Hike to Duguna Fort and Tatopani Visit

Making long story short, Shankar, Bibek and me went to Duguna Fort Hiking on last friday (thanx to Prajwal for recommending, D2 team had gone there last week) and to Tatopani the next day.

Took a bus to Barhabise, then to 8 kilo - 3 hrs hike to Duguna Fort through Yarmasing village - met a nice Buddhist nun on the way - reached the Fort at the top of hill - back to the village - had tea and potatoes - to another home for the night stay - awesome local wine - unforgettable smoking and guffs on veranda - next day to Tatopani - soothing hot spring water shower - crossed Miteri bridge - stepped on China!

Longer version? Well, pictures say thousand words..

The day i felt like Neo..

Ok, by Neo i mean The One in the movie 'The Matrix'. If you havent watched this epic movie, i suggest you do. This is one movie you surely dont wanna miss. Well, what happens in this movie is that this hacker aliased Neo lives in a virtual world called 'Matrix' and the people from real world try to contact him by sending messages to his computer.. 'Wake up, Neo. Follow the white rabbit!' [trailer]

Similar kind of message had started to appear my computer since yesterday. I was away from computer n when i came back, there was a libnotification popup message saying 'haha', 'happy birthday.. ' n like that.. i felt like being hacked coz my computer is always connected to internet. More worried than being hacked, i was interested on how it was done.. Read everything from libnotification api to hacking dbus through tcp/ip. I shared this situation to Ankur and Shankar too, and they too were quite puzzled.

But what happened this morning was out of proportion. The message appeared again! I woke up at around 8 in the morning, unlocked the screen to see if there's any new mail. No messages. Then i went to wash my face, and when i returned back, there was this popup message:

"The milk is on the table. Go and get it."

I was clever this time to take the screenshot.

The message..

You can see that the internet is disconnected. Surely, it hasn't come through the network. But lets not go into how it was done, lets focus on the message. I took a look at the other table, there was no milk cup too. But still i was confused about the message. Then i got up, turned around, n WTF, THERE WAS A CUP OF MILK ON THE TABLE NEXT TO THE WINDOW!!!

Are you kiddin me? I had this run over my spine but still i tried to control myself. Okay, "Go and get it." I was still confused. But i went and drank it (without coffee). Was something to happen to me? Well, nothing happened (but i sure had a terrible headache).

Then there were these plethora of questions that ran down my mind. Is 'somebody' 'watching' me? BTW, also look at the fortune cookie quote on the desktop. Does that imply anything? Also note the SETI satellite wallpaper!

The fortune cookie..

I was scared to death for a while and shocked till evening. What the hell happened? Also checked if i have dual-personality thingy too ;) Checked all logs, shell history.. nothing! Also wrote a mail to Shankar and Ankur explaining the situation. Ankur was already busy reading books on Conspiracy theory n what not (he always does :)). The whole thing went over-heated among us.

And finally during dinner i was asking mom n my sis on who touched my computer during morning. Mom def has nothing to do with my computer. And there was my sis, at first was playin cool but later on was goin like 'haha..' She was the one playing all the pranks with me!

Whenever you lock the screen in Linux, there an option to leave a message n i didnt know that.. Seems like she knows more linux functionalities than me.. She was the one behind yesterday's strange messages too..

The whole day i was like, 'OMG, i'm being contacted.. this Matrix thing DOES exist..' haha.. Felt like a total moron later on.. damn! My sis pranked me on my own computer, n i still didnt have a clue about it.. :) But nevertheless, feeling like being a Neo for the whole day was really cool!

debugfs and rdump

If you have broken ext2/ext3 filesystem, these two commands can be your lifesaver. Atleast it brought my friend Abish's HDD 'out of coma' ;)

He had his important files in an ext3 filesystem which wasnt being mounted. It turned out that it had its journal broken. Did everything from disabling the file system's journal to trying out alternate superblocks. Even tried to convert it to ext2 format. fsck.ext3 didnt seem to repair a thing and hacks using tune2fs also didnt turn out good. We were on verge of finally letting go of data and formatting the hdd.

Then i found debugfs. The man page reads,

debugfs - ext2/ext3 file system debugger. The debugfs program is an interactive file system debugger. It can be used to examine and change the state of an ext2 file system.

Surprisingly debugfs seemed to list the files and folders of the filesystem. Cool enough, it also has a tool called rdump which recursively dumps a folder to another mounted disk.

So after invoking

# debugfs /dev/sda1
debugfs: rdump /home/ /mnt/externalhdd

and all the files were dumped to the external hdd safely. Simple, yet awesome!

