Obfuscated awesomeness in C

Recently I've been bumping into obfuscated tiny C codes that does magic. Codes that are couple of lines in length but require pages of explanation on how it works.

There are lots of these in The International Obfuscated C Code Contest page, but here are some of the cool ones I've found in other places. (I'll update this list as I bump into more)

Yahoo! Logo ASCII Animation in six lines of C
20fps, antialiased ASCII art animation of the Yahoo! logo in six lines of C.

Donut animation
Donut animation with, well, donut shaped code. More impressive version here.

Spelt Number to Decimal
Spelt number (like, one, four, etc) in four lines of C

Brainfuck interpreter in 2 lines of C
For those who didnt know Brainfuck is a programming language.

NTC PSTN Number to Name

NTC's website has a nice feature called Telephone search. This is particularly handy when you get a call from landline (PSTN) number and have no idea who's calling. Ofcourse you can go to the site and search, but the following bash script makes it faster.

#!/bin/bash

#
# Nepal Telecom PSTN Number to Name search
#

if [ "$1" == "" ] ; then
    echo "Usage: " $0 "phone_number"
    exit
fi

# Prefix 01, if not provided
if [[ $1 =~ ^01 ]] ; then
    NUMBER=$1
else
    NUMBER="01$1"
fi

wget -q http://ntc.net.np/telsearchRes.php 
--post-data "searchFor=name&telno=$NUMBER&submitted=Search" -O - | html2text | grep "$NUMBER" | tr '_' ' ' | sed 's/ [\ ]*/ /g'

Save the file, chmod it as executable.

To use,

./telsearch 5544132
| 1 |015544132|Ntc |Cellular Mobile And New S|Jawalakhel|

Fixing overused touchpad with sticky note

If you're like me who spends more time with laptop than anything/one else, you'll end up with touchpad like this:

Due to overuse, the outer coarse layer wears off and touchpad starts acting funny. Plus it's difficult to slide your finger over it.

Fix? Stick a sticky-note over the touchpad. This surprisingly works!

Grub2 recordfail FAIL

I have this headless, keyboardless server running on Ubuntu 10.04. Runs fine, but once in a while while there's power cut off the server still remains dead when the power is back. I connected monitor and keyboard and found that the problem is with Grub2.

Turns out there's a variable named recordfail which is set to 1 during next boot whenever there's some problem with the computer (like due to power failure).

Now if you see /boot/grub/grub.cfg file, it has the following lines:

if [ ${recordfail} = 1 ]; then
  set timeout=-1
else    
  set timeout=10
fi

Which means, the timeout counter is disabled whenever the recordfail variable is set. This is nice for desktop environment, which has a monitor, so I can see the Grub countdown is disabled so I can proceed with Repair option if I have to, but for headless servers the computer just sits idle at Grub screen, puzzling the poor sysadmin.

Fix? I changed the timeout=-1 to timeout=10.

Nepal Map API

District-level Nepal Map PHP API. Generates variable-sized map of Nepal with user defined colors for districts.

Source and example:
https://github.com/jwalanta/NepalMapAPI

Demo (with maphilight jQuery plugin):
http://diyaalo.com/nepalmapapi/

Thanx a lot to Jitendra for providing the GIS map of Nepal.