Planned a vacation a week b4 and here I am in Thailand for the next 10 days. Leaving tomo morning at 5 am via Cathay Pacific and will be back on 21st. I am sooo excited. Let me know your list and I’ll try and get it. Will travel to Bangkok, Pattaya and will be there for the Full Moon party @ Koh Phangan on 18th. The Full Moon Party is something that I am looking forward for.
Took an extended weekend break from work prior to the new year and am off with my friends to Lonavala tonite and tomo at Pune. Hope to catch up with old friends. Will be back on Sunday.
I was almost about to miss this event! But somehow got up from the bed early enough in the morning to make it on time. I had returned home late from Bangalore as my flight got delayed by an hour. Reached home at around midnight and had to catch a 5am bus to Pune to reach there on time. I was very tired to get up at 4 am and get ready but somehow managed to do it and reached there on time 
With topics like Hacking one’s Firefox to steal his web secrets, Mining Digital Evidence in Microsoft Windows, 7 years of Indian IT act , etc and an opportunity to meet and network with some of the best Indian Hackers, this was an event not worth missing. This event was organized by Rohit Srivastwa. a renowned cyber security specialist. The speakers / topic of talks / venue / delegates .. everything was too good. I had gone with my ex- Katalyst colleague Ameya
The event started with Rohit introducing all the speakers of the event. The first talk that I attended was Sunil Arora on Backdoor 2.0: Hacking Firefox to steal his web secrets. He showed in detail about techniques to write a malware for Firefox to steal a victim’s web secrets like username, password, credit card number etc. He also talked about the recently discovered vulnerabilities in Firefox and how one can exploit them to push the malware to victim’s Firefox remotely. The session was very informative.
The next session was by Chetan Gupta on Mining Digital Evidence in Microsoft Windows. He showed us how forensic analysis was done on Windows system and how the cyber crime sleuths are able to recover all th details from a system at the time of investigation. Chetan Gupta is a very well known security expert working with Symantec Corporation and the best part was his introduction. He had almost a dozen security certificates under his belt. So, it took like almost 5 minutes to complete his introduction by the comparer and everyone started clapping soon after his intro. I am pasting a part of it here.
Chetan Gupta is a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Sciences from AIUMT, USA and has done his Masters of Science in Computer Networks. He has vast experience in the field of Information Security with a focus on the domain of penetration testing and digital forensics. He is well-versed with the Incident response and Computer Forensics standards and methodology, has a good understanding of the Cyber law & has led teams on Computer Forensic assignments for many multinational clients. He has also conducted penetration tests and risk assessment exercises for a multitude of international clients. Chetan Gupta is an Encase Certified Examiner (EnCE), SANS GIAC Certified Forensics Analyst (GCFA), SANS GIAC Certified Intrusion Analyst (GCIA), Master in Computer Forensics (US), Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), CIW Certified Security Associate and Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA).
phew…
The next talk was one of the most interesting one by Rohas Nagpal who is the President of the Asian School of Cyber Law. where he talked about the 7 most prominent cyber crime cases in India including the controversial Avnish Bajaj case of Baazee.com. There was so much to learn about the Indian IT act from him. Most of the things that I was not aware of. He also talked about piracy, pornography, etc.
Then headed for lunch break and attended sessions on Crazy Toaster: Can Home Devices turn against us? and Hacking Web 2.0 and then headed for the panel discussion with Cyber Crime Lawyers, Hackers and Cops. This was the most impressive discussion on Cyber Crimes, powerful Indian laws and the security. I cleared many of my doubts which were never cleared by anyone.
Overall an amazing event. Headed back to Bombay soon after the event.
Looking forward to be a part of ClubHACK2008 !
Had been to Bangalore between 4th to 8th December for foss.in/2007 and boy what an event that was! As I had mentioned in my earlier post that I will be attending this. I was at foss.in/2007 only for the first 4 days ( 2 project days and 2 main conference days ) as I changed my plans for the last day and went for Yahoo! India’s year end party @ Club Cabana.
day 1 @ foss.in
Reached Bangalore around 11 am as my flight got delayed by around 20 minutes and headed straight to my colleague’s hotel room to keep my belongings and then to IISc. The very first day was the project day and by the time I reached the venue, sessions were already going on it full swing. day1 had project days on Debian/Ubuntu , Open Solaris, Mozilla & Gnome and each of them were allotted a hall were sessions were going on. After jumping around from one hall to another to get a gist of whats going on I finally settled at the Mozilla Project. After the event I spent the rest of the evening with my friends at the 13th floor.
day 2 @ foss.in
Day 2 had project days of Fedora, Open Office, KDE and IndLinux. And I ended up sitting for almost all sessions of the Fedora Project day. It was drizzling whole day and the atmosphere around the JN Tata Auditorium was damn chill. Got introduced to quiet a few Bangalore LUGGers. Also, met Kartik Mistry. After the Foss we got invites to the amazing Mozilla Party @ Opus. They party was too good and it was the first time that I was partying with such amazing hip techie crowd. Its not everyday that you get invited to a Mozilla party and get an opportunity to chat with Mitchell Baker (CEO of Mozilla aka Chief Lizard Wrangler) and Mary Colvig (Marketing Manager) among others . Reached home pretty late at around 1am as the place where I was staying was at the other part of the town. It was damn chill..had a feeling that I would freeze to death by the time I reach home.
day 3 @ foss.in
The Main conference started on day 3. With many interesting talks lined up, it was difficult to choose which talk to sit when both were at the same time. Day 3 started with the inauguration of the main conference by Atul Chitnis and Kishore Bhargava which was pretty good. Then sat for couple of very interesting sessions by James Morris and (Why you should be a kernel hacker) and Rusty Russell (lguest: Hacking the Little Linux Hypervisor). After the event headed off to MG Road with friends.
day 4 @ foss.in
Day 4 was my last day @ Foss.in. Attended few sessions, had lunch, took loads of snaps, was fooling around on my Team Lead’s lappy most of the time. Made loadsa new friends. The main reason to attend such events is networking. You get to know and meet soo many like minded people and get an opportunity to discuss techie stuff.
