Use your Chromecast/Roku on a Hotel WiFi

Chromecast and Roku are really wonderful devices which allow you to take all your media with you where ever you go. Especially, if you travel a lot, it's definitely way better to watch something on your Netflix subscription rather than paying exorbitant rates on the hotel's pay-per-view.

But there's a problem. Hotel WiFi's usually use web based authentication (i.e.) their wireless network is usually open and anyone can connect to it. Only when you try and open a webpage, they send you to an authentication page that asks for a username/password (which the hotel will provide you) and/or asks you to accept the terms and conditions.

The problem is that Chromecast and Roku do not have native support for such authentication. But fear not, in this post, i am going to write about a few ways in which you can work around this limitation to enjoy Roku/Chromecast on the hotel's WiFi network.

Find out your device's MAC Address

2 of the 3 workarounds that i mention requires you to know the MAC Address of your Chromecast/Roku device. Here's how you figure it out:

Roku

• Switch it on
• Navigate to Settings->Network->Wireless
• On the bottom right, you can see the MAC Address of the Roku

Chromecast

• Switch it on
• Connect your phone to the hotel WiFi and authenticate it
• Open the Chromecast Setup app on your android phone
• Tap on devices and wait for it to scan
• Tap on your Chromecast device in the list
• Tap "Set Up"
• Tap "I see the code"
• Tap "Set Name"
• The MAC Address of your chromecast will be displayed on the screen now. 

Workaround 1 - Call the Tech Support

Most hotels give you a small sheet of paper with your WiFi username and password. That sheet usually also has a "tech support" phone number. Here is what you can do: Call the tech support number and tell them exactly this: "I would like to use the roku media player device over the hotel WiFi. I wanted to check if you could whitelist the MAC Address of my device to by-pass the authentication page".

Depending on the mood and knowledge of the tech support person, he/she might say okay. But nevertheless, it's gonna take some time before the whitelist happens. And once the whitelist happens, you can enjoy Chromecast/Roku over the hotel WiFi.

Workaround 2 - Spoof your MAC and authenticate from your laptop

The whole web authentication system works around MAC addresses. Once you enter your username and password, your MAC and IP addresses are going to be whitelisted for a certain amount of time (about 24 hours) and your device will be allowed to access the internet in that time period.

One key weakness about this authentication mechanism is that MAC address is easily spoof'able. So we are going to to assign your Roku/Chromecast's MAC address to your laptop and perform the authentication like usual and then make use of that whitelist to access the internet from your Roku/Chromecast. Here are the steps (follow them precisely to the word):

• Find the MAC address of your Roku/Chromecast using the steps above. Note it down.
• Open the terminal (assumes linux).
• Run "ifconfig" and note down the MAC Address of the laptop. [1]
• Run this command: "sudo ifconfig wlan0 down".
• Disconnect from the WiFi network on the laptop.
• Run this command: "sudo ifconfig wlan0 hw ether <mac address of roku>".
• IMPORTANT: Turn off the Roku/Chromecast by unplugging it.
• Run this command: "sudo ifconfig wlan0 up".
• Connect to the Hotel's WiFi network on the laptop.
• Open the browser and navigate to google.com (or any other website).
• It will ask for authentication, provide username/password that the hotel gave you.
• Type google.com again and verify that you can access Google.
• Run this command: "sudo ifconfig wlan0 down".
• Disconnect from the WiFi network on the laptop.
• Run this command: "sudo ifconfig wlan0 hw ether <mac address of your laptop from step [1] above>".
• Run this command: "sudo ifconfig wlan0 up".
• Now you can plug your Chromecast/Roku back in and connect to the Hotel's WiFi network on that. It should now be connected to the internet!

You will have to repeat these steps after the whitelist expires (usually about once a day).

Note: The above two work arounds will connect your Chromecast/Roku directly to the hotel's WiFi 

Workaround 3 - Set up your own WiFi network

Buy a portable WiFi adapter and use that to share your Hotel's WiFi through your own access point.

Hope this helps!

-Vignesh

Introducing Super Secure File - One File, Completely Secure, Access Anywhere!

Super Secure File gets you a really secure password protected file that you can access anywhere with an internet connection. Smartphone, Tablet, Laptop, SmartTV, anything!

To cut to the chase and create your Super Secure File, go to: http://secure.foamsnet.com.

How does it work?

Super Secure File basically uses Google Drive to store your encrypted file and does all the encryption and decryption locally in Javascript. The key never ever leaves your computer. Once you close the tab, boom, the key is gone. Nobody knows the key but you (and probably your spouse if you are married).

