Harsh J

• So, the pop-ups have been resurrected to bring about the end of world wide web. Or it’s just Firefox’s way of showing ad-love. #
• Who buys these Dummies books? They’re book-spam, “Pregnancy For Dummies”, WTF! #
• XKCD scares you sometimes, a mix of deja-vu and mind-reading. #
• Explode by Uh Huh Her is a track that hits you hard the first time you listen keenly. Then you half-laugh and switch to your headphones. #
• I can’t access the LICD comic website, but I recieve its feeds in GReader sans the image, very odd. #
• Memorizing the Jabberwocky poem by Lewis Carroll. I recited it in school days, forgot many lines now. #
• I don’t know why I log on to IMs anymore. Its like a power-on LED to my online presence and nothing more. #
• New Yeah Yeah Yeahs album – It’s Blitz! #
• Also tried out MSTRKRFT’s The Look album. #
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ It’s Blitz album is good, a lot better than their earlier music. They sound the same. Give it a try. #
• Nothing twists your brain in the afternoon like reading H2G2 does. #
• Switched to ArchLinux. Using Ext4.

• Checked out django-lfs from Google Code. Its all German, can’t understand the website. There must be an English version of it, soon. Babelfish, until then. #
• This day, everything went against my expectations. Some of my expectations were about something bad, luckily. #
• Something strange about the Remnants book is its similarity to the Lost TV series. Billy Weir is almost John Locke, almost. #
• Internal exams didn’t go so bad. Managed a 74 percentage., but the evaluation does not give me many ideas on improving my score. #
• Tried TheLastRipper, a last.fm stream to MP3 converter. http://thelastripper.com (Available on Win/Lin/OSX and uses Mono/.NET 2.0). #
• “An option to delete all traces of visiting a certain web site: Right click on a History item and select Forget About This Site.” – Firefox 3.5b3 #
• I also wish for a “Stop logging this website into the history” kind of option in Firefox. #
• Mark Summerfield’s “Programming in Python 3” has released. His books on Nokia’s Qt (The Qt-C++ one with Jasmin, for example) were good. #
• Nokia cut 1700 jobs. I wish it cut some prices too, damn. My old 6681 feels like a Pentium 2, a slowness even I have not experienced. #
• Adding news feeds to Google Reader. It increases the feed count a lot, but my ignorance reduces this way. The Hindu’s feeds are broken, they repeat articles twice. #
• Adding notes/comments to shared GReader items is fun. It does not have to be a comment on the website for all the visitors this way. #
• Yahoo Mail asks way too many questions. #
• The Burpee technique looks good, let’s try that out. I can’t do the entire 10 rounds however, not yet. #
• Heh. “Could I borrow your car?” “Sorry, I gave it to charity last year. Could you use a gun instead?“. From the Meteor mini-series. #
• Writing an HTTP web server in C is painful. “GET /pain HTTP/1.0\n\n”. Clients are so much easier. #
• I finished writing a (very) simple HTTP server and client in C. There’s still lot more to explore in headers and services, but this ought to cover the academic requirements. #
• Gave a seminar on Breakdowns in Communication. Went smooth (I think, did not get full feedback), and was my 2nd seminar. #
• Just began to use Google’s SearchWiki and comments for links I find useful while searching for programming help. #
• Searching for new music, in the trance/electronica genre. #
• Wow, I didn’t know there were laws that applied over the crypto one uses. France had one till the late 90s. Apparently, US still has them for certain countries like Cuba, etc. #
• The CPU fan’s noise was making me irritated. Giving it a good whack with the palm made it  silent. #
• ATB‘s next album “Future Memories” releases on May 1, 2009. Putting a reminder in the calendar! #

