Reasons to gift/receive saplings

a) Encourage gifting of saplings on birthdays/auspicious occasionsThe Sapling Project
b) Encourage your child to plant and take care of sapling
c) Gift yourself a sapling on 15′th august/26′th jan/1’st jan
d) Re-initiate lost/forgone relationship by sending saplings
e) Every year when you are renewing or buying your insurance (Life/Car), plant a sapling
f) Plant few saplings in memory of lost ones

We are looking for distributing and plating at-least 10000 Saplings in mumbai in 2010.

Please join hands at http://thesaplingproject.com/

Please feel free to add more ideas for distribution/receiving/gifting saplings :-)

The Sapling Project – Online to Offline

We went live with our first Sapling Project distribution drive today at Shivaji Park.

We shared around 120 saplings (Neem, Ashoka, Herbal Creepers) to friends who signed up, Housing Societies in Shivaji Park, General Public .

We also planted a few saplings at the Scouts Pavilion.

Would like to thank all the people both Online and Offline who Tweeted , RT’d , Blogged, Invited others on the Facebook &  turned up for the cause and volunteered for  The Sapling Project.

Thanks to Neeraj, Priyanka, Raxit, Priti Special thanks to Maithili  & Shalaka.

A big thanks to all those who contributed in sponsoring the Saplings.

Sharing some Pics

Saplings Loaded & Ready to Share

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More Pics  http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/thesaplingproject/

Today was just a start, we will take the movement further  and continue with regular sapling distribution drives in Bombay and other cities.

Coming Soon:-

Sapling project in Bangalore, Chennai & Delhi.

Photo Contest for people who planted sapling.

Sapling Van – Moving all across the city.

Thanks, Peace and Breathe Easy :)

Tiger Woods Accenture Homepage photo

Amidst the current problems faced by tiger woods in his personal life, last thing he could have expected accenture to do is put some really funny photograph of his on their homepage.

I mean nothing is wrong with the photograph … the timing of putting it on website could be weird …

It could not be intentional .. However tag line is absolutely apt : Opportunity isn’t always obvious

Opportunity isnt always obvious

Opportunity isn't always obvious

The sapling project : Mumbai, December 2009

We are starting with Mumbai Chapter of The Sapling Project on 19′th December 2009.

theSaplingProject Date: 19/12/2009
Time: 11 am
Venue: Shivaji Park Dadar, Opp Barista, Mumbai.

Info for Sapling Sponsors  -

You can sponsor any amount (Cash, Cheque, Wire ) to the cause to either Ranjeet Walunj or Satish Vijaykumar or handover at the venue.

Do feel free to call us in case of anything.

Website : http://thesaplingproject.com/

Twitter : @bombaylives @ranjeet_walunj

Map : Barista, shivaji park

The Sapling Project

The Sapling Project

Me and Satish are doing a small campaign to plant and share saplings, free of cost to one and all in different parts of our city.

Do check out http://thesaplingproject.com/ for more details and to sign up for the saplings.

Hopefully if we manage to get more friends interested in the idea , we should be able to trigger similar endeavors in different cities all over India

Do lemme know your views/inputs .

Peace &  Breathe Easy :)

Wordpress hacks: passing custom session variables in cforms

Many a times people configure and run their entire website using Wordpress.

cforms is an awesome feature rich plugin for Wordpress, offering convenient deployment of multiple Ajax driven contact forms throughout the website.
Many wordpress based websites use cforms to capture and store form submissions on their site.

Recently came across a requirement where client is running his website on wordpress and also using online marketing campaigns (google, adnetworks)  to drive traffic to his website.

Requirement was to track those custom variables (source, creative name) passed to his website.

Many analytics tools should be able to do this, however he wanted to store the data in surfer cforms submissions in database as well as take some action based on his submission.

