My Octopress Blog

A blogging framework for hackers.

Polite Birthday Wishes


Recently, I was watching a movie with my friends on my birthday. During the movie, I was getting birthday messages frequently and I was not able to reply to them instantly as the phone was on silent. I thought that there should have been a way to send automatic replies instantly so as to not be rude and then I can call up later when I get the time. That is when I came up with this idea.

Polite Birthday Wishes is a script for Android phones that will automatically send a Thank you message if an incoming SMS contains specific case-insensitive keywords like ‘birthday’ or ‘bday’. It can be installed on your phone as a Rule on the on{X} Android App.

on{X}
  • Lets you control and extend the capabilities of your Android phone using a JavaScript API to remotely program it.
  • Developed by Microsoft Corporation.
  • Official Website
  • Download App on Google Play.

Description

This rule monitors the incoming SMS and checks for ‘birthday’ or ‘bday’ (case in-sensitive) in the body. On receiving desired SMS the script sends a Thank you message as a reply.

How to Install
  1. Go to on{X} Website and Login using Facebook.
  2. Download on{X} app to your Android Phone.
  3. Click on Create a Rule.
  4. Paste the code from PoliteBirthdayWishes.js in the Code section.
  5. Give a title and then click ‘Save and send to phone’.

Have fun ! For any feedback, contact me at narangparas@gmail.com.


Comments

robin hood
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
sajith
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

NTFS Driver for Mac OS

Not being able to copy files to NTFS format external media drives (harddisk, pendrive etc.) is a common issue in Mac OS X.

To fix this, an NTFS driver for Mac is required.

A few reliable ones are :

  1. Paragon NTFS Driver : To use this driver for copying files to a Seagate external portable drive, Download this driver for free from the Seagate website here.
  2. NTFS-3G for Mac : Download it here.

Yahoo! Open Hack Day 2012

Some Notes on #openhackindia2012 
  • Venue - The Sheraton Hotel, Bangalore was amazing. Superb Ambience.
  • Food was unlimited and ridiculously delicious.
  • There were a few talks by yahoo employees on their products like yql, yui, mojito js etc.
  • Kinects, Xboxes, Mini Golf, Table tennis, Foosball etc were there. 
  • Amazing Laserman.
  • Got some goodies, beanbag and participation certificate.
  • My Hack (with Rohit Mishra) - The code was broken when time got over so couldn’t demo it. I hope to complete it soon.
  • Winning Hacks.
  • Some Pics.
  • Some More Pics.






Comments

robin hood
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Ajar Hets
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

Eclipse and Tomcat on Mac OS X

There is a lot of confusion. Follow these steps. Avoid the pain.
  1. Download Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers. Uncompress in a folder of your choice.
  2. Download Tomcat. Uncompress in a folder of your choice.
  3. Download Sysdeo Eclipse Tomcat Launcher plugin.
  4. Unzip the above plugin in :

    • Eclipse_Home/dropins for Eclipse 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6
    • Eclipse_Home/plugins for Eclipse 2.1, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3

  5. Launch Eclipse by double clicking the icon in the folder you had uncompressed to. You must see the Tomcat icons in the toolbar.

  6. Set Tomcat version and Tomcat home : Workbench -> Preferences, select Tomcat and set Tomcat version and Tomcat home

  7. Now place your project in apache-tomcat-x.x.x/webapps/
  8. Start Tomcat from Eclipse.
  9. Visit localhost:8080 from your browser to check if it works.
That is it !
If you don’t want to use this plugin, another way to configure eclipse and tomcat can be found here.

    Viewport Meta Tag

    If you have a habit of checking out the source code of different websites, you must have seen the following part of code in a lot of websites :
    <meta name=”viewport”>
    The viewport metatag is used in the head of a webpage if you are aiming to design a flexible layout. In this case, no need to design separate websites for Laptops, iPads and Mobiles.


    A typical mobile-optimized site contains something like the following:
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1">
    The width property controls the size of the viewport. It can be set to a specific number of pixels like width=600 or to the special value device-width value which is the width of the screen in CSS pixels at a scale of 100%. (There are corresponding height and device-height values, which may be useful for pages with elements that change size or position based on the viewport height.)
    The initial-scale property controls the zoom level when the page is first loaded. The maximum-scale, minimum-scale, and user-scalable properties control how users are allowed to zoom the page in or out.
    The viewport combined with Media queries can give you very good results.
    Here is a very nice tutorial on viewport meta tag : [link]
    There is clearly demand for the viewport meta tag, since it is supported by most popular mobile browsers and used by thousands of web sites.

    A Day Without Google Search

    I haven’t been able to Google anything since this morning. It is like Google is forcing me to use Bing!