Windows 7 – First Look

Posted on October 29, 2009 by Jerry

The new laptop that i bought for my fiancee was an HP Pavilion dv4 that was shipped with Windows 7. So i got to have a look at Windows 7.

Though a linux fan, i had to see what Microsoft was offering with its Windows 7. Well to start with it looks and feels like its older brother Vista. Oh ya, i remember someone telling me that Windows 7 is noting bug Vista with bug fixes. So here are some of the screen shots that i took.

look at the IE8 image. It broke the Mozilla homepage, but FireFox displayed it perfectly.

and She is the one …

Posted on March 16, 2009 by Jerry

Love strikes us at the most bizarre points in life. One day you are a happy chap, enjoying life as it comes and then a day comes when you get a feeling in your gut like you never felt before…

It was she who made me realize that i have always been a mama’s boy and she made me change. She lit up my world like the way no one ever did. It was my second year of engineering when i met her for the first time. I being myself, was having a tough time with the new environment and was just about getting to know the batch. By the 4th semester, people were already having a great time, except me. It was at first lab session of the semester that i noticed her. Our Head of Dept. was telling us something on the comp and we were standing in a semicircle around him. I raise my head and i get the first glimpse of her, standing in front of him. She was absolutely stunning that i realized, people could indeed live for few minutes without their hearts beating…

I couldn’t really muster the courage and ask her who she was, where she was from. I began to get a weird feeling down in my gut. I didn’t really knew what that was. For the next few days, i saw her and every moment that i saw her, i wanted her to be mine and only mine. God was at his creative best when he made her. It was not until another week, that i had the courage and the strength to even say a hi to her.

Slowly but steadily, we took our togetherness to new levels. I was cautions as not to upset her in anyway and she was equally cautions. I spoke my heart out and told her how i felt and how naive i was when it came to matters about her. She understood and held my hand. I trembled and looked around to see no one in the lab saw us. Yes she touched me for the first time in the lab. That was the only discreet place that we could meet and raise little suspicion.

Our relationship grew. We learned about each other more and more. The joy of being in each other’s company was overwhelming for both of us. We used to speak for hours at length. By the 7th semester, we had grown more and more intimate and passionate about each other. We were inseparable and this had quite a bit noticed by my friends. They began asking me things related to her and i felt shy to tell them even the most trivial of information about her. It was like she was mine and mine only. I blushed at that thought.

We spent sleepless nights together. Me totally lost in the wilderness of her hair. I made fun of the occasional grey ones that i noticed. She made fun of my relative inexperience and used to remind me, “Jerry, u need to learn a lot about me and how to treat me good…”. She was the sweetest angel that i had ever met.

8th and the final semester, saw us getting too intimate. I began mastering her in her ways and found out that it made her more and more irresistible. One night, when we were next to each other, she held my hand and guided my fingers through the curves, the humps, the troughs, the highways and the heaven. I was totally left spellbound and as i kiss her, i realized we will be together for ever and ever.

College was over in no time and i missed her. I used to take great efforts to just to have her next to me like the days that were etched in memory.

Nov ’05, i came to Bangalore. The city lured me in her seductive charms, and even before i knew, i was being totally unfaithful to my love – i was having an affair. I broke up and confessed all of it to her, word by word and second by second. I knew it would have been totally excruciating for her, but i saw no other way to tell her that i was sorry for being unfaithful and that i still love her with all my life. And i was indeed being true to every word; i just cant imagine a day without her.

She protested, and with some effort and cuddling we were back, she came down to Bangalore to be with me. We loved each other away from prying eyes and curious heads and walked the garden city like Adam and Eve.

Its been 6 years and i have never given up so many things for something. My folks have a tough time understanding the reasons. My friends couldn’t believe that this happened between both of us. I can promise that she is the one in my life and there would never ever be anyone worthy enough to replace her.

Everyday is a new adventure with her. She still teases me for my inexperience and caressing my fingers at the same time. So its without doubt that i say, she is the only true love of my life.

And her name is … Linux

——————–

Read - “I was cautions as not to upset her in anyway and she was equally cautious” – as - “System crashes and reboots”
Read - “Me totally lost in the wilderness of her hair. I made fun of the occasional grey ones that i noticed.” – as - “Terminal with the default black bg and white fg”
Read - “i was being totally unfaithful …. etc” – as - “Dad bought me a laptop with XP. Day-2 i wiped clean the hdd, along with the rescue partition, and installed Linux”
Read - “She still teases me for my inexperience” – as - “I still google and read man pages”

(now scroll up and read it again )

inspired from – Love and UNIX: An Undying Affection

EeePc Initial Reactions

Posted on March 11, 2009 by Jerry

Last Friday i bought an EeePc for my brother. I have heard a lot about this little master, or rather monster, but i had to see it for myself, what it could really do?

Got it home and the first thing i do, hook it on to the wifi – a plus over there. Then it was time for some serious browsing. Did that and the only thing that i found a bit difficult was typing. C’mon the entire keypad fits in my palm and how am i supposed to type. But still again a plus. One of the things that i need to do from a usability point of view, for any Linux box, is to play movies. Plugged in my thumb-drive and double clicked a movie. Cool! just played it just like that, without any problem.

So far EeePc has impressed me in more ways than most girls have ever done. But word of caution, if u r a linux junkie who likes to get your hands dirty by doing – ./configure; make; make install- then EeePc is not the one for you. Coz it has everything that you need for a, err say and over sized mobile with out the calling facility. (one of the reasons why i goes to my brother )

My initial reactions with EeePc has been captured with the inbuilt cam like this -

Here are somethings that i have tried out on EeePc -

Locate the Terminal (this is fun, coz u really need to know linux like your backyard to locate this)
Write a “Hello World” Python program (this was written at Barcamp Bangalore 8 )

Mailing and Telneting with PERL

Posted on November 16, 2008 by Jerry

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.

Telnet Scripting Tool a.k.a TST10.exe

Posted on November 11, 2008 by Jerry

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 Telnet Scripting Tool a.k.a TST10.exe

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

Jerry Mannel

Eternally alive on the Internet

Tag Archives: linux

Windows 7 – First Look

and She is the one …

EeePc Initial Reactions

Mailing and Telneting with PERL

Telnet Scripting Tool a.k.a TST10.exe