Obituary to an Extrordinary Man

My father fought a valiant battle with Cancer. He passed away in early hours IST today (May 15, 2009). He was 51, 13 days shy of being 52. He sustained Neuro Endocrine Carcinoma of Rectum (small cell type) - A rare type of protocol-less and extremely aggressive Cancer. However, Doctors at Yashodha Cancer Institute, Hyderabad, tried their best to palliate its aggression.

He did an amazing job undergoing a very excruciating Cancer treatment. He actually was asymptomatic for a couple of months in between. But the Cancer bit him back. Second time around, He could do only so much in response to the therapy. Yet he did well till the end. Thanks to the expert advice from the primary consultants at Yashoda, We were able to manage to reduce his pain to the least possible. He passed away amongst family with considerably very little pain.

Our family appreciates Dr.Vottery, Dr.Sagar, Dr.Mohanty and Dr. Babu Krishnamurthy for their efforts and their amicable nature. Without them, My father would probably have had a much difficult time.

I thank all of my friends, relatives and well-wishers who stood by our family through the last 9 months. Not only did it give us tremendous strength, but gave my father a lot more to fight this time through.

Humbled,
Sarath.

My Vote for democracy.

This visit to India enabled me to exercise my vote for general elections. Our part of the state has elections in the phase 1. My voter card was promptly delivered to my home. It did have some errors. But I carried my passport to the Voting booth and it all worked out fine.

The Voting booth was close to home. I went in around 10:30. Voting was at full capacity at that time. Waiting lines went beyond 1.5 hrs. So I went back around 2PM. In around 30 mins, I finished.

For all those people who are Voting in the second phase, Please DO VOTE! JaagoRe!!

On a Break

I havent been able to post in the last month. I am in India for a family concern. I have missed quite a few things in this month.

• Grails released new version , quickly following Groovy under SpringSource.
  
• Google released the much awaited Java support in App Engine
• My Grandcentral Account pepped to Google Voice
• Gizmo now communicates to Skype users (okay, I am late, I just noticed)

I have a lot to catch up.  My Google reader has 1000+ in every folder :p

How to Make a Local (Offline) Repository in Ubuntu / Debian

If you are in a place where you dont have internet (or have a bad one) You want to download .deb packages and install them offline. Each deb file is packaged as a seperate unit but may contain dependencies (recursively). apt-get automagically solves all the dependencies and installs all that are necessary. Manually install deb files one by one resolving each dependency would be tedious.

A better approach is to make your own local repository. Before you actually make a repo, You need *all* deb files. You dont practically have to mirror all of the packages from the internet, but enough to resolve all dependencies. Also, You have to make sure, you are getting debs of the correct architecture of your system (i386 etc)

# 1. make a dir accessible (atleast by root)
sudo mkdir /var/my-local-repo
# 2. copy all the deb files to this directory.
# 3. make the directory as a 
sudo dpkg-scanpackages  /var/my-local-repo /dev/null > \
 /var/my-local-repo/Packages

# 4. add the local repo to sources 
echo "deb file:/var/my-local-repo ./" > /tmp/my-local.list
sudo mv /tmp/my-local.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/my-local.list
sudo apt-get update

You can now use synaptic or cli
sudo apt-get install the-package-from-local

If all dependencies are available, it will install and be done. IF not, download those deb files (dependencies) too, and repeat steps 2 and 3.

Quickly: Command history in Linux / Shell

If you are like me, doing a lot of command line in linux (Bash) shell, there are a few commands you do very often. The following commands will make your life a lot easier to quickly go back in command history.

[!!] or better yet [sudo !!] - [!!] is an alias for last run command. One of the best use of this is - Sometimes, you type a command and the shell hits you back with a root privileges required message. You dont have to copy the command and run again. just run [sudo !!]

[history] - just spits out ~/.bash_history with line numbers. A good use of this is piping it to grep to find something. The line numbers can be used to execute the command following it. Say for example, [history | grep find] lists the previous searches (okay, it also shows all commands with "find" anywhere in the line - but a filtered, smaller list).

$history | grep find
 457  find *.wav
 462  find *.wav -exec lame --preset fast extreme '{}' '/tmp/mp3/{}' \;
 487  find *.wav -exec mp3cvbr '{}' \;

To rerun the search just type !nnn where nnn is the number of the line shown, eg: !462.

And the best one..
[CTRL+R] Dont *type* it - press control + r on your keyboard at shell prompt. It opens a prompt that will start a reverse search on history of commands. Then, Type any part of the command (or arguments) that you have done in the past, it will fill in the whole command including the arguments. Hit Enter to execute it!!

Fantastic Four Firefox Addons

I use only 4 firefox Addons. (I am guessing this may come down to 3 with FF3.1's Tabbing features). These four make the slickest and most productive FF for me.

Firebug - A Must for all Web Developers. One stop for all development.

Tab Mix Plus - Well there is some anticipation on the tabbing features coming in 3.1, but until then (or may be even after..), this one is a must have.

DownThemAll! - The best download manager. Very nice replacement for the not-so-friendly defaulter.

GrandCentral Click to Call - For those who use grandcentral, this is awesome. To be able to click a number on a webpage and place a call is one step closer to getting dead lazy

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