Pratham.name

Check if your mobile number affected by the 2G license cancellations

Optimizing App Engine datastore reads

App engine charts Greasemonkey script

2011-08-25T00:00:00+05:30

For everyone who manages more than a few App engine applications, this greasemonkey script adds an inline chart to each app-id on the dashboard. This way you don’t have to click through to each application page.

// ==UserScript==
// @name          GAE graphs
// @namespace     pratham.name
// @description   Adds inline graphs for GAE apps
// @include       https://appengine.google.com/
// @include       http://appengine.google.com/
// @require       http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js
// ==/UserScript==

function main() {
  $('a[title="view dashboard"]').each (function (index) {
		var link = $(this);
		var href = link.attr('href');

		$.get (href, function (data) {
			var str = data.match (/ae-dash-graph-img[\s\S]*chd=e:.*,(.*).chxp/i) [1];
			var url = 'http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=lc&chs=100x25&chd=e:'+str;
			link.parent ().append (' <img src="'+url+'">');
		});
	});
}

// load jQuery and execute the main function
main ();

Install GAE graphs script

Note that this script uses the “require” feature of Greasemonkey, so it won’t work on Google Chrome.

EveryDNS to shut down in August

2011-06-08T00:00:00+05:30

EveryDNS, my DNS host of choice, has informed its users that it will shut shop on August 31.

DynDNS, the new owners, will charge a 5$ redeemable fee for this transfer. Apart from that each hosted domain will cost 30$ per year (20$ for the first year). Note that EveryDNS used to be free for 20 domains.

I’ll be moving my hosted domains to Namecheap FreeDNS, who I anyway use as my domain registrar.

Rajiv is the most common India CEO name

2011-04-29T00:00:00+05:30

According to LinkedIn, the name “Rajiv” is the most common Indian CEO name. Oddly, the name “Rajeev” - an alternate spelling for “Rajiv” - also comes in at no. 8.

Django 0.96 documentation mirror

2011-03-08T00:00:00+05:30

Django recently deleted the documentation of the 0.96 version, the very same version that Google App Engine uses for its default templating engine. Luckily someone has mirrored the entire documentation.

Review umpiring errors with Bad Umpire

2011-03-04T00:00:00+05:30

Did a cricket umpire commit a major error ? Now share your feelings on Bad Umpire.

Normalizing free form text input

2011-02-08T00:00:00+05:30

If you’re accepting free text from users that needs make sense, you need to normalize it. For instance, if you’re accepting the name of a film actor, you need to understand that “Shahrukh Khan”, “Shah rukh Khan”, “SRK” or even “Sharukh Khan” point to the same actor.

You could use a dynamic drop-down to force a certain style of text-entry, but that gets a little intrusive.

Here I demonstrate a simple way to ensure consistency of this data without any intrusive UI elements. I’m using the Bing API, but any search API would do.

For film actors, I’ll use IMDB since it’s comprehensive and exclusive.

import urllib
import re

APPID = 'YOUR-BING-API-ID'
val = 'Shahrukh Khan'

# quick bing search with site:imdb.com parameter.
url = 'http://api.search.live.net/xml.aspx?Appid='+APPID+'&query='+urllib.quote_plus ('site:imdb.com '+val)+'&sources=web&web.count=1&adult=off'
response = urllib.urlopen (url)

# a simple regex (IMDB has "<actor> - IMDB" as title) and we have the normalized name.
normalizedName = re.findall ('<web:Title>(.*) -', response.read ()) [0]

RBI cripples PayPal in India

2011-01-28T00:00:00+05:30

After struggling to comply with Indian regulations for the past year or so, it seems RBI has fatally crippled PayPal. In an email to all its Indian users, PayPal notifies us about the upcoming changes.

With effect from 1 March 2011, you are required to comply with the requirements set out in the notification of the Reserve Bank of India governing the processing and settlement of export-related receipts facilitated by online payment gateways (“RBI Guidelines”).

In order to comply with the RBI Guidelines, our user agreement in India will be amended for the following services as follows:

Any balance in and all future payments into your PayPal account may not be used to buy goods or services and must be transferred to your bank account in India within 7 days from the receipt of confirmation from the buyer in respect of the goods or services; and

Export-related payments for goods and services into your PayPal account may not exceed US$500 per transaction.

This is very bad news for scores of Indian freelancers/SMBs which rely heavily on PayPal for international payments.

Mobile Number Portability finally goes live today

2011-01-20T00:00:00+05:30

After what has seemed an eternity, Mobile number portability will finally go live today. The MNP, which has already missed three deadlines last year, was introduced in Haryana as a pilot case in November. Since then, as the deadline approached, major player have started campaigns to woo prospective users.

Just in case you’re not informed, here’s what MNP is and is not.

You can retain your number while moving from network to network. Or from pre-paid to post-paid. Or GSM to CDMA.
It will cost you Rs 19.
The whole process will take upto 4 days, during which your number stays disconnected.
You cannot switch telecom circles with MNP (yet).
You cannot carry over pre-paid balances.

Operators, having long held post-paid users captive by their numbers, will be forced to offer better voice/data plans or risk losing them to competing networks.

Anatomy of a WordPress Theme

2011-01-13T00:00:00+05:30

If you’ve ever had to dig into the internals of a WordPress theme, this is a priceless infographic.

Simple HTML internet status checker

2011-01-01T00:00:00+05:30

My BSNL internet connection has been especially flaky lately, so I’ve written this simple HTML script to notify me when internet is back up.

<html>
<head>
  <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="60">
</head>
<body>
  <img src="http://www.example.com/icons/a.gif" onload="location.href = 'http://www.welcometointernet.org/';">
</body>
</html>

The page tries to load an image, and if successful redirects to this site (WARNING: loud sound). If not, it tries again in 60 seconds.