I recently started using Genymotion for emulating an Android image so I could test an app.  To install the app I simply dragged and dropped the apk file into the running Genymotion VM of the phone.  But for some reason the app just kept crashing with the error “unfortunately, your application has stopped”.

Running the following gave me a ton of output but this was what was the relevant bit:

$ adb -e logcat

java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: Cannot load library: load_library(linker.cpp:750): library “/system/lib/libhoudini.so” not found

What in the world is libhoudini??? Some googling brought me to this post.

According to this I needed an ARM translation library so the app still thinks it’s running on an ARM processor (which it isn’t because it’s running in x86 Virtualbox hypervisor).  Simply drag-n-drop the ARM translation.zip file into the Genymotion VM and boom, you should be good to go!

In the capitalist world, it is said that the companies survive on the hyper-consumerism of the people. The highly competitive economical scenario results in an environment where (as they say) consumer is the winner, but not without a fight.
A few weeks back, my Compaq Presario Laptop 2575us went bad. Well, the laptop is 2 yrs old and it has already been serviced twice so I guess my patience thresholds have diminished over a period of time. But this time around a person with even immense patience could have lost his mind. So here’s what happened. My laptop’s S-video port had been dysfunctional since the time I can recall but I never had so much time to let my laptop go out of my hands. This time when I sent it for repairs my laptop almost disappeared from the face of the earth for almost 25 days. And when they returned it to me to a wrong address I had a premonition of difficult times. The “repaired” laptop even failed to start.
This really infuriated me coz my 25 day wait had gone down the drain. So I called up the customer care and they asked me to ship the laptop to service center yet again. But this time around they wanted me to wait for 3 days before I could FedEx it to them. It was completely unacceptable to me. So I spoke to the supervisor and became as adamant as a stone. I continued to ask him for next day shipping and he continued to repeat that he could not do that. A 2hr45min sparring continued on the phone and it resulted in him being the loser as he disconnected the phone. He kept saying that this discussion is going nowhere as we cannot reach an agreement and I kept insisting that the call had multiple destinations : 1. To the HP supervisors and 2. To the BBB .
This guy called himself Nick and he also refused to give me his employee number. I knew very well (because of past experience that Compaq uses words like “You have no proof for your requests” etc.) so this time I needed some real strong evidence of my conversation. So I requested the permission from this Nick guy to allow me to record the conversation. I think this made him a little wary of my intentions. But still he did not give me his details. I think he was really scared because he felt that my wrath could result in him facing the music from his bosses in Palo Alto, CA. There were a few interesting discussions, for example, he said “I am Nick and you can identify me with this name alone.” to which I retorted by saying “Well…I know that Nick is a common name in U.S and you guys might as well redirect my call to NY Knicks judging by the way things are going.”.
So the next day I called up the HP Customer Care Service Manager’s Line at 1-877-917-4380 , code 94 option 1. This time I spoke to a guy called Douglas Gilmore who was equally tough with me (if not more). He refused to acknowledge any of my concerns initially. But later as the conversation progressed, it went on from being just a plain discussion to a heated argument. However, I did not utter even a single foul word because I knew that he could use my language as a pretext to disconnect my call which I was not willing to risk at all. So throughout the discussion I kept my head cool and tried to explain the things to him. But after going through the history of the whole thing, he realized that I had suffered a lot because of this laptop and that the attitude of the Customer care was rather cold. So he finally agreed to give me a replacement after much requests. This was probably my best argument till date and I think that it was some good thinking on my part as well as some codial behavior on the part of the managers that I could get what I truly deserved: a replacement to my defective laptop.
-Rajat.
Japanese art forms

I finally got a new home for my blog.  www.rajatswarup.com will be my new homepage.   In the coming days, I’ll continue blogging while also improving the look & feel of my website.  Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I wanted to use variables in a bash script’s for loop inside awk’s print statement.
Here’s an easy way to do it – enclose the bash variable within "’"

Here’s a sample scripts to take a list of IPs and do a DNS lookup and generate a CSV:

for ip in `cat ips.txt`
do
  host $ip|grep -v NXDOMAIN|sed 's/\.$//g'|awk '{print "'"$ip"'"","$NF}'
done

i updated my backtrack 4 R1 finally using the directions mentioned here. However, after the upgrade my Intel Corporation Wireless WiFi Link 5100 wireless adapter stopped working. My first thought was that the driver was corrupted or something after the upgrade.
But looking through the ‘dmesg‘ command output it became clear that during the startup a particular file iwlwifi-5000-2.ucode could not be located. I thought a reinstall will do it (always works right?).
# apt-get install firmware-iwlwifi
No luck yet! Searching for these files showed me that they were in two locations and both of these were identical (verified via md5sum) :
/lib/firmware-2.6.30.9/iwlwifi-5000-2.ucode
/lib/firmware-2.6.34/iwlwifi-5000-2.ucode
So I just added a symbolic link as follows:
ln -s /lib/firmware-2.6.34/iwlwifi-5000-2.ucode /lib/firmware-2.6.35.8/iwlwifi-5000-2.ucode
Voila! It now worked! Hope it helps!

I wrote a very small script to set static IPs on a kubuntu box.

#!/bin/bash
if [ $# -lt 4 ]
then
    echo "Usage: $0 <interface> <ip> <netmask> <gateway> <dns1>"
exit
fi
ifconfig $1 $2 netmask $3
echo "Static IP set"
route add default gw $4
echo "Routes added"
if [ "$5" != "" ]
then
    echo "nameserver $5" >>/etc/resolv.conf
fi
echo "DNS set"

Come end of semester and the project deadlines start impending! The situation I am in is one of great thrill and rush! For the CS558L I’m doing this project in which I have to implement an automated worm fingerprinting mechanism but not only that combining it with ITrace I want to make Worm attacks and DDoS attacks a thing of past!
The scheme in plain English is to detect automatically if your network is being attacked by looking at the traffic and if so communicate this information to whoever you are forwarding this packet to! The ICMP messages that will be forwarded will carry information about who sent this traffic and other such information (including the signature of attack traffic). The receiver with all this information could gather the source of attacks. If all the routers followed this scheme then we will be able to reconstruct the entire path of the attack so the entry point of the attack could also be sealed….(hopefully leading to a Worm and DDoS attack-free internet)!!!
Really hopeful…aren’t I??? 😉
But again this technique has the same single flaw as the other techniques in that it needs co-operation between ISPs.
I am currently coding this scheme in the Linux Kernel 2.6.11.7 and this is my first tryst with linux kernel programming…let’s see what future holds for me!