Love you Dev Saab

Always in our hearts.. with your songs and your killing smile ..

- yam

C you later

Thanks dmr for my bread, butter and all the technology that stands on your shoulders.

- yam

Steve jobs no more

Big chunk of creativity lost by the world. There will never be another one.

Miss you apple..

- yam

Windows 7 Random Theme Switcher

After installing Windows 7 Ultimate and some good themes from MS site, the next question that came to my mind was obvious,

How do I change themes randomly without me manually changing them from the personalization options?

Googling "windows 7 random theme" and "windows 7 random theme on startup" results in forum questions and not solutions. I then searched for the command to change the theme from command line. Got a windows scripting shell snippet. I then extended it to list and change themes randomly from the user theme directory. Here is the link for the script.

To use it,

Edit the script and change the user directory where themes are installed. Actually, you simply have to change the username, thats all.
Save it and test it once by double clicking it in Windows Explorer. If it does not work, comment below. I may try yo help.
If works, add it to start up or add a scheduled job to run it.

Be careful with viruses.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/36372405/RandomTheme.vbs

- yam

Your shit never stinks.

That is it.

--

- yam

Cheap Video Streaming Technique

There was a requirement from one of the clients to have a video streaming setup for some construction site. At first it sounded a huge setup n all. Then suddenly my common sense woke and I was sakshatkared.

Setup a web cam.
Register at any of the IM sites who provide audio/video chat services.
Login to the IM app and add everybody in your friends list.
Configure the IM app to show webcam to friends without any confirmation.

Even if you pay a simple data entry type of guy to sit and keep adding friends, it will still cost you may be 200$ here in India.

- yam

Javascript Marque

One of my colleague wanted a simple Javascript marque for some mobile site. Supports only plain text. Demo link below.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20544295/mob_ticker.html

- yam

Stupid bugs from conflicting classes

A few days back, one of our systems started behaving weird. I can't explain what all happened, but it was weird. Anyway, we put logging statements, changed the input parameters etc and tested it on one of our development machines. Nothing happened. To our surprise, even some logging statements were missing. We rechecked the build process and made sure, eclipse is REALLY REALLY building this thing. Console logs said, it was REALLY REALLY building it. Hmm.. so, what might be wrong :-? After thinking for a while, I asked the developer if he had copied/reused any code. "Aaa.. Umm... yes.. I had copied one XXXX class...". lol! He copied the entire class along with the package structure. What should I say, copy/paste helps and kills too. I know, this level of copy/paste is not at all acceptable, but again, fresher, deadlines, pressure etc.

To not to repeat this mistake again, I wrote a small Java Program which reads all the jar files in a directory and prints out any conflicting classes along with the jar file name. Link below.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20544295/ChkDupClass.java

- yam

Human errors and Password Harvesting

This trick of collecting passwords came to my mind after me repeatedly committing the same mistake multiple times. Yes, call me an asshole but it happens. Its human to make errors. Its this human behavior that can be harnessed by any website or service to collect passwords.

How you say?

Simple. Store all the invalid passwords that the user has entered along with the login name.

This works because most people today are internet savvy and will have signed up for services like Email, SMS, Net Banking, Shopping etc. As we are humans and not machines, we find it difficult to remember multiple passwords. What do we do next? We agree upon common phrase and one variable phrase based upon the website or service or something else all together. A combination of the both is the complete password.
Whatever the combination we might agree upon, the time when we have to enter the password for service A, we type the password, but many times the wrong password or the password of some other website or service B.

So now you have a list of invalid passwords of a particular person, you have his personal information, like alternate email id, library card number(used as secret question, can be your customer id for a bank..or whatever) etc. What you do is simply try the invalid passwords on the alternate email id, against open-id enabled sites etc.There might be some more use cases but these two are the ones that come to my mind most of the time.

I am not good at writing. I know the closing of the post is improper. It sounds incomplete, cant help it. I said what I had on my mind.

Thank you for reading this :)

- yam

Waste of real estate

These days many travel companies are running the B9R multi axle buses. Instead of advertising the pros of the bus, may be like "comfortable than normal volvo" or whatever, companies write "Multiaxle" in huge font. Whats the point? Nobody gets it. Its like "okay.. A bus with multiple axle..". Nobody tries to think about what multiaxle is and what it means, how it is good or bad or whatever.

Basically, advertise in simple language which people understand.

Bike, Marriage and Chaos

Comfortable now to ride in traffic, and broad roads. One problem that I see is that my route is not changing. I will have to experiment with different routes, places one-way, no horn, night riding etc. As of now, I have a hold of the mechanism of riding, but real experience is when you face variety of situations. I am not talking like the Mi2 or Mi3 kind of stuff but sufficient scenarios of bike riding. Masturbating on bikes and which one to buy(in case). Lets see.

I will be a married man by now in the next month. :-| (this means I am happy ok!)

Chaos in my mind on what to do after marriage. I mean, job etc. <silence time="5" unit="MINS" /> , Hope for the best.

- yam

Stupid stop smoking ad in BEST bus

Two people smoking in a restaurant. Another guy walks in. He is tired n pissed off for some reason. Weather is hot outside. Cigarette smoke irritates him. He walks to the two people, bashes one of them. Shoots him with a gun and kills him. A small text appears at the bottom, "smoking kills".

Moral of the story is, do not smoke around people having guns! Lol!

Pathetic ad agencies.