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Harish Vishwanath

Builder. Explorer. Infinite Learner.

Recent

Adding a custom launcher in Ubuntu

It is not straightforward to have your favorite programs that are not installed via package manager appear on Ubuntu (14.04) launcher. Couple of ways to do that: Sometimes, when the program is up, you can just right click and say “add to launcher”. It would work for most programs. However, this will fail for editors such as PyCharm that maintain project state and the launcher added this way will point to the specific project. The right way to do is this: Create a .desktop entry For instance, for pycharm, do : $ sudo nano /usr/share/applications/pycharm.desktop [Desktop Entry] Name=PyCharm Type=Application Exec=/home/hvishwanath/Downloads/pycharm-community-4.0.5/bin/pycharm.sh Terminal=false Icon=/home/hvishwanath/Downloads/pycharm-community-4.0.5/bin/pycharm.png Comment=PyCharm community edition 4.0.5 NoDisplay=false Categories=Development;IDE Name[en]=pycharm.desktop * You can then search for the entry in main “Search” in the launcher, and simply drag and drop the pycharm.desktop entry that you would find on to the launcher. That is it.

Dissecting the OASIS CAMP Specification

·10 mins
1. Background # 1.1 OASIS - The organization behind CAMP # OASIS is a non-profit consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society. The consortium has representation from private/public sector technology leaders and influencers and has over 5K participants from over 600 organizations! They are behind various standards such as MQTT, Web services security etc., A full list is here.

Oh mighty computer, I stand before thee!

·4 mins
Yes. I have decided to respect my computer more, starting 1 Jan 2015. It does deserve more respect considering how I handled it before - looking down, looking up, on the lap, on the tummy etc., Starting this year, I shall stand before it, with renewed respect. In other words, I switched to a fully jugaad standing desk at work. I have read before about people that switched to a standing desk, and thought it could be fun to try it. It all started when I discovered (accidentally) that the desks at work are height adjustable. Though not to the extent of being able to stand and work, it opened up doors for jugaad and experimentation. So, here it is in its current configuration!

Setting up Tun/Tap networking for a Qemu Image

·2 mins
Qemu is a very useful utility to play around with your code/application environment before you are ready to package it as a virtual appliance. Though there are various wikis available to help you setup networking between qemu guest and your host machine, I found that the steps required to setup TUN/TAP networking so that the guest is accessible from your extended network was either not accurate, or was not put in simple terms. So, here goes. Assuming that you are using Debian/Ubuntu as your host OS and you have qemu and necessary qemu-managers installed.

How to be a profitable housemaid

·6 mins
The (un)official guide to being a profitable house maid # So, you are a house maid. And that too in Bangalore. And you must be glad because the market has picked up considerably with all the new apartments being built, and all the fat parents and their arrogant children. And you are right to be very glad for if you play your cards right, you can end up being very profitable. Here is how :

Lord of the consoles

·3 mins
Context : At work , I routinely have to deal with multiple workspaces and a ton of consoles. Here’s my normal work setup (which I wish will magically conjure up, the moment I dock my laptop)