K World

Oh boy, floating points really float

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 12:01:00 +0530

I was reading a thread on Hackers News a while before and stumbled on a site wtfjs.com. The site points some crazy things done by JavaScript, at least, that is what I thought for a while before reading comments on the thread. Then, I read the comment that the author of wtfjs is just naive and doesn’t know about floating points. For a while, I thought it was just anomaly of JavaScript ( I never had any love for things that start with the word “java”) and was totally shocked to know that it’s not just Java Script, I just had no clue about the implementation - till now and this is very embarrassing.

The results were more like our democracy. All individuals are equal, and few are just “more” equal. I’m glad that I know the problem and reason atleast now :D

Mathematics is the language of nature

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 02:29:00 +0530

The last time I was on a small learning adventure was when I was solving challenges at http://hax.tor.hu, and I managed to finish it in couple of months. Then back to boring life without learning anything new. Then, life was the usual, 5 movies a week and regular work without real use of brain.

Then, I remembered Flute, one of my teamies was a big fan of one site named Project Euler. The site is a community of people solving a bunch of math problems. Fun part, problems are challenging. To add little more to fun, you can compare your logic to others. What adds even more to fun is, those guys are crazy. Few guys solve those tough math problems in Assembly language. Yes. Assembly. And to make things even worse, for few problems, for which my code takes around 15 to 20 seconds to solve, there are logics, which solve the problem in half a second.

So, I decided to start solving the problems, with couple of aims. First, solve atleast 100 problems in next 3 months (I’ve solved around 50 in the last week, but problems get tougher after that). Second being, try to solve them with logics that take as less time as possible rather than brute-forcing everything.

Now, there is another site, which runs on similar basis, called RoseCode. There are few nice problems there too. If you enjoy solving Project Euler, you will probably enjoy this too.

Just few moments before, I thought I will create a github repository with all solutions and later changed my mind of making them public and indexable. But anyway, if you happened to start solving Project Euler or Rose Code and want to compare your solutions with mine, I’m a tweet away to send you my codes.

By the way, you might want to register WeChall, if you start solving RoseCode. WeChall is a global ranking site, which can let you fight with few nice coders/hackers etc. Also, my nickname in all the sites is [108, 97, 122, 121, 105, 100, 105, 111, 116]

It happens only in ...

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 02:27:00 +0530

Of course India. So, the latest rumour is that Mukesh Ambani is behind YSR’s chopper accident. Now, let’s go through the story.

One Russian website tells that that Larry Summer’s ex-boss’s enemy is dead in Chopper crash. This article links to another article which tells ..
- Larry Summer’s ex-boss’s brother (Anil Ambani) chopper’s gearbox was tampered.
- Anil’s mechanic was killed in an accident.
- Anil suspected business rivals to have planned for the assassination.

Mechanic who found that gearbox was tampered died in an accident two days later.

Now, what Indian media made out of it.

Larry Summer’s ex-boss is Mukesh Ambani
Mukesh Ambani and YSR had few differences
So, Mukesh must be reason for YSR’s death

Now, this is my take -

One Russian Online Newspaper named “The Exiled” had an article written on 3rd September 2009, that YSR died in a mysterious accident.

Seriously ???? Indian media is digging a column in Russian newspaper, written by Mark Ames (an American Journalist, who use to write articles for Playboy) after 4 long months.

YSR had differences with Mukesh, Anil as well as their mother over gas deposits from Krishna-Godavari basin

Yeah, YSR had differences with both the brothers who were fighting over price, and their mother, who was trying to settle it. It’s not like he took someone’s side. He was neutral, and he wanted central govt. to take decisions on the price.

There was an assassination attempt on Anil, the medium was a helicopter. And Anil thought some “business rivals” planned this.

So, the business rival was his own brother. How about the word “coincidence” ?

These are the references from Exiled Online[1][mirror], [2][mirror]. Both articles attack Mukesh Ambani. Its obvious that none has any proofs till now and the author of article is just deducing stories by reading news items from other sources[1][2][3][4].

And the result of the above mess - Congress workers attack “Anil” Ambani’s offices in Hyderabad. Seriously ??? Anil Ambani, himself was a victim in the above story, and his offices are being attacked.

So, TL;DR - One wannabe fiction writer, creates a conspiracy based on various articles. Hungry for sensation - Indian Media sensationalize the story after three months. Work-less political party workers attack younger brother’s offices even though the villain in the conspiracy is the elder brother.

LandMark, XSS and The Injection

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 12:24:00 +0530

So, Landmark, a famous book/music/movies store in India is on the net at LandmarkOnTheNet.com. I was there to check whether they sell 3D glasses, even though there are some cheap paper glasses on ebay.in, but I want better quality. As usual, the bad habit of checking for SQL Injections and XSS tingled in my brain.

Apparently, LandmarkOnTheNet has both the problems.

and for SQL Injection, I didn’t try much, just give a single quote as input in search, the server choked with an error in the SQL Query (it actually told what the error is and where the error is; what a away to configure the production server)

So, there are many things you can have fun with above two, these are the keywords - My Account, Session Stealing, Gift Cards, SQL Injection, PIN Numbers, Free Shipping.

If I were a landmark website user, I would ensure that my browser is Firefox with NoScript addon installed. If I were a landmark webmaster, I would buy a book on Web Security right now, ah nevermind, I would just search in Google for tips of fixing XSS and SQL Injection vulnerabilities and fix them ASAP. I might also feel very bad for using so many tables in my markup.

It's a new decade

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 13:09:00 +0530

And … Good Luck for that.

