Sanity Insanity and Moi

I wonder if its the cool breeze on a summer day or the first drops of rain kissing the warm soil, that makes things seem so perfect, so divine, that no polaroid can ever capture them. Like pieces of a perfect puzzle, it all blends together to give all of it a touch of Midas. Then there is something innocent like a baby, unreasoned like the tempestuous seas - Love. That sums up all of it.

They met, she denied, he pursued, she succumbed to his unfaltering love and now they stand at the corridor, together taking the next big step.

My sweet-heart, my friend who never fails to kick my butt, simply coz she loves to do it, Soumya, is getting married to, My best friend, my brother-from-another-mother, Sandy a.k.a 2s as we all know him.

So guys gear up, its happening soon… get ready for the wedding…

Wishing ‘em the best of everything…

Their dearest,

xxx Joey..

N.B :  No, the venue wont be Legends of Rock

How/When did she say ‘Yes’? : Obviously after coming to know that he is friend of yours truly and after he got down on his knees and proposed to her with a diamond ring, in front of friends and strangers in the busy, crowded, romantic Take-5.

My Country is burning…

My Country Men are burning…

They are Laughing…

Mark my words: for the last time ever!!!

I dont know what else i should do other than sitting here and getting furious.

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(Still wondering what a BFG is? read on…)

I was there, standing at a railway crossing. I can walk across the rails and go ahead on the road, on my way, where ever it can take me. But, No! I park my bike and start walking on the railway line. Minutes and hours pass by. I come across green meadows, houses, hills; it was a timeless journey. No thirst, no hunger, no pain, nothing. It was me, the railway line and the view. I don’t know how far i was walking. The sun was there shining high up in the sky. He never moved. I was lost in my thoughts.

It has been quite sometime that I’ve started hearing some strange sounds. It sounded like the ringing bell of an old steam-locomotive. Ting…. Ting…. Ting….

I was high on my spirits. After a long walk, i have a train to go forward. This was like the ultimate dream. Or am i dreaming? I stop to turn around. What the…. my legs are glued to the ground. I cant move!!!. I was struggling like hell to free myself. Behind me i could see the dust and smoke rising up in the horizon. What ever it may be, the dream was just about to turn ugly. My heart’s beating a 1000 beats per minute.

I look behind. I see a shining far behind. Its small, its fast and its coming my way. I’m struggling like hell. I hear the bell ringing even closer. I turn behind… What the #$#%^&^(*(&)(*_)… a pandit with neatly shaved head, big pony tail flying behind him, ringing his bell with one hand and a ‘portable’-fireplace (might be some new 21st century invention).. running towards me. What on heaven’s sake is that?

“Son”, holy crap!!! its my dad, standing to my right.

“What… How… Why…”

“Son”, jeeezzzz, its my mom, standing to my left.

“What… What are you guys doing here?”

“Tie the knot my son!!!”, they both say that with absolute precision that can even leave the most meticulously synchronized systems to shame.

“Tie what?”, i look in front of me and i almost faint. I’m holding a ‘mangalsuthru’ and there is this girl standing in front of me. I don’t know jack shit about her. Is this a right time to at least ask her name?. What am i doing …

Ting ting ting ting ting ting ting ting ting ting …….

I was still sweating and breathing heavily as i jumped out of my bed. Checked around me and all round my flat just to make sure that i didn’t really wake up after my first-night… or worse 20 years after my marriage. So why do i get the feeling that this is what is going to happen to me????

Parental-pressure is high! By parental-pressure i mean damn crazy pressure that can cause you to go sleepless for days at end. If i thought that could only be the only one which can cause unrest in my serene life, i was wrong. There was… No… there IS a far more greater pressure that will eventually get happy bachelors to get married. Its scientifically called Peer-Pressure a.k.a Friends.

