How to sync thunderbird with icloud calendar

If you're one of those Apple users who want to use the open source Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client, you might feel that the calendar is one thing you're missing.  There are two general methods to sync the calendar to Thunderbird.

One is something which is widely popular and involves subscribing to a read-only view the iCloud calendar and the other is a bit involved but gives you Read-Write access to the calendar. iCloud calendar supports the IETF standard known as CalDAV which is all really nice but it doesn't provide users an easy access to it's URL, which can then be added to Thunderbird.

Start off by creating a new app (or skip if you already have one) from this URL - https://appleid.apple.com/account/manage

Then click on: App-Specific Passwords

Logging PF Firewall on Mac OSX

Steps to enable logging for pfctl utility on newer osx like Yosemite, Sierra:

Firstly,

Add "log" to all rules in "/etc/pf.conf" or which ever PF configuration file you have.

Also set the logging interface with:

set loginterface pflog0

on the top of the PF config file.

Create a virtual interface with:

sudo ifconfig pflog0 create

Now start viewing packets which match the rules you logged with this:

sudo /usr/sbin/tcpdump -lnettti pflog0

At the end do:

sudo ifconfig pflog0 create

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

Clash of Clans on laptop computer

Okay this seems to be a click-bait but really not. Android Developers would know how painful it is to get the default android emulator up and running, not considering the pain that eventually follows when the actual application begins to run. It takes ages for the emulator to run even in a decent configuration PC or MacBook.

Now, I wasn't sure this could be done until my sister brought up the topic. She plays Clash of Clans on her laptop! Wow!

So, I decided to google. I knew about genymotion but it's a paid service, and then here's one emulator which actually worked for me on Mac OSX - BlueStacks.

Check this out:

Pretty cool huh!?

Makkhichoose attempts to bring flights search

For a few days I noticed "hello from flights js" on my browser console. I would assume some rougue extension somewhere and ignored it to the point where it really got very annoying. I finally tracked down the extension to this: "gllmlkidgbagkcikijiljllpdloelocn"

To get the folder location of chrome extensions, according to this answer, I first checked out, chrome://version/ for my Profile Path.

I was able to track this down to being the Makkhichoose extension which I regularly use for tracking prices on various e-commerce websites, like amazon, paytm, shopclues, myntra and flipkart.

Okay... A moment of silence for me and my covert stinginess.

Now then that is over, we can proceed further. So apparently MakkhiChoose is trying out a new flights based comparison tool as well!

Here are a few samples:

console.log('hello from flights js');

// var mmt_domestic_page__previous_url='';

// function mmt_domestic_page_url_watcher(){

And for cleartrip as well:

//cleartrip parsing

var ct_domestic_page_load_checker_timer;

function ct_domestic_page_load_checker(){

console.log('executing load_checker');

var url_params=window.location.search.replace('?','').split('&').reduce(function(s,c){var t=c.split('=');s[t[0]]=t[1];return s;},{});

if( (url_params['page']=='loaded' && window.location.href.match('cleartrip.com/flights/results?') && ($('.loaderContainer:eq(-1)').css('display')=="none"))  ){

console.log(window.location.href);

 Also http://www.easemytrip.in/

      url: "http://emtxml.bookeasytrip.com/emtxml.asmx",
      processData: false,
      // url: "http://shades.makkhichoose.com/analytics/logextensionfeedback",
      data: xml_req,
      contentType: "application/soap+xml",

Seems like they are on to something!

In my bout of hacking their sources, I found a neat "What-is-my-IP" clone. Here it is:

curl "http://search.makkhichoose.com/getip"

Happy hacking!

OpenAM database connectivity with MySql

This post comes after a long time. I had been really stuck with my project in creating a Single Sign On implementation. I was working with an amazing piece of software, OpenAM, formerly OpenSSO, currently maintained by the Forgerock community. 

My setup: I used Tomcat with Mysql and OpenAM 11.0.0 running on Centos

So first things first, install mysql-connector-java for your operating system and you should get a jar file. Here is what I got on my box:

# rpm -ql mysql-connector-java | grep jar
/usr/share/java/mysql-connector-java-5.1.17.jar
/usr/share/java/mysql-connector-java.jar

Now copy this to your tomcat installation directory. At "$CATALINA_HOME/lib" and restart tomcat.

Tor browser bundle released

Gone are the days that the internal was the ultimate symbolism of freedom in the planet and lo and behold! The Internet that knows more about you than your mom does, is here. Thanks to Edward Snowden, the world has learned about  spying and snooping all over the world. Someone who the entire world had almost shunned is now being relooked upon, as he is being nominated for the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize. [1]

Ironically, even after Obama was left red faced and  promised (some) spying will end, [2] the Indian Government is getting started with NETRA – NEtwork and TRaffic Analysis System. [3]

Thankfully however, there are places in the Internet that are virtually untraceable. The "tor" network happens to be one of those amazing inventions man has made. For those who used tor earlier, they would know it was such a pain to connect to the network, Vidalia came and made it oh so simple! Here's a image poached off the internet to show Tor really works:

DejaVu Trends - The final story

Looks like the blog worked more than the threats to lodge a police complaint. For those who are clueless, please read my previous rant for DejaVu Trends (https://dejavutrends.com) and how I believed them to be fraudulent.

Okay, so I visited the MIDC police station the day I had posted the blog and really what I was told that it was all my fault that I had paid them in the first place (I know that, that is why I am here in the first place *frustration*). They told me to file a complaint to the consumer court and they would take action only if they court directs them! Realising they would be of no help I decided on
1. Go to consumer court and wait for ages.
2. Try the Juhu address of the Directors of the companies. This address was available on Ministry of Corporate Affairs website.

