I will be conducting a basic Django Web development workshop on Saturday 6th Feb. Check out the schedule from the website. [link]

I was being invited to the college being a Google Summer of Coder 2009 to share about my experience on FOSS and how to get started. I spoke to the students about how I started using the Revolution OS ‘GNU/Linux’, how does the community work and all. The students were very new to the GNU/Linux and they hadn’t been exposed to any GNU/Linux technology stuff before. They were really enthusiastic and excited hearing about it. After my talk on how to get started working with open source projects and how it benefits them, they shot me with numerous questions. They were really enthusiastic about it. After the formal session, we had another one hour question and answers session around the auditorium.

I never had seen this much of questions from any of my audiences before. I felt very glad about it. Felt like a mass transformation would happen around TocH students to GNU/Linux. After the session I had been in conversation with the Jayakumar sir, The head of the Department, Computer Science and Engineering. He told that they were trying to build a FOSS cell around TocH and transforming atleast the computer science labs to GNU/Linux.

It was really nice experience to inspire students to Free Software.

I just analyzed the http requests from that page and automated using the curl utility.

Here is the script it feel, it would be useful for many.

#!/bin/bash

customer=CNXXXX
password=XXXXXX

if [ -n "`ifconfig | grep -A 1  wlan0 | grep "inet addr"`" ];
then

curl https://mwcp-ekm-04.adlkerala.com:8001 --data "auth_user=$customer&auth_pass=$password&accept=Login" &> /dev/null

echo "Connected :)"

while true
do
	sleep 300
	curl https://mwcp-ekm-04.adlkerala.com:8001 --data "alive=y&un=$customer" &> /dev/null ;

done

else

echo "Wifi not connected";

fi

Copy down the above script in a text file and rename to internet.sh

slynux@slynux-laptop:~$ chmod a+x  internet.sh
slynux@slynux-laptop:~$ ./internet.sh
Connected  

This script has an initial check for ethernet interface. Here it is given Wifi interface, wlan0. If you use a LAN for connection change wlan0 to eth0 and the message as well

Happy New year to all

The 2009 has end. When I look back to the year 2009, lots of events and moments scroll around my mind. It was a very unique year in my life till now. Till 2009, I was very rigid with my thinking and activities around. I was categorized to be a geek and I lived around that circle. But there happened lots of changes and the environment was totally different in the year 2009. I watched more around the world rather than sitting in front of an electronic box most of the time. i started to become more social. I received more new friends, lots of fun, lots of serious stuff and lot more.
Only one word suits better for that year with respect to my life, its very “Dynamic”. The year brought to me a lot of changes, lots of life learnings, lots of visions. It was really awesome to keep in memory.

2010 started off with nice traits. We had a lot of fun with friends around. I am doing absolutely nothing these days. But I love the very calm and peaceful environment around.

But more techie savvy stuffs are in my workshop TODO, it includes Android, Linux kernel and more fun.

Once again, wishing you all a very Happy new year 2010.

It is interesting to see that around 50 out of 100 entreprenuers are from India.

It is glad that Ram Kumar is chosen to be one of the future 100 entrepreneurs in Asia. Dreamajax has been growing fast in the recent couple of months. They have recently launched WSNIndia, A platform for Wireless Sensor research based on Zigbee protocol. During the time I first visited Dreamajax during last july, it was a small company with 25 people around. Now the employee number has grown around 100 and they are expanding in more cities.

http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense

Once after I have completed watching this video, a relevent question came to my mind. Why does these kind of innovative research never happens in Indian universities ?

Currently I am the official Web admin at Model Engineering College. Its been a long time since I am elected to be the web admin, but I haven’t been doing any work regarding that being busy with Summer of Coding.

Our official college website http://www.mec.ac.in is a well designed site with a template system and plain html static files + php in the backend. But we don’t have any CMS used to maintain the website. But once you look at the website, it would seem like some CMS is running backend. It the successful design which gives such an impression. Kudos to the Alumnis of MEC who spent lots of sleepless night coding the MEC website and the template. Currently we give edit access to different departments and staff via a web based file manager. We were using phpfm, which is dead project and of consists of numerous bugs. Recent days, I have noticed a good amount of attacks towards the website. I was pretty sure that the phpfm would be the vulnerability made use by the attackers. They injected base64 encrypted shellcode into all the php scripts. Once they are executed, it made copies of html and php files with extension filename.infected.

I removed the phpfm and replaced it with File Thingie.

File Thingies seems to be a easy to use and fine web file manager. It supports multiple user accounts restricted to subdirectories other than giving access to the entire website.

