WordPress (the software that powers this blog) has a good interface for posting blogs, but I have always been a fan of fat clients so that I can write the posts offline. Recently stumbled across a new blogging tool from Windows ( Windows Live Writer ). This is the first post from it :).
Technology
A case of reverse engineering
As I noted in my last post, I recently ran the Shamrock shuffle 8K. The official pictures for most of the races in US are taken by Marathonfoto. You can go to their website after the race, put in your Bib no and get a preview of the photos that can then be ordered from them. In previous years, I was happy with just taking the thumbnail of the picture and sharing it with my friends. Looks like the Marathonfoto folks decided to “beef” up their security this year and put a annoying “Proof” across the picture. When you log into the site, it shows a list of all the pictures they took of you.. the list looks like this
Clicking on any of the thumbnails brings up a popup looks like
Here’s what I did to get rid of the “Proof” text
- Checked the page source of the popup and figured that it was a flash application. Clever way of obfuscating the link to the source image..
- Knowing that the flash application would use generic HTTP connections in the background, I fired up “WireShark“, a traffic capture and analyzer tool, and clicked on the thumbnail again to fire up the popup.
- An analysis of the traffic showed that the flash app was calling out a particular URL to get the image. Here’s a screenshot of the analysis by Wireshark.
- Fire up a browser window and directly access the image with the URL from the traffic capture to get it without the “Proof” text :).. The original image looks like this.
YouTube : Funny error message
I was doing a query on youtube and ran across this funny “500 error message”. I like it how they call their engineers highly trained monkeys 🙂
HOW TO : Use grep to exclude a pattern
If you want to search a file and show all the lines that don’t match a particular pattern, you an use the following option in grep
grep -v "PATTERN" fileName
Simple script to compare files in two directories..
Here’s a small script to compare the files in two different directories on a Linux machine. The script uses MD5 checksum to compare the files.
#\!/bin/bash
prefix1=“/usr/directory1″ # First directory without trailing /
prefix2=“/usr/directory2″ # Second directory without trailing /
find \-L “$prefix1″ \-type f \| while read filename; do
name=“${filename#$prefix1*}â€
sum1=“$(md5sum \-b â€$prefix1$name“)â€
sum2=“$(md5sum \-b â€$prefix2$name“)â€
if \[ “${sum1% \*}†= “${sum2% \*}†\]; then
echo “ok: $prefix1$nameâ€
else
echo “not ok: $prefix1$nameâ€
fi
done
Internet in the air..
I wrote ~2 years ago, about accessing the Internet, while I was flying at 35,000 feet in the air. Since then, the company that provided this service, Connexion, has declared bankruptcy and everyone pretty much wrote off the market for in-air Internet access. Looks like enough people want it 🙂 and several companies are reentering this market. This article at news.com claims that most of the US air-carriers will have some kind of broadband service available in the next 2 years. Say goodbye to the last “Internet free” place on earth 🙂
Save XP!!
While, I am writing about couples smooching over each other!! :), my buddy Ray is writing something meaningful. As he states, Microsoft is planning on ending sales of Windows XP on June 30 2008. While Vista, has a lot of cool features, none of them are compelling for businesses to make the expensive migration. Not only does the new operating system require extensive planning for the migration and training for the tech support teams, but businesses also have to consider the expense of training end users because the interface has changed so much.
And not to mention the 100 different (I am exaggerating!! 🙂 ) flavors of Vista that Microsoft has come up with to make the decision even tougher.
Sign the petition here . [UPDATE : Link has been corrected.. Thx Ray for pointing this out.]
Tools of the trade : SysInternals for Windows
SysInternals, a company founded by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, and later acquired by Microsoft, produces some of the well known “must have” tools for a system administrator. Top on my list would be
If a sys admin (esp Windows admin) says that they don’t know these tools.. don’t hire them :).
Did you know?
I recently typed “Hyderabad Time” in Google and it actually showed the current time in Hyderabad :). Apparently, this feature has been around for quite some time. And all this time, I was drudging along to www.worldtimeserver.com and clicking on a particular country/city to find the time there.. Google rules :).
Google does it again..
The almighty Google has come out with a new toy for me to play with :). I don’t claim, that I am a programmer by any means, but like to dabble in scripting now and then. So, I was really excited to see this new simple API from Google for creating charts. I can already imagine, how this can be used in generating some cool reports. Here’s my “Hello World” graph using the API.
The code I used to generate this graph is
“http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:hW&chs=250×100&chl=Vinay|Rocks&chtt=My+Hello+World”
Looks like some smart and entrepenuring programmer is already making some money out of this API :). Check out this link for a very cool and smart implementation of the API