Chromecast URL Player

I was annoyed by the fact that the Chromecast SDK has been out for the public for quite a while and yet googling for a simple URL player for Chromecast did not yield satisfactory results. So I sat down to create my own simple web app for playing back any http video or viewing any still image in Chromecast.

URL: http://movies.foamsnet.com

Source Code: https://github.com/vickyg3/UrlPlayer

Would love to hear feedback. Feel free to fork, send pull requests.


-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

Open sourcing Social Photos

I have been working on a lot of open source projects lately (chromium, AOSP, ffmpeg, etc.) and I have had this tremendous change in the way i look at software projects now. I am all the more convinced that open source is the only right way of doing software.

With that in mind, I've made a pledge to myself that no matter what I do, I am going to put the source out there. As a first step, i'm open sourcing the one big project of mine, Social Photos.

The source can be found here: https://github.com/vickyg3/social-photos

It is a snapshot of the one that's currently powering the live site: http://socialphotos.net (with API keys redacted). Feel free to fork and use as you please. Although i'd appreciate a link back, it's not mandatory. Also, i'll be more than happy to look at Pull Requests.

One of the main reasons that developers (including myself) don't post our code out there is that we are ashamed of our code. I was really ashamed by the number of hacks i did in this project that i couldn't even think of making it public. I'm over it. I'm ready to accept people fixing my mistakes.

Happy Coding!

-Vignesh

VLC Media Player: Automatically Skip Songs in Indian Movies!

I watch a lot of movies. Really a lot. And VLC Media Player is my (and many others') favorite. Indian movies are plagued with songs in irrelevant times and most of the time it just interrupts the pace/flow of the movie. No offense to music lovers/music makers, I like listening to songs in general. But I don't like them in the middle of an important scene in the movie.

The Problem

Whenever a song starts, inevitably I try to use the seek bar (using the seek bar is really one of the big pain points of any media player as it almost never takes you to where you want) and seek to the end of the song. Most of the time I end up seeking either just after the song (thereby missing something important) or to some portion in between the song (thereby having to wait for some more time for the song to end).

As an engineer, I naturally wondered, Wouldn't it be wonderful to have an automated way (preferably a keyboard shortcut) to just skip the song and move to the more important stuff?

This is exactly what I sat down to solve. Based on this xkcd, it seemed like it would be worth the time.And I (sort of) have a perfect solution that helps me skip songs automatically in the press of a button in VLC Media Player.

The Solution

As hard as the problem might seem, I ended up using a very simple heuristic. Start analyzing the audio stream, and whenever there is a silence for about a second or so, it's likely that the song ends there. I just came up with this heuristic based on the fact that most Indian movie songs are continuous (either lyric or the music goes on throughout the song without any breaks) and when the song ends, there is usually a small interval of silence before the next scene starts. And if there is a silence somewhere in between the song, just do the analysis again and it will take you to the next silence which is most likely the end of the song.

Is it perfect? Absolutely not. It's not even a solution, it's more of a heuristic (aka hack) which exploits some pattern in the Indian movie songs. And in my observation (I have been using this for quite a while now), It seems to be working correctly 99% of the time.

Implementation Details

Note: This section has technical jibber-jabber. If all you care about is how to use the script in your VLC media player, skip ahead to the "Usage" section.

First things first, I chose VLC media player, because that's the one I use. If you aren't using it, then you should start using it too. To begin with, we need to query VLC Media Player.

The overall flow goes something like this:

1. Get the name of the file that VLC is currently playing
2. Get the time point of the current playback from VLC
3. Analyze the audio stream of the file and detect the next silence beginning from the time point of current playback
4. Seek VLC to the determined duration where silence was detected (this is likely the end point of our song)

As complex as these steps might seem, they are fairly trivial to accomplish. To perform steps 1, 2 and 4 all we need to do is enable the HTTP interface in VLC. Once that's done, it is straightforward to get details of playback and control the player through a simple HTTP interface. The 2nd step is a little more tricky as it involves analysis of the audio stream of a file. Fortunately, we have a swiss army knife in our hands which will not only analyze the audio stream, but pin point us to the exact location of silence that we are looking for. The tool is none other than FFmpeg. The silence detect filter in ffmpeg has been used to accomplish this.

