Tuesday, July 24, 2007

AideRSS -- Filter the RSS

AideRSS is a new service which filters out RSS feeds to present before you only selective good posts. It may be useful for people who are get hunderds of feeds and are not able to spend time reading the most important ones. The idea is important because of the increasing usage of RSS. However, I was not quite satisfied with the results of this site for my blog :(

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Feedburner Integration!

Ever since acquisition by Google, Feedburner has made some interesting features free and created some new features. My brand is one such feature allowing feedburners to retain their domain-name in the feed. I used this feature to convert my feed address to
http://feeds.anurag-kumar.com/anurag-kumar from the earlier http://feeds.feedburner.com/anurag-kumar . Blogger has started allowing feed redirect which now allows more accurate estimation of number of subscribers by feedburner. I have activated this feature also, so hopefully I would see some increase in the number of subscribers :)

Create sessions to access terminal on multiple computers on Linux

On a linux machine, nohub command can be used to keep a program running even if a terminal is closed. But if you want to use a session from more than one computer, screen command can be used. Matt Cutts has a good short tutorial on how to use screen for working on a session from more than one computers:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/a-quick-tutorial-on-screen/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/screen-power-tips-screenrc/

Friday, July 06, 2007

Anti mosquito software !

Mosquitoes are a big menace and people keep finding ways of driving them away in different ways. A number of softwares are available now which use different methods for keeping the mosquitoes away.

Anti mosquitoes is a unique software which creates a low noise to keep the mosquitoes away. Various parameters need to be adjusted to suit it to the mosquitoes of your home :)
Download.com also lists a few of them. They are also simple to use requiring no external devices.

Some of them are even compatible for your mobile devices!

Google spreadsheet accessible with filters!

A very important feature which I find lacking in google spreadsheets is filtering. However, what sets it apart is its capability of collaboration and APIs. A google intern has created a simple and nice application for viewing google spreadsheets with filters using publicly available APIs. This can work as a great filler till spreadsheet starts allowing filters in its main version.

Setting up cron in Linux or Unix using shell script

Setting up cron is an easy way of performing time-scheduled jobs in linux or unix machines. Cyberciti has a good tutorial on how to setup cron.

Sometimes you may want to execute a script on 2nd Monday or 4th Thursday only. A one line shell script can do it for you.

Consider this:

$ date +%a

The output is: Fri
Now to execute a script on first Friday:

$crontab -e

Now, append the following code in script:

# Run a script called myscript.sh on First Friday at 11:30:

30 11 1-7 * Fri [ "$(date '+%a')" == "Fri" ] && /path/to/myscript.sh