Platonic

In the honor of Girish Kasaravalli samvaada.com has organized a two days Seminar to put light on the way of alternative cinema in Kannada film History. By the same time its going to conduct an essay competition on “Alternative Cinema: in my context” .

Topic of essay: “Alternative Cinema: in my context”

Rules:

1. It should be fresh and not published before.

2. It can be sent through post or through e-mail as baraha or nudi document.

3. No restriction on length of essay.

4. There will not be any entry fee and one person can send only one entry.

5. The last date to reach us : 20th November 2008

6. Selected essays will be awarded Rs 2000/-.

7. Competition will be conducted separately for College students and for Public

Send the essays to krnsmyle@gmail.com. If you have any questions, you can call up 9901399671, 9731755966

Webhosting appliance cPanel announces its new initiative called “cPanel Accelerated” with substantial performance improvements. It’s currently available for all with cPanel’s Current release. Later this month it will be made available with STABLE releases.

New Features

• XML-API
• Improved Backup Performance
• Transfers
• NSD nameserver
• Dovecot mail server
• VPS Optimized 2.0
• Getting Started Wizard

View Release Notes

Read about this announcement on cPanel blog:

cPanel, announced this week the release of version 11.24 of their industry leading server management software.  Version 11.24 introduces a new initiative to cPanel’s software, cPanel Accelerated.  cPanel Accelerated brings new features designed to decrease system resource usage and increase speed and performance significantly from previous versions.

Have got a dumb old PC sitting in a corner of your home? Convert that to HTPC. Check out GeeXboX.

GeeXboX is a free embedded Linux distribution which aims at turning your computer into a so called HTPC (Home Theater PC) or Media Center. Being a standalone LiveCD-based distribution, it’s a ready to boot operating system than works on any Pentium-class x86 computer or PowerPC Macintosh, implying no software requirement. You can even use it on a diskless computer, the whole system being loaded in RAM.

GeeXboX is based on MPlayer, which can be considered as one of the less cpu-dependent movie players, thanks to the use of FFMpeg for decoding movies. All comes in 8.9MB ISO.

Hardware Requirements:

* x86 Pentium-Class CPU or above (P2-400 should be quite enough, Core2Duo is recommended for HDTV) or Macintosh NewWorld G3 (G4 highly recommended)
* a VESA 2.0 compliant graphics card (for x86 PC only).
* an ALSA compatible sound card.
* at least 64 MB of RAM (128 MB or more are recommended for HDTV)
* CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive
* Motherboard which supports booting on CD-ROM (should be ok for everyone
* Keyboard, Joystick or Remote Controller, using a Lirc-compatible IR (InfraRed) receiver (check http://www.lirc.org to build yours), e.g. Miro PcTV’s one or ATI Remote Wonder.

Running security scan on your website? Then you might be looking for a tool for the same.

There are pretty good open source tools available to do this. One of them is Nikto2 . This is a great tool which packed with a lot of features which can scan for over 3500 kinds of potentially intrusive files and CGIs.  It makes a comprehensive check on various files and tells whether the file is secure or has a security vulnerability. Nikto scan process is designed to run the scan in the shortest possible time frame.

The latest version, Nikto 2, has a lot of enhancements. Some of the newest features are :

* Fingerprinting web servers via favicon files
* Reduction of false positives to a great extent
* Reports outdated software from
* Apache expect headers to check for XSS vulnerabilities.
* Tuning the scanner so that we do not need to run the same scan every time and focus upon areas of crisis.
* Single scan mode that allows you to simulate requests for testing.
* Provision for HTML requests and various templates for generating HTML reports.
* Provision for users to make additions to the scan database.
* Support for upgrading code automatically.

There are a lot more features and a very expansive documentation available for this software, which can be understood easily by a novoice. With all these features you can pin-point the flaws in your Web server and make it more secure, in turn also keeping your database safe to a greater extent.

Simple command that I run is as follows:

# nikto  -host <domainname.com>

Happy Hacking!

Out of memory? Did you upgrade your OS recently? Then carefully have a look at ps -auwx output for memory consumption.

Today I found that initscripts package owned minilogd was eating up almost 70% of the server resources on a VPS running on OpenVZ virtualization. After reading a bit about it on the internet I found that it’s used by syslog and I had to restart syslog service to get the issue sorted out.

Alway make good use of the tools given by Linux to monitor the processes. They will surely help you to knockdown the problem that you’re facing.

Happy Hacking!

It’s really cute to see the new face of gparted on Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex. No issues with NTFS resize. In turn it’s quite fast when compared to earlier resizes which I had done on dozens of laptops.

Above is the picture of Ubuntu Installation wizard paritioning stage. That also has been made colorful.