2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 9,500 times in 2010. That’s about 23 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 2 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 28 posts. There were 11 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 855kb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was April 12th with 103 views. The most popular post that day was A post on two ads….

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were google.co.in, jainbasil.net, razimantv.wordpress.com, search.conduit.com, and solidsmoke.blogspot.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for zoozoo wallpapers, zoozoo, zoo zoo wallpapers, vodafone zoozoo, and zoozoo images.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

A post on two ads… May 2009
6 comments

2

Read manorama online in ubuntu using firefox(again…!) November 2008
6 comments

3

Connect to internet in ubuntu 8.04 : a simple guide to windows users August 2008
4 comments

4

Schedule your torrents in Ubuntu August 2009
7 comments

5

What you need for a cool desktop…! August 2008
2 comments

A post by email!!

WordPress can post via email. Goto your dashboard, select My blogs and enable ‘Post by email’. WordPress generates a secret email id for you. Mail your content to that id.
I have attached an image to see how this works.

Denial of service : Do it the SMS way!!

Python S60

Denial of service (affectionately known as DoS attack), is an attempt to make a resource unavailable to its intended users. One simple method involves bombarding the victim with external communication requests.

Planning such an attack on a friend’s mobile phone needs these things

• A Symbian Smartphone
• Python
• A service provider which gives you unlimited SMS. (Airtel gives 4400 sms for Rs.44 recharge which is practically unlimited unless you have some serious grudge against someone)

Let us see how this works. What happens if your phone receives a 100 messages in 5 minutes. Yeah! It stops working.(Only for short time. I don’t intend to cause a permanent damage). Now, sending 100 SMS from a phone, especially a symbian phone is a tedious task unless you have a python interpreter. So get it from here and install it. (You will need two files. Python for S60 and Python Script Shell)

Copy this  script to the ‘Python’ folder in your memory card. (Remeber that the extension has to be .py)

Start the interpreter.
Select Options->Run Script
Select the script from the list.
Fire away!!

Here are some screenshots of the program in action.

Here is the code.

Disclaimer : Python S60 is a fantastic piece of software. You can do al lot of interesting and ‘useful’ things with it. Please donot think that I am a bad person because all I did with it was irritate someone. This is my first (supposedly) working python program. There may be better ways to do this. If you find any errors or have any suggestions, please let me know.

PS: Actually major part of the code above is just garbage for that user interface. Actually, the line

messaging.sms_send( phone_no_as_string, body_as_unicode_string)

sends an sms. Simply use it in a for loop to send as many as you want.

PS again : Many thanks to @neo2904 for letting me test this software on him.

Schedule your torrents in Ubuntu

This blog post is intended to help BSNL broadband users using the 500c Plan. It has become really tiresome for me to wake up every day at 2 in the morning to start my downloads. Setting up cron is a bit of a pain in the @$$ – especially for beginners. Some torrent clients like Ktorrent has built in options to schedule torrent. But my favorite torrent client is Deluge and it doesnot have such an option. I thought of a really simple way to schedule torrents. You will be able to do this if you know basic maths.

Say, the time is 12:05 when you go to sleep. Run sleep 2h && your torrent client. The client will start at 2:05. Now if you sleep at 11:40 run

sleep 2h && sleep 20m && deluge

it will run at 2:00.

Enjoy your sleep!!

Install Firefox 3.5 in Jaunty

The new version of Firefox, Firefox 3.5 was released this week. There is no update available for Firefox in the official ubuntu repos. But there is a package firefox-3.5 in the repo. But instead of replacing the old firefox with the new one, it installs the new version alongside it. The new browser is named Shiretoko(which is the codename for Firefox 3.5). This blog post aims to help users install firefox 3.5 from the tar file downloaded from Offical Mozilla website.

The very first thing I would like to do is to put an end to a very common superstition. The tar file you download doesnot contain the source code of firefox and thereby there is absolutely no need to compile it. The archive merely consists of the executbles needed for the browser. So extract the archive and then double click on the file named firefox to run it. Yeah! it is that simple. Now to find a good place to keep the untarred folder(I don’t like it cluttering my home folder). So keep it in the /opt folder.
Now remove the firefox link from your /usr/bin folder. For this run
$sudo rm /usr/bin/firefox
(Don’t worry. This is not going to uninstall firefox 3.0)

Now create a link to your new firefox executable. Run
$sudo ln -s /path/to/firefox/exe /usr/bin/firefox
i.e. in this case,sudo
$ln -s /opt/frefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox
Run firefox, set it as your default browser. Enjoy!!