Celibacy is not my way of life. But Yes, face it! Its your FRIENDS who will eventually get you married. They will all be there. They are the greatest treasure that u can have. Even long after you are gone, you will live within your friends. ‘Gone’ as in not like you are dead. ‘Gone’ as in, you go on-site and they will still talk about you as, ‘Kaminaa Saala!!! On-site se kuch nahi leke aayega. Fakeeerrrr…’. You live now, not after you’re dead.

They are there. But have you ever though about what happens when they all eventually face the running-pandit, gets run over by him, never gets a chance to wake up and lives the ‘dream’. Oops you’re in trouble.

They all get married and start their family. They no longer enjoy the jokes that you shared. Even worse they even reach a point where they tell you, “Dude don’t talk about all that, she doesn’t like all that”. Worse still, his wife hates you and more worse, her husband starts having feelings for you.

Oops! your friend will change. They all change eventually and you are left alone. You just cant go and make more friends because, the ‘make-great-friends’ list gets shorter with age. Soon you will find yourself without the great friends that you used to hand out with, no new friends and you are being treated like an adult where ever you go. And i believe the later stage is definitely not where i want to find myself at.

So now there is even more pressure on you to get married…

Whats that… Ting ting ting ting ting ting ting ting ting ting… Where is that BFG (Big Fucking Gun), i’m gonna kill that pandit…

WTF… its full platoon of relatives and friends marching towards me. Dad and Mom holding a garland each, friends with kids and its then i realize that the pandit was just a side-kick.

I just stand there like a scapegoat as they dance around me… Ting ting ting ting ting ting ting ting ting ting…

There are many tutorials on the net on how to use the Net::Telnet module to write a script that will automate a telnet session. Perhaps the best place is the CPAN site itself. Though all i needed was a simple script that did the job, i had to scour through many other sites for reference. Finally i’m done with the script that will telnet to the server collect the logs and then mail it to the id that i specified.

I wrote the working version as two perl scripts. I still dont know why i did that, may be for the simplicity sake.

• log.pl  => does the telnet to retrieve the logs and mail it to me
• run.pl => which runs the log.pl every hour

So here is the code -

log.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Telnet;
# ---------------------------
$date = `date`;
chop $date;
$mailId = "jerry\@jerrymannel.com";
$cmd = "cat in.log | mail ".$mailId." -s \"Logs - ".$date."\"  ";
# ---------------------------
$host = "192.168.1.100";
$port = "2300";
$uid = "jerry";
$pwd = "password";
open $inputLog,  ">in.log";
$box = new Net::Telnet();
$box->open(     Host => $host,
                Port => $port,
        );
$iLog = $box->input_log($inputLog);
$flag = $box->login(    Name => $uid,
                        Password => $pwd,
                );
$box->print("co");
$box->waitfor('/# $/i');
$box->print("show load;show cpu");
$box->waitfor('/# $/i');
$box->print("show log");
$box->waitfor('/# $/i');
$box->close;
# MAIL section
system $cmd;
exit

run.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl
while (1)
{
        $date = `date +%M%S`;
        chop $date;
        #print $date." - ";
        if ( $date eq "0000" )
        {
                print "Sending the mail @ - ".(`date`);
                system("./logs.pl");
        }
        sleep(1);
}

The script was run on a Linux machine. So i neednt worry about the ‘date’ command and getting the date printed out in a fashion that i needed.

Drop in a line of you have more queries on the script. Always happy to help.

The recipe for a perfect bad day was in place. I slept through the morning alarm, woke up at 11AM and missed the meeting at 10. To top things up, i woke up with a bad headache. Hangover from last night! 2 large vodkas with coke with 2 cubes of ice, that’s all that i had. Plus the fact that i went out on a weekday for a drive with the gang. I wasn’t home till 3 in the morning.

Well, i sat there on the bed contemplating what to do now? Obviously i had to get dressed asap and reach office. In the mean time i had to think of some real good reason to tell my manager why i was late. Cant tell him that i was working late, because the release was done and there was not much of work left. Ok, the most used and reused reason always works, ‘I wasn’t feeling well, i was having a bad headache!’. Thinking that will bail me out i had a quick shower, dressed and reached office.

