Technological curry

Automaticall reconnect the internet on disconnection

2009-08-18T23:55:00.003+05:30

Due to certain problems with my ISP my net often gets disconnected. As you can guess there is nothing more frustrating then trying to do something and see that your internet is not working and then manually reconnecting the network. In order to fix this i wrote a simple script to monitor my network at an interval of one minute
Command:

vi ~/monitor.sh

Script:

#!/bin/bash
export DISPLAY=:0
pingout=`ping www.google.com -q -c 5 -W 2`;
pingstatus=$?;
total=`echo $pingout| grep transmitted | sed "s/.*$[[:digit:]]$ received.*/\1/"`;
if [[ $total -lt 4 || $pingstatus -ne '0' || $total -eq '' ]]
then
logger "Internet connection not working.$total/5 pings. Reconnecting..."
notify-send -i modem "Reconnecting" "$total/5 pings failed. Reconnecting..."
poff -a;
pon dsl-provider;
else
logger "Internet connection working properly"
fi

The script pings google.com and if less then four pings are successful in five attempts(60%) then a reconnection is performed.
To execute it periodically every minute i just added it to cron by simply executing

crontab -e

in a terminal and adding the following line at the end of the file

* * * * * ~/monitor.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

New Post Finally

2008-04-12T18:27:00.002+05:30

First of all i would really like to apologize to my friends who visit my blog and don't find anything post on it :(. It has been almost 7 months since i posted my last post on this blog.
The reason for me not posting anything on the blog is that i got disconnected from the internet in september due to a small argument with my ISP. I got internet installed a month or two back and i had been so busy since then that i didn't get any time post anything. Anyways, here is a summary of what has happened in the past months.

Sadly but truly i have grown fatter.
The result for our 3rd semester came out and i have passed :).
Me and my team won two event trophies. "Technophilia - Jawahar Lal University"and "Envisage - IIC ,DU". Me and one of my friend also won three events at MSIT, IP. There was no team trophy there had there been any i am sure we would have got it ;).

This is in all what has happened. I have made a promise before to post regularly so i won't make it again to break it but i sincerely hope i will be able to update the blog as regularly as possible.

Online Office suite market heating up

2007-09-21T20:52:00.000+05:30

The online office suite market is heating up with Google launching it's power point creator to complete it's office suite. Google competes directly with Zoho which also has a very famous and successful offering for the online office suite.
Although Zoho is not as popular as Google docs it is much more powerful. For eg. The Google power point creation tool does not allow users to create basic figures in presentations which is allowed by Zoho Show.
In my view although less famous Zoho wins hands down in the competition against Google. It does help against competition when you are as famous as Google. But unless Google adds some of the basic functionality in it's tools I don't see it winning against Zoho in the near future.

Content-Aware Image Resizing

2007-08-29T02:54:00.000+05:30

'Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing' is the name of the paper presented by two Israeli professors, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir, at the SIGGRAPH 2007 conference in San Diego (paper here)

The algorithm for resizing figures out which parts of an image are less significant which makes it possible to change the aspect ratio of an image without making the content look skewed or stretched out.Let's wait and watch some real applications being made available which use this algorithm. I would love that.

Microsoft hackers blog

2007-08-29T02:42:00.000+05:30

"Hackers @ Microsoft" is name of a new Microsoft blog officially launched on blogs.msdn.com the website which hosts many of Microsoft's employee blogs. This blog promises to tell us what some of the white hat hackers at Microsoft do. Quoting the blog post...

We employ "white hat hackers" who spend their time pen testing and code reviewing applications and software looking for weaknesses and vulnerabilities so that others don't once we've released that code into the wild. We employ many many smart testers who know more about some of our software then perhaps the architects who designed it. We also employ some of the top researchers in their industry, dedicated people working on the bleeding edge of whats going to be common place in the next 5 or 10 years of computing. So yes, Microsoft does have hackers, and its time to introduce you to some of them and show you what it is, exactly that they do.

Interesting? Well, it has been three days and i haven't seen anything interesting on the blog come up yet. I do hope that hackers @ Microsoft come with a nice article soon.

Error mounting UDF DVD in linux

2007-08-13T01:00:00.000+05:30

Today while working on linux i stumbled on an interesting problem. The problem was that whenever i put my DVD which was in UDF format into the drive linux simply wouldn't mount it. It reported the following error:

Unable to mount the selected volume. The volume is probably in a format that cannot be mounted

mount: block device /dev/hdc is write-protected, mounting read-only
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdc,
missing codepage or other error
in some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

upone doing "dmesg | tail" i got the error "Unable to identify CD-ROM format". This surely was impossible as the linux kernel comes with udf support built-in. This lead me to believe that the problem lay somewhere else. After a lot of hits and misses i found out that the problem lay in the "/etc/fstab" file.
It previously contained the line:

/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 users,noauto 0 0

upon changing this line to

/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 auto users,noauto 0 0

everything started working great.

Download torrents using firefox

2007-06-22T22:01:00.000+05:30

Opera comes with an inbuilt torrent downloader which allows you to download torrents from the internet. Although the same functionality doesn't come inbuilt in firefox, there are couple of extensions available for firefox which allow you to download torrents.

Firetorrent

Firetorrent was initially created for a browser named wyzo , a firefox modification like flock. It is designed with people having minimal bittorent experience in mind.
Firetorrent adds a seperate tab to the browser's download manager where you can see all the torrents which are downoading. It is the best and most easy-to-use torrent downloading extension available today for firefox.

Firetorrent

FoxTorrent

FoxTorrent is developed by the Silicon Valley based company RedSwoosh .

Foxtorrent integrates nicely into firefox and starts downloading the torrent as soon as you click on any torrent link. However, we believe that it lacks usability. As it is still in beta this might be an extension to look out for in future.

