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 $egress
  200.99.99.200
  [bandarji ~]$