Here is a rough sketch of the ffmpeg command that I use:

ffmpeg -ss <start_time> -i <input_file> -t 600 -vn -af silencedetect=noise=0.1 -f null -

Let me break that up:

• -ss <start_time> :- seeks to the specified time in the input file. this value for this is obtained from VLC's HTTP interface
• -i <input_file> :- absolute path of the file that VLC is currently playing. this value is obtained from VLC's HTTP interface
• -t 600 :- analyzes only 600 seconds (10 minutes) of audio to detect for silence (as Indian movie songs are hardly longer than 10 minutes).
• -vn :- ignore the video
• -af silencedetect=noise=0.1 :- enable the silence detection filter with a threshold of 0.1dB. this value was picked by trial and error.
• -f null - :- just print the output of the filter in stdout rather than a file.

We then grep for the exact duration and then seek VLC based on this output.

Code

The code is in github here: https://github.com/vickyg3/scripts/blob/master/song_skipper.py

Look into the variables on top of the file and change them as per your environment if required.

Usage

To use this script, you need to install the following (fairly straightforward if you are tech-savy, but doable even if you are not).

• Install Python - Download Python 2.x (do NOT download 3.x)
• Enable HTTP Interface in VLC. Click on the link for instructions on how to do this. (you only need to do this once).
• Install FFmpeg
• Download the script from here: https://raw.github.com/vickyg3/scripts/master/song_skipper.py

Once you do the above steps, all you need to do is to bind a keyboard shortcut such that the script will execute. For Mac, I used Keyboard Maestro to set up a global keyboard shortcut which will invoke the script. There should be an equivalent program for Windows/Linux too. So that whenever a song starts, I merely use the keyboard shortcut to skip it.

Hope you enjoy it.

-Vignesh

Education is a cure for all problems. Donate for the cause of Educating kids: Computer Kindness Foundation is helping schools to build Libraries. Follow the link to contribute.

Using hash tags to organize bash history

We use hash tags all over the place in social networks. We use it extensively on Twitter and Instagram. Facebook recently launched support for hash tags as well.

So, in a way, our online life revolves around hash tags. Given that, it’s a really great thing for bash power users that # in shell means comment. I usually tend to type long commands and won’t bother remembering or saving them somewhere as it is in the bash history and i can retrieve it by reverse-i-search (Ctrl+R) anytime I want. 

As time passes by, more than often I end up retyping the whole command as reverse-i-search doesn’t have a unique combination of letters/words to search for. So, off late, I have found a dead simple way to never lose control over reverse-i-search because of too many similar commands. I just append a hash tag every command I type in. And later search for the hash tag in reverse-i-search. Since, anything that follows # is treated as a comment, the text is silently ignored, while giving you power to search through it alter on.

For example, when i write PHP code, I often tend to run lint on all the php files before executing them to make sure there aren’t any silly syntax errors. This is the exact command that i run:

find . -iname '*.php' -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 php -l

If you look at this command, none if its contents are unique by any mean. All these phrases and commands are something that we use over and over again. So it’s very plausible that this might get lost in the bash history and practically un-searchable with reverse-i-search. Now this is the command with a hash tag appended:

find . -iname '*.php' -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 php -l #phplint

Tada, there we go. From now on, we can do a reverse-i-search for “#phplint” or merely “phplint” to get back this command from the bash history. Also make sure you set HISTSIZE to a large value in your .bashrc to make sure you history is practically infinite.

-Vignesh

Do a good deed today. Donate to the Prime Minister's National Relief Fund.

Solving Boggle (Scramble with Friends) with a Bot!

Headnote

I am always fascinated by Android games, especially puzzle games. This is how it usually works with me and a puzzle game. I start playing them with random friends. They beat me and I beat them on and off. Then I sit and think, this is so monotonic and algorithmic that a human being shouldn't be sitting and doing it. Then I sit with the computer (with my favorite monkeyrunner Jython in it) and try to come up with a simple algorithm for it. Then i plug in the standard monkeyrunner code to actually feed the output of the program back to the device. Then I usually become #1 among my friends in the leaderboard (often even in the global leaderboard) ;-)

This is one such scenario. Zynga's Scramble with Friends has been really popular among my friends off late. So i hit this routine cycle and ended up with a beautiful bot which usually scores a centum (like the one TamBrahm parents force their kids to get in Mathematics).