MEC Webserver hosts not only http://www.mec.ac.in, but also several other college websites. So it handles large amount of data. Once some attack happens, it is really hard to recover the data since some proper backup techniques are used. So I have decided to go with decisio to install subversion in the webserver and make all the changes occuring to the website to be written through subversion version control only. It would help to maintain a changelog of all changes which are made in the website/webserver. Once we need some rollback or recovery, within seconds we can rollback to the prevous states. Also it enables to implement several users. It would keep track of users made changes to the website, and what are the changes. It can maintain a history of all changes happening to the website. Once new webadmins come, they can easily trace the history from the changelog and he would be able to learn a lot from the changelog also. Like how some problem is identified, how are they rectified, how is an update made etc.

Anyway I am going to implement the version control system. I haven’t decided whether to go with git or subversion.

These days I have been hacking with my Android phone. It is a great device to play with. Yesterday, I got enough time and I couldn’t stop myself in flashing the default OS with a customised android ROM.

Android is an Open Source Operating System. Hence anyone who loves to play with it can modify the OS and release their on firmware builds. Currently two types of HTC G1 are available. They are Google Dev phone1 and retail phones available with T-Mobile in US. Developer phone is a fully free(dom) phone and is for experimental purposes by build. Other ones are meant for users. Hence they vendor locks the Root access and restricts the users freedom to play with its internals.

Luckly no software is bugfree Android hackers made use of some bugs to exploit and get the root access on the phones. Several rooting methods can be found at xda-developers forum. The methods varies according to the firmware version.

Android also has got GNU/Linux distros like flavour effect these days. You can hear the names Cyanogen, Huykuro, JacX ROMS in the community. These are popular android hackers who releases their own improved android builds.

I used a simple method to root my phone. It is recovery image flashing method.? I downloaded the Recovery Flasher package and installed it. http://zenthought.org/system/files/asset/2/flashrec-1.1.1-20090908.apk

Ran it. and flashed the the recovery image with new cyanogen’s recovery image.

The phone rebooted and I got a bootloader like menu. (Recalls GRUB ).

So the phone got Rooted. It exploited some bug and could managed to get ROOT access. Now that I can install any custom ROM on it.

I prefered Cyanogen’s ROM. Get it from http://www.cyanogenmod.com/

I connected the USB cable and mounted the sdcard. Copied? the firmware image I downloaded from Cyangen’s site and placed it in root of SD Card and renamed it to update.zip

From the recovery flasher I rebooted to recovery mode. Then I selected apply sdcard:update.zip option. I didnt wipe out the ROM to factory settings. The installation went fine. I did a reboot.

Here comes the panic. The phone became stuck at T-mobile G1 splash screen nothing in progress. I waited for around 15 mins. I got tensed whether my phone will get bricked. If the Flashing of the ROM gets corrupted somehow, the phone will get useless like a ‘Brick’.

I went to IRC channel, #android-root and the folks at community helped me out to recover the stuff. God I am saved

The problem was that I didnt wipe out to factory settings. I removed the battery manually. After holding the Home Button, inserted the battery. It straight away went to recovery mode.

Did Alt+w to wipe out. After wiping out, I went for flashing the firmware. It went fine.

It took a couple of minutes to boot for the initial time.

Android has an great SDK with a set of utilities ADB is such a great utility. Download the SDK from here, http://developer.android.com/sdk. I connected the USB datacable and ran the command

slynux@slynux-laptop:~/android-sdk/tools# ./adb logcat | head
* daemon not running. starting it now *
* daemon started successfully *
W/System.err( 1150): ?? ?at com.rechild.advancedtaskkiller.AdvancedTaskKiller.getRunningProcess(AdvancedTaskKiller.java:207)
W/System.err( 1150): ?? ?at com.rechild.advancedtaskkiller.AdvancedTaskKiller$5.run(AdvancedTaskKiller.java:157)
W/System.err( 1150): ?? ?at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:1060)
I/AdMob SDK( 1150): AdMob SDK version is 20090331-ANDROID-cc0d740c1b8c3da5
D/AdMob SDK( 1150): Publisher ID read from AndroidManifest.xml is a14a6ac7fd9f387
I/AdMob SDK( 1150): Publisher ID set to a14a6ac7fd9f387
D/dalvikvm( 1150): GC(2) freed 2368 objects / 164776 bytes in 148ms
I/AdMob SDK( 1150): The user ID is 490BCF661AA5AB2645C71F147068194C

It printed out the background stuffs going on on android. When I did logcat during the first boot after flashing Cyanogen’s ROM I could see some applications installs were going on. That is why it took lots of time for the boot.

