September Earthquake

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The epicenter was near Sikkim about 20 km underground, 272 km from Kathmandu. However, it was strongly felt in Kathmandu. A wall on the British embassy in Kathmandu collapsed killing 3 people and smashing a car. Next morning we got news from all around that several more people had died and many more wounded. Several houses were destroyed and many more damaged.

Effect on Internet usage

2011 Sep 18 18:25 dipNPIX usages graph showed a big dip during 18:25 NST. Looks like all ISPs and International gateways saw similar trend. Most people went outside to the street and the power went off for a few minutes, and that could also have disconnected several computers and Internet connections.

We were hoping this would be the only effect of the quake but we started getting news of injuries and death.

Be Prepared

Nepal lies in an active fault line that gave birth to the Himalayas. Kathmandu valley saw tremendous growth in the past few years with brick and concrete building occupying every inch of Kathmandu leaving very little room anything else.

With so much brick being used and sub-standard constructions, the future for valley is worrying. Hope this earthquake reminds people that it is time we start preparing and building safely.

More at: USGS website

South Pashupati

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Managed to get some shots of Pashupati area from the south side. Sorry about the quality as I did not have my usual camera with me.

Linux Version Numbers

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Kernel Version
To find out the version info for the running kernel:

$ uname -a

This will give you something like:

Linux t.example.com 2.6.18-128.1.14.el5 #1 SMP Wed Jun 17 06:40:54 EDT 2009 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux

Ubuntu
On the ubuntu terminal, type:

$ cat /etc/lsb-release

Which will give you something like this

DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=9.10
DISTRIB_CODENAME=karmic
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 9.10"

CentOS and Red Hat Linux
On the terminal, type:

$ cat /etc/redhat-release

This will give you something like

CentOS release 5.6 (Final)

npIX crosses 400 Mbps

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npIX has crossed 400 Mbps mark in the last few days, I’m looking forward to the next milestone already. It is mostly driven by  the availability of Google Cache service hosted by Nepal Telecom. Also, the gradual growth of other local contents is also happening.

Now that some international content has becoming local, we are glad to “keep local traffic local”.

Mac OS X maintenance scripts

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If you do not keep your computer turned on during nights, it is likely that all the maintenance scripts have not run properly. To manually run those cleanup scripts, open Terminal and type the following:

$ sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

Type your Admin password when prompted. The scripts will run in sequence but no feedbacks will be given. When each of those scripts run, they will write to their logs and you can check those log files to know when they were last run.

$ ls -al /var/log/*.out
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 574968 Jul 31 08:24 /var/log/daily.out
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 2343 Jul 31 08:25 /var/log/monthly.out
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 5077 Jul 31 08:24 /var/log/weekly.out

In this example, all three scripts last ran on 31st July.