This can be achieved using following Steps:

Step 1)   Edit header.php of your wordpress theme and add following lines at the start of the file

session_start();
$am_usrc=$_GET['source'];
$am_adunit=$_GET['adunit'];
if (isset($am_usrc)) {
$_SESSION["amSrc"] = $am_usrc;
$_SESSION["amUnit"] = $am_adunit;
}

Note the variable names and use them as per your variable names. Also you can store them in sessions/cookies/database as per your requirement.

Step 2) Now define the variable names in `lib_aux.php` file from plugins/cforms directory in following manner

### get variables from session and assign to your temp variables
$sessCampaignSRC = $_SESSION["amSrc"];
$sessCampaignAdUnit = $_SESSION["amUnit"];

$m  = str_replace( ‘{Referer}’,        $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], $m );
$m  = str_replace( ‘{PostID}’,        $pid, $m );
$m     = str_replace( ‘{Form Name}’,    $cformsSettings['form'.$no]['cforms'.$no.'_fname'], $m );
$m     = str_replace( ‘{Page}’,        $page, $m );
$m     = str_replace( ‘{Date}’,        $date, $m );
$m     = str_replace( ‘{Author}’,        $find->display_name, $m );
$m     = str_replace( ‘{Time}’,        $time, $m );
$m     = str_replace( ‘{IP}’,            cf_getip(), $m );
$m     = str_replace( ‘{BLOGNAME}’,    get_option(‘blogname’), $m );

$m     = str_replace( ‘{CurUserID}’,    $CurrUser->ID, $m );
$m     = str_replace( ‘{CurUserName}’,    $CurrUser->display_name, $m );
$m     = str_replace( ‘{CurUserEmail}’,$CurrUser->user_email, $m );

$m     = str_replace( ‘{Permalink}’,    $permalink, $m );
$m     = str_replace( ‘{Title}’,        $find->post_title, $m );
$m     = str_replace( ‘{Excerpt}’,        $find->post_excerpt, $m );

### define your custome variables campaignSRC and campaignAdUnit to store the values from temporary variables
$m = str_replace( ‘{campaignSRC}’, $sessCampaignSRC, $m );
$m = str_replace( ‘{campaignAdUnit}’, $sessCampaignAdUnit, $m );

Note: the variable names and session retrieval … you can get them from cookies if you’ve stored them in cookie files
Also make sure variables used have unique names without conflicting with cforms variable names

Step 3) Use the above mentioned custom variable names in cforms while configuring hidden variables and their values.

{campaignSRC}
{campaignAdUnit}

Configure your form accordingly and insert into your normal post and you are done :-)

Working example of the same can be found here on following two links

Sample Click through url : http://mayavi.info/?source=google&adunit=mayavi_ads

Form url :  http://mayavi.info/index.php/lamp/cforms-test.html

Check the view source of form page and you’ll be able to see the above two tracking parameters in your hidden variables.

cforms test

  1. (valid email required)
 

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Contribute to drizzle full-time, employed at Rackspace Mosso

Rackspace had launched their cloud computing, cloud hosting service Mosso last year. We are hosting at Rackspace for quite sometime, although haven’t been able to try out Mosso.

Rackspace has always tried to contribute to opensource in some or other manner. (e.g. Custom Nagios modules,  documenting various technologies used,  and many more ).
Some may argue that its their business … However contribution in any format is welcome :-)

Rackspace Mosso has gone one step ahead and is offering to support Drizzle (A Lightweight SQL Database for cloud and Web) Development in their capacity. Mosso is willing to employ fulltime developers and let them completely work on Drizzle Database development.

Adrian Otto wrote on Drizzle mailing List:

” I was speaking with Eric Day at the developer conference, and I mentioned that Rackspace is wiling to employ full time developers for the specific purpose of furthering the Drizzle project’s mission. He suggested that I email you on this list becuase he expected there would be interest in this offer. If you work on the project now part time, and want to make it a full time job working exclusively on the Drizzle project, let me know. The Rackspcae Cloud believes in open source, and we want to do our part to make Drizzle a wild success.”

Personally even though I’ve been a big admirer and user of MySQL for the last +10 years, recent developments with MySQL are not looking great and sooner or later I’ll look for replacement.

