Month: July 2013

name-taken – Check if your project name is taken

Every time I want to start a new open-source project, I come across this small “problem”: making sure that the name for the project isn’t already taken. Today I decided to solve it by creating a simple script that queries different open-source repositories to check if a project with the desired name exists.

Usage is quite simple:

$ name_taken.py enlightenment
Debian: Name not taken :-)
SourceForge: Name taken :-(

Currently, the script is in an early stage and can search for projects in Debian’s list of packages and on SourceForge. The code is hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/guyru/name_taken, and licensed under GPL2 or higher. Suggestions on how to make this tool more useful (and, of course, patches) are really welcome.

Haaretz Premium Bypass Userscript POC

Haaretz‘s site became paywalled a couple of months ago, allowing users to read 10 “premium” articles before requiring payment. After a friend recommended their smartphone app, which unlike the site is free, I started reading it mainly on my phone. A few days ago I had no internet connection on my phone, and instead of seeing an article I saw an error page saying it wasn’t reachable (the usual Android built-in browser type). The URL was something like http://www.haaretz.co.il/misc/smartphone-article/.premium-1.2070500, while the URL for the same article on the regular site is http://www.haaretz.co.il/news/world/middle-east/.premium-1.2070500. This of course got me curious, and a quick check showed that there is no problem accessing the mobile version from a desktop browser. So I went ahead and wrote a simple proof-of-concept Greasemonkey script to demonstrate replacing missing premium content on the desktop site with content intended for the smartphone app.
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Dealing with Spam – Follow-up

In the beginning of June, I wrote about the rising number of spam missed by Akismet. The main issue was a noticeable increase in the number of spam messages that get through Akismet, which is kind of the de-facto spam filter for WordPress. Twice a day, on average, I had to manually mark comments as spam, which really got under my skin. After writing that post, I looked at a number of solutions.
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