Bought a new SMPS for my PC

My old computer got a new SMPS (Switching Mode Power Supply) today. My PC is really old (bought in 2001). And the SMPS was also of that time. It had been too much noisy these days. The other day, I was surprised when my computer started up noiselessly. The fan inside the SMPS was not rotating at all! I had to poke it with a stick to make it moving. I knew it is time to get a new one.

I was not sure whether a new SMPS will fit into my old computer. But it didn't make any problem. Actually I was a little confused when I saw the motherboard connector was more wide than the old one and wouldn't seem to go into its socket, but later found that it can be opened into two parts.

Now my room has got back its calmness. If you are thinking of replacing your SMPS do it today. It does not cost much. And it is easy to assemble. You have to just screw the thing to the cabinet and plug the cords to the motherboard, hard disks and any other drives (CD-DVD, floppy) you have.

Hubble Finds Youngest Galaxy

Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has found a galaxy 13 billion light-years away. Current estimated age of the universe is 13.7 billion years. So we are looking at galaxy (A1689-zD1) only 700 million years after the big bang when it is just coming out of the dark ages.
The dark ages began about 400,000 years after the big bang, when the universe is filled with clouds of cold hydrogen. Later, formation of galaxies and stars cleared out the hydrogen and put an end to the dark ages.
The galaxy is not visible in light images because it is red shifted into the infrared region and detected by the Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) and Spitzer. A phenomenon call Gravitational Lensing also helped magnify the faraway galaxy and increase its brightness about 10 times.
The galaxy is brimming with star birth in the early universe. It is still in formation stage and in an irregular form. This discovery will help astronomers to understand the various stages in formation of galaxies. More detailed study of the galaxy can be done with the Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scheduled to launch in 2013.

Read the Original Hubble News Release

Connect through TELNET and SSH

Recently I found out how powerful these telnet and SSH technologies are. Well, I have heard about them previously, but never got interested to try them out.
With a telnet client which is available for virtually any platform you can connect to the sever computer and work on there. To telnet to your computer you have to set up a telnet server on it.

To install telnet server on ubuntu use the command

sudo apt-get install telnetd

After the installation is complete run

sudo /etc/init.d/openbsd-inetd restart

A simple Java based server is PWTS which runs on any platform which have Java Runtime Environment.

Telnet server by default runs on port 23 and SSH on port 22. So you may have to forward those ports if you are behind a router and want to telnet your computer over the internet.

There are also some free public systems to which you can telnet and and work on there. Such as, if you want to connect to the SDF Public Access UNIX System from Windows XP, in the command prompt type
telnet sdf.lonestar.org

You have to register to use it, of course. I found a list of free shell accounts on the internet, you may check out.

Telnet clients are also available for mobiles. A free J2ME telnet client is MidpSSH through which you can connect to a telnet server from your mobile and run commands.There is also PuTTY - a free cross platform telnet/SSH client which is also available for Symbian platform for mobile phones.

Telnet is said to be not secure as it sends everything including passwords as plain text. Thats where comes SSH (Secure Shell), which secures transmission of information between two computers. Nevertheless telnet still remains very popular.