Yearly Archives: 2006

Search the web for devanagari words.

devanagari, India, Internet, software, , , , , , , ,

I created a small form using which you can search the web for unicode devanagari words. It is very cumbersome to actually enter unicode devanagari characters using qwert keyboards, so I have adopted the phonetic transliteration scheme from Manogat website. Do give it a try:

http://amit.chakradeo.net/search/ (Link now removed, please see update below)

Start typing devanagari words phonetically and you will see unicode characters in the input area. When you hit enter, the phrase will be submitted to google.

Update: (2009-07-14) I have taken down my link now, as there are many more effective alternatives to do this. Check out the following pages from google:
Google Indic Transliteration (Marathi, Hindi)
Bookmarklets to transliterate any text element on any webpage.
A simple form for transliterating any text.

Religious Stotra – काही धार्मिक स्तोत्रे ध्वनीरूपामध्ये

audio, India, Misc, religion, , , , , ,

Update: For those looking for the lyrics of Mahishasura mardini shloka, here is a link.

Update: There have been many requests for Shivaleelamrut (Shivleelamrut). Here is one link to the complete text in devanagari: - श्री शिवलीलामृत

Update: Click here to listen to Complete Ganesh Pooja.

I keep getting a lot of hits on some of the old posts (Ram Raksha Stotra and Hanuman Chalisa) with visitors asking for audio versions of the stotra. Here is a page where I will keep collecting the audio versions of various stotras.

To Play: If you have javascript enabled, you can click on the small arrow before each link to play the file.
To Download: Right click the link and select "Save Link As" or “Save Target As”.

श्री शिवलीलामृत - ११ वा अध्याय (अपूर्ण) (Shivaleelamrut - 11th Chapter (Incomplete))

RamRaksha Stotra - श्री रामरक्षा स्तोत्र

Ganapati Atharvasheersh - श्री गणपत्यथर्वशीर्ष  (or in PDF)

Ganapati Stotra - गणपती स्तोत्र (words and English Meaning)

Guru Mantra - गुरू मंत्र

Another version of Guru Mantra (Guru Stotram) by Swami Atmananda.
Guru Stotram गुरू स्तोत्रम Text
Shiva Tandav Stotra - शिव तांडव स्तोत्र

Shiv Mahimna Stotra. Lyrics / शब्द

Vishnu Sahastranam - श्री विष्णुसहस्रनाम

Beej Mantra - बीज मंत्र

Maha Mrutyunjay Mantra - महा म्रुत्युंजय मंत्र

Shivoham

Kailas Rana Shiva Chandramouli - कैलास राणा शिव चंद्रमौळी

Mantra Pushpanjali - मंत्र पुष्पांजली

Bhimarupi Maharudra (Hanuman Stotra) - भीमरूपी महारुद्रा - शब्द

Mahishasur Mardini Stotra - महिषासुर मर्दिनी स्तोत्र -

Pasayadan - पसायदान शब्द

Purush Sukta (with meaning in English) - पुरूष सुक्त (इंग्रजी अनुवादासहित)

Chandika Devi Kavach - चंडिका देवी कवच

Durga Kavach 1 - दुर्गा कवच १

Durga Kavach 2 Anuradha Paudwal- दुर्गा कवच (अनुराधा पौडवाला)

Hanuman Kavach - हनुमान कवच

Shree Sukta - श्री सुक्त (Script and Meaning)
 - Thanks to Abhijeet V. Wajpe for this

जय अंबे माता Jaya Ambe Maata

Jai Jai Hanuman - जय जय हनुमान:
Shree Hanuman Chalisa (Anup Jalota) श्री हनुमान चालिसा (अनुप जलोटा)

Hanuman Austak - हनुमान अष्टक

Hanuman Stavan - हनुमान स्तवन

Chhand - छंद

Jiske Man Main Base Shreeramji - जिसके मनमें बसे श्रीरामजी

Jai Jai Jai Hanuman Ki - जय जय हनुमान की

Kab Loge Hamari Khabariya - कब लोगे हमारी खबरियाँ

Shree Hanuman Aarti - श्री हनुमान आरती

जय जगदीश हरे जय जगदीश हरे - Jay Jagadeesh Hare (words)

Credits:

Song from animation film Hanuman
Mahabali maharudra

beautifully sung by Vijay Prakash, Sonu Nigam, Shaan, Palash Sen, Kailash Kher, Madhushree, Sneha Pant, music by Tapas Relia and lyrics by Satish Mutatkar.

