Hi tech आषाढी एकादशी..

#include <stdio.h>

void main(void)
{
for (;;)
{
printf (“विठ्ठल विठ्ठल जय हरी विठ्ठल..!\n”);
}
exit(0);
}

 

gcc -Wall -lm vitthal.c -o vitthal; ./vitthal

Django Live | Download Django Live software for free at SourceForge.net

Django-OS – Live CD running on hardened kernel and LAMP stack – http://sourceforge.net/projects/djangolive/ #opensource #python #LAMP #india

via Django Live | Download Django Live software for free at SourceForge.net.

Python Pits..

Q. How many times do we require to convert a python tuple to plain string?
A. It was during one situation that I required to collect some data directly from the database. If this wasent enough, I had to send the data to a mobile using sms. I used MySQLdb and connected to the database.The program was as follows.

import codecs
import MySQLdbconn = MySQLdb.connect(host=’localhost’,use_unicode = True, charset = “utf8″, user=’harshad’,passwd=”,db=’statusnet’)

cursor=conn.cursor()

p=cursor.execute(“”"select content from notice where profile_id = 1″”")

g=cursor.fetchall()

q=[]
for i in g:
j=str(i)
q.append(codecs.encode(j))

print len(q)

for e in q:
print codecs.encode(e)

The output of the program was as follows.

python statusnet.py
5
(u’Traces, many faces, lost till the end of time… http://localhost/statusnet-0.8.2/index.php/attachment/1&#8242;,)
(u’hello.c http://localhost/statusnet-0.8.2/index.php/attachment/2&#8242;,)
(u’Hallo.’,)
(u’Wussup??’,)
(u’!harshad hi..’,)
["(u'Traces, many faces, lost till the end of time... http://localhost/statusnet-0.8.2/index.php/attachment/1',)", "(u'hello.c http://localhost/statusnet-0.8.2/index.php/attachment/2',)", "(u'Hallo.',)", "(u'Wussup??',)", "(u'!harshad hi..',)"]
root@indiaforce:~# python statusnet.py
5
(u’Traces, many faces, lost till the end of time… http://localhost/statusnet-0.8.2/index.php/attachment/1&#8242;,)
(u’hello.c http://localhost/statusnet-0.8.2/index.php/attachment/2&#8242;,)
(u’Hallo.’,)
(u’Wussup??’,)
(u’!harshad hi..’,)
["(u'Traces, many faces, lost till the end of time... http://localhost/statusnet-0.8.2/index.php/attachment/1',)", "(u'hello.c http://localhost/statusnet-0.8.2/index.php/attachment/2',)", "(u'Hallo.',)", "(u'Wussup??',)", "(u'!harshad hi..',)"]

Wow..look at the output. I got a nice tuple. Now do I send a tuple as sms??

After some time I realized that there must be a way to convert all tuples to a string and then send the strings either to the screen or to the mobile or anywhere…

Here is the code..

import MySQLdb
import codecsconn = MySQLdb.connect(host=’localhost’,use_unicode = True, charset = “utf8″, user=’harshad’,passwd=”,db=’statusnet’)

cursor=conn.cursor()

p=cursor.execute(“”"select content from notice where profile_id = 1″”")

y=[]
while (1):
a=cursor.fetchone()
if a == None:break
print a
y.append(a)

print y

g=[]
for i in y:
s=i
b=[j.encode("utf-8") for j in s]

for i in b:
print b
g.append(i)

