Completed one year in IBM today. Ironically, I told my manager that I’m going to quit today. :)

I’ve learnt lots and lots in this one year, both technically and non-technically. Nothing much more tell. Rather, I prefer not to say anything in my blog here. :)

Hi all,

I’m very happy to present you Online Programming Contest Calendar (http://www.opccalendar.com/). This is something I wanted to do for Spider in college. All I could finish in college was a simple fetcher from algorithmist.com and topcoder.com. Now, I have everything I wanted to have in this new site. And yes, I hated the algorithmist.com calendar. There was so much I wanted to do for that calendar and the result is http://www.opccalendar.com/.

Some of the cool features I like in this site are.

• Long list of services like Twitter, Google Reader, Google Calendar, Google India SMS Channel, Wordpress plugin, Firefox plugin and lots more.
• Alerts through Email, Orkut and Facebook are on the way.
• Automated parses for most of the common programming contests.
• Neat interface.

Things I would like to have in this soon. (Of course, depends on how much time I have to spend on this project)

• Accounts for each member, where they can choose the alerts they want to have. (probably Google accounts integration)
• Interface for members to add contests on their own.
• A simple forum

Any volunteers out there?

There are so many people who helped me in build this site. I guess this is right place to thank them.

Yazhini for helping me with the first prototype of the parser code to fetch from algorithmist.com. Written in C++ and still works cool :)
Vivek for helping me with the text context for this website.
Sindhu and her friends Sathyajith and Gautam for helping me with the ads.
Taggy for giving me webspace in his mediatemple account. Seriously, I should thank this guy for his continuous support with his mediatemple account.
Arvind, Vinod and Prasanna for their feedback during each iteration of this site.

Hope this becomes the one and only place which has all the details about programming contest.

How can you help me promote this site?
1. Keep this site url as GTalk status message. That will really help many many people know about this site.
2. Tell your geek friends about this site.

This is a tutorial about how to perform a dummy dictionary attack and how web-masters can prevent a dictionary attack.

Wikipedia defines Dictionary attack as,

In cryptanalysis and computer security, a dictionary attack is a technique for defeating a cipher or authentication mechanism by trying to determine its decryption key or passphrase by searching likely possibilities.
A dictionary attack uses a brute-force technique of successively trying all the words in an exhaustive list (from a pre-arranged list of values). In contrast with a normal brute force attack, where a large proportion key space is searched systematically, a dictionary attack tries only those possibilities which are most likely to succeed, typically derived from a list of words in a dictionary. Generally, dictionary attacks succeed because many people have a tendency to choose passwords which are short (7 characters or fewer), single words found in dictionaries or simple, easily-predicted variations on words, such as appending a digit.


In this post, I’m going to write a simple code which will send POST requests to the web server and process the response of each request. Before I start, let me tell you that there are many softwares which already do this. Some of them are,

1. Burp Suite
2. John the Ripper

But what’s the fun in using a software and cracking something. :) The fun part is when YOUR code does something. After all, Code is Poetry (Check wordpress.org footer) ;)

For the demo here, I have this login page, which is very similar to my college mail server (or any horde server). The user-name and password for a successful login is “cs10528″ and “remember” respectively. If you provide a valid user-name/password combination, the page will display “Login Successful”. For any other user-name/password combination, the page will display “Login Failed”. So, now all we need is a code which can send POST request to the login page and a dictionary from which we can pick up the probable passwords.

This is the PHP code I’ve written to automate the login process. It reads from the “dict.txt” file and uses that to send the HTTP request. The code is well commented and main login process is done by curl functions. And finally, here is the dict.txt I’ve used for this demo. It has only around 25 words, so that the processing ends sooner. In case you are not comfortable with curl in php, you can see this post, which explains about curl basics.

You can see the whole login process in action here.

So, how can a web-master prevent these automatic logins?

1. Captcha
Adding a captcha prevents almost all the automatic login attempts. But be careful about what kind of captcha you choose. There are quite a few captchas which confuse people and scare them away.

2. Math Puzzles
Instead of images, you can ask the user to enter some simple arithmetic calculations (like what is 10+15). This loads much faster and prevents any confusion.

3. Maintaining the state in server
Store the login access time for each user, and if the time difference is less than 5 seconds, then block the user for next 10 minutes. This needs some more modification in the server side code, with new tables needed to store the login access time data.

Note :
1. The code posted here won’t work for horde. There are cookies and other stuff to be handled in many cases.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

I’ve been to Proto.in a month ago. I should have posted this long back. Better late than never.

The event was awesome. The experience and inspiration I got when seeing other startups can’t be described in mere words. The last session of the second day was pretty interesting. People were asked to pool in the questions they had in mind and again people were “forced” to answer them. (If you don’t answer it in 10 seconds, they were bashed by smiley balls).

Here is the list of questions and the answers people had. I started writing this from the first question. So I’m pretty sure this is the comprehensive list.

What made you decide stop thinking about the product and actually start work on the product? What gives you the initial push to quit the current job and work on your idea?

1. Picked up a date to start working on the idea.
2. Boozed lots with a group of friends. Got high and decided to quit from current job and start working on the idea.
3. This comes in automatically.
4. Did some initial market research, then mailed the friends circle and got initial feedback. The feedback was too good and they started working on it.
5. One day, just realized that they have to start things at that moment.
6. They analyzed the web for sometime and his friend wanted someone who can work with Web 2.0. So the moment they formed the team, they started.

How do you spread your product by word of mouth? What are the different means by which you can advertise your product without paying much?

1. Give the media a story about your product. They are always hungry for news.
2. Educate people and give free suggestions.
3. Advertise with give away t-shirts and in autos.
4. Social networking like orkut, facebook and blogger
5. Get a widget from tellafriend.com. It mails all their friends in gmail, yahoo and hotmail about your product if they are ready to give their password.
6. Get involved with NSACOM ( Happens every 2nd Friday in Bangalore). Contact is bangalore@nascom.in
7. Tell your friends and get review from them. They will tell their friends.
8. Hang out in local user groups and open coffee clubs. People will know you by person. This works only when the number of customers are small.

How do you hire employees for your startup? What do you do to keep your employees motivated and work with enthusiasm?

1. Go to good colleges and train them to work on your startup. Initially they won’t charge much. But once they find the team and work interesting and fun, they will join the team.
2. I had a friend who was working in other company. He explained his idea to his friends who work with him. And those who are interested join the team.
3. Tell people about your startup in events like proto.in and college technical festivals.
4. If you have company space, then allow events like barcamps, discussions and other local events to happen in your company. This will give a great publicity for your company.
5. Have bill boards with puzzles in your company. People who come to visit the company will get impressed.
6. Go to hackathons and barcamp sessions and talk to them about your product.
7. Hire a fresher as an intern for a week or two. If he/she is intersted and he is good, hire him/her.
8. Go to companies that are sinking and get cheap people. :)

When you should quit from your current job?

1. When you feel you can’t do justice to both your current job and the startup.
2. When the current job is not able to satisfy yout needs. When you are not happy with the current job.
3. If for more than a week, everyday morning you feel your job is boring the moment you enter your company.
4. When you feel that urge to do something so that you do it before others do.
5. When pay hike and promotions doesn’t excite you anymore.
6. Save enough money and quit won’t work.
7. Quit if you don’t find your work challenging and interesting.
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