Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

I'm posting this via Opera on my phone. I just got an error message from Squid, but I'm not using any proxy settings. I guess this means Hutch is also running a transparent proxy. Now what? Running an SSH tunnel from my phone is not an option.

Opera on Symbian is amazing. It’s perfectly rendering the CSS stunts that even IE on Windows cannot. This screenshot shows Opera in large screen mode, where it tries to emulate a regular desktop and allows both horizontal and vertical scrolling. There’s also a small screen mode in which it discards stylesheets, scales images down, and ensures the page fits in the limited space available. It’s not anywhere as comfortable as a regular desktop, but it’s better than anything I’ve seen on a handheld device so far.

Opera software may have finally found the niche audience that has eluded them on the desktop.

Now this is what I call getting online from a cell phone.

I’m considering running a synchronised moblog at Flickr. The site has an utterly complicated UI. I still haven’t figured how to run a moblog there. Let’s see how this works out.

Last night a beggar accosted me at the Airport road flyover crossing and left me very disturbed.

I do not give money to beggars as a matter of principle. I have always believed that anyone who can’t work to support themselves doesn’t deserve to get it free. I’ve lately come to believe that giving money to beggars is not just a bad idea, it’s plain evil. When you give money to a beggar, you’re destroying his will to support himself. A beggar who’s not had to support himself for a while no longer knows how to. He’s permanently disabled, using society as a crutch. And it only gets worse with time.

If you’ve ever walked down Brigade road with a fair skinned person and seen beggars swarming around him, you know how when you try to pry the beggars off, they tell you to stop hassling them so they may continue hassling your friend. Their dependence on the societal crutch has grown to the extent that they consider this their God-given right.

If you really care for their welfare, you should give your money or time to an organisation that helps put beggars back on their feet.

Except, in this case, this man wasn’t begging. He was trying to sell me a pack of ear-cleaning buds. I didn’t need it, I have a mostly unused pack at home. Then I saw the desperation on his face. He appealed in Hindi, said he had not eaten all day and if I could please buy one. But I didn’t want it! He appealed again. His desperation was soul stirring. I considered giving him some money and not taking his product, and then years of hardening against beggars kicked in: no giving money to beggars.

By then he lost interest in me and moved on, and I suddenly realised that he wasn’t begging. He was offering me something tangible in exchange for the money. Despite his desperation, he hadn’t stooped to begging. Should I have bought his product just to acknowledge his honour?

It was too late now. He was gone and I was very disturbed. I tried consoling myself with cold capitalistic reasoning, that if he wanted money, he should sell something people want to buy; but it didn’t work. Other distractions on the road put him out of my mind until I got to bed, and then I couldn’t sleep. I cried.

I’m reminded now of a passage from the Rough Guide book, First-Time Around the World:

Read on...

The Indiatimes Dating columns are always a blast. This guy says he’s married but wants relationships with several young women and is willing to travel around the world for it. This sounds so like that infamous person on LJ.

A burst pipe on Bannerghatta road, caused by the road laying work. It’s throwing water about 15 feet sideways. I got “hit” too when passing by it.

At dinner with Dag and Divisha from Opera Software.

I’m trying to use Eclipse as a Python IDE, but all the dialogs freeze when I press any button. It’s bizarre. Downloading the 2.1 build now.

This plant was on my desk when I came in today. It’s dead, shrivelled up. The mud has dried up into a brick. The leaves have gone white but still not fallen off.

For cheetah, my self appointed nanny. It’s going to be a healthy crop again.

Receptionist.

R K Laxman surprised me today with a cartoon that is neither about bumbling politicians nor about enterprising beggars. Unfortunately, it’s still not funny.

Laxman should retire while his reputation is still intact. He’s long since run out of gags.

This crow’s having a squirrel for breakfast.

Praveen is getting married July 4th. ____ and __________, ____ __ ____ ____? (fill in the blanks)

I am very red faced to admit that my analysis of the Yahoo Groups blockage was flawed. The problem appears to be with VSNL.

What I did was:

~$ sudo tcptraceroute groups.yahoo.com 80
Selected device en1, address 192.168.1.34 for outgoing packets
Tracing the path to groups.yahoo.com (66.218.66.240) on TCP port 80 (http), 30 hops max
...
8 core1.delhi.vsnl.net.in (203.200.87.15) 334.212 ms 332.150 ms 335.797 ms
9 202.54.2.253 (202.54.2.253) 331.953 ms 330.886 ms 332.507 ms
10 202.54.2.21 (202.54.2.21) 335.630 ms 335.024 ms 335.579 ms
11 groups1.vip.scd.yahoo.com (66.218.66.240) [open] 334.578 ms 337.981 ms 338.041 ms

From which I erroneously concluded that requests were going through to Yahoo’s network and failing there. I was expecting to see the request dropped abruptly wherever it was blocked, which is why I used tcptraceroute instead of regular traceroute. What I failed to notice was the sudden jump from VSNL’s Class B 202.54.* network to Yahoo’s Class A 66.* network. That’s a very unlikely router configuration.