Foxtorrent

Allow users to print your page as pdf

2007-06-22T04:04:00.000+05:30

Pdfonline, the service which provides users the ability to convert their documents to pdfs easily has launched a new service which will give you the ability to allow your site visitors to convert any page on your site into pdf and download it.

To add this functionality add the following code to your site:



<script type="text/javascript">

function savePageAsPDF() {

var pURL = "http://savepageaspdf.pdfonline.com/pdfonline/pdfonline.asp?cURL=" + escape(document.location.href);

window.open(pURL, "PDFOnline", "scrollbars=yes, resizable=yes,width=640, height=480,menubar,toolbar,location");

</script>

<a href="javascript:savePageAsPDF()">Save Page As PDF</a>

Click here to convert this page to pdf.

Please note that this service is currently in beta and the result might not be as expected.
More here

Accessing web mail securely and ads free

2007-06-20T12:18:00.000+05:30

When it comes to privacy i am a total freak. Some might reason that perhaps this is because i don't trust my Internet service provider( ISP) and they would be right. I really don't trust my ISP.
Many people are in the illusion that when they are using web mail they are secure and the traffic between their browser and the server is encrypted and the data is safe from prying eyes (I have actually talked to quite a few people who believe this). The data between your browser and the server is not encrypted in any sort of way. The login information might be encrypted in some form of another but never the data. The service in which complete encryption is provide is usually paid. Worried? Don't worry there is a way in which you can use your mail securely and whats more it is completely ads free.
Most popular email service providers yahoo and google (gmail) for example provide you ability to access to your email account using POP. This allows you to access your mail from an email client (outlook, thunderbird etc.) directly and unlike web mail the traffic between the client and the browser is completely encrypted and is very secure. To start using pop all you need is an email client. You can use outlook which comes bundled with every version of windows. Click here to know how to configure outlook to access yahoo and here to configure outlook for gmail. The more adventurous of you people might want to try thunderbird for accessing your email.

Related: How to tell when someone is reading your email | Add encryption to your webmail | Add encryption to messenger

How to tell when someone is reading your email

2007-06-15T23:45:00.000+05:30

Sometimes it happens that you suspect that someone is reading your email and but you don't have any proof that someone is actually reading your email. You can verify this by following this simple three step procedure:-

Step 1:- Create free accounts at any email service of your choice and at sitemeter.

Step 2:- From the new email account compose an email to your email address.

Step 3:- In the email put the html tracking code you get from here.

Now whenever someone sees your email this will be tracked by sitemeter and you can easily verify that someone has read your mail or not.

Note:- If the person has turned of images then this trick will not work.

How browsers make money while remaining free

2007-06-14T20:53:00.000+05:30

Sometimes back speculations were rife that mozilla had earned about $72M in the year 2005 in revenues. Altough not exactly true this estimate was pretty close to the actual revenue of $52.9M. Most of this revenue was generated through what mitchell termed as search engine relationships.
Whenever you type any search query in firefox a client=firefox-a string is appended to the search query which tells the google servers that the search generated from firefox. This is logged by the google servers and whenever a user clicks on a adsense ad which generated from the firefox browser a cut from it goes to mozilla. Seeing that there are millions of firefox users a $1 contribution from each user will be enough to generate a revenue of millions for mozilla.
This market is so lucrative that it converted opera a shareware browser earning about $4M each year to a freeware. Even a popular download manager( flashget) ended up being a freeware due to this reason.
I wonder what mozilla's revenue will be this year. Seeing that firefox user base has grown by an enormous amount i bet it will be close to $150M.

Google fixes it's url

2007-06-14T00:16:00.000+05:30

Most of the people now know that we have a search url for google on which when you search for anything google doesn't display any ads. For those who don't know it is simply the google search url with output=googleabout appended to it.
It seems that now google has fixed this and this hack is no longer useful. Try searching for monster and immediately you see adsense infront of you whether you use output=googleabout or not.

Use google PPT viewer to convert powerpoint presentations to slideshows

2007-06-13T04:04:00.000+05:30

Google has launched it's ppt viewer which integrates with integrates with gmail and allows users to view power point attachments as slideshow on computers which don't have powerpoint installed. We can use this functionality to convert any presentation to a slideshow. Simply browsing through all the slides makes the slides available in the flash format in the temporary directory of the browser. This works great for internet explorer and is not very usefull for firefox. For more advanced purposes you can use slideshare.net a service for creating and sharing presentations.

Was blogger ready to come out of beta?

2007-06-13T03:33:00.000+05:30

Google happily removed the beta tag from blogger some times back. But was blogger really ready to come out of beta? There are still some horrid issues with blogger which need to be fixed. For example:

Issue 1: In the post editor the < or > in the post don't get automatically changed to < or > and changing them manually is very inconvenient.

Issue 2: The blogger post editor is not very compatible with opera, a browser whose market share is constantly increase and is the third most used browser today.

There are several other issues including issues with the feed, the layout editor. The above two are the issues which i find the most inconvenient. In my opinion taking blogger out of beta before fixing these issues was not at all good. I certainly didn't expect something like this from google.

Recover your lost disk

2007-06-13T03:24:00.000+05:30

Sometimes when trying to boot your machine it just happens that the machine just doesn't boot. Everything else seems to be working fine and whats more is that you can use another drive or a bootable CD/DVD to boot your machine but not your default disk drive. Also, sometimes it happens that your disk stores backup of some very important files. For this all is not lost and there is still some hope left. You can try using TestDisk.

TestDisk is a cross platform, open-source and free software which you can use to recover your disk. It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting your Partition Table).

