Happy Onam to all !

Off this friday on a weeks vacation to celebrate Onam with my parents.
I feel really drained and maybe the break will do me good - I will also need some time to think things through ...
"All my bags are packed , Im ready to go" : ok , ok , that might not fit the context , but it sure feels like that :-)

By the way , please welcome Vinay to the wonderful world of blogging !
You can "chori him" (like daku put it :-P) here : http://things-undone.blogspot.com/

youtube shows ...

Nowadays , when I am at home and bored/tired , I end up watching one of these on youtube :
a) Steven Colbert's Colbert Report.
b) Jon Stewart's Daily Show.
c) Mr. Cook

Just should be able to find their shows with ease ... and they are amazingly hilarious !
A very entertaining way to while away a couple of hours :-)

/me is famous

Check this :-D

Seeing yourself

I am extremely camera shy and just do not like being photographed ... no , nothing to do with "a camera will capture one’s soul" :-P
I feel extremely embarassed for some reason and I just dont like seeing myself in a static picture ...
Now , I can add a video to that list too :-)
Friend of mine showed me a 'movie' he took of a bunch of us - and man , did I hate seeing myself in it !

Moral of the story - stay away from all cameras : static or motion :-D

Peer to Peer across NAT's

The importance of peer to peer communication cannot be played down.
Recently , I was thinking about how to make file transfer more efficient and p2p hit the top of the list.
Assuming you do not want to filter the client traffic at the server side , it remarkedly reduces the load and even cost at the server side if the individual clients can transfer the content directly to their peers.

The major problem with this approach is that , most users nowadays are increasingly getting connected to the internet through NAT's. This prevent's one client to establish a direct connection to the other - since it cannot reach it directly !
I am not very sure of what the solutions are in this space to continue to use p2p , but the following solution looks interesting.
It basically uses STUN to establish a p2p session : a straightforward application of the rfc in some ways actually ... and I would expect this , or better solutions to be quite widely deployed already.

The basic idea is something like this :

You have three entities : client a , client b and the service provider's STUN server on public internet (which could also be the protocol host).
The actual protocol that the server and client's use to talk to each other could be anything ...
Initially , neither client a nor client b what type of NAT they are behind , or even if they are behind a NAT it is in the first place !
Both clients find out what type of NAT they are behind using STUN (section 8 , 9 and 10 of spec).
Now , over their existing protocol , the client's will exchange the obtained information with each other (if two way communication is to be attempted or only the p2p host will transmit this to the p2p client).
Once this is done , the p2p client will transmit udp datagrams to the p2p host with the 'packet from' set to what the STUN server used and the destination being the internet side of the discovered IP/port for the p2p server host (I am not sure if this is allowed in all/any case - assuming you can do it) ....

And voila ! You have p2p transfer happening over udp.
You will ofcourse need to renegotiate in case the binding lifetime is low , etc ... minor enhancements and essentially implementation details.

Have I implemented this before lecturing about it ? No ....
But it felt like a good idea - thought people who are really in this field (cisco friends , hint hint ;-) ) can comment better.

It is very much possible that this is a solved problem , with the solution being something infinitely better than what I describe above (or maybe this is the solution and I just did not get to that part of the spec/skipped that) - or maybe I am talking zilch and am exhibiting a markedly high degree of ignorance of my networking knowledge (or lack of it).
RTFM's and links welcome !

Free Akash !!

While we are celebrating independence day today , there is one person who is crying out for his freedom. Sadly , this person cant make his voice heard - so I am pitching in. I am talking about Akash (a pseudonym) - and this person is under captivity : with absolutely no way of making himself heard.
For more than a year , some of us have been raising the demands to secure his release - countless mails and discussions have taken place : with no result as of now ... the captors are unmoved by our pleas. So I am raising this in a more public forum - maybe this would get more people interested in the 'cause'.
I cannot reveal the exact details of the captors ... but all I can say is , he used to work with me and both of them got married last year.
If you are wondering more about Akash , he is not yet born ... yes , dont be surprised ! There are a few of us : me , Girish , etc who are fighting a battle to free him : and bring him to this world from the previous.
So , join me and raise the demand - FREE AKASH !!!
I will make sure that the concerned read this :-)

And last , but not the least - Wish you all a Happy Independence day !

Pics ...

* Update *

Thanks for the suggestions - created a flickr account and uploaded select few of the pics (20 MB limit ?! wtf !!).
Looks like I can retrieve back only scaled down versions of my image :-(
If I go pro (IF) , will I be able to save and retrieve images of arbitrary sizes ?

The uploader is simple and intutive.
The web interfaces needs some getting used to - but once familiar , it looks reasonably ok.
Ofcourse , integration with yahoo is pathetic ... they seriously need to work on that !
My profile here - the really interesting pictures , I had to take them off because of objections from certain someone :-P

----


I have never owned a camera ... partly cos I am lousy at using them.
Side effect of that is that , I dont have any pics :-)
No pics of my friends , my college , school , nothing about any of the trips I have been to , the people and places I have met/seen , etc , etc.
... until a friday 4 weeks back , when I got one.
Since I knew so little about these things - and research on internet will not help much (for me) , I just dragged vipin along : he did the talking , I did the paying and now I have a cool camera for use !
Now comes the dilemma ... what do I do with the pictures I have taken ?!
Storing them in my system is not very reliable - considering the number of reinstall's and the like I go through. I am notorious for "loosing" CD's - range from them literally getting lost to 'damaging' them ;-)
I am thinking of hosting them online some place ... whether they will be public could be a different discussion : so , if anyone has suggestions of where I can put these up , please let me know.

Leaving ...

Thats it , I am out of here !
Should get back to Bangalore on sunday night :-)

How has the trip been ?
It was quite awesome : the interop event was a blast and I got to meet all those folks , could get a lot of stuff completed with Jacques , met a lot of my friends - some of them after like ages ! and rest of the time , Daniela was a dear and amazingly hospitable :-)

But for now , I am looking forward to getting back home !