VT's Tech Blog

Online Reputation Management

sharonshousley — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 05:09:56 +0000

Google is sometimes thought to be the bane of the Internet, and it certainly can be a thorn in the side of search engine marketers. Many fail to look beyond the search of today, toward what the implications of indexing and storing information will have on future generations. Forget the slogan “diamonds are forever” — “Google is forever” is more accurate in regard to the Internet. And if not Google, then some other search giant will be able to retrieve information from previous years within a few seconds. If something is online, it does not just “go away”. Like it or not, the entire world is being indexed and categorized, and will be searchable for years to come.

Individuals today have a personal brand. Employers and colleagues will search on your name, so it is imperative that you keep this in mind when posting online. You must control your online reputation.

The web is not always a friendly place, so what do you do if you are not using an alias and someone is posting derogatory information about you, your company, your products, or your brand?

Monitor Your Brand
The first step in monitoring your brand is to setup automated notifications within the various search engines, either via email or an RSS feed. This way, you will know when you are being discussed, either in favorable or unfavorable terms. For example, the “Google Alerts” feature is a free service that will send email notifications to you when specific words or phrases appear in new search results. Simply use your name, company name, product name, or brand as the phrase being monitored. Ego Feeds work in a similar fashion, except the alerts appear in a custom created RSS feed that updates whenever new mentions occur. For more information about Ego Feeds, see a related article at http://www.feedforall.com/ego-searches.htm

Control Your Brand
The second step in protecting your brand is to take a pro-active approach to appearing in the top search results when your name is entered into a search engine. You can do this by offering interviews, reviews, SEO, and writing articles or posting blog entries. At the very least, make an effort to control the top search results for your name. This will ensure that when your personal brand is searched, those items will be listed in the top 10 search results.

Damage Control
If you find something that is damaging or harmful, do damage control. Control your responses, and behave in a professional manner so it is clear that you took the high road when the exchange is viewed by others at a later time.

Social
The final bit of advice is to simply keep personal things personal. While the social sites are great for maintaining friendships, they are not helpful for people who have an occasional lapse in judgment. Refrain from posting pictures that show anything that you would not want your mother or future grandchildren to see, or saying anything when you are mad or upset since we often say things “in the heat of battle” that we regret later.

The Internet is preserving and archiving personal history in a way that has never previously happened. Control your online reputation for posterity.

About the Author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for RecordForAll http://www.recordforall.com audio recording and editing software.

HTML5 in brief – Getting Started

vinu — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 10:02:38 +0000

HTML5 source code

If you’ve been hearing about the buzz about HTML5 and what it is – here’s a brief post and ways to get to know HTML5 better.

HTML5 is the latest version which newer HTML and XHTML documents should confirm with. This version of HTML aims at simplifying and overcome issues with the older HTML4 presented.

The first thing you’ll notice in HTML5 is that the HTML declaration itself is simplified. To declare a HTML document, all you need to do is to declare the document in this way:

< !DOCTYPE html>


  
  Sample HTML5 Document


This is my first HTML5 document

You’ll notice that the standard DOCTYPE declaration which is required in HTML4 is missing here. This is the first in many simplifications which eases up development in HTML5.

There’s simplifications on other tags also. For example HTML5 features a tag which makes it easy to embed videos in your page, without any third party plugins, as simple as this:

 
If you are seeing this, your browser may not be fully HTML5 compliant.

There’s still debate about what the default format for HTML5 videos should be, Google in the meanwhile has introduced the WebM format which royalty-free high quality video compression codec for use on the web. This format has eventually gotten the support of Mozilla, Apple, Opera and Google. The newer nightly builds of Firefox and Chrome support this format.

If you are looking at exploring the differences between HTML4 and HTML5, this links should be of help – HTML5 differences from HTML4. Another very useful site for developers who are new to HTML5 is Dive into HTML5. The author of this site explains the basics of HTML5, what’s new with it and how to do stuff with it in a simple way.

To get you started on HTML5, here’s a screencast by Addy Osmani which takes you through the basics in under 5 minutes.

Even though the HTML5 specs are still evolving, and browser support for the new features may time sometime to stabilize, the power of HTML5 is the way to go. The first uses of HTML5 is going to be what is powering the mobile web, since most Smartphones these days are running Webkit browsers which are HTML5 compliant.

I’ll be taking a deeper look into HTML5 in the future posts, so look in the HTML5 section here for updates. Here are the links from this article for your reference:

Image credit – via Wikipedia

Domain Name Suggestions

sharonshousley — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 19:50:10 +0000

This is a guest post by Sharon Housley, and you can find more information about her at the end of this post.

Innovative, memorable, and compelling domain names are becoming more and more difficult to come up with. The following tools can help webmasters find great domain names for their online businesses….

