Open numbers in whatsapp without saving as contact

Whatsapp Number Opener

Say you want to make a whatsapp conversation with someone for temporary purposes but in order to do that you need to add that person as a contact first. Now adding someone as a contact is by itself a security risk as you can potentially expose your display picture and status to that person. If this is someone with whom you are involved in a transaction, then you'd not want to save this contact just for one time communication. Well, then what is the solution? How do you text this person without saving their number first?

Fast download with Golang

Hey all, people keep saying about how great the concurrency is in golang. To be honest, I am pretty much a novice in this.

So just wrote a download accelerator in golang using it's much awesome parallel feature, the source of which can be found here: https://github.com/rghose/go-parallel-downloader

Here are a few results:

URL Downloaded	Time taken by wget	Time taken by Golang
http://get.videolan.org/vlc/2.2.5.1/macosx/vlc-2.2.5.1.dmg	1m3.375s	0m26.609s

This was with GOMAXPROCS=2, threads = 5  with Chunk Size = 10 KB

So well, the chunk size of download did make a lot of difference, since the number of connections to download the thing would decrease, too many connections does not help in speed up

Selenium ChromeDriver Install Script

Hello Folks,

As I was trying to instruct someone how to install Selenium Webdriver on OSX, I realised that there were no good scripts to automate this task. There were instructions, sure, but none of the were a copy and paste solution. Not that I encourage copy-paste, I found this rather inconvenient though.

So here's a script install selenium chromedriver for any unix osx or windows computers (assuming cygwin) -

In case, the github plugin did not work the URL is here:

https://gist.github.com/rghose/106ae71639c6f9ce9076a260a5614b94

Enjoy!

One line youtube video downloader

Okay, so this might be illegal in certain places. I just decided to try this out for fun, and here we have it, download youtube videos with 1 line of shell script (and some perl)

The script looks like this:

curl -H 'Upgrade-insecure-requests: 1' -H 'Cache-control: max-age=0' -H 'Accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.8,bn;q=0.6' -H 'Accept-encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch' -H 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.106 Safari/537.36' "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II3L1noJlYQ" | gunzip | egrep -o 'https%3A%2F%2F[^\.]*\.googlevideo.com%2F[^,\]*' | perl -pe 's/\%(\w\w)/chr hex $1/ge' | head -n1  | xargs wget -O out.video

One line.

Get it here:

https://github.com/rghose/youtube-downloader

Identifying the actor

So, here I am at Candies, Bandra looking at an all too familiar Bollywood actor, who was also a customer there. He played the villain or cop in many movies, I know him. He had his son with him as well. They bear an uncanny resemblance. I want to go up there and get a picture clicked with him. Wait, what was his name?

I asked my friend who was with me, he too seemed clueless. He also wanted to get a picture clicked, but what if he asked his name? We were terrified of that prospect, as we saw a young woman probably in her 30s, go up to him and click one herself. Damn. Shes knows his name for sure.

In our dilemma and brain racking to recollect his name, he was done with his buying and he left. Leaving me pondering over this problem of his identity. So I came home and tried searching Google, assuming it will read my brainwaves. No use. I could not find a Bollywood actor who visited Candies often, he was not a very well known figure like say, Shahrukh Khan for instance, but he was pretty well known. Now I decided to do this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_film_actors!

Again, there were too many! So I made these:

a) Python script to get the images from an infobox element in a page here.
b) Shell script to automate this here.

Armed with these tools, I did this:

# wget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_film_actors
# grep '<li><a href=' List_of_Indian_film_actors | grep 'title' > list

Deleted the last irrelevant line and fired up "./parse_names.sh list"

I made myself some coffee, came back to my laptop and casually started browsing the thumbnails from my file manager. Found him!

Database connectivity with Java

Spent a lot of time today searching for ways to use Database connectivity on my Ubuntu box. I write the code but it just was not working!


Wrote this code to test for connectivity with this :


import java.sql.Connection;
import java.sql.DriverManager;
import java.sql.SQLException;

public class TestDatabase {

Captcha in PHP

Writing a custom captcha for your website is a fairly easy task with the PHP GD Library.

The GD Library is a graphics library that enables to draw (and generate) graphics. This output can be done on any of the standard image file formats.

In my example I choose to create a PNG file that will be displayed in my registration page. So the first piece of code I need is somthing like this: