Open Hack 2009 concludes

Wow.. what an event!!! I had amazing last two days. Thanks to all who joined us at the event. The excitement that all the participants showed was awesome. One hacker came to me and i could see his desperation. He was ready to pay "any" amount of money right way for a live windows hosting, all he wanted was an immediate activation. I hope atleast one of my suggested providers were able to help him. There were people hacking on maps, local, BOSS, fireeagle, messenger and what not. Few students even had a hardware hack using a h/w called Sun Spot (aah, is the name right?). Free food, tea/coffee, cold drinks, beer and redbulls.. awesome was the only word in air! Most of the hackers were up whole night to get their ideas up and running, what a tempo!

It was really special one for me too. More so because i had few of my "very good" friends hacking on their ideas as well and we all had an awesome time. Last two days passed without any knowledge(we slept a little at odd hours) and now i can only long for more of that excitement and fun. Thank you Y!, we rock and i'm looking forward to the next blast...

See list of the hacks that were developed for this hackday (within 24 hr hackathon!!!).
See pics

Up and running on a new rootshell.be a/c

So few of my friends are planning to attend Y! India hack day scheduled on 14-15th Feb 2009. They just requested a free rootshell.be a/c and thanks to the guys there, they had a free a/c to play with within few hours (Thanks to Xavier and his team at rootshell.be again).

We hit a small problem while hosting our application there. First of all the files we created were not having the right access permissions. Second, rootshell has default configurations to append a little tracking scripts from google to every page that is served from its servers. Now we had problem with this because YAP (Y! application platform) tries to validate a domain by fetching a static file uploaded with some specific content onto the target server. We were getting screwed here because of that small tracking script. This is how we resolved the two issues.

1. All files in ${HOME}/html folder were given 755 permissions so that apache could read and execute them (umm well most of their stuff is going to be dynamic, so uhh you know...).


2. We added a .htaccess file in ${HOME}/html folder to change some of the default settings. The portion that helped us get rid of the tracking script is as follows:
   
   LayoutMerge Off
   LayoutDefaultHandlers Off
   


3. Provide 755 permission to .htaccess file as well so that apache can read it. Else it will be throwing "403 forbidden" errors

But, this is just part of the .htaccess configuration. If you are writing a .htaccess file, it is recommended that you search on Y! Search for tutorials on what all you should take care of. That's all for now. Will keep updating as we go on.

BTW everybody is invited to the Y! India hack day. There are limited seats and final participation will be by confirmed invitation only. So what are you waiting for, go book your seat before they are gone... :-)