Every blogger has their own reasons for blogging. Many these days do it for the money, other for fame or to keep in touch with their family and friends. I do it for one simple reason... I learn lots of things everyday and I forget lot of them too. I don't want to remember topics which aren't absolutely essential for my day-to-day work. However I do need them at times and often with high degree of urgency. So I use my blog as a knowledge repository. I write about the things I learned so I am (and you too) able to search them later on my blog. It is much easier to find things on my blog than in the wide world of world wide web with Google search. Also what you will find on this blog is distilled knowledge, not just some random brain dump or post-hangover ramblings. Simple thoughts is about simple solutions to complex problems, mostly technical in nature. We do not cover celebrities, except as jokes or in technical context, nor do we cover politicians, except occasionally to ridicule them, nor do we blogbait, except maybe once (successfully if I may add). I do sometimes include some humor (my style if I may add); even techies need to laugh, no? So if you are looking for a hardcore techie diet or you have a question to answer (or an itch to scratch) you come right here. Check the categories on your right to find the topic that interests you and jump right in. Don't forget to use our search should you need something specific.

All SSH servers on the internet are heavily targeted for brute-force cracking of passwords. Easy passwords can and are often cracked to gain full control over the machine. Here is a simple hack to thwart most of such hacking attempts.

Why in the world I am getting overseas travel insurance ads on my highly technical blog?

I typically use more on Linux following my earlier habit from Unix & Sun / Solaris days; and it works fine for most purposes. However today I found out that less (which bills itself as opposite of more) is actually much more functional and useful than more.

Comment Guard Pro is finally turning out to be the uber anti-comment spam protection plugin I dreamt of; everything you would ever want in a comment spam protection plugin and more, much more. The plugin itself is composed of several modules, each of which can be individually enabled / disabled, tweaked and configured all from the user interface. You can easily write your own modules or pluglets too. It addresses all forms of comment spam including regular comment spam, trackback spam, referrer spam and pingback spam. It will ship with over a dozen pluglets (small plugins) for filtering spam. We are in the final stages of development, adding few plugins, making the UI nicer etc. The documentation (my bane) is yet to be written but I have found a volunteer this time around.