Author: abhijit

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!

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.

nginx auto-index styling

December 16, 2019 / abhijit

I’ve always been envious of the directory listing that Caddy has for serving files. Nginx also has the capability to list directories and files.

This is extremely useful to serve a directory out quickly over LAN or even where it is required to serve a directory listing instead of a web page.

However, the default Nginx styling leaves a lot to be desired!

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.