You might have already read my blog post about deathball riddle. Few days ago, I started doing another internet riddle, but not like deathball, this is a programming riddle. It’s python challenge.

You might not familiar with python, but this is definitely a really good way to learn the language. When, I started doing this, I only knew few syntax in python.. But after finishing several levels, I learned about some really good ways of using python - or I can say the art of python.

If you don’t know about python, It’s not a dead language or not a useless language. It’s quite powerful scripting language, which also have GTK bindings. Many of the novel linux apps are written in python. Gentoo emerge is a very good example.

Today, I received a hilarious comment in one of my posts. Here it is.

--
hello , my name is [censored] and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq [censored] or write me [censored] , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you
–

Sorry dude, Akismet works fine for me(And it will identify your comment as a spam very soon).

I have been using paradox server to handle my blog(www.sandaru1.com) and emails(AT gunathilake.com) for more than a year now. However, due to several reasons our server went offline by a timely manner. The problem is fixed now but the xmail configuration is not perfect either.

So, I decided to go for google apps. I have used that for about a week now, and so far the only problem I got was, since the mailing account is new some important mails are marked as spam. However, google really learns fast(or it has some hidden filters for each user) and by clicking on “spam” and “not spam” buttons managed to fix the problem.

So, overall the system seems pretty good and handles with out any errors. Another big advantage of the system is it has superb gmail interface.

We have just finished a small project - p2p mind.. We’ll probably release the code as GPL, even though it might not be useful for many of you

check this out : http://www.sandaru1.com/p2pmind/

Yesterday, I tried to download debian DVD images from their site. One image is about 4 GB which is bigger than 2^32 bytes. So, here is the problem; since all the download accelerators use 32 bit integers for the file size, it doesnt work at all. I tried prozilla and axel. Then I also tried to wget the file into my server, split it and download the files. Wget doesn’t work either.

I sent an email to LKLUG and one of them suggested to use jigdo. But It takes hell of a lot of time to download it file by file. The other solution is to use bittorrent, but I have port limitation problems. So, the only solution left is to download and modify the source code of an accelerator. I downloaded the axel code, but It’s seems bit messy to change it. So, I decided to code my own one to download it. It’s time to start coding again.

Thousands of people searches through the internet for the above topic, and apparently they come up with quite nice articles which explains how to hack. Most of those are sending an email to a specific email address of the service provider which is a system account. What you have to do is, send an email from your account with your password and also add the email account to be hacked into it. I’s very easy, they give you the format of the email, you just have to insert the two values and send the email to the system account. And just after you send the email, the system account logs into your account and then do some bullshit(this changes from article to article) and send back the password of other person. Pretty cool isn’t it?

This method is really simple. As I mentioned before, this technique is called social engineering. Once you sent your password, it’s a hack! They have used social engineering to get into your account.

There is one thing you need to keep in mind before searching through the internet for above topics, don’t fall into pitfalls. There are thousands of security experts working on securing the email services, so it’s very unlikely there are flaws on those. In other hand, even if there’s a flaw, who would want to share it? As a matter of fact, just after he shared it the service provider will get alerted and they’ll close the hole, and the founder won’t be able to exploit it any longer.

So, if you really really want to hack into email accounts (I strongly recommend not to), find your own way. The best possible is to use social engineering.

If you are a web developer/designer you should have surely checked your site in popular browsers. Specially if you are using css. I always used to use only firefox for the development stages and then later test the sites in IE. But after that i came to aware about the mozilla plugin “IE tab”, it became easier. I started to test the site with IE in the development stages. But recently Nayana have found out that IE doesn’t emulate the Internet Explorer exactly. I dont know what is happening there even when it is using same ActiveX control. However, if you are using IE tab, be careful - just a small warning.

Kathapettiya alpha version has been uploaded to the site. www.kathapettiya.com. It’s not completed yet, but working demo is online. Just try it and send your comments. Oppss…. Forgot to tell you, I didn’t implementing the channel delete function ;-). Totally forgot to do that. Will do that when I have time.

Yesterday, I was looking at my access logs (using webalizer) and found out that there are many hits from people who are searching for a sinhala font for google.lk. Google Sri Lanka is based sinhala Unicode fonts. For windows users, fonts can be downloaded from www.fonts.lk; Last year, it wasn’t fully supported – ‘rakaransaya’ and ‘yansaya’ didn’t render properly in firefox. I wonder whether they have made any progress since then. For linux users, get fonts from www.linux.lk. The sinhala support was debianized, so, if you are in debian environment, just a matter of adding the repositories and using apt-get or synaptic. It works really nicely.

After successfully finished an AJAX project (a simple AJAX Content Management System), this time I’m going to create a complete AJAX site. The CMS was created without using any 3rd party frameworks, and had a great time debugging the javascript code. So, this time I decided to use a framework.My choice was Rico – A client side javascript framework. It also provides some javascript animations and drag n drop features – haven’t tried those yet. Actually, this made my work much easier. If I want to update the value of an element, then I just have to create a piece of xml code, the framework parses it and updates the element automatically. But it only supports updating an element value, if I’m doing something outside that, I have to parse the code manually and do it. So, I created my own mini framework using Rico:). Now, it’s really easy.

When I was creating the CMS, the alerts did a great job ;). It really helped me to debug the javascript code. But this time, Rico blog directed me to a nice extension for firefox – FireBug. It’s really cool. Actually, the main advantage is, it captures all AJAX events. Simple and Useful.