i n d i k a ' s BLOG

Facebook automatic birthday wishes

2010-05-09T18:18:00.000-07:00

I've always wanted to see a facebook app to automatically respond to friends birthdays... not because I'm lazy to log in everyday (don't ask why then do I have an account :) but because I care for each of my friends. Anyway, since I don't know how to write an FB app I used this nice app called FBCMD (this gives command line access to FB) to send b'day greetings to all my friends.

I wrote this tiny script to check b'days of my friends and send greetings. Of course the greetings are random and customizable...and you can ignore friends that you don't want to greet (though I don't use this feature :)

You need to have working FBCMD and python installations. Setting up is just as easy. Add it to scheduled tasks or anacron or whatever and you have a personal assistant to greet friends everyday.. enjoy !

pppd session history tool

2008-11-13T05:09:00.000-08:00

Don't you think it is really nice to have ppp session history .. ?
Well, KPPP and QtWvdial(a pretty front-end for wvdial) provide history but for me neither worked :-(

So here is a tiny tool to generate history which parses syslog for pppd statistics and provides summary for given range of dates. This also keeps track of older stats that may not be available from syslog (as they were rotated)
hist.py

FREC - A little Face RECognition program

2008-06-10T23:33:00.000-07:00

This is a little Face RECognition program I wrote with C++ and OpenCV.

The purpose of this program is to provide an extensible platform to develop
different face recognition and image pre-processing algorithms and test them with ease.

Currently this includes a couple of basic image pre-processing algorithms and
Eigen Method(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenface) based face recognition system.

This can be run in interactive mode and in a Self Test mode.

I used the face db at here to test and the results are quite amazing !
The only outputs are Gnuplot scripts and data files (for now). I'll upload the colorful plots soon...

Download FREC
Download YConfigFile (this is a small lib to manage config files)
Download OpenCV

There are few things TODO.
- autotools to build
- some dependency with OpenCV internal headers. Try to remove
- write a couple of pre-processors for different purposes
- provide a decent results document

Break / Bypass download limit !! Hack the squid proxy :-)

2008-01-21T21:10:00.000-08:00

Many http proxies enforce a download limit to users.e.g no downloads over 5MB
It is really horrible... if you can download 10 files of 1MB this is simply $%%%

while trying to figure out a workaround I found this very simple method...
why not fool the proxy saying we are downloading only small files ?

Here's a small script to do it. It works with squid proxies.
Download it from here

I wrote its initial version in C. However, it became quite difficult to install because of externel dependancies. But this will work if you have perl & curl which all systems usually have...

If you like this pls link to this page and make this popular... I'd like to see people removing this stupid download limit thing and make the www free !

enjoy breaking limits !!

pls report dead link to indikabandara19@(yahoo|gmail).com

Vim Tips & Tricks

2008-01-14T21:02:00.000-08:00

There are so many excellent Vim Tips pages out there...
This is just a small collections of nice plugins/tools I use all the time
These come very handy if you are writing code on vim.

1. taglist(plugin) - Function browser in a seperate window ! looks like a bare minimum IDE !!!
http://vim-taglist.sourceforge.net/
2. cscope(external tool) - Calling/Called function browser, Find C symbols, Find function definitions
http://cscope.sourceforge.net/
3. ctags(external tool) - Generate tag file of C/C++/... functions and go to functions definitions on the fly
However taglist & cscope can do this too
http://ctags.sourceforge.net/

Bought my new gadget ZTE-f152 !

2008-01-10T03:04:00.002-08:00

ZTE - f152 cheap 3G phone... excellent features
far better than a regular one for the price
NOKIA, Sony phones are great.. but why are they so expensive?

This has ZTE - USB modem
connects to linux like a charm with usbserial stock module comes with FC6
(I only tested on FC6)
- #tail -f /var/log/messages
- #lsusb > before
- plug phone
- #lsusb > after
- compare before & after files and find the vendor & product id of new usb device
- #modprobe usbserial vendor=0xaaaa product=0xbbbb
- look at /var/log/messages for something like
.... usb 1-1: generic converter now attached to ttyUSB0 ....

- if modprobe above gave some error try modprobe -r usbserial before plugging phone
- if all goes well fire up kppp/wvdial with the new modem /dev/ttyUSB0

Comes with a phone manager software for XP
works with gammu/wammu too!
Phone Home page
http://www.zte.com.au/main/F152.htm

Additional info about Linux compatible mobile phones
TuxMobil - Linux on laptops, PDAs, mobile phones

What is 19 about me?

2007-08-02T01:39:00.000-07:00

Why do i have 19 appended for most of my mail IDs, www sites etc?
u thought about that too?(well that's surprising...)
anyway, it is not because i started this when i was 19 or i was born in 1919.
In fact 19 is my LUCKY number. i was born in december 19, my employee ID sums upto 19 and my uni ID used to sum up to 19 .... and the list goes on.. pretty strange huh?

Change of phone number 08/08/2006

2006-08-09T06:32:00.000-07:00

Changed my phone number to +94 77 344 50 80 . i know u tried my old no and got frustrated and still trying... sorry

at last ... uni days r over

2006-06-22T23:28:00.000-07:00

its time to say good bye to my beloved campus... will be leaving this place in couple of months time

started blog 22/06/2006

2006-06-22T23:12:00.000-07:00

every odd bugger seems to have a blog these days... so why not ME!