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irfan

173 karma · joined March 15, 2009

CTO & Co-Founder FootMetrics (footmetrics.xyz)

http://i.com.pk/

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/irfan; my proof: https://keybase.io/irfan/sigs/MtSoLiEraNSdMn7Ddp-2-6tDeK9u4r1Rd5_Zhl8UVl0 ]

submissionscomments
irfan··on Amazon2csv: Amazon products scraper to CSV (no API token required)
Ok I had my first horror story with custom clearance today. Going to give nazdeeq.com a try next time :-)
irfan··on Amazon2csv: Amazon products scraper to CSV (no API token required)
I disagree with the last point. Services like MyUS, Viabox etc. are cheaper than Nazdeeq in many cases.
irfan··on Show HN: Howmanypeoplearearound – Use wifi to calculate number of people around
Is there a better way to check if an OUI is being used by a mobile phone or a router? e.g. There are plenty of huawei/apple routers and if one of them is in your neighborhood, you'd always get incorrect count. Similarly, there are many infamous smart phones and people use them but your code seems to ignore them.
irfan··on How to Download a List of All Registered Domain Names
I had been downloading the zone file for .PK domains on daily bases until they blocked the zone transfers. Based on comparison of these daily zone files I managed to publish the statistics [1] and also broke the news about hacked .PK domains [2] which was picked up by all leading tech blogs and news agencies.

Currently, I cannot find a way to get the zone file even by officially requesting the registry manager.

[1]: https://www.i.com.pk/pknic-domain-registration-statistics/

[2]: https://www.i.com.pk/110-pk-domains-managed-by-markmonitor-g...

irfan··on New FCC Rules May Prevent Installing OpenWRT on WiFi Routers?
What about installing OpenWRT on RaspberryPi with USB WiFi dongle which can be used like any other router? Can they ban it as well?
irfan··on Taking the Raspberry Pi 2 for a Test Drive with GNU Radio
This is how flightradar24.com and flightaware.com work
irfan··on Show HN: Awesome-radio – a curated list of radio resources and information
Great effort but isn't wikipedia a better place to make such documents?
irfan··on Show HN: Dump receipts as you get them through the year, recall them at tax time
3 wrong approaches towards UX/Security 1. Extracting username from email 2. Extracting password from email and setting it same as username 3. sending password in plain text email.
irfan··on Twitter bot that tweets Wikipedia edits made from IP addresses of Congress
Just launched @PakistanEdits Unfortunately IP addresses of Govt. owned institutes are not available but its fun to see what is being edited from the whole country :-)
irfan··on Web Starter Kit
This is how their homepage appear in my chrome:

http://i.imgur.com/UCfMstr.png

irfan··on Yo App Allegedly Hacked By College Students
The app uses parse.com API for all communication (and probably for all data storage) and I haven't seen it communicating with anything other than parse, getsentry and flurry services.

Does hacking the app means hacking parse.com?

irfan··on Ditching Wordpress for Pelican
I moved my personal blog from posterous to pelican long ago and hosting it over heroku for free. Optimized it for exceptional performance and got 99 page speed score: http://www.i.com.pk/exceptional-performance-without-mod_page...
irfan··on This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan
Interesting point is that no sweet shop owner knows any sweet by the name of 'Jhajaria' in Lahore. Even 'Fazal Sweets' shown in this ad doesnt know about it. Same seems to be the case in India: http://thedailyretard.in/demand-for-jhajariya-on-the-rise-af...
irfan··on Winning at Candy Crush
In 2007 I did the same level of digging with a facebook puzzle solving game. Game used to post daily puzzles and top scorers (solving the puzzle in minimum time) were shown on global leaderboard. At that time, the app was not using any kind of hashing or validation. It was simply posting the score to the server so tempering the data was easier. After staying on top of global leaderboard for a few days (with impossible score of 1 second), the app developer contacted me and requested to stop cheating the system. I suggested him some changes and the game became much better
irfan··on Obfuscated C Code Contest 2006. Please explain sykes2.c
Interesting, tried making my version

    main(O){10<putchar(5^--O?82-(31&4763657>>5*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
irfan··on Show HN: 140verses
Cool idea btw "love", "coffee" example doesn't work
irfan··on Show HN: my useless weekend project, add speech bubbles to images
"take a random photo" might be NSFW
irfan··on .pk registrar hacked, Pakistani sites for Google, MSN, Apple, Ebay redirected
There are 975 .Pk domains registered by MarkMonitor. google, visa, PayPal, sony, zynga, microsoft, hp all rely on MarkMonitor for their identity in Pakistan. It seems that MarkMonitor's account with pknic was compromised. 110 .PK domains had their name servers changed to freehostia.com recently. All of them registered by MarkMonitor. Here is the list: http://i.com.pk/110-pk-domains-managed-by-markmmonitor-got-h... [note: this list was compiled by me]
irfan··on World.db - A Free Open World Database and Schema
quite incomplete. why not ask github users to fork, contribute as fixtures & send pull request
irfan··on My popular Twitter Analytics app has reached technical limits. Need help
I was talking about simple http connection for API instead of https for API
irfan··on My popular Twitter Analytics app has reached technical limits. Need help
I had a similar problem when using SSL connections. I'm not sure about your data by in my case the data was pretty much public data and there was no harm in using simple HTTP connection. This significantly improved the speed and no more very frequent timeouts.

Also try enabling/disabling gzip compression for API calls.

irfan··on WhatsApp is broken, really broken
New version of whatsapp for iOS is there.
irfan··on Show HN: We got tired of asking 'What browser are you using?' and created this
Hoping to see wget info, tried getting it via wget and it showed something went wrong :-(

https://aboutmybrowser.com/2691400901

irfan··on Ubuntu is coming back to Dell Laptops
Recently 125,000 Dell Laptops with Ubuntu pre-installed were distributed for free among Pakistani students by the Government.
irfan··on Eric Schmidt's thoughts about Pakistan
That exactly is the image problem Eric is talking about
irfan··on Github: United States Code
Interestingly http://github.com/president is guy from Russia
irfan··on Getting Real book is now free PDF
or http://mailinator.com
irfan··on Some quick Django optimisation lessons
"Django makes it extremely easy to generate database queries, which is both a good and bad thing"

I experienced this when a junior developer made queries in a loop inside template without realizing that it is actually going to be a lot of SQL queries in the end.

irfan··on Preventing Site Scraping
I agree with the argument * People will get your data if they want it* Reading the discussion here and on original post, I can make a scraper that would be difficult to detect and block ;-)
irfan··on Building a learning engine to understand what tweets are relevant.
Right now they are based on person's location but we can extract the location from content only if content has this information. In case of tweets, not all tweets contain this information.
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