Motivation

This is not a big feat or anything, this is merely a mashup of a few libraries to prove a point to myself. The motive behind this app is to build a secure mechanism to store my passwords and credit card numbers on the cloud so that I can access it anywhere. I do not trust anyone who links me up to a server when it comes to information like this. Which is why i wanted a completely static HTML page with no server access whatsoever to provide me with this functionality.

Feel free to examine the source code here (and please let me know if you find anything utterly stupid): https://github.com/vickyg3/super-secure-file

Hosting and Links

Since this is a static page, I have not hosted this on my server. This is merely hosted as a github page (if you look at the repo, you'll see the default branch to be gh-pages and not master). Hosting it as a github page also proves that it has no server interaction whatsoever and cannot steal your key by any mean.

So, all you need is to remember your password and one of these URLs (they all redirect to the same Github Page): http://bit.ly/securefile or http://bit.ly/supersecurefile or http://secure.foamsnet.com or http://vickyg3.github.io/super-secure-file/super_secure_file.html

Get your Super Secure File and make your life a little easier! :-)


-Vignesh

Announcing Social Photos v2!

I have been working on this side project for quite a while now and I am happy to announce that it is launch ready now!

Visit http://socialphotos.net to manage all your digital photos across Social Networks in one roof using a simple intuitive user interface.

Features Include:

• Transfer Photos
• Transfer Albums
• Download selective albums as a zip file
• View Slideshow of your albums
• Monitor progress in a simple pane
• And much more!

Please do feel free to give feedbacks/suggestions. Use it and Share it!

http://socialphotos.net

-Vignesh

Replacing Lightweight Web Services with Twitter Bots!

Foresight
Here is a vague idea. I'm not sure if i can even call it an idea. I always had the tendency to create lightweight information portals as usable web-based services with a very simple user interface. It just used to get things done and nothing more.

Practical Use Case
For example, let us consider a simple problem of "PNR Status Enquiry" in Indian Trains (for the uninitiated: PNR status is nothing but the current status of a waitlisted ticket in Indian Trains). First of all, such a system is really useful because the official Indian Railways websites are a bit clogged and they don't provide any alert services. Also, their websites are not so catchy and mobile compatible, and we definitely don't want to switch on the computer just to check the PNR status.

Before today, if i was asked to build such a system, i would go for an elegant google-like web page, where there is just a text box and a button for the user to enter the PNR number and click go. The resultant page will be again a simple HTML table with the ticket details (of course all of them scrapped from one of the railway websites - pretty sure that this isn't legal, although i am not aware of any laws against site scraping).

Do we really need web for this?
But this thought stuck me today. Web is a wonderful platform, at times too good to host silly and redundant stuff like this. Tomorrow i may have to build a similar system for Buses or Aeroplanes requiring me to add more and more pages with almost same functionality but different information sources. We don't need the web for such silly things. My idea is that, why not use "Twitter" as a platform for such web services. I've heard of facebook as a platform before for many applications and games (Farmville), so why not twitter as a platform too?

Twitter as a Platform
So what exactly do i mean by twitter as a platform? Let us redesign the same PNR status enquiry system using what i mean by twitter as a platform. Instead of having a web page for inputs, lets host a twitter bot, say @pnrbot. Now, whenever you need to enquire the status of a PNR number, all you have to do is post a tweet mentioning that bot, for example "@pnrbot 1234567890" (where 1234567890 is the PNR number you wish to enquire).

Now, as long as your tweets are public, the bot can read your tweet almost instantaneously thanks to the vast amount of real time APIs provided by twitter. Now the bot does the usual site scraping from the railways website for your PNR status and it posts it as a reply to your tweet. Simple isn't it? To take it a level further, the bot can also autotweet your PNR status every day until your journey date, which is not very easy in the case of a web based app. Also, since you will not be following the bot and the bot will not be following you, you will not clutter any of your friends' timeline with this tweet as it won't appear in their timeline.

If any of the input data is sensitive and not to be exposed, then the same design can be adopted by just switching the term "tweet" with "Direct Message" (although in that case, both you and the bot need to be following each other, which can be easily accomplished).

Pros of the Platform
Twitter is a part of our day to day life since the inception of mobile internet. So, you get many useful information from such bots interactively rather than opening your webpage and waiting for the page to load. Moreover, twitter is known for its notifications. If you have activated SMS alerts for @ mentions, then you don't even need to have internet to make use of such a bot. You can just send the tweet through an SMS and read the reply from the bot as SMS. Also, twitter has email notifications which may also be of good use. As mentioned in the example, you can have one input with multiple periodical outputs (like time based notifications, etc.) which is not so easy to implement in web based systems.

