K World

This is an old news, but I came to know couple of days before when I was watching TED Talks couple of days before, I came across “The true face of Leonardo Da Vinci” by Siegfried Woldhek. The presenter himself is an artist and he has done a good research on finding the true face of Da Vinci. He uses the known facts about Da Vinci and proves that Da Vinci did three pictures of himself. And he points out the similarities of the three pictures. Well, you can watch it here

But, for the lazy folks who cant/wont/dont have time to watch the show, here are the three pictures.

1. Franchino Gaffurio, The Musician
   
2. Vitruvian Man
   
3. His portrait in red chalk
   

He also stated that the age of the subjects in the photos suit the age of Da Vinci and the time of the photograph. For me, the rather interesting and fascinating thing is that the man in the painting Vitruvian Man was Da Vinci himself. Anyway, this research was presented in an interesting manner and the talk is a small one. So, now stop being lazy and watch it.

Friendfeed is a one great service which I’m using from few days/weeks. So, I thought, I will publish my friendfeed on this blog. Well, as usual, I’ve some of my own requirements. Requirement is that I dont want to show it on my sidebar, but I want to dedicate a page for it. So, I need to take json/xml/rss/atom from friendfeed and create html out of it. Obvious is that I’ve to either write a JS to parse it client side or PHP script to parse it server side. PHP was my choice and I needed an option to exec php on single page. There was on plugin named phpexec, but, I wasn’t very comfortable (call it being paranoid) for using that plugin.

So, I used a small work around. I created a page feed.php and added

/*

Template Name: My Friendfeed

*/

Now, my wordpress thinks that its a template and gives me an option of choosing template while creating pages. I created a page but without any content. I wrote all my php logic in feed.php and now wordpress parses the template and gives me required output. Anyway, you can download the code here. You’ve to extract the contents to your theme folder. Btw, You can see it working here.

Well, its a hackjob. It works (only) for me. If you want to do same, you’ve to edit the code according to your needs. It could have been done far more easily, but my stupid host has php4 and I missed many features. And, I’ve had something else in mind (I thought to publish friendfeed I follow, ie., all friends’ feeds) but later changed mind. By the way, if you don’t know what’s friendfeed, it is an aggregator of all 2.0ish services you might be using in a small definition. Check it if you want to know more, you wont be disappointed.

PS: There is absolutely no reason why I haven’t blogged for more than a month. I wasn’t busy. Its just that nothing had happened in my life to blog. Absolutely nothing. Uhmm, wait, I’ve been to Coorg on an adventure trip. Nothing more than that.

Something more free from Rediff ?
Hell Yeah.

Whats that ?
URL redirection service.

Ads ?
Come on, its rediff, there will be Ads.

What makes it different from other URL redirection services ?
Other URL redirection services are created by themselves. Here, even rediff doesn’t know that it got one too !!!

What ?
okay, in clear words, yet another stupid implementation by rediff.

Where ?
here - > http://www.rediff.com/login/inredirect.php?url=http://karteek.selfdabba.com

What does it do ?
Arghh !!! Click on it !! -> K World

Wow. Anything more in it ?
Uhmm, you want more and rediff will never say No. Yeah, it got XSS in it too.

Double Wow. Show me, show me !!
Well, Neither I can tell no. Click this.

Can I use it for anything more ?
Hell, yeah. How about printing your name there on that page ?

Triple Wow. Show me, show me.
Dude, not going to show you this. But, yeah. Will give you a hint. Document.write in Javascript. And you know how to inject javascript into that page

What ? Do I know ?
Fck. Thats why I should have kept a disclaimer on the top that this post aint for everyone. XSS is Cross Site Scripting, where you would just inject javascript in to another site.

Oh. okay. What do I do now ?
Uhmm, how about one fair deal. I will show you all the bugs I/others found in rediff and you stop using it ?

Yeah. I’m in.
Just goto Xssed.com and search for rediff. Lazy guys like me, click this.

Being a guy who wants to learn something new all the time, I had a wish to keep three computers one on windows, one on Linux and one on OSX and see them talking to each other. Well, being a guy who is neither born with a silver spoon nor working for Apple or Google, I can’t afford a mac(book). I’ve to adjust with my bulky-yet powerful Dell. My cousin got a VAIO which runs on Vista. My Dell runs on Gutsy as well as Good-old-XP. Apart from these two laptops, I’ve a desktop under my control which use to run XP. I wanted to share screenshots of 3 great Operating Systems - one which is maximum used OS and definitely a favorite for gamers, one which is hacker’s OS and the third being - the designer’s paradise.

1. Windows XP SP2

2. Gutsy Gibbon - Ubuntu 7.10

3. Leopard - OS X 10.5.1

The third one was something which I was missing from long time. Very long time. I wanted to buy one but not in my budget. I wanted to try one, none of my friends got it. I wanted to experience one atleast on my laptop, I wasn’t very sure of risking the data on it. Finally. Today is the day for my Hackintosh and it worked out. I will write a detailed post sometime regarding the care that needs to be taken while trying this. I messed-up my partition table by missing just 2 characters and later I managed to recover couple of partitions, I went for a clean installation. It is a great experience and is for a great OS. Now, saving each rupee for a real mac book.

If you see carefully, theme of my XP is variant of famous “Bluecurve”, which is a Linux theme and the mouse theme is of OS X Tiger. Theme of my Gutsy is theme of OS X Tiger and theme of Leopard is not changed (yet)

Update : Just saw that post got nothing to do with the Title. Uhmm, I started to post about my journey and ended up posting just screenshots. Anyway, I’ll tell you how to tame the leopard some time soon.

Update : No more hackintosh. Using work’s macbook pro.