Recent linux

• All your aliases are belong to you

  I like setting up shortcuts to frequently used commands whether I used Windows or Linux. I use the terminal often and create shortcuts to frequently used commands using “alias” feature of BASH. This has saved me considerable time in the past. However, I recently felt that if I could have a helper [...]

  August 28th, 2009

• Query Wikipedia from your terminal

  I refer Wikipedia frequently. I use this BASH function to help me do that from the terminal. For explanation of how this works head over here.
  BASH function

  # wiki

  # eg: wiki India
  # wiki Apple_Inc
  # wiki Anglo_Saxon
  wiki()
  {
  dig +short txt $1.wp.dg.cx
  }

  Example usage

  prashanth@prashanth-desktop:~$ [...]

  August 23rd, 2009

• On setting up USB RAID

  I bought two Dane-Elec 8GB USB drives recently. Flash memory (as opposed to Hard disk storage) has faster “seek” capability. This is inherent in the design as flash memory is solid state whereas hard disks are electro-mechanical with a “head” that needs to be moved around using a “drive” mechanism. Since seek times are better [...]

  August 7th, 2009

• XMonad: A Window Manager for “real” people :)

  I have been a happy Gnome user for many years now and only recently started thinking about switching to KDE 4.2 when Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) comes out. However, it so happened that I bought two new widescreen monitors and setup a dual-monitor environment. This is when I started realizing the Gnome was clumsy [...]

  April 26th, 2009

• Nose – TDD – Python

  What, why
  I’ve been reading up on TDD and it has struck me as particularly useful methodology to achieve “clean code that works”. TDD encourages writing unit tests to cover all the code (because by definition, you write a test before a line of code is written). Because all your code is covered you are freed [...]

  May 22nd, 2008

• Project Gutenberg Ngram data: English only

  In my earlier post, I’d posted links to the Project Gutenberg Ngram data I had computed for e-books of all languages. If you are interested in only the English data, get these files instead.

  These two files are splits of a compressed file which contains all of the Project Gutenberg English e-books downloaded about a week [...]

  May 13th, 2008

• N-gram data from Project Gutenberg

  I’ve been working on Wordza.com for which I needed Ngram data from a sufficiently large corpus. Initially, I thought of using Wikipedia data which I already have on my disk, but decided on using Project Gutenberg data as it is more representative of the general usage of English language.

  May 4th, 2008

• Selecting a random row from a table in mysql

  I have come across more than one instance when I had to select a random record from a table in a MySQL database. Here is how to do it.

  April 8th, 2008

• Visualizing mpeg4 motion compensation vectors using mplayer

  The MPEG4 video encoding process makes use of block motion compensation to achieve compression. The motion compensation process serves to produce the intra frames which are the frames between keyframes. I’ve always been fascinated by this process and was delighted to find out that my favorite video player, mplayer, allows one to visualize this process. [...]

  March 30th, 2008

• Creating video thumbnails using ffmpeg

  Generating thumbnails/screenshots of a video is useful in many ways. Youtube and many other video sites use this to show a preview of the video as a small thumbnail. Google video captures a series of thumbnails from a video at various time intervals to show a better video preview.

  March 29th, 2008

• Watching Television on Linux: setting up a TV Tuner card

  A couple of weeks back, I went shopping looking for a TV tuner card that is compatible with Linux. Googling had told me that “Hauppauge” card was known to be compatible. However, I could not find it anywhere in the market (SP Road, Bangalore, India). On going to one of the shops, I found a [...]

  March 23rd, 2008

• KDE4 on Kubuntu – Impressions and Screenshots

  I love Gnome and its simplicity and use it regularly. I loathe KDE and its complexity. Although I used KDE about 5 years back, ever since Ubuntu was released, I’ve been using Gnome. However, when KDE4 was announced, I decided to check it out with an open-mind and re-evaluate.

  January 13th, 2008

• Building a low-cost bad-ass “server” machine

  I have been playing around with Wikipedia data and tried doing some byte pushing on my Dreamhost web space. Since this is shared web space, the processing power and memory available are limited. I was able to create database tables in mysql by parsing the wiki xml dump and some extra processing as well to [...]

  November 27th, 2007

• Making Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) look slicker

  It has been three weeks since I upgraded to Gutsy from the development repositories. Gutsy got released just a little more than a day back. While going through the news from the blogosphere about this event, I wished Ubuntu had released a “non-brown” desktop. I don’t like brown and have seen quite a few [...]

  October 21st, 2007

• Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon and Linux on the Desktop

  I’ve been using Ubuntu Feisty and waiting to get Gutsy when the release comes out. However my curiosity got the better of me and I could not resist upgrading from the beta repositories. The first thing I noticed after upgrade was the amount of polish and attention to detail. Everything looks slick (thanks to Compiz).
  Instructions [...]

  October 6th, 2007

• Drawing on your Desktop

  This is related to the previous post and is meant in part to demonstrate how great Linux is for doing “weird” stuff . This is what we are
  trying to do.

  The circles in the background have been drawn by the python script below. To get the script running you should have python and pygame [...]

  August 24th, 2007

• Matrix Desktop

  What you see above is how my desktop looks now. You need to be using gnome to get this working.
  Nautilus draws the desktop (including the icons) for you in gnome by default. We have to tell it to stop doing that, so we can do the matrix animation in its place. Nautilus can be configured [...]

  August 22nd, 2007