Etherpad; Opensourced

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 23:18:00 +0530

Etherpad is a lovely app which is bought by google and was opensourced 10 days before. Now, just to add a drop of water to the ocean.

A small how-to on deploying Etherpad

The package

Etherpad source from http://code.google.com/p/etherpad
Some minor fixes and changes, here and there
File Imports [gist]
File exports to DOC/PDF/ODT using Oo.org [gist]

How to compile, run and test

Grab the code from my github repository
$ git clone git://github.com/karteek/etherpad.git
You can optionally do a diff -r to above created clone with original clone to see the changes I’ve made to the code.
Set up the environment to compile the code. Open the provided env.sh, and look at the needed variables. Existing values are values from my MBP, and they most probably won’t work for you
$ source env.sh
Create a database “etherpad” on your MySQL database. Same time, create a user “etherpad” with password “password” and grant him all privileges on the database “etherpad”
Update etherpad.SQL_JDBC_URL, etherpad.SQL_USERNAME, etherpad.SQL_PASSWORD and etherpad.adminPass in the file etherpad/etc/etherpad.localdev-default.properties
- etherpad.SQL_JDBC_URL is the jdbc URL of your database (in our case, its jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/etherpad )
- etherpad.SQL_USERNAME is the username to connect to database (in our case, its etherpad)
- etherpad.SQL_PASSWORD is the password to connect to database (in our case, its password)
- etherpad.adminPass is the password needed to login to admin panel of Etherpad instance
Change directory to etherpad, compile the jar, and start the server
$ cd etherpad
$ bin/rebuildjar.sh
$ bin/run-local.sh
Now, fire up your browser, and visit http://localhost:9000 to play with your instance

File Imports

File Imports depend on com.oreilly.servlet (cos.jar found at http://www.servlets.com/cos/)
Check their license @ http://www.servlets.com/cos/license.html. If you are fine with their license, download cos.jar and copy it to infrastructure/lib folder
Search for locations where file upload related code is commented, and uncomment the code.
$ grep -r “REMOVED_COS_OF_COS” *
Recompile the package
$ cd etherpad
$ bin/rebuildjar.sh

File Exports

File exports depend on Openoffice.org for conversion
You need to start Oo.org as a service
$ /path/to/openoffice/soffice.bin -headless -nofirststartwizard -accept=”socket,host=localhost,port=8100;urp;StarOffice.Service”
Just make sure that etherpad.soffice has some value in etherpad/etc/etherpad.localdev-default.properties
Check infrastructure/com.etherpad.openofficeservice/importexport.scala for more information

How to deploy the same on example.com

Wild card dns for your domain. Point *.example.com to same server where example.com resides. This is the server where you are deploying this instance.
Make sure that your SMTP is working. Activation of Pro accounts happen over email, so its important.
Open etherpad/src/main.js, and update domain in line #273
Open etherpad/src/etherpad/globals.js and change the domain in variable SUPERDOMAINS found at line #30
Open etherpad/src/static/crossdomain.xml and add your domain to crossdomains.xml
Look into etherpad/src folder and search for etherpad.com. You will find many locations, where your instance will be coded to mail from an @etherpad.com account. Update all of them to your domain.
$ grep -ir “etherpad.com” *
Open etherpad/etc/etherpad.localdev-default.properties and update
- devMode to false
- etherpad.isProduction to true
- listen to example.com:80
- etherpad.isPNE to true (only if you want to run in PNE mode)
- And ofcourse, change etherpad.adminPass
As long as you din’t change anything in infrastructure folder, you need not recompile the jar. So, just go ahead and start the server. For starting a server on port numbers less than 1000, you will need to have root access on OS X.

Running the instance behind Apache using mod_proxy

Do the same as above from steps #1 to #7.
In step #7, rather than changing listen to example.com:80, change it to localhost:9000 or just 9000
Start the server using bin/run-local.sh

Your apache configuration might look like -


ServerName      www.example.com
ServerAlias       *.example.com
ServerAdmin     admin@example.com
ErrorLog        /var/log/apache2/etherpad.error.log
LogLevel warn
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/etherpad.access.log combined
ServerSignature Off
ProxyPass / http://localhost:9000/ 
ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:9000/
ProxyPreserveHost on
   
    Options FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all

This might or might not work for you. Anyway, I guess you got the idea. Check manual for more information

Well, the patch I wrote for enabling file exports so as this tutorial come with no warranty. Don’t ask me even if it breaks your bones. This is what I did, following it is completely your choice. Code from Etherpad is under the license they specified. The file import part depends on MultipartWrapper and MultipartFilter. If you don’t like their license, its better to write your own code for doing their work.

Feel free to ask any doubts and/or fix my bugs. There is a great tutorial on installing Etherpad by Nuba Princigalli. Do check it, if you find any problems with my post.

Zimbra and EC2

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 22:00:22 +0530

Zimbra offers an awesome Open Source collaboration suite. EC2 is an awesome compute cloud service. The points I learned and did while deploying Zimbra on EC2.

