I came across this short but extremely powerful post on the gapingvoid blog. It not only moved me but forced me to question myself, to ask myself what is it that I’ve done in my life. I thought it needed to be reproduced in full here, with proper attribution. To paraphrase Seneca, the tragedy isn’t… [Read more…]
I spent the last week travailing away, trying to painfully find a way to deploy a web.py based API on IIS7 using PyISAPIe. As frustrations had begun to mount up, I had nearly decided to give up. Being a die-hard Linux and Mac guy, I despise having to work on Windows. Here I was, not… [Read more…]
OS X has the habit of keeping recently closed applications in memory so that if they are run again, they load quickly. The part of physical memory used for this purpose is called “Inactive memory”. The “System Memory” tab on the Activity Monitor application gives a break-down of the physical memory, including available free and… [Read more…]
I recently came across a requirement in a project where I had to, in Python, programmatically extract all available public IPs on available interfaces on the machine the code would run. I looked around and settled with the following snippet of code that uses the built-in, standard socket Python module: import socket ip_list = [ip… [Read more…]
Until today, we had most of the projects on Mercurial repositories hosted on a Windows box in-house. The Mercurial web interface was set up to provide a convenient read-only access to both contributors and non-contributors within. However, the box in question was unreliable, and so was the Internet link it was alive on. And, in… [Read more…]
I am not a big fan of BlackBerry smart-phones. I realize that there are a lot of people who can’t seemingly exist without access to their emails virtually all the time, and for those lot, BlackBerry, with its prominent push email feature, is perhaps a better fit than any other smart-phone platforms out there. When… [Read more…]
MacOS has this application called Front Row. When activated, it takes over the entire screen, displaying what is known as the “10-foot user interface” to allow the user to kick back, relax, and watch and listen to videos, podcasts, music, or media content of any kind. If you’ve got a big screen, such as an… [Read more…]
The day I got a grip of git, I fell in love with it. Yes, I am talking about the famous distributed version control application: git. I was a happy Subversion (svn) user before discovering git. The day to day workflow with git and the way git worked made me hate Subversion. I was totally… [Read more…]
I have a 13″ white MacBook. It has a glossy display that is about the best I have ever used in my life. Great quality, lovely fonts. The only drawback with it is a drawback with glossy displays: it reflects ambiant light which can at times cause problems. But I really don’t mind that. I… [Read more…]
When I am writing code, I spend most of my time inside Vim on Terminal.app on MacOS. When I am not writing code, I still end up spending a good bit of my time on Terminal.app, running all sorts of commands, using command-line applications (such as irssi for IRC), and editing files in Vim here… [Read more…]
I thought I would make a quick mention of a web page I came across that introduces really useful third-party Firefox plugins which a person such as myself who gets involved in hanky-panky from time to time can make really good use of. I know I have relied on Firebug on far too many occasions… [Read more…]
August 12, 2011
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