I have never written about someone elses blog on mine ,not that i hate others blog but most of the blogs were well known (usually tech ) or they were of friends that others wont be interested in .

some 14 months back i found a Blog akruti which brought in lots of traffic and for the same reason the author pulled it back .And then came aalapna with even more anonymosity .

Her writing are fresh and can be heavy on your heart at times .Its here that i have read some of the most touching articles,those that force you to look back at your life and relive the best and worst moments .

Its amazing to think how little things go missing in our busy lives and then one fine day we think about it and realise how much we miss them .

While at school i hate to go through the 40 min train journey from villivakkam to my school in avadi and it was a cry scene every day but now looking back i would just love to go through those ,stand on the footboard for 40 minutes ,let the train go through the bust Villivakkam->ambattur->annanur ( where my best friends boards at ) –>avadi ( how much the train wud go empty ) and then in to the Airforce area ,th e entire train would be empty and i would then start opening my breakfast boxes .

now coming back ! , for all those who love to just sit back relive those little moments from your life or wish how it was from others ,i would definitely give this blog link .

She is definitely on of my favorites and you will never see any personal info about her anywhere on the blog,she thinks being anonymous is the way to be :)

I never write something emotional and keep all those emotional ones in to my private blog ;) but everytime i read this blog i have this huge urge to write some down and then i back off .May be iam too exposed in this blog ! i dont want to be haunted really .

http://www.aalapana.net/

Send post as PDF to

70%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Got this and tried from sp2hari’s blog and i was definitely hoping for a higher score :) 70 % is less for someone like me .

go check yours and tell me

http://www.justsayhi.com/bb/blog_addiction

Send post as PDF to

yes,its pretty exciting now .My restlessness in holidays gave rise to a small hack,the twitter hack ,twitter.com/meninblue ( update: The scores and commentary was taken from their wap feed ) .Shortly after i released it ,i got a hello mail from Krishna Vedati ,the CEO of a silicon valley startup and they kindof liked my little hack and asked me if you could do some for them .

People who know me know it well,the word startup excites me for it allows

• one to work with things that are close to his heart
• Write production ready code overnight and see people use it the next morning
• And best to work with people who are smart and will help you become smarter
• Get paid to do what you love to do and learn to do the same in a better way
• yeah the place is silicon valley the *hottest* technology bed

i told him i would love to and checking out their widgets page at plusmo ,i see a huge list of existing widgets and now i get to add some :) and hopefully ones that people will love to use and keep it on their phones.

Ok,its not for this announcement that iam making this post ,i wanted to put a few things

I told you how i landed with this oppurtunity ,a little idea ,one that people will *use* it and working with the latest in thing .

In my case twitter and cricket action that is on . Iam sure there are lots of people who do such hacks and better ones than mine :-) ,as much as it is fun making them i would suggest taking them to a bigger audience and build a even more robust app is exciting and challenging . The team at plusmo respects such ideas and hackers would love to work with them and same with me ,if you are in india and have some really cool ideas with proven skills with technologies (mobile html ,python,popular socialnetwork API’s ,linux and opensource ) then please feel free to mail me up ,i would be more than happy to get you in touch with some people who can help you out .

Also to tell my friends ,yes iam very excited to be working with a team that looks great on paper and does work thats as good and exciting .

more to come so keep watching …..:-)

If you have an internet enabled phone ,then do check out their page to create your own widget or use their existsing ones or mobilize your blog with a button :-)

http://plusmo.com/create/publish.shtml

Send post as PDF to

Openid is slowly becoming the standard for user authentication .Wordpress went open first ,soon blogger has followed suit .

For those who don’t know what openid is ,

“OpenID eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience.You get to choose the OpenID Provider that best meets your needs and most importantly that you trust. At the same time, your OpenID can stay with you, no matter which Provider you move to. And best of all, the OpenID technology is not proprietary and is completely free.“

Its very easy ,you only authenticate once on your openid server and then work acoss all platforms that support openid .

I use phpMyID to run the openid server ,its easy just two files to edit and you should be running .

Now just use it !

Send post as PDF to

i was planning to put this one last week when i released meninblue but thanks to exam i just got time now .

It was basically a bot that would give you the latest commentary of india’s cricket matches on your twitter and it was written in python and using python-twitter .

First the libraries you will need

GNU/Linux or its variants preferred, python,urllib,urllib2,python-twitter and sgmlib and also minidom for xml parsing .