TestDisk can:

Fix partition table, recover deleted partition
Recover FAT32 boot sector from its backup
Rebuild FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 boot sector
Fix FAT tables
Rebuild NTFS boot sector
Recover NTFS boot sector from its backup
Fix MFT using MFT mirror
Locate ext2/ext3 Backup SuperBlock

and it supports:

DOS (either real or in a Windows 9x DOS-box),
Windows (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003),
Linux,
FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
SunOS
MacOS

Overall TestDisk is a great utility to handle rough situations like disk failures.

Add encryption to your webmail

2007-06-13T02:43:00.000+05:30

Free email services are great. The only thing they lack is an encryption facility which is provided by default by any business level email service. Due to this the emails can be read by any middleman using a packet sniffer.

Now you can use FireGPG to encrypt your email messages. It is a firefox extension which adds support for encryption to email messages. For this it adds an entry to the context menu for easy accessibility and the encryption is done using GnuPG.

FireGPG

Currently only gmail is supported and support for other email service is being added.
Related: Encrypt your chat messages

Increase your privacy in firefox

2007-06-13T00:42:00.000+05:30

Stealther is a firefox extension for those people who like me are very concerned about there privacy. It gives you the ability to disable any sort of browsing history or information maintained by the browser for a particular session and converts firefox into an ultimate stealth browser. It is different from other extension due to the fact that the information which was there before enabling stealther will remain there and is not deleted. Only the information for the particular session is deleted. Get it from here.

Wikipedia gets about 1.7 billion hits each month from google

2007-06-12T21:01:00.000+05:30

There is an interesting statistics which was released by wikimedia's leuksman.com. According to it wikipedia gets around 7 billion pageviews each month. Majority of these are generated by the internal wiki links (around 3 billion, or roughly 43%). Google accounts for about 23% of the traffic with approximately 1.7 billion referals. Huge numbers in my opinion :).

Alexa traffic rankings

2007-06-12T20:16:00.000+05:30

Alexa is a traffic ranking site. It displays traffic rating of a website based on certain statistics it collects by installing a toolbar. This statistics is basically the average number of hits and users a website receives. A lot of people take alexa traffic ranking as the measuring stick for site statistics. Use of alexa traffic ranking to measure a website's poplarity for business purposes is extremely hazardous due to various reasons.

Reason 1:- The traffic ranking are based on statistics collected by a toolbar which is extremely rare. I have hardly seen the toolbar installed on any computer i have come across( i myself didn't know about the toolbar sometimes back). Due to this reason a small number of hits from a browser which has the toolbar installed will reasult in a large fluctuation of the traffic ratings.

Reason 2:- There are various websites such as alexabooster which provide specialized services to you to boost your traffic ratings for a few dollars. There even exists specialized user groups like alexasurf where people help each other to increase their traffic ratings.

Reason 3:- It was found sometime ago that using alexa redirects helps in boosting your traffic ratings. This flaw has been exploited ever since.

All this makes alexa highly unreliable. Alexa traffic ranking is nonetheless being used as it is the only solution of it's kind available in the market and there is nowhere else to go.

An alternative solution such as google teaming with other site statistics websites like sitemeter,statcounter and using the combined data to estimate a websites popularity would have been much nicer and more accurate.

Now universal automatic face recognition courtsey polar rose

2007-06-03T01:59:00.000+05:30

Polarrose is a swedish startup which promises to allow the user to identify a face from all the photographs distributed over the internet. This means that you would have to just give the photograph of the person you want to find and polarrose will give you all the photographs of the person, distributed all over the internet. Imagine what would happen when you give the photograph of your girlfriend and find her making out with your old class mate :D. This has already stirred a huge privacy debate when the The Harvard Law Review, a journal for legal scholarship, recently published a short piece on the privacy implications of such online photo-tagging. See the slashdot thread for more.

Webmaster's tip for search engine optimization

2007-06-02T21:21:00.000+05:30

I have noticed recently that many websites which rank highly in search engine rankings have a <link rel="archive" href="archive pages"> in there head. Anything in the link is not displayed by the browser but is seen by the search bots.
In a way these links are helpful in allowing search bots index the pages in the links although the links are not displayed to the user. You can use this feature to make search bots index the pages which are not linked through your main page. This makes your website more cohesive and easily searchable by the search bots.

How to get access to email address of the deceased?

2007-06-02T21:06:00.000+05:30

An interesting topic emerged at google groups some time ago. Someone from a family had passed away and the family wanted to access the gmail account of the person. According to gmail guide in order to do that you must provide the following information

Your full name and contact information, including a verifiable email address.
The Gmail address of the individual who passed away.
a) The full header from an email message that you have received at your verifiable email address, from the Gmail account in question. (To obtain the header from a message in Gmail, open the message, click 'More options,' then click 'Show original.' Copy everything from 'Delivered- To:' through the 'References:' line. To obtain headers from other webmail or email providers, please refer to http://www.spamcop.com/help_with_headers/)
b) The entire contents of the message.
A copy of the death certificate of the deceased.
A copy of the document that gives you Power of Attorney over the Gmail account.
If you are the parent of the individual, please send us a copy of the Birth Certificate if the Gmail account owner was under the age of 18. In this case, Power of Attorney is not required.

All this information must be sent through post or fax to :

Google Inc.
Attention: Gmail User Support
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

650-644-0358

Google will take approximately 30 days to process and verify the information and then give the person access to the email account if the information provided was correct.

In case of yahoo the only way to get access to the email account of a deceased is by going to court and then legally asking yahoo to give access to the account. The email account of the deceased, will otherwise, be closed after 90 days of inactivity.

Google pages you might not have seen.

2007-06-01T19:25:00.000+05:30

Here are some interesting pages on google you might have not seen.

