Yarl Devi : The train of HOPE

The media of the last week was full of the launch of the Peace Train to Vavuniya on the 20th of May. Looking back at the protracted armed conflict in this country, the `moments of peace` or more accurately, the `the moments when war is absent` have been few and far between.

The Yarl Devi intercity express train was the train which connected the Jaffna peninsula with the rest of the country. And she had two sisters one moving to southern sriklanka and the other moving to hill country. This is the first advertisement published by the Srilanka Railway department is the following.



Last train moved to the jafna peninsula in 1987 and never returned until it was shipped to Colombo when the armed forces took control of the jaffna pennisula in 1996. There after the train opperated only to vavniya.

Both Tiger Air Crafts Downed

The confirmed sources says both LTTE aricrafts had been shot down. Sources say the first plane downed on the IRD building following anti-aircraft gunfire. over 40 persons, majority civilians were injured in the downing of the plane. One person later died. The other plane went down at Anamaduwa following F7 attack.

LTTE aircraft shot in the skies of colombo

Unconfirmed reports form Colombo indicates that one of the two aircraft's carried the air strike had been shot down by the sri lanka air force.

the following link provides an insight of the usage of light aircraft's by the LTTE. Click here to view the article.

LTTE Aircrafts attacks Colombo 20/02/2008

Latest reports form colombo Says that two tiger air crafts have bombed the city of Colombo. The location was a civilian settlement and the inland revenue department. 28 Civilians are reported injured and one civilian killed. The location of the explosion is in close proximity to the capital Colombo.

The anti aircraft guns was heard firing form the roof tops of the secured buildings. The attack
comes after few hours the defense ministry has announced that it had finally encircled the tigers last bastion.

"Two aircraft came and the engagement is still going on," said Lankan air force spokesman, Wing Commander Janaka Nanayakkara.

The LTTE aircraft was spotted over the skies in northwestern Mannar forcing the authorities in Colombo to activate air defenses system and shut down power supply in the national capital.

According to sources, the radar in Mannar detected the LTTE aircraft short while ago following which the air defense system in Colombo was activated.

Anti-aircraft guns were heard firing in the air in Colombo.

Power was cut off and searchlights pointed to the sky to detect any suspected LTTE aircraft, he said.

Troops in the north reported that two unidentified aircraft were heading towards Colombo, the sources said.

In the last few months the Tamil tigers of Elam (LTTE) conducted 9 air raids at Colombo and suburbs. The Srilankan Air force if equipped with Chinese made F7 interceptors and radars to counter the treat.

The latest reports indicated one aircraft was shot down by the air force.

More information will follow.

AMD Phenom II Overclocked to 6.5GHz - New World Record

The story sounds familiar: Intel hits a new milestone in nanometer architecture, and AMD waits a while to follow up. It happened with 65nm processors, and it's happening again now. Two days shy of a year since Intel launched Penryn, its first 45nm chip, AMD is finally ready to counter with a few 45nm CPUs of its own--Phenom II has finally arrived. But based on our hands-on testing of two Phenom II machines--the Dell XPS 625 and the Maingear Dash--the chip isn't quite as dominating as AMD would have you believe.

AMD Phenom II Explained

AMD is positioning Phenom II in between Intel's Core 2 Quad and Core i7 offerings. Phenom II chips are available in two versions, the X4 920 and the X4 940 Black Edition, which compete tit-for-tat against Intel's highest Core 2 Quad CPU frequencies at 2.8 and 3.0 GHz, respectively.

AMD Phenom II CPUAMD bumped the shared L3 cache of the Phenom II processors up from 2MB to 6MB, giving each CPU a total cache of 8MB. L3 cache serves as a shared memory space for the cores to draw from. Increasing the amount improves the CPU's ability to pull data from this faster memory space instead of having to issue slower requests to the system's main memory. The move puts Phenom II processors right in the middle of Intel's Core 2 Quad lineup for cache size, but the result is still short of the 12MB caches found on higher-end Core i7 chips.

Though limited overclocking of the 920-edition processors is available through AMD's OverDrive software, the company is tipping its hat toward the extreme-performance crowd with its Black Edition processors. These CPUs run multiplier-unlocked, which liquid-nitrogen-armed enthusiasts have been able to exploit to frequencies above 6 GHz, surpassing the world record for Intel Core i7 processors, which stands at 5.5 GHz. 

The new world Record

In the past, the AMD Phenom II has been overclocked to an extremely impressive 5 GHz. And while this was extremely impressive, it would seem that AMD wouldn’t want to be outdone.

AMD’s own Pete Hardman and Sami Makinen were able to overclock an AMD Phenom II to a blazing 6.5GHz, at an operating temperature of –230 degrees Celsius using liquid nitrogen and liquid helium as their cooling agents.

Should you be interested in seeing the whole process play out, be sure and check out the video here (and, as is usual with videos of this nature, prepare your ears for some awful trance music).