Zimbra on Ubuntu is supported on Hardy (8.04), but not newer. Install only if you want an adventure. I didn’t want an adventure, and I love Hardy.
Hardy EBS backed image was not available on Amazon (by today) So, I did this, and got things ready. (If you want the AMI, let me know. I can share the same with you.)
Download Zimbra Ubuntu package, unpack stuff and … wait.
Zimbra uses LDAP for maintaining user registry, so, you need to know that Zimbra is going to install LDAP for you.
But, LDAP has a weird habit of checking for host over DNS even if you install the LDAP server on same machine AND editing /etc/hosts file do not suffice.
So, you need few entries in your DNS.
1. MX Entry for your website. (MX entry tells which server will handle mails for that particular domain)
2. A Entry for your MX server. (that particular mail server should be resolved to an IP)
This should solve your problems if your servers are connected to internet, but most of time, they do not. They will be behind a firewall, and they will have LAN IPs which won’t be same as your public IPs, and your server might not even know that it has a public IP (server will just know natted IP). This is just the case with EC2.
So, now you need to configure a DNS server on your LAN to do the work for you. Follow this tutorial on how to create zones. It will help you to create proper entries on your Bind server.
Confirm that your Bind server is working by doing. Replace example.com and mail.example.com with appropriate domain names.
- dig @localhost example.com MX - to see your server’s MX record
- dig @localhost mail.example.com A - to see your mail server’s A record
Once, local DNS is configured. Add an entry to your /etc/resolv.conf and also add mail.example.com xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx to your /etc/hosts. Replace domain and IP appropriately.
Now, you can continue with installation of Zimbra. Just start the installation. And follow the steps. Zimbra installation, by itself is a fairly simple process.
During the installation process, Zimbra will think that mail.example.com is the domain for which you are installing, and try to check MX record for it. As, we do not want email for our mail server (we dont want mail@mail.example.com, rather we want mail@example.com), we didn’t not create any MX entries for for mail.example.com. So, Zimbra will fail to check for MX record of mail.example.com and ask whether you want to change it. Now, change it to example.com
And, finish installation.
Last and important, goto your AWS console, Security Groups, and enable SMTP, SMTPS (IMAP, IMAPS, POP3, POP3S ports if needed)

Now, as you are on EC2, there are some issues, you are going to face.

EC2 doesn’t support reverse DNS, which means, your example.com will resolve to Amazon IP, but that amazon IP when nslookup’ed on, will return something like ec2-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com rather than example.com. There is no way of changing this as of now. LittleScrewed.
That means, some mail servers might not accept your mails, thinking that your spamming. Screwed.
EC2 has very bad limit on sending outgoing emails from its SMTP ports. I got an email from EC2 abuse for sending 10 emails. Totally Screwed.

But, as light at end of the tunnel, there are few things you can do.

You can use an external SMTP service to send email. For that you have to configure your MTA ie., Postfix here, to relay emails using that external SMTP service. Of course, the a reliable external SMTP service will add some weight to your bill.
Configure a proper SPF on your DNS and pray that all mail servers accept your email.
Rather than going for external SMTP, you can configure SPF and request Amazon to increate your email limit and hope they approve.

But, because bad things always happen, few mail servers like my employers, throw you a 554 code when reverse DNS fail for your IP. Logically speaking, things should work when proper SPF is configured, but, this is practical world. Things are always beyond the control of standards. If you are an IE user, you would never know this.

EBS backed EC2 - Life made easy

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 20:54:00 +0530

After Amazon launched EC2 back in 2006, they’ve been adding new features in regular intervals. On EC2, for starters, one thing that confuses a lot is the lack of persistent storage - in simple words, you lose all changes made and data once you reboot. There were options like S3 and EBS though to over come this problem. But, much configuration is needed, need for regular backups, booting was slower etc., etc.

One of their recent addition to features list is EBS-backed AMI. It allows an EBS volume to be root device for an instance, in other words, one can boot an instance from EBS volume. Property of EBS is being persistent, which automatically makes your instance’s root persistant, which means, one can reboot their instance as much as they want without having to worry about losing changes they made to the settings or their data. So, conclusion is EBS backed EC2 is … cool.

But, if you are an Ubuntu guy like me, you would be disappointed to see that there are only 4 (as of now) public EBS based Ubuntu Images on EC2 right now, and you would be even more disappointed to see that none of them is Hardy (8.04.3 LTS) image. No LTS image. But, Everything’s shiny captain, nothing to fret. One very nice tutorial and a kick-ass Python API for EC2 come to rescue.

This tutorial on Elastician which is based on Boto comes to rescue and help you to create an EBS-backed AMI. Before going through and following that tutorial, just make sure that you have latest version of Boto (>1.8d). Just make sure that the AMI which you are using to create an EBS-backed AMI is a reliable one.

By the way, you can see an awesome list of available images at The Cloud Market.

Migration of blog to Tumblr

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 17:56:00 +0530

After two years of my last migration from blogspot to wordpress, Here I am, after 3 years of blogging, migrated to third service. This time, moving out of self-hosted wordpress to a nice hosted solution Tumblr. You might haven’t seen many differences other than theme becoming extremely minimalistic.

Well, there are the changes.

Now, the service is no longer wordpress, its Tumblr :D
All posts are migrated
All comments are migrated to Disqus, a very good global comment system
URLs of all posts are changed, but any time you can you use the search
All bookmarks, external links, google indexed pages till re-indexing are broken. Boo Hoo.

Migration went smooth, but there was a small problem for doing the same. There were no softwares available to do the same. “Migration from Wordpress to Tumblr”. If any existed, they will certainly miss migrating the comments or the attachments you’ve done in your previous wordpress blog. And, it of course is a tedious task to migrate everything if you do that manually.