PS: Me, Abish and Tushar were together when the recovery happened. Abish was so happy he took us all for a tea party right away. But no shops were open. Can you guess why? It was 2 at night!

Dharan FOSSification

The day i was supposed to go to Dharan, it was terai bandh and i was at Biratnagar. Really got numb on how to reach Dharan. But fortunately, Prahmod (of PUSET) managed a bike. Dilip (also present at FOSS Orientation Program) dropped me upto Itahari. From there took a bus to Dharan.

Coming from a week long stay at Biratnagar, Dharan was a heaven for me. Clean and cool. Abish and Tushar had managed me a room at BP Koirala Institute of Health Science (BPKIHS)'s Boys' hostel. Again impressed by the size of the college. And another impressive thing: no mosquito!

I'd already met with Tushar and Abish previously in Biratnagar and had infact known Abish since a long time, so no introduction required. During dinner we talked about the FOSS Training to be conducted the next day. I kept babbling about FOSS and stuffs. Tushar was especially interested on LTSP and Freedom Toaster. These guys were already making up their mind of taking LTSP to schools and cyber cafes.. Especially i found Tushar to be hyper-excited about all these stuffs.. We all stayed late night preparing for the training the next day.

BTW, one thing about Abish. He's a medical doctor and a computer geek. Multiple personality disorder, as he admits.. haha. We've been online frens since quite a while and even if there was no FOSS Training program at Dharan, i'd have gone there to meet him.

Well, about training, it was supposed to start at 10am, but there was power cut-off. So had to get a generator. And then again a voltage stablizer. The program finally kicked off at 11:30am.

We were to cover the following topics:

1. Introduction to FOSS
2. FOSS in Nepal
3. Linux Installation (Ubuntu, using Wubi)
4. Linux Desktop Basics
5. FOSS Softwares
6. LTSP Introduction
7. Shell Basics
   

The linux distro for installation was Ubuntu and it was done through Wubi. Previously we also had plans to teach partitioning and other hells but later thought it'd jus scare the newbies. We also demonstrated the whole installation process and it went smooth. Nobody even had a hint of how hard it used to be to install linux couple of years ago..

Linux Desktop Basics basically dealt with general functionality of Linux Desktop (Gnome). It was fairly easy for the trainees to grab the concept. Not much different from Windows when it comes to GUI. Jus point and click. And we should really appreciate the latest distros, who have worked hard to make the shell as obsolete as possible.

About FOSS Softwares, almost everybody were familiar with Firefox and VLC. Few of them also had used Openoffice.org before. Lots of them seemed to like Disk Usage Analyzer (baobab).

Each topic was followed by a query session. There were questions regarding security of FOSS to how to hide files in Linux ;). Each query session went soo long, we had to cut off the final topics on LTSP and Shell Basics. Everybody were so hyper-excited! There were just one or two guys who knew about FOSS before, but i think they are pretty much ignited now..

I think the training went pretty good. Everybody present there got a copy of Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 -- the CDs we'd burned during Ubuntu release party. Some of them took Fedora 9 CDs too. And ofcourse, i strongly encouraged them to SHARE the software and the CD.

During evening, the organizing team also had a meeting on forming a FOSS Dharan Community and they are going to register it very soon too. We at FOSS Nepal, Kathmandu now need to discuss on how to give affiliation to FOSS Dharan (and others that may form in near future) in a legal way..

In overall, i should say that FOSS Training at Dharan totally rocked! Finally, thanx to Dharan FOSS Team for the beautiful token of love.. Special thanx to Tushar's mom and sis for the wonderful food!

More photos are here.

Terai and Rickshaw

There are few things i really dont like about terai. The first one being the heat. I was brought up in a cool weather (of Baglung and Kathmandu) so cant tolerate heat. The second thing being the dirt and the foul smell. Not all but most places in terai has a peculiar smell that doesnt cope well with my nose. ;) I can point out few others but nothing beats my dislike for rickshaws.


I agree that rickshaws are convenient means of transportation on flat lands of terai and has provided employment to a lot. But dont u think they are inefficient and inhuman??

Yup they are environment friendly but what about efficiency?? It takes ages to go from one place to another. Most people think rickshaws are fastest means of transportation in terai but how fast is 10km/hr??

And i think rickshaws are jus too inhuman. A human or two enjoying the ride in the shade while another human pulling them sweating his breath out in that scorching heat for such a low fare.. how human is that? You ride a rickshaw and the whole time you see sweat dripping from the rickshaw-puller's face, it makes you wonder - what's the price of sweat, BTW?