Roy's musings

The login form of the IRCTC web site is being submitted over HTTP in plain text. This is a very serious issue since both your user ID and password could be sniffed by someone. One thing that I observed was that they have a HTTPS server running and this server is capable of receiving login requests. I think it was a bug in the code that the developer gave the URL as HTTP instead of HTTPS. How to overcome the issue? This is not a clean approach but works fine. You can copy and paste the URL "https://www.irctc.co.in/cgi-bin/bv60.dll/irctc/services/login.do?userName=XXX&password=YYY" in your browser. Replace the XXX with your user ID and YYY with your password. I tried to send a feedback about this to the site admin or someone in charge. Pathetic ... I could not find any link/email address in that website to do this. Hopefully someone from IRCTC will read this blog and fix the issue.

Tata Indicom has an amazing (?!) web site to manage all your accounts with them online . I don't know WTH is wrong with them, none of the login pages are being submitted over HTTPS. Yes, any n00b running a sniffer can sniff out your password and any other sensitive information you give with a little effort. On top of this, the page was submitted to an IP address, instead of a URL, which was beyond my wild imagination. I had to run a whois query on APNIC server just to confirm if I am talking to one of their servers. I am surprised how on earth Tata Indicom claims to be the number one (or one of the top) telecom service provider in India, if they don't even know the seriousness of their user's identity.

There are two pages that I would highly recommend to get started with Emacs Lisp. Xah Lee's tutorial on Emacs Lisp . Steve Yegge's Emergency Elisp . Of course you should always have the Emacs Lisp reference manual handy.

The default foreground of prompt (gdb, shell, etc.) in the comint package in Emacs is blue. If you are working in PuTTY, the default background is black. Imagine blue on black background. Looks nasty! You can customize the color of the prompt by using the comint-highlight-prompt variable. For e.g. I am using yellow foreground in my system. Here is how I have customized it by adding these lines in my ~/.emacs : (copy-face 'default 'comint-highlight-prompt) (set-face-foreground 'comint-highlight-prompt "yellow") In short, the first lines creates a font-face variable by copying the default face and the second line changes the foreground value of that font-face variable to "yellow". Scott A. Kuhl's .emacs file helped me a lot in understanding how to customize this. Thanks to him.

You can create a short cut in your Quick Launch folder that looks like: \path\to\putty.exe -load "session name" Session name could be obtained from your PuTTY dialog box when you launch it normally. This saves me a lot of time, since most of the time I connect to the same host. There are other interesting questions available under PuTTY FAQ .

This posting is specific to customizing the dircolors in bash shell in Linux. It may or may not be applicable to other shells and other platforms. When the bash shell is started, it executes all the shell scripts under the directory /etc/profile.d/ *.sh . You might find other shell scripts under this directory (for e.g. colorls .csh ), but those scripts are not to be executed by the bash shell. These files are executed within the current shell's environment, not in a separate execed shell (like a dotshell). One of these files is colorsls.sh . A set of rules in colorls.sh search for the user specific dircolors file. This file could be any one of the ~/.dircolors, ~/.dircolors.$TERM, ~/.dir_colors or ~/.dir_colors.$TERM. In case the user has more then one of these files, whichever comes last will be taken. Let us stick to the convention of using ~/.dircolors file for our customization. It is very easy to create this file by giving the following command: dircolors --sh > ~/.dircolo...

Okay. This one is just as useless argument as anyone could imagine: C++ or Java - which one is faster? The long discussion could be read from here. The original poster of the thread (Razii) came up with this idea of reading the whole bible verse by verse and sort it and write it back to disk using programs written in both Java & C++. In doing so he will compare the time taken by both Java & C++ programs. The (seemingly wrong) conclusion he came upto was that Java is faster than C++. Let me give you my gist of it. I copied and pasted the same piece of code (and fixed the issue of including the iterator header file and dividing by 1000 to get the milliseconds) , and ran the same test in my Linux box. Well, almost always the C++ program was considerably faster than the Java program. Many a times my C++ program took only 50% of the time taken by the Java program. My Java version is "Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_14-b03)" and my g++ versio...