the old 500 mile email story

The author of the below email story was once a Morgan-Stanley employee. Perhaps someone responded to his last line :)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The following is the 500-mile email story in the form it originally appeared, in a post to sage-members on Sun, 24 Nov 2002.:

From trey@sage.org Fri Nov 29 18:00:49 2002
Date: Sun, 24 Nov 2002 21:03:02 -0500 (EST)
From: Trey Harris
To: sage-members@sage.org
Subject: The case of the 500-mile email (was RE: [SAGE] Favorite impossible
task?)

Here's a problem that *sounded* impossible... I almost regret posting the
story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks at a
conference. :-) The story is slightly altered in order to protect the
guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the
whole thing more entertaining.

I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when
I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.

"We're having a problem sending email out of the department."

"What's the problem?" I asked.

"We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained.

I choked on my latte. "Come again?"

"We can't send mail farther than 500 miles from here," he repeated. "A
little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther."

"Um... Email really doesn't work that way, generally," I said, trying to
keep panic out of my voice. One doesn't display panic when speaking to a
department chairman, even of a relatively impoverished department like
statistics. "What makes you think you can't send mail more than 500
miles?"

"It's not what I *think*," the chairman replied testily. "You see, when
we first noticed this happening, a few days ago--"

"You waited a few DAYS?" I interrupted, a tremor tinging my voice. "And
you couldn't send email this whole time?"

"We could send email. Just not more than--"

"--500 miles, yes," I finished for him, "I got that. But why didn't you
call earlier?"

"Well, we hadn't collected enough data to be sure of what was going on
until just now." Right. This is the chairman of *statistics*. "Anyway, I
asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it--"

"Geostatisticians..."

"--yes, and she's produced a map showing the radius within which we can
send email to be slightly more than 500 miles. There are a number of
destinations within that radius that we can't reach, either, or reach
sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius."

"I see," I said, and put my head in my hands. "When did this start? A
few days ago, you said, but did anything change in your systems at that
time?"

"Well, the consultant came in and patched our server and rebooted it.
But I called him, and he said he didn't touch the mail system."

"Okay, let me take a look, and I'll call you back," I said, scarcely
believing that I was playing along. It wasn't April Fool's Day. I tried
to remember if someone owed me a practical joke.

I logged into their department's server, and sent a few test mails. This
was in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, and a test mail to my own
account was delivered without a hitch. Ditto for one sent to Richmond,
and Atlanta, and Washington. Another to Princeton (400 miles) worked.

But then I tried to send an email to Memphis (600 miles). It failed.
Boston, failed. Detroit, failed. I got out my address book and started
trying to narrow this down. New York (420 miles) worked, but Providence
(580 miles) failed.

I was beginning to wonder if I had lost my sanity. I tried emailing a
friend who lived in North Carolina, but whose ISP was in Seattle.
Thankfully, it failed. If the problem had had to do with the geography of
the human recipient and not his mail server, I think I would have broken
down in tears.

Having established that--unbelievably--the problem as reported was true,
and repeatable, I took a look at the sendmail.cf file. It looked fairly
normal. In fact, it looked familiar.

I diffed it against the sendmail.cf in my home directory. It hadn't been
altered--it was a sendmail.cf I had written. And I was fairly certain I
hadn't enabled the "FAIL_MAIL_OVER_500_MILES" option. At a loss, I
telnetted into the SMTP port. The server happily responded with a SunOS
sendmail banner.

Wait a minute... a SunOS sendmail banner? At the time, Sun was still
shipping Sendmail 5 with its operating system, even though Sendmail 8 was
fairly mature. Being a good system administrator, I had standardized on
Sendmail 8. And also being a good system administrator, I had written a
sendmail.cf that used the nice long self-documenting option and variable
names available in Sendmail 8 rather than the cryptic punctuation-mark
codes that had been used in Sendmail 5.

The pieces fell into place, all at once, and I again choked on the dregs
of my now-cold latte. When the consultant had "patched the server," he
had apparently upgraded the version of SunOS, and in so doing
*downgraded* Sendmail. The upgrade helpfully left the sendmail.cf
alone, even though it was now the wrong version.

It so happens that Sendmail 5--at least, the version that Sun shipped,
which had some tweaks--could deal with the Sendmail 8 sendmail.cf, as most
of the rules had at that point remained unaltered. But the new long
configuration options--those it saw as junk, and skipped. And the
sendmail binary had no defaults compiled in for most of these, so, finding
no suitable settings in the sendmail.cf file, they were set to zero.

