Cynic's Blog

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My Experience with Free SeedBoxes

More people are becoming more and more tech-savy, Internet content is increasing by the second into humongous proportions. Internet bandwidth from the days of dial-up modem (256 kbps) to ADSL (~2 Mbps) to Fiber (+10 Mbps) have increased the connect of people with Internet. Today, torrents form a large part of the traffic flowing through the Internet allowing people share music, open source softwares and literally everything under the sun. Along with torrents come the task of seeding etiquettes. Simply being a leecher is not encouraged in the torrent sharing community as you are supposed to keep the torrent healthy by sharing your 'bit', no pun intended. Keeping your desktop powered on all the time for seeding and leeching is not advisable for a variety of reasons including but not limited to Security: A seedbox will normally be out of the jurisdiction of your 'evil' state. Infact, you are not even installing a bittorrent client on your machine. So, no worries of l...

Simple python script for creating an image listing in HTML

Just a code snippet without any adieu... #!/usr/bin/python import sys, os foldername = sys.argv[1] file_list = os.listdir(foldername) file_list.sort() output = "<html><body>" for file in file_list: output += "<img width='100%' src='" + foldername + os.path.sep + file + "'></img>" print output Simply redirect the output to a file with a .html extension and open the html file in browser.

Contribute to OpenStack: n00b's guide

Contributing to OpenStack can be tricky at times because of the gerrit , a web collaboration tool and jenkins , a continuous integration system. Gerrit is a web based code collaboration system and Jenkins is continuous integration (CI) system which maintains a sane and deployable version of the code at all the time. Although, both makes like easier for experienced developers and system integrators, it can be intimidating for a newbie, myself being one. So, here I present some basic steps one has to take for submitting code for review in jenkins. Create an account at https://review.openstack.org /. If you have launchpad account you can use the same account by simply pressing the sign-in button and then entering launchpad credentials. While you are at it, generate an ssh-key in the machine from whcih you will be pushing your code to gerrit by issuing the command, ssh-keygen –t rsa less ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub Now copy and paste the key to https://review.openstack.or...

Android Studio with third party emulator

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...

Unit testing OpenStack with tox

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 installation with cells in multiple machines

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...

Hard disk partition not getting detected by Windows Explorer

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...