print “g > “,g

Output

python statue.py
(u’Traces, many faces, lost till the end of time… http://localhost/statusnet-0.8.2/index.php/attachment/1&#8242;,)
[(u'Traces, many faces, lost till the end of time... http://localhost/statusnet-0.8.2/index.php/attachment/1',)]
(u’hello.c http://localhost/statusnet-0.8.2/index.php/attachment/2&#8242;,)
[(u'Traces, many faces, lost till the end of time... http://localhost/statusnet-0.8.2/index.php/attachment/1',), (u'hello.c http://localhost/statusnet-0.8.2/index.php/attachment/2',)]
(u’Hallo.’,)
[(u'Traces, many faces, lost till the end of time... http://localhost/statusnet-0.8.2/index.php/attachment/1',), (u'hello.c http://localhost/statusnet-0.8.2/index.php/attachment/2',), (u'Hallo.',)]
(u’Wussup??’,)
[(u'Traces, many faces, lost till the end of time... http://localhost/statusnet-0.8.2/index.php/attachment/1',), (u'hello.c http://localhost/statusnet-0.8.2/index.php/attachment/2',), (u'Hallo.',), (u'Wussup??',)]
(u’!harshad hi..’,)
[(u'Traces, many faces, lost till the end of time... http://localhost/statusnet-0.8.2/index.php/attachment/1',), (u'hello.c http://localhost/statusnet-0.8.2/index.php/attachment/2',), (u'Hallo.',), (u'Wussup??',), (u'!harshad hi..',)]
['Traces, many faces, lost till the end of time... http://localhost/statusnet-0.8.2/index.php/attachment/1'%5D
['hello.c http://localhost/statusnet-0.8.2/index.php/attachment/2'%5D
['Hallo.']
['Wussup??']
['!harshad hi..']
g >  ['Traces, many faces, lost till the end of time... http://localhost/statusnet-0.8.2/index.php/attachment/1', 'hello.c http://localhost/statusnet-0.8.2/index.php/attachment/2', 'Hallo.', 'Wussup??', '!harshad hi..']

I dont know how many times we land up in a similar situation, now that we have got a list, we can easily iterate through it and get a sleek string as output. No hassles at all.. It still shows some hiccups, nevertheless it works..kludgy but effective. Can work for any amout of rows that we need..

Main intention of writing this place is that I couldent find a better example on google and wondered if I write it, might be useful, and if someone is finding a solution for it, here is it..

End of Logs.

Posted via email from [root@localhost /root]#

PS – In case you wonder I havent added any exception handling code..it is one of my prime mottoes not to write code generating exceptions. so far its been good.

print q

India Force Linux presents a hardened kernel

Get protected…

Now no more of computer security woes, India Force Linux GNU/Linux now comes in a 'hardened' avatar, protecting you from malicious viruses, rootkits, stack smashers, buffer overflows and wrenches thus making it extremely hard for evil code to create trouble in your system.

How nice…

Get it now http://indiaforcekernel.googlecode.com/files/linux-image-2.6.32.9-grsecindiaforce1.1_1.1_i386.deb

Its very well from India.

wrenches – yup, the $5 wrench cannot hurt the kernel, but we advice you to maintain safety against such devices.

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Why Open Source Linux Desktop is practically a fail

I met a group of people and we had to discuss on open source. I began as usual – Stop using proprietary Windows. Stop stealing software. Embrace Linux, it helps you (after that I told them several examples of how commercial companies are benefiting from open source technologies. All the case studies and examples were stolen from net and distro sites)In that interaction, I rediscovered some facts -

1. In this social media age, no one cares for the tool but for the work. It dosent make a difference whether a software is free or not; as long as it dosent cost a penny. The end result matters, not the way how you do it.

2. Piracy isent openly encouraged, but its the least thing cared about.

3. Commercial Linux distro owners need to have a higher marketing budget then the funds needed to develop the core software. To make this thing works, a community based, unstable software having latest versions is given out free. Tweakers use it and report the bugs, fix things, enhance it and pass it back. This stable software is then inducted into stable desktop and sold as a commercial product. Red Hat has been doing it since 2003 and perheps this is what makes Red Hat to top linux distro list.

4. People like to use GNU/Linux on servers but they are reluctant to pay a price for getting a software. However, they do spend on training users.

5. Some distros like Ubuntu are absolutely hell bent on mimicking Windows way of functionality and seriously, its the first instance in 7 years where I have seen a Linux distro crawling on desktop, and well, crashing it..!! Their latest version is hopeless..!

At the end.

Open Source is very good sounding concept but a newcomer finds it extremely hard to earn something real fast as compared to those using non open source. You need to have a sure backup plan if Open Source based concept back fires.