Domain Name Soup
Domain Name Soup is a free domain name generator that helps you find available domain names in your niche.
http://www.domainnamesoup.com/

Bust A Name
Bust A Name is a free tool that lets you quickly check domain name availability. The Bust A Name domain search engine combines the keywords that are entered and tells webmasters what combinations are available.
http://www.bustaname.com/

Domain Suggestion Tool
Domain Suggestion Tool uses name-spinning and semantic technology to come up with unique domain name options for webmasters.
http://domain-suggestions.domaintools.com/

Dot-o-mator
Dot-o-mator can be used to create domain name suggestions. Simply enter keywords in the box on the left, and then choose different endings, or enter your own ending. Click the button to see what combinations are available.
http://www.dotomator.com/

Domain Exposer
Domain Exposer is a tool that helps webmasters find available domain names. Combining keywords with common words to create a new domain name, the Domain Exposer tool checks the domain name availability for all of the created suggestions.
http://www.domainexposer.com/

Domain Typer
Domain Typer uses a domain name generator to create easy-to-remember domain names. Domain Typer randomly generates .com domains, and lists their availability.
http://www.domaintyper.com/

DomainsBot
DomainsBot includes domain suggestions, name-spinning, a complete searchable index of expired and expiring domain names, as well as a list of all domains available for sale.
http://www.domainsbot.com/

Name Boy
Name Boy generates domain names based on keywords you enter, and it also allows you to instantly register domains that you locate.
http://www.nameboy.com/

Make Words
Make Words creates random phonetic names. Make Words is a random domain name idea generator. The Make Words website includes keyword collections, and synonyms to assist webmasters in finding the perfect domain name.
http://www.makewords.com/

Name Tumbler
Name Tumbler allows webmasters to enter keywords, and then the Name Tumbler tool combines those keywords with their database. It allows you to select keyword placement, and optionally whether you want a hyphenated domain or not.
http://www.nametumbler.com/

Snap It Now
Snap It Now generates domain names that are based on keywords and categories. You can optionally include hyphens to find a great domain that meets your needs.
http://www.snapitnow.com/

Domain Pigeon
Domain Pigeon lists available domain names, as well as Twitter names, which you can register as you find one you like.
http://www.domainpigeon.com/

Coming up with a great domain name can be a struggle, even for the most creative entrepreneur. The above tools will assist in your domain search.

About the Author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for RecordForAll http://www.recordforall.com audio recording and editing software.

mysqlind_qc: Client Side Caching for MySQL extensions for PHP

vinu — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:50:02 +0000

Here’s something in the making, a PHP extension which caches MySQL queries irrespective of the extension being used. It’s a plugin for mysqlnd, the native MySQL driver for PHP called mysqlnd_qc. This currently requires PHP 5.3.3-dev which is still in development.

The extension allows caching buffered queries through mysql_query and mysqli_query. It allows cache-invalidation though TTL or a user defined callback. This extension is still in the protoype stage right now and will evolve as the project progresses.

The Query Cache is implemented as a PHP extension. It is written in C and operates “under the hood” of PHP. During the start up of the PHP interpreter it gets registered as a mysqlnd plugin to replaces selected mysqlnd methods.

At PHP run time it proxies queries send from mysqlnd/PHP to the MySQL server. If a query string starts with the SQL hint (/*qc=on*/) to enable caching of it and the query is not cached (Cache miss), the query cache plugin will record the raw wire protocol data send from MySQL to PHP to answer the query. The query cache records the wire protocol data in its cache medium and replays it, if still valid, on a cache hit.

Note that the query cache does not hold decoded result sets consisting of zvals (C struct representing a PHP variable). It stores the raw wire data of the MySQL client server protocol. In case of a cache hits, mysqlnd still needs to decode the cached raw wire data into PHP variables before passing the result to the user space. This approach has one major advantage: simplicity.

You can get more information and installation instructions over at the MySQLND Query Cache Project page at Mysql Forge.

Check out this slide which gives you more information about this extension:

Built-in query caching for all PHP MySQL extensions/APIs

View more presentations from Ulf Wendel.

Free Ebook on the Zend Framework

vinu — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 08:02:28 +0000

Here’s a very good e-book on the Zend Framework called Zend Framework: Surviving The Deep End by Pádraic Brady. You can access this book from it’s site at www.survivethedeepend.com. It’s not yet available in print or download, but the author does mention that there’s a print book coming out in the near future.
Here’s a top level Table of contents of the subjects covered in this book:

1. Introduction
2. The Architecture of Zend Framework Applications
3. The Model
4. Installing The Zend Framework
5. A Not So Simple Hello World Tutorial
6. Standardise The Bootstrap Class With Zend_Application
7. Handling Application Errors Gracefully
8. Developing A Blogging Application
9. Implementing The Domain Model: Entries and Authors
10. Setting The Design With Zend_View, Zend_Layout, HTML 5 and Yahoo! User Interface Library
A. Creating A Local Domain Using Apache Virtual Hosts
B. Performance Optimisation For Zend Framework Applications
C. Copyright Information


If you’re already working on the Zend Framework, take a look at the section on Performance optimizations for apps built on the Zend Framework, which has some useful tips.