So, on my way here, I wrote a small script for doing the same - Wordpress to Tumblr migration. I called it Wp2Tumblr.Py

Well, it does the following things -

Takes your wordpress extended rss archive and parses it
Post all your wordpress posts to Tumblr
While doing above step, it posts all your image uploads to Tumblr as Private post, extract the url of the image from Tumblr post, change the same in your wordpress post.
Migrate all the comments of the post to your disqus account and link them to your post

Well, as I promised, I’m going to release all my personal code as opensource under WTFPL. So, if you’ve a similar requirement, you can clone the repo from http://github.com/karteek/wp2tumblr.py

By the way, I didn’t tell you whats better in Tumblr than Wordpress yet. These are few I found as new

Totally customizable themes. Of course, you can do same on self-hosted versions of wordpress. Paid feature on wordpress.com, I guess.
Multiple of types of posts. Unnecessary in my opinion, but what the hell.
Custom domain support. Self hosted wordpress, obvious. wordpress.com, its a paid feature.

Above all, the main reason, I wanted to move to a hosted service. Blogger is too messy. Comment system sucks there. Wordpress is nice, but I couldn’t get username ‘karteek’ and custom domains are not part of standard feature set and I was feeling all excited for an adventure :p

I still think that Wordpress is the best blogging software available, but updating the codebase, payment to the hosting provider etc etc are few things you really are not supposed to be worrying about when you blog for fun. Tumblr made life easy, without losing my identity - karteek.selfdabba.com. All I had to do is point my subdomain’s A record to Tumblr’s server.

Its a year and ...

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 07:00:20 +0530

Its been a year that Bombay was attacked by terrorists and killed a 166 innocent people. Well, whats happening after that.

- India has got a new guest. Terrorist Kasab. Yeah, Government has spent 31 crores for his safety
- Pakistan is still playing blame game that India is not giving enough evidence to arrest Saeed, founder of a terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba
- US is giving more and more aid to Pakistan to fight terrorism
- India is expecting US to be headmaster and detain Pakistan
- Pakistan is expecting US to be headmaster and force India to give Kashmir to Pakistan
- US doesn’t care if Pakistan is sending terrorists to India as long as it kills the terrorists which are attacking the US.
- Headmaster as well as both the kids know that things are not moving anywhere.

So, after all the crap that has happened in last one year, troubled remained troubled, terrorists remained terrorists, victims remained victims, and every one’s shitty life just remained shitty life. Just to find out what Google thinks about India and Pakistan, I took couple of screenshots -

So, people who search Google think that India is the richest country in the world, in asia, a third world country, great, Afghanistan’s largest trading partner. They want to know what India is known for and which continent it is in.

And about Pakistan, they think that its failed state, dangerous, doomed, a problem and a mess and few think its better than India. Few want to know where it is located.

Well, as an Indian, I think Pakistan’s leaders are stupid, immature at the same time, Indian leaders are just stupid other than a few like Raj Thackeray. They are stupid as well as immature.

TL;DR - One year over after attacks. No progress, none punished. Pakistan leaders are stupid.

Diwali - Here and there

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 12:29:30 +0530

The South Indian version of Diwali - Naraka, [Son of Lord Vishnu (Varaha avatar) and Bhudevi] got killed by Satyabhama (Sri Krishna’s wife, avatar of Bhudevi). Simple version, a pissed off reincarnated mom killed her son because he is an idiot.

The North Indian version of Diwali - Rama came back after killing Ravana and finishing 14 years exile. Simple version, an exploited poor son, who was exiled to a forest, fought with a villain for kidnapping his wife, rescued his wife from beautiful gardens of Lanka and came back home - soon to throw her back in forests. The conspiracy version of Diwali - Bloody Sivakasi guys have created a fake festival to sell all those expensive crackers and fireworks. The atheist version of Diwali - Holiday, Cool. Long weekend, AWESOME. What next ? The insect world version of Diwali - Holy crap. Dooms Day. *cough* *cough* *death*

After all, the festival doesn’t give a lot of happiness to me, but at least a holiday. So, Happy Diwali. Have Fun.

Rediff and its chat app

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 03:01:00 +0530

Title has Rediff, what else is it going to be ? Yet another bug in their app. This time, the app is in their Chat Application. Background of the application is … they invite some celebrity or counsellor or some expert in some field and enable them chat with the usual rediff junta.

Now, the app, doesn’t allow any two users to login with same username (even if you juggle with uppercase and lowercase). Well, Wow rediff. +1 for you.

Uhmm okay. Let me login as SRK for now. Now, this is the app.

Now, the bug … You can see that, there are already few guys chatting there and I can type my question in a box on the bottom right corner. If you clearly see, thats a frame. Now, let me open that frame in a new tab.

Now, see the URL, my username is in the query. Of course, doing that is so reddity. Now, let me change that to some other name, uhmmm say Aftab.

Note from the first image that there is already another user named logged in with id “AFTAB”. Now, Of course, you can post any message with his ID and make him wonder when did he do that.

Thats my message on top telling those guys that I’m not Aftab and the chat is NOT now, but tomorrow. Thats the story. Login and post as any user in one and only Rediff Live Chat. I didn’t want to check the possibilities of XSS there as there are few other people logged in and I don’t want to annoy them with my tests. Any way, rediff, I don’t expect you to fix the bug as … You didn’t really fix one of the bugs I reported TWO long years before. Come on, you must be kidding me. That’s your damn shopping portal.

There is a rule #0 for every web developer. Never trust the end user, always sanitize the content and that’s some thing I don’t know why rediff developers never do.

Moved Karteek dot Net to App Engine

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 09:38:27 +0530

I had a single landing page with links to my social networks and etc., while Ashok and Bala migrated their main blogs to Irresistible theme on wordpress. That’s an awesome theme with loads of features and both of them can use the features perfectly. I didn’t want to move my blog outside Selfdabba and did want to make use of Karteek dot Net for more than just a single landing page.

