Know the secret of writing well? Read out aloud.
Mac has a feature to read out any selected text. We can enable it by:
Going to system preferences >> Accessibility >> Speech >> Speak selected text with shortcut
I use the default shortcut: Option + Esc.
Same panel also provides the option to select voice and read speed.
Now select any text and press the shortcut to read it out.
“When I was very young, my father practiced law. One of his best friends, Grant McFayden was a client. He was a perfectly marvelous man of enormous charm and integrity - just a wonderful, wonderful man.
In contrast, my father had another client who was a blowhard, overreaching, unfair, pompous, difficult man. And I must have been fourteen years old and thereabouts when I asked, “Dad, why do you do so much work for Mr. X - this overreaching blowhard - instead of working more for wonderful men like Grant McFayden?”
My father said, “Grant McFayden treats his employees right, his customers right and his problems right. And if he gets involved with a psychotic, he quickly walks over to where the psychotic is and works out an exit as fast as he can. Therefore, Grant McFayden doesn’t have enough remunerative law business. But Mr. X is a walking minefield of wonderful legal business.”
This case demonstrates one of the troubles with practicing law. To a considerable extent, you’re going to be dealing with grossly defective people. They create an enormous amount of the remunerative law business. And even when your own client is a paragon of virtue, you’ll often be dealing with gross defectives on the other side or even on the bench. That’s partly what drove me out of the profession.”
- Charlie Munger in The Poor Charlie’s Almanack
A very similar thought is in Desiderata too:
Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit.
I broke my phone and missed carrying a few items on my last trek. This is a short checklist for future references.
Bonus: Want some ideas for places to travel? Check this.
Last week, I visited Shenzhen in China with my family for 3 days. Shenzhen is a shopping paradise with huge markets such as Dongmen and Lo Wu commercial center. Shenzhen is surrounded by hills, which give it a pleasant weather all the year round.
I compare my visit to China to that of some alien world, where the habitants have progressed as much as us (or even more), but where they don’t understand our language, they don’t accept our credit cards and where we can’t use our mobile applications.
These are few of the things I noted for our next trip to China.
Things to note before visiting China:
Workarounds and preparations:
Enjoy your trip to China.
I like to use DigitalOcean for trying out new web-applications and scripts. The cheapest plan comes at $5/month but provides only 512MB of memory. Adding a 1Gb swap memory is usually sufficient for temporary memory extensive needs. These is a short documentation on how to add the swap partition.
Adding a swap partition:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap bs=1M count=1024
sudo mkswap /swap
sudo swapon /swap
Making the partition persistent on system reboots:
sudo vi /etc/fstab
# Add a line to tell the system to use the file
/swap none swap sw 0 0
Optimize swappiness and vfc_cache_pressure for VPS needs:
sudo vi /etc/sysctl.conf
# Add the following at the bottom
vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 50
vm.swappiness = 10
The detailed article about what each of the above commands do is available here.
Image credits: @Mukesh
I attended Pycon India during last couple of days. As always, it felt great to meet so many smart programmers creating amazing things. These are my notes from various workshops, talks and interactions 1.
In an interaction with @Gaurav, he mentioned about Behave library - “it is for behaviour-driven development. It is so intuitive that even a non techy person can write specs for your code.” The concept sounds interesting for writing browser tests with Selenium.
@Shashank gave a workshop on “scraping even the hardest websites.” Though I have used BeautifulSoup 2 before, using Selenium with PhantomJS was a new learning. Another interesting note from the talk was using DeathByCaptcha API for solving captchas on websites.
So now my workflow for scraping websites is something like this:
In another workshop, @Anand not only explained us how decorators work, but also made us do lots of exercises. One can go through the notebook here. By the end of the workshop we learned to write our own trace, memorize / cache and routing decorators.
Apart from decorators, I also learned about various magic commands in IPython Notebook:
%%file filename.py
# Python Code
# below it will save the code
# in the given filename
!python filename.py
# using ! we can run bash-commands
%magic
# To see all the available magic commands in IPython
# (found in an interaction with Eswar Vandanapu)
@Kushal gave a keynote on the importance of contributing upstream. By going through the source codes of our favorite programs, we can not only become a better programmer but also get an opportunity to contribute to them. I pledge to have a closer look at the source codes of two of my favorite Python packages - Rhythmbox and Django.
Guys from IIT Bhu talked about using SimpleCV to play flappy-birds using gestures. The library looks quite powerful to do some interesting stuff with cameras and images. I have a few toy-ideas in my mind now 3 - will see how they go.
@Kiran shared the problems he faced while creating LastUser service. I learned about database-backed sessions and about how they differ from cookie based sessions. Kiran also emphasized on using HTTPS by showing how easy it was to hijack sessions using FireSheep on an unsecured network.