Google sets: This page allows you to create sets of similar items with few examples.

Google adsense for domains: This page allows domain registrars to fill up there otherwise empty domain pages with google ads.

Google Valentine: This one is google's tribute to the valentine day and includes the first ever valentine day google doodle. There is also a second page here.

Google Easter: Google's easter holiday celebration.

Google plex: Take a look at how it is inside google plex.

Google stickers: A collection of all the official google banners.

Goolge Holidays: A collection of all the google doodles till date.

Google fanlogos: A collection of logos created by contributors.

Google Search patterns: This is one of the most interesting page at google. This page gives the patterns and trends of all the search queries recieved by google till date. You can even see the summary on monthly and daily basis.

Google Mentalplex: Google played an april fool's joke on it's users back in the year 2000. This page is still there for you to see. You can find a few more of google's jokes here and here.

Google moms:- Google's tribute to moms.

Google hacker: A tribute of google to the hacker culture. Are you l33t? Some of the more miscleneous ones are elmer, bork, kligonand piglatin.

Google Microsoft: Search anything related to microsoft. A few more include BSD, Linux, Mac, US governmentand local search.

Google moon: See the pictures of moon. There is also Google mars.

There are many more unseen pages on google which i will add in part 2.

Eff finds hidden account info in new DRM-free iTunes track

2007-05-31T22:12:00.000+05:30

Ars Technia and TUAW had reported that apple is hidding account info in the new iTunes track and when EFF tried to find out and compared two files of the same track downloaded with different accounts they found a difference of about 360k of data. This data could be possibly containing hidden personal information about the user. I wonder what will apple do with such information since this information is easily locatable and spoofable in the files and might not be effective against music pirates.

Firefox Tip: How to disable auto suggest in the search bar

2007-05-31T00:18:00.000+05:30

I always wonder what would be the reason that would make a user to disable the auto suggest feature that exists in the firefox search bar. I have seen these questions asked on many discussion boards and decided to lookup the matter. Disabling auto suggest is a three step procedure in firefox.

Step 1:- Type about:config in your browser's address bar.
Step 2:- Type browser.search.suggest.enabled in the filter bar on the page that loads.
Step 3:- If the value of browser.search.suggest.enabled is true Double click on it to make it value to false.

After following the above procedure the auto suggestion would have been disabled. You can set the value to true anytime to enable the auto suggestion.

Why doesn't javascript has a sleep/wait function

2007-05-30T20:18:00.000+05:30

One of the primary goals of affective web designing is increasing web page responsiveness and that is the goal which lead to the development of Javascript and then Ajax. What i really couldn't understand is, why doesn't javascript has an inbuilt sleep/wait functionality? A user might ask, why do we need such a function? The reason is that when you execute a script which does a lot of work, taking lot of time the browser just becomes unresponsive on slow computers. Executing such scripts in smaller steps would have been much for usefull. As a test just go to slashdot and go to any story with more then 250 comments. Try reducing the expanded comments to 0 and then increasing them to the maximum allowable limit. A user will not be seeing all the +250 comments at the same time and thus executing the script at small intervals would have been much more effective. Granted javascript provides the setTimout function which can be used to rewrite the function to do the work properly. but, is this the correct way? Having a native sleep/wait function would have been much nicer.

How to access blocked websites

2007-05-30T16:47:00.000+05:30

There are several thousand articles available on the internet explaining the means to access blocked websites which according to me lack somewhere in the explanation. In this article i will try to explain some of the possible ways of accessing a blocked websites that i know. If you can't use any of the method explained here i am not sure that you will find another way to access the website.

Way 1:- Use Tor. Tor is the most famous and the most secure anonymity network that exists today in the world. All the data from your machine to server is transmitted over several internal nodes of the network in an encrypted form before it is actually transmitted to the server. Although the use of tor is not recommended for websites like youtube which require high bandwidths it is the best and the safest way to access a blocked website. If you are behind a proxy server you need to set the tor configuration to use the proxy. See the tor documentation for it. (it takes some time before you can start using it after executing it)

Way 2:- Use a proxy server. A proxy server takes a clients request and retransmits it to the server. You can find a list of proxy server by searching google. Then you can set the proxy server in your proxy configuration and start using it. Note that if you are already behind a proxy server this approach will not work for you. Also this might not work in case the blocking is based on keyword filters as the data between the client and the proxy server is not encrypted in any form.

Way 3:- Use a web proxy (anonymous browsing service). A web proxy is similar to a proxy server with the difference being that you don't need to explicitly set the browser proxy configuration to use the proxy. You can just type in the address of the proxy server and you can start using the proxy. Due to this reason these kind of proxies work even if you are behind a firewall. There are thousands of web proxies available at open directory which you can use. Although great at accessing blocked sites they may not work in cases where blocking is based on keyword filters. Also, several of these sites may already be blocked and you might have a hard time finding one working proxy in that case you can search google using the keyword inurl:nph-proxy.cgi to find a proxy which might not me blocked. The use of these proxies to surf websites where private information is transmitted is not recommended.

Way 4:- Use the websites ip. You can perform a dns lookup of the site you want to access to get the site's ip and then by putting the ip instead of the sites direct address you might be able to access the site.

Way 5:- Use your web server which can access the blocked site. If you own a server that can access the blocked site you can host a cgi or a php proxy script on the server and use your web server to access the site. This approach is similar to the web proxy one but in this case you own the web server and hence you can rely more on it. In case of blocking based on keyword filters you can add some sort of addon to defy such keyword filters (for desperate,advanced users).
You can also create an ssh tunnel from your computer to the web server which is very very reliable but is recommended only for advanced users.