So, due to different set of requirements, and love for minimalist design for main website, I ended up coding a web application (a single page right now :P) using Google App Engine. And Google lets you host the same web app under Google Apps for free as long as the application stays under the free limits. The quota is too big for my need, so I decided to move.

For folks, of similar requirements, if you want, you can make use of the code. I always wanted to use github for sharing code, and finally did the same. Here is the code of current version of Karteek dot Net. And about github, certainly looking forward to share more code in future.

SRK and his detention

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:56:24 +0530

Shah Rukh Khan was detained for couple of hours in US lately, and the whole bollywood as well as normal junta are angry over the issue. And on the other hand, few sensible people are angry that bollywood is unnecessarily making an issue of a small thing. I’m not sure which side should I take, but this is what I think. Of course, US immigration should have some sense in detaining celebrities. SRK was on Newsweek’s most influential people list or something like that. If not the top, he is at least one of the top bollywood actors right now. Thats it. He isn’t anything more than an actor. But, wait, aren’t couple of our bollywood actors arrested for having links with Mafia ? One of them is also a top actor, Sanjay Dutt. It clearly indicates that being a top bollywood actor doesn’t mean that you are above the law. Forget US, not even India.

I accept that detaining SRK sounds like it was done on racial basis just because his name ends with Khan. Well, they did a boo boo and SRK is not wasting any of the chance to promote his new movie ‘My Name is Khan’. I think, we should just move on with the issue and suggest US Govt. to make sure that this kind of things doesn’t happen again, at least to Padma Shri winners (Kamal Haasan, Mammootty and now SRK) and start learning protocols with former Presidents of India.

On the lighter note, I was going through one article on Rediff (Oh yeah, rediff) and stumbled on a funny comment. Here is the comment.

SRK as usual did not comb his hair and was dressed shabbily…

Immigration officer: Who are you?
SRK with a loud voice: ” Im KING KHAN “.
Immigration officer: What……???
Other Immigration officer: Sir! He said he is KING KONG…..
Immigration officer’s : Guys catch the monkey in disguise……
SRK: Maahaaa Maahaa Maahaa Maahaa Maahaa…
Immigration officer: Sir…Howz the monkey sounding like a Goat????

So this is how SRK was caged in America…he he he

Bollywood, Move on. In other countries, people might not recognize you. US, update your algorithms of ‘random’ selection of names for questioning - How about not detaining celebrities at least ? Yeah, they make quite a fuss when you do mistakes.

Before buying a Magic

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 09:52:00 +0530

In one of my previous posts I mentioned few interesting things that can be done with your Android phone. Well, if you wanna go ‘Droid’ you better know few of these things.

As of now - Tuesday, 11th of August 2009, 1.45 AM, few variants of HTC Magic phones are not rootable. Yeah, you cant root few models. No Root = No fancy stuff like your own distro or custom builds or Hero or Wifi Tether and many more things.

Android phone will just yet another phone if you cannot root it. It will be just pretty icons. And as boring as a regular Nokia crappy phone if you cannot root it.

So, remember these things before buying yourself an Android. This is especially for Indian folks, as Airtel is shipping HTC Magic in India.

Don’t buy Airtel branded HTC Magic. I don’t hate Airtel too much, but the technical reason is the board on Airtel branded HTC Magic has SPL hboot version 1.33.0010 As of now, it is NOT rootable. The other SPLs which are not rootable are - 1.33.0006 and 1.33.0004. So, stay away from those Magic phones.
Airtel branded phone doesn’t have Google applications in it. So - No Gmail, No Google Talk, No sync with Google contacts, No Google Maps/Latitude which S.U.X big time. I’m still not able to understand why would someone ship a half baked phone by crippling it without its basic important features. So, you are actually spending 25K INR on a phone which doesn’t do anything more than a regular phone.
Android doesn’t support bluetooth transfer yet. Its a no biggie, but just for your information. Don’t complain later. People who share files over bluetooth, Sorry.

Well, just for recap - No buying HTC Magic with SPLs 1.33.0004 (HTC Magic Japan), 1.33.0006 (TMobile Mytouch 3G), 1.33.0010 (Many versions including Airtel HTC Magic) till they are rooted. You can check the progress at xda-developers forum. Google Ion is rootable.

In order to check the SPL of your mobile, turn off the mobile. Then turn it on by pressing the volume button down and power button together. It will take you to the fastboot screen. And you can find the board model in first line (32B, in this image). HBoot version in second line (1.33.0009 in this image). I think, if your model has SHIP S as OFF in the first line, thats a rootable model. So, if you can check, just check the SPL info before buying the phone.

So, what if you had already bought the phone with one of the dreaded Perfect SPL ? Well, by now you would have understood that your phone doesn’t do anything more than an ordinary phone. This is especially about Airtel branded HTC Magic phones. They don’t even have the awesome Google stuff (I’m not sure about other brands). This is what you can do.

As you have realized that there is no Android Market on your phone, there is no way of installing any applications on your phone. Actually, no. There is a method. But at the same time, there is a problem though, that you cannot install applications which require other libraries like PDF Apps or new IMEs or even applications dealing with Maps. For any installing any other app, you can follow this method. You will have to first goto Settings - Applications - Check install from Unknown Sources. And also, Enable USB debugging.

Now, there are two options for you. One is Open Market. Another is searching for the applications online and installing them using the ADB command of the Android SDK tools. The first option gives you something similar the Android market.

