I have just released yet another useless script: goodbye.py. When someone unfollows you, this program sends a message saying goodbye to that guy. This is not intended to be something irritating or disturbing, it can totally turn into something useful or funny with creative ideas. I’m using it only to keep track of unfollow reactions to my tweets in my timeline. You can send a random fact every time someone unfollows you. Read More →

For a long time, I had a plan to expose data about myself publicly and I came up with this idea of personal dashboard. I launched it and it is live on my home page. Go ahead and take a look. → I had three motivations that made this idea possible: Data should be about myself and my daily life Data should flow to the system automatically It should look cool Collecting data As a data freak, it didn’t take me too long to realize that I actually can collect a lot of data about myself using various APIs. Read More →

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 →