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The Internet's Treasure Hunt: How Your Computer Finds Websites

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 Have you ever realized that computers don't actually understand website names? When you type  https://something.com  on your laptop or phone, your computer has no idea where that is. Computers only speak in numbers, specifically  IP Addresses  (like  192.0.2.1 ). The system that translates the human name you know into the numerical address the computer needs is called  DNS (Domain Name System) . Look at the diagram below. It might look like a confusing map of arrows, but it’s actually a very organized treasure hunt. Let’s break down the story of how your request travels through this map using an analogy of trying to find a specific room on a giant school campus. Step 1: The Quick Check (The DNS Cache) Look at the stick figure on the left. That’s you trying to go to  something.com . Before your computer goes out to the internet, it does the equivalent of checking its own pockets. It looks in the  DNS Cache  (that first diamond shape). Th...
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AI's "Brain" is Stuck in the Past. Here's How We Give It a Library Card.

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 We’ve all been there. You ask an AI chatbot for help, and it confidently tells you something that's... well, completely out of date. "I'm sorry, my knowledge only goes up to 2023." It’s frustrating. These incredible "brains," known as Large Language Models (LLMs), are like the smartest person you’ve ever met. They’ve read almost the entire internet, but they’re stuck in a "closed-book" exam. They don't know what happened yesterday, and they certainly don't know anything about  your  private company documents or your school's homework list. So, how do we fix this? We can't spend millions of dollars retraining these giant models every single day. The answer is surprisingly clever, and it’s called  RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) . Forget the jargon. At its heart, RAG is just a story of a great partnership. Here is that explanation adapted into a blog post with a human, conversational tone. AI's "Brain" is Stuck in ...
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Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange (TLS Handshakes)

How Your Browser Secretly Shares a Key (Even on Public Wi-Fi!) Ever see that little padlock 🔒 in your browser and wonder how it  actually  keeps your stuff safe? How can your browser and a website agree on a secret code to scramble your password... when any hacker could be listening in? It sounds impossible, right? It's not magic, but it's a super clever mathematical trick called the  Diffie-Hellman key exchange . At its core, it's a way for two parties (like your browser and a server) to create a  shared secret key  over the public internet, without  ever sending the key itself. This brand-new shared secret is then used to create  another  key, called a  symmetric key  (you might hear tech folks call it 'AES'). This  second  key is a super-fast, heavy-duty encryption key that does all the hard work of scrambling and unscrambling your data for the rest of your visit. The easiest way to get this is with the famous "mixing paint...
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Building a Smart Holiday Booking System with Agent-to-Agent Communication

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 Building a Multi-Agent Holiday Booking System with the A2A Protocol (An MVP Approach) The world of AI is rapidly moving towards "agentic systems" — autonomous AI agents that can perform complex, multi-step tasks by collaborating with each other. The challenge, however, has always been standardization: how do you get agents built on different frameworks, by different teams, to communicate effectively? This is the problem the  Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol , an open standard, aims to solve. It provides a common language for agents to discover, communicate, and collaborate securely. In this blog post, we'll walk through a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach to a real-world scenario: building a holiday booking system using the A2A protocol in python. Design Architecture (MVP) The Problem: A Siloed Booking Experience Imagine a traditional holiday booking website. It might have separate sections for flights, hotels, and cabs. Each of these services is handled by a different int...
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Scaling Up Your Kafka Cluster: A Step-by-Step Guide

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Apache Kafka is a powerful distributed streaming platform. But for high availability and increased throughput, running a single Kafka server might not be enough. This blog post will guide you through setting up a multi-node Kafka cluster using the KRaft protocol. What You'll Need: Multiple servers with Kafka installed SSH access to each server Step 1: Configure Server IDs Navigate to the config/kraft directory within your Kafka installation on each server. Grant write permissions for the current user: Bash sudo chmod -R u+w /opt/kafka/config/kraft 3. Copy the existing server.properties file and rename it for each server: Bash sudo cp -f server.properties server1.properties sudo cp -f server.properties server2.properties sudo cp -f server.properties server3.properties 4.Edit each server's configuration file and update the node.id property with a unique value: server1.properties : node.id=1 server2.properties : node.id=2 server3.properties : node.id=3 Step 2: D...
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Apache kafka using kraft

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Getting Started with Kafka in Kraft Mode: A Step-by-Step Guide Kafka is a powerful platform for real-time data processing. Traditionally, it relied on ZooKeeper for controller election and state management. However, Kraft mode, introduced in Kafka 3.0, offers significant improvements in reliability, performance, and manageability. This blog post provides a step-by-step guide to running Kafka in Kraft mode, helping you unlock its benefits. Let's dive in! Understanding Kafka Configuration Files: Navigating the Configuration Directory: Bash cd /opt/kafka ls config/kraft This command navigates to the Kafka configuration directory and lists files specific to Kraft mode. Configuration File Breakdown: broker.properties : This file manages topic partitioning and data storage/retrieval. controller.properties : Here lies the configuration for Kraft-based leader election. server.properties : This file combines the settings of both broker.properties and controller.properties for a strea...
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Apache kafka Setup in Google cloud

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This blog post guides you through setting up a basic Kafka environment on Google Cloud Platform for learning purposes. Kafka is a powerful distributed event streaming platform used for real-time data processing. We'll walk through launching a Kafka cluster, creating a topic, and sending and consuming messages. Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform that lets you read, write, store, and process events (also called records or messages in the documentation) across many machines. Prerequisites: A Google Cloud Platform account Steps: Deploying Kafka: Head over to the Google Cloud Marketplace: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/google/kafka Click on "LAUNCH" and proceed with the deployment configuration. Important: For service account, you can choose an existing one or create a new one with appropriate permissions. Select a deployment region closest to you for optimal performance. Keep the disk space settings at default for this learning exe...
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