vim

April 17th, 2009

vim - is definetly more powerful than I actually assumed. After you have basic stuff out of the way, here are a few things that you want to setup before working with large projects.

Tabs , cscope, marks, mouse, key mapping

Of course, all of this and more comes for free with eclipse, visual studio, etc. Oh, I forget they are IDEs and take five years to load.

Of course, I’ll post more when I configure my vi.

Hail, vi!

Naati Koodi Koora (Chicken Curry) - Type II

January 17th, 2009

Use the same procedure here. Instead of the chilly powder use - one spoon of pepper powder and three green chillies.

Oh, yeah - you’ll love ‘em. Andra Style :-P

Naati Koodi Koora (Chicken Gravy)

January 17th, 2009

1) garam masala two spoons
2) chicken masala two spoon
3) dhaniya powder two spoons
4) chilly powder     two spoons
5) grated coconut - one spoon
6) Ginger garlic paste  one spoon
7) salt (to taste)
8) onions - two
9 )tomatoes - half? [I use 3-4 spoons from the diced tomatoes can]

chicken - 1.5-2lbs

Preparation:
i. Cut the onions
ii. Put (1) through (9) in a mixer to make a paste
iii. Defrost the chicken
iv. Cut the chicken
v. Boil the chicken with just a little water in a cooker - until it seems cooked. [The chicken will begin to sweat - it will “yield” water]

Now you have “almost” cooked chicken and beautiful paste that you made in step ii.
vi. Put the paste in the cooker with the chicken. Add water to the paste to make it a gravy to desired “density”.
vii. Pressure cook it - for a single whistle. You don’t want more than one whistle because it chicken is already cooked. Ideally, you should get the gravy depending on how much water you’ve added in the first place, right?

You might want to add salt to taste, but it should do if you used the proportion that I mentioned.

 I’ll post a picture in the coming posts.

Arches National Park

December 12th, 2008

It was a hot day, close to 100F. I want to say cloudless but, that wasn’t true. Anyway, it was desert for as far as I could see. Lone standing rocks as if they were kept there on pupose or, as if someone had forgotten to get it out of the way. At the distance, looking at the colour of the rocks, you would tend to think the rocks are burning, trust me, they were.

Balanced Rock

I spent the whole afternoon driving around - rested at the Double arch for a while. Under the arch is the only shelter you would find in the piercing heat. The Delicate Arch was the big one everyone talked about. It is almost a symbol of Utah. (Wonder why everything is called an Arch?) I bet you have seen it somewhere! The walk to Delicate arch, if I remember right was close to 1.5miles from the road. I thought it was off-season at Arches, yet I couldn’t get parking to walk the trail. Disappointing. There was an Delicate Arch View trail a few miles down the road. It was a far-side view of the arch, across the valley. The valley was breath taking. Are you the types who is afraid of heights? Good luck looking down.

Lower View Point - Delicate Arch

Moab, Ut

December 12th, 2008

This was my base station. Small town in Grand County, Ut with a population of five thousand (may be?) - two hours from Grand Junction. I had booked a room at a hostel in the city. I was apprehensive about staying here, but it turned out to be one of my luckier decisions. Great people , very helpful. They helped me plan the rest of the trip. It was an ideal place to stay because, it was ten minutes from Arches National Park and thirty minutes Canyonlands.  There are a plenitude of activities that you engage yourself with: sky diving, whitewater rafting, mountain biking. Oh, by the way, did I forget to mention? - it is an outdoorsy place!

Talking about delays..

December 12th, 2008

The flight from New York to Denver, Co was delayed - missed the connecting flight to Grand Junction. Luckily, that wasn’t the last flight. Took the next flight at 9:40pm, reached GJT around midnight. Happy, that I got a 4×4 and stayed over at a motel nearby. Got a few hours of sleep, and started out to Moab the next morning.

It is refreshing to see the clear blue sky, mountains far in the distance, once again. At least, I’m not running on a schedule. Hitting the road, yeah!

Utah

December 12th, 2008

After a lot of research, about what to do for long cheap vacation, I didn’t have too many choices. Cruise to Alaska, to Jamaica, hiking in Peru, to African safaris - exciting as they may sound either involved a visa hassle or, cost me an arm and a leg. During my brief chat with people, I came across a very useful website - GAP Adventures. There are many a breath-taking tours, that I might take some day. Yeah, not just yet.

