It was recently that I decided to check out this cool microblogging site thanks to geekandpoke and my friend Swaroop . Twitter has this concept that, when you 'follow' someone, you get know by minute updates on the things that they do. When you 'tweet' it means that you just update what you are doing now. So if I was tweeting now, I would something like 'blogging about twitter'. To know more -> twitter help.


Twittering with python

Twitter is a cool micro blogging site, with many people updating their day to day activities on a minute by minute basis. So what if we could get as well as post updates in a neat way. The possibilities are endless. One possible scenario would be, If you have a firewall, your firewall could 'tweet' every time it is targeted by an attacker. So people around the world( who follow you) would get to know the attack process in real time !!!

Now lets try to programmatically read and then post a few tweets using python.

So lets get started,

The first site would ofcourse be the python section of twitter api library - http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Libraries#Python

In the next 4 steps, lets see how we could post a tweet in twitter

1. First download the wrapper python twitter.

2. Run > cmd. Go to the folder where you have downloaded python twitter( as mentioned in step 1 ) and Fire up python

3. Type
>>> import twitter

4. If you want to get latest tweets of someone, then the type the following

>>> client = twitter.Api()
>>> latest_posts = client.GetUserTimeline("yourusername")
>>> print [s.text for s in latest_posts]

5. If you want to post your own tweets, then type the following

>>> client = twitter.Api(username='yourusername', password='yourpassword')
>>> update = client.PostUpdate('The Twitter API is easy')


Other cool twitter api wrappers

• Twyt - A twitter api interface for python
• Python twiiter tools

Hang on buddies, more updates coming soon.

Labels: python

hi all,

This is the first post of 2009, nearly 6 months after the year began. And in the next few posts, I would like to update you guys on all the cool things that happened in the last many months(Yeah ofcourse it would be along with the regular posts on current happenings). I bet the blog is gonna have some really cool post on a variety of topics, Many things that i feel that you too may find useful from an information technology perspective.

Thanks for continually visiting my site. Thanks for your great support.

love you guys

Justin

Hi,
Following are some of the links I came across while trying to make a python based rss aggregator. Although the following resources(links) can guide to some really cool stuff, my plan is to have a python based rss aggregator customized to present information in some really cool ways like depending on my usage, tell me which news i like the most and present those and so on. If they are really nice info, I should be able to send it to my news group > uit_tvm, by just a click of a button. I will keep you guys updated on the status of the project.

As per current requirements, the project has 2 parts
1. Python parser - which fetches rss feeds from sites
2. Email the feeds to uit_tvm - either I need to run my own email server(which is really cool ) or I need to access GMail/Yahoomail using python API provided by yahoo.

So the following links to point to the above mentioned ideas.

Email APIs
Send email in python
http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread136280.html

Accessing your Gmail inbox with Pythonhttp://www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2004/06/18/1751
libgmail — Python binding

SendYmail
http://sendymail.sourceforge.net/

About BBauth required for yahoo mail APIhttp://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/web/LondonHackdayBbauthAndYahooMail

for Google's Gmail service
http://libgmail.sourceforge.net/

Running your own server
Apache emal serverhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_James Comparison of mail servershttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mail_servers

Misc
PyDigg - A Python Toolkit for the Digg API
http://neothoughts.com/2007/04/30/pydigg-a-python-toolkit-for-the-digg-api/







Accessing Yahoo Mail withtout POP
http://bytes.com/forum/thread521242.html

Yahoo! Mail Web Service Code Samples
http://developer.yahoo.com/mail/code/

Labels: hack, hobbies, project, python, rss

Tomorrow (Aug 11, 2008)is my joining date as an official employee of mulinational company ACS, and I am very much proud of it. The interview and selection process was really cool and I enjoyed every bit of it. Its a really good feeling to be part of $5bn company, and to know that whatever you learned could be put to use in the following days.



