Reliance IndiaCall Website Hacked?

Published September 9th, 2006 in Blog. 2 Comments

About four hours ago, someone called and said RelianceIndiaCall has been hacked. Apparently, credit card numbers of subscribers were posted on the home page.

Almost every Indian I know in the United States uses Reliance, which, to give its due, provides a decent service for calling people in India (and lately, a lot more countries). The call quality is almost always better than the weird names phone cards, and it comes with nice little extras like pinless dialing and an online phone book. The popular opinion is that Reliance India Call is much better than other phone cards, especially when calling India from the United States.

Since then, the website has been down, adding credibility to the rumor. Leave a comment if you have any information.

Update: 09/10 4 PM EDT - The website is up, but the displayed balance is $0, although you can still use your left minutes. The customer service phone lines are very busy.

Read Your Yahoo! Mails With Fewer Clicks

Published July 31st, 2006 in Greasemonkey and Yahoo. 0 Comments

I wrote a Greasemonkey script today that lets you preview your Yahoo! email messages right from your Inbox, or a message folder. Yahoo! is not my primary email service provider - I mostly use it for my Internet subscriptions and such, which means that I never actually reply to emails in there, but I would still read most of them. I didn’t want to have to click on every message just to see what it says. The script adds a small text link just near the subject line, which when clicked on shows the message content in a dynamic layer. Saves me a lot of time and clicks. Check it out here.

Dilbert on Google.com

Published June 21st, 2006 in Blog, Google and Greasemonkey. 4 Comments

Dilbert on Google.comUserscripts.org is a nice place to be. It has lots of cool scripts, and I have been writing a few lately.

Today, I wrote a Greasemonkey script that inserts the strip of the day from Dilbert.com on Google’s homepage. Check it out.

Greasemonkey script to use Google Send to Phone

Published June 19th, 2006 in Blog, Google and Greasemonkey. 1 Comment

Google Labs has a nice Firefox extension called Google Send to Phone that you can use to, well, send text from web pages to your phone. However, a lot of people do not seem to like to install an extension to do something like this, and also, the extension adds an icon 16×16 in size to your toolbar, which makes the toolbar at least 16 pixels high. [See screenshots below]. I didn’t like that - so I wrote a Greasemonkey script to do the same thing, without having to install the extension.

Before

Before

After

After

Click here to install the script. To use it, just select text on a web page and hit S. To get back to where you were, click on the « Back link on the Google Send to Phone page. This was necessary because the Google Send to Phone page uses redirects, promptly breaking the back button.

Unsleepable Title Graphic Using GIMP

Published May 5th, 2006 in Blog, Themes and Wordpress. 11 Comments

Ben Gray of OpenSwitch recently released an amazing free Wordpress theme called Unsleepable. It’s unbelievably gorgeous and yet so simple. My favorite wordpress theme was K2 until now, but I am switching over to Unsleepable - it is built upon K2 after all.

Unsleepable uses a graphic for its blog header, and you can find a tutorial (by Ben himself) on how to create the graphic using Photoshop.

Hey! I can’t afford Photoshop. (And neither can any of my friends!). I have always done using GIMP whatever I had to do using Photoshop. So, I tried, and I hope you can see my title graphic on the top of this page. It wasn’t rather straightforward getting it done in GIMP - so I thought I’ll write a tutorial. I assume you have basic knowledge of GIMP. I used GIMP 2.2, but it shouldn’t really matter if you have an older version.

Step 1: Open GIMP and create a new image. The size doesn’t matter, as long it is big enough for your text to fit. By default, GIMP creates a white background.

Step 2: Change the foreground color to #333333. Fill the background with the foreground color (Ctrl+,).

Step 3: Create the text. As far as I know, there is no way in GIMP to select a part of text and change it to a different color. If you want multiple colors, create multiple layers of text and align them together. You may want to use a few Guides.

Create text

Step 4: Select “Flatten Image” from the Image menu. Then, select “Autocrop Image”, again from the Image menu. By now, you would have something like in the image below.

Flattened and Autocropped

Step 5: Select Layer » Transparency » Add Alpha Channel. Nothing will happen, don’t panic. Select Select (as in the Select menu item) » By Color and click anywhere on the background (anywhere except on your text). You should see something like this:

Almost there

Step 6: Select Edit » Clear (Ctrl+K). Save the image as a GIF file (title.gif) and upload it to the right place (wp-content/themes/unsleepable/images) on your server, cross your fingers, and hit the refresh button on the browser window displaying your blog.

New blog, new theme

Published May 4th, 2006 in Blog and Wordpress. 0 Comments

This is my new blog, and I am using a great new Wordpress theme. I was too lazy to move my old posts here - I am sure it’s not worth the trouble. I am currently moving my other blogs onto this server - and I hope to be done by the weekend. Feel free to go elsewhere until then.

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