Chaos Laboratory

Linked-in delinked! What on earth happened to it?

miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 04:39:46 +0000

This morning a strange sight greeted me when I tried to get on to Linked-in - a HTTP 500 error!! Never have I encountered such a thing with any major online service that is delivered from a worldwide CDN (Content Delivery Network).

A couple of servers down here and there and minor disruptions in service (slow load-time due to rerouting) is understandable, but a 500 error? As far as I know, this occurs only if there’s something severely wrong with the application’s code causing Apache to hiccup and die while trying to deliver it.

And for Linked-in to be knocked out on this scale, the same code-base must have propagated to all their servers across the world.

If you ask me it’s outright callousness on part of their dev team to let something like this happen. Even if I were to consider that someone’s been playing naughty with ‘em, I can’t imagine on what scale the hacking would have happened to make their whole network behave the same way!!

P.S. By the time I got over with writing this post (11:20am UTC+7), they’re still in the same state. Someone probably needs to stick a finger in their eyes and point it out… they can at least afford to put up a graceful “Maintenance mode” page, till they rectify this.

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Original publication: Linked-in delinked! What on earth happened to it? by Sourjya Sankar Sen at Chaos Laboratory on 2011-06-03.
Digital Fingerprint: CLxSSS__5zzEccS8Xi7vXxsuXh2ER8632Q7AE2Ds

Introducing the CakePHP SecurImage Component

miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG — Fri, 20 May 2011 09:58:45 +0000

I’ve just released a CakePHP Component for displaying CAPTCHA images in your CakePHP based applications.

The component is fairly easy to integrate into your projects and displays dynamically generated CAPTCHA images each time the page loads. You can grab the component from here or from its GitHub repository.

The component requires the SecurImage Captcha Library to function properly.

Details about installation and usage of the component (along with code samples) can be found on it’s homepage.

Any comments / suggestions are most welcome.

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Original publication: Introducing the CakePHP SecurImage Component by Sourjya Sankar Sen at Chaos Laboratory on 2011-05-20.
Digital Fingerprint: CLxSSS__5zzEccS8Xi7vXxsuXh2ER8632Q7AE2Ds

Free eBook: The Complete Windows 7 Shortcuts list

miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 07:35:15 +0000

The Windows Club has just released a free eBook titled, “The Complete Windows 7 Shortcuts”.

Apart from an exhaustive list of more than 200 common and new keyboard shortcuts for Windows 7, this eBook contains introductory discussions on basic keyboard usage, organization of keys, typing & editing, creating custom shortcuts, etc.

The actual list of shortcuts covers the following areas:

General Windows functions keyboard shortcuts
Dialog box keyboard shortcuts
Windows logo key keyboard shortcuts
Windows Explorer keyboard shortcuts
Ease of Access keyboard shortcuts
Magnifier keyboard shortcuts
Remote Desktop Connection keyboard shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts for MS Paint
Keyboard shortcuts for WordPad
Keyboard shortcuts for Calculator
Windows Journal keyboard shortcuts
Windows Help viewer keyboard shortcuts
Windows Media Player keyboard shortcuts
Internet Explorer keyboard shortcuts
Windows Media Center keyboard shortcuts

The eBook has been authored by Nitin Agarwal, a Windows 7 enthusiast and is available in both PDF and XPS formats with fully linked content index.

You can grab the eBook from here.

Google IME: Typing Indian languages made super easy

miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:20:10 +0000

Here comes Google’s latest baby – Google Transliteration IME (Input Method Editor) – a freeware tool that allows you to attain mastery of typing 14 different languages including Indian scripts such as Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.

What makes the job easier is the phoenetic transliteration feature that allows one to type in any of these languages using a roman keyboard.

Users can type a word the way it sounds using Latin characters and Google Transliteration IME will convert the word to its native script.

This is very different from translation – which is conversion of a word or sentence from one language to another while keeping the meaning intact. With transliteration one converts the sound of words from one alphabet to another.

Earlier on, I had reviewed two very useful transliteration tools – Avro Keyboard and QuillPad. While both these tools are superb at their respective tasks, they suffer certain limitations. Avro Keyboard – a desktop application, was designed to type only Bengali. QuillPad supports multiple languages – but one has to be online to be able to use their editor.

Google IME is an offline application that transcends these boundaries by providing support for a multitude of languages without being dependent on internet connectivity. The application sports extremely useful features like dictionary support for completion for common and rare words, personalized correction memory, typographic customizations, quick web search etc. A full list of features is available on the Google IME page.

Once installed the IME can be fired up via the Language bar or through shortcut keys. It manifests itself in the form of a small floating band (status window) at the bottom right corner of your screen. The leftmost icon denotes the application itself and doubles up as a dragging handle. The second icon represents the input language and can be used to switch back and forth between it and English. The third one is used to launch a virtual keyboard while the last one brings up the application menu.

Once you start typing in your favourite editor, a small suggestions window pops-up displaying completion lists based a customizable dictionary which allows addition of new words in case none of the suggestions match with what you want. The correction memory keeps a note of this and next time you start typing in the same sequence of letters, your preferred word will be shown at the top of the list.

The virtual keyboard is mighty useful too and comes to your aid when you just can’t dig up the correct sequence of keystrokes required – specially in the case of complex joint characters - for a successful transliteration.

As of now Google IME only supports 32-bit Windows 7/Vista/XP. For other platforms, there’s always the online Google Indic transliteration tool. One drawback is that the supported languages are not bundled in together and need to be downloaded individually – as per your requirement. This helps keep the baggage at a bare minimum, though!

So… how about you grab a copy of Google IME and run down your experience by me.

[via The Official Google India Blog]

Free eBook on best performing Ad placements for Chitika and AdSense untis

miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 05:04:08 +0000

Chitika, the search targeted advertisement network is offering a free guide (eBook) for making the most out of Chitika Premium and AdSense.

The book analyzes various medium to large websites and provides valuable suggestions for optimal & harmonious placement of Chitika and AdSense advertisement blocks on your website leading to greater revenues.

Also provided are tips for customizing the Chitika ads (color palettes, fonts etc.) through code as well as heatmaps of high CTR (Click-Through-Rate) locations.

You can download this free eBook from here.

For those who haven’t tried out Chitika yet, Chitika Premium ads are displayed only to visitors coming to your site from search engine results pages. In contrast with the contextual AdSense ads that depend upon your site’s content, these ads are relevant only to the searched keywords. For example, if you searched for “technology” on any of the major search engines and landed on a post in this site, here’s what you’ll see…

On this site, Chitika Premium ads are displayed immediately following a post’s content. However, the target segment is visitors from the US. Hence to see these ads in action, you’ll have to visit this live demonstration link. Alternatively, they can also be viewed by appending a #chitikatest=keyword(s) at the end of any post’s URL.

If you’re interested in serving Chitika Premium ads on your website, you can do so by signing up as a publisher with them.