Monday, October 27, 2008

Source Viewer

I was surfing on my phone and a page showed XML parsing failed. I wanted to check what's wrong with the BSE site. Just googled for an online source viewer, found a few which didn't appeal to me so I decided to write my own and under two minutes I built my own source viewer and uploaded on my PHP capable server. Here's the darn few line code:

<?php
header("Content-type: text/plain");
$page=$_GET["url"];
$fp = fopen($page, r);
while (!feof($fp)) {
echo fgets($fp, 128);
}
fclose($fp);
?>

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Old School Games

Its 2008! The PC games require gigs of RAM, a hefty graphics card and a processor that crunches numbers really fast. My 3+ year old PC can't withstand the sheer length of coding involved in latest games, so I keep sticking to old games.
One sunny day, when there was no college; I got nostalgic about an old game called SPEEDKAR which I had played in 1998 in school when I was studying in 6th grade. So, I decided to find the lost thing. After a lot of googling I finally found it!! Yes, and whole lots of old school games like DAVE, PRINCE, PRINCE1, MARIO, SPEEDKAR, ISLAND HOPPER on a site which has the full collection of old DOS games. Here is the damn link. Just go and search for your lost game and 97% chance is that you'll find it. But wait, on clicking a game name you may not be able to download it because they've messed with the a tag. Just right click any game then copy link address and paste in address bar of your browser and then correct the link by removing 8 to 11th characters from beginning.

Ok, so you've downloaded your favourite game but your PC isn't emulating the sound effects correctly. Just download VDMS and see the magic!!! VDMS sits between your game and Windows and translates game sound effects properly and routes to your sound card. Download VDMS here.
If you are on Vista and still having problems then just use DOSBox which is a pure DOS emulator. Get it here. If you're having problems using DOS Box then don't ask me, because I haven't used it. And I assume that you're not a newbie in computers so you can solve these kind of small problems yourself instead of bugging me.

TOR - The Onion Router

Sometimes when I get bored, I engage myself in some black activities on net like trying to crack into servers and much more which I am not going to detailize here. Well, to anonymize myself and save from wrath of some of the creepiest system administrators I use proxies(like everyone). But searching for a working proxy is a pain sometimes. Although there are some programs with predefined proxy lists but they are either trial or paid or crap!!!
While delving for a feasible solution I came to know about The Onion Router - the best solution to all anonymity woes!
TOR connects you to your requested site through a networked virtual tunnel of relays.
For more information visit their site.
TOR itself is not a HTTP proxy, it acts as a SOCKS proxy. The download from their site is called Vidalia bundle, and contains Privoxy which works as an HTTP proxy so you can use any browser. I am not going into detail of how to use TOR to anonymize yourself because they themselves have such a good and informative site. Just visit them and know everything about TOR.

Monday, October 20, 2008

Opera Mobile 9.50 beta released for UIQ!

Today on October 20th, 2008 Opera Software after a long wait, have released the first public beta version of its long awaited Web Browser for Symbian OS UIQ3.x platform. Earlier it was available only for Windows Mobile.
According to Opera, following bugs are there:
->The browser sets a new system-wide home-page, which cannot be opened by the embedded Internet browser (Opera 8.65).
->Cursor is not shown when HTML edit fields are partially out of screen.
->No support for landscape screen mode due to a number of system issues with the OpenGL graphical engine.
->Browser plug-ins are disabled by default due to non-existent or incomplete system support for Flash content. They can be enabled by the user for experimental purposes only, via More > Tools > Change settings > Advanced > Allow plug-ins.
->The continuous browser usage experience might be affected by the amount of available phone RAM memory.

As a lucky owner of Sony Ericsson P1i, I got to use their new lil kid. As soon as I came to know about the release I jumped to the Opera Mobile's official download. It was a monstrous 4.14MB!! Yes monstrous because I am using GPRS and it takes an era for downloading 4MB.

I got hold of the browser and was extremely happy to use it. The browser gave me the best experience ever on mobile. I could open the full facebook, and gmail standard view on my phone!!! But alas, due to crappy policies of Orkut its full view isn't available for mobiles. They detect the browser and redirect to the mobile version.

It also comes with the Opera widgets - handy little apps that run in the Opera browser.

So far I'm extremely satisfied with the new app. It changed my perception of web on my phone. The old Opera 8.65 was too crap to be usable. The worst thing that I hated most in it was the automatic link highlighting and mixing up site's CSS with the phone's theme. Digia @Web had come to my rescue but didn't appeal much. And finally Opera 9.5 put an end to my problems and I now can browse the web with ease.

There's an issue with mobile sites on 9.5 though. When you open any XHTML mobile site, it seems to hold the left part of the screen unless you zoom.

For the SE P1i/G700i/G900i/W960i, here is the download link

A new beginning

Today, I decided to jump into the blogging arena properly. I had a blog earlier on blogger, but I never used to update it. Hope, this one keeps getting my attention :P