Free online Security scanner – ZeroDayScan

vinu — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 13:30:31 +0000

ZeroDayScan in an online scanner which can scan your site for the following issues:

Detects Cross Site Scripting attacks (XSS)
Detects Hidden Directories and Backup Files
Looks for Known Security Vulnerabilities
Searches for SQL Injection Vulnerabilities
Automatically detects zero day bugs
Performs Website Fingerprinting

Once the service finishes scanning your site for issues and vulnerabilities, it emails you a PDF with what they found for your site.

In order to prevent sensitive security reports like this going out to others, ZeroDay scan asks you to add a text file with some security text to be added to your site. This ensures you can scan only sites which you have control over.

Check out this service at www.zerodayscan.com

Create RESTful Webservices in minutes with FRAPI

vinu — Thu, 27 May 2010 10:02:44 +0000

Planning on starting a project with REST webservices? You’ve gotta check out this new framework called FRAPI. This API framework built in PHP eases development of REST webservices, by allowing you to add actions, responses and even create users and assign API keys to them for accessing the services you create. Here’s a video showing an overview of FRAPI and how simple it is to deploy and manage webservices.

This project is still quite new and their documentation is down to the bare minimum. They do have the required documentation for you you’ll need to get your hands dirty with FRAPI. First you’ll have to download the sources and set it up on your own. One you’ve downloaded the files and setup the directory permissions, you’ll also have to make the Apache Virtual host settings to get FRAPI to start working.

FRAPI has the following requirements for it to run:

PHP 5.2.2 or later
APC: Required for caching of actions, errors, etc.
HTTP: (http://pecl.php.net/pecl_http
PEAR: (http://pear.php.net)
PEAR::HTTP_Request2: This could be replaced by pecl_http however it is used in the bundled ArmChair package which is used to access CouchDB (http://pear.php.net/HTTP_Request2)

Some of the advantages I see after playing around with FRAPI is that it auto-generates the code skeleton for you to work on so you just have to go fill in the blanks to create your service. You also don’t have to worry about transfoming the your data into different formats, FRAPI supports JSON, XML, PHP, and plain text natively. This enables you to make your webservices cross-platform and even power mobile apps. You also don’t have to tweak around with code which handles http requests and responses while creating your webservices.

For more information on this project, head over to their site getfrapi.com or their project page on github.

Check your server load before you process

vinu — Tue, 18 May 2010 12:30:36 +0000

Most of us just write applications to be deployed on a webserver without thinking about what to do when the server becomes overloaded. What happens in most cases is that the application would go trying to run itself on every request, and on a heavily loaded system, it just goes on the aggravate the problem, making increasing the load on the server, till finally the server becomes unreachable.

What if you could actually check the server load in your PHP application? Would you think about checking the server load before doing some heavy computational task or database accesses? There’s function in PHP which will allow you to check the load averages on a server.

The sys_getloadavg() in PHP gives you the load averages for your server. You can use this to check the load on your server before processing a request.

$serverload = sys_getloadavg();
print_r($serverload);

The code above gives the output:

Array
(
    [0] => 1.07
    [1] => 0.89
    [2] => 1
)

The output from the code shows the system load averages where [0] is the load averages for the past 1 minute, [1] is for the past 5 minutes and [2] is for the past 15 minutes.

On an ideal server, the load averages on the server shouldn’t go above 3. A load average of more than 15 would mean that the server is already running much lower than normal, and you may not want to add more load to this.

You can use this output to decide whether to serve a process intensive page depending on the server load. Here’s a pseudo-code on how you’d do something like this:

$serverload = sys_getloadavg();
if ($serverload[0]<10)
  {
    // process loads of data now
    some_big_process();
  } else
     {   // Send a 503 header stating that the server is overloaded.
         header('HTTP/1.1 503 Too busy, try again later');
         die('The server is busy at present and cannot process your request.');
      }

You can also run the application in such a way that you can wait till the load on the server decreases to run your process. This is useful if you are running a cron for processing data:

set_time_limit(0);
//set time limit to 0, so PHP's max execution time doesn't interfere with the processing script
$serverload = sys_getloadavg();
//Check load and see if it's low enough to start processing
while ($serverload[0]>5)
{  //Wait for 1 minute to check load again
    sleep(60);
}
// out of the loop - so let's do some processing now!
some_big_process();

To ensure that the script doesn’t run endlessly on a permanently overloaded server, time check in the while loop to auto-end the script it the server load remains high for a certain amount of time.

