Putting Emacs Backup Files in a Separate Location

Whenever Emacs saves a file, it makes a backup of the original. So if I had a file.txt and I make changes and save it, Emacs firsts backs up the original to file.txt~. While I love this functionality, and it has saved me from a pickle more than once, I don’t love the way my folders get polluted with ~ files all over the place. My blog’s drafts folder had hundreds of these....

November 17, 2020 · Mario Jason Braganza

A Day of Updates

Could not focus much on programming today. So decided on doing things with Python programs. Nikola Upgrade I use Nikola to generate both my websites. It is an extremely easy to use, no fuss static site generator, which is easy on my server’s resources. Version 8.1.2 was released a few hours ago and I hopped on and installed it. I follow a slightly unconventional upgrade path, because I was terrified of breaking my server in the early days, when I was still learning about how to go about installing things on servers....

November 16, 2020 · Mario Jason Braganza

Git the Branch

I started playing with a way to control Git via Python. Kushal had asked me to write a program, that would show me the local git branches. So here it is! I call it Git the Branch. (painfully, punny, I know :)) And now I realise why he asked me to do this. The program itself is trivial. Here’s the code on my code repo, Gitlab, and Github. It just consists of me using GitPython to access the current folder via a GitPython Repo object....

November 13, 2020 · Mario Jason Braganza

Poem Feed

Update, 2020/11/13: This has been working beautifully! I love the poems as they show up in my feed. This is a tiny little niche thing, I built all for my ownsome. It all started, when I got hooked on reading the daily poem, on the Poetry Foundation page. Learning Python as I am, I wondered if there was a way to have it come to my RSS reader. And so Poemfeed is a tiny little utility that does just that for me....

November 13, 2020 · Mario Jason Braganza

Starting Work on Git-the-Branch

The Itch Aiming to write a tool using this which will show all the git branches in the current directory and the last commit date on those branches (and only the local branches :)) What I did today I had to carry my phone in to the service centre, so I did not quite have as much focussed time as yesterday, with all the coordinating and carrying, but I learned a few new things...

November 12, 2020 · Mario Jason Braganza

A Good First Day

Was a really good day to ease back into Python today. I got my VS Code up and running. I got a personal [Gitea instance][crjw] up, to host my code, from where I will syndicate it to Github and Gitlab. And finally I got a projects page up, to slowly fill up with projects. I also managed to improve an old program I wrote for myself, but I’ll write about that in the next post....

November 11, 2020 · Mario Jason Braganza

Getting Back on the Horse

Ok, one more time. I know there have been lots of one more times before, but I am going to keep at this until I get proficient enough at this to land a job :) And while I may not be brainy enough, the one thing I can do is be persistent enough to show up. This time, I will focus on building tiny projects. I realise my life is too chaotic for #100DaysofCode....

November 11, 2020 · Mario Jason Braganza

A Hundred Days of Code, Day 026 - Refactoring

Worked only an hour today. Trying to change the little lookup program, I made the other day, into something a little better. Not quite a good day. Calling it quits early.

August 3, 2020 · Mario Jason Braganza

A Hundred Days of Code, Day 025 - Comprehension Exercises

Working on Comprehension exercises today. Reflections and Experience I really need feedback, when it comes to programming. I cannot face a blank page. I always seem to start with printing something out to screen and then my brain kind of kicks into gear. Everything after that is just type, print, is this what I expected, if not then fix, type, print … Exercise 3.1 and I think, I am finally getting good handle on comprehensions....

August 3, 2020 · Mario Jason Braganza

A Hundred Days of Code, Day 023, Day 24 - Tiny Utility to do comparative DNS Lookups

Problem - Compare domain lookups, against DoH Servers Take a list of domains (one per line) from a text file as input, find the IP address for the domain using the standard system level DNS, and then check against DoH answers from both cloudflare and google. and say if all answers match properly or not. Notes What do I need to do? (checklist) Get a list of popular websites, (probably Alexa) figure out a way to read them in loop through each line, and look up its ip with the local dns (use the sockets module) with Google’s DoH json endpoint (use the requests module) with Cloudflare’s DoH json endpoint (ditto like Google) Compare all the values....

August 1, 2020 · Mario Jason Braganza