Rhythmbox 0.9.7 now includes the Cover Art plugin. Also checking out Audacious as a replacement for xmms and xmms2.

For once I can say been there done that! Haridwar/Rishikesh was the only place that I enjoyed being during my trip to the north early December. The white water rafting from Shivpuri to Rishikesh is so good that I did it twice.

http://specials.rediff.com/yearend/2006/dec/22yrsl8.htm

Completed upgrading mediawiki from 1.4.x to 1.6.8 earlier today. One more long pending todo off the list.
http://shankerbalan.net/wiki/Main_Page is now back online. Also enabled the automagic URL rewriting so that the URLS look like http://mywiki.site.tld/wiki/Article_name instead of /wiki/index.php/Main_Page

See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Rewrite_Rules

My provider is still on php4. Does mediawiki > 1.6 work well with php4? I went with the legacy version because the documentation claims it needs php 5 or later.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Upgrading_to_1.7#Check_requirements

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Upgrading_to_1.8#Check_requirements

Go to http://www.lyngsat.com/in4a.html and http://www.lyngsat.com/packages/tatasky.html

Now navigate to “System Settings” -> “Add Channels” and do a find with the following fields set:

Freq: 11.630
Polarization: H
Symbol Rate: 27.500
FEC: 3/4

The full frequency list is on the lyngsat page. Looks like all the KU band transponders on INSAT4A are leased out to TS. There is nothing more out there>

http://shankerbalan.net/wiki/index.php/TataSky#Adding_New_Channels

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoGuard is the encryption/encoding system used by Sky networks all over the world. Its a news corp company.

“Several groups managed to reverse-engineer VideoGuard to the point where a legitimate subscriber's card can be read and utilized firmware to decrypt only those channels that subscriber is authorised to view. A
software CAM emulator for the DreamBox Linux-powered satellite receiver, along with the Dragon and T-Rex Conditional Access modules. However, many broadcasters choose to pair their cards to a specific STB serial number, meaning that a paired (also called “married”) card can only be used in a broadcaster-supplied STB, or by using the serial number from said receiver with one of the reverse-engineered solutions.”

The more I fiddle with OpenBSD Packet Filter (PF), the more I like the way it works when compared to its peers like iptables, ipchains, ipfw and ipf.

Today, I wanted to add logging for all the block rules that I had to track down something. Add a “block in log all label “block-all”" rule and turn on the pflogd service. This dumps all the block log data via pflog0 device and also writes the same to /var/log/pflog in the tcpdump binary logging format.

You can then invoke tcpdump (with all its powerful expression matching features) on -i pflog0 to dump data in real time or use tcpdump -r on the log file for the entire session saved so far.

Also, the concept of assigning labels makes it much easier to understand which rule is being hit for a packet. Assign all rules a “label” and then do pftop -v label.

http://shankerbalan.net/wiki/index.php/FreeBSD_Afterinstall#Security_And_Firewall

There is also a SNMP module for pf(4) already in the base system. See /etc/snmpd.config and /usr/share/snmp/mibs/BEGEMOT-PF-MIB.txt.

begemotSnmpdModulePath.”pf” = “/usr/lib/snmp_pf.so”