With that out of the way, let's begin.

Objective of the Game

The game consists of a 4x4 grid of letters. You have to form as many words you can by starting from a letter and by moving to one of the (upto) 8 adjacent letters. Dead simple, but really interesting and addictive.

The first thing needed to solve this is a dictionary of words. I went on the internet and downloaded a plain text dictionary file which had about 170k words in it. Good enough to start with.

Algorithm - Breadth First Search

The number of valid words is usually very limited. In most games, the total number of valid words is usually < 400. So, a simple Breadth First Search (BFS) will do starting with single letter elements and then add the neighbors recursively. One key insight is, if you come across a prefix that never occurs in the dictionary, you can discard that prefix at that point instead of adding it to the traversal queue.

A rough sketch of the algorithm is as follows:

• queue = [all 16 characters]
• while queue is not empty:
• word = head of queue
• if word is in dictionary output it [1]
• for all neighbors adjacent to the last character of word
• new_word = word + neighbor
• if dictionary has words with prefix new_word, add new_word to the queue [2]

That's it. Straightforward implementation of a BFS-like algorithm.

Choice of Data Structure

The key to solving this problem efficiently lies in choosing a good data structure for implementing the dictionary. The dictionary needs to support two major operations. One is looking up if a word exists. This is used for step [1] in the above algorithm. The other operation is, given a prefix, check if there is atleast one word containing that prefix in the dictionary. This is used for step [2] in the algorithm mentioned above.

Array ?

One good looking candidate is using a simple array (note that the dictionary is already sorted for us). Look up can be performed using simple binary search. Prefix checking can also be performed using a modified binary search (if search succeeds, then prefix exists. if search fails, prefix existence can be determined by looking at the bounds in which the search failed). Also, note that the dictionary has ~173k words. So, searching is gonna take log(173k) which is approximately 18 hits in the worst case. This is a totally fair deal.

Trie ?

Another possibility is using the Trie, whose raison-d'etre (very reason for existence) is to implement such dictionaries. The Trie implementation is also fairly trivial (since we require only two major operations apart from Trie construction). In the Trie, both the operations are gonna take as many hits as the length of the word or the prefix being looked up. So asymptotically, both these data structures are more or less similar and we don't have a big advantage in using either one over the other since our output is always gonna be < 400 words.

I decided to go with the Trie. After reading this article about Trie implementations in Python, I decided to quickly write my own implementation of Trie. Also, this made life simpler as I couldn't quickly find any good resources about using external libraries within monkeyrunner.

Implementation Quirks

Since I had already used monkeyrunner a few times before, implementation turned out to be pretty straightforward. The following are a few implementation quirks and nuances that the script deals with:

• Input is manually entered as a raw row-major string of length 16.
• If the same word can be formed by two different combinations, only one combination is actually considered valid. This is overcome by storing a list of already found words in another Trie.
• Even though the script finds smaller words first (because of BFS), it actually starts outputting words of length >= 5 first and then after it has exhausted all the lengthier words, it then outputs the smaller words in the reverse order of length (4,3,2). This is to maximize points in case we don't find time to output all the words.
• The game offers three lifelines. I found the freeze option to be useful to the bot (as each freeze gives you 15 additional seconds of game time). So, the script automatically taps on the freeze lifeline every 30 seconds.
• We also need to store the co-ordinate of each letter in the queue along with the letters themselves in order to simulate the output in the device.
• The co-ordinates are hard-coded for Nexus 7 portrait mode.

Code

The whole implementation can be found here: https://github.com/vickyg3/scripts/tree/master/scramble_bot

Sample Video

Here is the exciting part. This is how it looks like when my bot plays the game:

It's always a very nice feelings to watch you script do such beautiful things.

-Vignesh

Wanna do some good deed? Visit http://www.computerkindness.org (Or look for the banner in the top-right of this page).

C++ COW Craziness

Note: This isn't one of those Linus'ish articles that bitches about C++. I like C++ and I would just like to point out one of the many nuances in the language that could affect the performance of your program without your knowledge.