Lyrics in itrans ascii:
(jaya hanumaan gyaan guNa saagar
jaya kapiis tihu lok ujaagar
raamadoot atulit bal dhaamaa
a.njanee putra pavanasoot naamaa)

paraakram se gu.nje tribhuvan
dharatii paataal,duShTa bhanjan
jal saagar kare paraajay kra.ndan
trikaal nira.ntar lok va.ndan

mahaabali mahaarudraa mahaavajraa
shauryavaan veer hanumaan......

chehare se chhalakatii namrataa
aankho.n me.n shaa.nt chit kii chhaayaa
mukhapara hai.n subaha kii laalii
vishaal si.ndoor lipii kaayaa

(mahaabeer bikram bajara.ngii
kumatii nivaar sumatii ke sa.ngii
ka.nchan baran biraaj shubhesaa
kaanan ku.nDal ku.nchit kesaa
haat vajra aur dhvajaa biraje
khaa.nde moo.nj janeu saage
sha.nkar suvanaa kesarii na.ndan
tej prataap mahaa jag va.ndan)

bikaT samay nikaT jo aaye
pratham vahii smaraN aa jaaye
har vipadaa vo door kare
sa.nkaT mochan tabhii kahalaaye

shaktii kii nayii paribhaaShaa
viraaT vikramii roop anokhaa
laaye uThaaye droNagirii
aur jag dekhe leelaa nyaarii

Devanagari:
(जय हनुमान ग्यान गुण सागर
जय कपीस तिहु लोक उजागर
रामदूत अतुलित बल धामा
अंजनी पुत्र पवनसूत नामा)

पराक्रम से गुंजे त्रिभुवन
धरती पाताल,दुष्ट भन्जन
जल सागर करे पराजय क्रंदन
त्रिकाल निरंतर लोक वंदन

महाबलि महारुद्रा महावज्रा
शौर्यवान वीर हनुमान......

चेहरे से छलकती नम्रता
आन्खों में शांत चित की छाया
मुखपर हैं सुबह की लाली
विशाल सिंदूर लिपी काया

(महाबीर बिक्रम बजरंगी
कुमती निवार सुमती के संगी
कंचन बरन बिराज शुभेसा
कानन कुंडल कुंचित केसा
हात वज्र और ध्वजा बिरजे
खांदे मूंज जनेउ सागे
शंकर सुवना केसरी नंदन
तेज प्रताप महा जग वंदन)

बिकट समय निकट जो आये
प्रथम वही स्मरण आ जाये
हर विपदा वो दूर करे
संकट मोचन तभी कहलाये

शक्ती की नयी परिभाषा
विराट विक्रमी रूप अनोखा
लाये उठाये द्रोणगिरी
और जग देखे लीला न्यारी

Check if a site is phishing site.

Programming, Scripting, Security, webdev, , , , , ,

Here is the updated bookmarklet: Phishy? (tested on firefox 2.0 only!)

1. Drag this link to your bookmark. This checks if the site you are currently on is a phishing site.
2. Drag this link to your bookmark. This prompts for a URL and checks if it is a phising site.

Uses phishtank's check URL API.

If this does not work try turning debug to true above if you want to see the encoding.

Update: This still uses the GET method for checking the URL. Phishtank recommends using the POST interface (which will remove limitations on URL length: base64 inflates the length by 33%). Implementing that would need some kind of xmlhttprequest hackery. Stay tuned...

Update2: I got the AJAX bookmarklet ready, (thanks!)but it hits the infamous "uncaught exception: Permission denied to call method XMLHttpRequest.open" bug. i.e. you cannot do cross-domain xmlhttprequests. To solve that I think I need to convince PhishTank to host the javascript code, so the bookmarklet will insert a hidden iframe into the current page which will load the javascript from phishtank page, which will eventually make xmlhttprequest to phistank and display the result back. Are you listening PhishTank ?

Update3: Thanks to "till" who commented below, here is the bookmarklet using the POST method so now the solution will also work for really long URLs. Till's solution is good, but it makes users trust his site (in addition to phishtank). So basically user has to trust that he is not trying to filter the results being presented..

I have also merged the two earlier bookmarklets so that the current site location will be autopopulated in the prompt, so that user can easily change it if he wants to check a URL different from the one he currently is on.

Against all Enemies

Books, Security

Against all Enemies: Book CoverAgainst All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror is a fascinating account of events that happened inside the White House before and after 9/11 and how the focus shifted from fighting the terrorists to war with Iraq. I got to know about this book after watching Clinton's interview with Fox News. where he repeatedly asks the interviewer to read this book. The book starts off describing events in situation room and then goes back in history and explains the background of how Al-Qaeda started appearing on CIA's radar. There is an interesting account of different presidents and their view of terrorism and the changes in the mindset from Cold-War era to terrorism.

Excellent read and is highly recommended...

