/me on the net!

Pradeepto and his team have come up with kde posters for Foss.in.



Posters were announced today morning, and within 20 hours 917, 1237, 689, 869 visitors viewed the posters respectively. I hope we'll do a re-run of some new posters for spring '08 collection too

A few IRC idlers met up at Pizzeria for a round of pizzas, since BigBeard was in town. And make no mistake, BigBeard knows more about food places than all of us localhosts combined

As with all such unplanned BoFs, it went very well. Let's just hope Pradeepto will find his way, and become a Page 11 Celebrity.

And as for Green Chili Icecream, head over to marine drive and look for Bachelorr's

After attending Freed.in, we took a bus and ran away to Manali to escape the delhi heat. The 19 hour bus journey started around 4PM in the evening with everyone buying random stuff to eat and drink, fixing the music system, clicking pictures of random people and objects, listening to gora crack random jokes and searching for a good dhaba to have dinner.



Next morning we all woke up in himachal pradesh, drooling at the awesome himalyan mountains and the gorges. Next day was the trip to Rohtang pass to see the fresh snowfall. High altitude (well, compared to Mumbai), freeezzzzing atmosphere, super chilled breeze, it was all there.



Solang valley is a small place 18Km up the hills from Manali city, with half a dozen resorts and facilities for rope-way and para gliding.

After taking a dip in near boiling sulphur smelling ground water at vasistha, it seems my hair fall has come down considerably - or is it just my figment of imagination



Trip to manali was sure fun. Now let us see when do i get to go to laddakh.

Pictures from Manali trip

Kind of funny - but there's an engineering college in Andhra Pradesh named Anurag Engineering College.

There was a time when i used to have a watch, a bedside alarm clock, deskside calendar, el-cheapo calculator, a camera, a paper address book. And i was planning to buy a digital diary too.

Now i just use my cell phone to do all that. Wonder which other daily life gadget is the cellphone going to replace.

Last week all of us (#linux-india) gathered at JNU for Freed.in, the annual Foss conference organised by ilug-delhi. Spread over 2 days and dozens of talks, Freed.in turned out very well this year.

Many thanks to the entire Freed.in team and volunteers for the awesome hospitality (and the plentiful kebabs).

Pictures from Freed.in 2007

A week back, we went on to a trek to the Torna fort. Located about 40KM off from Pune on the Pune - Bangalore national highway, this place is well known for the enormous amount of flowers that blossom in this season(first to second week of september).

Reaching the base village is not too difficult if you have hired a vehicle. Once reaching the base village Velhe, it takes around 3 hours to reach the fort. The upward climb it not too difficult if the weather is calm and cloudy. The best time to go there is first and second week of September when the monsoon has just finished and the flowers start blossoming.

Awesome place really

author ketan tanna talks about the foss movement, in the weekly section tribal instincts in times of india. check out the 12th page or on timesofindia epaper

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HTTP based authentication is the most common and easy-to-setup way of protecting content in apache. But with normal .htaccess/.htpasswd based protection, the problem is, .htpasswd file should be present in the webserver's filesystem, and in most cases those users are not local unix users.

mod_auth_imap attempts to overcome this limitation by allowing apache to authenticate against an IMAP server, local/remote/whatever. Setting up authentication with mod_auth_imap is also straightforward.

• Download the mod_auth_imap tarball from http://ben.brillat.net/projects/mod_auth_imap/, and extract the contents.
• Make sure apxs is installed (its available in apache2-dev package in debian)
• Run # apxs -i -a -c mod_auth_imap.c as root user to build the apache module and install it in apache.
• Make sure that mod_auth_imap module is enabled in your apache configuration.

An example .htaccess file will look like this.

#Turn on IMAP Authentication
Auth_IMAP_Enabled on
AuthName "Use IMAP username to login"
AuthType Basic

# Turn off Basic auth. We'll make IMAP as authoritative.
AuthBasicAuthoritative Off

#If you feel like it, restrict the users or allow all valid users:
# Require user foouser
Require valid-user

#Make IMAP Authentication authoritative for this .htaccess file:
Auth_IMAP_Authoritative on
Auth_IMAP_Server imap.example.org
Auth_IMAP_Port 143
Auth_IMAP_Log on