Author: abhijit

fossil core dumped error – home directory must be writable

August 23, 2020 / abhijit

I got this fossil error during the latest server setup on Ubuntu. Earlier, it was just the question of adding fossil to the path.

But for some weird reason, I got this error this time –

home directory "" must be writeable
Aborted (core dumped)

After trying to search for the error, I finally got a clue at this fossil check-in, which shows the check for write access to the home directory to create a .fossil file.

Checking all accesses, everything seemed absolutely correct, so the only thing left to do was to create the file manually –

touch ~/.fossil

This solved the problem correctly.

ruby – update default bundler

August 19, 2020 / abhijit

Whenever I get this error, I have to again do a google search. So, this post is for me not to do that again!

Could not find 'bundler' (2.1.4) required by your .Gemfile.lock.
 (Gem::GemNotFoundException)
To update to the latest version installed on your system,
run `bundle update --bundler`.
To install the missing version, run `gem install bundler:2.1.4`

Unfortunately, the suggestions don’t quite work.

The correct way to fix this is to run these three commands:

gem install --default bundler
gem update --system
bundler update --bundler

Courtesy of StackOverflow. (The correct answer on StackOverflow didn’t quite work either!)

Use Wake-On-LAN to wake up another computer when your PC resumes

August 15, 2020 / abhijit

Starting up another computer on a network itself is such a fascinating idea! For me, it literally feels like magic!

There are so many things involved. The computer which needs to be started (or woken up) has to have the capability, both at the hardware and the software level.

Also the computer doing the waking needs to send a magic packet!

When I initially heard this, I honestly thought this was a joke of some kind. A magic packet? Really?

How I wish we had been taught all this instead of inane and archaic stuff in college!

poor man’s directory monitor – part 2

May 4, 2020 / abhijit

After having created the directory monitor, I realized that it would not be suitable for everything.

For example, if I needed to know which file was getting modified in the directory, rather than just anything having gotten modified.

Well, in that case we would somehow need to store both the file name and the modified time of the file which changed.

poor man’s directory monitor – part 1

May 3, 2020 / abhijit

There have been many times over the years that I’ve been wanting a simple capability of monitoring changes in some directory or some files in my system.

Linux has inotify and Windows has WatchDirectory.

The biggest challenge has been to look for something that works seamlessly across operating systems.

So, I thought of creating my own solution!

gitignore settings

April 30, 2020 / abhijit

To get git to exclude files and directories, we need to add a .gitignore file in the root folder of the project.

Some of the things I learned from setting up my .gitignore

ruby Open3 module

April 29, 2020 / abhijit

What a fantastic module!

Every once in a while I get to know a bit more of Ruby and I feel the joy which Matz talks about!

From: The Philosophy of Ruby –

For me the purpose of life is partly to have joy. Programmers often feel joy when they can concentrate on the creative side of programming, So Ruby is designed to make programmers happy.

Today I was looking for executing a program from within Ruby. Now this program takes command line input and gives some output as well. So, I went around trying the usual %x(program.rb) but obviously that didn’t work.

Finally I came across Open3 which is a core module of Ruby!

customizing Microsoft Word – zoom shortcuts and full path names

March 11, 2020 / abhijit

This adds a few convenient customizations in Microsoft Word. I’ve always liked the zoom shortcuts in browsers where Ctrl++ (Control + Numeric Keypad +) and Ctrl+- (Control + Numeric Keypad -) zooms in and out on the page. I wanted the same functionality in Microsoft Word as well.

Additionally, full path to the document in the title bar would also be nice.

pipe localhost to the internet using inlets over Nginx

February 21, 2020 / abhijit

Many times during developing some application it becomes important to show the progress to someone over the internet.

Most of the time we end up using some screen sharing software. That, however, can only show my screen to the other person. They cannot really interact with the application.

We can use some software for remote desktop sharing but then I cannot work while the other person is using my screen.

One very nice solution is ngrok, which essentially creates a tunnel from the local system to ngrok’s servers and gives a nice URL.

However, I was a bit concerned since all my traffic was getting redirected via ngrok’s servers.

I was looking around for something which would do the same thing but via my servers and finally came across inlets. This is an open source project, written in Go, which can be easily self hosted.