Now here is a small review of the new browser

Firefox 3.5 comes with no new feature that amazes an end user(The support for HTML5 is not something that wow!s an average computer user.). But there are a lot of usability improvements and stuff. Pages load faster. Firefox developers have included the one feature that all it’s competeters presently boast of : The so-called “Porn-Mode” (Private browsing and neat history management). There is an option “Forget about this site” in history. LOL!! It is now possible to recover recently closed tabs and windows. Google chrome fans are going to like the fact that they could simply drag the tabs between windows. There is also a new text recovery feature. Firefox remembers filled forms if it accidently crashes.
I am still not able to load the site http://bbservice.bsnl.in/ (Bsnl accounts management).
Anywas, I am a fan of firefox. This release is bound to attract more people towards it.

Obama… getting powerful!!

Looks like Obama has more followers than God himself!!

How do you microblog ?

Microblogging has been the latest trend among the Internet users. I learned about twitter from an article in some tech magazine. I wasn’t really planning to use it when I joined. Now it has become a habit rather than a hobby. For those who have not yet entered this world, microblogging is rather like the status message in your IM client. As twitter puts it, “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”. You can see the updates of people whom you follow and vice versa.

Then I came to know about identica from the tweets of @anivar which seemed to come “from identica”. “Identi.ca is a microblogging service brought to you by Control Yourself, Inc.. It runs the Laconica microblogging software, version 0.7.3, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.” You can integrate your twitter account with your identica account so that your tweets also come “from identica”.

Posting from the web will get tiresome after a while. So most people will go for a microblogging client. A simple google search will show you plenty of options. Every microblogger develops his own style of blogging. Here is what I do:

Now that all my twitter posts are done from identica, I have to post to only one account. Identica allows you to send and receive posts through Jabber/Gtalk. Simply give your gtalk address in the identica settings page (example@gmail.com/Home) and identica will appear as a friend in your Gtalk. To post a notice, send a message. This way you get updates from your friends as offline messages(Mind you, this can get annoying after a while.) This has got a problem. You don’t get updates of your friends who use only twitter and not identica. Being a hardcore ubuntu user, I use pidgin for my Gtalk(thereby identica), Yahoo and IRC. So using another client like twitux was not a comfortable choice. So I needed a plugin that made pidgin a twitter client. As usual, google gave me the answer. I found such a plugin – Twitgin. This plugin allowed me to listen to the updates of my friends. Now pidgin is my answer to Yahoo, Gtalk, IRC, Identica and Twitter.

But these days I use a faster way to post to identica: gnome-do. Here is a screenshot:

Follow me on twitter : @aswins

Follow me on identica : @aswins

Please share your microblogging habits as comments to this post.

Suffering from the cluttered-gnome-panel syndrome??

Are you suffering from a cluttered gnome panel because you have the habit of experimenting?? Well, I am!! Here is a screenshot of my panel:

These are what flood my panel: The standard gnome menu, My application launchers(Firefox,Pidgin,Deluge,Bluetooth file sharing,Synaptic,Terminal), Music Control Applet, Eyes, Netspeed Applet, Tomboy, Force Quit, Notification Area (Banshee,Bluetooth Applet,Receive Files Via Bluetooth,Pidgin,Tracker,Gnome-Do,Power Manager,Network Manager,SCIM), Volume Control, Brightness Applet, Clock , a separator and the Fast User Switch Applet.

I just got my Ubuntu CD…

I just got the free Ubuntu CD shipped by Canonical! Thanks to the Canonical team for the help. I will make sure I will “Pass it on!”.

To request free CDs goto https://shipit.ubuntu.com/

A post on two ads…

This is something I have been wanting to write for a long time. At least, a part of it. I would like to share with you two advertisements, one which is my favorite and the other which I hate the most!!

1.Harpic

Yeah! I am referring to the one in which a guy goes door to door cleaning toilets! I don’t know why they have advertisements like these. Imagine having to see this when you are eating… Yuck!!

2.Vodafone

Vodafone ads never ceases to amaze us. No one would have forgotten the girl with the dog. The cute white people of the new vodafone ads have achieved more glamour than the IPL players themselves. My neighbour has a boy who is in Kindergarten. I don’t think he understands cricket. But he watches IPL with his father and laughs with the vodafone people. I recieved a forwarded message this evening. I’ll list some of the content here. (The author does not bear responsibility for what is mentioned below).
The cute white people are named zoo-zoo. Vodafone has made 30 ads at 30 crores featuring this zoo-zoos. Already 15 has been released. Rest will be released between the IPL matches. Little known is the fact that zoo-zoos are not animation. They are actually humans inside costumes.  They are all females who are short and thin and they were selected from drama theatres in and around Mumbai.