Way 6:- Use google cache. If you are know what you are looking for you can use google's cache to view the site. Search for the subject you are looking and add site:yoursitenamehere and then in the results click cached to view the content from the google cache.

Way 7:- Use anonymity network. Some anonymity networks such as Java Anon Proxy, I2P and Freenet are also available which can be used to access blocked sites and surf websites anonymously. Tor also belongs to this category but it has several features(like using tor behind a proxy) which prompted me to give a unique section to it.

Way 8:- Use a mobile proxy. There are several proxy sites like phonifier, mowser and google mobile which adapts webpages so that they appear correctly on your mobile. These sites can, in some cases, be used to access blocked sites although the result may not be pleasant to the eyes.

Way9:- Use a translation service . You can use a translation service like babelfish and google translate to access blocked sites by setting the translation option to translate from english to english.

Oh my god: Spammers are faster then google

2007-05-30T00:54:00.000+05:30

Just 2 days after i disclosed my email address publicly here while explaining the ways to hide one's email address from spambots and not legitimate users. I started getting spam emails but what really surprised me was the fact that when i searched for my email address using google i couldn't find any result (they are available at the time of posting but were not when i checked initially on getting spams). This just explains how efficient these spam bots are becoming on harvesting a user's email address and how necessary it has become to use a way that hides your email address properly from these bots.

BeautifyJson - More then just a JSON pretty printer

2007-05-29T23:34:00.000+05:30

Recently i was working with a JSON feed and the feed as all JSON feed was a little obfuscated. I searched for a program to provide a more readable output and found one called Tidy JSON. I downloaded it and tried it on my feed. The program worked just fine but it was not very convenient due to several reasons. The most i hated was the inconvenience i faced when traversing the DOM structure. And then it was platform dependent. In the end i decided to write my own version and since it may be useful to many people decided to publish it.
This program is capable of producing output in HTML and text format. The HTML output is very easy to traverse with the inbuilt javascript feature i added. You can download it here. Everything you need is present in the archive. You will need flex to compile it.

Output of BeutifyJSON in html format

Click Here to see a live demo of the program's output.
Please report any bug you find and also any feature you want me to add to it.

EDIT: Due to strange rendering bugs in IE the HTML doesn't display properly in it when the JSON input is large. Try using firefox at that time.

Tutorial: Easy way to replace your Blog Atom/RSS autodiscovery feed with feedburner

2007-05-28T18:00:00.000+05:30

This is the easiest way to replace your blog's Atom/RSS autodiscovery feed with feedburner and it involves no hack of any sort. Just follow the two step procedure:

Disable your sites default feed by going to Settings -> Site feed and then setting the allow site feed option to none.

Go to Template -> Edit HTML and search for </head> and add the following line just before it. <link href='Your feedburner feed URL here' rel='alternate' title='Site description here' type='application/rss+xml'/>.

Microsoft Imagine Cup 2007 India final: Review

2007-05-27T23:32:00.000+05:30

It all started with me getting a call from microsoft inviting me to come and watch the event which was to take place at Air force auditorium, Delhi. Frankly speaking i was not at all interested in going to watch the event as i knew that the projects would be build on .NET only and i don't like .NET at all. But then, the lady on the phone said the golden words. She said, "You are going to get a Free DVD of windows Vista for personal use, free lunch and tickets to watch the movie Spiderman 3". I was already planning to go and watch the movie the next day which incidentally was the release date (5 may 2007) of the movie and getting printed DVDs of windows Vista was also to my liking. So, i agreed to go to watch the event along with a few of my friends. I was in for a big surprise.
The first thing i noticed when i reached the venue was that the persons who were managing the event and were at the reception were pretty bad at management and things were haywire everywhere. Then, they didn't have my name on some kind of list they had. When i told them that i had got a call from microsoft to come and watch the event they said they knew nothing of that sort and i would not get the movie tickets. I would still get Windows Vista for which i would have to fill in a form. When i had a look on the form i realized that we were net getting any printed DVDs but instead i would get a userid which i can use to download it from microsoft's website. Aargh!! this sucks. I came in the hope that i would get printed DVDs and free spiderman tickets but instead i got none. I tried to console myself that atleast there was free lunch and knowledge to gain. Little did i know what was to come later.
The projects that were on display had some genuine good ideas although one can't say that they were really innovative but yes they were good. I would give a brief description of the top three. Remember that the theme of this years imagine cup was "Education for all" so all the project had to do something with education.

Aabha: (3rd) This was supposed to be a integrated web based educational system with facilities has facilities for Multilingual Text Summarization, digital lecture board, online handwriting recognition and Speech to text and text to speech facilities. The text summarization part was really and maybe was the only reason the team got the third place. The rest of the things were pathetic jokes just using .NET frameworks apis and doing nothing more.
eduGrid: (2nd, my pick) This project aimed to answer the what and why questions given a database and some collaboration using grid computing as the backend. Although not innovative in any way they were doing something of my interest and according to me going in the right direction.
Recog: (1st) This project aimed to improve learning by clustering information and showing how these clusters correlate with each other and to what extent. Good idea but nothing innovative. I believe what was going on is a simple keyword matching going on to find to what extend the keywords match in between different clusters which were nothing clustered but simple data with certain key word defined. The only thing i believe which got them the first prize was their snappy GUI.

The teams had worked hard and i hope Team Recog wins the first prize in korea. Nothing against any team just my 2 cents :).
There was also initially a panel discussion on "What is required to spur innovation among indian students". This discussion was good and to the point.
Coming to lunch. The lunch was managed horribly. There were too many people and too few plates which had been arranged. There was no planning whatsoever. I had to wait half an hour for more plates to come. Total disappointment!!! :(
At the and there was too much commotion at the counter where we had to submit our completed forms to get the userids. Sigh, another example of bad management.