One of the settings that was set to zero was the timeout to connect to the
remote SMTP server. Some experimentation established that on this
particular machine with its typical load, a zero timeout would abort a
connect call in slightly over three milliseconds.

An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100%
switched. An outgoing packet wouldn't incur a router delay until hitting
the POP and reaching a router on the far side. So time to connect to a
lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be
governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by
incidental router delays.

Feeling slightly giddy, I typed into my shell:

$ units
1311 units, 63 prefixes

You have: 3 millilightseconds
You want: miles
* 558.84719
/ 0.0017893979

"500 miles, or a little bit more."

Trey Harris
--
I'm looking for work. If you need a SAGE Level IV with 10 years Perl,
tool development, training, and architecture experience, please email me
at trey@sage.org. I'm willing to relocate for the right opportunity.

Mumbai Attacks - just some quotes

Just putting some quotes together...making a picture, is your job:

1. R.R. Patil. Deputy C.M. Maharashtra : "इतने बड़े शहर में एक दो घटनाएं हो जाती हैं । "

2.

"When I went out today photographing, a lot of local people were coming up and being apologetic and saying, `Sorry, this isn't what India is normally about.' All the people in the hotel are very kind to me. They're very humbled by this...They're apologetic about what's going on in their city." - Daniel Gautreau, a Canadian who's been in Mumbai since Monday.

3. "बिहारी, मराठी भूल जाओ। हम सब हिन्दुस्तानी हैं। " - An NSG commando

4. "It's not burning there, it's burning here (pointing to his heart)" A man near the funeral pyre of ATS Chief Hemant Karkare.

5. "We will send ISI chief to India to help in the investigation. We are not in this, then why should we be ashamed? We have nothing to hide." Pakistan Prime Minister on 28th Nov.

"Umm....scrap the above. We will not send the ISI chief to India." Pakistan Prime Minister on 29th Nov.

6. "Whoever these terrorists are, they are not true Muslims. They are maligning my religion. As per Quran, anyone who kills even one innocent person will go to Hell and anyone saving even one innocent soul will go to heaven." - A Muslim Mumbaikar.

7. "भारत माता की जय !! भारत माता की जय! " - Common People across the street.

When the night is dark enough...

The path may be dreary
Your goal not near by
But the target should be clear
And don’t let your dreams die.

Strive for what you want to achieve
Don’t fear from the slope
You can conquer the mountains
Just start with a hope.

Win over your misfortunes
No-matter-what comes your way
Keep making the picture,
Your eyes will see it real some day.

Relish even the gloomy moments
Smiles can conceal the tear
And when the night is dark enough,
Remember –
“THE DAWN IS NEAR !!”

Ankush Agarwal

Copyright ©2006 Ankush Agarwal

Vote for it: http://www.poetry.com/voteforme/poemvote1.asp?PID=9407420

इजाज़त

हम जिस ज़मीं पर ठोकर लगा आये थे,
सुना है उन पत्थरों पर, अब फूल खिलते हैं |
दोस्ती तो है इक आदत बुरी मेरी, मगर
ये अजनबी क्यों इस अपनेपन से गले मिलते हैं ?

चंद पलों में, कई सदियां गुज़रने के बाद,
दिल ने कुछ कहना चाहा ही था;
आंखें भरी भी नहीं, ज़ुबां हिली भी नहीं,
बस कानों ने सुना - "चलते हैं"

चेहरे पर चिपकी मुस्कराहट, देखी तो मगर
सोचा न कभी, क्या किसी कोने में आंसू भी पलते हैं ?
जुदा होने कि इजाज़त, वो मांगते हैं हमसे,
हम खुदा तो नहीं, हम भी कुछ बातों से डरते हैं |

बीती हुई कुछ यादों की गर्मी बची है बस,
जिनके सहारे हमारी ज़िन्दगी के पल पिघलते हैं ;
सपनों को पुकारे जो, इक ऐसी रात का इंतज़ार है मुझे ,
ये बात और है कि कुदरत में,रोज़ सूरज ढलते हैं ||

'तू ' - मेरी एकमात्र कविता

दिल ये चाहता है,

सुना तुझे अपना हाल दूँ,
सदा के लिये मेरी बन जा
आ; तुझे कविता में ढाल दूँ |

ज़ुल्फ की काली घटाओं में छुपा,
प्यारा चांद सा गाल दूँ,
जिसकी न कोई हो मिसाल,
एैसी तेरी मिसाल दूँ |

रेशमी हों , या नागिन कि तरह ?
कैसे तेरे बाल दूँ ?
या दिल जिसमें उलझा मेरा
उसे कह एैसा जाल दूँ ?

