Couldn’t think of a title that rhymed better!

It has just been a day since I landed here. The weather was pleasant even though it has been raining throughout the week. So I went Downtown with my Uncle and Aunt to see the place. My cousin brother, his wife and two kids are also here. Saw the library, Town Hall and the Confederation Mall at Downtown. Didn’t take many pictures as was not sure regarding the policy that prevails here regarding taking pictures in public. I think I will grow more adventurous with time and get more photos!

Due to non-availability of Internet at my place, this (and forthcoming) posts might take some time to make it to my blog so bear with me

Finally when I found yesterday that my account had been upgraded to their RC (Release Candidate version), I couldn’t help but try sending an SMS and guess what ISDN (it still doesn’t work!).

OK, I had a tremendous urge to call this post “Hacking Web Interfaces”. But due to some uneducated folks who believe hacking is a bad word, I think I will stick to its euphemism.

The most direct way to feed random data to a web-service is in a raw format. Use telnet for absolute low level communications or tools like Fiddler, for communications at a higher level like HTTP. But with sites hosting hundreds of script files and html pages on their server, this approach has become more and more impractical. But there are other means to mess with the client side code.

DOM Inspector

If you use Firefox, you will notice there’s a utility called DOM Inspector that is included with it. As the name suggests, it allows you to see the DOM of the rendered HTML page. But, it also allows you to modify that DOM. You can modify the values of the properties of different DOM objects in the tree and even insert new objects.

Let’s try this technique on a product of one of the largest software companies, Google Calendar. I will use no other software than Firefox and DOM inspector.

Let’s go to the Settings screen. They have a setting for the “Custom View” property for the calendar.

Now I am a guy who wants to know what he would be doing in next 2 months but there is no option for that kind of view. Hmm, lets see if the DOM can help us. Firing the DOM Inspector, we see that the logic is quite simple.

The value of the ComboBox determines how the duration for which the custom view display the calendar. The value in the ComboBox is simply translated to the number of days. So I change the value to 42 (which is 6 weeks) and save my Settings. Et voilà, I get a custom view with 6 weeks Cool!

Using Visual Studio with IE

IE has a script debugger built in, but it is worthwhile to go in for Visual Studio as the debugger of choice. There’s a free version of the Visual Studio suite called the Express edition available which you can download and use.

Now to make it work…

1. Enable Script debugging in Internet Explorer.

   

2. Create a New Solution with an Empty Website (File > New > Web Site…)

   

3. Go to Property Pages for the new Website in Solution Explorer and enter the URL you want to debug. Don’t worry if you don’t know the URL, just enter any URL and fire the breakpoints only when you hit the required URL.

   

4. You might get a dialog asking you to include the web.config file. Answer Yes and continue. Now you will be surfing with the debugger attached to Internet Explorer. You can hit pause, set breakpoints and even skip those functions that don’t interest you

Using Venkman with Firefox

I would have loved it if Visual Studio also worked with Firefox. There’s a solution called Venkman. I won’t go through the complete detail of how to go about using it, you can read it up here.

I haven’t found a way to skip code (a la Visual Studio) using this yet.

You can change variable values by directly typing the JavaScript code for it.

The interface doesn’t have all the bells and whistles but should be able to get most of your work done.

OK, many might ask, what’s new; almost no one manages to fill up the >2GB email space given by GMail. I agree. It is more of a gimmick but what was hilarious was this message posted on the Welcome page.

Seems like Rediff is encouraging people to store files on their server. What next, RediffDrive after GMail drive?

Technorati tags: Rediff, Rediffmail, unlimited, storage

Same with Orkut. So for all you Orkut fanatics out there I came up with a URL that would allow you to get there even with Opera Mini!

The link is

https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLoginBox?service=orkut&…

This is NO CUSTOM link but a link to the login box page provided by Google. I think with a little modification, other services which use the “Google Box” can also be made more accessible. Feel free to submit if you come up with any and I will post them here

P.S. It seems people were not able to scrap using Opera Mini. To do this type your scrap in the text box, then type this Javascript as the URL in the browser and your scrap will be posted! You might want to bookmark the URL for easier access