Preaching of the theorotical Open Source concepts like – Free Software, Libre, Open ness etc is all crap, people start yawning after hearing this nonsense for more then 3 minutes. And this is what the Open Source Evangelists do..and make sure people run away from it as far as possible ! People have got real FUD in using open source software, we cant cant claim all FUD’s are artificial or unreal.

But all is not bad. I would recommend that every newcomer who wants to develop apps in GNU/Linux or wants to work as a network administrator should start using Red Hat software (FC and CentOS). This is true for Indian public, at other places, YMMV. The other prominent players in commercial Linux market are – Suse and Ubuntu. Try this once you feel Red Hat is letting you down.

The title of this post is somewhat wrong, but I couldent find one better.

Posted via email from [root@localhost /root]#

A sneek peek

Thats the first preview of India Force Linux Desktop. Stay Tuned…

Here it comes..

India Force Linux

6 years ago, I had my first ever tryst with Linux. One step towards the goal. Coming here was a task I dont want to remember. Still, I will reach to the top.

Here comes Agneya. The first release from India Force Linux.

How to write a kludgy news crawler in Python and challenge Google News to its limits

A kludge (or, alternatively, kluge) is a clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem or difficulty. In engineering, a kludge is a workaround, typically using unrelated parts cobbled together. Especially in computer programs, a kludge is often used to fix an unanticipated problem in an earlier kludge; this is essentially a kind of cruft.

I was searching data on my old disk and I found some interesting code I had written(rather abandoned) an year and half ago. At that time, I was very fascinated by the concept of Google News, which scanned and gathered news from almost 450 sources and mash up them together on one single page.  Mnay sources, one destination. Needless to say, Google created a smash hit product.Life appeared easy, all of sudden.

Given my nature, it wasent surprising  that I desired to write the next Google News Killer app. It began at night…around 10:30 to be precise. I was determined to finish the program in a nights time. Python was my original (and only) choice that seemed suitable for me to create the next biig thing. Googling around I found that a module feedparser.py makes parsing RSS feeds easy(so to say). However, there was a problem – At that time, I had no clue of what XML meant. That was only the beginning. Later, I also discovered that I had extremely limited knowledge of HTML..Then I realized that my Python basics were giving me plenty of surprises…

Bah..it looked so bad, here I was trying to write a good program, and there were tonnes of difficulties in first path itself. However, determination took over desperation, and after tweaking and pondering for well over 46 minutes, I was able to produce an extremely kludgy , extremely basic, extremely primitive Google News Killer – Wow…..the feeling was so good.  Imagine – writing something out of scratch, and that too without any help(ok, I took help from Mark Pilgrims feedparser.py and python.org) I chose to call it News Crawler.

Get the python file by clicking the link - check-news Dont forget to rename it the file to check-news.py and also, make sure that identions are proper.

Now something about the code.

1. As I said earlier – the code is extremely dumb, extremely kludgy, extremely primitive, extremly basic and theres lot of shoddiness in there. Dont laugh at it even if it appears funny.

2. The code has heard nothing of security, and is meant to run under controlled environment.

3. It dosent make use of any SQL database backend, but is wise enough to store the RSS feeds on HDD before dissecting them,and extracting useful content.

4. It expects that the XML files are in Unicode format. Some rouge sites make use of shabby encoding, which raises an exception in the program.

5. I havent added any exception handling, just laziness, nothing more.

6. For reference, I have shown how we can incorporate Slashdot and Reddit feeds on single page. You can add in your favourite feed.

ToDo

1. Make use of a good HTML templeting system.

2. Solve the problem of unicode.

3. Add error checking and improve its utility by making use of Pythons object oriented features.

4. Add a SQL backend system for storing the parsed RSS data. To be honest, its the toughest job to do.

5. Post up a nice powerpoint presentation describing the system.

5. PS – I will definately not do anything of above unless someone seriously decides to fund me.

After a long time I am back to programming world, I got so busy with other things that I had to abandon my dream project, but who knows, someday it may come true.. 

Google provided email ids to spammers – The reality behind the closed doors.

I got this mail a few hours ago.

hi there,

i believe we are in the same boat.
this is in regard to the mail i received from deepta from google and i understand u folks too have got the same. this was on 25th of Jan. later on 26th of Jan, once again i received a mail with an attachment named Video_part.mim, which due to being infected by virus didn’t opened up.
have anyone of u folks got any further correspondence from the other end. and if so would u be kind enough to update me with whats going on.

please be sensible and do reply.
take care.