बस चले गर मेरा, तो दुनिया भर का
शबाब तुझमें डाल दूँ ;
नज़रों पर जो थोड़ी इनायत हो जाये,
मौत को भी मैं टाल दूँ ||

मेरे सिवा न कोई समझ सके,
बना तुझे एैसा सवाल दूँ,
सारा जहाँ भी न कर सके बराबरी,
अँकुश का इतना तुझे प्यार दूँ ||

Hindu Rate of Wrath

An article published in Outlook. Though a bit tilted, it does makes some interesting points:

Is there such a thing as 'Hindu terrorism', as the arrest of Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur for the recent Malegaon blasts may tend to prove? Well, I guess I was asked to write this column because I am one of that rare breed of foreign correspondents—a lover of Hindus! A born Frenchman, Catholic-educated and non-Hindu, I do hope I'll be given some credit for my opinions, which are not the product of my parents' ideas, my education or my atavism, but garnered from 25 years of reporting in South Asia (for Le Journal de Geneve and Le Figaro).

In the early 1980s, when I started freelancing in south India, doing photo features on kalaripayattu, the Ayyappa festival, or the Ayyanars, I slowly realised that the genius of this country lies in its Hindu ethos, in the true spirituality behind Hinduism. The average Hindu you meet in a million villages possesses this simple, innate spirituality and accepts your diversity, whether you are Christian or Muslim, Jain or Arab, French or Chinese. It is this Hinduness that makes the Indian Christian different from, say, a French Christian, or the Indian Muslim unlike a Saudi Muslim. I also learnt that Hindus not only believed that the divine could manifest itself at different times, under different names, using different scriptures (not to mention the wonderful avatar concept, the perfect answer to 21st century religious strife) but that they had also given refuge to persecuted minorities from across the world—Syrian Christians, Parsis, Jews, Armenians, and today, Tibetans. In 3,500 years of existence, Hindus have never militarily invaded another country, never tried to impose their religion on others by force or induced conversions.

You cannot find anybody less fundamentalist than a Hindu in the world and it saddens me when I see the Indian and western press equating terrorist groups like SIMI, which blow up innocent civilians, with ordinary, angry Hindus who burn churches without killing anybody. We know also that most of these communal incidents often involve persons from the same groups—often Dalits and tribals—some of who have converted to Christianity and others not.

However reprehensible the destruction of Babri Masjid, no Muslim was killed in the process; compare this to the 'vengeance' bombings of 1993 in Bombay, which wiped out hundreds of innocents, mostly Hindus. Yet the Babri Masjid destruction is often described by journalists as the more horrible act of the two. We also remember how Sharad Pawar, when he was chief minister of Maharashtra in 1993, lied about a bomb that was supposed to have gone off in a Muslim locality of Bombay.

I have never been politically correct, but have always written what I have discovered while reporting. Let me then be straightforward about this so-called Hindu terror. Hindus, since the first Arab invasions, have been at the receiving end of terrorism, whether it was by Timur, who killed 1,00,000 Hindus in a single day in 1399, or by the Portuguese Inquisition which crucified Brahmins in Goa. Today, Hindus are still being targeted: there were one million Hindus in the Kashmir valley in 1900; only a few hundred remain, the rest having fled in terror. Blasts after blasts have killed hundreds of innocent Hindus all over India in the last four years. Hindus, the overwhelming majority community of this country, are being made fun of, are despised, are deprived of the most basic facilities for one of their most sacred pilgrimages in Amarnath while their government heavily sponsors the Haj. They see their brothers and sisters converted to Christianity through inducements and financial traps, see a harmless 84-year-old swami and a sadhvi brutally murdered. Their gods are blasphemed.

So sometimes, enough is enough.At some point, after years or even centuries of submitting like sheep to slaughter, Hindus—whom the Mahatma once gently called cowards—erupt in uncontrolled fury. And it hurts badly. It happened in Gujarat. It happened in Jammu, then in Kandhamal, Mangalore, and Malegaon. It may happen again elsewhere. What should be understood is that this is a spontaneous revolution on the ground, by ordinary Hindus, without any planning from the political leadership. Therefore, the BJP, instead of acting embarrassed, should not disown those who choose other means to let their anguished voices be heard.

There are about a billion Hindus, one in every six persons on this planet. They form one of the most successful, law-abiding and integrated communities in the world today. Can you call them terrorists?

---

By Francois Gautier

(The writer is the editor-in-chief of the Paris-based La Revue de l'Inde.)

awww

click on the pic, to see it properly.
Thx to "Desi in Toronto" for this.