More reading:
Load & Load Averages on Wikipedia
PHP function – sys_getloadavg

Bangalore PHP Meetup April ’10

vinu — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:06:43 +0000

Just a quick heads up in case you missed out on the announcement. The Bangalore PHP Meetup’s happening this month on the 24th. For a change, I’m not involved much in the organization of this event. Indus Khaithan took care of the venue arragements and Harsha MV’s taken up co-ordinating with the potential speakers and finalizing the talk list. Thanks a ton guys for taking taking the initiative.

Harsha’s put up a tenative list of talks for this month’s event:

Developing Facebook Application using PHP by Sriram Kumar
Job Queues by Abhinav Lal
Zend ACL Component - Bare_Acl by Sudheer Satyanarayana

Here’s the link to this month’s meetup event – www.meetup.com/Bangalore-PHP-Users/calendar/13135127. We’ll keep that page updated with the latest details about the event. If you are planning on coming for this, join our Meetup group and RSVP ‘YES’ to the event.

As always – Please forward that link to your friends who you think would be interested in our group as well.

BSNL 3G – HELP!

vinu — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 05:00:14 +0000

I had picked up a BSNL 3G connection a few weeks back hoping for a faster internet connectivity on the move on my N900. The N900 being a mobile computer, I’m able to do most of the work on that without having to boot up the computer. It’s also an advantage having a fast connectivity on the mobile with the 4-8 hour power cuts in Bangalore, the UPS doesn’t hold up with WIFI connectivity too long during an outage.

When you get a prepaid connection from BSNL, their initial 120 topup gives 25 MB download free. The call rates also seed reasonable. I was pretty impressed with the speeds I got on the mobile. Here’s the screenshot of the speed test on the N900′s browser:

That’s pretty decent speeds for general surfing, VOIP calls, and IM. Even Skype calls go through without any major breaks in the call. This kind of speeds after the ultra slow Edge speeds on Airtel GPRS was mindblowing.

Now the free usage was coming towards it’s end, and I had to look for ways to top up the balance. After surfing around the unintuitive BSNL portal, I found that their portal shows data plans for prepaid and postpaid over at http://karnataka.bsnl.co.in/3G/dataplans.htm.

First stop’s their dealer

The dealer I got the connection from had no clue about how to get this done. The BSNL rep who was at the shop also was clueless about 3G data plans. He asked me to call the customer care folks to find out the details.

2nd stop: Customer Care Number

Customer care on the other end just want to end the call as fast as possible. The first time I called customer care, the person hardly heard what I was asking for and told me some instructions to get Blackberry service on the mobile and dropped the line. The next call I got through asked me to SMS some text to a number. When I did so, I just got a reply message that the option I messaged was wrong!

Still getting no where!

I searched for other dealers on the way to office and dropped into one more place – they too were clueless about the 3G data recharge. Next stop, Customer Service centres. I hunted and found their CSC locations and phone numbers from their site. I tried the two locations closest to me, and tried calling up to find how to reach there. No replies on the numbers listed on the site!

Recharge online?

They advertise that you can recharge online on their portal portal.bsnl.in. Well you can, if you have the patience for the site to load up. My luck’s been so good this far, that when I try logging to recharge, I never get past the login screen. Luckily I found another service to recharge my talktime balance for BSNL. ~~Unfortunately, neither BSNL or other recharge portals I’ve checked out, provide data recharges for BSNL’s 3G service~~Unfortunately the other recharge portals I’ve checked out don’t provide data recharges for BSNL’s 3G service.

Update: I did check out the BSNL portal after reading a comment from Uday, using Internet Explorer, the site did go through and I did see a data top-up option. But the payment options don’t include a credit card, you’ll need an account from one of the National Banks to pay on the site. The banks I have accounts in don’t seem to be on the list there.

I still have yet to get the data plan top-up done. If any of you know how to get this done, and a CSC/dealer where the people know how to do this, do let me know by commenting below! BSNL’s service is good while it runs, when you need help, you’re on your own. Their service is like a do-it-yourself kit where the instructions are missing.

Mobikwik – Online recharge for Prepaid connections

vinu — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 17:54:13 +0000

I was first introduced to this service from the folks over at Mobikwik when they sent me a email about their service. I actually used this when I needed to do a quick recharge of my BSNL and Tata Docomo connections while I was travelling.