Developer Standpoint
So from a developer standpoint, what do we ultimately gain by choosing Twitter as a platform over Web for lightweight services? The answer is quite simple and really advantageous. For one, you need not host a web server for lightweight web services. All you need to do is run a script that will act as the bot. The script will also be really lightweight since twitter APIs does all the pushing for you (no polling). You offload majority of the user interface and load to twitter and do only the actual processing in your server.

From the implementation perspective, it'd be really great to have a good library/framework in a nice scripting language (like php or python) for building such a bot so that the possible features (like twitter API access, etc.) could be abstracted out thereby the developers actually have to write just the logic of their actual bot and nothing extra.

Closing Thoughts
I am pretty sure such bots already exists. By building more and more of interactive bots Twitter can really stand tall as a good platform not just for communication but also for instantaneous information retrieval.

P.S.: I am in the process of developing a simple such bot as a proof-of-concept. I am also highly determined to come up with a generic twitter bot library as i mentioned in the post. So as always, interested developers are welcome to carry on if you like the idea!

-Vignesh

Orkut Deja Vu - The Technical Side!

Its been almost two months now since I first launched "Orkut Deja Vu" - A series of web applications and a chrome extension that helps you move your memories from orkut to facebook. Personally, I think the application was a good hit. In this article i will try and explain the technical side of it and the various hurdles faced on the due course of development.


Note: This article is for the technically inclined and if you don't want the technical details and just want to use the application, visit http://orkutdejavu.foamsnet.com!


Java and My server!


To begin with it, my server is a VPS running linux with a humble 700MB RAM and a shared processor. My search for an Orkut API ended with orkut os client - An official API provided by Google. This is more of a library than an API and only the java implementation of the library was very sophisticated (though there were php implementations, they weren't that good). Ever since i started learning computer science, if there was one thing i hated, it was java (now don't even get me started about perl).


So there lied the first problem in front of my eyes: Running java in my server. I didn't want to take up the pain of setting up JSP for this sake and decided to just call the java program that does the orkut calls from PHP using shell_exec. I know it isn't a safe option, but since there is no user passed data and the calls are hard-coded, i was sure that there was no injection vulnerabilities. Yet this approach isn't very efficient as it spawns a separate java vm for every exec call, but it was a compromise that i had to make for not setting up a java based server.


OAuth - The headache!


The orkut library's OAuth implementation was really messy. Fortunately, it had a method to explicitly set an OAuth access token obtained from elsewhere. That said, I used Zend OAuth library in PHP to perform the 3 legged OAuth and use that access token in the java programs. There were totally four java programs: one each to fetch the user's orkut name, albums list, photos and scraps. The java programs printed the output as JSON if it was successful or nothing if there was an exception. PHP then parses that JSON. I used JSON so that all the escaping will be taken care by the JSON libraries and thereby ensuring safety of data transmission.


Photo Album Migrator


The photo album migration was quite straight forward without much hurdles. All i had to do was integrate the following: Image gallery, Facebook API, Orkut API and write some simple javascript that made AJAX calls to transfer the photos. This was quite a cakewalk as i was already very familiar with the Facebook graph API.

Scrapbook Downloader


Again, the programming side of this was quite straight forward. But there was one major challenge involved in designing this. The java program generates a html file containing the scraps which is then converted to PDF. HTML to PDF conversion is CPU intensive and hence needs to be done with care. I could have used a resource manager like Sun Grid Engine, but i did not want to make things complex for a simple job to be done. Also, the conversion is not done programatically by a library as all the PHP PDF libraries were memory-wise very expensive (a file with ~100 scraps always exceeded PHP's memory limit of 64MB). So, I used a external command line utility (wkhtmltopdf) to accomplish this conversion. Again it was a simple shell_exec with hard-coded arguments.

Testimonials Migrator


This was the really challenging part. There was no Orkut API that gave access to users' testimonials. But i didn't want to give up. I really wanted to pull off a tool that can migrate testimonials to facebook. So I thought of attacking this problem from the heart of orkut - the orkut website. Obviously, the first thing that came to my mind was a Google Chrome extension. The extension will inject a javascript into orkut.com website and add a "Post to Facebook" button beneath eacch of your testimonials.


The first hurdle in accomplishing this was that there were two versions of orkut (old and new) with different page structures. I didn't want to write two different scripts to handle the versions. Instead i wrote another script that detects the version and if it is new, it prompted the user to redirect to the older version in order to use the extension. The next job was to understand orkut's DOM so that I can place the buttons. This ended up being quite an easy job too.


Another glitch in chrome extensions is that we cannot specify images directly in CSS for content scripts(for e.g.: background: url(a.jpg); is not possible), as the CSS will run in the scope of the website. So, it has to be either done programatically using javascript or encode the image in base64 and hard code it in the CSS. I chose the first option. From this point, it was fairly straight forward. When the user clicks on the post button, store the corresponding testimonial using HTML5's local storage and create a new tab where the user can choose the posting options. Again, the facebook authentication and API usage here were simple as i had enough exposure already.