• PDF vs. CHM for technical e-books. A well made CHM is actually better than a PDF, though it’s not so portable. I’ve started liking CHM more. #
• Take any prime number greater than 3, square it, subtract one and divide by 24. It’s always divisible! (more @ http://is.gd/mt2g and around) #
• I guess it is due to all squares of primes being odd, and thus even upon subtraction of one. A little more thought would tell you “Why 24?”. #
• I’m afraid I was a little wrong in my thinking. It’s more cause of the fact that every prime can be expressed as (6n+1) or (6n-1). #
• It’s a shame, having read all the Animorphs books (by K. A. Applegate) but for the last one cause I couldn’t find it at my lending library. #
• Ghevar is delicious. It’s one of the very few sweets I like. http://is.gd/mtNK #
• Avira AntiVir (Free, Personal Edition) is quite good! Has detected all the infected files on the office PC and disabled them. #
• I request for a password reset on Baywords 4 days ago. Got the mail just now. The pirate ship is slowing down! #
• Can’t stop these FreeNode incoming packets from appearing in my syslog. Tried everything I know. #
• I prefer having a capitalized nickname in any service I use. ‘QwertyManiac’ over ‘qwertymaniac’, but Identi.ca doesn’t seem to support it. #
• Should have chosen the shorter ‘qwertym’ at Identi.ca. It’s not a big deal, anyway. #
• WP’s QuickPress was impressive when I first saw it, but I’ve hardly used it at all. I guess I’m not one of those tumblrs. #
• Subscribing to your own feed makes you think a lot about how your post would appear in the feed readers, and about its readers. Writer’s block! #
• Watched “Adventures in Babysitting” (1987). Honestly? I only watched it for Elizabeth Shue. Medium-funny movie otherwise. #
• LOL.cat ( http://lol.cat ) should be a domain name with great potential today. But I wonder if that site is popular. #
• Being an rTorrent user is difficult sometimes. Need to write a script that begins rtorrent if net’s idle. I always forget to start it back up myself. #
• Tried XFLUX on Linux. It works great! F.lux auto-controls your monitor brightness based on what time it is. http://is.gd/kbFN #
• I’m getting good at Urban Terror Multi-player. Sign that I should stop and switch over? #
• My current music collection is 1137 tracks long. #
• Curse internal exams. I couldn’t attend the OSI Tech Days event in my city. #
• Tried Teeworlds now, its a small and pretty neat multiplayer game. http://teeworlds.com #
• Currently reading “Remnants” by ‘K.A. Applegate’. Just the last four books of the 14-part series I missed reading when I was young. #
• I like When I Go by Emancipator. The music track’s a slow and beautiful one. It’s tagged as trip-hop/electronica on last.fm. #
• Pencil is an interesting software for GUI sketching. Runs on Firefox as well. #
• Some people are all ‘Hey cool, its asking my GMail ID and password, lets just give it! Wow!‘. You then recieve the side-effects of that. #
• So many text-bins to choose from. I liked codepad.org‘s services the most. Next comes GitHub’s gists, but its slightly different. #
• I’ve started sleeping almost 2 hours earlier than before, sort of bored of the PC. #
• I just read the plot of “Food Boy” (2008). Who would want to watch such a ridiculous movie?! #
• Tried new music (the trip-hop/electronica genre) – Uh Huh Her. It’s nice too, but has a pop touch to it. #
• My “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” does not have the words “Don’t Panic” written on its cover as it claims #
• Anna University revaluation results are out. http://www.annauniv.edu/result.php #
• I WANT THIS! http://tinyurl.com/asbrbr #
• Got my new headphones (Panasonic). Thanks to Jayahari and Anjan for it #
• I suddenly feel the need of comments on a WP blog to be numbered per post, making references to them easier. #
• I suppose some themes do have such a thing enabled. #
• Argh, my simple priority queue implementation in C looks stupid. #
• I’m damn confused looking at my graph code. In urgent need of some pen, paper and ten minutes of silence. #
• Cleared system logs and freed up 800 MB. #

For the last few days I’d been observing unusual blinkenlights on my router even when the connection was supposed to be idle. Trying to fix overheating issues and a loosely mounted graphic card that was causing havoc in my game sessions, I did not decide to investigate early.