Guess what? That’s VSNL’s transparent proxy masquerading as groups.yahoo.com. If you have the means, use an SSH tunnel. VSNL’s proxy has given me major grief in the past and I doubt it’s any better now.

PS: gromhellscream, you may now say “I told you so!”

Turns out Yahoo has an internal network problem. The gateway timeout message is coming from a load balancer within Yahoo’s network:

$ telnet groups.yahoo.com 80
Trying 66.218.66.240...
Connected to groups1.vip.scd.yahoo.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0
Host: groups.yahoo.com

^]
telnet> q
Connection closed.

No ISP is blocking Yahoo Groups. Touchtel is (possibly) not running a transparent proxy. It’s all a false alarm, folks.

If you still can’t access Yahoo Groups, you know who the Yahoo people on LJ are. Yahoo’s had an internal network failure for over three days and none of their engineers has detected fixed it yet, while people around the country are blasting their ISPs for censorship.

That said, I still don't know why I can’t access IRC. tcptraceroute gives me 21 hops before it loses track, and this happens only with port 6667. This seems like genuine censorship.

Riding on a bicycle with pretty scenery.

Gujarati and Bengali dishes are famous for their generous sprinkling of sugar. People not from those regions have trouble with this, but the Gujaratis and Bengalis don’t. They like it that way.

Similarly, this editor likes his magazine with a very generous sprinkling of commas. At the very least, two per sentence. I can’t stand this, but the editor obviously has no problem. I guess I have to acquire the taste.

From Asian Photography comes this interview question: “How did you come up with this innovative idea of Photographer on Call Program in India and what was the tip of the iceberg for such an initiative?”

I want drag that editor back to grammar school and lock him up until he passes his exams without cheating.

What is it with crappy quality of Indian photographic magazines anyway? The Times Journal of Photography is not worth the paper it’s printed on and Better Photography, if you can ignore that pompous tagline, has the enthusiasm of a senior citizens’ retirement home.

Turns out SD and MMC are not the same thing. This SD card won’t fit in my phone, and my camera refuses to start up with my phone’s MMC card. Both have the same shape and size but the SD is a wee bit thicker.

Now I have figure out how to get pictures from the camera to the phone so I can post somewhat higher quality pictures on the move. The camera has only USB and the phone has only IR and Bluetooth, no data cable port.

It appears that Touchtel is also blocking port 6667, the port number for IRC. I can’t connect to either FreeNode or Undernet unless I use an SSH tunnel.

This block has been on since Friday. Sreekanth Rameshaiah at Mahiti first noticed it; we dismissed it then as a local firewall configuration error. Ashhar Farhan has written to Bharti Broadband and not received a response yet. Frederick Noronha confirms blockage even on BSNL in Goa.

What’s going on?

Update: fus reports that Yahoo Groups is inaccessible via BSNL DIAS in Bangalore. He called tech support and they said they are not blocking anything. He’s getting the same gateway error message I’m getting on Touchtel, suggesting that either both use the same blocking software, or both have a common upstream provider doing the blocking. This is getting more and more curious.

I’m reading The Times Journal of Photography. This is one majorly crappy magazine. The headlines are worse than in ToI, the typography is all wrong, the writing’s weak, editing horrendous, and pictures bland.

The review of a Canon 3 megapixel camera lists its resolution as one of the plus points, complete with two exclamation marks. Hello? What year is this? Three megapixels in 2004?

This page is a list of contest themes for the next 12 months. This is the May 2004 issue. Notice the year in the left column? Maybe that explains why they are raving about three megapixels.

Today I discovered that Touchtel is running a transparent HTTP proxy that is potentially logging everything I read. It freaked me out enough that I installed Squid at seacrow.com, set it to serve only localhost, then created an SSH tunnel between my localhost:3128 and seacrow.com’s localhost:3128. As a bonus side-effect, all my wireless HTTP traffic is also encrypted now.

If you didn’t understand what I just said, here is the non-geek version:

I’ve discovered that Touchtel has computers that are making a copy of all the Web pages I see—for the stated purpose of giving that copy to anyone else who wants to see the same page, making it faster for them—but that can be easily subverted to keep a tab on me or any other user. Since they have no business doing this, and I have no means to stop them, I’ve created an encrypted link from my computer to a server beyond their control.

As a bonus side-effect, since the encrypted link runs uninterrupted from my computer to the remote server, it also protects me on my wireless network. I run an open wireless network that anyone can use to connect to the Internet, and that anyone can also potentially use to read the web pages of other users.

Update: Here’s how you can do it too. You will need:

Read on...

The glee on irq2‘s face is priceless. They’re playing Yeti Sports 4.