Loading... Born a day after the American Independence in Jalandhar, Punjab, India, I've spent most part of my life there. Studied till 5th standard in St. Joseph's Convent School, Jalandhar, and later had to join Apeejay School, Jalandhar as, perhaps, the former school decided boys could be troublesome in a girls' school after 5th. After completing schooling in APJ (till 12th), joined National Institute of Technology [NITJ] (again, in Jalandhar) as a Computer Science & Engineering student in 2005. During the worst period of downtime (recession), got an on-campus placement in Accenture in 2008. Graduating from college took another year after that, and finally joined Accenture in mid-2009. This is my story so far... Btw, you can find me at: facebook twitter last.fm digg librarything granular
Nov 07

TweetDeck — Installing in Ubuntu 64-bit

linux, tutorial No Comments »
TweetDeck

TweetDeck

With Adobe AIR‘s (the runtime required by TweetDeck) official support for Linux ended, and no Linux 64-bit edition already in place, installing TweetDeck it in Ubuntu 64-bit is one hell of a task. You can get it installed in your 64-bit Linux system by following one of these tutorials, but chances are you’ll end up with a partially working installation, as happened with me.

Here I list out 4 simple steps to get the thing properly installed & working in Ubuntu:

  1. Download the 64-bit Adobe AIR deb package.
  2. Install the deb using the command: sudo dpkg -i adobeair_64.deb
  3. (Important) Install ia32-libs: sudo apt-get install ia32-libs. This is required for 32-bit environment emulation. Remember, the above packaged “64-bit” AIR is still 32-bit Linux version only. If you do not install ia32-libs, you may get errors like – Error loading the runtime (libxml2.so.2: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64)
  4. Download the latest TweetDeck AIR package. Install the package by double-clicking on it. Alternately, fire the command “Adobe AIR Application Installer” (with quotes) to invoke the GUI app installer, from where you can browse to the location of the downloaded TweetDeck AIR package to install it.

Tested on Kubuntu 11.10 (64-bit)

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Nov 05

TestDisk — A life saver

Blogging, Rants No Comments »

TestDisk

TestDisk


Turning on your computer one not-so-fine day just to discover an entire partition (drive on harddisk) gone is nothing short of a nightmare potent enough to give you a mild heart attack. Unfortunately, exactly that happened to me yesterday.

An ardent distro hopper that I am, I recently installed (K)Ubuntu 11.10 on my laptop. Things were all fine for 4 days until I fixed a startup issue with my Windows installation using its DVD. The issue was temporarily fixed and I was able to log into Windows. But the next time I booted into Linux, my Windows partition was no longer being shown in the file manager. I fired up “fdisk -l” just to find out that the Windows partition had been overwritten by another hidden 2GB FAT partition, which was now being shown as a twin duplicate of the original. It didn’t take me much time to realize that the Windows DVD had screwed up my partition table, making the whole 80GB Windows partition disappear!

After some research, I found this excellent opensource partition recovery tool by the name TestDisk. Thanks to its Linux version, I was able to find the lost Windows partition, recover it and write the updated partition table to the harddisk. Although it’s a command-line application, believe me, it’s damn straight-forward, and as simple as any other GUI thing.

(God forbid) In case, some day, you find yourself with a partition or two gone from your harddisk, give TestDisk a try. Highly recommended.

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Nov 04

Epoch

programming 2 Comments »

INTERESTING
How you determine your age?
I was born in 1987 and this is 2011, so I am 24 years old right now.

How most computer systems determine your age?
Time passed since 1st January 1970 till now (2011)
minus
Time passed since 1st January 1970 till when you were born (1987)
equals
(well, again) 24

The date 1st January 1970 is the Epoch date for the computer, signifying the start of time for it. That’s why timestamps in most programming languages are the seconds/milliseconds elapsed since the epoch.

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Oct 01

Unjumble — You won’t lose that jumbled words game again

downloads, open-source, programming 2 Comments »
Unjumble

Another of my free time exercises, Unjumble does just that – it unscrambles a jumbled/scrambled word into all possible English dictionary words that can be formed out of that jumbled word. The interface is extremely simple. You have a textbox to input your jumbled word, and as you type, all unjumbled word suggestions start appearing as list items in the combobox below. To copy an unjumbled word to clipboard, just click on it. Simple, isn’t it?

Like QuickCopy, Unjumble was coded in C#, and makes use of SQLite as the portable database to store a huge list of English dictionary words. What’s the most interesting thing about this little app is the algorithm behind it.

There is a pre-prepared database of almost all (58000+) English words [wordlist.txt], stored along with their hashes (words formed by the original words’ individual alphabets in sorted order). The input jumbled word’s hash is then calculated in a similar way, and is compared with the hashes stored in the database. All matches are then displayed in the list box.

I bet, using Unjumble, you’ll never lose your newspaper’s jumbled words game again. ;)

Download: Source Code (1.5 MB) – Installer (1.7 MB)

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Oct 01

QuickCopy — No typing that password again

downloads, open-source, programming 1 Comment »
QuickCopy

A very simple password management tool that I developed in my free time. It aims to simplify the task of copy-pasting frequently used text, like usernames and passwords. A Windows-only tool, it’s code purely in C#, and makes use of the wonderfully portable SQLite to store entries in the backend. The interface includes 2 components (basically 3; one is hidden) — system tray icon and “add content” dialog. All content added through the dialog gets added as a menu item in the system tray icon’s context menu (the one you see on right-clicking the icon). To copy a content from the menu to the clipboard, all you need to do is just click on its entry in the menu and it’s done!

Some features:

  • Store content – frequently used text, like usernames.
  • Store passwords – these are masked by content tags, which are then shown in the context menu (in red color).
  • Hotkeys – the top 3 entries in the context menu can be quickly copied to the clipboard using the key combinations of CTRL+F1, CTRL+F2 and CTRL+F3.

For a password, its respective content tag acts as a mask to hide it under its name. Say you’re adding your Gmail password @ILuvKatz!! in the dialog, and set its content tag as Gmail Password, the password’s entry will appear in the menu in red color with the name Gmail Password. When you click on Gmail Password, your actual password will be copied to the clipboard.

There is no easy provision of modifying existing content entries. But I’ve provided a QueryEditor (invoked by pressing CTRL+Q in the “Add Content” dialog), where you can change the content entries by issuing your regular SQL queries. For example:

UPDATE content SET content='@IHateKatz!!' WHERE content_tag='Gmail Password'

Download: Source Code (1.1 MB) – Installer (1.2 MB)

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