As mentioned earlier, I didn’t attend the day 5 of foss.in as I was with my friends @ Club Cabana. for Yahoo! year end bash and boy what an event that was.
All in all it was a gr8 event. Very much worth taking a much needed break from work for 5 days and flying all the way to Bangalore for it. If folks can come from abroad to talk or to attend this event as delegates.. so can I !
Meet you @ foss.in/2008
Three Web 2.0 travel portals that I am really impressed about and these sites give smart way to find absolutely relevant information in less time and help you make your travel plans.
I follow a few blogs on Indian Startup / Web 2.0 and Webyantra is one of them. I came to about IXIGO from it. The way IXIGO shows the flight available and the cheapest option is really impressive. I find searching for flights at IXIGO better than any travel website. Use it to know better. Also, their revenue model is simple, they get a referral fee whenever someone goes from iXiGO.com to their partner websites and make a booking and also make money from relevant sponsored links shown on your search result pages. I have booked 2 round trip flights using this site and my experience has been really good coz it presents in the flights and its timings in such a way that its very simple to plan your trip. BTW iXiGO is free to use.
What does iXiGO mean ? As far as they know it doesn’t mean anything even though it is pronounced ‘easy go’ in some languages. They wanted a short and joyful name that people can remember easily:)
I happened to meet Mr. Aloke Bajpai the Founder - CEO of iXiGO @ BarCampMumbai2 on startups. Missed his talk though 
as parallel sessions were going on in the other room.
Again, heard about this web 2.0 travel company from one of blogs. I am yet to use this service am I am sure that I will one day redbus.in finds all possible buses available between two places and shows the same and one can book the tickets online.
Its an interesting read about how this website originated. Read it here.
Nirav had earlier talked about making IRCTC better and had made a cool prototype. I believe that people behind IRCTC might have taken a lesson or two from the prototype and the comments posted and have made a slight improvement and have made the site easier to use. However, like before, I came across this website called erail.in from one of the blogs on start ups. The cool thing about this site is that it shows you just need to select the start and end point of your journey and it shows the trains available and then proceed to IRCTC to buy them.
I was surprised that I didn’t find any links about the promoters of this site. Dunno who are the guys behind this, but they have done a splendid job here !
..of India was really awesome. I have 3 of my friends from my previous workplace who are now working with Yahoo! Bangalore. So, one fine morning I just gate crashed at their place for a weekend. I left Bombay early morning on 23rd February and came back Monday 26th Feb night. Reached Bangalore at 9:30am by early morning Bombay-Bangalore flight of GoAir. I found GoAir pretty decent as compared to other low cost - no frills airlines. My experience with Air Deccan was really horrible that I now tend to avoid it whenever possible.
One thing I couldn’t help to go unnoticed at the airport was that everywhere I saw, I could see only Airbus A320 and Boeing 747-300 and a couple of Kingfisher ATRs.
First day was pretty good. First of all went to a Southie Restaurant and had a delicious meal there. Went to the ISKCON temple and spent half of the day there. In the evening I went to shop at MG Road popularly called as emgiees and Brigade Road. Then had an awesome dinner at Caesar’s which is next to Yahoo India’s office on MG Road.
Next day we all got up pretty late and I headed towards other part of the city near The Forum to meet another friend of mine. This time he took me to a Mallu restaurant to have awesome veg mallu food. And in the evening we went shopping at the Forum. Next, we went to a place called NASA which looked more like a space craft and then moved to a more rocking place called Purple Haze. Its a club for all the Rock fans. There is a pretty big hall with a huge 3 huge LCD screens where they play awesome rock music videos and guys just stand around and headbang. They usually played videos of some rock concerts. They usually played hard rock like Sepultura, Korn, Metallica, Led Zeppelin, Rammstein, etc. The atmosphere there was really Rockking..
Next day again as usual got up late and missed the chance to go on a day’s trip to Mysore. So, we had an excuse to have Brunch on Sunday without pre-planning it. The we decided to go to Bannerghatta National Park. It around 30 minutes drive from the Bangalore city. Went for a mini safari, spotted a white tiger too and then checked out the poor animals in miserable conditions at the zoo. There was a cage full of turtles, sadly all of them were dead. No matter which National Park you go in India, the condition of the animals is really pathetic there.
Then we headed back to the city and went to Garuda Mall to roam around and since we had nothing better to do that Sunday evening we bought tickets for Ghost Rider at Inox. Pathetic movie. Made no sense at all except for Eva Mendes.
Next day we started out hunting for MTR(Mavalli Tiffin Rooms) restaurant as we had heard that you get awesome southie meals there. After searching for it for couple of hours we finally found it and also got to know that its closed on Mondays. Gr8! So 2 hours of traveling with our backpacks turned out to be a waste. Finally had some food and headed back to the Bangalore Airport.
Boy! Hate it when they write Bengalooru or Bengaluru on the flight boarding pass or just anywhere.
Off to Bangalore for the weekend to spend some time with some buddies of my previous work place. Will be back to Bombay on Monday. Will pen down interesting things from my trip after I come back.
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