Dejavutrends - Fraud Avoid, the story

I had deleted the following post after insistence on the part of the company representatives who said they are actually honest and are trying very hard to meet demands. I put this post back up sighting the following:

1. They deleted me from their facebook page
2. They deleted their facebook page!

People who are looking to file cases against this company might find some handy information contained in this post. Read on.

Hello folks, this is regarding one of the amazing scams that runs in the city of Mumbai. Some of you must have heard of, or have got e-mails from Deja Vu Trends (https://dejavutrends.com) regarding their e-shopping website. They are selling products at very cheap prices and they even have a HTTPS SSL Certificate!

Well, let me tell you about this company in depth. If I had not bought something from this website I would not have known about this scam but since I have (been duped) I gleefully blog about it! What I bought was a WD External Hard-disk which they have no intention of shipping to me. It has been over 2 weeks and all I hear is that the product is being shipped. They have provided any tracking code nor do they have an option to cancel the order (and opt for a refund). Repeated calls to their customer care center did not prove to be fruitful for 2 reasons.

Atlassian Crowd and Gitlab

As you may be already aware, I am hacking gitlab and am currently trying to implement an identity management solution along with gitlab. The software that I tried including (rubycas, simpleid) all had the inherent capability of Single Sign On (SSO) however it lacked the finely grained authorization I was looking for.

So far here are some more I have isolated for this task. Some of them are:

1. JOSSO
2. freeIPA

However, I decided to give Atlassian Crowd before these Open Source alternatives. It apparently provides everything my organisation needs and some of it's competitors include:

• Oracle Enterprise Single Sign On
• IBM Security Identity Manager

For both of the above solutions I found no demo or trial was available. However, I managed integrating Crowd into gitlab and it was pretty basic stuff. Here's what you need to do:

How many websites in the world?

So here I was sitting on my desk at work wondering how may websites are there in the world. The guy next to my cubicle announced Google had 8 billion websites indexed in it's servers! So I had to delve in and find out how many are there really.

So here's the number for today:  146,350,470

So, it was actually pretty easy to find the internet on the internet. So here are some cool links that have the relevant info.

Timeout while testing with centos httpd (solved)

Hello all,

A tech post after a long time! So, here I was in my desk trying to understand how HTTP headers work. So I did a telnet to my CentOS VM's httpd (apache web server) and just typing

GET / HTTP/1.1

and just when I was in the next line, the connection got terminated. Annoying! Just then my mentor, told me that there were apache flags for that stuff. It looked like this

RequestReadTimeout header=50-80,minrate=1
RequestReadTimeout body=50,minrate=1

So I added that stuff to the "httpd.conf" file and it was supposed to work. Boom! It gives me an error saying the directive was not recognized. 

Hacking Wordpress

I was to configure and install wordpress for a client and so my recent obsession is wordpress themes. Wordpress has a large collection of themes, however a lot of wordpress premium themes are for sale (you need to buy them).


After a lot of searching on the web I found methods to get the professional look and feel for a website by extending wordpress with plug-ins and themes. 


A few websites I found useful for getting themes :

• wordpressthemes.com
• wordpress.org/extend/themes
• wordpressthemesbase.com
• freewpthemes.net
• skinpress.com
• fthemes.com
• premiumwptheme.net

Now let us see how the files are designed.

Tikona WiMAX Internet Connection Problem

It's been over a month I have been stuck with an odd problem that prevented me from getting online from my Linux boxes. Pretty frustrating. I was stuck with XAMPP and realized how buggy the DevC++ System  was. Okay, let me get to the point.

So apparently Tikona WiMAX changed it's system as it would not acknowledge any DHCP requests made by lines that Advertise 100 Mbps connections. It kept fooling me for so long!

So, one fine day, I found @yagoo on #ubuntu. He pointed me out my system was using Half-Duplex connection.. after a brief diagnosis on my WinXP. He then told me about the mii-tool.

Google Voice on Linux

Finally, the day of reckoning has arrived. Google voice plug-in now works on Linux based systems... Yipee!!

Thumbs up for Google for this. I knew this was coming. And today I have been awarded.

Download this here:

http://www.google.com/talk/

Spread the love!

The Epic Web Browsers

A few days ago, Yahoo.com informed users of a browser that is Made In India for Indians - Epic.

Well, to me this is just a marketing gimmick since any FOSS guy can tell that anybody can build a browser based on Open Source tools. The browser in question is based on Firefox.

There are many browsers that have forked from Mozilla Firefox mainly due to Mozilla Corporation's policies that do not strictly confirm to the Linux philiosphy.

Among these are (the ones I have used) :
IceWeasel
SwiftFox
Nakamora
Flock

There is no dearth of Open Source browsers in the planet today.

A few are:
Chromium
Konqueror
SeaMonkey
Epiphany
Galeon
Kazehakase
Midori
lobo
links2
dillo
netrik
netsurf
chimera
lynx
elinks
links

Songs.PK Downloader

My exams (6th semester) are going on right now and I care a damn!

I wrote a songs.pk down-loader, a bash script that currently works on Linux (any *nix btw)... it will download the required songs from your favorite film. it has a GUI -- but you need xenity for that.

Requires wget to download songs and you can schedule it to download at a later time with at.

So here is the link:
http://rghose.byethost5.com/software/songspkdownload.sh

Please do report any bugs to me.