Hassan's blog

Hassan's Dance performances in HCL ODC.

2009-11-13T05:01:00.000-08:00

After long time, I got chance to look at my old videos. I cherish these moments with my friends.

1. 2001 - First public performance in HCL CODC with Venu, Venkat, ReddyBabu, Deepak

2. In 2002 - Dance was choreographed by ourselves, mostly Maddy, Hudson (Karate poses) and myself :-)

My First Movie with my son !

2009-08-19T03:03:00.000-07:00

8th Aug 2009

After dropping my wife (Nishath) to the MBA class in the afternoon, I just got idea of watching Movie 'Love Aaj Kal' (starring Saif, Deepika and Giselle Monteiro as Harleen).

Just went directly to Satyam Cinemas, but tickets were full already. As a last try, went to INOX movies in City Center. To my surprise, I could fetch tickets in the last minute and they were the final tickets. Just got lucky!!!

Straightaway informed my wife that we are going to movie in the evening after her classes over. It was a pleasant surprise for her too.

But, we were little worried whether my son 'Rayhan' will be able to adjust to theater environment or not, will he get scared by that big screen and sound effects etc. We just prepared our minds that if Rayhan didn't like, one of us needs to take him out and be with him outside of the movie hall and just play with him.

To our surprise, Rayhan liked the theater environment and he started enjoying watching the characters on the big screen and most importantly, the movie songs as well :-) I think he just loves the Music. During the interval, we just moved around and got some snacks and cool drinks. Rayhan too tasted the snacks from there and forced us to give him the Cool Drinks.

My family just enjoyed the Movie till the end and I will rejoice these memories forever. After the movie is over, we just had dinner in the Food Court in the City Center itself and finally moved towards the home back again.

My son, Rayhan !

2008-07-09T06:27:00.000-07:00

Sorry to update this blog toooo late about this news ! I am blessed with baby boy on 13th March 2008. Myself and Nishu gone through some of the most enjoyable emotions in our lives. We are grateful to Allah, for blessing us with parenthood.

We named the baby as Mohammad Rayhan. There are two meaning for Rayhan:
- First, sweet smelling plant/flower. Its mentioned in Surah Ar-rahman (55)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ar-Rahman

"Ar-Rahman is often regarded as the 'beauty of the Quran', in accordance with a hadith: Abdullah Ibn Mas'ud reported that the Prophet Muhammad said, "Everything has an adornment, and the adornment of the Qur'an is Surah ar Rahman" [Bayhaqi in Shuab al Eiman]

The main theme of the Surah is giving manifestation and fruits to the attribution of Allah's mercy and grace, which is evident right from the beginning, till the very end."

- Second, in some web sites, the meaning is mentioned as "Favored by God".

On this occasion, I would like to thank my parents, Nishu's parents and all family members for their love and support. May Allah bless Rayhan with health, happiness and success !

Drive through ambitions !

2008-07-09T05:19:00.000-07:00

It's been a ambition for me to own a car and have fun with family. Nowadays, my attention always go towards various cars roam on the roads. They catch my fascination and increase my passion to own a car sooooon.......I hope its on the cards .... very soon !!!

But, being a first car, I am thinking about pre-owned car. Mostly a sedan. I like Ford Ikon (ofcourse the one which suits my budget :-) )

Looking for an used car is little tough.

First SPOT is always special !!!

2008-02-22T03:57:00.000-08:00

I was surprised when my manager announced about SPOT award last time. It was ME ! Though I had several good moments to cherish in my previous organization, the first one (within 4months of joining time) at Arcot is a special one. Cheers to ME :-) ..... and long way to go !!! Hahahaha ....

CiscoWorks HUM 1.0 announcement from Cisco.com - Hurray !

2008-01-21T04:08:00.000-08:00

Yup, finally I saw the announcement about HUM 1.0 release (Health and Utilization Monitor) on Cisco.com web site. I am very happy to see this, and proud to be part of the development team at HCL, Cisco ODC.

Read more about it here :

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9303/index.html

Some pictures:

What I am doing during free time ??? Learn about Instrumentation in Java :-)

2008-01-21T03:32:00.000-08:00

Better late than never !!! Finally I got chance to learn and experiment with instrumentation in Java. Started discussing with friends on this topic and got some good information:

Instrumentation....JMX and SNMP are the two methods commonly used.Here is a good comparision (http://blogs.sun.com/jmxetc/entry/jmx_vs_snmp)]

----Tutorial on JMX : http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/jmx/

---- Tutorial on SNMP : http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/management/SNMP.html

and there's a neat and good stuff to try out one area of instrumentation - profiling using netbean's profiler.

http://www.netbeans.org/community/magazine/html/04/profiler.html

( make sure u do run this in a hig-end machine, as it eats quite some memory)

Netbeans site also has a good write-up on using JMX: http://www.netbeans.org/kb/articles/jmx-tutorial.html

I found this article on Profiling quite good:

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/391/viswanathan.html

I will add more stuff on this, as I work on this.

Top 10 reasons why IPsec VPNs fail

2007-12-04T07:58:00.000-08:00

Here's a top ten of possible weak points to check as you assess your IPsec VPN (got from NW site):

1. Use of weak pre-shared keys.

2. Inappropriate use of IKE/ISAKMP aggressive mode (with weak pre-shared keys).

3. Inappropriate method of authentication (pre-shared keys when digital signature [certificate] based authentication might be more appropriate).

4. Inappropriate use of wildcard or group pre-shared keys (where use of alternatives might be more appropriate/possible).

5. Use of identical pre-shared key with multiple peers (similar to #4).

6. Inappropriate use of Extended Authentication (XAuth, which may be vulnerable when used with weak pre-shared keys and aggressive mode IKE/ISAKMP).

7. Vulnerability of NTP and/or CRLs/OCSP used by PKI to DoS attack (relevant when using digital signature authentication).

8. Relatively weakly secured CA private key storage.

9. Storage of IPsec VPN gateway configuration files containing paintext pre-shared keys.

10. Use of encryption without authentication.

Where is Hassan nowadays?

2007-12-03T03:36:00.000-08:00

After working for more than 7 years at HCL Cisco, Chennai, it was a tough decision for me to change my job and move on to new exciting company Arcot Systems, Inc (www.arcot.com), Bangalore.