Category Archives: Nitin’s Blog

Firefox extensions to improve history tools

We visit and revisit web pages. You will find that more than 60% of your web visits are actually revisits of some sort. But web browsers support for such revisitations is limited to bookmarks, history list, URL auto-completion and back button. Here are a few history tools which can greatly improve your experience during web browsing.

  • Tab History: It is the simplest yet very useful extension. Usually when we open a link in a new tab, the back button history for the new tab is empty. This extensions adds the session history from the parent tab to this new tab, so that you are not lost with the question “where do i come from?”.
  • Tree Style Tab: This extension arranges your tabs in a tree structure, like a folder tree of Windows explorer. So whenever you open a new tab from a link, this tab is added as ‘child’ node in the tab tree of the parent node.
    Tree style tab

    Tree style tab

    You can conveniently arrange these tabs in the tree using the simple drap and drop feature. You can go through  an extensive list of features on the official site. One thing I would like to mention is that if you close a tab, its children are orphaned. As the father is gone, no way children would know about their grandparents ;). Continue reading

“Hey Chef”, South Park

Some of the “quotes” I like from South Park, by Chef.
Disclaimer: The following contains coarse language and due to its content it should not be viewed by anyone.

Chef with Boys

Episode 401

Chef: Well look at you cute little crackers with your money and your fancy clothes and your cell phones. It’s almost like you were… Oh my God! Children, what have I told you about drugs
Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny: There’s a time and a place for everything and it’s called college.
Continue reading

Facebook: Bug with URL encoding

Today, while I was working on the URL encoding for the recently released Facebook-style Links module, I realized a bug with Link Attachments feature on Facebook. Before I explain, let us reproduce it:

Try to attach the following link on Facebook: http://google.com/search?q=blenders%26pride. This URL actually queries Google for ‘blenders&pride’. Facebook converts/encodes the above URL to http://google.com/search?q=blenders&pride which is not the same as above and queries Google for just ‘blenders’.

So, why Facebook does this? Probably Facebook tries to encode the URL to remove the characters which are not allowed by RFC 3986 and replaces them with their percent encoding. But there are certain characters which should not be encoded, such as ‘/’, ‘?’, ‘#’, ‘@’ which are the reserved characters and used as delimiters in the URL. So, it decodes these characters and converts their encoding to the original character which gives rise to the problem. Let us see an example:
Continue reading

Dumping a remote SVN repository without admin access

When you need to dump a SVN repository, all you have to do is

svnadmin dump REPOS_PATH

But wait, then you need to have admin access to the server on which your SVN repository is hosted. Often, that is not the case and you have to contact the company which hosts your repository to do it for you. I have a repository hosted at CVSdude and I needed to dump it. As I am on the Developer Edition plan, I do not enjoy the privileges to backup my repositories from my admin panel. I could have mailed the guys at cvsdude, who according to me are quite supportive and quick to respond, but that would have taken longer than what I am going to describe next.

SVN provides a unique utility, svnsync which is a Subversion remote repository mirroring tool. Put simply, it allows you to replay the revisions of one repository into another one. Now, we can create an empty repository on our local system, synchronize it with the remote repository and then dump the local repository. Follow the following 4 step process to have a dump of your repository:
Continue reading

GoogleSharing: Remain Anonymous from Google

Who knows more about the citizens in their own country, Kim Jong-Il or Google?

Google tracks everything, your searches, web movement which arises from your search, what places you went last summer (or are planning to go, thanks to Google maps). Google not only knows about you but also understands you much better than your own girlfriend. If that freaks you out, I’d say you are in your right mind. But now you can avoid it to a certain extent by using GoogleSharing.

GoogleSharing is an extension for Firefox, which will anonymize your requests to Google products which do not require you to log in but where your activities can be tracked by Google. Google keep tracks of you through cookies. If you attempt to strip off your cookies from your HTTP request, Google might tag you as spam bot and will force you to type in a CAPTCHA for your every request.
Continue reading

Withdraw PayPal Money Directly to A Bank Account in India

PayPal is used by a lot of online merchants to accept payments for the products they sell online. PayPal can also be used to accept donations for your technical open source projects or charity organization.

Recently, I opened an account with PayPal to accept payments from my clients who reside outside India. Before I started, I searched for reviews on PayPal which seemed quite horrible. You can read a lot of them here. But then I needed the payments and had no other option (without spending a huge transaction amount), so gave it a try and I am happy that my experience with them till now is excellent.

So, here is a step by step procedure to Withdraw funds to your bank account in India. Continue reading