I ported Zach Holman’s command line charting script, spark, to C#. You can grab the source code from GitHub and the binary package from NuGet. Here’s simply how it works. ::csharp using SparkNet; ... string chart = Spark.Render(0, 30, 55, 80, 33, 150); // "▁▂▃▄▂█" Well, it does not work properly on good-old command line of Windows, cmd.exe. Default font of cmd.exe is bitmap (raster) fonts which has a very limited support for fancy chars and Windows console host has no support for Unicode. Read More →

Two years ago today, I started Microsoft Windows Azure as an intern, in the very same team I joined right after college and I am working for last 8 months. I decided to summarize a few points I learned so far in this job during last 8 months. This may sound like the way things work are crappy, it is not. I learned that one will see this sort of problems in all large scale companies. Read More →

If you are also using Supervisor to monitor and heal your long running Python projects and observed that output of your program is not being logged to stdout_logfile, it is because Python print statement does not automatically flush output to STDOUT. One solution is using sys.stdout.flush() frequently to flush the output or if you are using Python 3.3, print(msg, flush=True) is another solution. However, a better solution is to run python with -u parameter (unbuffered mode). Read More →

People often wonder about what kind of software projects a company could or should open source. This is a dangerous decision for a company, due to the risk of losing strategic position against competitors. As someone working at a company, here is what you can open source from your work. Read More →

Lately, I’ve been reading Joshua Becker’s book Simplify about minimalist lifestyle. It’s a very short book, but hey, it has to be, this is minimalism!

This is an inspiring book about removing clutter and stuff you don’t actually need from your life and enjoy your life –not the things. Here are my key takeaways from the book:

• Which you hold, holds you. Things you own actually begin to own you after some time. You clean them, organize them, buy them, sell them etc. More you own, the more time they rob from your lives.
• “There are things more you should value more than possessions –God, family, relationships, character etc.”
• Give things away or sell them if you are not really using. You won’t lose that much.
• Spend money on life experiences than possessions.

Read More →

iTunes has a nice public music search API which offers 30-second previews and detailed information about music albums and tracks. However I could not play these previews on Android or Chrome browser —but it was playing perfectly in iOS apps and OS X Safari browser. (See sample audio here.) With the help of a little bit of packet capturing I found out the reason why iTunes previews cannot be played outside of iOS and OS X. Read More →

Yaay! Happy birthday pal. It all started with a handmade blog written in classic ASP. Read More →

This weekend I decided to practice my iOS skills with a simple utility app. The TV satellite receiver box in our home Vu+ Duo runs on Linux and it has an API to simulate remote control, change channels, set volume, list channels etc. After connecting to the device over WiFi local area network, it can be used to “zap” channels instantly or controlling device with a virtual remote. So I put these down in an app and submitted to App Store today for free. Read More →