C++ STL's string class promises Copy-on-write. What that means is that, you can make as many copies of the string, but the actual memory duplication will happen only when one of the strings are actually written to (i.e.) no memory duplication will be made for copies that are made for pure reads. Or atleast that's what I thought, until I discovered today that, if you use the [ ] operator on the string, you rig the COW functionality of it forever. It is something that you normally don't do, but doing so could cost you a lot of performance. Let's run through an example.

string s1(1024 * 1024 * 16, 'g');
for(int i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
  string s2 = s1;
}

This runs in 19 milliseconds. That's because (obviously) there are no actual copies made. Just 1000 pointers being created to the existing 16 megabytes of data. Now, lets try modifiying the copied string.

string s1(1024 * 1024 * 16, 'g');
for(int i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
  string s2 = s1;
  s2[0] = 'v';
}

This runs in 4.3 seconds. That's right, from 19 milliseconds to 4.3 seconds for making 1000 actual copies of 16 MB of data. This is the expected behavior, a copy is done when you try to write to it. Next comes the weird part, consider the following code:

string s1(1024 * 1024 * 16, 'g');
for(int i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
  string s2 = s1;
  s2[0];
}

Guess how much time this should take? Intuitively it seems like this should hit the COW fast path (i.e.) no actual copies, because there is no "write" here. This takes 4.3 seconds too! The problem behind the [ ] operator is that, you can easily stash away a pointer to some portion of the string and modify it later thereby screwing up the state. So, it is impossible to perform COW once you use the [ ] operator on a string. The following snippet illustrates this:

string s1("hello");
char *p = &s1[2];
string s2 = s1;
*p = 'v';

You see what happened there? You stashed away a pointer to the middle of the string and then tried to change it later after the copy. This is sort of an indirect write, and there is no way for the compiler to determine this. So, the moment is sees the [ ] operator, it removes the COW functionality for that string. One way to do such a read without rigging the COW functionality is to do a crazy cast like this:

string s1(1024 * 1024 * 16, 'g');
const_cast<const string &>(s1)[0];
for(int i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
  string s2 = s1;
}

This snippet takes the fast COW path and runs in 20 milliseconds. The takeaway from this article is that, do not use the [ ] (or the .at()) operator on strings, especially large string that could be copied later on. Even though you think you're doing an harmless read, you are rigging the COW functionality of that string forever. You are paying the price for that pointer you stashed away (or may be even released long back) without knowing.

 -Vignesh

Serverless Downloads - HTML5 Awesomeness!

HTML5 brings an awesome feature known as client downloads. At first glance, the term "serverless downloads" may sound oxymoronic, but it sure makes a lot of sense. In the HTML5 era, we write a lot of thick clients. All the day to day web apps which we use are damn thick (Gmail, Facebook, etc.). So in the context of thick clients, serverless downloads make a lot of sense.

Content-Disposition HTTP Header

On the web 2.0 days, when you wanted to force a browser to download a file to disk rather than displaying it (especially if the file is of some format which the browser is capable of rendering), you used to set the Content-disposition header in the HTTP response.

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="sample.txt";

There is no way for the browser to let the user download the file without contacting the server, even if the contents of the file were to be generated totally on the client side.


The Problem

This is old school. These days there are lot of web apps where you create the data on the app itself. For example, consider Google Docs, you create all sorts of documents on the web. Every time you click the download button, the data is sent to the server and the same data comes back along with required filetype's additions and you see the download dialog box.

This step seems too radical and unnecessary. Given how thick the clients are these days, it is atrocious to send some data to the server and get back the same data as a file from the server. The same holds for all sorts of web based photo editing apps, etc.


The Solution - "download" attribute

Now with HTML5 it is possible to generate a file on the client side and make the user download it without contacting the server at all. The simple addition of "download" attribute to the anchor(a) tag will tell the browser to download the content present in the "href" attribute rather than navigating it. Now, this can be combined with a "blob:" or a base64 encoded data url to create a file and download it, all on the client side.

I have put up a demo where you can enter text into a field and then download it as a pdf.

