Nifty tidbits!

Desultory Monday...

16 Jun, 2008 Java Java hadoop

This entry was posted using Its all text on Firefox 3.0 RC2 on Ubuntu Hardy heron, with emacs 23 snapshot as the editor. I love it :-) Well, Its all Text is great if you hate typing into webforms with textboxes that make editing such a big pain in the butt. Its great to see that Its All text has been updated to work with FF 3.0 now. The fun would be to see if this works on Windows with cygwin emacs as the editor.

VPN into Windows VPN Server from Ubuntu Hardy Intrepid

12 Jun, 2008 Linux Tips Tools Utilities

Update 2008/11/17: Networkmanager is broken in intrepid. To get it working had to install network manager from ppa as given here - http://www.ubuntu-forums.com/showpost.php?s=e0d93c09b8c340976477456593ac4cf7&p=6094870&postcount=5 Ok - this was easy - and while there’s some resources on google, I had to figure out a few itty bitty things for my work VPN setup. install network-manager-pptp pptp-linux Restart network manager with killall nm-appletsudo /etc/init.

Scalability principles: Lessons from eBay

5 Jun, 2008 Java

InfoQ: Scalability Best Practices: Lessons from eBayGreat article on Ebay scalability principles.

Drip...

1 May, 2008 photography Very Cool

Drip.. IMG_3370_crop, originally uploaded by Raghu Rajagopalan. *Drip…. *

Water droplets - dipping a toe in macro photography

1 May, 2008 droplets macro photography Very Cool water

he he - so I have a canon S3 IS - got it last year since it allows enough manual control while also having family friendly thingies like video :). Also, with the chdk hack, the S3 IS is good enough for me to experiment. So, one of these long time itches has been to take a water droplet splash - you know, the immensely close up snaps where you see a single drop splashing…

Free subversion hosting - What's the best?

2 Apr, 2008 Tips Tools

All - I’ve just signed up for an Assembla account - these folks provide free subversion hosting with a 500 meg space and unlimited spaces. Will see how it goes.

Firefox 3 beta 5 released. Yahoo Mail is still broken.

2 Apr, 2008 Firefox Web

Firefox 3 Beta 5 release today. Release notes and downloads here. Installed it as soon as I got to know today morning and the first thing to check was whether Yahoo Mail still crashed. Initially, Yahoo Mail seemed to work alright for all of 50 seconds - quickly moving over items in inbox caused Firefox to crash :-( Guess will wait for some more time. I’m sure there’s a bug report somewhere on this - Yahoo mail was broken on Beta 2, got fixed in Beta 3, then was broken in Beta 4 and is still broken on Beta 5.

Hardy heron - first impressions

31 Mar, 2008 Linux Tips Troubleshooting

He he :-) - finally got Ubuntu Hardy heron beta on my home and work laptop. first impressions below: Wubi install from within windows is easy and works great. If after setting up so many boxes, I can go on and on about it, I’m sure that its great help for anyone who’s on Windoze. I mean, the barrier to entry has never gone down so much. I guess once you’ve installed via Wubi and configured your system to your liking, you can uninstall and take an image that you finall install to a dedicated partition - isn’t that just awesome.

Gnuplot, dstat - easy graphing on Linux

28 Mar, 2008 Cygwin HOWTO Linux Tips Tools Utilities

Recently, started fiddling around with how to monitor and graph performance data on linux boxes. Other than the usual tools like top and vmstat, which are either interactive (top) or too textual to do anything much. First off, vmstat, doesnt lend itself well to graphing without additional scripts to lay out the data so tools like gnuplot can be used. Secondly, and more seriously, it doesn’t include a timestamp in the output.

Working with huge XML files - tools of the trade.

27 Mar, 2008 HOWTO Tips Tools Utilities XML

XMLStarlet is great for slicing and dicing huge XML files. Had a run in recently - had a 80 Mb XML file in a single line :D. Guess what, most editors that I tried balked and fell over. This was on a 2Gig Core2 Duo machine. XMLSpy, vi, emacs, notepad++ all died - and trying to do something with a 80 Gig XML where the 80 gigs are on a single line isnt much fun.