Final Toughts
Although the event on the whole was all right the management was horrible. Microsoft is a big company and can't afford to do such kind of mistakes especially when it is facing so much heat from the market already. This is in contrast to the world finals of 2006 which also happened in Delhi and i was fortunate enough to attend. The event was very, very well managed. And they had got beer there :D. Maybe they have some kind of prejudice against India. I went empty handed and came back empty handed. You might also think that i am greedy or something but then when you have the prospect of getting a $250 worth of software for free who isn't?

PS:It has been around 25 days and me and my friends are still waiting for the userids to come.

10 reasons to use pidgin as an instant messenger

2007-05-27T19:19:00.000+05:30

Cio has an article running explaining the 5 reasons to use mysql for development. I thought i would follow it with my own article outlining 10 reasons for using pidgin (previously gaim) as an instant messenger. You can read what pidgin is and what it is used for at the pidgin website.

Pidgin is multi-protocol and multi-platform:- The first and the foremost reason for using pidgin is that it is multi-protocol supporting virtually any messaging protocol a user requires plus it is platform independent. You can run it on linux, windows, bsd any platform you want.
Large userbase:- Pidgin is the most popular instant messaging protocol and included as default messenger in many bsd and linux distros. It has been time tested by a large user base and once you start using it you rarely go back to using another messenger (i have been using it for over 3 years and rarely use any other messenger).
Multiple login support:- Most of the time users have multiple logins available for a particular service which they use it for different purposes(home, business etc.). Most of the messengers don't allow multiple logins(without using some kind of illegal hacks or patches). With pidgin this is natively supported. You can login in any number of accounts you want to login to at the same time(more then 10 accounts are logged in on the same computer at my home all the time and i have tested it by logging in for 120 accounts which included the accounts of all my classmates in my college and it worked like a charm).
Large developer base and actively developed:- There are numerous developers all over the world actively maintaining pidgin and squashing bugs whenever they are found. Although, pidgin has a long way to go we are moving ahead by leaps and bounds :). They are soon going to get one more developer!!! Me.
Free support:- Support for pidgin is free. Whenever you have any problem you just have to join the irc network here and here in case of any problems and i am sure you will find somebody to help you out immediately.
Sharing of profiles over multiple platforms:- You can share your profile over multiple operating systems effectively having a common configuration over all the systems. You change one configuration and the change is reflected to all the installations. To some this might mean nothing but it is a boon for developers like me who frequently hop between multiple platforms. Although a very convenient feature the documentation for this is very hard to find. Just use the following line to launch the application pidgin --config="your configuration directory".
Scripting and plugin support:- Pidgin has native scripting support. You can write scripts in perl and as of version 2.0 in python. Using these scripts you can make pidgin dance to your tunes. There is a plethora of plugins available for pidgin which you can use to extend the functionality of this wonderful messenger.
Encryption support:- Many people know it that using any kind of sensitive infomation while chatting is very dangerous for privacy. With the encryption plugin you can use any kind of information with no worries whatsoever. You can read more about privacy issues here.
Anonymity support:- With the off-the-record messaging plugin you can hide yourself completely so that the person at the other end doesn't know where you are chatting from. This is a state of art plugin and i believe it is one of it's kind and available for pidgin only.
Finch:- Finch is the text base pidgin which can run on many linux and unix variants. It is very easy to use and the best availabe text based messanger out there. Although lots of people love GUIs but believe me this works just fine.
Tabbed GUI(Added):- The browser wars have proven how important a tabbed interface is for the overall functionality and usability of application. Pidgin has an easy to use tabbed interface (windows easily traversable using CTRL+TAB) which makes chatting much more fun.

Like many messengers pidgin has some bugs but i think that it has too many merits which outshine any bug which exists. Just give it a try and i am sure you will love it.

Hide your email address to protect yourself from spam

2007-05-26T19:36:00.001+05:30

Many times you want to give away your email address so that people can contact you using it but you can't give it away because of the fear of spamming. Spammers run spam bots which scan webpages and as soon as they find any email address it is added to the list of addresses to be spammed. As email addresses always contain the @ symbol finding such addresses is trivial. Listed below are a number ways to hide your email address from these spam bots which can be used effectively to counter such threats.

Replacing Words:- The simplest technique to hide your email address is to replace words in your email address with meaningful replacements and adding alternate text so as to confuse the spam bots. This includes replacing @ with AT, . with DOT and arbitrary space addition. You can also add random meaningful words so that humans who understand their meaning can remove them. A few example using this techniques are

sandeepthepro AT gmail DOT com

sandeepthepro (AT) gmail (DOT) com
sandeepthepro_AT_gmai_DOT_com
sandeepthepro@.remove.gmail.com
sandeepthepro (AT) gmail (DOT) com.iamnothere.

HTML email obfuscator: You can use html email obfuscator which obfuscate your email address by converting them in an html encoded form unsuitable to spambots to read.
Javascript email obfuscator: As the spambots generally don't have a javascript engine in them which is present in every browser, decoding content encoded in javascript is impossible for them. You can use an online javascript email obfuscator to encode your email address for this purpose.
Using css to hide email: You can use css techinuques so that your email address is visible correctly to the human but not to the spam bot. For eg: <style type="text/css"> .backwards {unicode-bidi:bidi-override; direction: rtl;} </style>

<span class="backwards">moc.liamg@orpehtpeednas</span> will appear as moc.liamg@orpehtpeednas to the spam bot while it will apear as sandeepthepro@gmail.com to the user
Using images: There are various services available online which can take your email address and convert them to images. These images can be easily read be human beings and not by bots. You will get something like this
Using an online contact form: Now why do you need to display your email address? So that others can contact you. You can register at an online contact form site and publish the link given so that the user can contact you without any hassles. You can contact me here
Flash: You can also use flash to hide your email address but since i have a personal dislike for flash on a site i am not describing the technique and just mentioned it because i thought that the user should know.