Normally,I would have ignored this mail, but it had a curious refrence. This mail was bcc’d (blind carbon copied) to almost 427 other recipients. These were the blokes who were interested in working for Google as an Adwords Representative(Whatever that means). Unfortunately for Google, one of these 427 recepients is a potential spammer, a script kiddie, who sent a malignant mail containing a virus attachment to some Satyendra Sheth , who inturn started speculating that Google(or someone similar) sent him a virus*..!!

And now, the funny part is that some guys are ‘bcc’ing their sentiments to the entire group of 427 people, thus causing a perfect situation creating chaos, misunderstanding and a mess, to be precise.

Now the reality

1. Google India hasent sent anyone a virus. The girl (deepta mathur) who sent the original mail, is a real person, who has graduated from Hyderabads ICFAI bussiness school in 2006. She does work at Google India as a Google recruiter.

2. Google India has not sent any spam or virus, but accidently, they have managed to provide the spammer(Dont know who it is) a good amount of valid email ids, thus making his life easy. Must a prankster kid, good for nothing.

3. Those who sent the CV that matched Googles expectations, actually got another mail that provided details for further interactions. No need to tell that it was all authentic. For Pune, Google had conducted one exam on 4th Fed 07 at Reliance Web World. Unfortunately I didnt make it..

What was the reason for this chaos?

1. The enigma maintained by Google India. Ever since the Google Wordmasters Challenge 2006, Google has managed to spoil its ‘goody boy’ image, thus creating a sense of apprehension amongst all the participants.

2. Even if they had sent a mail, Google provided no additional resources. No official telphone/email was provided. Lets face it. People are lazy to hunt for all the official resources. And is the get apprehensice, its difficult to gain the confidence back.

Moral of the story -

1. Ignore this matter as far as possible, use a good antivirus, maybe use Ubuntu Linux, dont spread rumours or dont get hanky panky about a minor issue.

2. The email list contained mail ids originating from biig companies likeWipro, TCS, IBM, Nilhent etc. It seems that everyone is interested in working for Google. Hey, provide your employees with better solutions, else they will leave you more fast..

If anyone has to speak or put up his/her own view, please make use of the comments section.

• - The virus is Worm.Win32.VB.b that spreads through email attachements. It affects all Windows OS, and its alias are Nyxem.D, Kama Sutra,W32.Blackmal.E@mm,CME-24 ,WORM

1 year of blogging

Gosh..Its my blogs 1st birthday today. Happy birthday little blog.

AppArmor

I am tempted to use this distro..has got more sleek graphical features as compared to ubuntu, and also has got AppArmor

AppArmor is an application security tool designed to provide an easy-to-use security framework for applications. AppArmor proactively protects the operating system and applications from external or internal threats, even zero-day attacks, by enforcing good behavior and preventing even unknown application flaws from being exploited. AppArmor security policies, called “profiles”, completely define what system resources individual applications can access, and with what privileges. A number of default profiles are included with AppArmor, and using a combination of advanced static analysis and learning-based tools, AppArmor profiles for even very complex applications can be deployed successfully in a matter of hours.

The official description is located here and Ubuntu users will be happy if they click  here.

Microsoft Vista released for sale

As I am typing this post on my blog, Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows Vista, starts its global roll-out on Thursday, being first made available to business customers.

The system, a replacement for the firm’s current Windows XP operating system, will not be available to home consumers until the end of January.With Windows running on nine in 10 of the world’s PCs, analysts agree the new version should be a big success.

However, Vista is two years late and its consumer launch misses Christmas.

A huge but slow success

Last minute delays at Microsoft meant that computer makers would have been able to install Vista only on about half the computers that they were hoping to sell over Christmas, said Al Gillen, a Vista expert with technology consultancy IDC.

Microsoft predicts that Vista will be the fastest-selling operating system to date.

Experts agree, but say this is merely a result of the wider usage of computers compared to five years ago, when Windows XP launched. Corporate customers, meanwhile, will take their time deploying Vista as well.

