Work

Ok, now that I’ve installed CentOS, I decided to install X Windows. And like Rip Van Winkle, I learnt that a lot has changed in 20 years :) A windowing environment was easy to install … sudo yum groupinstall "Gnome Desktop" and the trusty old startx & gave me a Windowing Environment (which I have yet to explore) However, switching permanantly to graphics mode (or vice versa) wasn’t so easy. I wanted to set my command line as the default startup environment and so I went to look for the default runlevel. I coudn’t find it. That’s because they don’t exist anymore. No inittab of old, nothing. ...

I got myself a new pc to learn Linux and do all my crazy experimenting on. What’d I use as my primary OS? Why CentOS, ofcourse. Two reasons … These are long term, slow stable releases, just the way I like my software to be. My last exposure to Linux was Red Hat Linux v5 & 6 way back when1. CentOS looks familiar enough to ease my apprehensions. First step on the way, was getting the OS installed on the machine. Slight hiccup though. I had the ISO and no optical drive! ...

Writing this up, for future dumb me. I wanted to be able to archive my Google Apps account (just me on my domain) to somewhere else on a sorta-kinda automatic basis. I also did not want to make domain wide changes, because I don’t want to affect any future users I might add to my Google Apps account. What I want: Archive all my incoming and outgoing mail (on Google Apps) to another cloud account ...

Short new series for me. Quick and Dirty Programming Posts They’ll be tagged qdpp. They’ll be raw, error prone and mostly works in progress. A few reasons to help me write for a few minutes (publicly) daily. I’ve realised slow and steady is a good way to build a body of work, (Godin, Kushal). Even if the beginning is slow and shitty. to save myself searching the web for stuff I need to have handy. these are primarily for me, and me alone. If they help you as well, that’s a bonus! Let’s start with PEP. ...

Being laid up sick in bed is never fun. Yet, serendipitously, it was the being laid up, that gave me time to focus and complete my first Python program. We were to make a project, that combined what we’d learnt so far at DGPLUG. So to me that was: Markdown (or RST; I chose Markdown) Git (my bugbear. I still can’t quite wrap my head around it) and Python. So I created a spanking new repo for my crazy, one off projects at Github. Created a license, because, well because Anwesha says you ought to, and even shows you how to. (and it’s generally a good thing any way :) ...

Note: This is for the Student Planet. Please read this on the blog. At the dawn of computing … Last night, over at DGPLUG, Kushal gave quite a heart rousing talk on the history of Free Software, covering quite a bit about Richard Stallman and the events leading up to him (RMS, not Kushal) launching GNU & the FSF. If you’re interested in reading more about that sort of thing, here’s a few more books & resources. ...