In the second option, you will have to download the application (Google is your friend) and install the application/the APK file by using the command adb install [Filename].apk

The second option can be made easier, if you can first install ‘Astro File Manager’ by using above command, then you can just copy the other applications to the SD card and install them using Astro.

Now, your phone is far better than the stock phone Airtel had rubbed on you. Of course, this is just until some one releases a hack for the so called Perfect SPL. When that happens, your phone can be magically made into an Awesome Droid.

Edit : Bala posted a nice illustration on how useful the current Airtel branded HTC Magic is to an end user. Check it here.

Update on 15 Aug 2009: For daredevils, Guys at XDA have released info on how to fix Perfected SPL. After that, of course, you can root your Magic. If you are not technical and daring enough, it seems HTC is going to release an update for Indian users next month, so wait for it.

Luck is Yuck

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 12:41:45 +0530

Guess is right. Its about the movie ‘Luck’. Contains spoilers, so don’t read if you want headache after watching the movie. Movie sucks. Sucks very bad. I wish Shruti Hassan had a better debut. Imran Khan’s luck is not going good. Well, yeah, what can one tell. He is choosing wrong stories and movies. Probably he would have chosen a worse movie for debut, if it wasn’t Aamir’s choice.

Coming to the movie, Luck. My guess was wrong, the movie is not a copy of The Condemned. Probably, the movie would have been better if it was at least a copy of that. Well, the movie is about luck. Luck of Ram Mehra (Imran) who has some financial crisis - and ends up in an illegal realty show (Now, just think about Roadies for 1 second). Aisha (Shruti) comes back to the game after finishing it previous time. But, she seems to be very uneasy about the game. Major (Mithun) joins the game to earn money for his wife’s operation. Short Cut (Chitrashi) is yet another character. Raghav (Ravi Kishen) a serial killer is the bad man of the story, who is another participant. The show is run by Moosa (Sanjay). He has some rounds of games which involves luck to escape. People might die when a round is completed. Internet betting happens while the game progresses. Participants make money while they finish each round. Moosa challenge them for a death match when any participant wants to leave and he kills them as he is luckier than them.

Now, coming to the rounds of the movie. First round is when all the first fifteen participants are given revolvers with 1 normal bullet and 5 blanks. They point guns at heads of the person standing right to them. So - game motto is ‘Lucky guy lives’. While watching the game, I dint understand one thing. 5 blanks and 1 normal bullet. That makes, kill probability as ⅙. Now, here the statistics part of my brain got activated and started talking to the logic part of my brain. If the the probability of dying is ⅙ - Why would a LUCKY guy be dead (Did I tell you that they had a very strong recruitment policy ? Yeah, they take only luck people into the game). Now another doubt. 5 out of 15 people are dead after the end of the round, which means ⅓rd of the participants are dead. I don’t remember my probability lessons very well, but, I think, the probability of that to happen is ⅓ * ⅙ which is around 5.5%. Uhmm, okay, thats still a big percentage. Now, there is one more thing. Two people standing next to each other are dead. Which means - there is a delay of shooting by one person, who actually killed a person who killed another person right next to him. Now, probability part of my brain is shouting at me, shut up and sleep. I’ve no clue how did this round finish. Yeah, one guy wants to leave, and Moosa kills him in a death match.

Then, the second round. People have to take parachutes and jump from a height of 2000 feet. The catch is that there are 12 parachutes, only 9 parachutes work, only 9 people are there (6 of 15 are dead in first round). Uhmm, lets consider that the chopper took them another 500 feet up in the air. Well, it doesn’t seem to take them much higher. Now, all the guys jump one by one from that height. Now, the physics part of my brain is hurt. its 2000 feet - and the scene goes at full pace for next 2 minutes. Wait - there is one blunder here. Is gravity less in South Africa that, it will take 90 seconds for a person to reach ground from 2500 feet. Well, g is 32 feet/sec². Now, you calculate the time a human will take to reach the ground from 2500 feet. Our hero, reaches jumps first, stays in air, then - thinks for a while, grabs heroine and then opens his parachute. Uhmmm, did I tell you there is one blunder here ? Wait …. Ever heard about minimum/safe height for deploying a parachute ? Well, its about 2000 feet. It can be brought down to 600 to 1200 feet, if the parachute is awesome. I fail to understand how they managed deploy parachutes and land safely … perfect landing and do so much drama in the air when the height is just 2500 feet.

The next rounds turn even more ridiculous. People swim faster than sharks. Hero and heroine run faster than the effect of the explosion on a train which was actually moving in the opposite direction. Well, yeah, Heroine is one of the twins and she is the unluckier one. Her sister is the one who played the previous time, but ends up committing suicide. So, she wants to take a revenge on Moosa. Movie ends when Moosa and Ram fights the death match and shoot each other. Ram is a mirror bla bla guy who has heart on the right side. So, he survives. He is an adult, and he doesn’t know that till the doctors tell him. So, I think that his brain is misplaced rather than just mirrored.

The movie is one of the most boring movies I’ve seen lately. It has nothing to offer other than a tag that its the debut for daughter of a great actor. Shruti is cute in few scenes and atrociously emotionless in few scenes. But, yeah, she will learn, she has the talent. Imran should better ask his uncle (Aamir) to choose stories for him in future. His choices are turning out as huge flops. Well, if you are lucky enough, you will stay out of the theatre for this film.

