This post is inspired by the Coursera Junkie post by Kathryn last year that happened to invite the ire of lots of learners interested in MOOC (Massive Online Open Courses). Whilst I was observing the comment chain in that post, I had never bothered to actually take the time to...
Read more →Macros are a great way to automate tasks in Spreadsheet applications, be it the good old Microsoft Excel or the equally efficient FOSS alternative, LibreOffice Calc. The best thing about macros is that they are often written in a very easy to grasp language called Basic (though Calc also supports...
Read more →Being a web developer, one of the nagging things to do is keeping your hardware in sync with your performance requirements. In the good old times, a P4 or even a Celeron based PC or laptop was enough for programming. But with changing times, the required investment to get a...
Read more →I will start this post by thanking the kind folks at the Reddit’s linux subreddit and Voat’s linux subverse who wholeheartedly participated in this survey. Here are the results and they are pretty insightful. For a developer who builds apps targetting the linux platform, it helps to know what are...
Read more →So after hearing about all the hype and praises about this Eclipse new release called Mars, I decided to give it a try on my Ubuntu laptop yesterday. Since I already use Kepler the older version, I was looking for some big positives like performance improvements (most often talked about...
Read more →One of the most frequently asked questions on almost any social networking sites these days is how do I start android app programming? Indeed, it is as if Android Development has become some abstract and obscure layer of programming model that only few Illuminati sort of individuals seem accomplished at....
Read more →Firefox has long been a pillar of the open-source software community, renowned for its commitment to privacy, freedom, and transparency. With strict guidelines for what enters its add-on repository, it’s easy to assume that developers of highly popular extensions share these same values. But sometimes, reality challenges our assumptions in...
Read more →Ever since I bid farewell to Windows after they introduced that horrible Metro interface in Windows 8, I had been on the lookout for FOSS Linux alternatives that can run easily on my ubuntu 14.04 machine. One such lookout was a replacement for Notepad++ as I always need a handy...
Read more →In on of my recent projects, I came across the need to develop a JSON based REST API to fetch data from the sqlalchemy objects. Now, the Query object is a great way to access data using the powerful sqlalchemy orm, but it doesn’t give any built-in way to convert...
Read more →You have probably heard about all the recent buzz surrounding the sourceforge.net website hosting adware/malware bundled installers and naive users falling prey to it. In some cases, SF even actively took control of abandoned developer accounts. to bundle their crapware. So, is it safe anymore to go to this site...
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