Fixing the geocoder gem.

Programming, ruby,

I wanted to use the ruby geocoder library on the windows machine, but the installation of the gem failed due to some weird error. I checked the rubyforge project page to see if someone else had a similar problems and someone actually had, but the bug was open for a long time. I decided to fix this issue and found that the problem was due to the fact that windows platform does not allow characters '?' and '&' in the filename with any escaping, period. The said files were used (in a very innovative way I must say!) to test the library by modifying http.rb to return the test datafile contents instead of fetching the URL from the net. (yay open classes in ruby!). The way I fixed the problem was to change the filenames to use '_' instead of '?' and '__' instead of '&'.

I wrote to the developer, but there was no response. Anyway I managed to create a new GEM with the changed files so that this should be installable on windows now. Here are the files if you want to try installing the gem. (Also including the tgz because... it got generated anyway!)
geocoder-0.1.1.gem
geocoder-0.1.1.tgz

More about Phishtank API

Internet, Programming, ruby, Security, software

Here is what will be good-to-have from phishtank.com API:

  • Good documentation about each interface e.g. how is callback_url used by auth.frob.request API ?
  • Description of all possible fields in return response (all possible XML elements and their possible values)
  • Some test URL's and emails which will return known responses (i.e. phishy URL, good URL, not in the database etc.)
  • Developer mailing list/wiki
  • Response should always honor the responseformat parameter if specified and valid

Phish Tank

Internet, Programming, ruby, Security, software, , , ,

http://www.phishtank.com is a new service which aims to help weed out phishing URLs and email addresses using wisdom of the crowds. Users can submit emails/URLs which they suspect of fraud and others can vote if they really are fraudulent or not. I think it is a great concept. There is a REST API using which applications can embed this webservice within them. So for example, there could be a outlook plugin which will display "phishy" email addresses in a special way in order to alert the user immediately. Same for web browsers which can render phishing websites in a special stylesheet. The applications can also add interface for the user to submit suspect pages and email easily without using web browsers.

I checked out the API and it does not feel like it is fully baked! There are interfaces for authorization and checking email/url status and submitting new emails/urls. Some things that stand out immediately are:

  • Exclusive use of SSL for the API access.
  • Parameter authentication (i.e. including cryptographic digest of all the parameters to ensure that parameters are not changed using man-in-the-middle attack)
  • Choice of xml or php output.

The api calling sequence works like this:

  1. User registers on the web for API access and gets api key and shared secret
  2. Using the API, application gets a frob (what is behind the name ?) and authorization url using auth.frob.request
  3. User has to authorize the frob using the authorization url specified in the response. (optionally you can specify callback url which the server will call for authorization, I will need to check this from home when I have access to a server -- the docs are very thin about the mechanism)
  4. Once authorized, app uses the frob and gets a token for short time API access (30 minutes in my tests) (auth.token.request)
  5. App can check token status which tells remaining time on token.(auth.token.status)
  6. App can revoke the token when it is done using it. (auth.token.revoke)
  7. The APIs for check.url, check.email, submit.url, submit.email then use the token.

I did not understand why there is a need for FROB in this, why can't you just get the token from api key and shared secret ? What problem are they solving by this indirection ?

Anyway, here is the ruby script that I used for testing this... I am planning to turn this into a module, but providing it here for early access...
phishtank.rb
config.yml

P.S. the check_url interface is not working, I am getting invalid token error. and the same token can be revoked successfully.
P.P.S. The API uses SSL (no cleartext api available) and ruby's open-uri library insists on checking the server SSL certificate which always fails (probably because signer needs to be trusted by openssl), I had to change it locally to ignore ssl verification in order to proceed.

Update (Oct/12/06): the check.url interface is finally working. For this API, the signature needs to be calculated before escaping the url. I refactored the ruby script a bit to remove redundant code and moved the configuration to a seperate file. I still need to work with the response parser and make it general for all types of responses. XML parsing gets so ugly so fast, it's amazing!

Book Update

Books

Haven't been updating the blog recently... Here are some books I read in the last few weeks...

  • A View from the TOP (Audio Book) by Zig Ziglar. A very good audio programme about achieving significance in all aspects of life - Health, Finance, Relationships, Spirituality. This may be the first time I encountered someone being so open about his religious beliefs in a self-help program.
  • Think and Grow Rich - CoverThink and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill - about creating a burning desire to achieve success and generating ideas.
  • Digital FortressDigital Fortress by Dan Brown - I was fascinated by earlier two books by Dan Brown - Angels and Demons and The DaVinci Code and this one deals with topics that are dearer to me - Security, Encryption, NSA. But I did not find it as gripping as the first two. I was particularly turned off by the concepts (e.g. mutation strings) that the author tries to create for the story to advance, such things just turn the brain off. (That makes me think that maybe I enjoyed the first two books because I do not have any knowledge about the topics of Pope, Illuminati, Christian history)
  • Deception PointDeception Point - by Dan Brown. This was even more boring about a new discovery by NASA, the politics, cover-ups, yawn...

