No, I am not talking about the green thing that grows in the garden, nor am I talking about about the stuff that you must be smoking while reading this article :p . Grass is a restaurant at Nakshatra Mall near Dadar railway station towards the west. The place is located amongst the hustle bustle of Dadar area. The restaurant is right next to the theatre on the 2nd floor.
The first glance at the place – a not so brightly lit but adequately pleasant atmosphere. The place is sufficiently lit considering since there's no wall/windows facing the road, just an open gallery. The seats and quite nice and comfortable and about 4-7 people can fit on each table.
The food served ranges from Indian to Mexican to Chinese to Italian. Alcohol, soft drinks and hookah are also served. The preferred item on the menu is, without doubt, hookah, like most hookah joints I have seen ![":-P"]("http://blog.mehulved.com/templates/default/img/emoticons/tongue.png")
. We had some pasta, garlic bread and noodles. The food was nice, garlic bread were delicious. Then, while couple of friends enjoyed the hookah, I had a atrocious vanilla milkshake.
The service there is below par – the waiter had to be requested too many times for hookah. Small things like sauce were being forgotten, too ![":-("]("http://blog.mehulved.com/templates/default/img/emoticons/sad.png")
. Still, the time period for being served was pretty decent if you discount the long time that waiters take to approach your table. But, most people visiting the place don't really care as they're out to have some nice chat, chill out and smoke hookah. The atmosphere is leisurely amongst the general crowd.
So, overall it's a nice place to hangout with friends, especially if you're into having hookah and don't mind the slow service. A good place to hang out with friends occasionally on a leisurely weekend.
Hi Friends,
I have been reading up on network marketing recently. Like it or not it's something that is catching up everywhere around the world.
Network marketing as a concept sounds really catchy. It is definitely marred by a lot of fraud companies coming up with schemes which are unsustainable. But on the other hand there are definitely some good companies who have implemented these schemes in a honest manner.
Looking around I have found a lot of information explaining network marketing schemes but without any real world explanations. Then there are a lot of blogs on network marketing material, but it seems to be too narrow in scope and a bit biased by author's viewpoints.
Hence, I am taking up an initiative to collect real world examples of people who have actually participated in such schemes and can give me details of those schemes. I hope to receive some information which is hopefully backed by conclusive evidence to the statement.
If you have been a part of any network marketing, whatever your experience – good or bad, short period or long, gainer or looser, joined a good scheme or a bad one send me an email to
!["email]("http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/3113/mehul_netmkt.png")
Hopefully if I have enough good replies I can compile it all and put it up on the web so that everyone can benefit from the same.
No how-to from my side this time around. But a nice link I followed to setup tor and privoxy on my machine. It’s really easy to follow and straightforward.
http://www.opensourcehowto.org/how-to/privoxy/setup-tor–privoxy-for-anonymous-searching.html
Probably I will write a how-to on customising privoxy to block ads, unwanted url’s, redirect machines on the network to use tor and privoxy using firewall rules.
Met up again with junior college friends yesterday. And as always we were up to our stupid jokes, babe talks and business discussions.
While all that was going on we paid a visit to BPT – Bombay Port Trust Gardens at Colaba, near Navy Nagar. It's a really scenic and picturesque garden. Located right on the coast near Navy Nagar. It's provides an absolutely awesome view of Mumbai port near Navy Nagar, which is quintessentially naval area. You can see the tall and beautiful buildings in the area. You can also have a peek at TIFR, which is located at the end of Navy Nagar area. At the place where we sat, we saw a stunning cottage by the sea side with glowing light, turning more beautiful as it grew darker. We didn't figure out what the mysterious place is but it's too beautiful to be described.
The trees are really well maintained, hardly any garbage around and the place is much quieter than any I have seen in Mumbai.
Worth way more than Rs. 2 per head per visit.
If you live/visit to mumbai and love visiting scenic locations, this one's definitely in my recommended list of places to visit.
It's India's 61st Independance day today. 61 years filled with stories of failures, success, joy, anguish and all the emotions under the sun. There have been some great achievements and some things that have taken really bad turn. But, it always is those shades of gray that make it all worth it. We all love our motherland India for all it is and despite all is not.
We are afterall an independant country with the freedom to do what we want. On the 61st anniversary of India's Independance I would like to be thankful to my motherland and all it's inhabitants for the freedoms that I enjoy, that makes the life worth living.
Happy Independance Day to one and all.
I just had about 2 hours of nice sleep, after having been awake whole saturday night doing nothing fun. Then my friend called me up at around 12p.m.. My group of friends from VJTI were meeting up at our usual place near Ruia college.
I met them up at around 2 p.m.. We sat and chatted for the next one hour at the place discussing about what's going on with jobs and interviews scenario amoung ourselves. After that we decided to visit Baghdadi's, a small restaurant at Colaba known for it's non-veg food and serving size. So, after wasting another half an hour deciding mode of transport and destination to meet up at, me and another friend reached the place by bike while the rest of them took a train to CST, despite telling them to take one for Churchgate .