Epilogue


Though it seems like a simple app, huge amount of thoughts are put into every single aspect in design of the application and the entire development process was a fun journey with a great learning curve. This application has made me feel my web presence. Web is really a great platform for amateur developers like me. I have got around 20 new followers in twitter and a person from brazil appreciating me for this application. I have really been motivated a lot by this and hope to continue the same stride in creating usable applications as this one!


This post will not be complete without a heartfelt thanks to all those who supported me on due course of development and all those who used and shared this with your friends!


-Vignesh

The Social Network - Build it Google, We will Come!

I recently read an article about Larry Page taking over as the CEO of Google and sending an internal memo to googlers about 25% cut in their bonuses if Google didn’t do well in social arena this year. I was disturbed a lot ever since I read that and wanted to pour out my thoughts about a dream social network from Google. Yes, I frankly think Google can still do much better than Facebook.

A headnote, this article is totally how i view a Google social network shall be made possible. I have tried to think of it as practically as possible. Some of it may sound silly/stupid for expert readers, so kindly bear with me.

Orkut was the trend setter! - What went wrong?

Orkut was the first and most famous "social network" of all time. It came during the period where the term "social network" was not really defined. Orkut gave that term a definition. And it was doing really well especially in places like India and Brazil. Ever since Facebook came in, Orkut started to lose.

I, personally, would say that the reason why Orkut never caught on was because Google tried to remain professional. They probably wanted to stick to the Google style of doing things and in the process forgot that people just wanted to have fun and party on in the social network unlike other Google services where professionalism kept people happy. The best example i would like to quote is, Orkut did not have scrap threading for a long time and that was available even for SMS by the time Orkut added that. Naturally, we don’t want to roam around in a blazer/suit 365x24x7. Facebook realized it and they just let people do whatever they wanted to do, literally no restrictions whatsoever.

Sign of Innovation - Google Wave

Google then launched wave and claimed that "it is simply going to change the way people communicate". Well, we know how true it is from the fact that wave has been axed by Google few months back and is now residing in its open source home of Apache.



Again, the problem with Google Wave has been that it was difficult for a layman to understand and use it on a day-to-day basis. Even when wave was axed, not a single layman cared about it, only computer professionals cared since the underlying technology and protocols were really well built. Yet again, Google had failed to capitalize the wonderful technology they built by coping it up to what everyone actually wanted. In short, Google tried to remain professional with wave too.

Sign of Desperation - Google Buzz

Then came Google Buzz, supposedly the "Twitter killer". One major factor that i feel Google doesn’t realize when building social products is that, You cannot force people down their throats to go Social. Yes, I love Twitter and can’t live without it but at the same time I don’t want to read my tweets in my Gmail inbox.



Similarly, Google Reader is one of the most wonderful software ever built. But with literally no connection whatsoever, Google decided to tie Buzz with Reader. This tie up lead to nothing but junk in both Reader and Buzz. And when people wanted to opt out of Buzz, it resulted in loss all their Reader follow list too. Making it opt-in is a really good vision by Google and at the same time they should also make sure that the opt-out is cleanly done.

What next? Social + Google = ??

So can Google ever surpass the mountain, that is Facebook, and succeed in social like they did in search? My answer is, yes they surely can. Sure Facebook has some 600 million users but Google is no poor lad when it comes to userbase too. Infact, Google is still a more prominent part of our life than Facebook is. Conduct a poll asking "Which of the following can’t we live without - Facebook or Google?" and i bet the winner will be Google.

Imagine a social network that revolves around all of Google’s services. Imagine a service that aggregates all of gmail, youtube, reader, maps, picasa, talk, news, voice and even orkut. Google, if you can build a rock solid service that does this and add your typical magical touch to it, then definitely you can climb the mount everest that is Facebook. Add to this the crazy, yet possible, thought of Google acquiring Twitter and integrating Buzz with it seamlessly. By recitifying all the mistakes that it did in the social arena in the past and building such a clean and fun service, it can surely overpower Facebook.

Google’s userbase is much more loyal when compared to that of Facebook. Google, as a company, with its policies is much closer to our hearts than Facebook is. Identify Facebook’s problems and fix it. Facebook’s main concerns today are spam and privacy. I can’t think of a product other than Gmail that can handle spam so near to perfection. Also, Google Talk has been an integral part of Gmail and Orkut for so many years now and not once we have seen any spam in it that can even be compared with the Facebook chat spam we have these days. Though Google have had their own share of controversies regarding privacy, they have somehow held on and been in the good books of their users when it came to privacy.