Ruby script to get a list of all mp3 files in a directory sorted durationwise.

Computer Science, Programming, ruby

Here is some ruby practice...

def mp3len(dirname)
require 'mp3info'
summary=[]
Dir[dirname].each do |f|
Mp3Info.open(f) do |info|
summary.push([f,info.length])
end
end
summary
end

puts "Enter directory containing mp3 files"
dirname=gets.chomp
dirname = File.expand_path(dirname)
puts "Searching #{dirname}"
dirname += "/**/*.mp3"

s=mp3len(dirname).sort {|a,b| a[1] < => b[1]}
s.each{|q| puts "#{q[0]} => #{q[1]} seconds"}

Update: Here is the link to the file on github (for updates) or the git repository

Using GPG from behind proxies.

Security, Work

I have struggled a lot to get the GPG working inside corporate firewalls. It is so cumbersome to set the tools to automatically request keys from keyserver for signature validations. Finally found the magic options for doing this from behind HTTP proxy. Just keeping this command here for reference.

gpg --keyserver x-hkp://pgp.mit.edu --keyserver-options honor-http-proxy --recv-key 060C80C2

Fair Use and Google Book Search

Books, DRM, Internet

There is a big copyright violation fight going on between Copyright Holders and Google about what is fair use and what is a violation. I came across a great article by Cory Doctorow on this issue. He is firmly on the side of Google on this issue and lists the three main points of contention:

  1. Google should cut copyright holders in for a slice of any revenue that comes from this.
  2. Google should have obtained permission before scanning the GBS books
  3. Although Google only shows excerpts, wily hackers could eventually piece together enough excerpts to reproduce the entire GBS library and then post it on the Internet

He then goes and explains how each of the three points are invalid. As he rightly points out, the biggest threat as an author isn't piracy, it's obscurity.

He has quotes Tim O'reilly, who says Piracy is progressive taxation. This appears in this article which is also a must read. That article was written in 2002 and was about legality of online file sharing.

If I were a copyright holder, (I mean a big copyright holder), my own stand would be to let google scan and index all my work (with possible penaulties if any evidence was found that people can hack google's system to reconstruct the complete work). The publishing industry will definitely move online and I will gain more if people can find links to my work when they are searching for related content.

Book update

Books

Here are the books read in the past few weeks:

Blink : The Power of Thinking Without ThinkingBlink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell is about snap judgements (the author terms this as thinslicing)that we make about things, people. It gives a lot of examples where people make judgements about certain objects (e.g. whether a statue is genuine or fake) or people (whether the teacher is good or not). In many cases the judgements are amazingly correct with no scientific logic behind the judgement, but in other cases they are plain wrong. Malcolm has also written about the topic in this New Yorker article. Though the book has a lot of fascinating examples, I found much of the material common-sense and as you would guess there is no positive or negative about these judgements.

How to Win Friends and Influence PeopleHow to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie is about various things that make you popular among people. As we all find out by experience, people that are most popular and/or make a lot of money are not necessarily geniuses, but they all have very good people skills. Some pieces of advice from the book: Never critisize, Praise (not flatter) people to give them importance, Make people want to do the things that you want them to do, Smile. Overall a good book with a nice conversational style (though the examples given are those of people way out in past - hey, the book was written in 1936!)

Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into CustomersPermission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers by Seth Godin is about a new way of marketing where the marketer instead of interrupting the consumer, builds a long term relation with him. They offer some goodies in order to get permissions to send messages to the consumers and then they continue offering more and more baits to obtain more permissions. A very good read. Even though Seth works for Yahoo, it seems like their competitor is using his concepts in much more effective ways.

Emacs Rectangle Editing quick help

emacs

Enter picture mode (ESC-x picture-mode)

Marking rectangle

  • Go to top left corner, press CTRL-Space.
  • Go to bottom right, press CTRL-x-x (This selects the rectangle)

Working on rectangle

  • Press CTRL-x-r-k to kill the rectangle (and make it available as 'last-killed-rectangle')
  • Press CTRL-x-r-d to delete the rectangle
  • Press CTRL-x-r-y to yank 'last-killed-rectangle' with its top right at the mark.

    • Press ESC-x-clear-rectangle to fill the rectangle with spaces.

Finally quit the picture mode with CTRL-c-c