Inspirated

Thanks to Christoph Korn, Ubuntu users can now install the package with a single click from the GetDeb repository. The Deb file itself is available on the release page here, along with an RPM for Fedora users.

The looks:

And the hooks:

Changelog:

• Fixed:
  • Bug #522735: Facebook: Application Request Limit Reached
  • Bug #523378: Connection reset by peer
  • Bug #522487: Facebook Friends Graph fails when friends have a dash in their name [patch by Little Jawa]

Tags: Code, Deb, Facebook, Facebook Friends Graph, Friends, Graph, Graphics, Internet, Open Source, PyFacebook, Python, Social Networking, Statistics, Technology, Ubuntu, Web 2.0

Threads are love. Threads are speed. And more often than not, threads are a consistent PITA. However, I’ve had an accidental epiphany just a few hours ago:

“When in doubt When you need to communicate among threads, use synchronized Queues.”

There. This magic mantra will solve more issues in your life than you can ever imagine, and certainly more than I expected.

Getting back to the topic at hand, adding threading support to the program has sped up the bookmark checking process by a factor of about 435895234. Coupled with fixing of some parsing bugs, Bookmark Undertaker v0.3 is finally capable of providing a quick, stable and consistent way of sanitizing your Firefox favorites:

This time, I’ve also tried to provide Deb and RPM packages on the release page for easy installation by the Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora populace.

Ushering in the era of communist applications:

“If everyone gives one thread, the poor person will have a shirt.” — Russian Proverb

Tags: Beautiful Soup, Bookmark Undertaker, Bookmarks, Code, Deb, Debian, Fedora, Firefox, Mozilla, Open Source, PyGTK, Python, Red Hat, RPM, Technology, Threading, Ubuntu

I never really thought anyone other than me would be interested in seeing gargantuan graphs of their friends’ connections until I found out through this post on the OMG! Ubuntu! blog that my application was included in the GetDeb repository for Ubuntu users. I have not used Ubuntu myself since about never, but apparently you can now install the application on Karmic Koala with just a few clicks.

Edit: I have now tested the installation on Karmic myself and can guarantee that it indeed works without any fuss. Gotta love Launchpad/Ubuntu.

The application itself was in a pretty much skeletal state of being so I was a little taken aback by the exposure. Nevertheless, I was reminded of the famous aphorism apropos of open source development:

“Release early, release often.” — Linus Torvalds

And indeed, the bug reports that came from users were a valuable byproduct of the Ubuntu push as I had stopped development on the script after it started working fine for me.

Tags: Code, Deb, Facebook, Facebook Friends Graph, Friends, Graph, Graphics, Internet, Open Source, PyFacebook, Python, Social Networking, Statistics, Technology, Ubuntu, Web 2.0

Baffling all reason known to mankind, I have somehow entered my final year of engineering — that is, after earning every conceivable grade on my transcript. As is the custom, I was supposed to work on a graduation project and the first step included presenting a proposal and defending it. Brainstorming sessions for a project idea left me with classical stuff such as HAL-9000 or the Nebuchadnezzar hovercraft. At which point I decided that I simply wasn’t creative enough to come up with an idea on my own and asked around for help. After a few days of frantic Googling and inept socializing with senior academia members, I finally found something which at least managed to sound horrible: an Intrusion Tolerant Threshold Cryptographic System.

The proposal can be found at this link. If the contents seem a bit sparse to you, reread the title as “A Not-At-All Fault Tolerant Attempt at Getting to Grips with and “. Although, I’m not entirely sure my attempts at doing something with latex were more successful than Geroge’s.

“And you wanted to be my latex salesman.” — Jerry Seinfeld

Tags: ITTC, Rants

“Anyone who slaps a ‘this page is best viewed with Browser X’ label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.” — Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996

People never learn. Slapping such labels is one thing, they even go as far as adopting brain-dead practices of checking user-agent strings and refusing service to any browser not originating from Redmond. For example, Opera Mobile — the sexiest mobile application on planet — works astonishingly well for Javascript websites. Nevertheless, when trying to browse my university’s academic management portal on it I am presented with a big ugly “We’re dumb, you need to open this page with Internet Explorer 6.0 or later because it uses JAVASCRIPTXX0RZ.” Even though Opera does allow spoofing of user-agent strings, the fake strings still contained “Symbian” as the operating system which still resulted in incompatibility errors.

As ever, Python came to the rescue. Firing up the Twisted framework, I created a simple HTTP proxy which modifies the user-agent string on the fly. Peaches:

The script is still very quirky and is the farthest thing from what you’d call a stable solution. You can download the inital release here. The zip file contains the tiny proxy server script as well as Twisted and Zope dependencies. Good luck with trying to counter retards who’re doing everything they can to avoid compatibility. Yes, even 14 years after Sir Tim’s veracious proclamation.

Tags: Code, Flag 42, Internet, Nokia, Open Source, Proxy, PyS60, Python, Series 60, Symbian, Technology, User-Agent

Continuing the migration to E71, here’s the new release for Inbox Stats which works on Python 2.5 releases:

inboxstats-1.1.zip

Tags: Code, Graphics, Inbox, Inbox Stats, Nokia, Open Source, PyS60, Python, Series 60, SMS, Statistics, Symbian, Technology

As I finally got my hands on a S60 3rd Edition device last week in form of E71, it was obviously the time to fix my PyS60 scripts for the new version. By using some workarounds to fix some brain-dead compatibility issues which I will detail in a later post, I was able to get CSV Auto-Responder running properly:

csvautoresponder-1.0.zip

Tags: Code, CSV Auto-Responder, Mobile, Nokia, Open Source, PyS60, Python, SMS, Symbian, Technology