Sushil Bajracharya's Bliki

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skb — 2008-06-13T02:08:45GMT-08:00

Here is a handy way to archive everything you send out thru Mail.App

getting rid of ^M

skb — 2008-04-17T23:24:11GMT-08:00

sometimes dos2unix doesnot work properly to convert dos/win files into unix format. In that case this helps:

tr -d '\15\32' < dos-file.txt > unix-file.txt

command line backup/restore in mac using 7z

skb — 2008-04-11T19:06:59GMT-08:00

Just a reminder on using 7z..

backup a directory:

tar -cf -  directory  |  7za  a  -si  directory.tar.7z

to restore your backup:

7za x -so directory.tar.7z | tar xf -

explain language evolution in one line each

skb — 2007-11-27T12:43:21GMT-08:00

Here is how you explain language evolution in one line (per significant release)..

where is enum ;)

compilation error -> free text search -> patch -> origin

skb — 2007-11-15T18:51:17GMT-08:00

It amusing what how free text search is the most useful (with human judgement added of course) sometimes. While testing our new parser for Sourcerer I encountered this error in one of the projects in the repository..

Well its quite frustrating that people release code with compilation errors! I traced the project's origin to sourceforge to see if they had a new release. This is what I found..

The project apparently looks defunct looking at the dates of release and no other updates thereafter. But as curious I am, I did a free text search in google..

Quite amusing what I found, the first link took me to a place where I saw this..

Not only I found patches for two errors I had encountered, I came to know this project is still alive. Of course, had I clicked on this link (http://sourceforge.net/projects/uportal) I would have found the project's original home. Its quite interesting that a bunch of releases for this project were hanging around in sourceforge and our crawler picked that up. The accurate origin for this project should have been this.

So here is a simple heuristic: if a project is hanging around in a repository for last three years without an update, its either dead or it comes from somewhere else. But still, I'm amused that a compiler error took me to a correct location for the origin of the project via free text search on google. Now, had your crawler known to do that, won't that be fun?

Perhaps another interesting point here is how would you express queries to find possible patches for code fixes with compilation errors? And you are working with code you cannot trace back to an accurate origin. As strange as this scenario sounds, this is very similar to what we encounter in CodeGenie. We are working with erroneous code, in the case of CodeGenie incomplete or missing implementation of classes, and formulating queries based on compilation errors. We do not deal as much with syntactic errors such as the above (p = new PersonFactory.createPerson()), but missing features such as methods in the above example is exactly what we encounter in CodeGenie.

I tried to locate a possible patch for the missing 'getLocalPort()' method too. First I tried plain text search with google; querying for terms such as 'requestparamwrapper' and 'getlocalport' took me to only one entry that seemed to be yet another origin of this project. Koders has a nice feature of doing something like 'cdef:requestparamwrapper mdef:getlocalport' and I got no results, Krugle apparently has indexed the same erroneous copy I had encountered originally..

So I was back to the same file that I started from. Some more digging here revealed that 'RequestParamWrapper' has been moved and structurally changed too. May be the problem has been fixed in recent versions.

'sort' in mac terminal : wierdo

skb — 2007-11-11T16:46:23GMT-08:00

'sort' in my mac is behaving really strangely. It does not seem to differentiate files based on case and also deletes the entire content of files.

Here is a simple text file:

'sort'ing in terminal is fine, while redirecting to a file however the original content is lost and the new file is never created !! I ran these in a gentoo box and it works fine there.

This can be a quite disastrous. Imagine you had some file that took you hours of work to produce and you forgot to back up, and sort quite neatly sorts it - by turning it into a blank file.

Added to the fact that there is no Java 6 on mac yet, this adds yet another accolade to apple's mac for being an even greater nuisance for developers.

Earlier I experienced a different behavior. 'sort' would modify the contents of the file 'a' as well as create a sorted version of 'A' on running `cat a | sort > A`. And, finally a friend reports that this works fine in his mac. This makes it even more annoying.

long live backus

skb — 2007-03-20T01:02:47GMT-08:00

John Backus passed away. In his memory, watch this video

“You need the willingness to fail all the time,” he said. “You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work.” Source

an enounter with a technical interview

skb — 2007-03-15T12:18:19GMT-08:00

I had the first ever technical interview for an internship position at a highly regarded company recently. That was probably the most horrible experience I have ever had in anyone assessing my skills so far in my career. I underperformed severely.

I am trying to reflect upon what went on during the entire interview. Thus, I am putting down my understanding of how these interviews work and how the assessment of a candidate is made.

Not surprising that I did not get the offer, but it motivated me enough now to start this snip.

eclipsecon

skb — 2007-02-22T16:12:28GMT-08:00

http://www.eclipsecon.org/2007/

whow!

skb — 2006-11-17T09:41:08GMT-08:00

yes! whow !