Tech Notes

So there I was, trying to use the World of Warcraft downloader and it telling me some of my ports were blocked. It apparently needs a set of ports to be open and enabled. I googled and found that I need to setup port forwarding for faster downloads. But that assumes a static IP for my computer. My setup is something like this:

Airtel --> Huawei modem with DHCP enabled --> Netgear router with DHCP, which doles out IP addresses to my VOIP adapter, my laptop, my desktop and any rogue machines in the wireless vicinity that are aware of my SSID.

Fixing a static IP for my desktop was the first step. I could set it up in my Negear router itself, by assigning a fixed ip to the MAC id of the desktop. Then I moved on to the Huawei modem and went into the Virtual Servers section. Added the ports needed by the WoW downloader. Restarted the modem. Moved to the router and went to the Port Forwarding section, ditto. The final part was configuring my Comodo firewall to allow TCP-in on those ports. Everything worked like a charm and I felt so proud of myself.

Until I found the Vundo trojan happily resting in my machine. Sigh.

Infinet and beyond...

Tried out HCL Infinet connection yesterday, worked like a charm. I told the chap at the shop that I was having problems with my NetKracker account. He immediately responded by asking me if I stayed at Indira Nagar ! Apparently Indira Nagar users of NetKracker have faced problems in accessing the Net. Wow.

I might get one more convert to Live Journal - my friend Nachiket. Heh heh.

Questions:
- Should I buy a second hand car ?
- Should I buy a first hand car ?
- Should I buy a car ?

Thoughts:
- Eating Prawn Manchurian for dinner may leave you with a queasy feeling the next day
- Its impossible to walk up four flights of stairs if you have had a couple of beers the night before
- Chicken liver fry is usually very very tasty

Yes, I'm hungry.

Discworld, Messengers and other very important stuff

Work, the curse of the drinking class ! Lots of small things to be taken care of, lots of big problems too. Still find time to update the journal from office, so that's probably a good thing.

Sindha's phone problem has been solved. She will be here on Sunday. Ya-ay !

My login frustration continues. Tried for close to an hour yesterday from home. Sent a stinker to netkracker today. Got an automated reply which listed out a series of telephone numbers and a statement that the SUN never sets on netKracker.

A note about the Discworld series I've been reading. Its about a disc shaped world which is borne by four gigantic elephants. These elephants stand on an even bigger turtle, which travels across space. The sex of the turtle is known, and is the cause of much research on the discworld. This world is inhabited by men, wizards, trolls, gnomes, barbarians, etc. There are also heroes, one of whom bears the interesting name of Cohen the Barbarian. Visit Terry Pratchett's website for more information. He also has a site which is under construction at the moment.

Another day, another Instant Messenger comes my way. Apart from the main ones like MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AIM, I tried out Jabber and Odigo which claim to integrate all the big four in one screen. I didn't like the clunky interface of Jabber and the oh-so-kool one of Odigo, so sneered at both and promptly uninstalled them. Then I came across Indiatimes Messenger, which is pretty fast, and also does integration. Trillian is the latest one which I found, but I was put off by its complex interface. So what do I use ? Actually I prefer to use msn and yahoo, even if it means having multiple messengers in my system tray. I like the interface on both these apps, and they have a lot of value added stuff.

i2 uses Lotus Sametime for intra-office communication. Now Sametime is integrated with AIM (AOL messenger), so I'm online on AIM also. However Liza is the only one on my buddy list on AIM.

What were the above two paragraphs all about ? Why are they important in my life today ? Oh well.