Author: abhijit

ruby Classes and Modules

December 14, 2019 / abhijit

Classes and Modules in ruby have always intrigued me!

So, I thought I’ll write some code to understand what they were.

Besides the standard Class aspects of ruby, there are a lot of interesting things that can be done with them – like singleton objects.

Modules, of course, give another level of flexibility.

Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.
H. H. WILLIAMS

different ways to run program as root

August 28, 2019 / abhijit

I discovered that there are many different ways to run a program as root.

The most well known way is to use the sudo command

$> sudo run_as_root_program.sh

This, of course, prompts for the password which you need to then enter.

But what if we need to run the program itself from another program so that the password prompt doesn’t appear?

I came across this requirement recently and it took quite a few iterations before I got it right.

remove favicon request error in Chrome

January 15, 2019 / abhijit

Chrome has this weird habit of requesting for a favicon to show on the tab. For developing applications locally this is a major pain.

There is a way to overcome this, however.

chrome favicon request

To avoid this, we can add a very small snippet in the in the head of index.html file.

<link rel="icon" href="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhEAAQAAAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACASgAOw==">

setting up Wallabag with SQLite on Ubuntu

November 15, 2018 / abhijit

After I got Shaarli setup, I realized that a lot of bookmarks I had imported had broken links and I had no idea what those links were and what they contained.

This caused me a bit of grief, until I came across this software called Wallabag.

Wallabag promised to save pages to my server after cleaning up scripts and unnecessary junk from the html pages.

And the best part was I could choose from Shaarli which pages to save for posterity in Wallabag!

setting up Shaarli on Ubuntu

November 6, 2018 / abhijit

Browser bookmarks has been an essential part of browsing for me. But once multiple browsers started appearing, I found that I couldn’t share my bookmarks across browsers.

And then delicio.us appeared. And they even had a free tier! That was such a lifesaver. But like all good things it came to an end and I had to choose something different. I exported all my bookmarks to Diigo and had been using it for ages.

But from the time I got more comfortable with the server side of things, I wanted get off Diigo as well. I didn’t want to face the same problem again in the future.

I came across Shaarli some years ago and always wanted to install it on my own server. Shaarli seemed to always get recommended as an easy-to-install software.

setting up Syncthing on Ubuntu – Part 2

October 18, 2018 / abhijit

Syncthing by default runs on localhost on port 8384

I wasn’t too keen to run syncthing publicly directly, so I created an nginx reverse proxy for it.

The other reason being I wanted to put a basic authentication to access the syncthing main page so nginx seemed perfect for this job.

setting up Syncthing on Ubuntu – Part 1

October 10, 2018 / abhijit

Syncthing is an application to sync files across devices. Supports Windows and Linux. Also has an Android App. Since my server is Linux and I work across Windows desktops, this seemed ideal to use.

Setting up syncthing wasn’t too difficult. Lots of tutorials abound. The basic commands involve installing using apt-get.

setting up Fossil on Ubuntu – Part 3

September 30, 2018 / abhijit

Once fossil is set up, I wanted it to start automatically on system reboot, so that I needn’t worry about it in the future.

After trying many different ways of doing this and failing, I ended up with a configuration which included a shell script and supervisor to start it.

Those who know, do
ARISTOTLE