Of course all this is not going to be an overnight affair, it is going to take lots of effort and time. Given that Google is investing so keenly on getting that top spot in the social arena, proper focus, being unprofessional and learning from the past are the key factors that will decide the fate of Google in the social arena. They can’t afford to flop anymore. This may be Google’s last chance to make an impact. By heart, i sincerely hope that Google can just snatch that number one spot in the social arena!

So, my message is short and simple: "Build it Google - We will come!".

-Vignesh

Introducing Orkut Déjà Vu! - Orkut to Facebook Photo Album Migrator!

As we all know, Orkut was the trend setter of the modern "Social Networks". Few years back, Facebook took over that top spot in social networks from Orkut. Yet we all have lots of sweet memories stuck with Orkut in the form of Scraps, Photo Albums, Testimonials, etc. This website helps you pull out your old memories from Orkut and make them brand new by moving them over to Facebook!



This is just a night time project that i have been working on for almost a month now!

I don't want to bore you with stories. Try out the app straight away here: http://orkut.foamsnet.com or http://orkutdejavu.foamsnet.com

I am sure there are plenty of bugs. Please email me at vig..@gmail.com(click to expand) for any comments/feedbacks!

-Vignesh

Why Plagiarism Hurts?

I recently attended a so called "online programming contest" of one of the premier institutions in the state (not mentioning the name to not stir any arguments over it - I tweeted it here and here though). I have been attending this contest since the past 3 years and was highly disappointed about this year's event.

The reason is, as the title suggests, it was nothing but a blatant ramp of plagiarism. There were totally 8 questions to be solved out of which 4 questions were mere "copy-paste" jobs from spoj. Such events need not be perfect, but when you conduct an event of such stature you are atleast expected to make sure that google doesn’t give an exact match for the questions you give. As i mentioned in the tweet, the other 4 questions were very poorly worded and more or less dumb. Anyways, i am not going to ramble about the contest in this post. But it got me thinking, plagiarism can really hurt. It can hurt both the ends of users badly.

First things first, what is plagiarism? Sounding like a fancy GRE word, it has a simple meaning: Copying someone else’s content without their consent. I know spoj doesn’t mind if their questions are being copied, but it should either be altered so that it doesn’t look like the original question or (even and) spoj should have been properly cited.

When someone writes something on the internet these days, it has become like they have lost complete ownership over it. Plagiarism is a very big problem these days. It exists on all levels. Starting from a simple online programming contest to industry definers like Microsoft. Google even launched an algorithm change to their core search engine algorithm this week that ranks plagiarised pages lower than pages with original content.

My point is, when you plagiarise something without consent and citations, its not just a matter of two keystrokes in your computer. You hurt people’s feelings. And you will never understand those feelings unless you start writing something on your own and someone else copies and pastes it without your consent. It takes very little effort to cite the original source of any content you use, but that gesture will make your users respect you more than they did before.

There are even licensing policies that helps you prevent plagiarism and at the same time lets you use others content (one such license is Creative Commons License).Always place appropriate citations. If an author is writing content on the internet, then he’d sure respond to you via email/twitter if you want to use pieces from his article. Be gentle and place the credit to the work where the credit actually belongs to rather than stealing it. You will definitely be insulted when the plagiarism is spotted. So why not place credit and not screw up your reputation? You may have loads of original content. But even a small piece of plagiarised content is capable of bringing you under the spotlight (the recent Ankit Fadia scam for example - Fadia may have saved a war or billions of rupees for the indian government, but now he’s been registered in my mind as the guy who copied a book in the name of authoring it).

To sum up things, The world has evolved, Internet has become commonplace but what will always remain is the human values that we possess. If you copy content without consent, you are violating the human values that morally governs the internet.

Take a stand, Say no to plagiarism, Innovate the planet together!

-Vignesh

IPv4 is dead!

IPv4 is dead.

What this means is that, no more IPv4 addresses are remaining to be alotted to systems that will be connected to the internet. This marks the end of the protocol that has been running the internet since 1981. This is similar to how IRCTC recently moved to a 5 digit train number, as there have been too many trains to be numbered with 4 digits and the existing conventions (2 prefix for superfast and such). So IRCTC moved to a 5 digit train numbers (mostly adding 1 prefix in front of all major trains).

The same story holds on when they say "IPv4 has been exhausted". All the computers in the internet are uniquely identified by so-called IP Addresses (Internet Protocol addresses). When you want to communicate with other systems on the internet, you make use of IP Addresses to accomplish that. Now that the internet has had too many systems, the IPv4 scheme of numbering is no more sufficient. IPv4 used 32-bit addresses (yeah computers talk in bits). So, a typical IPv4 address would look something like 208.43.209.220 (with each number between the dots represented as an 8 bit integer).

