sandipb.net

Every time I come back to Python from the land of Perl here at work, I need to re-learn how to use regular expressions in Python, as it is, IMHO, quite a bit different from Perl. Rather than trawling through the docs again, I made some online notes this time. Hope it is useful to somebody.

This is something that has bothered me always for the past several years, especially in the period when I was working on my own. Paul Graham has managed to put this so eloquently into words: … There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. Its embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals.

The latest Ubuntu releases makes it real easy to set up a local DNS cache for your workstation using dnscache from the well-known djbdns software by D. J. Bernstein. For those who have historically installed djbdns/ucspi-tcp/daemontools from source because of distribution restrictions, things changed really for the better after DJB placed all these software in the public domain in 2007. You can now setup all this in about one minute! (depending on your Internet connection though.

11 years back, I was just yet another guy out of college with a background of Turbo C/C++ and Pascal as most other batchmates of mine. My software career could have gone anywhere. PC Quest Linux was just a toy with which I was playing with but wasn’t too much attached to yet. A stroke of good luck helped me get an opportunity to work with one of my close school friends - Inder, who introduced me to PHP 3.

This time when we went to Pondicherry on the year end, we took two cameras - I took my Rebel XTi and my wife the LX3. While uploading our photos to Flickr, we had a problem. We wanted to merge our photo sets, but because of the different photo naming conventions of the two cameras, the photos won’t be sorted according to time taken. The solution, as I found out after a bit of digging and trying out different exif tools, was simple enough.

A quick tip. I couldn’t find this from a quick search when I really needed it. The problem - command line programs like fetchmail use the system wide openssl CA certificates to verify the authenticity of the server certificates they are provided when they connect to an SSL server like POP3 or IMAP. Sometimes, you will have providers like Dreamhost, who will get smart and ditch the atrocious certificate issuing set up we have right now, and give you a self-signed certificate to verify their servers.

I normally use jUploader for uploading photos to Flickr from my Ubuntu Jaunty box. However, since I got the amazing Panasonic DMC-LX3 compact camera, I have been uploading HD videos too to Flickr. Now none of the FOSS tools that I know of support video right now. Since I insist on uploading photos in the order that I have taken them, it makes my photo upload workflow really messy - upload a few photos from jUploader, go to flickr.

Akamai footprint awesomeness. My IP address. sandipb@pluto:~$ wget -O - -q http://www.whatismyip.com/automation/n09230945.asp;echo 122.167.0.79 sandipb@pluto:~$ host 122.167.0.79 79.0.167.122.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer ABTS-KK-Dynamic-079.0.167.122.airtelbroadband.in. Akamai CDN for downloading Adobe AIR. sandipb@pluto:~$ host airdownload.adobe.com airdownload.adobe.com is an alias for airdownload.wip3.adobe.com. airdownload.wip3.adobe.com is an alias for airdownload.adobe.com.edgesuite.net. airdownload.adobe.com.edgesuite.net is an alias for a1396.g.akamai.net. a1396.g.akamai.net has address 203.101.62.10 a1396.g.akamai.net has address 203.101.62.11 sandipb@pluto:~$ host 203.101.62.10 10.62.101.203.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer dsl-KK-static-010.62.101.203.airtelbroadband.in. I am downloading from a server co-located at my ISP.

Texinfo manuals are used primarily by various GNU projects like Glibc, gcc, gdb, etc. Texinfo is an extremely powerful format for writing high quality professional documentation and can be easily converted to HTML, PDF, Docbook XML and various other formats. The language features tex macros which are quite easy to pick up, and much easier to hand write as compared to the new fangled XML formats. However, my pet grouse for a long time was that the PDFs, which look excellent on screen don’t seem to print too well on paper.

Many service providers have started encrypting the statements that they send you. While at some level, it does add some amount of security when the path to your inbox is not very secure. However, it is sometimes a major pain when you want to archive your emails. This is because every provider has decided on a different secret to encrypt your PDF. So if one day you wish to access a statement of your phone bill from three months back, you have to look up the bill from your archive and read the mail to find out what they used to encrypt it.