Demo: http://garage.foamsnet.com/static/pdf.html
Image Courtesy: http://www.html5rocks.com

-Vignesh

Convert your keyboard into an Android game controller!

I have been gifted with a new android phone. It's the big G branded Galaxy Nexus. Its blazingly fast and awesome to use (especially after years of HTC Wildfire usage). Right from day one, i have been really addicted to this game called Temple Runner which wasn't compatible with my old phone.

The game is very straightforward to play and it involves only 4 different operations. Swipe up, left, right and down. Coming from a strong keyboard background, I was never 100% comfortable with touch interfaces as i was with keyboard. And these 4 operations sounded analogous to the accelerate, brake and turn operations while playing a racing game in the computer keyboard.

That got me thinking, is there a way to make the computer keyboard into a game controller for my Android phone? Turns out its fairly straightforward. In this post i'll explain exactly how to do that.

Ingredients

• Android phone (obviously)
• USB cable connected in debugging mode
• Android SDK installed
• Very very basic python english

There's a tool named monkeyrunner which enables us to send operations from the computer to the phone via a very simple Python API (monkeyrunner tool is a part of Android SDK). A sample code for a controller would look like this:

Code until line 7 is fairly straightforward to understand. The only thing that i would like to explain here is the device object. It is an object of the MonkeyDevice class. This class has all the API methods that you need to use in order to simulate the operations. For example, device.touch(100, 200, MonkeyDevice.DOWN_AND_UP) will simulate a touch event at co-ordinate 100, 200 (with the origin being top left). As simple as that!

You can find the detailed documentation of the monkey device class to know about other methods like drag, type, etc.

The full code which i used for playing Temple Run game is given below:

One point to note is that, the sys.stdin.read(1) line will read one character and wait for the enter key to be pressed. This could be annoying given that you are writing a game controller. In order to avoid the enter key press, if you are on linux run "stty raw" before running this script and if on windows use the getch function in msvcrt module.

-Vignesh

Pre School Problem - A programmer's approach!

Flashback - A few weeks ago

I came across this question in facebook. It said, "This problem can be solved by pre-school children in 5-10 minutes, by programmers in 1 hour, by people with higher education.. well check it yourself :)"

I shared this post and we had few nice sessions of fun with my colleagues in office. Myself and a colleague of mine were discussing about this and i told him, "the best part about this puzzle is that it cannot be solved programatically". And we carried on with our lives.

Train Journey - Last night


Last night when i was travelling by train, I had gotten a side lower berth and hence couldn't sleep (i have grown too tall to fit in to side berths :-( ). So, i had to while away time. I was tweeting, finished through a couple of stanford algo and nlp class videos. Then i had nothing to do, phone was almost running out of charge and so was the laptop. So i closed everything and started staring outside the window. Various thoughts came across, and one among them was "is there no way to programatically solve that facebook puzzle?".

Thus I started thinking about it, the first solution that came to my mind was to convert the numbers into a linear system of equations and apply linear regression on it. Then, the value of the co-efficients would give the mapping between a number and how we arrive at the solution (explained in detail below).

Coding Session - Today


I came home had a nice sleep. When i woke up, the first thing i wanted to do was to test out if my theory works. Obviously python (numpy) was the toolkit in my arsenal that would help me do this quicky. So here are the steps:

• Convert the input number into co-efficients of 0 or 1. For example, 2172 would translate to [0, 1, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0]. (i th element denotes the number of times number i occurs).
• Now we have the coefficient matrix ( of size n x 10 where n is the number of inputs).
• We also have the constants column vector which are the known outcomes
• Now, we apply linear regression on this system to get the output
• Output will be a mapping between a number and how much it contributes to the output (0 maps to 1, 1 maps to 0, 2 maps to 0 and so on.)
• So to compute the outcome of a new number, merely sum the mappings of the digits in that number.

The whole program is embedded below:

The output of the program is:

['0 maps to 1', '1 maps to 0', '2 maps to 0', '3 maps to 0', '4 maps to 0', '5 maps to 0', '6 maps to 1', '7 maps to 0', '8 maps to 2', '9 maps to 1']

As we can see, that's a perfectly valid mapping!