“Our big corporate customers were the first to test Vista, but will probably be the last to introduce it, because they have the most [hardware and software] to test for compatibility with Vista,” said Gareth Hansford, managing director of Lenovo UK, the company that was IBM’s PC division until it was bought by Lenovo of China.

He expects corporate customers to begin large-scale rollouts of Vista in about a year’s time. IDC’s Al Gillen agrees, and points to a very unusual feature built into Vista, which allows IT managers to “downgrade” the software on new computers and run Windows XP instead.

Once the company is fully Vista-ready, the IT team can simply activate the original Vista license bought with the new PC. Most analysts believe that Vista will dominate computer desktops in about two years’ time.

These are some interesting stats about Microsoft

Founded: 1975

HQ: Redmond, Washington

Staff: 71,000

Sales: $44.3bn

Operating profit: $16.5bn

Windows sales: $13.2bn

Office sales: ~$10bn

Financial year to 30 June 2006 Source: annual report 2006

Now it would be interesting to find out what the Linux biggies like Red Hat, Debian and Ubuntu will try. I am not counting Novell Suse or OpenSuse here, probably due to its partnership with MS. Gazing into the crystal ball, its apparant that comon users will go in with Windows Vista, and XP will coexist atleast for 2 years for now. Interesting facts will pop us soon on the financial aswell as technology markets.

All trademarks are acknowledged as the property of their respective owners.

An overview of free and open software(part 1)

I support and use GNU/Linux kernel and open source software mainly due to following factors.

1. Its free. Nothing can beat that.

2. Its stable and seldomly crashes. Memory management is more efficient.

3.Most of the documentation is available for free either online or offline.

4. It has got great desktops and allows one to fully customize the environment and settings without causing major hiccups. However, newbies need to be watchful.

But there are some things that are criticized

1. Lack of central control – Who controls Linux OS? Do new distribution makers need to follow certain common norms that would enable core system to setup easily without involving too much user interference?

2. Too many distros spoil the party – There are approx around 80 linux distibutions available today. Out of them, only 5 – Red Hat, Suse, Ubuntu, Debian, Knoppix are well known
amongst common users. People get confused in this matter.Its hard to decide when there is too much or too less.

3. Geek or n00b – Todays distros have to manage a balance between the geek and newbie. Too much simplification of Linux will definately affect its stable usability and real geeks will turn to more geeky kernels like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris etc. Linux is attractive, mainly because of its geekiness factor.

4. Heavy duty multimedia users and gamers have to suffer a bit – Its true that linux clusters have helped to create some of the Hollywoods greatest flicks, but even then, its hard that pure gamers and CG programmers will switch to linux.

5. Device manufacturers often ignore Linux users while designing drivers, although the scene is changing fast. Big players like HP, Nvidia, ATI, Creative bundle Linux drivers too.

Meanwhile, feel free to vote in your favourite linux distro here.

Google Co-op Search Engine

I think I am a little late on this topic,but anyway…

This is my new Google Co-op Search Engine over here.

Feel free to experiment, but note that it dosent index thousand/million/billion pages. However, it does incorporate nice links and good content for technology/food/linux/Web 2.0 fans and users. And following Googles method, its currently in beta.

Direct link to Semantic Space – http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=004747769890504554559%3Anckzlkyfnc0

There is one Rollyo also, but I think that its less technical.

Google Code Search

It really seems that Google is on fire. It has definately taken search engine’s utility to a new level. Google Labs has got a new beta tool in its arsenal – ‘Google Code Search‘.

Developed by Russ Cox Google Code crawler gives programmers a single place to search publicly accessible source code. It includes:

• Support for precise searches using regular expressions
• Restricts by language, license, or filename with advanced operators
• A search index that includes billions of lines of code

Code Search crawls and indexes publicly hosted archives (.tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar, and .zip) and CVS and Subversion repositories, making them searchable in one place. Results are also accessible via a GData feed, which people will use to create plugins for their favorite editors and IDEs.