Today, a little peek into the system logs gave me these odd looking lines:

[  245.194635] Inbound IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=00:F8:a1:68:d7:63:00:0f:a3:52:11:33:08:00 SRC=85.190.0.3 DST=192.168.1.2 LEN=60 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=51 ID=56199 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=57538 DPT=17771 WINDOW=5840 RES=0x00 SYN URGP=0
[  248.186412] Inbound IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=00:F8:a1:68:d7:63:00:0f:a3:52:11:33:08:00 SRC=85.190.0.3 DST=192.168.1.2 LEN=60 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=50 ID=42755 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=38368 DPT=80 WINDOW=5840 RES=0x00 SYN URGP=0
[  248.193452] Inbound IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=00:F8:a1:68:d7:63:00:0f:a3:52:11:33:08:00 SRC=85.190.0.3 DST=192.168.1.2 LEN=60 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=51 ID=42451 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=45035 DPT=18844 WINDOW=5840 RES=0x00 SYN URGP=0
[  248.193505] Inbound IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=00:F8:a1:68:d7:63:00:0f:a3:52:11:33:08:00 SRC=85.190.0.3 DST=192.168.1.2 LEN=60 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=51 ID=42230 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=53061 DPT=28882 WINDOW=5840 RES=0x00 SYN URGP=0
[  254.188289] Inbound IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=00:F8:a1:68:d7:63:00:0f:a3:52:11:33:08:00 SRC=85.190.0.3 DST=192.168.1.2 LEN=60 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=50 ID=42756 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=38368 DPT=80 WINDOW=5840 RES=0x00 SYN URGP=0
[  254.189632] Inbound IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=00:F8:a1:68:d7:63:00:0f:a3:52:11:33:08:00 SRC=85.190.0.3 DST=192.168.1.2 LEN=60 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=52 ID=51624 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=60700 DPT=33322 WINDOW=5840 RES=0x00 SYN URGP=0

A quick google later, I realized these were messages sent by 85.190.0.3 to me looking at random ports like 33322, 80 (HTTP), 28882, 18844, etc.. A little more research over the IP led to this page: http://proxyscan.freenode.net/.

I was confused for quite a while. I don’t run nor use a proxy or an IIS server, as their policy page states. Why would they continuously poke around when nothing’s found? I can’t give up on FreeNode, but I certainly do not like this continuous checking. Do all of FreeNode users face this? It never used to happen before.

That said, a little more info into the message follows:

[  254.189632] Inbound IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=00:F8:a1:68:d7:63:00:0f:a3:52:11:33:08:00 SRC=85.190.0.3 DST=192.168.1.2 LEN=60 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=52 ID=51624 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=60700 DPT=33322 WINDOW=5840 RES=0x00 SYN URGP=0

Drilldown:

• Inbound – Incoming data
• IN=eth0 – Data incoming via eth0
• OUT= – No outgoing interface
• MAC=00:F8:a1:68:d7:63:00:0f:a3:52:11:33:08:00 – Breaks down to “00:Destination MAC”:”00:Source MAC”:”Payload-Type:00″ (IP)
• SRC=85.190.0.3 – Source address
• DST=192.168.1.2 – Destination address
• LEN=60 TOS=0×00 PREC=0×00 TTL=52 ID=51624 – Length, Type Of Service, Precedence(?), Time To Live, ID(?)
• DF PROTO=TCP SPT=60700 DPT=33322 WINDOW=5840 RES=0×00 SYN URGP=0 – Don’t Fragment, Protocol, Source Port, Destination Port, Recieving Window Size, Reset(?), Sync packet (trying to connect), Non-Urgent Data.

The doubtful ones are indicated with a (?). It was fun analysing this, and I think the solution is to block all incoming ports? Or perhaps, blocking the IP?

Ordered Chronologically.

• Ragnarok’s client size has grown 4 times since the time it was launched. I felt like playing it again, but can’t cause of these patches. #
• New mission: Become lolcat nazi. #
• Decided not to go for the industrial visit. #
• GitHub gists are good! #
• Why would they attack a cricket team, of all people. It isn’t relevant to any kind of cause! #
• Why didn’t rTorrent come to my mind when I wanted to see some curses code. Wasted so many hours! #
• Think I got an eye infection, gotta be off the computer for a few days. #
• The eye swelling seems to have gone, but I still gotta be careful. Anyways, whatever happened to the entire Baywords.com concept? #
• Watched “Bolt” (2008). Funny movie, with lots of good moments. Not quite a Disney classic, however. #