kya meri hindi itni kharaab hai

I am slowly (comfortably) learning Hindi. That means, I am not studying, just having fun picking up words and phrases, listening to music and watching Bollywood films. I want to understand the basics, so I have some books, software and MP3 files. The other day, I was asked if I have ever thought about using Rosetta Stone software. Well, I have Rosetta Stone software installed. I am not the biggest fan.

I stopped using Rosetta Stone early on in my learning days. It hates my accent, which is more my problem than its, but was frustrating to work around. I also did not find the exercises engaging. "Writing" in Hindi using the keyboard was a bit painful as well.

But, I was recently asked, so I tried it again. After returning to it after all this time, and knowing more Hindi now than then, I was surprised to learn a lot of the training is simply wrong. Yes, incorrect. Maybe you learn something, enough to build on, but you aren't going to properly learn the language.

January #lspe Meeting

I decided to give public speaking a go by presenting at the January meeting for Large Scale Production Engineering (#lspe). The evening's topics were on Load Balancers, and my presentation was on using anycast as a load balancing solution, without the need for load balancers.

Kadorto

Kadorto, a photo by s_w_ellis on Flickr.

In case you were wondering about the source of the name in the URL for this blog, it is from the 80s computer game, Wizardry. Kadorto was a spell you could use to bring a character back to life. In the game, you basically needed to work on your characters until you had someone that could cast KADORTO, to resurrect players, and TILTOWAIT, which could take out any creatures you encountered. Taking care of WERDNA, the bad guy, was no problem at that point.

Determining Public IP Address

Sometimes, it is just the simplest of things. An admin asked the other day what our Internet egress address was. I told him that he could use his browser to find out. However, he was dealing with a remote host, which had a different public address. A couple sites you can use to easily grab your public address from the command line are ifconfig.me and icanhazip.com.

  [bandarji ~]$ curl http://ifconfig.me/ ; curl http://icanhazip.com/
  200.99.99.200
  200.99.99.200
  [bandarji ~]$

These can also be used within bash quite easily.

  [bandarji ~]$ egress="`curl http://ifconfig.me/ 2> /dev/null`" ; echo $egress
  200.99.99.200
  [bandarji ~]$

HTTP Status Cats

500 - Internal Server Error, a photo by GirlieMac on Flickr.

I am not typically a fan of Internet cats, but I found this set on Flickr to be well done.

We have probably all encountered some Internet site malfunction which displayed an HTTP server status code. Those codes have individual meanings, and the label for each numeric code has been associated with a photograph of a cat. Click here to view a slideshow of several of these, created by Bay Area user experience engineer, GirlieMac.

NX-OS Piping Options

Pipe Dream, a photo by s_w_ellis on Flickr.

A friend forwarded to me the options he sees when working on his cisco Nexus 7000. I must say that I am impressed. It surprises me that network gear from all vendors is not like this: processors are fast enough, DRAM is cheap, flash is plentiful and all this software has open source options. Oh, how I wish I had grep, or even just the ability to pipe multiple times, on all this gear I manage. NX-OS seems to have all the commands an administrator would need to easily manage a large configuration from the command line. Running Linux under the hood is not such a bad idea.

Note: The image is simulated, based on copy and paste from an email, just in case it looks different from your Nexus.

SVCCG Workshop in San Jose

Attended this weekend's Silicon Valley Cloud Computing Group meeting. PayPal hosted the event at their town hall, which had ample space for the eight hundred attendees. The schedule called for some tough decisions: I really wanted to hear about cloud work being done at both eBay and Netflix, however those discussions happened simultaneously. So, after weighing the options with Nisheed, who told me about this event in the first place, I decided on what to listen in on.