Congrats to Thomashawk on the flickr interview! “Why? Who?”, you ask. Thomashawk, photographer extraordinaire, has taught me a lot about photography. I’ve never met him, or gone on a photo-walk (to be fixed some day), but have learnt from his work, nonetheless. I am compelled to write this, because, in some ways, there is a certain vindication to Flickr doing an article on him. He has been Flickr’s ardent fan, and critic. It’s been a long road! From the fun insanity of DMU(s), Zooomr, and flickr censorship to getting some well reserved recognition. Kudos! ...

Unix. I love thee! Extract an rpm without installing in to the current directory (really, the rpm command should support this): $ rpm2cpio myrpmfile.rpm | cpio -idmv *i: Restore archive *d: Create leading directories where needed *m: Retain previous file modification times when creating files *v: Verbose i.e. display progress List contents of an rpm: $ rpm -qlp myrpmfile.rpm source

The great G.B Shaw, in “Man and Superman” (not that Superman), quipped, “There is no love sincerer than the love of food.” I had a weekend, that reminded me how much I love being fed. It also, reminded me of my wayward ways, in keeping the waistline in check, but I diverge. For this Christmas, I got the most amazing gift – the gift of an evening out trying out food that tasted, as good as it sounds and looks. Without much ado, here is the spread: ...

Working with git is fun. However, it is easy to get tired of the log list of parameters one has to use to very often. Git aliases are a great way to deal with this. For instance, the standard git log, it pretty much useless in any large project, where there are several hundred commits in a day. Most often, the commit you are looking for in probably several pages deep. ...

I’ve been using my MBP as the main computer at work for a couple of weeks now. It is not officially “supported”, and I’m left to my own devices to figure out any issues that arise. Configuring proxies on the mac for all GUI applications is quite simple. However, most of the *nix tools have trouble with it. Macports, which I love to hate, should read it from the environment’s $http_proxy and $rsync_proxy, but for some reason doesn’t really do so. The simplest fix, is to override system env variables, and use the macport configuration file to provide the proxy. It works like a charm (one of reason to like macports, I suppose) ...

For the last few months I’ve been annoyed. Two or three times a week, I get a flurry of emails from Facebook and twitter claiming that I reset my password. Sounds like a first-world problem? It is. However, I have 4 emails linked to my Facebook account and one to my twitter account. I get on average 15-20 mails a week, and I dutifully dis-avow each one of them. Then, this happens. It scares the hell out of me, but I procrastinate. After a good two weeks, and 40 mails later, I’ve finally caved, and enabled it. Now, it’s practically impossible to hack my account. Password + token to access from any new device, and I can remotely revoke access to any device I lose. ...

I use git – quite extensively. At work, we have several git repositories, across different organizations. In addition, I also hack for pleasure. Interacting with several git servers means that I need to have different roles and identities for them. The solution is to setup up one ssh key for each domain, and use ~/.ssh/config profiles to control them. Based on the host I’m connecting to, a different ssh private/public key pair is used – make life a lot easier! ...

BMI, is not the best measure of health, or fitness, but >30 is a definite indicator of lack of care about one’s health. After several years of exactly that, I’m finally within reasonable limits. My BMI is 24.0; It’s official, I’m not obese anymore. In the last 4 years, I have seen my weight go from 230 lbs to 266 lbs, and back to 202 lbs, as of today. It’s a good day! ...

Ohh the unix command prompt, I love thee! Can you guess what these commands do? 1 2 # grep -l <regex> # find . -name <regex> -delete

I have been meaning to get into the exciting world of static site-gen. Why, you ask? Well, I will tell you why?! Actually, I’m too lazy, and it’s late on a Sunday night – instead, Mick Gardner, can inform you on the virtues of static site-generation. After an hour of mucking around with several site-generators, I chose Stasis, which is a good compromise to the blog-oriented Jekyll, and options-insanity that is nanoc. With my new-found fascination for Ruby, I wanted to stay away from Hyde (which is Python based – it’s time to try the dark-side, a little) ...