Defending Viruses that spreads from usb drives

Well all of us have the problem of viruses if we use Microsoft versions of operating systems. Most often the usb drive becomes a virus truck. The moment we plug our pen drive to a windows machine it is Automatically mounted and played. This is configured using the autorun.inf file. This file consists of the cell scripts to execute when the USB is mounted via the windows based operating systems.

Now what the viruses do is when it write itself to the USB disk it

also edits the Autorun.inf with a command to execute itself on the time of mount.

such edited file is shown below

[autorun]
open=system.exe
shellexecute=system.exe
shell\Explore\command=system.exe
shell\Open\command=system.exe
shell=Explore

Here the system.exe is a virus. So how can we get through with this. The way Im going to tell you is by disabling the autorun feature of the Operating system. Well this is not an exact cure but is will hold on as it wont execute any files in a USB or a Media drive (CD VCD).

Once this is done you want see the Selection menu that pops in when you plug the pan drive or a CD. But this is easy than removing viruses.

So this is how to disable this feature.

We do this using the Group Policy editor. Like many other management consoles, the GPE is not listed in Start-All Programs. To open it, go to Start-Run and enter "gpedit.msc" (without quotes). Figure 1 shows one view of the console.

figure 1 

So once this dialogue appears go to the Computer configeration and click on the Administrative Templates. A tree list will be opened. Click on the system folder and you will see a set of files open on the settings. Scroll it down till you find the Turn off AutoPlay.

once clicked on the Turn off Auto Play you will get this type of dialogue. Click on the disables radio button. And press ok. So we are done

So as we are done now windows have the autorun feature disabled. This will partaily protect you form the viruses that comes within the USB. 

The tradeoff we are facing here is that the DVD and Audio CDS wont autoplay. You will have to manually autoplay them using a media player or by write clicking the disk. 

Well You wont have these problems if you move to UBUNTU. 

2008 Best of Open Source Software

The Infoworld had selected this year best open source software under eight categories covering business and productivity applications, development tools, middleware, networking, security, and storage. They have chosen 60 products.

Among the easy picks for this year’s winners were OpenOffice.org for office productivity suite, Snort for network intrusion detection, and Splunk for security log analysis. Although, these applications were already believed to be solutions ahead of their competition, InfoWorld’s editors, analysts, reviewers really had a difficult time choosing between other solutions in all eight categories that included the following: enterprise applications such as CRM, ERP, BI, and reporting; collaborative applications, including mail/calendar, wiki, and social networking; desktop productivity apps from office suites to 3-D modeling; platforms and middleware, including operating systems, databases, virtualization, and SOA integration; developer tools from AJAX and rich Internet apps to Web service testing and version control; networking, including server monitoring, routing, Wi-Fi scanning, and VoIP software; security software, including firewall, IDS, disk encryption, and security testing; and storage which includes monitoring and administration, backup, and NAS.

Three sun products won the awards in two different categories: My SQL as best database and the recently acquired VirtualBox as best desktop virtualization both under the Best of Open Source Platforms and Middle category and OpenOffice.org as best productivity suite under Best of Open Source Productivity Apps category.

A partial list of the winners as listed in the InfoWorld website is as follows:

Best of open source in productivity applications

Audacity, Sound Editing
Blender, 3D Modeling
Firefox, Web Browser
GIMP, Image Editing
OpenOffice.org, Productivity Suite

PDFCreator, PDF Creation

Best of open source in enterprise applications

Alfresco Community, Content Management
Compiere, Enterprise Resource Planning
dotProject, Project Management
Hyperic HQ, Application Monitoring
Intalio BPMS, Business Process Management
JasperReports, Reporting
Liferay Portal, Enterprise Portal
Magento eCommerce, E-Commerce
Pentaho Open BI Suite, Business Intelligence

SugarCRM, Customer Relationship Management

Best of open source in collaboration

Elgg, Social Networking
MediaWiki, Wiki
VNC and Chicken of the VNC, Remote Control
Scalix, Mail and Calendar

WordPress, Blog Publishing

Best of open source in networking

Asterisk, IP Telephony
AWStats, Log File Analyzer
InSSIDer, Wireless Network Scanner
Nagios, Server Monitoring
NDISwrapper, Wireless Network Interface
Vyatta, Router, Firewall, & VPN
Wireshark, Network Protocol Analyzer

Zenoss Core, Network Monitoring

Best of open source in platforms and middleware

CentOS, Server Operating System
JBossESB, Enterprise Service Bus
MySQL, Database
phpMyAdmin, MySQL Administration
Puppy Linux, Small-Footprint OS
Talend Open Studio, Data Integration
Ubuntu, Desktop Operating System
VirtualBox, Desktop Virtualization

Xen, Server Virtualization

Best of open source in security

AppArmor, Application Security
Metasploit Framework, Penetration Toolkit
Ophcrack, Password Cracker
SmoothWall Express, Network Firewall
Snort with BASE, Network Intrusion Detection
Splunk, Security Log Analysis
TrueCrypt, Disk Encryption

Untangle Gateway Platform, Gateway Security

For complete coverage and the rest of the winners see the article at InfoWold.

Source: http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/08/04/32TC-bossies-2008_1.html