As if i had a clue, work piled on me when i got my senses back. I thought about the book, “Who Moved My Cheese?” by Dr. Spencer Johnson, now i should be Haw. How can i be Haw? Screw it, let me get through the day first. Just want to get back home. Some how i managed to push myself through what was left of the day. Remember, i reached office at 12PM. Finally after managing to stage some ‘i’m feeling sick’ drama i was out of office by 5PM. Please don’t ask me how, but i managed it.

Whats next? Took my bike and was out of Embassy Golf Links, on to Intermediate Ring Road and i was headed towards K-Town. Hmmm.. none of my friends are going to be free till 7PM. Not even my jobless sweetheart, my pseudo-wife in the group, who only has time to cut her hair. Someone should tell her that at this rate she would go hairless in a month or less. The fact is that, that someone should be Mr. India, not because he can charm her into not doing it, because she is the bully of the group and we all are, to be frank, scared to tell her this. That even applies to her ‘real’ boyfriend too.

This did bring a smile on my face, which quickly faded into something like - Ooops i’m screwed again - when i realized that i jumped the signal at Sony World. Throttled to the max and even before the cowboys of Bangalore Traffic Police could jump in front of my bike, i had crossed e-zone. Hmmm where do i go next. Let me go to Forum. I’ll go to Landmark and roam around till everyone is free and its time when the ‘gang’ can meet up.

I was feeling much better compared to how i had started the day. It was returning to normalcy. 30 min in Landmark and i was bored to my karmic senses. Oh crap, let me have a coffee now. I went all the way to CCD and ordered for a Mocha with an extra espresso shot. That ought to cheer me up a bit. Waiting … waiting … waiting … looking at the chicken-tikka sandwich, thinking over what had happened till now, i lost track of my environment and was cursing me in my head when,

“What a bad a day!!!”

“Tell me about it…”, i replied.

Oops. Did i just say that out loud. With ninja-reflexes and blood rushing to my head and beads of sweat forming on my forehead, i looked to the side, to find those beautiful hazel-eyes looking quizzically at me. The ninja ran for cover, more blood rushed to my head and i was sweating so badly that i could have used a shower at that point.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have been thinking for a long time that i need to write about this tool that i found. Its quite interesting that this tool is really helpful in automating many of the routine sessions that i as a tester came across. This is by far the best automation tool that i found for telnet sessions.

Imagine these scenarios :

• You need to do BSO authentications frequently when you switch networks
• Get intermittent logs from the server for analysis
• Run automated tests on remote systems (something which i have started to call as run-and-forget)
• stuck in traffic…no way
  

Lets get into what this tool is and how to use it.

The tool is for windows (one of the things that i felt bad). To make use of this tool, u will need the exe file, i.e., tst10.exe and an input commands file. The input file will has the first line as the hostname/IP and port, which is followed by alternating SEND and WAIT commands.

Consider this example. I need to connect to a server of IP - 192.168.1.100, where a telnet service is running at PORT - 2300. This is how my script/input file will look like :

192.168.1.100 2300
SEND "\m"
WAIT "login:"
SEND "admin\m"
WAIT "Password:"
SEND "admin1\m"
WAIT "s1#"
SEND "co\m"
WAIT "s1(config)#"
SEND "show load; show cpu\m"
WAIT "s1(config)#"

“\m” = \n in C/PERL/Java/most programming langunages = CR or in non-techie terms “Enter”. SEND, sends the commands to be executed and the WAIT that follows tried to match the string in the output of the SEND commands before it.

How to run it?. There are 2 ways to do it. You can open up the command prompt navigate to the directory where the files are and then issue this command -

tst10.exe /r:IN /o:OUT

where IN is the input file and OUT stores the complete output of the session, so that you can skim through the file and have a look at what happened. OR, put the command in a batch file and double click it every time you need to run it.

Here is the screen capture -

TST10 Screen Capture

How is it different from Net::Telnet module of Perl or something similar in TCL or Python? Think about it.