I just want to thank all my friends, teachers and especially my parents who stood by me, and helped me get this job. Thanks for your prayers and blessings. Love you guys

bye


Other news

------------

My brother and my sister in law, would be reaching trivandrum, within a few hours. They will be spending some days at trivandrum.

Swaroop's dell laptop is half-way through shipment, and when it arrives, it would be the 3rd Dell laptop in our place where we are staying. Mine was the first!!

Came to know about hudson from Java posse podcast(Java posse is a really cool awesome java podcast). Its a continues integrations system. Hudson helps you to build/test software projects continuously and automatically. You can find more about Hudson here and to see hudson used in a live project visit the status of Continuous Integration Builds for NetBeans Projects site.

Labels: acs, java, job

Its been some days, since my mom wanted to write about one of her favorite pass times: Gardening.

She told this to me, and I just said Okay. Some days later, I found her meticulously(since she was new to blogging) going though the cool blogger help, page by page. This really did catch my attention and I asked her what she was up to. She told me she wanted to create a blog, to blog about gardening and was trying to learn about it.

I loved her enthusiasm, in learning new things, and sat with her. She created the blog and added a new post. Since she had selected one of the templates provided by blogger, it kind of looked dull, atleast not at all apt for a gardening blog, I thought, and I told her, of the same. She too liked the idea, and so I decided to chip in, to redesign her blog design.

So as mentioned in one of my previous posts(Changing blogger template) I started with freecsstemplates.org. Got a nice template, Nature's charm , hacked it a little bit to suit her needs and uploaded it to blogger.

But here comes the problem.


The navbar problem



So I decided to remove the navbar. After a bit of research(Googling around), I found that removing navbar DOES NOT violate (citation needed) TOS with Google.

You can hide the navbar, by inserting this code in the style sheet part(css part) of your page

#navbar-iframe {height:0px; display:none;}


Even though you remove the navbar, the content seems to be around 50 pixel, shifted downwards.

So in the template, I added the following code inside the body { }


This effectively shifts the contents upwards. Since the problem was solved, I decided to add the navbar back again - as a small token of thanks to Google.

So everything is cool, and my mother has a really cool, sleek blog which I am proud to announce to you.

---

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So guys do check out this cool new blog, and I wish my mother all the best for this new endeavor :)

Labels: blog, blogger, gardening, hack, hobbies

According to wikipedia,

A CAPTCHA (IPA: /ˈkæptʃə/) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer

which in plain English means that, whenever you want to register with some site or avail its service, the guys who run the site wants to make sure that its you, and that its not a bot(computer program created to automate / impersonate a human accessing that particular site)

Usually, this procedure involves, showing some images containing words in it, and asking the user to type those words. But as computer programs started to imitate these things too(using image recognition softwares) captchas started becoming more complex.See an example below,



The funny thing about this captcha ^^ is that, you are supposed to find the letters where a cat is supposedly sitting and type those in a text box. Also while looking at the picture, one wonders whether, it was a 2 or Z, 0 or O and so on. If you get it wrong once, the process repeats again.

While talking about this, I am reminded of a funny cartoon post from geekandpoke.


The make/break world of captchas

You can find a lot of technical aspects of captchas from the wikipedia page. Currently(while you are reading this) a lot of research is still in progress by people who want to break the captchas while another group finds newer and tougher(awkward?)ways to make it harder to break them.
At the end of day, its the end user who is at the receiving end.

A simple search for captcha in google is good read for an afternoon.


Accessibility problems for visually challenged

Captchas also cause serious accessibility problems. Even the audio these sites provide as an alternative is so hard to understand, let alone to make any sense of it(at least for me; but I would urge you to check out some sites for yourself to understand the situation better)

You can find an amazing blog by a visually challenged person at Blind Access Journal. I also came across a Great Accessibility Blog Roundup.

I guess, more research is needed in this area, and I believe all of us CAN contribute to make websites accessible, for all of us. Do post your suggestions and alternatives to captchas in the comment section.

Bye guys.

Labels: accessibility, captcha, computer, internet