Spam and Recaptcha

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 08:22:26 +0530

I’m getting few spam comments once in a while, even though Akismet is working hard to protect me from them. So, I thought to add another layer of protection from spam, I’ve installed reCAPTCHA.

It’s about giving a helping hand through you guys as well as stopping spammers. reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows. Take a look at their site, reCAPTCHA.net for more information.

Well, sorry for asking you to prove that you are a human to comment. Thanks.

Idle 'harmful' brain

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 11:27:55 +0530

Idlebrain, the telugu film website is one site almost all Telugu movie lovers go after release of any Telugu movie to read reviews. The website is so greedily filled with ads that I’ve almost stopped going to that site. Well, hope they have learnt their lesson atleast by now. Guess why ?

Well, WTH Idlebrain ? How about learning some basics in ‘everything’ from Passion for Cinema ?

Few interesting things you can do with your Android phone

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 05:58:38 +0530

I’ve been working on and about Android from last couple of months. I ended up learning few nice things about android from XDA developers and web sites of few other android hackers/developers. Starting with few bad things - No android phone is released in India yet - Google/HTC - WTF ? Ofcourse, Google is selling its ADP1 (Android Developer Phone 1, in other words completely SIM unlocked HTC Dream a.k.a TMobile G1) for Indian crowd, but the phone+shipping can become unnecessarily expensive. But, anyway few lucky folks with friends coming from US, who went to US or whose company is good enough to provide them with an Android phone (Yay !!) are lucky enough to get their hands on HTC Dream. But, anyway not-so lucky guys can always get the awesome emulator from Android site. Coming to the interesting things that you can do with your phone, well, these are NOT for guys who are scared of command line, who do not understand terms like root, or people who are just too scared of spoiling their phones and ESPECIALLY NOT for people who doesnt RTFM. If you are wondering what the hell is RTFM, you might want to buy an iPhone ;) Kidding anyway. Android is awesome platform out of the box, but it can be done more awesome by doing some nicer stuff to it. Now, you should know few things/terms here.

ADP1 - Android Developer Phone 1 (Google branded, Black one with fancy design on it) - images
G1 - T Mobile G1 (Black/White TMobile branded phone with Google logo on the back) - images
G2/Magic/Sapphire (Vodafone branded HTC Magic phone, G2 - is just made up by people. Sapphire is probably HTC code name) - images
Google Ion - HTC Magic phone given by Google the attendees of 2009 Google I/O conference

Now, all the above phones + few more phones (chinese stuff like Lenovo Ophone etc.,) run Android. So, if you get your hands on any of the above phones, you can do few nice things with it.

Root the Phone Rooting the phone - simply means that you get ‘root’ access on the phone. So, unless you possess root you cannot feel the true potential of your Android (linux) phone. But .. wait … what is root ? If that is your question, you wasted 5 minutes of your precious time by reading this useless post. You can simply return your useless linux phone and live with a Nokia phone happily ever after.Rooting is a fairly simple process if you RTFM. But, beware that it can brick(break) your phone if you are careless. So, if at all you decide to root your phone, DO read the instructions carefully on XDA or Android-Dls.com and the try it.
Change the bootloader This is not a fancy thing that you can do with your phone, but more of an essential thing if you decide to play with your phone. Check this thread on XDA and install the Hard SPL. G1s will have the default G1 Original SPL, where as ADP1 will have Engineering SPL. I’m just not sure what SPL does Ion and Magic have (probably the newer one which is not listed on that page). HardSPL is the recommended one.There is a newer SPL (1.33.2005) which actually bricked many phones. This SPL is the most useful as it increases system and data partitions of your phone by 30 megs each. Which means, you can do more fancy stuff with your phone. If you decide to go with this SPL, - Do check your Board type … and research on which board you can install, Make sure that flashed your phone with latest Radio, And make sure that you will never go back to older radios on the phone.The essential part of modifying SPL is you can apply NBH update files (I hardly did this), and flash nand backups (I do this a LOT). Its simply means, you can take back up of your phone and save them on your computer, and whenever you manage to spoil your phone, *if you have Engg./HardSPL* you can simply flash that backup back on your phone.
Install the ‘n’ awesome ‘custom’ android builds Simon Walker is maintaining a very good list with all the available Android Builds, features, requirements, dates etc., here. If you’ve time, try out all of them and stick to the one you like ‘teh best’. Each of them is great in its own way.
Compile your own ‘Android’ distro If you are more into ‘my own’ things, you can always download the android source and build the images for your ‘dream’ (Only Dream is released ADP1, thats why Google has instructions only for building for HTC Dream. But, by the time you play a lot with those Custom builds And your own distro (#3 and #4 points here), you will understand how you can play with your ‘Magic’. And there is XDA all the time.
Edit your boot splash screens and theme your distro Same as what it tells. There is no better way to show your love for customization than changing your Splash screen or making your own theme for your phone. Well, you can start that by reading stuff here
Wifi/Bluetooth Tether It just means that you can share your phone’s internet (Edge/GPRS/3G) connection to your computer over wifi. The whole process is simplified a lot by few applications. I suggest Android Wifi Tether which is just an awesome opensource application. The whole process needs some features enabled on your kernel, so, it works only on rooted phones with kernel with iptables and netfilter support
And few more and just don’t forget to do some kickass things like using applications Shopsavvy, Locale, Wikitude, Twidroid, Barcode Scanner, Google latitude, Google Skymap. You can find all the list of applications available in Google Android Market over web at Cyrket (No, its not Cricket, its Cyrket)
…. and try to be a Hero This is more related to #3. But, this is so awesome that it does need a separate point to talk about. Install HTC Hero with Rosie UI. This requires you to know fairly enough about Android builds. Anyway, you can see the Rosie demo for yourself on Youtube here

Out of the endless possibilities of ‘awesome’ things, these are few nice things that you can do with your Android phone. Anyway, as usual I take no responsibility for what ever you do with your phone. No, I’m not going to help you with rooting your phone or any other thing here. I gave links to the sources of information and you can learn easily from them.