A nice tool. Shows Google’s innovation and an old habit to create probable issues. Frankly, this tool is a boon for those programmers. Helps to locate variables, comments, refrences all at one place. Infact, it was due to this tool, that I came to know about specific virus called as Tchernobyl/SpaceFiller. Infact the most surprising thing was that I found this refrence in a code snippet from the Mplayer software. (For n00bs – Mplayer is a popular audio/video software natively available under GNU/Linux systems, and has the ability to play almost every media format).

So many times I went through Mplayer source code, but it was honestly impossible to find this thing.
Its stunning..but only for the right audience.

Google criticizers can raise following points.

1. An easy way for script kiddies to find a virus code rather easily. More access means more convinience to find code and create(or rather steal) malware and cause nuisance.

2. Google may have unknowingly crawled proprietery source code, not intended to be released to the common public.

3. What about the cache?

The answers loom large ahead of us, but it will apparently become more clear after some days. Till then..Enjoy Google..

The future of Google and conventional computing(beta version 0.01)

Today I had a nice closer look at . Infact, I must say that it is a nice product, definately a good competition to its paid and bloated counterpart MS Word.

Going by current product releases by Google, it seems that now the paradigm is slowly but surely shifting from offline, desktop based apps to online, Web apps, in which broadband has goot a major role to play. There are many speculation as how the GoogleOS would be like, and even I would like to put in my views.

1. At the core, Google will have a very minimalistic version of OS kernel (either Ubuntu or its own derived from GNU sources)

2. The job of this core will just be limited to setup the screen, perform minor system checks, set local time and after authentication, log on the the main server or the cluster grid to which the computer(in this case a thin client) belongs.

3. HDD will mainly be used as a supportive backup utility and will contain small apps needed for booting and setting up the system.

4. The apps will be similar to the ones like we have seen – Google Writely (for all text processing), Spreadsheets (for all tables), Google Pages, Blogger etc.

All these services will work as a unified collection of tools togather.

5. And the best part of this is that all apps will be free for commercial or personal use. Google will earn its future income mainly through ads, big corporate markets and can even venture into consumer product market like shopping malls etc.

6. The market for distributed computing and apps will be at its best and Google will also get its major share from creating a very economical desktop for developing countries like India, Brazil, China etc. The software will be developed into local languages and this will help in reducing information and digital divide across the globe.

7. Google will create redundant cluster grids that will be deployed in space research, pharmaceutical and drug modelling, SETI, Human genome product etc. Googles search technology will be used to explore gigantic databases.

Now for some challenges to be faced by Google.

1. Issues related to local polictics and Government regulations.

2. Problems related to privacy.

3. Lack of fast broadband facilities in many parts of the world.

(Disclaimer – This post in beta and may be modified by author as per updated information. Commercial use not allowed without permission of author. Can contain wrong spellings and grammatical mistakes, which are natural to be present when posts are written in a quickfire way. BTW, as I said, this post is still in its beta version Today is incidently Google’s 8th birthday)

Ubuntu

Today I got my official Ubuntu copies from Canonical. It feels nice that this distro is doing good, and I am sure that oneday it will be one of the most preffered and liked version of OS. It has got a nice GNOME desktop and an uncluttered interface making it very attractive. Even Google makes use of this distro within its Mountain View office..

I recommend this version for college students and engineers.

Get your free copy of Ubuntu Linux here.

Software should be a liberating force, but sometimes too much commercialization can make this freedom turn into chains. Its upto us that we prevent this..

The above quote (c) Harshad Joshi, 2006

Linux for desktop users.

Conventionally,GNU/Linux has always attracted the higher end market comprising of Geeks, nerds, techies, and for a time it was good.

But now, many useful changes are occuring and GNU/Linux is now available as a conventional ‘Desktop OS’, with sleek window managers like KDE, Gnome, Firefox, a good collection of useful software etc. Many end users are now ready to accept GNU/Linux as an alternative to proprietry, expensive software.

Please vote in for the most ‘user friendly’ linux distro available in the market over here -

http://zohopolls.com/harshadjoshi/the-most-user-friendly-linux-distribution-in-the-market

As for now, results are showing ‘Ubuntu’ leading the distro list. I was tempted to add OpenSUSE, but somehow it slipped.

See you there. Your vote can make a difference..