• Time to write the code - 30min to ? depending upon how complex the situation is
• Trying to match the output to with REGEX, which means that you need to spend time in coming up with the right regex. Now you have 2 problems in hand
• Testing time to make sure that the script is robust enough

So this is perfect! NO. This doesn’t work for ssh sessions. Since telnet is getting substituted by ssh in most of the servers due to the secure nature of the connection its kind of difficult to fit it in a normal installation of Linux. I’m not sure about the telnet-ssh thingie happening in Solaris or any of the other servers.

Is there something like this for Linux? No. Hey, but look at it this way. Its some relief for us on windows platform for scripting.

You can build complex automatons with this combined with a little bit of Perl and Outlook. Here is one typical scenario that i made and which i have presented as a white-paper.

• Outlook has a setting that detects for incoming mails with a specific subject line.
• When the mail comes it evokes a Perl script.
• The Perl script will go ahead an call the TST’s batch file, which initiates the TST10 session, connects to the remote server starts/runs the automation. The output will be stored in OUT file
• The Perl script will skim the OUT file for any errors reported during the run.
• Then it calls an FTP script that will go ahead and get the log files from the remote system
• The log files are read, the results extracted and neatly formatted into mail and send to the required email-ids

sounds complex, but this script gave me enough time to hut for a new job and quit the previous employer.

Who wrote this? Someone by the name of Albert Yale. His home page is - http://ay.home.ml.org/, sadly the site is no longer online.

What happened to the white-paper? It got rejected , humor was not the order of the day.

Download TST10 : tst10.exe | tst10.zip

I was there. It didn’t feel great.

I was scared, i was lost, i was wandering in the dark.

I hit the Writer’s Block.

Trust me its a damn scary place. Felt good when i reached there, mainly due to the fact that i was busy at work and i was in no way even getting time to pee. Forced into the dark the force grew weaker in me. Two days back i faced the bitter reality that i had hit the block, i shouldn’t have taken the left turn at the T-junction at the dead-end, for what joy?, i have no idea.

Goddess Wikipedia (a.k.a. Goddess Saraswathi in Hindu Mythology), describes Writer’s Block as :

Writer’s block is a phenomenon involving temporary loss of ability to begin or continue writing, usually due to lack of inspiration or creativity.

Naah!!! Nothing of these caused my condition. I had inspiration(lots of it) and i had lots to write but i didn’t. Why? I needed a reason and today i have a reason to write. Breaking the door, like Rajani, i’m out with the reason i needed (I wish it was more like a girl that i walked out with).

20th Sept, 15th Oct and this one on the 30th of Oct, that was the frequency of my posts in the last 2 months.

Looking back i ponder what made me stop, was it the work or was it something more noir. Yes, work was one of the reasons, undeniably. 20+ hrs of working on a single day, my friends began referring me as IBM’s bitch. Getting adjusted to the new life was one definite factor. But when i search deep it was something more than that. One that pains me still, tried shrugging it off, but couldn’t, it still lingers in the darkest thoughts. It can be described as one that is scariest for a writer. I was never credited for something that i wrote. Even my closest friends didnt acknowledge the fact that it was me. Bang! i got a “500 Internal Server Error” when i was expecting a “200 OK” with “Connection: Keep-Alive”.

Any way its all behind me, and i at least think that i’m back.

BTW my lingo has now been reduced into the results of an aftermath of heavy AS2/AS3 testing, with heavy dosage of XML and Development team that doesnt consent to bugs.

Taken this opportunity, if u would like anyone who is coming across this post to share, what made them hit writer’s block and how they did eventually overcome it….

I’m still recovering out the laugh attack that i had in the morning …

More at XKCD

It Hurts … when you know a person for so long and yet she compares you, measures you ..

It Hurts … when things that you do goes unnoticed …

It Hurts … when she tells you, that you are not good enough …

It Feels Better — when i say FUCK YOU !!!