How to add digg, del.icio.us, reddit etc. to blogger beta

2007-05-26T04:33:00.000+05:30

Well, i searched a lot on the internet and couldn't find a decent and easy article explaining how to add the above social bookmarking sites to blogger beta with minimal pain. Maybe, i looked badly. Finally after 4 hours of useless toil i have been finally able to add them to the site. To add them follow the following steps:-

Start by editing your template HTML.
Search for the following line post-footer-line post-footer-line-3. If you are not using a modified template then you will find something like this <p class="'post-footer-line post-footer-line-3"/>.
Put the code contained here after the line. .
If you want you can wrap the above content in <b:if cond="data:blog.pageType">above content here</b:if> so that the buttons appear only when you are displaying the full post.

Comments and suggestions are always welcome :).

This blog sucks

2007-05-26T00:40:00.000+05:30

There are many people who visit my blog in the hope that they will find good and interesting articles but instead they find the same old articles and no regular updates being performed. But, now i promise things are going to change. I am working on giving this blog a new look. After that is done this blog will be updated regularly with the best articles,tips and news on the net and my own contributions :).

Still using YM, AOL or Gtalk? Think again

2007-04-29T02:22:00.000+05:30

Before starting on what are the disadvantages of using these let me give you a brief intro on how the internet works. The internet is a group of small networks which are connected together into the internet. Whenever we send data the data passes through various routers (controlled by different organizations and individuals) to reach the destination.

INTERNET TOPOLOGY

The messengers we use don't provide any support for encryption. The initial login details used are encrypted to some extent but the rest of the data is not encrypted at all. People who have access to the routers can simply use a packet sniffer like wireshark to see the data. As an example let us see what appears in the sniffer after i have sent the string "How are you :)" on yahoo messenger.

PACKET SNIFFING

Clearly, a user who cares about his privacy would not like this kind of stuff to happen as this allows other people to steal the private data which users are careless enough to share on these messengers.

The alternative to this would be use third party encryption addons to these softwares like rocksyahoo , aim encryption . However, there are several problems with these approach. Two of the main problems are.

You would have to seperate a seperate plugin for each of the seperate messengers you use.
These types of plugins are not available for all the messengers (eg. gtalk).

The alternative would be to you use a simple, multi-protocol, multi-platform and very famous open source messenger known as Pidgin along with the encryption plugin. This extension adds a secure encrypted layer over all the protocols supported by pidgin. Thus a user can communicate with other people securely. There are various other benefits of using this messenger which a person comes to know after using it. You would also like to add the guification plugin which is a must have for it.

Notes:

You might have to enable the encryption plugin through the plugin menu. Click Tools -> Plugins -> Pidgin-encryption to do that.
Whenever chatting simply click the little lock on the upper right corner of the window to enable encryption.
If the other user doesn't have the plugin he will see the following message ” *** Encrypted :: Send Key”. You would have to disable encryption at that time.

Customize google according to your needs

2007-04-22T19:05:00.000+05:30

We had compiled and posted a list of top firefox extensions here. We forgot to mention Customize google. Customize google is a Firefox extension that adds or removes some features in Google's services, including links to competing search engines, removing ads and click tracking, rewriting links to point directly to images in Google Image Search.
It add a lot of features to google which are otherwise unavailable.

Google Trick: How to access blocked google talk

2007-04-22T18:19:00.000+05:30

Many administrators block google talk now a days. This is a 2 step trick to access google talk even if it has been blocked by the administrator.

Download the firefox web browser from here.
Download the gtalk extension from here.
Restart the browser.
Simply press Alt + G or Go to the view menu at the top and then under sidebar submenu press gtalk sidebar.
Login and start using goole talk.

Best firefox extensions

2007-04-21T20:13:00.000+05:30

Firefox is one of the most famous web browsers available today. It is the most extendible browser which is largely due to firefox extensions. Firefox extensions "are small add-ons that add new functionality to Mozilla applications. They can add anything from a toolbar button to a completely new feature. They allow the application to be customized to fit the personal needs of each user if they need additional features, while minimizing the size of the application itself" (from the official Firefox Extensions site). Here are my picks for the Best Firefox Extensions:

Scrapbook: "ScrapBook is a Firefox extension, which helps you to save Web pages and manage the collection." Internet Explorer also has this ability but it doesn't provide the power which is provided by this extesion. This extension is the best of all firefox extensions available today.
Web Developer: This extension adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools. A must for budding developers like me.
Grease Monkey: Greasmonkey allows you to execute user scripts depending on the site you visit. There are thousands of scripts available at userscripts.org. Just have a look.
Scribfire (Performancing): If you are a blogger you got to love this one. No need to visit the site to post. Just click the little icon showing in the status bar. Setup the account and start posting from the browser itself.
Adblock Plus: Adblock Plus in an extension which, as the name suggests filters advertisements from the pages you visit. The filters are updated regularly and it loads the page much faster.
Sage: Sage is a lightweight RSS and Atom feed aggregator extension for Mozilla Firefox. It allows you to read feeds right in your browser.
No Script: This extension allows JavaScript, Java and other executable content to run only from trusted domains of your choice, e.g. your home-banking web site, and guards the "trust boundaries" against cross-site scripting attacks (XSS). Such a preemptive approach prevents exploitation of security vulnerabilities (known and even unknown!) with no loss of functionality...
Flashgot: Download one link, selected links or all the links of a page together at the maximum speed with a single click, using the most popular, lightweight and reliable external download managers. Supported download tools are dozens, see http://flashgot.net for details. This extension offers also a Build Gallery functionality which helps to collect in a single page serial movies and images scattered on several pages, for easy and fast "download all".
Tab Mix Plus: Tab Mix Plus enhances Firefox's tab browsing capabilities. It includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager with crash recovery that can save and restore combinations of opened tabs and windows.
Minimize To Tray: Minimizes Mozilla windows into the system tray. Also includes a right clickable tray icon menu to further load only the windows you want visible. MinimizeToTray's extension options allow you to configure your desired behavior. The three options are:

Always minimize to the tray instead of to the taskbar.
Minimize to tray on close.
Require a double click to restore from the tray.