The service is pretty easy to use. All you need to do is to sign up for an account. You’ll need to fund your account in-order to recharge your phone. You can fund the account using your credit/debit card or netbanking. I was able to recharge both my phone in under 5 minutes. I am also very impressed with their support. I got an answer to a query I posted on their site within a few minutes.

Another interesting service prepaid users should find interesting is the ability to schedule a recharge, so you can set a future recharge date, and your prepaid balance recharged on the date you set. Useful to schedule the next month’s charge in advance.

When you’re on the move and you’re almost out of balance, you can also send the service a quick SMS and get your account recharged in a jiffy. All you need to do is to register your mobile number and send a message with the amount you want to recharge to their service : RC 50 9810125432 where 50 is the amount to recharge on your number.

I had asked Mr. Bipin Preet Singh the CEO of Mobikwik a few questions about their service:

Q: What happens when a recharge doesn’t go though properly? how long does it take to locate the problem/refund the charge?
A: Mobikwik realizes that operator server’s are not 100% efficient and recharge can sometimes fail due to operator server being down, or invalid amount being entered etc. Therefore, mobikwik has concept of mobikwik balance. So, if you pay Rs 100 to recharge, but recharge did not happen, your balance does not get deducted. So you can try again later. Else, you can send a customer support email which is there on our home page. We respond in 24 hours.

Q: Recurring Recharge – I see you have a scheduled recharge which allows a user to plan one charge in advance. Are you planning something where the user can set a recurring recharge, let’s say once a week/month/…
A: Actually, with current schedule recharge, you can set it up as many times as you want, once a week, once a month, once a year. There is no restriction.

Q: Do you support data plan recharges? If yes, which operators do you support currently and which ones are planned in the future?
A: Yes, we do support data plan recharges for all leading operators.

I did find the data recharge option missing for my operators unfortunately, Tata Docomo and BSNL didn’t have the 3G data recharge options on Mobikwik yet. Hope that too comes up in the near future. I hate having to run to the nearest dealer to get that done.

Check out their service at: www.mobikwik.com and follow them on twitter @mobikwik . If you’ve tried out Mobikwik let us know your experiences by commenting on this post.

Skipfish a Web Application Security Scanner from Google

vinu — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 13:31:51 +0000

Google has released a Web Application Security Scanner over at Google Code. This can be used to scan you site for possible security issues which might be lurking around. Skipfish prepares an interactive site-map for the targeted site by carrying out a recursive crawl and dictionary-based probes.

This scanner is easy to setup on an Ubuntu machine. You’ll need to have the packages for gcc and make installed on your system in order to compile Skipfish from it’s sources. Once you install these, download the Skipfish package from the project download page. Once you download it, unzip the files to a folder of it’s own and head over to that folder in your terminal window and issue a make command by just entering this in the terminal.

make

After the package compiles you can test to see if it was successful by issuing the following command in the terminal

./skipfish -h

This should show you a the Skipfish help screen. If you don’t get that, check the make output to see if there were any errors during the compile process.

Once you get Skipfish compiled and ready on your system, head over to their documentation pages to learn more on how to use this to tool to scan your site.

This tool creates a html report of the scan in the output directory you specify and the output looks like this:

Skipfish has a highly optimized HTTP handling which allows you to achieve up to 2000 requests per second on servers which can take that load. It also doesn’t depend on the technology you use to host and build your web application.

If you’re interested in what types of scans are currently implemented on this tool, here’s what it supports (from their documentation page):

High risk flaws (potentially leading to system compromise):
- Server-side SQL injection (including blind vectors, numerical parameters).
- Explicit SQL-like syntax in GET or POST parameters.
- Server-side shell command injection (including blind vectors).
- Server-side XML / XPath injection (including blind vectors).
- Format string vulnerabilities.
- Integer overflow vulnerabilities.

Medium risk flaws (potentially leading to data compromise)
- Stored and reflected XSS vectors in document body (minimal JS XSS support present).
- Stored and reflected XSS vectors via HTTP redirects.
- Stored and reflected XSS vectors via HTTP header splitting.
- Directory traversal (including constrained vectors).
- Assorted file POIs (server-side sources, configs, etc).
- Attacker-supplied script and CSS inclusion vectors (stored and reflected).
- External untrusted script and CSS inclusion vectors.
- Mixed content problems on script and CSS resources (optional).
- Incorrect or missing MIME types on renderables.
- Generic MIME types on renderables.
- Incorrect or missing charsets on renderables.
- Conflicting MIME / charset info on renderables.
- Bad caching directives on cookie setting responses.

