I like setting up shortcuts to frequently used commands whether I used Windows or Linux. I use the terminal often and create shortcuts to frequently used commands using “alias” feature of BASH. This has saved me considerable time in the past. However, I recently felt that if I could have a helper tool to monitor my usage of commands and automatically suggest candidates for aliasing, that would be useful. The output of that is Aliaser.

Aliaser works by monitoring your bash history. It analyses command frequency and suggests candidates for aliasing. It manages aliases so created. The feature I like most in Aliaser is that it reminds you to use the aliases you created by showing tips on opening a new terminal session.

Download Aliaser from http://aliaser.googlecode.com.Continue Reading »

I refer Wikipedia frequently. I use this BASH function to help me do that from the terminal. For explanation of how this works head over here.

BASH function

# wiki

Example usage

prashanth@prashanth-desktop:~$ wiki India
"India, officially the Republic of India ( '\; see also other Indian languages), is a country in South Asia.
It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country, and the most
populous democracy in the world. Bounded by t" "he Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on
the west, and the Bay of Bengal on the east, India has a coastline of ... http://a.vu/w:India"

prashanth@prashanth-desktop:~$ wiki Anglo_Saxon
"Anglo-Saxons (or Anglo-Saxon) is the term usually used to describe the invading tribes in the south
and east of Great Britain starting from the early 5th century AD, and their creation of the English
nation, lasting until the Norman conquest of 1066. The " "Benedictine monk, Bede, identified
them as the descendants of three Germanic tribes: http://a.vu/w:Anglo-Saxons"

Here is a simple utility created using Python for translating text from various languages into English. It uses the Google AJAX API to do this.

Usage

prashanth@prashanth-desktop:~$ translate bonjour
hello
prashanth@prashanth-desktop:~$ translate guten morgen
Good morning

Continue Reading »

I bought two Dane-Elec 8GB USB drives recently. Flash memory (as opposed to Hard disk storage) has faster “seek” capability. This is inherent in the design as flash memory is solid state whereas hard disks are electro-mechanical with a “head” that needs to be moved around using a “drive” mechanism. Since seek times are better on flash drives, they are faster when you are reading or writing a lot of small files.

However flash drives do not have sustained data transfer rates that hard disks have (i.e throughput). My thought process what that the throughput can be made up by slapping together two or more USB drives and applying software RAID 0 over them. Below are some performance results and they look encouraging.Continue Reading »

I ate some c#@& outside and got “food poisoning”. I am at home and since I have nothing else to do… I am making rice

Here is my recipe (sourced from my wife)

Hmmm… I am going to try it now. Let us see what happens…

Some time back I had done some work on extracting topics from an arbitrary piece of text using Wikipedia data. Recently I thought of a concept to put that algorithm to work. As a part of this project, I need to extract relevant text from an arbitrary HTML page. By relevant I mean the “meat” of the page devoid of navigation links and side-content.

This algorithm has the following steps:

Continue Reading »

As a part of a project I am working on, I had to cluster urls on a page. After some light googling I found, python-cluster. You can find below a simple python script to illustrate the usage of python-cluster library.Continue Reading »

I have been a happy Gnome user for many years now and only recently started thinking about switching to KDE 4.2 when Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) comes out. However, it so happened that I bought two new widescreen monitors and setup a dual-monitor environment. This is when I started realizing the Gnome was clumsy at best when it comes to managing windows across monitors.

The reason I bought multiple monitors is to maximize my work area so I do not have to keep switching between overlapping windows. Gnome it seems is ill-suited to effectively and effortlessly managing space.Continue Reading »

I had written earlier about my experience with Microsoft Surface. I’ve captured some videos of me using it. Here they are …Continue Reading »

Greetings webizen, I tried hard to get back to my blogging schedule but my laziness got the better of me. I am back truly with a new batch of posts which I will publish over the next few days.

Recently, I went to Veveo’s main office near Boston, USA and had the privilege of experiencing a finger freezing winter! (Not to mention a three day power-cut which I spent under multiple layers of blankets).

A few weeks before I was going to return to India, I started shopping. One of things I bought was a Refurbished NVidia GeForce 9800 GTX+ by EVGA. It was the best deal I could find on NewEgg in terms of value for money. I bought it primarily to have a betterr experience when flying over Paris … in Google Earth.Continue Reading »