Sarath Chandra Pandurangi's Blog

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 sour...

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 *.wa...

Update: This post is outdated, I created a Firefox Addon collection I use only 4 firefox Addons.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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Dont print that email/document. Its not a request. Its a real, honest, warning. Dont do it. You must be really out of this world, or of the last millenium, or simply a silicon dimwit to use that printer instead of using it electronically. In the first place, you are consuming (carelessly) yet another enviromentally expensive resource. No, not the paper. The Tree (do you know how long it takes for a tree to be ready for paper manufacturing? and all those chemicals used to make it?). On the other hand, it is much easier to search an electronic catalog than manually looking up a drawer full of business requirements in hard copy. Instead of printing those comminucation emails, jira tickets, corporate bills, use case documents (and the list goes on..) - scan them / store digitally. Many of these start off as electronic documents. Use those. You can make it worth even more by using Google Desktop search or similar tools. Much worse is printing books/study material for *reference*. Are you...

This one is my all time favorite! Happy Valentines Day!

Meld is a popular diff viewer in linux (gnome). It is extremely light weight. UI is very similar to WinDiff. Although it is not comprehensively robust yet, It is still a great help for people like me, handicapped to read huge diffs in command line. Git is awesome when it comes to managing version control, esp in command line. However, while committing, you would want to check what changes are going in. git gives git-diff for this purpose. Spitting out a (unified) diff format text for showing changes. But reading this could be cumbersome at times. To visually inspect git diff, you can use the latest version of meld. The version that comes with debian or ubuntu 1.1.5 lacks git support. You need to build the latest meld (I got 1.2.1) from source. Here is how you can do it. resolve dependencies: sudo apt-get install pyorbit pygtk gnome-python intltool Get the source from here (opens new window). Extract the archive. In the exploded directory, run make. It makes an executable mel...