Celine Dion song I used to love, which made it all the more difficult to leave that place we once called home.

As for my own new room, I've spent 4 days moving my stuff into my new room. FOUR whole freakin days to move a large amount of all manner of belongings which I would estimate to be in the range of >>100kgs in total. I'm not even in the mood to christen it as my new evil headquarters. I'm just gonna call it my new room. Maybe someday I'll think of a cooler name or something.

Moving in and rearranging all my stuff was tough. But the precious memorable things she left behind with me were even harder to place. Do I keep them locked up safely in the luggage, or do I keep them close to me around the room?

The stars there are still glowing every night,

and I'm still waiting everyday for some news. MSN. Skype. Email.

Anything.

 

 

 

I miss you.

The new year.. Each year, always different. So many things change, and its rarely merely the digits.

Each new year, as I do every year, I look back all the previous new years I've ever recorded in this place, and dream at night of the ones I did not. And always try to learn the lessons many only see at the end of lives.

People make resolutions on this day.
I made a goal.

This year, New Year went by in a flash. I can't even remember how December 31 2008 started, but I knew how it ended. It was not the most perfect dream, but it is a memory all the same. And with every step, I guess we come closer to knowing each other a little better.

Having the heavens present the most splendid star studded sky only makes the moment resonate with memories and patterns of all the new years that came before it.

It makes sure I never forget the flow of life.





Happy New Year to all, and to all, a good night.

Windows XP Internet Speed Hack I

Are you aware that a portion of your available bandwidth is always allotted to Microsoft Windows to perform updates or any other nefarious actions upon your system?

Well, time to reallot it back to you. You'll get about 0-20% increase in bandwidth, since you are merely taking priority from Windows, not blocking it from doing what it wants to do outright.

Open Run, and type gpedit.msc

Go to Local Computer Policy>Computer Configuration>Administrative Templates>Network>QOS Packet Scheduler>Limit Reservable Bandwidth

Enable reservable bandwidth, and set the value to something between 1 and 10%.

Oh yeah, did I mention, Linux doesn't try to connect to random servers like this behind your back. Come. Use Linux. Join the penguins. You know it's better.

Hacking Windows XP DNS cache for faster surfing

I'm pretty sure few will know what DNS is all about, so I'll keep it simple.

Let's imagine you type in www.facebook.com in the address bar in Internet Explorer or Firefox. Your computer now needs to connect to Facebook's computers (servers) to get to your account. But www.facebook.com means absolutely nothing to the computer, and says nothing about where exactly to connect to.

And so, after you press Enter, your laptop asks a giant online address book called a DNS server, which will hold information on how to connect to Facebook's servers in the form of a series of numbers.

Using those numbers, your computer now connects to Facebook's servers, and the login page is loaded.

All this occurred in milliseconds (let's say, 100ms), so you probably wouldn't notice any delay. But www.facebook.com is not the only site you visit. You probably also visit www.friendster.com or www.hotmail.com. (Let's say around 50 sites each time you go online)

So, at each session, using this system, you will spend 50x100=5,000milliseconds referring to that giant online address book. And let's say you go online once daily on weekdays and twice daily on weekends. This means a total of 9 sessions x 5,000 milliseconds= 45,000 milliseconds per week.

In a year, that would mean 52x45,000=2,430,000milliseconds.
That's about 67.5 hours of time merely spent referring to the DNS servers.

And these values are just for the average casual server. We have not even begun to consider people like me who are capable of being actively online surfing and reading more than a hundred sites a day. Obviously, we need to find a way to minimize this waste of time.

There is something in both Windows and Linux that reduces this load, called the DNS cache, that temporarily stores the DNS information. Sort of like copying down notes from the giant address book. The problem is, the default DNS cache isn't very large, and in the case of some linux distributions, it does not seem to be permanent, being erased at system shut down.

So, how do you further reduce the time spent referring to the DNS servers?
By running your own little storage of DNS addresses. Think of it like copying the addresses off the giant online address book at the first time you refer to it, so that you don't have to keep referring to it for the same address each time.

Well, in Linux, it is solved easily enough via dnsmasq.
yum install dnsmasq (for RPM based systems)
or
apt-get install dnsmasq (for Debian systems)

For Fedora, dnsmasq seemed to run fine without changing anything, but I have not got around to making the cache permanent on my Fedora 10 machine rather than frying it each time I turn off my laptop.(*edit: dnsmasq is designed to lose the cache on shutdown. For a permanent cache that survives shut down, try pdnsd. I might, someday.) The service was disabled when I checked the services though. Fixed that, and it was all good.

For Debian systems, apparently there are some changes to make before it works:

1. Uncomment the following line in /etc/dnsmasq.conf :
listen-address=127.0.0.1

2. Add this to the /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf file:
prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1; request subnet-mask, broadcast-address, time-offset, routers, domain-name, domain-name-servers, host-name, netbios-name-servers, netbios-scope;

Boom, you're done.

For the hardcore people, there's always the option of a dedicated proxy server to handle this. For the 90% of users out there, who are home users running Windows, neither is really a practical option, let alone a cost-effective one.

The solution for the regular user on Windows XP? Here:

Run regedit

Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Dnscache\Parameters

Right click, and choose: Create> New DWORD (32bit) Value

Modify (or create, if absent) the following DWORD [REG_DWORD] values :

CacheHashTableBucketSize 40 CacheHashTableSize 307 MaxCacheEntryTtlLimit 432000 MaxSOACacheEntryTtlLimit 90 NegativeCacheTime 0 NetFailureCacheTime 0 NegativeSOACacheTime 0

And you're done.


ALTERNATIVE:

If you are not really into digging in the registry, try this alternative for Windows XP:

Download this file, and run it, accepting anything it orders you to do.

I have no guarantees on that though.
(*edit: the script doesn't work,sadly. Do it manually via regedit as per above. )


At the end of all this, you now have a larger DNS cache, which over time, shall hopefully save many hours.

FREEZE

I'm putting all my laptop/repair/security tasks on hold till after my university exams.

This basically means that lingghezhi's services will no longer be available, as of this Sunday, November 16, until February. It also means that if you have any issues you want me to resolve or any laptops that you want reformatted, they have to be delivered by Friday and collected on Sunday. After Sunday, if you show up or call me regarding reformatting your laptop or a latest virus infection that you can't fix, I might get irritated and screw you over. If you ask me on MSN I will block you. Needless to say, I unsafely assume every living being reads lingghezhi.blogspot and understands this.

If you are really desperate because you feel your laptop is committing suicide, try offering me coffee or paying me double. I might consider it, especially if you offer both. Otherwise, please leave me alone.

I'm sure there are others who have some rough knowledge about computers. I can't possible be the only tech-savvy person in this whole state. At the very worst, go try your luck with the local computer shops, and pray VERY hard if you do, because you might not get your laptop back. Go find them and give them your problems.

Lingghezhi is not in the house till February.

If you don't like it, send an email to /dev/null.

Editorial board

I was buzzed early in the morning today, to help design a poster for the newly re-founded editorial board of MMMC. They were bringing the extinct yearbook back to life, and were recruiting members.

Here's the poster, in all it's glory of 60 minutes of editing.

Not too shabby if I do say so myself. Leave comments about what you think.

As for myself joining the editorial board, I think I'll keep those plans, if it still appeals to me then, for next year, after the university examinations. I've been in an editorial board before, and it involves a buttload of work, which most of us medical geeks lack the time for.