Waves

Hey friends, lots of people have been asking me why I have two separate blogs (tech and non-tech), while I could have them both in the same place. I would like to answer that in 2 ways:

1. Both the blogs are in the same place. All the posts in the proper order can be viewed at http://www.aswinanand.com/blog.
2. Subdomains such as http://blog.aswinanand.com/ and http://tech.aswinanand.com/ exist for backward compatibility.

Long back, when I started blogging, while many readers enjoyed reading my blog, some of them didn’t like the tech content in between. Hence, I moved the tech content to another blog. Finally, when blogger for domains came in, my tech and non-tech blogs became available at the links mentioned above. Hence, for those users who had subscribed to this blog, I didn’t want them to lose out.

So, the actual blog url is http://www.aswinanand.com/blog and the tech and non-tech blog show contents from the space, just separated by tags. This, along with the magic of htaccess and 1 php file, many things can be changed so that the permalinks will be available in a better fashion. Moreover, when I want to do a post in both the tech and non-tech blogs (like this one), I can just add the 2 tags to this post and they are available in both the blogs. Change the post once and the change is visible in both the blogs (if you visit them separately). Configuring a mobile client for the same is very easy and all this can be done in a single space 😀

When this blog pings certain links after an update is made (like technorati etc.), the blog url goes as http://www.aswinanand.com/blog and not blog.aswinanand.com or tech.aswinanand.com. Therefore, when someone is redirected by search engine results, they will just visit the full blog and not the other ones 😉 How’s that?

When template is changed, the change is visible all throughout 🙂 and looks very uniform. So…. that’s the reason for both the blogs being “virtually separate” hehe…

Friends, I have moved this tech blog to my own domain. You can now read the blog at http://tech.aswinanand.com/ and get your feeds at http://tech.aswinanand.com/atom.xml.

Do stay in touch 🙂

P.S: I posted this message long ago on my non-tech blog and completely forgot about posting it here.

Yep! it’s true. The news is out. I purchased a brand new Nokia E51. The device has not yet been listed on the Nokia Asia site as of 4 days ago. Support activities don’t accept E51 as a model. Even many mobile shops in Chennai do not know about a device called E51. It was first released world wide on September 2007 according to gsmarena.com and its specs arrived on my rss reader just a few days ago 😀 To tell about the device, its truly awesome! Battery life comes close to 2 and a half days, which is pretty good for a smart phone. It is a Series 60 3rd edition phone with feature pack 1, running Symbian OS v9.1. Supports lots of applications and most importantly, supports many of the latest Java ME APIs. This means that, I can now try a whole new range of applications which was not possible using my old phone.

Since E51 is supposedly a “business class” device :P, it supports all modes of connection.. such as bluetooth, infrared, wifi, usb, push-to-talk and the usual sms, ems, email, mms etc. It also supports VoIP over LAN. Therefore, when my office provides wifi, I can use the in-house SIP server to communicate to colleagues directly from my mobile ;-). The screen resolution is very good. It has a light sensor on top left of the phone which adjusts the display on the amount of external light available. The keypad is very comfortable. There are 4 dedicated keys for doing 8 specific operations, 6 of which can be customised. Apart from that, you can configure the 6 quick launch icons available from the phone’s standby mode, not to mention the 2 soft keys. Apart from all this, there is 1 touch access to switch on bluetooth, browser and silent mode. You can therefore, configure 14 icons to suit your needs/interests.

Browser is superb. It’s a port of webkit and displays websites as-they-are on a wifi connection. On normal connections (such as GPRS), the browser s/w tries to tone down the site so that the site is usable. There are zoom features available too 🙂 (please don’t compare with an iPhone here). It has an inbuilt RSS reader which sucks. Supports an unlimited number of contact entries. The phone’s 2.0 megapixel camera is pretty good. It doesn’t have flash, but it still does a decent job in fairly lit places. On open sunlight, the picture clarity is too good.

It has a decent music player. But considering the fact that it runs Symbian, there are tons n tons of music software available.

However, there are a few features that I miss from this E51. These small features are available on almost all Sony Ericsson phones.

1. Intellisense support when typing messages/emails. I’m not kidding. When you switch on to T9 mode and start typing, a small menu pops up – right next to the cursor - with possible words, on K300i. You can select whichever word you want.
2. New Paragraphs. Opening up new paragraphs in my K300i was a breeze. Not possible in E51.
3. When you receive a call, K300i shows a small icon. That icon denotes the number-type. E.g. You have stored 3 numbers for a contact (home, business & mobile). When the caller calls from a mobile, a small mobile icon is shown. The same is applicable with SMS also. But such a number categorisation is not visible at first sight on this E51. Miss this feature very much. Deciding the type of number from the call is not fun because in most cases, we don’t remember the number at all.

One huge advantage of the phone is that, it’s very sleek and handy. Put it in your upocket and you will forget that the phone even exists. For all the bells and whistles, the phone is slightly on the heavier side. But its ok, considering the fact that it has a whole lot of features. Loud speaker clarity is very good. Calendar is on the nicer side. The best part of calendar is that, if you place something on the todo list and don’t get it done, it screams on the standby, making you feel very guilty … heheh!

It comes with a very powerful 369Mhz, ARM 11 CPU, 96 MB of SDRAM and built-in 130 MB of storage. Supports micro-sd based memory cards upto 4GB. Heap size is unlimited, which means, apps can use any amount of memory, only limited by the device specs. Java ME JAR files can also be of unlimited size. It supports HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access), which is all set to invade GSM in less than a couple of years.

All-in-all, it’s a very nice package and comes at a very low rate compared to all other phones having these features. Go, drool over the specs :D and let me know if you want any clarifications on any of the features.

Enjoyed this story? Please do a favour by digging it.

Time and again, there are countless number of articles written on not to trust user input and do a server side validation of all input. There are quite a lot of libraries in all imaginable languagues that make server side validation very easy.

But time and again, every other site pops up that have only client side validation. One such site is http://www.cinetickets.in/. The site has a registration page. The first field required is called “user id” and we have to give our phone number. What crap!

On firefox, there is a superb toolbar called the Web Developer toolbar. Once installed, you can play with all components of the page, including cookies, headers, scripts … anything. That “user id” field accepts only numbers. Hence, I disabled all javascripts on the page, entered some text, filled up the rest of the page and clicked on Submit. Guess what? The page registered perfectly. With scripts disabled, I’m able to login also.

I went back to the registration page again (with all javascript disabled ofcourse!) and clicked on Submit without giving any data. The site throws an error message saying that the user is already registered. LMAO.

With such crappy validation schemes, I’m pretty sure that there are no server side validations being done as well. They are just taking data from the client and pushing them into a database (most probably MySql) without sensitive data being encrypted (they accept credit card details etc.). Assuming I’m a hacker, the site can be brought down within a few minutes! Looks like the CineTickets website is programmed by a company called EvinceTech.com. Don’t ever outsource your website development there. It’s very easy to conclude that they are a shit load of programmers.

Anyways, I found an awesome PHP script some days ago that filters out dangerous tags from strings. The script is available here. I encourage everyone to use it, if you can’t/don’t-want-to write one on your own.