Setting up a new Linux Machine

Soon after getting acquainted with Vim, I had to change my machine. My old Toshiba, with 3 Gigs of RAM and an Intel Pentium at it’s heart, had a broken display, and it was not cutting it anymore.

The new machine is armed with 4 Gigs of RAM, a 4th Gen i5, and 2 GB of AMD Radeon Graphics. It came pre-installed with Windows 8.1. And when I bought it, I had all the intention required to change the operating system to something faster and much more customisable and useful for stuff like Git, Rails and all else, Of course, Ubuntu!

My config on the old laptop was perfect and well toned. Over the past year and a half, I... Read More

Configuring Vim and more!

The Fall semester ended on Dec 28th. And after that a lot of things have happenned. It’s been a long time since I wrote a post, because I have hardly had any time, since then. I am leaving for home day after tomorrow. And now finally, all the tasks are moving into “pack-up” phase.

There have been many changes to my development environment in these two weeks. The most important is the integration of Vim into the scheme of things.

For some time now, I have been trying to get into this amazing command line editor that almost everyone seems to love so much.

Almost always, whenever I started using Vim, I got frustrated and left it to go back... Read More

Gmail 5.0 (Material Design Update) is here!

Well, Gmail 5.0, was probably the one release of Gmail, which I was most eager for. Before this, almost always, the updates have been merely “behind the scenes”. Slight bug-fixes, fixing crashes etc. But this was different, this brought on a totally new and fresh material design template to the one app on Android which I used the most!

For the past few days, there have been many updates for the Google apps on my Nexus 7, and all of them have been updated with the Material Design guidelines, and now, Google+ actually makes sense. I have been using it often to check out articles and stuff shared by Coursera, and other such firms, but basically, I am kinda hooked... Read More

Ubuntu for Devices (And then back to stock Android!)

And then, I decided that my beloved Nexus 7 (2012 version, the device is called “grouper” for some mysterious reason!), had remained with stock Android for too long, and that it needed to go out there and explore the world of flashing custom ROMs, and experiencing other OSs. So, I opened up the Ubuntu for Devices installation guide.

The webpage was familiar, I had been there before a lot of times, almost always, with the intention of flashing Ubuntu onto my Tablet, but always, coming up with some excuse to not do so. This time I was determined! I had backed up everything using the adb command line utility from my Ubuntu 12.04 laptop, and anyway, it wasn’t... Read More

(Ruby) Gems are powerful!

So, after my last post, I came back to campus, this Monday! And once I came back to the campus, I was behind a proxy again. This ensures that there is no easy way (as for now, I don’t know any way at all) to SSH with servers outside. So, Git SSH, Heroku SSH everything’s gone!

So, I am pretty convinced that I made the most of my 6 days at home, where there were no proxies, just pure internet access!

At home, I had also, configured three basic Ruby Gems, which I am determined to use in all my successive projects and one Gem which was a failure.

So, starting with the three that worked perfectly well, they were... Read More

Ship it!

So, after the previous post, which actually caught the attention of the people at Travis CI, I am back with the next part of the application lifecycle.

Shipping! Although, the word is simple, and the process is pretty easy to understand, it was something that I obviously, had never done before, and didn’t have any idea what it meant either. Because, till now, I have worked with PHP and deploying PHP is simply copying the files onto a server that supports PHP hosting (whatever that means!). Rails, though, was a different game, altogether!

Heroku, seemed to be the platform of choice, on the internet. So, I went through the Heroku Getting started for deploying... Read More

Cracking Travis CI.

About a month into this semester, I found out that Travis CI is actually free for open source projects. And since all of my projects were open source, and I had already seen those great looking badges on some repositories, I was excited.

Building a project was something new for me. Generally, all I really cared about was how it rendered on the screen, but building a projects, and running Unit Tests (which was the single most intimidating thing according to me) was new and something that waited to be explored! So, I set out on the journey to crack Travis CI and get the above badge on the README files of one... Read More

Going Home

It’s that time of the Fall semester again. About 70 days ago, we came back and started second year (Yay!). And now we are going back, “The Durga Puja Vacations.”, and unlike last year, (when it was a badly scheduled 5 day holiday), this year it is 5 weekdays, and with the two weekends, preceding it and succeeding it, you learn to put them all together, and get 9 days out of it! The campus is slowly emptying out, those without labs, would mostly have left the campus, ( the three days after mid-semester exams, hardly matter! :P )

I am still here. Leaving tomorrow. It would be a 26 hour train journey to Chennai (yeah, new home!).

The Mid... Read More

4 exams, three days.

Four exams, two of which were “Science of Living Systems” and “Environmental Science” (Who thought we would have to study these in college! :/ ). And the other two were Dynamics and Transform Calculus.

Although, at the very beginning, I was pretty afraid of Dynamics, (Analysing moving parts always freaked me out!), I turned out to love Dynamics, surprisingly! Transform Calculus, has always been great!

But I guess, the emphasis should be on the fact that, these papers were within a span of 72 hours. And in quick succession. Morning Afternoon, + 24 hours and +36 hours. Which was just bad!

But somehow, it’s over, and we are up and running again.

Right about now, almost everyone started the countdown... Read More

Installed Ruby. Yay!

Often called, the best language to develop web applications, Rails, has pretty much been a stranger to me, much to my disbelief (at not being able to install a simple package on my machine, even after asking so many other people) and unhappiness (I really do wanted to get on board, with the language that was being used in SO many web applications, starting right from GitHub! [ Which is probably the best web application out there! ]).

But now I have it installed. Yay!

Once I installed Ruby, from source, (because apt-get didn’t work, and I didn’t wanna debug.) Fingers-crossed, I fired up the first command. rails new blog.

I had a lot of ideas... Read More