Tips & Tricks

After 12+ years, I built a workstation from scratch. Hardware has come such a long way, but that is a post unto itself. Having always worked with Ubuntu and other debian variants it was time to venture into a more lean distro. I picked Arch Linux, on the recommendation of several colleagues. It’s been fun. Pacman and Yaourt are great package managers, and the rolling release model ensures access to the bleeding edge all the time.

In *nix systems, you can make the display, the GUI of an application, appear on another machine. This if often required, when the machine you want to run the application on is in a lab, and you have access through a desktop machine that has a monitor. You can do this, by running an XServer on the desktop machine and configuring the client (the one where you run your app) with the XServer details.

Several people are shocked to hear that I read 1000+ emails and several hundred blog posts a day. Ofcourse, when I say that, all I mean is that, I process that much content. I read around 30-40% (That is really the signal-to-noise ratio of web content these days–and that is, if you are subscribed to high quality feeds) [caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“450” caption=“google reader trends”][/caption] One of friends was curious how I can handle all that data flow, and I emailed her this:

The simple way to retreive the list of changed files would be to update the tree, which would then list the files updated. #cvs update . > filelist.dat The problem with this, is that if there have been changes to other files after your last update, you will have to manually glean the files that you have changed. I tend face this, particularly during the last couple of weeks before a release, since you don’t want to risk updating your tree everyday, but still have to make 2/3 checkins.