Cynic's Blog

To be honestly, the emulator which comes with Android Studio sucks! So, the only option left is to either connect a physical device to test out your apps (which I assume no one among us would like to do) or to use third party android emulators like androVM/virtualbox etc. Now, the thing is because of devilish market forces and 'policies' charted our by MBA guys, androVM, now rechristened as genymotion stopped releasing their awesome android images which could easily be downloaded and imported into any hypervizor like VMWare/VirtualBox. Instead, they have started making users register to their website and making them download images only though their genymotion application. But, some angelic creature has mirrored the old-er images (as new as 4.1.1). You can access those images at this page . The description about the download variants can be read here . Now that being said, download the suitable images on .ova format and import the image in VirtualBox and voila! you h...

Testing is and will always be an integral part of any software development. OpenStack is no exception. In OpenStack, unit testing is done using tox. Installing tox, [apt-get | yum] install python-pip; pip install tox Tox has various tests defined in the envlist. One can open tox.ini for a complete list of envs defined. OpenStack defines, py27 and pep8 test. Former is for unittests and later for style checks. How to run tox and testr Tox can use used to list unit tests and execute all of them or any subset of them using regex. To run all tests, tox -e py27                        # you can chose any other                                                          ...

  Devstack is a testing and development package for OpenStack . The official devstack website has excellent but terse installation instructions, which could be daunting to a newbie. Normally, a traditional install is pretty straightforward but problems creep in when you have to go for some particular configuration or installation like cells or a simple code-test-debug setup, the information on the main site is insufficient. In this blog, I will enumerate the steps for setting up a cell-ular devstack installation with one parent and one child. Parent will not be instantiating any VMs s it's only a 'command centre'. 1. On both machines, install git and vim, clone the devstack repo using git. yum install git vim git clone https://git.openstack.org/openstack-dev/devstack 2. On both machines, open up the file 'local.conf' inside the cloned directory 'devstack' cd devstack; vim local.conf 3. Copy the parameters below to the file...

I recently encountered a problem with my Toshiba external hard disk. While transferring files from the hard disk to my computer, my laptop shut down unexpectedly because of some hardware issues. When it came back, the particular partition in the external hard disk from which I was copying file was inaccessible! Windows explorer looked something like this - Notice that I had 3 partitions in the external hard disk (G:/, H:/ and I:/). Drive I:/ became invisible. I looked a further and found that computer management was able to detect the partition well, but it couldn't find out the format of the partition, and moreover there wasn't any letter assigned to that partition. Right clicking the partition and trying to assign a letter invariably ends up in error saying The operation failed to complete because the Disk Management console view is not up-to-date.  Refresh the view by using the refresh task.  If the problem persists close the Disk Management console, then rest...

Google offers excellent non-latin character input software which works on transliteration rather than explicit keyboards which is very hard to do specially when the US keyboard layout had virtually overtaken the computer industry. Google Input Tools (GIT) installer from the official site is online, i.e. it downloads a small stub and later depending upon the configuration and setting will download the larger installer. If someone needs an offline installer for GIT, you can download it from the following links, Hindi (Devnagri) : http://dl.google.com/transliteration-ime/1.0.4.0/googlehindiinputsetup.exe Malayalam (Malayalam) : http://dl.google.com/transliteration-ime/1.0.4.0/googlemalayalaminputsetup.exe Sanskrit (Devnagri) : http://dl.google.com/transliteration-ime/1.0.4.0/googlesanskritinputsetup.exe Basically, just replace the from the url and enter your desired language name.

My WD external hard disk wasn't getting detected by windows. Upon looking up at Disk Management in Computer Management, I found out that the disk was made unallocated. This was troublesome since it was working fine a day ago. After a few hits on Google, I came across a utility named TestDisk . It's an open source application which diagnoses hard-disks, recover data and correct disk errors. The official website describes the software as this -- TestDisk is powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software , certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy. TestDisk can Fix partition table, recover deleted partition Recover FAT32 boot sector from its backup Rebuild FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 boot sector Fix FAT tables Rebuild ...

Ever tried doing this? java -cp "." -jar Sample.jar Doesn't work, does it! I found out it the hard way. I actually had to debug all the way down to logging all the classpath in the program. Java(1) 'does' spell this out. -jar Execute a program encapsulated in a JAR file. The first argument is the name of a JAR file instead of a startup class name. In order for this option to work, the manifest of the JAR file must contain a line of the form Main-Class: classname . Here, classname identifies the class having the public static void main(String[] args) method that serves as your application’s starting point. See the Jar tool reference page and the Jar trail of the Java Tutorial for information about working with Jar files and Jar-file manifests. When you use this option, the JAR file is the source of all user classes, and other user class path settings are ignored. Note that JAR files that can be run with the “java -jar” option can ...