Thoughts of a coder

It’s how I think! It’s how I code!

Conwitter – Twitter Google Chrome Extension

Dec 31

Posted by Sandaruwan Gunathilake in Google, Internet, Web 2.0 | 5 Comments

We have released a twitter extension for google chrome. Conwitter is still in alpha stage, however it’s currently usable and available via google chrome extension gallery.

Compared to other twitter clients, conwitter provides two main features :

  • Realtime Updates – You can enable twitter streaming API option in conwitter. This will ask twitter servers to push new tweets the client rather than pulling them in a time interval. In other words, new tweets from your friends will appear instantly as soon as those are published.
  • Conversation Style – Can you remember how many times you had to click on in-reply-to link to see what the tweet is about? We are hoping to solve that problem by introducing a new interface where all related tweets are displayed as one conversation. When new tweets arrive, it’ll be appended to the conversation and marked as new. Look at the screenshots below

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Picasa Wordpress Widget Updated

Oct 18

Posted by Sandaruwan Gunathilake in Open Source, PHP, Wordpress | 34 Comments

My picasa widget hasn’t been updated for quite a long time. Since then, there was a new widget API – the old widget worked without any problems because the new API is backward compatible, however those API calls are now deprecated. Meanwhile, I’ve received a lot of comments regarding the plugin and I’ve used that input to reshape the features of the update. Thank you all for your comments.

The new widget is a complete rewrite of the old widget. Earlier all options for plugin was in the widgets section. The new version adds a new options page to the “Settings” menu. Once you have installed the plugin, make sure to set your username on the picasa settings page. Once this is done, It’ll download the photo information and cache them. I’ve also added an option to list out the albums in this plugin. So, once the username is set, you can go to the widgets page and add any number of widgets – there you’ll get a list of albums, photo size and number of photos for each widget instance.

If you have uploaded new photos to the picasa albums, you can go to the options page and click on the “Refresh Cache” button to download new photos. Even if you have forgotten to do this, the photos will automatically get updated based on the cache lifetime you have set.

That’s all the features for now – I’ll add more features along the way once the base functionality of stable. Please remember, this is pretty much a complete rewrite, there might be few bugs here and there. If you have found any bugs, make a small comment here :)

Download from here

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Reject IE6

Oct 17

Posted by Sandaruwan Gunathilake in Internet, Javascript, Wordpress | 7 Comments

If you have ever created a simple web page, you know that IE6 should be banned by law. Here is a very simple wordpress plugin to reject IE6 and inform the users.

This is using the jreject jquery plugin. The wordpress plugin simply uses the wordpress hooks to insert jquery plugin into your theme.

Download Here

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Sinhala Spell Checker for Firefox

Aug 29

Posted by Sandaruwan Gunathilake in Hacks, Open Source, Sinhala | 10 Comments

Update : I’ve changed the addon words list to “UCSC/LTRL Sinhala Corpus Beta“. This provides much more accuracy. Updated version is in the addons site. I’ll combine both word lists in the next version.

Sinhala language has been used in computers for a long time. In the beginning, it was simple ASCII fonts, replacing the English glyphs with sinhala letters. However, sinhala unicode came to play around in 2004. Around that time, we built a search engine converting ASCII text to unicode, so that it can search sinhala text written in any font. Actually, that’s how Paradox Software started. There were few blocks with rendering the unicode fonts, and people weren’t exactly using them. However, those problems are solved with newer releases and sinhala unicode is extensively used today.

You might have seen that there is a english to sinhala dictionary developed by UCSC Language Lab. It’s released under GPL as a firefox addon. Today, I extracted the words from the addon database and built a spell checker for firefox.

Following python code is used to extract the words from sqlite database :

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sqlite3
import re

conn = sqlite3.connect('en-si.db')
c = conn.cursor()
c.execute("select * from dict")
out = file("words","w")
for row in c:
  words = re.split(r"[ |]",row[1])
  for i in words:
    out.write(i.encode("utf8")+"\n")
out.close()

After that simply running, “cat words | uniq | sort > words.sorted” produced a sorted uniq list of words. The “affixcompress” tool comes with hunspell generated the affix rules file and I’ve placed some rules to support some common mistakes.

Sinhala Spell Checker Screenshot 1 Sinhala Spell Checker Screenshot 2

Install the addon from here. Once after you installed, you can right click a textbox, enable spell checking and select Sinhala as the language.

(Don’t ask me how සොක්කා got recommended for මඤ්ඤොක්කා)

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Ubuntu 9.04(Jaunty Jackalope)

May 17

Posted by Sandaruwan Gunathilake in Hacks, Linux | No Comments

As you all aware, ubuntu 9.04 has been release on last April. I’ve been delaying the upgrade for several weeks because of the exams, project, etc. Today, I decided to replaced my ubuntu 8.10 with the new version. There is also an upgrade option which will allow you to upgrade directly from 8.10, however I have some bad experience with upgrading. So, I decided to go for a fresh installation.

The installation was straight forward. The only major difference was that ext4 file system was available. I created a separate partition for my home directory, and used ext4 for that. So far, I can’t tell a real difference. The ext3 was working fine, I just installed ext4 to test it out. Ext4 didn’t give any problems yet, but not any advantages so far either. Installation process finished very quickly and the booting time has been improved (They have finally changed the usplash theme and the GDM theme).

Besides the booting time, the next major feature 9.04 adds is the new notification system. This replaces the gtk notification daemon. The new notifications looks really nice, however the spec doesn’t allow any actions for the notifications. This seems to be a problem because lot of applications are using notifications with actions. It wouldn’t be a big deal if notifications are just shown without the actions, but instead it shows a dialog box with buttons as actions.

I’m using two applications which use notifications with actions, emesene and mail-notification. Mail-notifications doesn’t have any option to remove actions in the configure box, however there is an option in the gconf settings. You can fire up the gnome configuration editor using “gconf-editor” and remove the actions from “/apps/mail-notification/popups/actions” key. Emesene uses a plugin called “LibNotify” for it’s notifications. The code for actions can be easily disabled by commentting relevant the code. Comment following lines(lines 231 – 240) in “plugins_base/LibNotify.py” using ‘#’ chars.

	#if execute == 'conversation':
	#    def on_notify_action(notification, action):
	#        self.controller.newConversation(None, data[0], data[1], True)
	#    notification.add_action('default', 'default', on_notify_action)

	#elif execute == 'mail':
	#    def openMail(notification, action):
	#        desktop.open(self.controller.hotmail.getLoginPage\
	#            (data[0], data[1], data[2]))
	#    notification.add_action('default', 'Open Mail', openMail)

Other than that, the dropbox daemon was not working initially. I manaully downloaded the propertiary daemon and extracted it to “~/.dropbox-dist”. However, even with that dropbox was not starting up properly at boot. It should start automatically with the nautilus – the extension was loaded properly but it wasn’t not spawning the deamon. I simply added the “~/.dropbox-dist/dropbox” to startup and that sloved the problem (Yes, I know that it’s not a good hack). I also installed “ubuntuone” which is very similiar to dropbox, but I haven’t played around it yet.

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