SourceForge.net is an online community supporting open source projects by providing hosting, distribution and subversion services. They choose a project every month from the hundreds of thousands of projects that are hosted on SourceForge based on popularity and activity. Most of the projects are the who is who of the Open source community. This is a good link to bookmark.. http://sourceforge.net/community/index.php/potm/
Technology
HOW TO : Delete duplicate lines in Linux/Unix
If you have a large text file and want to quickly delete any duplicate lines, you can use the following option of sort in *nix..
sort -u filename > newfilename
If you want to get even funkier :), like only checking duplicates on a particular column, feel free to check out this link http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/sort-invocation.html#sort-invocation.
HOW TO : Microsoft Windows – Routing to /dev/null
Ran into an interesting issue at work today and wanted to document it. We had a rouge process in one of our applicatoins and it was trying to send e-mails via one of our mail gateways at an alarming rate..There was no customer impact, since the mail server was rejecting all the connections. But the high number of connections were causing a strain on our firewalls..
If this was Linux, we would have done something simple like adding a route to point all the traffic destined to mail server to /dev/null by running “route add IP_ADDRESS_OF_MAIL_SERVER MASK /dev/null”
A search on Google showed that you can achieve similar results by doing the following “route ADD IP_ADDRESS_OF_MAIL_SERVER MASK 255.255.255.255 127.0.0.1“. 127.0.0.1 being the IP address of the loopback interface in this case. But when we ran the command, we got an error “incorrect gateway 127.0.0.1”.. So there is NO way to route traffic in Microsoft Windows to a null device..
Finaly, we figured out a round about way to achieve this.. Since the main aim was to reduce the load on the firewall, we identifid an un used IP in the same network as the application server and added a static route to point all traffic going to the mail server to this IP. We ran the following command “route ADD IP_ADDRESS_OF_MAIL_SERVER MASK 255.255.255.255 UN_USED_IP_ADDRESS”
For example, if you application server is in the range 192.168.1.0/24, the mail server is 192.168.2.20.. and an unused IP in the application server range is 192.168.1.10.. the command would look like this “route ADD 192.168.2.20 MASK 255.255.255.255 192.168.1.10“.. You will see a lot of SYN_SENT status in the network connections, since the application is trying to connect t othe mail server via an IP address that doesn’t exist..
Might not be the smartest way to achive this.. but it did the trick.
Windows 7 : Installer Issues
As posted here, I have been playing around with the Beta version of Windows 7. Everything was working great, until I started getting  a mysterious error “Installer stopped working”, when I tried to install any new software. A Google search, led me to this site (http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/2349-windows-installer-cant-install-any-msi-package-4.html) . Here’s the solution to the issue.Â
start regedit
navigate to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows\DisabledSessions
rename MachineThrottling to _MachineThrottling
Beta for the Beta
I got a copy of the Windows 7 Beta copy from my colleague and installed it on my Lenovo X61 tablet. The install went through pretty smoothly and . upon booting up the computer, me and my colleague had the following conversation..
Colleague : Thats a Beta!!
Me : Yes.. it is Beta..
Colleague : No.. No.. that”s a beta!!
Me : Dude.. seriously.. it is Beta.. I know it..
Colleague : (almost smacking me on my head) No..that is a Beta Fish!!
Looks like a smart programmer (or marketing person) put the picture of a Beta fish as the default background for Windows 7 Beta :-).. Here’s a screenshot.
Hopefully, Windows 7 will finally convince us XP lovers to upgrade. Vista is a failed operating system as far as I am concerned. Not in the league of “Windows Millenium“, but it is going to be shoved away into the annals of history soon if Windows 7 delivers as promised.
Tools of the trade : Postfix Configuration
Good link with information on configuring a custom transport link in Postfix. A transport link in a SMTP server is a way to define a communiction/delivery channel with particular settings. Example, you want all e-mails for a particular domain to be sent to a particular server at a particular time.
http://linuxnet.ca/postfix/dedicated_transport.html
In this particular link, the author shows the steps to configure a transport link for sending e-mails to servers/domains with high latency.
Tools of the Trade : Perl script to manage Postfix mail queues
Simple and elegant script by a Bulgarian author (name unknown) for managing queues in Postfix.
Visual outlook of Kudithipudi.org
I ran across an interesting app called Wordle, that the BBC news service, used to show a visual representation of all the words president Bush used in his state of Union speeches (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7813432.stm).
Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/) take text or a URL as input and automatically generates a visual representation of the text based on the number of times a term appears. Very cool application of Web 2.0Â technology.
Here’s how this website looks after wordle analyzed it.
Wordle is a “toy” created by Jonathan Feinberg. Here is a good interview with him regdarding Wordle and how he created it (http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research.nsf/pages/d.compsci.can_i_have_a_wordle_with_you.html).
Support WikiPedia
It is the season of giving.. And who else can be more eligible than the WikiPedia Foundation. For those that use the Internet regularly, you know that WikiPedia has become an indispensable resource. This is collaboration and sharing in it’s purest sense. How many of your arguments end now with.. “I checked WikiPedia and I am correct” :).
I know that times are tough for many people, but if you do have the opportunity..take a minute to donate to the WikiPedia foundation. Click on the this link to go to the donation page .. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate/Now/en
They are aiming to raise $6MM and are up to $3.8MM now.
Loose the shackles..
If you need to edit documents, create spreadsheets and presentations… and don’t want to spend $$$ for Microsoft Office, download the latest version of OpenOffice for free and give it a try. You might be pleasantly surprised.
I wrote a post earlier about using OpenOffice as a free PDF Editor.. And that is just the tip of the iceberg of what you can do with OpenOffice.
Most of the people that use Microsoft Office, only use the basic functionality. As my old boss used to say, “95% of the people use 5% of the functionality in Office”. And switching to OpenOffice would be a breeze for then. OpenOffice is available for Microsoft Windows, Linux and Apple Mac OS X.
Since OpenOffice 3.0 was released back in October, the software has been downloaded more than 10 million times. And we are close to hitting 20 million downloads..Here’s a live counter from the OpenOffice website