Moral of the story:

1. Mathematics is really powerful. 
2. We can teach a computer much faster than we teach a pre-school kid. ;-)

-Vignesh

Google DevFest 2011 - Bangalore!

Atlast, I attended a professional developer meet! And it couldn't be better. It was the Google Developer Fest organized by Google at Lalit Ashok Hotels, Bangalore. Most of the speakers were from Google headquarters, working on key Google products like Android, Chrome, Maps and App Engine.

The registration process went on very easily as they had a QR code in the confirmation mail, and used an android phone to take a picture of the same and verify the registration. Also, they had queues based on alphabets range. The T-Z queue was empty while the other queues were having atleast 20 to 30 people in it. For the first time in my life, i experienced an advantage of my name starting with V!

In this post, I am sharing the raw notes which i took during the keynote and various other talks. Hope this will be of some use.

Keynote - Android
* 550k+ activations per day
* Complex Screen density vs Size matrix - unifying everything => android
* Always use DPI (density per square inch) for specifying assets
* Honeycomb features
* Fragments
* Loaders - wrapper on top of asynctask
* Action bar
* Tabs
* Animation framework
* Compatibility library
* Multiple APK Support

Keynote - Bleeding edge HTML5 - http://india-devfest-keynote.appspot.com
* Interestingly, this keynote isn't called as "Chrome", though most of the topics were Chrome specific
* 160M active users
* Page Visibility API
* Prerendering
* Offline capabilities
* Web animation - CSS3, WebGL
* Native Client
* Future
* Web intents
* Fullscreen content - Fullscreen API
* Web Audio API - Real time processing and analysis of audio
* WebRTC - Real time communication
* Be updated
* chromestatus.com
* updates.html5rocks.com

Android Market - Tony Chan
* 250k + apps, 6B+ downloads
* In app billing, carrier billing
* Licensing
* All licenses allowed
* Code Obfuscation
* Don't reuse sample code
* In app billing
* Sell only digital content
* Reports for developers
* Device Filter
* Ability to exclude handpicked devices
* Multiple APK
* Filter by specific segments (platform version, screen size, etc.)
* App available as one product listing
* Apps upto 4GB coming soon (50mb app + 2gb archive)
* Pay attention to graphics - Featuring in android market depends mainly on that

Android Fragments & Open Accessory ADK - Tony Chan
* Fragments
* Fragments need not always have UI
* Fragments are an investment for the future!
* Fragments vs <include/>
* Fragments (optional UI, has lifecycle, not standalone, no direct interaction with intents) vs Activity
* Open accesory & ADK
* USB Device basics (Descriptor, etc)
* Open Accessory -> A USB host device that can communicate with an android device (e.g. Arudino)
* Use Android Accessory Protocol for communication

Building Integrated Apps on Google Cloud Technologies - Alfred Fuller
* App Engine intro
* Google Storage
* Store data in google's cloud
* Access via RESTful API
* Objects of any type (100GB / object)
* OAuth / Web browser
* Prediction API
* Machine learning API
* Upload training data -> Build model -> Predict new data
* Many machine learning techniques, Asynchronous training, Many platforms access
* BigQuery
* Analyze massive amounts of data in seconds
* SQL like query language, REST, RPC, etc.
* Batch jobs (Mapreduce)
* App Engine Identity API (For secure authentication)

Google Apps Marketplace - Claudio Cherubino
* Google Apps as a pure platform
* Google Apps APIs
* Success Stories
* OpenID SSO & OAuth
* Provisioning API
* Gmail contextual gadgets
* Sidebar gadgets in Gmail/Calendar
Twitter: @ryguyrg @scottmcmullan @stevenbazyl

Chrome Developer Tools - Boris Smus
* Basics - Cheat Sheet
* Revision history for all changes made inline in dev tools
* Aim to transform this into an IDE
* Commandline API - console.log takes n parameters, copy(), inspect() and $0
* Javascript debugging - See call stack, Pretty print
* Breakpoints - Line, Conditional, Exception, DOM, Event, XHR
* Future
* Extensions can extend developer tools too!
* Use chromiumer
* Remote debugging (--remote-debugging-port=31337 , Blackberry PlayBook only)

