Tag Archives: Scripting

Dear Lazyweb

audio, Programming, software, webdev, , , , ,

I am looking for a flash media player which can play audio/video content in browser. I am currently using del.icio.us's playtagger for now, but it is limited to mp3 only (I had to change the code a little bit to prevent it from adding multiple inclusions - my changed code is here) and it does not allow rewind/forward.

I also looked at this post which suggests using google video player, which would be nice as it could then also play video files, but it consumes a lot of real estate on the pages. There is also this website mentioned which is nicer but that player is bigger than I want too... And it is probably not a fair use as it is undocumented use...

I also checked out the odeo player, which is nice but you need to host the files on odeo, which is a no-no.

Here are my requirements for this with a scorecard for Playtagger and Google:

  • Easy to use. No need to add tag soup for each file. (Del.icio.us + Google -)
  • Small size on the page (need to collapse the buttons until user clicks on play button) (Del.icio.us + Google -)
  • Ability to rewind/fast forward (Del.icio.us - Google +)
  • Play different media formats (mp3/wav/ogg/avi/mpeg video, possibly realmedia) (Del.icio.us - Google +)

Any suggestions ?

Thanks!

Fix maharashtratimes.com font problems on firefox

devanagari, India, Programming, Scripting, webdev, , , , , , ,

Maharshtratimes.com (or maharashtratimes.indiatimes.com) is a marathi news website using unicode fonts. But it does not display correctly on firefox browser. The problem is because of a single HTML div which uses justified font style. It displays correctly on IE (which is why it is not getting fixed) - this could be because of firefox's buggy implementation of "align: justify" or that IE simply ignores that style (likely).

Anyway, here is a javascript one liner that you can bookmark and once the page is loaded, click on it to fix your font problem.

Fix Ma. Ta. -- Drag this link to your bookmarks.

I tried to create a greasemonkey script to do this automatically, but it's not working for some reason...

Update: Apparently it *is* a mozilla/firefox bug open for 4+ years. See here and here.

Update2: Here is a greasemonkey script by Saravana Kumar to fix this issue. Caution: you might want to change the included domains carefully (it by default runs on all http and https sites!)

Update3: Here is my greasemonkey script specific for maharashtratimes. Enjoy!

Update4: (2009-02-16) The original site seems to have removed this style attribute now. So the above post is now only for posterity.

Using Ruby for integer format conversions

Programming, ruby, Scripting, ,

Here are some recipes for interpreting stream of bytes as different C types. I will keep adding more to this as I go...

Convert a byte stream (embedded in a string) into 1 byte signed integers:
"\xfc\xfd\xfe\xff".unpack("c*")
=> [-4, -3, -2, -1]
Convert a byte stream (embedded in a string) into 1 byte unsigned integers:
"\xfc\xfd\xfe\xff".unpack("C*")
=> [252, 253, 254, 255]

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.

Yahoo Geocoding in ruby…

Internet, Programming, ruby, Scripting, webdev, , , , , , , ,

Find lattitude and longitude of any address

Yahoo just released a new beta of their maps webservice. Here is a small ruby script (inspired by Rasmus's PHP code ) that I wrote that returns Lattitude, Longitude of the address provided...

require 'open-uri'
require "rexml/document"
include REXML
url='http://api.local.yahoo.com/MapsService/V1/geocode?appid=yahoomap.rb&location='
puts 'Enter Location: '
address=gets
address=URI.escape(address)
result=URI(url+address).read
doc = Document.new result
r=doc.elements["/ResultSet/Result"]
print "Precision: ", r.attributes["precision"],"\n"
r.children.each { |c| print c.name, " : ",c.text,"\n"}

Update: Here is a link to the script in github or to the .