Low risk issues (limited impact or low specificity):
- Directory listing bypass vectors.
- Redirection to attacker-supplied URLs (stored and reflected).
- Attacker-supplied embedded content (stored and reflected).
- External untrusted embedded content.
- Mixed content on non-scriptable subresources (optional).
- HTTP credentials in URLs.
- Expired or not-yet-valid SSL certificates.
- HTML forms with no XSRF protection.
- Self-signed SSL certificates.
- SSL certificate host name mismatches.
- Bad caching directives on less sensitive content.

Internal warnings:
- Failed resource fetch attempts.
- Exceeded crawl limits.
- Failed 404 behavior checks.
- IPS filtering detected.
- Unexpected response variations.
- Seemingly misclassified crawl nodes.

Non-specific informational entries:
- General SSL certificate information.
- Significantly changing HTTP cookies.
- Changing Server, Via, or X-... headers.
- New 404 signatures.
- Resources that cannot be accessed.
- Resources requiring HTTP authentication.
- Broken links.
- Server errors.
- All external links not classified otherwise (optional).
- All external e-mails (optional).
- All external URL redirectors (optional).
- Links to unknown protocols.
- Form fields that could not be autocompleted.
- All HTML forms detected.
- Password entry forms (for external brute-force).
- Numerical file names (for external brute-force).
- User-supplied links otherwise rendered on a page.
- Incorrect or missing MIME type on less significant content.
- Generic MIME type on less significant content.
- Incorrect or missing charset on less significant content.
- Conflicting MIME / charset information on less significant content.
- OGNL-like parameter passing conventions.

You can get more information about Skipfish and download it from their project site on Google Code.

Links:
Skipfish Project on Google Code
Skipfish Documentation
Skipfish Downloads

The ultimate Hackable phone – the N900

vinu — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:36:05 +0000

I’ve been tinkering around with Python on the N900 and this one one phone hackers will love. You can make the phone do almost anything you want if you know a little bit of scripting. I picked up a bit of python to try making a call blocker which was missing for the N900, and this is what I came up with. You can read how to do that with Python in the article I wrote on MyNokiaWorld – Block Unwanted calls on your N900. You can even configure the Notification lights on the Phone by editing a configuration file.

Now how about a script which detects if the phone is in your pocket and automatically turn on the vibrate mode? I found someone who wrote up a Python script which does this for the N900 here – http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=44484

I’ve just begun exploring this phone in my free time, but it’s a great phone if you’re looking for a customizable phone and you do know Python or some Linux programming.

The default Office Suite on Ubuntu is…

vinu — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 06:47:46 +0000

Here’s another article from our Guest Blogger Dr. Abhishek Puri on Opera. You can read his previous article here and here

Open Office has gone through various incarnations being heavily promoted by Sun. The best part is that it is a free open source software and be ported across different platforms. But that’s where the “good things” end.

Ever since I have shifted to Ubuntu, Open Office has remained static in it’s appearance; I am counting over 6 years of “free open source software use”. The ideological underpinnings not to use closed source software ever has not yet blinded me to the eye candy and the functionality of other systems. This is not a gripe session but Open Office is found wanting in it’s approach. It’s good thing to be standards compliant, it’s good to have cross platform availability but it sucks to have a jaded look because one doesn’t really have a choice. Indeed a paradoxical situation.

Downloading and installing to use K office is a pain because they have implemented the product in a manner which throws out user friendliness out of the window. I am not a KDE fanboy but clearly having few default “settings” that works also makes sense most of the times. It feels buggy and bloated and clearly not in the best of the “open source implementation”.

Contrast to this is perhaps the only product from Microsoft that works to some extent is their Office platform. It has been criticized ad nauseum because of the “additional options” it provides but it works and is a huge money spinner for the company. Another notable mention is Apple’s Keynote software that consistently gets scored high on usability, themes and transitions.

Why is that the developers from Open Office have not been able to innovate? In retrospect, it seems as if they are trying hard to emulate the previous versions of the closed source systems and bring out a functional product. Truth be told. Open Office is definitely a vast improvement over the previous versions. I use Impress heavily and I can testify clearly that ability to add tables and images has vastly improved over the previous versions. Animations and slide transitions are more or less static in their development but they deliver the goods specially when over the top eye candy is not required.

The difference in the approach is for other software. I had the opportunity to see Keynote in action recently and was totally wowed by the implementation. It is not even surprising that Google spews out thousands of results to turn the computer into a Mac lookalike. The usability is definitely a concern but Apple does provide a fresh perspective to it’s operating system and it’s various tightly integrated components. Ubuntu is inching closer but yet too far off for practical purposes.

This is not to say that anything free cannot compare to closed source alternatives. The debate usually centres on individual perspectives. It is all about choice. Yet, I do feel let down because my Ubuntu Box cannot match the best in the world for Office Applications.

