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Archive for hacks

Cricket Score in your IM Status

I’ve been using this since IPL started - setting my IM status as the current Score.

Some even pinged and asked me, “Why are you wasting time updating ball by ball scores?” - answer is here.

It is a modification of the existing DBus example in pidgin. It is a cheap hack, urllib2 - readline - set status. So, you have edit i, change cricinfo url to current match,pick the line number and set your status. Though dirty, it works.

Can you do this in Google Talk? ;)

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Yahoo! Open Hack Day

After London, Its Bangalore. Go book your ticket!

The hack in the site itself looks cool!

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GMail Chat Stats

Ok, this is one of the products of heights-of-joblessness. GMail Chat History Statistics uses libgmail. It is a python script which crawls through your GMail chat history and creates a Pie-Chart of how many lines (and how many times) you have (wasted) spent chatting with whom(in %). It uses chartdirector for creating graphs. The data is also serialized using cPickle, in case you want to use it for something else.

Sounds good, isn’t it? Definitely not if you try it. When you use the script for indexing just the first page of the list of chats(Around 100 chats), it works fine.

But when you go deep into searching your whole chat history, GMail thinks that you are doing something fishy with your account, and it locks it(Yes, I couldn’t access my GMail account for a day). So, probably you can give a sleep for half an hour once in a 100 messages and keep indexing, or just search one page.

The graph looks something like this and the code is here. It works well for Linux, and can be used in any OS by downloading the corresponding chardirector. Comments welcome!

PS: /me is planning to take a printout and stick it in my room/cubicle.

PPS: /me is not sure about the limit of requests for GMail to flag the crawler as a bot.

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I work at Yahoo! - the opinions expressed here are my own, and neither Yahoo! nor any other party necessarily agrees with them.