Neither Utah was my dream destination nor, was I thinking about it for years before I landed up there. However, when I started looking up about Utah, it never let me down. I will skip the details of the national parks for later but, the following was my brief eight-day schedule in Utah. I spent very little time driving except toward the end of my tour, but had more than enough time at each place I stayed. I didn’t feel the pain of driving, even for whatever I did - it’s beautiful, hot country out there.


View Larger Map

Of course, I had my own 4×4 and, my Nikon D80 to give me company through all the one-thousand miles - now, why would I complain? Well, I didn’t really ask Advantage for this car, but they messed up and gave me this one for the rate of an economy car. I did not complain but, just guzzled 1.5 times more of the fuel. Now, that’s its over who cares!

Liberty Jeep on the 128, La Saal Loop Road

Cheat Sheet

August 13th, 2008

How many times have times have you used a command on the shell and it ends up spewing a whole load of information which you would never be looking at? I know a lot of commands do this. I will use the ps command for the sake of this example.

Whenever you  use the ps command with additional options like au or, aux- sometimes it results in excessive information. Excessive information at that point in time.

# ps aux

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND

root         1  0.0  0.1   2844  1688 ?        Ss   22:46   0:01 /sbin/init
root         2  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   22:46   0:00 [kthreadd]
root         3  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   22:46   0:00 [migration/0]
root         4  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   22:46   0:00 [ksoftirqd/0]
root         5  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   22:46   0:00 [watchdog/0]
root         6  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   22:46   0:00 [migration/1]
root         7  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   22:46   0:00 [ksoftirqd/1]
root         8  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   22:46   0:00 [watchdog/1]
root         9  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   22:46   0:00 [events/0]
root        10  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   22:46   0:00 [events/1]
root        11  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   22:46   0:00 [khelper]
root        46  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   22:46   0:00 [kblockd/0]
root        47  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   22:46   0:00 [kblockd/1]
root        50  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   22:46   0:00 [kacpid]
root        51  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   22:46   0:00 [kacpi_notify]

Let us assume that we are interested in the USER, PID and the COMMAND fields of the output. Certainly, one way of dealing with it probably to provide a complex set of options to the ps command, which I’m not sure will work. Or, another way to do this is to display only columns of information from an output stream is using the cut command. The following line of code should help you list desired columns from the output list.

# ps aux | tr -s ' ' | cut -d' ' -f1,2,11
USER PID COMMAND
root 4725 /sbin/getty
root 4726 /sbin/getty

root 4730 /sbin/getty

root 4731 /sbin/getty

root 4732 /sbin/getty

root 5601 /usr/bin/X

..

Cheat Sheet

July 16th, 2008

Just as much as I hate make this a technical blog, I am forced to write it. Being a developer myself, I hate to remember most odd syntaxes especially with shell scripting. Especially, with the tons of shells that ‘nix supports. My school and projects have made me work on and off on the platform. I hate to say that I am novice in the ‘nix world. This post (hopefully, of the many to come) will be a quick reference to some of the commands that one might have to use in a command line interface. There is no specific order that I have followed here. It’s something that will help me remember.

Set an environment variable (in a bash shell)

> export VAR=value;
> echo $VAR

The above command will set the value only for the current shell. In order that this variable retains this value each time you login type the above line in your bash_profile

> vim ~/.bash_profile
> [make the needed changes]
> source ~/.bash_profile

[source command runs the given file in the current shell]

To find a file in a directory structure (recursively from the current/given directory)

> find -name ‘*.txt’
> find $HOME -name ‘.*txt’

This is a basic use case, and should suffice for day-to-day usage (for me, for now). Here is the link to the bible I hope to familiarize in some time. And, hopefully, (geez, hope again!) this is the first of the many posts to come.

This is England

June 30th, 2008

Moving away from the crash-boom-bang of Hollywood, This is England, is the story of little boy (Shaun) in England during times of growing racism in the early eighties. Shaun, is a single child, whose father had passed away in the war. Being bullied time and again by his seniors in school, Shaun is upset and pissed off. He finds a set of skinheads, (Woody, Milky, Smell) who treat him, unlike the scoffs at schools. In these skinheads, he finds friends and family and begins to feel one among them. All seem to be well, until one of Woody’s friend, returns from jail. That skinhead, a racist, light things in perspective for growing boys like Shaun, and what the immigrant population does to the respectable, and once all powerful English community. Also, perturbed by the death of his father in the war, Shaun, gets in embroiled in the racist mess. The turnout of events are rather heart touching, though I would expected the end to be more powerful.

The movie makers seem to have really gotten under the skin to portray the actions and feelings of the racists and ones on the other side and, its influences on a growing boy. Well, that is England.