There are ofcourse extensions which i have left or forgot to mention. Please leave comments and i would update the list as soon as possible.

Computerworld to launch Tech Blogs Network With Ad Revenue Sharing

2007-04-20T02:27:00.000+05:30

ComputerWorld, the famous web magazine is going to launch a new service by the name of Tech Dispenser later this month.

Unlike the existing tech news aggregators which use automatic analysis and proprietary algorithms to choose the articles which appear on the site , Tech Dispenser editors will pick and choose technology blogs to be included and indexed by their service. The editors will also review and highlight selected posts from these blogs.

Content from selected bloggers will be displayed on the main aggregator website. Like Techmeme, Tailrank or Megite, only the blog post title and short excerpts will be shown and visitors will have to visit the underlying blog to read the full post.

Tech Dispenser will ask participating blogs to insert an ad snippet (from Adify) on their site and the net advertising revenue generated from these online ads will be spilt 50/50 between Computerworld and the blogger. [Adify ads are generally CPM based]

Tech Dispenser is currently accepting applications from all English-language blogs regardless of location. Payments for advertising can be made in US Dollars, Euros, or Pounds Sterling.

Text and image ads will appear in a standard 160x600 "skyscraper" unit in the location of your choice. When there are no ads in our system, you can set a default through Adify (i.e. your Google Adsense ads) to run in this spot.

More can be read here

Microsoft slashes price for office suite in developing countiers

2007-04-20T01:53:00.000+05:30

Microsoft has announced plans to offer a limited version of its Office software suite to schoolchildren in developing countries for the price of $3 per copy. The program has been compared to the One Laptop Per Child initiative in its attempts to modernize nations; however, it may also be viewed as a move for Microsoft to build markets in places that are now looking at alternatives such as Linux.
Through the program, Microsoft will offer the $3 software suite to qualifying governments that purchase and supply PCs directly to students. The Microsoft Student Education Suite includes a specialized version of Windows XP, Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, Microsoft Math 3.0, Learning Essentials 2.0 for Microsoft Office, and Windows Live Mail desktop.
But is this really going to work? Lets wait and watch

Surf websites through web-proxies (Part 2)

2007-04-17T23:24:00.000+05:30

I have already told you the basic of web-proxies. You can read it here. These proxies are only helpful in hiding the actual website.

Compared to the security threats they pose. I think not accessing that website is far better than accessing it.

Hey, what security threats? I have been using these websites for years and nothing has happened. So, you wan’t to know the security threats these sites pose. Ok, will name two of the most dangerous ones.

The purpose of a secure connection is to help people keep there sensitive information(passwords/logins…) hidden. But as i have already told you the information to and from these websites is completely unencrypted standard html format so any time you login using these proxies a person somewhere in the world can intercept your data and steal that information.
The owners of these websites are not that innocent as many people might think. They might be keeping logs and any personal information that you are sending to them might get logged in these logs which is again hazardous as the website owner can look into his logs anytime and get each and every information about you. This is i think the most serious issue.

So, do i suggest you to stop using these proxies? Yes, infact i do. But, to all those to whom accessing the website is more important than keeping personal information personal i suggest that atleast change your password from somewhere you can directly access the website, after you have accessed the website using a web-proxy.

Any comments and suggestions will be most helpful.

Note: I will be writing another article to tell you the easiest and the most sure shot way of accessing these websites from workplace in a secure manner. Hopefully that will be done by tommorow :)

Surf Websites through web-proxies (Part 1)

2007-04-17T23:21:00.000+05:30

Recently i have seen that many people who can’t access websites like orkut and myspace using direct connection/proxies due to ISP restrictions, access it using web-proxies like cooltunnel.com and ghostproxy.com thinking that the data that comes from that site is encrypted, that is why the ISP can’t block it. (this i got from a person when i talked to him)

Let me tell you that the data that comes from those sites is not at all encrypted and the ISPs block sites generally using an Access Control List(ACL). Whenever a user requests a website from a gateway/proxy that request is matched for hit within the ACL and if a match is found an error response is sent back. So, the data from the web-server to your machine is not checked at all (most of the times) only the website name is checked.

Also, the data from your computer to these web-proxies is not encrypted as most of these websites(free) don’t allow secure connections.

Ok! I got it. So, what does it signify? Don’t worry. I will be following it up with another article tomorrow to tell you what it signifies.

Windows Xp Key for free - Who to blame?

2007-04-17T01:14:00.000+05:30

I don't know how many people are there who are stupid enough to post their windows XP keys on the internet. Just doing a simple search like

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Microsoft+-+Windows+XP%22+%22Belarc+Advisor+Current+Profile%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

exposes hundred of keys.
But, are these users really to be blamed?
But i think more then the fault of the users it is the fault of the software makers who included such an information in the report which a simple person can post on the web unknowingly. I think it is the responsibility of the software publishers to keep such information out of these easily publishable documents?
On second thoughts, was it a ploy on the parts of the software developers to provide a free software and steel the keys? Remember, such incidents have happened in the past!!