Twitter provides you with a very easy api to work with .posting a message is just two lines.

Here is how i have tried to go about my task .

Choose the main page where you get the list of all ongoing matches and i chose wap version of cricinfo since its easier to parse with minimal html and also their html is a little complex to parse with so many iframes .

i use the sgmllib to parse the html ,the code snippet is below

def get_contents(url):
import urllib, sgmllib

f=urllib.urlopen(”http://ci.plusmo.com/cricket/wap”)
s = f.read()
print “Read”
myparser = MyParser()
myparser.parse(s)
a=myparser.get_hyperlinks()
b=myparser.get_descriptions()
wget_command = “wget -p –output-document=index.html “+url
system(wget_command);
print wget_command
f=open(”$CWD/index.html”) #change the $CWD to what dir u have
filer=f.read()
strnew= filer.replace(’ ‘,’ ‘)
strnew1=strnew.replace(’ ‘,”)
findex=strnew1.find(’<div class=”dat”>’)
findex1=strnew1.find(’</div>’,findex+1,UP_LIMIT)
newindex=strnew1.find(’</div>’,findex1+1,UP_LIMIT_1)
newindex2=strnew1.find(’</div>’,newindex+1,NEW_LIMIT)
finalmesg=strnew1[findex:newindex2]
s=Stripper()
s.feed(finalmesg)
score=s.gettext()
score=score.replace(’<’,”)
score=score.replace(’>’,”)
score=score.replace(’div’,”)
print score
print “SCRE OBTAINED”
check(score)

And now the parser class

class MyParser(sgmllib.SGMLParser):
def parse(self, s):
self.feed(s)
self.close()
def __init__(self, verbose=0):
sgmllib.SGMLParser.__init__(self, verbose)
self.hyperlinks = []
self.descriptions = []
self.inside_a_element = 0

def start_a(self, attributes):
for name, value in attributes:
if name == “href”:
self.hyperlinks.append(value)
self.inside_a_element = 1

def end_a(self):
self.inside_a_element = 0

def handle_data(self, data):
if self.inside_a_element:
self.descriptions.append(data)

def get_hyperlinks(self):
return self.hyperlinks

def get_descriptions(self):

for i in range(len(self.descriptions)):
str=self.descriptions[i]
if str.find(”India”) != -1:
index=i

return self.descriptions

The next stage is to strip all html and get the full content which we can post :-)


class Stripper(sgmllib.SGMLParser):
def __init__(self):
self.data = []
sgmllib.SGMLParser.__init__(self)
def unknown_starttag(self, tag, attrib):
self.data.append(” “)
def unknown_endtag(self, tag):
self.data.append(” “)
def handle_data(self, data):
self.data.append(data)
def gettext(self):
text = string.join(self.data, “”)
return string.join(string.split(text))
And see if the last posted message was the same as the message you have ,if yes then abort posting and wait for a update to be done ( mostly for script when its running while no match is on or after play)


def check(score):
settings={
“username”:”YOURUSERNAME”,
“statusdelimeter1″:”<p class=\”entry-title entry-content\”>”,
“statusdelimeter2″:”</p>”
}


url1=”http://twitter.com/”+settings["username"]
message=”"
print url1
statusdelimeter1=settings["statusdelimeter1"]
statusdelimeter2=settings["statusdelimeter2"]
try:
print “In to the message checkloop”
instream=urllib.urlopen(url1)
for line in instream:
if statusdelimeter1 in line:
message=line[
line.index(statusdelimeter1)+len(statusdelimeter1):line.index(statusdelimeter2)
]

print message
print score
if string.lower(message)==string.lower(score):

print “No change in Score ,May be break or match just got over”
else:
if len(score)>140:
print “LEN Greater than 140,so truncating”
newscore=”
newscore=score[:140]
print newscore
twitter(newscore)

else:
twitter(score)


except IOError, e:
raise “Could not connect.”

And finally when you have the message to be sent ,just use a few lines of twitter library and its done !

def twitter(score):


import sys,os,string
sys.path.append(’$CWD/twitter/’)
sys.path.append(’$CWDsimplejson/’)
import twitter
api=twitter.Api(username=’YOUR_USERNAME’,password=’YOURPASS’)
try:
status=api.PostUpdate(score)
print “POST SUCCESSFULL”
except IOError,e:
raise”Could not Post”


Thats all the code is about :-)

check out 2s birthday update bot :-)

UPDATE: The feed and scores were taken from Plusmo services .

Send post as PDF to