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 …

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 …

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 …

These are the websites I use the most based on my browser's frecency:

This post is inspired from S Anand's blogpost.

• A is for amazon.in. Though I don't shop too much, I usually use Amazon to browse though books and read their initial pages.
• B is bseindia.com - mostly for checking current stock prices and for keeping a track of latest corporate announcements.
• C shows one of my favorite tech blogs - codinghorror.com. Recently, have been visiting it more frequently to check the blog's integration with Discourse. It is followed …

I celebrated the new year on a vacation with a group of friends. One of the best time-pass was the group game of Werewolf.

Be it a bus journey, waiting at a stop or a late night hangout on a beach, we played Werewolf everywhere. It required only some chits of paper (though we used a playing deck as a better substitute).

It requires minimum 7 players and is best experienced with 10-12 players.

I would highly recommend it to anyone who has a large group, scope to shout, and time to go through the rulebook.

Of all the sportsmen, I admire MS Dhoni and Brian Lara the most. Whether India wins or not, I try to hear his words and learn from his temperament. Found this wonderful interview of Dhoni where he talks about the role of mind, and gives advice on how to be a better player. These advice apply as well to other things as to cricket.

What advice would you give to a young player who wants to improve his game?

First and foremost, I would tell him that he must love and enjoy his sport. If …