Django uses database-backed sessions by default. While digging into the related documentation, I found the solution to some of my problems 4.
Second keynote speaker, @Michael Foord, emphasized on moving the projects from platform-as-a-service (such as Heroku other such hostings) to infrastructure-as-a-service (such as Amazon AWS). A hosting service should be considered as livestock or sheep instead of as pet. It should be easily migratable and redeployable whenever needed. Docker and JuJu are steps towards that.
@S Anand presented a talk on “faster data processing in python.” He began with basic pieces of codes and then optimized them incrementally - explaining the measurement techniques and conceptual approach towards optimization. The complete talk can be viewed online, while the notebook is available here.
Few important libraries mentioned in the talk were:
During the lightning talks, @Vineet showcased his
library Pipdeptree, which displays all the pip
dependencies in a tree format. It will surely come
quite handy for generating sane requirements.txt.
@Ankur showcased his awesome new project ImportPython.com - a customized Python weekly newsletter. Apart from that, the website lists all the Python books (free as well as paid) categorized by reader’s levels. In future he plans to bring everything else, including videos, presentations etc. related to Python at one place.
Together, this is a long list of new libraries and concepts to try-out and practice. It should keep me busy well until the next PyCon.
Note: This is not a post about everything interesting that happened at the event. There were many other interesting talks and workshops. These are only the things I noted down during the event to implement them in my projects at sometime. ↩
I prefer to use lxml with PyQuery
for parsing and selecting the elements. ↩
Toy-ideas: 1. Write a script to take images each time I open the lid of laptop. 2. Write a script to automatically filter the best, find duplicates, and fix images from a large album. ↩
In a database-backed session, a
session row is created in the database on each
user login. The encrypted id of this row is stored
in the user’s cookie. On each is_authenticated()
call, this session row is fetched. Thus this can be
used to store session data of any size without
incurring any additional overhead - example use
cases: storing user’s votes, alerts, carts,
trackers etc to show “already voted or item
present in cart” flags. ↩
These are few of the bash commands I often find useful:
z: Z allows jumping (cd) into frecently
(i.e. frequently and recently) used directories.
Instead of doing
cd /home/pratyush/websites/project_name
each time, I can now simply do z project_name.
Z supports tab completion too. Link to Z library.
ps -u <username> -o pid,rss,command | awk '{print $0}{sum+=$2} END {print "Total", sum/1024, "MB"}':
When accessing remote servers using shell, I often need to
check the list of scripts running and the memory
they are consuming. This command does exactly
that. It is a sort of minimal task-manager. I
found this command here.
php -S localhost:8888 -t .: Though I am not a
PHP fan (anymore), this command serves the
current directory using a live php server. This
comes handy to tryout a local wordpress
installation by just extracting the package.
python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080 is a Python
alternative for starting a live server from
current directory to serve the files.
netstat -plunt: To see which ports are open and
which application is on each one.
du file/path -chs: du is the disk-utility
command. This command shows the total size of any
directory. -c is for total, -h is for showing
humanize file sizes and -s for showing only the
summary. I often use this command on web-servers
to find the size of file-system caches.
ssh-copy-id user@example.com: This appends the
public key to the remote-host for password-less
ssh logins.
mysqldump -u username -p --all-databases > alldbs.sql:
For creating a backup of all the mysql databases.
mysql -u username -p < alldbs.sql:
For restoring all the databases from the dump.
Both of the these mysql commands are high on performance. These come handy for creating a backup snapshots of databases.
I found these two commands here.
ssh -D 31500 user@example.com: This turns the SSH client into a SOCKS proxy server. It provides me a VPN on the fly. So if a website refuses to open, or is restricted to a particular country, I run this command and then update the proxy settings in Firefox as below:
1. Enable proxy in firefox.
2. Enter "127.0.0.1" for "SOCKS Host"
3. Enter "31500" (or whatever port we chose) for Port.
Full documentation for this trick is available here.
howdoi: HowDoI provides answers to
programming questions from command line. Thus
instead of opening a browser and getting
distracted in web, I can now simply type in
something like howdoi convert csv to namedtuple
to get the leads.
I usually pass the -ac arguments: -a provides
the full text of the answer, -c enables
colorized output.
ab -n 100 -c 10 http://www.example.com: AB is a
poor man’s website performance benchmarking tool. -c
specifies the number of concurrent requests and
-n specifies the total number of requests to be
sent to a webpage. This comes handy while
migrating websites to new servers or when making
significant frontend changes.
wget "url" -c: WGET is for downloading files
from command-line. I often find the download speeds
significantly different in browser’s built-in
download managers and wget. -c enables the
resume support.
There are various other must-know bash commands
such as awk, uniq, head which are
super-useful in daily work. Akshay has covered
them in a brief tutorial here.
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