Google Places API - Chris Broadfoot
* What is a Place -> Abstract & Concrete
* Available as a web service and as a part of javascript maps library

Designing UIs for Phones and Tables
* UI Patterns for Honeycomb
* Action Bar
* App Icon - Where am i?
* View details - What can i see?
* Action buttons - What can i do here?
* Multi Pane Layouts
* Take advantage of screen real estate
* Consolidate multiple related screens into a compound view (similar to iframe in web)
* Screen rotation handling - Stretch (Settings), Stack (Calendar), Expand/Collapse (Gtalk), Show/Hide (Gmail)
* App Navigation
* Beyond the List
* Think and use innovative UIs to replace traditional lists (carousel, slidestack, etc.)
* Do's
* Aim for single APK
* Use compatibility library
* Customize visual design completely, if straying from Holo theme
* Support both landscape and portrait
* Extract dimensions for phones and tablets
* Use theme/style/etc. to reduce redundancy
* Marry OS visual style with your brand
* Don'ts
* Assume API level >= 11 (tablet)
* Assume xlarge == tablet (7" inch tablet is large)
* Use small font sizes
* Overuse fill_parent; Avoid excessively long lines of text
* Think tablets are big phones

Btw, the lunch was awesome too! :-P Overall, a great experience! :-)

-Vignesh

How I hacked an android game with Python and OCR!

Math Workout is a famous android game. In fact, it features in the top 5 of google listings for many math game + android related queries. The objective of the game is very very simple. It will fire simple math questions one after the other and you'll have to tap in the correct answer. Its a race against time among other users of the app in the world.

Here's how the app looks like and a few screenshots of questions:

As you can see, the game is fairly straigtforward. So its the time that you have to beat. A naive approach to that would be having a calculator or a computer near by and feeding in the questions to determine the answer and feeding it back to the phone. Totally manual!

Thats when the programming neurons of my brains started itching me that this could be automated and cheated by some mean. Come on think, think! So i sat on to solve this problem during my weekend and started thinking about ways i could attack this problem.

These are the steps that came into my mind in the first thought:

1. Grab a screenshot of every question
2. Crop the screenshot so that only the question is visible
3. Run the cropped image through an OCR engine
4. Parse the result and evaluate it
5. Identify the co-ordinates of the resulting number and appropriately simulate touch events in the phone

Bummer! Every step looked a bit complex in itself at first sight. Then came along a bit of googling, and voila, i found the perfect tool that i needed to perform steps 1, 2 and 5. It is the monkeyrunner tool that comes along with the Android SDK. It opens up a Python API through which i can grab and crop screenshots, simulate touch events given an (x,y) co-ordinate. Exactly what i wanted.



Now, I have the cropped image that has the question in hand. Next step is to run it through an OCR engine. Again googling told me that ocrad is an useful OCR command line tool that was available as a part of the GNU project. I installed it and found that it cannot process png images. So i had to run the image through a converter before passing it to ocrad. This small piece of shell script helped me accomplish that:


To keep things simple, the shell script is invoked from python using os.popen(). Now, I have the actual expression as a python string. As you can see from the sample screenshots, few questions can be solved by a direct "eval" whereas others require some processing. Basic operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division can be solved using "eval". Whereas questions like "10% of 20", "square root of 9" needs some processing. Thats what this following if else block does:



Now that the expression is evaluated and we have the result in hand, all that's left is to go through the result character by character and simulate touch events in corresponding positions in the screen. I managed to identify the co-ordinates of each number in the screen by trial and error and hard coded those values within two functions named getx() and gety() which will take a character and return its corresponding x and y co-ordinates respectively, and the simulation happens. Here is the code snippet:



To orchestrate this whole process and play the game fully automatically other cosmetic additions like coping up with the frame rate of the phone and taking care of screenshot/ocr lags are to be considered. These are handled by minor if conditions and sleeps for very small amounts of time.