It is no wonder that Ubuntu wanted to let go of Open Office for it’s netbook edition. It is bloated, eats up huge amounts of memory and would definitely be a pain for underpowered processors. They wanted to settle in for Google Docs with Gears implemented; it would have been a huge commercial spin off for them too. The idea is to implement Open Office as a lean mean application with eye candy and extensibility.

Interestingly, on their ideas implementation Wiki, Open Office does aim to “ape” Apple’s keynote. Unfortunately, there is no “out of the box” idea to justify this.

I am typing this out on Google Docs because it would let me email this presentation in couple of clicks. All the more practical approach. I can also collaborate with others to edit it and it works for me if I don’t demand anything extra from it. Very soon Google would be streaming advertisements too. It keeps a back up of all my past write ups although this is unhealthy reliance on cloud computing.

As I had mentioned, this is not a gripe session but an earnest need to improve upon open office beyond it’s jaded interface. This would bring in more “respectability” as well as more users, in my opinion. Ultimately it’s about increasing the user base and claiming 100 million users on the website is not going to help. Most of them, on any given day, would still want to use addictive eye candy.

Opera & the Freedom of Choice

vinu — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:50:54 +0000

Here’s another article from our Guest Blogger Dr. Abhishek Puri on Opera. You can read his previous article here.

Shifting to Linux is fraught with taking a decision in the unknown many a times. This was my feeling when I first pestered with a barrage of questions on the forums as a “n00b”.

We are so much used to the proprietary systems that it seems the “open source alternatives” may not be able to “stand up to them”. For example, the open source alternative to MS office is Open Office (including a suite of other programmes but then it is all about choice). For an average user, the predefined set task flows are good enough. Yet, there is an inherent resistance to change because the open source options don’t always feel “like” the way “standard” option does.

Hence it makes sense to stick on to products with options for cross platform approach. I have been using Opera as my standard desktop browser, which may sound antithesis to my said approach towards Open Source as a whole. The very fact that Opera has a commitment towards “Open Standards” and to “free up the web” from the evil eye of “Explorer” is a motivation enough to stick on to this browser.

Opera has had a solid reputation for innovation. They came up with tabbed browsing way before anyone even thought of that. Firefox as a “spin off” from the doomed Mozilla product is in many ways an “open source clone” of Opera. It has sought to “generate” a whole ecosystem of “extensions” with a very buggy approach towards it’s browser as a whole. The software is stunted in it’s approach and the Mozilla Foundation has neither a coherent acclaimed goal nor depth of thought process to implement it’s flagship product.

Opera has followed consistent path to dominate the browser market through mobiles and game consoles but has raised serious issues of privacy concerns. In any case, the vast majority of us nevertheless have been relying on so called “cloud computing” with no iota of debate about the same. Privacy can never be guaranteed on the Internet with variety of methodologies to hunt your browsing habits. Barring this, the product is sheer joy to use because of it’s intuitive interface and the fact that it works across the platforms. Which means that user choices are similar across the platforms and it is just a matter of synchronizing with Opera’s servers.

This isn’t about Firefox bashing but it’s competitors have a pathetic approach which makes Opera “stand out” in comparison. Coming back to where I started from. Opera has it’s native feel in Unix, BSD or even Solaris and across the “dominant platform”, Microsoft Windows.

Two notable events are worth mentioning. One is that Opera’s implementation of Widgets which can run on any platform independent of the browser; almost like an “extension library” as for other browsers like Firefox and Chrome. The other is implementation of user sharing experience of Unite. This is brilliant because it allows for a simple file transfer protocol to be implemented from the browser; while not in the strictest sense of the term but nevertheless, makes file sharing across the various connected systems a breeze.
Firefox has a lot of catching up to do; it uses up a lot of memory footprint, eats up bandwidth and is bug prone. Neither it has a mobile version but it remains a pathetic implementation of Open Source. Worse still, it cannot even package for Unix systems; instead relies on old “tar” archival format.

Should closed source systems be allowed to be ported on open source systems? This is indeed a matter of debate but then again it all boils down to personal perspective and user choice. The whys and hows are best left to be answered according to one’s approach to the solution.

I did have an issue with Opera’s 10.10 default installation in Ubuntu. It used to randomly freeze my “X” screen. This was a documented bug mentioned on the forums but there was no quick work around. Opera is implementing the new version of it’s Carakan based browser very soon and has significant amount of resources devoted to the same. They must beat the Mach deadline before MS starts shipping with it’s service packs and allows for a browser choice. For obvious reasons, Opera wants to have a stable release of it’s justified claims of the “fastest browser”.