Drizzle is looking very promising and its manifesto of keeping it “simple, reliable, fast and scalable Database” is wonderful for Web or Next generation Cloud Applications.

IMO Rackspace Mosso has got it right and is willing to put money on the future winning horse. (Drizzle is definitely looking very much future of lightweight Web/Cloud Database.)
It’s logical for cloud services to offer the best, fast and scalable options to its clients and Drizzle will no doubt cater to that specific need.

It looks like Mark Callaghan (Google) likes the idea, along with Jeremy Zawodny and Don MacAskill (SmugMug).

Twitter Search results alongside google results using greasemonkey

Lots of people/blogs have discussed whether twitter’s search (Real time) can pose threat to Google or not.  I’ll not get into details of the same again.

IMHO it will be difficult to pose threat to search engines however real time search results from twitter cannot be ignored certainly.

Especially when the real time news/discussions about events on twitter are far much relevant than the indexed news from search engines.
(The news items will take a while to get indexed and appear on the front page.)

We have seen the power of twitter when terrorists attacked the Mumbai hotels. Lots of news channels combined were not able to provide actual happenings as twitter #mumbai was providing.

Mark Carey (@mthacks ) has written the cool greasemonkey script to show twitter search results along side Google results.

I’ve installed it and following is the sample results page :-)

Twitter Search Alongside Google Results

Twitter Search Alongside Google Results

Marc has written blogpost about the same :

http://mt-hacks.com/20090302-realtime-twitter-search-results-on-google.html

How to accomplish this ?

1) You would need Greasemonkey Add on for firefox  — Install from here (If you dont have it) and restart firefox

2) from Userscripts.com install `Twitter search results on google` script written by Marc Carey (@mthacks)

3) Above script loads 5 results from the google search results … However if you want 10 results and along side google search results then …

a) Edit above Greasemonkey script by accesing

Tools –> Greasemonkey –> Manage User Script –> Edit `Twitter Search Results on Google script`

Choose your favourite editor and replace this code with above script

4) Now Google search results will have twitter search along side it …

Please note :

Search engine results for facts/past events are far much superior to Twitter …

Whereas Twitter results may contain current action/buzz across world but can contain lot of noise also

Argument: Is open source software secure enough ?

I’ve heard this argument by many microsoft/closed source technology evangelist that Open Source softwares are not secure enough.

And any one can easily find the flaw in the software and use it for his benefit.

This week there was an argument on slashdot about the same.

According to the Linus’s Law, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”. More formally: “Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix will be obvious to someone.” — this rule was formulated by ESR (Eric S. Raymond).

Open Source due to its very own nature of revealing all catches attention of all users/hackers/programmers across the world using that software. (Pls Note: Hackers always have good intentions.)

The source code is validated by many learned people and if any flaw is found it is quickly reported and fixed.
If a certain OSS is subject to vulnerability continuously then it looses its charm and people quickly migrate to more secure alternatives.
(For example: Most of the new installations of mail servers are based on qmail/postfix rather than Sendmail)

In case of closed source (for e.g. windows) it takes long time to report flaw and much longer to fix it.

I dont hate microsoft, infact i use windows XP for most of my day job and happy with it. But I feel much flexibility with my linux. Most importantly if something is going wrong I know where to check and what could be the reasons. (syslogs are also great friend)

But talking about security NO OSS is less secure than any closed source software just because it is open in nature or for that matter any other reason.

Lots of learned independent developers/testers/reviewers have gone through the codes/designs/outcomes of the OSS and have contributed to the security threats/bugs/potential problems.

Collective intelligence (worldwide) is always superior to a closed group of people.

As someone suggested it is easy to experience than arguing over this.

Best is to deploy for yourself and run weekly penetrative testing to see the possible results.

There is no security from stupid actions of users/administrators, however assuming security by obfuscation/closed source is nothing but stupidity.

I’ve been personally using OSS for years now and absolutely happy with the way it has helped me in learning things.

Collective intelligence (worldwide) is always superior to closed group of people !