Ok, now what? How do new systems get added to the internet if there are no more addresses left? In comes one of the major changes that is going to be incorporated into the internet in the near future, IPv6. It might sound as simple as adding a 1 prefix like IRCTC did. But it runs the entire internet, so its a bit more complicated than that. Of course IPv6 addresses are longer than the v4 counterparts in that they consist of 128-bits (an example of an IPv6 address is fe03:ff34:ab34:1235:2932:6bdf:22af:23aa). As you can see, these are hexadecimal represented numbers. Each part consists of 4 hexadecimal digits amounting to 16 bits and there are 8 such parts, totalling to 128 bits.

IPv6 is not just IPv4 where you have longer addresses. Since this is going to be a major change that requires modifications in working of almost all the devices connected to the internet, the developers of IPv6 decided to do try and clean up all the drawbacks that were incurred by IPv4 (mandation of IpSec, elimination of need for NAT to name a few). Things would be much simpler if IPv6 had just been interoperable with IPv4. Unfortunately, it is not so and hence the transition phase is not going to be very easy.

However, there have been software level solutions to make it look as if IPv6 is interoperable with IPv4. Yeah, you guessed it right, Tunneling! Imagine you have a shipping company that allows only red colored boxes to be shipped. What will you do if you need to ship a blue color box? Simple isn't it? Just wrap the blue colored box into another red colored box and ship it and make sure that the recipient throws away the red box when he receives it. This is called tunneling. Our shipping company is nothing but the backbone network of the internet (majority of which consists of IPv4 only devices), red box is analogous to IPv4 and the blue box is analogous to IPv6. So the internet is going to rely on tunnelling for majority of its functioning until IPv6 gets well established among the devices in the internet.

So, lets all take a second to thank IPv4 that has been making our lives easier for almost the past three decades. Also, major software giants are joining hands to celebrate World IPv6 Day on June 8, 2011.

P.S.: I conclude with the hope that the IPv4 to IPv6 transition among Indian ISP's will not be as un-smooth and scandal-driven as the 2G to 3G transition.

P.P.S.: This post was drafted during my college lab hour and posted using lynx. :-)

-Vignesh

InstaShare - Facebook Extension for Google Chrome! :-)

InstaShare - Share everything you find interesting on the web as and when you browse to your Facebook profile! The web you surf daily is now just a single click away from your facebook profile!

This is a mature version of yet another script that i have been using personally so far.

Features include:

• Post status updates through an always-present browser icon


• Share any image in the pages you visit in a single click


• Share any link in the pages you visit in a single click


• Share any piece of text in the pages you visit in a single click

Download You can download the extension from here: http://www.foamsnet.com/instashare

Screenshots
Sharing Images





Sharing Links





Sharing Selected Text





Posting Status Update




You are sure to find a lot of bugs. Feel free to contact me at vig...@gmail.com (Please click to view the full address) for any bug reports or suggestions!

-Vignesh

Why you should tweet?

I am one among the many millions out there who belong to the social era. The world is socializing much more than it ever did before. If facebook were a country, it’d be third largest in terms of population. Facebook (and even the damned orkut) is really famous in India. Twitter is a similar service with even a simpler goal, share all you can in 140 words.

I have found many teenagers (especially college goers) not use Twitter. It is not really surprising considering twitter doesn’t have many entertaining’y things like photo tagging, liking every damn comment, etc. Twitter is the best example for “simplicity”. The inception of twitter has rendered many bloggers lazy to even blog regularly, as they start tweeting more about things rather than writing lengthy blogs.

In this post, i want to publish my opinions on why teenagers should tweet or atleast use twitter.

Source of Information
Twitter is really a great source of information. Let it be technical information or some interesting news from/about your favorite celebrity, the first place where you can find it is twitter. If some hot news is being flashed in the tv channels worldwide, then you bet its definitely trending on twitter. You really get an instant, unbiased view of many people all around the world on any topic. This kind of rapid fire spread of a news is more common in twitter than in facebook because of twitter’s short and sharp nature.

Social Media is a fancy term used these days to indicate the facebook, twitter and co. Not only social media provides entertainment and helps you kill your time in the form of facebook, it also gives your brain some real value additions in the form of 140 characters.

Enterntainment
Many teenagers (atleast my friends) have the opinion that twitter is for geeks. Whenever i hear someone say this, i go WTH. Twitter is definitely much more than a source of useful information. You have entertaining discussion going on between not just your friends, but also with many other people with whom you might have just dreamt of before. (For example, i have got one or two replies from my favorite singer Chimayi).