We can also get the Root shell on our development machine using,

root@slynux-laptop:~android-sdk/tools# ./adb shell
#
# ls
cache                 init.goldfish.rc      root
data                  init.rc               sbin
default.prop          init.sapphire.rc      sdcard
dev                   init.trout.rc         sqlite_stmt_journals
etc                   lib                   sys
init                  proc                  system
# cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor	: ARMv6-compatible processor rev 2 (v6l)
BogoMIPS	: 245.36
Features	: swp half thumb fastmult edsp java
CPU implementer	: 0x41
CPU architecture: 6TEJ
CPU variant	: 0x1
CPU part	: 0xb36
CPU revision	: 2

Hardware	: trout
Revision	: 0080
Serial		: 0000000000000000
# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:          97880 kB
MemFree:            2760 kB
Buffers:             416 kB
Cached:            22584 kB
SwapCached:         1292 kB
Active:            36848 kB
Inactive:          38540 kB
Active(anon):      25188 kB
Inactive(anon):    27736 kB
Active(file):      11660 kB
Inactive(file):    10804 kB
Unevictable:         252 kB
Mlocked:               0 kB
SwapTotal:         24464 kB
SwapFree:          13516 kB
Dirty:                 0 kB
Writeback:             0 kB
AnonPages:         52148 kB
Mapped:            15852 kB
Slab:               6044 kB
SReclaimable:        820 kB
SUnreclaim:         5224 kB
PageTables:         4112 kB
NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
Bounce:                0 kB
WritebackTmp:          0 kB
CommitLimit:       73404 kB
Committed_AS:    1125304 kB
VmallocTotal:     811008 kB
VmallocUsed:       57508 kB
VmallocChunk:     676860 kB

Now I have cyanogen’s ROM running on my phone. It is a very nicely customized rom with good performance. The improvements in the ROM includes Multitouch support, better camera options, Faster applications, 5 desktops etc. Anway I am addicted to Android. Trying out more and more hacks these days.

Thinking of trying, HERO ROM for G1

HTC Dream G1

Finally my dream full filled by owning an HTC Dream aka HTC G1 powered by Android Open Source operating system. I have been playing around it for the last two days and I have become absolutely an addict.

I got an unlocked T-mobile G1 which was linked to someone’s Google Account. I did a master reset. After that it required to connect to the internet for linking the phone with a google account.? It requires a GPRS/EDGE connection. It cannot be configured with Wifi during this stage. Afterwards I could use the phone with all features. The biggest advantage of Android is that it has Google account integration. We can sync our phone contacts to the Gmail contacts. Also we have access to all gmail contacts. Also Google Calender is very helpful in synchronising events and tasks. G1 has got excellent sound quality as I felt. Youtube player is another interesting application, which is very optimised for the G1 screen so that videos look awesome.

Android market has got plenty of free applications. I spent most of the time surfing the android market. Found lots of nice applications. The GPS device which comes with the G1 can identify the location where we are standing and it will show the position on map. It can also post entry to the google maps. G1 has a poor battery backup. That is the negative point I have noticed.

Innovative keypad unlocking using patterns

It suits me well for to be connected with Gmail, Twitter, Orkut, gtalk, IRC and lot more.
I will update with more Android hacks and experiments..

I have successfully completed my Google Summer of Code 2009? programs with Pardus project. The Pardusman is now ready to build custom pardus distros through web. Some of the work remaining is to? setup the server configuration files at pardus server. I will be looking forward to setup it in a couple of weeks. Once it is setup, it would be able to build distros through the web interface at http://pardusman.pardus.org.tr. Waiting for the official Summer of Code T-Shirt to be shipped.

The ExcelX, the 10th edition of our college techfest is coming soon during Oct 9-11th of 2009. I am one of the co-ordinators and I have been working on it. Had a good time coding in Google Appengine. It is cool web framework to work with. Hats off to Google. I would come up with a Online Shell Scripting contest web application within 5 days of coding. Feels awesome.

Google appengine is a mix of several web frameworks bitten by python. it derives most of the things from Django 0.96. Django 1.0 is the latest release and I have been working on it. Hence backward compatibility was an issue while coding. Some features are missing. It eated up some of my time finding out what the issue is.

Suppose you are guy who is familiar with Django 1.0 and never used 0.96, I might be trapped tracing the issue while coding. So I suggest you to verify whether that feature is available in Django 0.96 while coding with Google Appengine.

An example,

In template system, we cant use dictionary traversal in the following manner

{% for key,val in dictionary.items %}

<!-- some html tags -->

{{ key }} : {{ val }}

{% endfor %}

instead you have to use 0.96 style,

{% for item in dictionary %}

{{ item.0 }} : {{ item.1 }}

{% endfor %}

Try out. Have a good time with GAE