Why I use OS X reason #121211

I move the iMac from Pune to Delhi, join the WiFi network, click on Add Printer and not only does it detect the HP Multifunction thingy attached to my router instantly, but it’s installed and ready to use without me having to click on “Yes” infinite times or without anyone telling me the drivers might be the bastard child of someone cause they aren’t properly “signed”.

As a bonus, it also installs the scanner, which I use to “pull” documents from the scanner on the network onto my computer, with fully functional settings like changing the file type etc. And all this without having to install any of HP bloatware on my machine.

The next time Software update runs, it also informs me a newer version of the drivers/ software I used in also available. I then appreciate the fact that the OS didn’t bother me with this when I was trying to install the printer and print something in a hurry. Non-critical updates can wait until you have the time, user, is a nice approach.

The very definition of “it just works”.

Reliance Wireless broadband auto-login (and logout) script(s)

The old “curl” based method stopped working yesterday when Reliance got a new login page as well as a new backend. It seems Reliance is now also looking at Cookies during authentication. Here’s a little Python script that you can execute to automate the process.

If you don’t know what Python is, you better stick to browser based authentication 🙂

Needless to say, you can schedule this script as a cron/ launchd job to run periodically and keep you logged in. That’s how I use it, which is why the script doesn’t output anything to prevent unnecessary log “pollution”.

Login Script for Python 2.x

#!/usr/bin/env python
# encoding: utf-8
"""
Reliance Login Script for Python 2.x v1.0

Created by Kunal Dua on 2009-12-18
Reliance Wireless broadband auto-login (and logout) script(s)
This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Python itself. """ import urllib2, urllib, cookielib username = '1111111111111111' #replace the text within quotes with your username password = 'password' #replace the text within quotes with your password jar = cookielib.FileCookieJar("cookies") opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(jar)) response = opener.open("http://10.239.89.15/reliance/startportal_isg.do") login_data = urllib.urlencode({'userId' : username, 'password' : password, 'action' : 'doLoginSubmit'}) resp = opener.open('http://10.239.89.15/reliance/login.do', login_data)

Update: Logout Script for Python 2.x

#!/usr/bin/env python
# encoding: utf-8
"""
Reliance Logout Script v1.0

Created by Kunal Dua on 2009-12-22
http://www.kunaldua.com/blog/?p=323

This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or
modify it under the same terms as Python itself.
"""

import urllib2, cookielib

jar = cookielib.FileCookieJar("cookies")
opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(jar))

response = opener.open("http://10.239.89.15/reliance/login.do", timeout=2)

resp = opener.open('http://10.239.89.15/reliance/logout.do')

Update: Login Script for Python 3.x

#!/usr/bin/env python
# encoding: utf-8
"""
Reliance Login Script for Python 3.0 v1.0

Created by Kunal Dua on 2009-12-30
http://www.kunaldua.com/blog/?p=323

This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or
modify it under the same terms as Python itself.
"""

import urllib, http.cookiejar

username = '1111111111111111' #replace the text within quotes with your username
password = 'password'	#replace the text within quotes with your password

jar = http.cookiejar.FileCookieJar("cookies")
opener = urllib.request.build_opener(urllib.request.HTTPCookieProcessor(jar))

response = opener.open("http://10.239.89.15/reliance/startportal_isg.do")

login_data = urllib.parse.urlencode({'userId' : username, 'password' : password, 'action' : 'doLoginSubmit'})
resp = opener.open('http://10.239.89.15/reliance/login.do', login_data)

Bad Bad Twitter

Since a few asked – I am moving from @duak to @kunaldua since Twitter refuses to index the former. What difference does it make? A lot!

  • I don’t appear in People Search. By itself, probably not a big deal and something I could have lived with. But not when you include the next 3.
  • If I “mention” anyone (@twitter_id) in one of my tweets, they’ll never see that tweet in their list of mentions unless they follow me.
  • Even if you are following me, unless I start my tweet with @yourtwitterid, you won’t see that tweet in your list of mentions.
  • My tweets don’t appear in any search results, so if I participate in any conferences/ events and use hash-tags and the likes, no one sees it!

So that’s it – there’s the reason for the switch. Probably Twitter thinks I am a spammer so they decided to block me and unfortunately there’s no way for me to get this addressed in any other way. See you @kunaldua.