Multi-protocol Google Talk, Facebook Messenger on Pidgin with App passwords

With the new control in privacy across the social media websites, multi-protocol chat clients like Pidgin have had some tough times. This post aims to solve the problem with tools from this new era of the privacy conscious Web. For those who are unaware, Pidgin, is a chat client which aggregates most social media protocols like XMPP (Gtalk), Jabber, Facebook, ICQ, IRC, into one compact interface.

 

We'll go through this blog, the process to add app-passwords in Google and Facebook so that it works with Pidgin.

Google Talk App Password Generation:

Sign in here: https://myaccount.google.com/apppasswords

Step 1, select the app

 

Step 2: Use Other (custom name)

 

Step 3: Give a name,  I already have pidgin, so used this, for you, use "Pidgin" and click on generate.

 

Step 4: After generating you will get this window, copy the app password

Step 5: Use the generated password in Pidgin with your Gmail username as usual.

Now for Facebook App password generation.

Step 1: Open facebook settings

 

Step 2: Go to security and Login

Step 3: Scroll down to App Passwords under Two-factor Authentication and click on generate an App Password

Step 4: Apply similar steps and use a name for this after entering your password for additional authentication, if any.

 

Step 5: Use the generated password in Facebook app in pidgin.

Enjoy!

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!

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!

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:

Setup gitlab openid authentication with simpleid

Gitlab is a wonderful new tool that allows one to host projects just like we do on github. The basic difference is that github has public projects as it's default setting and gitlab has private!

What I was about to do was to integrate OpenID authentication mechanism so I needed a OpenID server for that. I used a fairly simple OpenID server, SimpleID. The name says it all!

Gitlab version 6.3.0 does not support openID authentication out of the box. Here are the necessary hacks required to get it running. I got it running on a centos 6.3 box.

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.

Orkut Music Scrap

So I found something interesting on Orkut.

I found a way to post a scrap with music playing from it without any video or picture showing. Just make sure the video exists on youtube.

So, if the video goes like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15p7wE7I8m8

Your html code to insert is:

<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
src="%3Ca%20href="></embed>http://www.orkut.gmodules.com/gadgets/proxy?refresh=86400&amp;container=orkut&amp;gadgets=http://orkut.com/img.xml&amp;url=http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/15p7wE7I8m8%26autoplay%3D1"
width="1" height="1" style="" id="927013156" name="927013156"
bgcolor="#FFFFFF" quality="autohigh" wmode="transparent"
allownetworking="internal" allowscriptaccess="never">&

Please do comment.

Learning about Web Technology

I am a C fan, hence I love PHP. The world of ASP.NET seems to be very attractive due to the obvious reasons of GUI designer and Rapid Application Development. Again, JSP has got a similar attraction.

However, due to poor support of ASP.NET on Linux, (or perhaps my lack of knowledge in this field!) I am still unable to say hello world on MonoDevelop. JSP appeared pretty complicated at first due to the oh-so-many XML files and odd looking folders. So PHP seemed natural.

Well I have to admit that I like things hand on, so the toolkit based approach in Netbeans, Eclipse and Mono seemed a little too heavy for me. Another reason may be these tools are so sluggish! On my 1-Gig P4 machine, it takes ages for Eclipse to load.