Since we reached ultra fast on the bike, compared to the train, we decided to have some cold coffee (yummy) in the meanwhile. They delayed for too long so we finally decided to meet up at Gateway of India. There was a huge crowd, typical on sundays, with hardly any place to sit. Thankfully we found enough place for 10 of us to sit side by side near the wall facing the sea.
Here we spent a good amount of time chatting, joking and arguing. I kept getting angry with idiots dumping all kinds garbage in the water. Worst part was when a policeman took a seat taken from a tonga(a horse carriage for those who don't know the local name) and threw it in the water. This is a really apt example of how moronic some of our police are. Hopefully, an article on this incident a bit later.
We decided to chuck the plans for Baghdadi's as no one was that hungry. Rather, we decided to go to the terrace restaurant at Hotel Strand, which I had once visited a couple of years back with some building friends. It's a not-so expensive restaurant considering the locality and the reputation of hotels in the area. A pot of tea/coffee for 2-3 just costs Rs. 50. Besides we ordered some Cheese Garlic Bread and scrambled eggs, some cold coffee for those who didn't have pot coffee. The food was great but it was eclipsed by the view around the hotel. The stretch of Gateway of India spread in all it's grandeur, overlooking the majestic Arabian sea with dozens of boats going around in the sea. And it's even better when viewed at late evenings – with the setting sun, cold breeze and the darker skies blending nicely with the open air restaurant. Just splendid! It's a view to experience, especially with your other half ![":-D"]("http://blog.mehulved.com/templates/default/img/emoticons/laugh.png")
.
We spent our whole evening at Hotel Strand's restaurant. With just 4 of us left at 8:00p.m. we decided to finally pay a visit to Baghdadi's and let my friends try their delicious non-veg dishes for the first time. My friends ordered for a Chicken Fry and a roti while I settled for an Egg Masala and Veg. Biryani, as I am not fond of chicken.
We spent a whole of 7 hours hardly realising how fast the day passed by. An awesome and joyous day ended with a nice early sleep that I so needed to catch up with.
A bit later in the day, but still Happy Friendship Day to all my friends out there.
Spent an awesome day with friends and recollected the memories of college days. ![":-)"]("http://blog.mehulved.com/templates/default/img/emoticons/smile.png")
Today on ##linux-india at irc.freenode.net people were discussing about DNS and the recent DNS security issue and it’s implications and solutions. So, I decided to try out the test for my ISP’s nameservers, the default nameservers that I use. The test can be found on Kaminsky’s Website.
The test confirmed that my ISP’s nameservers aren’t patched, so I decided to finally configure my dnsmasq finally and again use local DNS servers. But, the dnsmasq configuration is too lengthy and complicated for this purpose. It’s a great software if you want to have a lot of function like tftp boot, dhcp and such. But, in my case I just need a caching DNS server so decided it was either bind which I always use or try maradns, as suggested by someone on the channel.
Since, I have gone with bind in the past I decided to go with maradns, which I heard is easy to configure and is supposedly as secure as djbdns. So maradns it was. I downloaded the latest release from their download page as no binaries are available in arch repos.
So, let’s start with the process, now that you’ve downloaded the binary. This will work, only for linux. Please check the README files and documentation for further details and different platforms.
First untar the downloaded file, in my case the tar.bz2 file
tar xjvf maradns-1.3.07.08.tar.bz2
cd maradns-1.3.07.08
Then run
./configure
make
Now, your binaries have been created and you’re ready to test out the DNS server
Note:-You need to be root henceforth
mv server/maradns /usr/local/sbin
mv tools/duende /usr/local/sbin
mkdir /etc/maradns
touch /etc/mararc
Now open the /etc/mararc file in your favourite text editor and add the following
ipv4_bind_addresses = “127.0.0.1″
chroot_dir = “/etc/maradns”
recursive_acl = “127.0.0.1″
Now start maradns
/usr/local/sbin/maradns
Then test it
dig @127.0.0.1 example.com
If it returns a reply, you’re good to go 
If not, post the errors I will be glad to help out.
Now, try running it in daemon mode
killall maradns
/usr/local/sbin/duedne /usr/local/sbin/maradns
If all is fine till here then we can proceed to actually install maradns.
First cd to the maradns directory, where the source is place then run
make install
Now, we need to add /usr/local/sbin and /usr/local/bin to our PATH variable
add the following to your bashrc
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/sbin/:/usr/local/bin
That’s it, you’re done! Your server is ready to run.
TODO :- Find init scripts for starting it at boot time. My distro is arch. If anyone can supply me one I will be thankful.
PS :-
If you want the server to listen to multiple IP’s add them in a comma separated list inside the quotes for ipv4_bind_addresses. Check http://www.maradns.org/tutorial/recursive.html
Lots of nice stuff can be found at http://www.maradns.org/tutorial/tutorial.html
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