Building CS Explainer Videos with Code
I decided to make an animated computer science explainer video similar to the 3Blue1Brown channel that does the same for Math
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My IOS Development journey
I have made the decision to learn Native IOS development using the Swift programming language and produce a portfolio of apps. This page would therefore be updated with everything I learn daily. I am primarily doing this to keep myself accountable to my progress. I’ll be updating my progress in reverse chronological order below:
Building a youtube commenting bot to win $1000 (technical writeup)
This is the documentation I wrote for the code on my Github. I was trying to win Mr Beast’s 1000 dollars for being one of the earliest 10 commenters on his youtube video that comes out on the 19th December 2019. I call this bot the BeastBot, the angry youtube commentor bot (version 2). I coded a bot using node.js that used 6 different methods nonstop to find the latest post in a youtube channel as the updates in the Youtube server and API calls take time to propagate. The six methods include the Youtube API, Youtube RSS, Youtube Channel Videos page scraping, Youtube Channel latest videos page scraping and scraping using the tor protocol to prevent ip banning.
*DISCLAIMER* To the best of my knowledge, I am not violating any Youtube Guidelines, please do not replicate unless you know what you’re doing.
Redesigning this website.
Two main reasons: speed & control. I’ve completely redesigned and revamped my website. The stack used is Jekyll with Ruby on Rails and is now hosted on Github pages.
All of the previous versions of my website ran on Wordpress which was hosted on Hostinger. Let me list out the problems I had with it to explain why I needed this redesign.
iGem competition experience in Boston
iGem, The International Genetically Engineered Machine competition is a worldwide synthetic biology competition. Yes, biology. I love delving into fields I know nothing about. I became a part of the iGem team at the beginning of this year. To be fair, it can involve a lot of engineering and computer science depending on the project the team is working on.
This year we decided to build a device to be used in airports that is non-invasive and can detect 5 diseases using only saliva. No more blood swabs! I was the head of the computer science team. My work first entailed working on the website with the computer science team as it is one of the three things the judges will see (the presentation and the poster being the other two) and developing the WEB API for the device.
How I found a loophole in Facebook's messaging system when I was 14
I was watching the news one day and I saw a report on a Palestinian man who found a bug on Facebook that allowed anyone to post on anyone’s Facebook wall but wasn’t taken seriously by Facebook so he posted on Mark Zuckerberg’s (the CEO of Facebook) account to prove himself. When I saw this I started to get interested in Computer Security and the idea of Ethical Hacking. Even though they never revealed how he did it, I was pretty sure I knew how and was intrigued in how simple it was and why I didn’t think of it - this then led me to a nonstop search for loopholes on facebook for the next few days. I was surprised when I actually did find a loophole, and it was a more serious one than the one that was reported on the news. I found a way to send a message as anyone, to anyone - meaning a hacker could send a message to your parent’s facebook as if it was you with anything they wanted to.
Myslsm, the social network I created from scratch for my high school (and how I made my own Alexa before it ever existed)
In 2010, when I was 11 years old, My family and I went to watch The Social Network, a movie about how Facebook was founded. I was deeply motivated by this movie and I started looking into the programming language used to code facebook which was PHP at the time. I started looking into simple html, javascript tutorials first and then went on to look at some PHP tutorials - I quickly realized how powerful this tool is as I could make anything I imagined, all that was required was the thought and the code. I started with simple projects such as asking your name and information and giving you interesting facts to a small product search engine system based on keywords and a MYSQL database, which I amusingly tried to sell online in 2012:
My dream at the time had always been to make my own social network. I started by learning how to make my own Login and Registering system including the UI, backend and database. From there it was an exponential learning experience where I kept learning and implementing features that a social network would have such as a wall, profile, like button, commenting etc. which brought me to Myslsm. My school’s name is Sri Lankan School Muscat, Slsm for short. I named the social network Myslsm for this reason.
Story: How I got Sean Parker's attention when I was 13.
When I was young I was devious, malicious and didn’t know the difference between right and wrong. I was 13 at the time, I had recently gotten the hang of PHP and built a social network for my school from scratch but this isn’t about that, this is about a hack.
Designing and Laser Cutting a Cardboard Bicycle
So I decided I want to make a bicycle, but I didn’t know how a bike worked and what exactly each component looked like. Cardboard was the material I chose to use because of its availability as it can be easily found in scraps so I’d be able to do many retries with the laser cutter.
Air Music Player
I took my previous project where I visualized music through the microphone and reversed it. I wanted to in some form visualize the music with my hands and play it on the computer.
My First Software Enginneering Internship
I recently was accepted into a software company in Oman, Al Madina Development, which has many government funded projects mainly related to security and identity documents. A few days before I started working, I had a look at their website and just wanted to see what CMS system they used and ended up finding a serious loophole on the site that allowed me to have complete control of the site’s content and edit/delete anything. Here’s a video showing you this:
Experience: Winning an international hackathon
It was 8pm the day before the Hackathon, my suitemate knocks on my door and challenges me…..for a table tennis match. We play table tennis, seriously. By seriously I mean playing for six hours straight, sweating, aching legs, and raising our voices causing random students who pass by to look at us weird. It’s 2am when I go back to my room, I just fall on my bed and think of the hackathon(which starts at 6am) the next day, ‘No way I’m going to go for that, I’m way too tired’, and I doze off in a flash.
Knock knock. I hear banging on my door, “Get up you have your hackathon!”.
DJ Music Mashup (Using XBOX Kinect)
This is my Intro to Interactive Media - Final Class Project documentation.
Background
My final project was a, “DJ Mixer” where the user could use his/her own hands to control and mix two songs together to play at the same time. For example, Ed Sheerans’s shape of you background music could be played with Justin Bieber singing love yourself.
Life or Death Data Visualization (video)
So for this project I wanted to do some data visualization that could be regarded, “live”. I got some interesting rates of from http://www.ecology.com/birth-death-rates/ where I found that the rate of birth worldwide is about 4 every second and the rate of death as 1.78 every second.
The idea was to basically show the user how many people have born and died since they opened the application and perhaps make them understand the importance of life by its fragility and beauty.
My Electronic Music Visualizer Project
[xyz-ihs snippet=”musicCircle”] So for my project this week I wanted to recreate some of the music videos for electronic music on youtube such as this one:
LIGHT ORGAN PROJECT.
I started tapping on my desk to a beat, and felt like I wanted to make a “beat boxing machine”. But, I didn’t have a proximity sensor to detect movements and I didn’t want to use buttons as that seemed counterintuitive. What I did find in my kit though, was a photo resistor. I figured if I could connect it and detect when the light intensity is low(when you wave ur hand over the resistor) I could set up some arbitrary values and make the buzzer make some sounds.