February 2009
7 posts
New site! →
UPDATE: FEB-2011
After being a virtual nomad… hopping from Tumblr to Blogger to Wordpress to Jekyll static blog to…. I’ve finally setup my personal site at akash.im and my blog at blog.akash.im
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ShoutJam now stable
There was a technical fault in the ShoutJam system which prevented it from being active today morning. This was the same bug that caused the downtime yesterday.The problem has been corrected.
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Now tinkering with OpenStreetMaps, Gosmore and...
I’ve got myself a new problem to solve, routing on maps based on live traffic data. Well, before that I’ve got to add new commands to ShoutJam.
4 tags
PyS60 Bluetooth stress tests
I’ve been testing my phone’s bluetooth connection to my PC.
Here’s my config: Nokia N70 phone programmed in PyS60, PC with Ubuntu Linux kernel 8.04, Bluez, PyBluez and programmed in Python. And my phone and PC are sending data almost every half second, so there’s no chance of a timeout due to idle connection.
Feb 9:
Connection lasts only for 20-30 minutes. After that the...
3 tags
Workaround for PyS60: Sending SMS in a loop
It isn’t possible to send SMS in an iteration in PyS60 since the messaging.sms_send() will raise an error if the previous SMS isn’t sent (or failed to send). The PyS60 docs say that the state of the previous SMS can be determined by using the callback function as an argument in messaging.sms_send() and then checking the state of the SMS by testing with messaging.ESent,...
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Auto-Commit mode in Python-SQLite
I executed all the insert statements for SQLite in Python and was wondering why my database was empty when I queried it. This I did from my Python script.
I was scratching my head as to what’s wrong and then found out that the isolation_level must be set to None while connecting to the database like below
from pysqlite2 import dbapi2 as sqlite connection =...
1 tag
How staying away from the computer helped me
My first thought when mom forced me on a trip to to a pilgrimage with her was “What the hell am I gonna do there?” But the week long trip helped me plan a lot of things, coz I fell sick and was mostly resting. For the first time I was planning things before-hand. I had no access to a computer, so all I could do was just think and try out snippets of code on PyS60 on my N70 phone...
January 2009
5 posts
4 tags
Bluetooth programming in Python
I have been tinkering with my bluetooth dongle and Nokia N70 phone trying to make a connection between them in Python. N70 is a S60 phone and supports PyS60 a limited version of python (but cool).
I tried to setup Bluetooth stack on Windows XP, but my bluetooth dongle driver is BlueSoliel and the latest version is being sold at a price. The BlueSoleil SDK has C++ and C examples which I...
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Compiling libfbml for Facebook Open Platform on...
Heard a lot of people saying that this Facebook Open Platform’s libfbml compiles fine on Fedora Core 6 and CentOS, but since I favour Kubuntu for it’s ease of management, I decided to go with it. Follow the install procedures right and check the whether you’ve got all the dependency libs installed or else you will run into a lot of errors. I screwed up one ubuntu install and two...
1 tag
You know the "Security Rings" in PHP? :D
I just cleaned my cupboard and found a lot of old print-outs of tutorials and worked-out algorithms. Those were around 3 years old :) no wonder why I would still be having sessions and cookie tutorials for PHP which I then fancily called “Security Rings”. LOL.
Now after 3-4 years and half a dozen more languages into this deep web and programming pit, I know I was silly back then. So...
2 tags
Kubuntu (8.04) bug fix for Dolphin file manager
I just switched from Ubuntu to Kubuntu. Infact screwed up my ubuntu install due to another fatal bug in ‘tasksel’. Doing “sudo tasksel install lamp-server” actually begins to remove the ubuntu-desktop and whatever thats selected in the menu other than installing the lamp-server. Sounds crazy!!!
Then when I just installeed Apache to reinstall the Shindig OpenSocial...
1 tag
Tinkering with Shindig OpenSocial container
Just downloaded and setup the Shindig OpenSocial container. Getting a ‘real’ social app requires Partuza to be installed. Our app Casbour runs fine on Partuza.
Note: To connect Shindig to Partuza’s social graph, you need to deploy php classes and connect these classes to Shindig via the a local.php file or container.php file in the config dir of Shindig.
Thanks to Chris Chabot...
December 2008
10 posts
1 tag
Yeah! Got OAuth working with OpenSocial today!
Learnt how to use OAuth in OpenSocial apps. It took a dozen-dozen page refreshes and reuploads of my application to get this right.
3 tags
Sinatra: a beautifully small ruby web framework →
I just found this on Adam Wiggins’s blog http://adam.blog.heroku.com/past/2008/11/7/rubyconf_slides/
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411 Public service →
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“A line of code a day keeps the recession away.”
– Akash Xavier :]
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Announcing a new app and OpenSocial CSS Kit
Update: I just put up the project at http://code.google.com/p/opensocial-css-kit/
The project is still an alpha. I’ll continue developing this one.
Just started working on a new app with pd.
The idea was the outcome ot a chat session. pd just mentioned the idea and we agreed to work on it. And almost everything was on the floor immediately. Just within hours. It was around 3PM in the...
1 tag
Some work with Haml
Finally, I could design a fairly attractive UI for my app. Got to work with Haml and I’m beginning to understand more than the bare bones of Rails.
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Trick to quickly start rails server on windows
Since I use Windows XP, I often found it painful to cd to the app dir, then type in the command to start the rails server. I have multiple apps and this adds to the pain when I want to switch or even restart the server. So I just created a batch file that takes the app name/path and starts the server.
I have a folder called ‘apps’ which contains the folders of my all my apps. So I...
3 tags
Using BlueprintCSS and Haml
When BlueprintCSS - a CSS framework is cobined with Haml, the productivity surely increases. All you’ve got to do is to drop the Blueprint folder into the public/stylesheets dir in rails and you can start rocking.
The code to use Blueprint has to be converted to Haml though. The Haml docs say that when the <!—[If IE]> element is encountered it adds the...
5 tags
Getting started with Ruby on Rails
After meddling with Merb and Haml for a while I have switched to Rails. Merb’s lack of good docs and tutorials pushed me to make this change. And after a quick scan of the Rails docs I could get it running in a couple of minutes. Here’s a quick 4-step overview as to what is supposed to be done to get Rails running with MySQL and Haml on windows. Linux users can omit the...
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Getting started with Merb and Haml
Merb and Haml can be installed from gem.
gem install merb gem install haml
(As of this article the latest version of Merb is 1.0.3)
Note: All commands are alike for both windows and linux environments unless mentioned
Unlike Rails, there is nothing else to be configured to get Haml working with Merb. All views ending with .html and .haml files are automatically handled by Haml.
To generate...
November 2008
4 posts
2 tags
Road Accident
My first road accident. I tripped over a stone while driving. Ah! I’m not immobilized. I can still win a limping race.
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Created my first Wordpress plugin
Thought creating a Wordpress plugin was tough. But now it seems like a cake walk. My plugin doesn’t do anything special. It just displays “Hello World” at the end of every post :)
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Tried Ruby
Got a feel of Ruby for the first time. I used the online app TryRuby at http://tryruby.hobix.com. Cool app showing off a cool language.
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OOP in PHP
Created a class for the first time in PHP out of my heart. Loved procedural stuff till today. But now think OOP is sweet.