Useful yet underutilized commands

Recently, I have started looking towards system programming (thanks to my arm processor project). While I was glancing through the manual pages, I noticed these commands that are extremely useful but rarely used (or probably implicity used).

Here they are:

• csplit: split a file into sections …

A USB Drive Full of Viruses

Yesterday, when I plugged in my usb stick onto a college computer little did I realize that it would get infected with hundreds of viruses. Not that I am bothered by these viruses because I use GNU/Linux. I just wanted to safeguard my …

Mod_WSGI or Mod_Python?

Recently, I had the opportunity of deploying django apps that would receive heavy traffic and yet be lite on the memory because I was using a 256 MB virtual private server.

Django has two options:

• Mod_Python
• Mod_WSGI

I have had bad experiences with Mod_Python with issues ranging …

Some latest projects

I have been mum over the past couple of weeks because I have been busy with (sigh!!! repetitive) work. I have been involved with the websites of Euphoria (the cultural fest of my college) and CSFest (the technical fest of the CSE Department). Both the sites use …

Ramblings on Fossconf Chennai'08

Went to Chennai to attend my second FOSS conference. Though Fossconf 08 did not live up to my expectations, it was a perfect conference for first time speakers and absolute newbies who had no idea of what Foss was. I was really impressed by the project …

Rename tables easily in SQLite

Django-Tagging recently moved to version 0.2 and introduced certain backward-incompatible changes. Due to these changes the tagging support for my blog had broken. The remedy as per the wiki was renaming the tables:

• tag to tagging_tag
• tagged_item to tagging_taggeditem

SQLite does not have a …

Flex and Django: Partners in Crime

I have an interesting project coming up which requires a heady mix of Flex and Django. If you are wondering how the two are being mixed, here is the simple answer. Flex will be used at the presentation level and Django at the application …

Launch of Safebrowsing-python

Today I launched my second project online after django-check-constraints, safebrowsing-python. The project is based on the Google Safebrowsing API. Check out the announcement on the google-safebrowsing-api mailing list and also the usage wiki page at the project home.

Wish you a happy and safe browsing on the …

An idle mind is a devil's workshop

On thursday, my previous semester results were out. I logged on to the site and checked out my result. My result was anything but surprising. Then I thought to myself, "Why not give people the freedom to compare their marks with their peers' …

Rendevouz with Firefox3

I have been using Firefox2 for quite a long time and had a hell lot of complaints about it. One was with its memory hogging nature and the other one was with its rendering capabilities.

I decided to try on Firefox 3 (beta 2) after hearing some …