Short lifetime of tweets
You post a status update in facebook, and it definitely lies around in your homepage (in the form of notifications, etc.) for a minimum of one day (mostly more than that). Whereas lifetime of a tweet is much shorter than that. Your tweet will remain in your followers’ home page for hardly a few minutes. So all the communication and sharing remains up to date and instant. This point could be argued either ways as both advantageous and disadvantageous. But in facebook, after some 50 odd notifications over a period of week, i’d regret why i liked a status in the first place.

I am not coming to say that facebook is bad. Facebook has its own use case. The status messages in facebook are meant to be lingering around one’s homepage for a longer period of time. Hence twitter should be the real tool that shall be used to post real time updates, where people can comment on it instantly too. Also, tweets come up in what is called Google Realtime Search results.

Internet is huge and a few years back Google revolutionized it by organizing the information available in the internet. That was purely an algorithmic approach, whereas today, twitter is trying to generate and organize information based on one’s personal context, supplemented by algorithms. So, join twitter today and i promise i’ll follow you :-P

You can follow me in twitter here.

-Vignesh

Improved IRCTC Ticket Booking - Google Chrome Extension

*Note: This extension does not work anymore and I have stopped updating it. Please do not contact regards to this*

AutoIRCTC! - A Google Chrome extension that helps in speeding up the IRCTC ticket booking process.

Scripting has always interested me and being a reasonably active member of the internet community, i always tried to customize the road of web i travel to my likes and needs. This is one such script that i thought will be helpful if shared. So i have added minimal features to the script i have been using personally for quite a while now. It has really helped me speed up the ticket booking process.

Features include:

• Automatic Login
• Swap from and to stations in a single click
• See all the trains availability in a single screen
• Pre-fill the passenger details

Download: You can download the extension from here!

Instructions and Screenshots

• Accept the warning and click on continue
  
  
• Click on Install
  
  
• After the installation is complete, You will see a confirmation like this:
  
  
• Also, you can view AutoIRCTC in the list of extensions in chrome://extensions
  
• Now, when you visit www.irctc.co.in, you will see a small icon next to the bookmark star. Clicking on that icon will give you a pop up where you can configure your settings. If you leave the login credentials empty, then auto login will be disabled. Click on "Save Settings" after you have entered your details.
  
• Now, when you reload your page, you will be automatically logged into IRCTC. And instantly, you will be able to notice the "Swap from and to" option under "Plan my travel". This button helps you to swap the from and to cities without making an unnecessary server request.
  
• Enter your travel city and date. Now you will be able to see the availability of all trains matching your criteria in a single screen. Also, the page has been cleaned up to now show First class AC and First class (if you are making a first class booking, then disable the extension and go ahead as usual). The default class to check availability for can be changed by clicking the page icon near the bookmark star.
  
• Now, in the passenger details form, you can see that it has been pre-filled with your data thereby avoiding your need to type your details every time (Note that pre-filling senior citizen is not supported in this version).
  
• The quick book form too will be pre-filled with your data.
  
• After these steps, proceed as usual for payment options and complete your ticket booking.

Disclaimer
The purpose of this extension is to increase the ticket booking experience of a common man and it no way intended to be commercial. Using this extension does not guarantee your ticket booking. Its just a minor enhancement to the ugly IRCTC user-interface.

Footnotes
I am still a beginner to the world of Google Chrome extensions. So you are sure to find a lot of bugs. In case of any feedbacks/issues, please write to me at vig...@gmail.com (please click to view the full address).

-Vignesh

A flaw/feature in Google Chrome Extension design!

I am recently into customizing my road in the web with simple google chrome extensions to get and share content in the web the way i want. After having spent a good amount of time with the Google Chrome Extension Framework and their javascript API, i feel there is a flaw in the design of it. I still am not sure if this is a flaw or an intended feature.

Before describing the exact flaw, let me give a brief overview of things whose understanding is required to understand the flaw.

Browser Actions
Browser Actions are those using which your extension can do things along with the browser. Every browser can include a pop up page (yes the one which pops up when you click on the extension's icon on the top right corner). As of now, the only way to open up the pop up page is by clicking the icon. This point is important. Let me come back to it in a while.

Context Menus
Extensions can add custom context menus (the one that appears when you right click on something within the browser).

The flaw/feature
Now, as of writing this, there is no programmatic way of invoking the pop up page (other than clicking the icon manually as mentioned earlier). This makes sense because if a non-manual initiation of the pop up was allowed then it would be an irritation for users to see the pop up page annoyingly appear just when they install an extension.