The end result is as you see in the below screenshot :-P

Here is a video of how the game looks like when it is being played by my script:

Though these steps seem like computationally a bit expensive, in practice i found them to be really fast. The script was able to answer approximately 2 questions per second (with an explicit sleep of 0.2 seconds between two questions - which leads to 2 questions every 0.8 seconds). A C/C++ program might run faster than this, but i stopped here as i have accomplished what i wanted. Overall it was a fun filled Sunday! :-)

Here is a link to the full source code of the automated script: auto_math_workout.py (you can find ocr.sh from the gist above in this page - rest of the source code is in the link)

Any comments/feedbacks are welcome! :-)

-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

Je L'ai Dit turns one!

Yesterday, may 31, 2011, my blog turned one. I have written around 60 posts altogether and I really feel good about it.

My heartfelt thanks to all who are following and managing to read all the rubbish I write. Thank you! :-)

-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

Scripting vs Programming - Mastering the art of arts!

Why this post?

The line of difference between a script and a program has become very blurry these days to the extent that these terms are used interchangeably. Though there is no hard and tight way to theoretically define what a script is and say how it is different from a program, if you have done a lot of programming and if you are a person who loves to automate things, then you can definitely realize the clear line of difference between scripting and programming. In this article, I try to give my views on what scripting is, how it differs from programming, etc. (Whole of this article just represents my view and there is a good chance that some of it may be wrong).

What is a script?

A script is just a small piece of code, usually written in a non-traditional programming language (like bash or perl) that is used to get a job done. Well, sure you can’t see much of how it differs from the definition of a "program". That is what i try to explain on the due course of this article.

How does it differ from a program?
As i said earlier, there is no concrete set of rules to distinguish a script and a program. The main deciding factors are:

• the purpose with which its developed
• the design mechanism underwent on due course of development, and
• the person who uses it

Scripts are generally very specific to their task. They just do what is to be done, nothing more or nothing less. Whereas programs generally have a broad scope. They are more sophisticated and usually do much more than what they are supposed to do. This is the difference with respect to the first point.

Scripts generally don’t follow any design. Scripts are usually just written, with no design in mind whatsoever. Even if they are complex, they aren’t designed with care and concern. Whereas programs on the other hand are designed to work with a proper flow and fault tolerance. Scripts are usually used by programmers themselves internally, whereas programs are full fledged tools that are used by everyone from geeks to laymen. To state an example, Facebook is a "program" and if you build something that will scrape data off facebook in the format you want, then that could be a "script".

Scripting is usually considered as programming as a part of developing an actual program. For example, the recent android patent issue says Google used a "script" to clean up all the comments and other stuff from the kernel header files. So, scripts can be generally categorized as utility functions that helps you making your "program" development easier.

What’s a scripting language?

Again, a scripting language is a programming language that is generally non-traditional. Scripting language usually provides constructs for doing things in the quickest way possible rather than in the most efficient way possible (For e.g. most of the scripting languages usually have a sort() function to sort the data. Though they may not be the most efficient implementation of sorting data, it gets the job done without fuss). Another aspect is that scripting languages are usually interpreted and not compiled. This gives the assurance that the script dies if anything goes wrong, the script starts over all again, taking advantage of the fact that scripts need not provide any atomicity over what they do.

Uses of scripting

I love automating things i do and hence scripting is a very essential part of my online life. Scripts can help your online life get much easier and better. For example, i have various little chrome content scripts (google chrome’s equivalent of greasemonkey scripts) that helps me make my day-to-day browsing easier and more productive. Also, i extensively use sed and awk scripts to browse through log files generated by the programs i develop. I even have scripts that help me check if there are new episodes of my favorite TV Serials (BBT, HIMYM) available for download and alert me.

When it comes to automating day to day online tasks, scripting is your swiss army knife. You can accomplish things quickly and in the way you want them to be.

Scripting as an art

We all know that programming is more of an art than a science. Developing a perfect program is close to impossible. But scripting too is an art that can aid you in making your programming life much better. Learning a scripting language at the beginning may seem weird, but once you get used to the constructs, it will really be a cake walk and you will find it a lot useful to have it as one of your assets.

To sum up..

Scripting and programming always go together. Scripting aids in automating things that will make a program better than what it is now. Though only a beginner, my humble piece of advice to every programmer out there is "Never hesitate to automate things. You learn a lot while automating silly things! So next time when you come across a silly problem in your work or in your project, try to tackle it with a quick utility script rather trying to fix it manually!"

-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

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