Monthly Archives: April 2010

IPL- Innocence Probably lost for cricket?

For the cricket lovers the muck raking of IPL has been too much. We can take heart that every other sports which has seen success is hit with scandals involving players, refrees, countries, owners…., so love the game, play the game and don’t put people like modi on pedestal.

1. NBA – betting scandal

2. NBA refrees involved , something  like this happened in 1951 for NBA – Sol levy case

3. Italian soccer matchfixing/betting – Unresolved still? , Marseille 1993 soccer match-fixing scandal – win the match and surrender it next time, Juventus too went through something similar. German soccer too went through – Bundesliga scandal (2005) – a match fixing scandal in German football

4. Other soccer instances -

2005 Soccer Brazil Edilson Pereira de Carvalho, Paulo José Danelo…vietnam, israel, south africa are in this company….

5. NHL’s coach Rick – pleaded guilty for gambling Ring, Alan Eagleson’s advanced scandal involving too many people across teams.

6. Off course this was waiting to be disclosed – US swimmers accuse coach of abuse.

7. NFL – spygate stench, forgotten “Hornung and Karras”  betting scandal, NCAA – gambling/match fixing(SMU) and related scandals(Baylor university), Minnesota viking pleasure boat scandal.

8. Players getting out of control – Maurice claret is prime example, Brett Favre, Irving Fryar, Wilt Chamberlain – great pro but target for Tiger woods, Vick of NFL using animals for watching pleasure. We too should expect many more spats, bad boys in Cricket.

9.  Baseball – Barry Bond/A-Rod’s Steroid admission.  BTW  match fixing reached its peak in Black Sox throwing their game and finally commissioner getting annointed.

10.  Drug Abuse – Micheal Felps smoking substance, Marion Jones, our own weightlifters/boxers, Mitchell Report on baseball players , skiing, bike racing legends falling down the pedestal, Operación Puerto (2006) in spain ,Doping at the 2007 Tour de France

11. Bribery – IOC bribery case – skating etc

12. NASCAR/MotorSports – just lookup many cases starting from angela …, 1990 Japanese Grand Prix, 2008 race fixing controversy

Boxing (grand daddy of match fixing and betting) was joined by Sumo fixing :) (Japanese don’t admit faults ). Horse racing too has many legends including murders of horses :) .

Annoying @smarx

Steve Marx posted – http://blog.smarx.com/posts/annoy-smarx-com-letting-the-internet-choose-my-wallpaper , I needed to get my mind off clear present boredom. Gnutools (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages.html) helped a lot.

To annoy @smarx – I needed to get all the “references” to the image so that I could do a simple get on them.  I followed following

Get the url content.

1. curl -o http://bit.ly/aENgVz > page2.txt

Get all https references

2. grep -o “[']https://[^[:space:]]*['$]” page2.txt > links2.txt

Remove all references to quotes

3. sed s/’//g links2.txt > links3.txt

Remove non essential urls

4.find “SetWallpaper” links3.txt > cleaned.txt

Just get them all

5. wget – wget –no-check-certificate -i cleaned.txt

Another idea was to really annoy smarx by creating vsts webscript  which I could keep executing till cows came home.

The only challenge that I saw was VSTS was doing request for ticket from servicebus etc…which I thought was not really required in this case.

WebTestRequest request5 = new WebTestRequest("https://urs.microsoft.com/urs.asmx");
request5.ThinkTime = 12;
request5.Method = "POST";
request5.Headers.Add(new WebTestRequestHeader("SOAPAction", "\"http://Microsoft.STS.STSWeb/RepLookup\""));
request5.QueryStringParameters.Add("MSURS-Client-Key", "WY4Moa9cz7fn1iOp5HVkPQ%3d%3d", false, false);
request5.QueryStringParameters.Add("MSURS-Patented-Lock", "N2kJLJI9LH4%3d", false, false);
StringHttpBody request5Body = new StringHttpBody();
request5Body.ContentType = "text/xml; charset=utf-8";
request5Body.InsertByteOrderMark = false;
request5Body.BodyString = @"<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap=""http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"" xmlns:xsi=""http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"" xmlns:xsd=""http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"" xmlns:soapenc=""http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/""><soap:Body><RepLookup xmlns=""http://Microsoft.STS.STSWeb/""><G>{2CEDBFBC-DBA8-43AA-B1FD-CC8E6316E3E2}</G><O>{6C2BDA4A-56C4-4105-9634-3EEB51D49562}</O><P>{AAE07637-72AE-4759-AA9C-128BA0B99828}</P><D>8.0.6001.9</D><C>8.00.6001.18669</C><S>6.1.7600.0.0</S><I>8.0.7600.16385</I><L>en-US</L><R xmlns:q1=""http://Microsoft.STS.STSWeb/"" soapenc:arrayType=""q1:Rq[1]""><Rq><T>URL</T><R>https://annoysmarx.servicebus.windows.net/annoysmarx/setwallpaper?id=fc8a2ecf-d0be-4257-83fd-ae4ffe14064d</R><O>POST</O><W>FRAME</W></Rq></R></RepLookup></soap:Body></soap:Envelope>";
request5.Body = request5Body;
yield return request5;

Now to the F#’s famous |> operator, that should be quick.