Whereas, the restriction now enforced is a bit too strict. The restriction should look something like this, "The pop up page can be initiated only by a manual action", whereas the restriction that chrome enforces now looks like this, "The pop up page can be initiated only by clicking the pop up icon". This restriction is too much because, there are other manual actions than clicking the pop up icon, that might require an user interactive window for processing. For example, consider the case of a context menu. When a context menu is clicked, it completely makes sense for the extension to initiate the pop up with the context based content and enforce user interaction. This is simply *NOT* possible now.

Other options
Though the clean solution is not possible, there are one or two workarounds that i have found out to overcome this problem.

• If the user-interaction required is really simple, then merely use the javascript prompt('') function from the background page.


• You can always create a tab and make the user interaction


• Use a floating div or a jquery modal window to enforce the user interaction (this can be done using the executeScript API function).

-Vignesh

Android 2.1 USB Tethering in Ubuntu

The worst part about owning an android phone is to wait for updates from your hardware vendor (HTC in my case) to provide OS updates. I am still stuck with Eclair and eagerly awaiting froyo,while the N1 counterparts are eagerly awaiting gingerbread :-P.

Wifi tethering (using the phone as a wifi hotspot) is one of the key features of froyo. Since i don't have froyo, i have to go through a tedious process to setup wifi tethering in my eclair. So, i chose the easier option of USB tethering.

Before i even connected the USB cable, i browsed through the internet and found out there are various methods available for USB tethering. There were many tutorials on how to achieve this. I read all levels of tutorials from rooting the device to installing the SDK to installing a $30 app. Atlast i found a simple app, which could do the trick.

I connected the phone (running android 2.1) and the computer (running ubuntu 10.04 netbook remix) and selected "Enable mobile internet sharing" in the phone. Thats when the miracle happened. A small pop up notification appeared in the top corner saying "Connected to wired network auto usb0". I was surprised. I had just spent half an hour surfing through tutorials to make this work. All of a sudden out of nowhere it works out of the box on just connecting the cable. To ensure i just pinged my blog and it was working like a charm!

So its windows that requires all the crappy drivers and vendor software for USB tethering. In ubuntu it automatically established a LAN (PAN may be) and set the IP, gateways and DNS and works on the go without any manual effort (except for connecting the phone and computer of course ;-))

So for all who want to tether your phone's internet connection, please do not waste your time in reading tutorials and rooting your device. Just boot into linux and connect your phone :-)

P.S.: This post is through the tethered 3g connection :-D

-Vignesh

Playing With Technology - Break Bob's Account!

Folks,

In this edition of Playing With Technology, we have yet another simple challenge. Go ahead and enjoy it!

Scenario

Bob is a famous underworld hacker. His systems are known to be of proven security. He has recently launched a public website to which only very few of his friends have access. He has an admin account where he manages all the user accounts. Your goal is to login into the admin account and find the secret key! Bob generally is too confident about is system's secureness and hence he chooses only passwords of length 4. Also, he enforces an hourly limit of 30 hits to his website. As with the previous hack, clues and hints can lie anywhere and everywhere!

Bob's Website: http://foamsnet.com/pwt/bob_account/
Username: admin
Password Length: 4
Hourly Limit: 30 requests per hour!

Once you find the key, Post it as a comment in this post. I will approve all the comments once i reveal the answer and will aggregate all the correct responses along with the answer.

-Vignesh

Doodle it up - My first google chrome extension !! :-)

Google is really a part and parcel of our daily life. It has become so inevitable to our daily lives. I have taken a bit of my time to quickly develop a simple Google Chrome Extension to customize your daily visits to google. Wouldn’t you love to see your own picture instead of the boring google logo everytime you open google’s homepage? Yes. This is exactly what this extension does.

Here are step-by-step instructions for installing the extension:

• Download the extension from here


• Install the extension by clicking "Continue"


• Confirm the installation by clicking "Install"


• You will see the confirmation message


• Goto chrome://extensions and click on options under "Doodle it up" extension


• In the page that opens up, enter the URL of the image and then click on Save Settings


• Now, goto Google and Voila! you have your own image instead of the Google logo!

Please post your comments/suggestions as comments.

-Vignesh

Happy Birthday Google (12 years old) !! :-)

Today google celebrates its 12th birthday! Started in the year 1998 by two stanford guys in a garage, google has been the one thing that has transformed the whole world. Began as a search engine, today they work on almost all the cutting edge technology in the world (rather they invent most of the cutting edge technology).



Google has really become an integral part of almost all of our lives. Google co-founder Sergey Brin's dream when he initially thought about google was to "download the entire internet in his computer" and thats what they have achieved today!

As some rightly say, "when a noun becomes a verb, technology has really matured" and thats exactly what google is.

Happy Birthday Google !! May you make the life of more and more software engineers easy day by day !! :-)

Do you have a google moment to share ? Do it in the comments :-)

-Vignesh