K World

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 -


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 ?