Any alternative to Opera like Chrome is less than perfect solution. I have had to add extensions downloaded from Chrome website to make it functional as I was used on Opera. It’s ad blocking and handling of RSS feeds sucks majorly and I truly miss the in built mail client and RSS reader with occasional IRC chats as all in one solution.

The newer beta for Windows is truly a revelation. I still have to get used to something better than this. The page loads up in a jiffy and handling of resource intensive web sites is simply amazing. Opera’s engineers have worked truly hard to make an astounding product and justify the tag of the world’s fastest browser.

It would take some time before Opera 10.5 is available for other platforms; nevertheless, the wait is truly justified.

The debate between closed and open source can never have a clear winner. But everything is finally dependent on the freedom of choice and it is imperative that we become aware of such a choice too.

On to Ubuntu 9.10 – real life experiences

vinu — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 07:16:24 +0000

This article is written by a friend of mine, Dr. Abhishek Puri. He’s a doctor who’s a technology freak on the side. He dabbles around with Open Source software and is a strong advocate for the Open Source community. Here is his experience with setting up Ubuntu 9.10 on his latest laptop.

My trusty Lenovo laptop died on me as it had issues with it’s power supply. I had no other option but to sell off my three year old celeron powered workhorse which had served me rather well. However, the search for a new one proved to be more difficult than I had anticipated.

My search had been on for a system that would work on Linux flawlessly. For the past few years, I have come to love the reliability and the stability of Ubuntu and with it’s more frequent updates which give me the “best” in the desktop appearance. With an anemic RAM in the previous version, I could ill afford to run multiple applications, turn on anti aliasing of Open Office or even risk the opening up of multiple tabs while running Opera. At risk of a system freeze, it was still a workable and a usable laptop. The present day era is of 64 bit processors and it’s hard to justify their routine use for a casual user. Nevertheless, it has never been the user’s prerogative to choose.

A search in most of the electronic showrooms was quite disappointing. Most of the laptops on display were infested and infected by bloated crapware called as Windows. With jacked up prices for fancy video cards, it drove me away as I had a limited budget. I went running to my old trusty vendor who showed me a nearly perfect laptop for my needs with preloaded DoS. More than that, it had a great combination of a motherboard, an Intel chipset and integrated Wifi.

The Live USB version of Ubuntu worked great and after a quick lspci command in the terminal, I put down my hard earned money for a Compaq system.

The first thing was to format the hard drive, load up Ubuntu, apply the updates and viola a nearly perfect system was ready to use. After the mandatory load in of plug ins to ensure playback of restricted formats, it was all set up.

The only major issue surprisingly was with Opera 10.10. It used to crash the X randomly with the screen freezing up and an unresponsive keyboard. In any case, there was no solution from the forums except that I could try out Qt4 version. I decided to chuck it in favor of waiting for Opera 10.5 which promises to be a fab release due out for Unix in couple of months. I was indeed sore that the Windows version would be released first as they have huge amount of resources dedicated. This is because, Microsoft has been forced to give an option to consumers regarding the choice of browsers and Opera had been behind this landmark anti trust case. It only goes on to prove that Unix platform does offer a choice; but Opera has “cold shouldered” the Unix community as a whole since any reported bugs get scaled down on a lower priority till the new version comes out in the beta or the final release.

There is a plethora of browsers to choose from in Unix; yet I settled down on very remarkable and wonderful Google Chrome. It’s one of the most exciting software to have been released in recent times and although it doesn’t have the functionality as Opera in it’s default form, there are numerous extensions available for the same. Frankly, I have never been too happy about the extensions per se because I feel that the browser ought to have the key features built in. In any case, it all boils down to a personal choice though. For my mail and RSS feeds, I found that Evolution is a good alternative to Opera’s both inbuilt mail as well as RSS reader although the format has not really changed in the past few years. Yet, it works the works and I do miss Opera.

The icing on the cake is perhaps oodles of RAM being able to support Compiz Fusion and it’s brilliant and awesome effects. It’s sheer eye candy customisable to the nth detail and a great execution of details. Full kudos to the developers who have developed various plug ins; my favorite is the “burn” effect which burns down the window when you close it. You Tube is full of videos on this and it is indeed a school boy’s fantasy come true to own such a thing. Day in day out, I am fascinated by various effects and Mac Os looks pale in comparison in many respects.

It would not be feasible to run a full scale comparison with other platforms; this write up only details my purchase, the customization, the software and of course, the choices made. Your own experience may vary or some of the readers would want to defend the “latest” Windows 7. Yet, my arguments stay in place that “free” open source software can outperform the “closed” systems by a mile.
Ubuntu 9.10 is a great option; admittedly, there are tons of other distros that would have their adherents too. But then Open Source is all about the choice.

Picture Credit: Laptop picture has a Creative commons license from Otacon_85 on flickr