Hola. Como Estas ?

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:56:56 +0530

Its been long time that I didn’t write anything here. Well, I’ve been busy. Very busy. I was at Santiago, Chile for last month working on one of the nicest things in current technology world. I was working on Android and I truly enjoyed each moment of it.

Coming to my experiences, I have seen too many nice, funny and great things this time. My travel to Santiago was itself a nice experience, its a long journey around 40 hours. I’ve seen arrogance of immigration guys at Delhi Airport. They made one guy stand in a corner for 10-20 minutes, as he crossed the ‘yellow’ immigration line before they called him. And carelessness/faltooness ;) of Delhi Airport guys – They broke my suitcase’s wheel as well as tampered my number lock. Quick tip here – If you are travelling through Delhi Airport, I suggest you to get your baggage plastic wrapped. Actually, better tip – Try to avoid Delhi airport if you are not a local.

Well, after the long journey via Delhi, Amsterdam, Lima – We reached Santiago some time in midnight of 23rd March. The accommodation provided by my employer was nice. Though, I did a mistake of searching for it’s address once in Google and ended up on an article where couple of guys were killed in the same building because of gas leaks few years before. Coming to my work – it was very nice and challenging. Client was fun to work with, probably one of the best clients I’ve worked with till now.

Coming to Chile, most of its population is based on Santiago (atleast they work at Santiago, the capital city) Santiago is a very nice city, with very good transport, nice roads, pleasant climate (atleast for Indians). Pollution is more compared to other western cities (its a valley surrounded by mountains, there is no air to take away the smoke). It rains very less (once in a year) there. They depend on recycling water (they recycle around >71%) People are very friendly (atleast in the area where I lived). There are few catches. Very few people speak/understand English. If you don’t know Spanish, you might have to depend on sign language. Overall, Santiago is a nice city. It doesn’t feel like a city of a ‘developing’ country.

Colleagues at my company were very friendly. They helped a lot, otherwise, survival there in a non-English speaking country would have been very tough for us. Thanks a lot guys. I went to for camping with them for the first time in my life, and it was fun. Hitchhiking, raising tents, sleeping next to a lake, roaming around during nights were few of the highlights for that camping trip. To be frank, I dint do too much for this trip compared to my earlier trips. The only culprit could be my fear of Spanish. Well, may be, I was just too lazy this time.

40 days passed by very fast, very very fast. And I had to return back. My return journey is even bigger adventure. I’m coming alone, and the journey is 64 hours, with 6 hours wait time in Lima, 21 hours wait time in Amsterdam and 7 hours wait time in Mumbai. I met one Chilean lady in flight to Lima and had a nice conversation. Believe me, she was the only Chilean lady I spoke with for more than 10 minutes/sentences through out my trip. I think I spoke with my HR for 10 minutes :p The other ladies were simply non-Chileans or conversations were just ‘Hi and Bye’. And I forgot to ask for her name ! Then, my wait time at Lima was just boring so as my flight from Lima to Amsterdam. Then, 21 hrs, I stayed at airport hotel in Amsterdam. Schiphol airport was the best airport I’ve seen till now (I’ve seen Heathrow and Frankfurt in Europe) It was a huge airport with a lot to explore. Though I hated it for few seconds when McDonalds there charged me 0.4 Euros for single sachet of ketchup. My flight from Amsterdam to Mumbai was interesting, I met one guy coming from West Indies, and my journey went fast and smooth with his stories from the islands. And yet another time, I forgot to ask for name ! (He even told me that he wants to do MBA in Mumbai, and even then I dint ask for name !!) Then, I met a Telugu couple in Mumbai who were travelling for the first time, and were in a complete panic mode as their flight from Mumbai to Hyderabad was cancelled. I met another Telugu student coming from London for his sister’s marriage there and helped that couple along with that guy to get their boarding passes for the same flight as him. This time, I asked for all the names. (Actually, I forgot to ask this time too … and uncle asked for our names and we got to know our names that time). A quick tip – Never travel without print out of your itinerary. I met another IT guy who got stuck at Mumbai airport as he doesn’t have a printout of his e-ticket/itinerary and the King Fisher counter was closed at the International airport, and the security guys dint let him take the transfer to domestic terminal. His story became happy ending with my brilliant idea (:P) of ditching the transfer and taking cab to domestic terminal, as KF counter will be open there and he can get boarding pass there using his ID proof. With all this community help activities my wait time at Mumbai went very fast. And yeah, all of a sudden I saw a familiar face there at Mumbai airport. She was looking at me as if she knew me, and both of us couldn’t recollect how we know each other. Then, she remembered that she was my colleague back in Santiago who happened to meet me only once on a road and my boss introduced me to her that time. As both of us work at client sides, we never met again after that first meet. It seems, she too started for India, but on a different airlines, and a day after I started. She reached Mumbai at the same time, I reached. Both of us told quick ‘Chao’ and left as she went to Bangalore and I came to Chennai.

This trip, I met a lot of Chileans, few Uruguayans, few Peruvians and of course few Indians. As a whole, this was a very nice trip for me with many lessons, nice experiences in a completely different world.