mmsganesh

I took a unix shell scripting session today for my office mates today. Some of the resources that i shared and recommend

• Sed one liners
• Awk one liners
• Sed reference chart
• Bash tutorial
• Regular expressions for unix
• Sed Tutorial

mmsganesh Tech programming, shell scripting, unix

Its a known fact that every one gets fed up with pop-up, pop-under ads, audio, video ads, ads in all forms. There are certain options to block these ads from being viewed by you using certain addons like the famous Adblock plus plugin for firefox. For the not so firefoxy folks out there, there is a quick hack to this.

• Windows users, edit the file C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
• Linux users, edit the file /etc/hosts file

Modify these files to add the content from http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt. This redirects request to common adservers to 120.0.0.1 thereby stopping the ads.

mmsganesh Tech adblock, internet

No i din’t misspell “‘Cain and Abel” (Sons of Adam and Eve) or “Kane and Abel” (novel by Jeffrey Archer). This is just a quick post on the common mistake that we hear in spoken english especially in southern India.

Very often i see people using both the words ‘can’ and ‘able’ in the same sentence which is incorrect. The word can by itself means the same as ability. Using it in conjunction with able is not required. Sometimes, peple say “I can’t able to read this”. Instead frame it as either “I can’t read this” or “I’m not able to read this”.

A small and quick tip, but will help you avoid cutting a sorry face in front of others. If you find some one using this, please correct them.

mmsganesh Life english

Although there seems to be a craze around twitter, these are some real facts from Web security SaaS company Purewire

• 40 percent of Twitter users have not tweeted since their first day on Twitter (i.e., the account was most likely created and subsequently forgotten about).
• Approximately 25 percent of Twitter users are not following anyone, while two-thirds are following less than 10 people (i.e., the account was created but is not actually being used regularly).
• More than 1/3 of Twitter users have not posted a single tweet, and almost 80 percent of the users have less than 10 tweets (i.e., while Twitter is billed as a great collaboration tool, a large number of users are there to consume content, not distribute it).
• Approximately 30 percent of Twitter users do not have any followers, and 80 percent of Twitter users have less than 10 followers (i.e., for many users, their posts are not being widely tracked or read).
• 50 percent of Twitter users are following more people than they have as followers, and another 30 percent of Twitter users are following the same number of people that are following them (i.e. users are aggressively trying to attract followers by hoping they will “follow back” but have been unsuccessful).

I’m definitely under the category which reads ‘Joined twitter just to find what the heck is it?’

mmsganesh Life, Tech socialnetworking, twitter

Its always a good idea to register a domain in your name to get your identity and establish your webpresence. To start with let me explain what it takes to get your own website running.

There are two basic things to this

• registering your domain
• hosting your site

Domain names
To put it simply domain name registering is just for getting the website name that you prefer. Domain names are now available for approx 10$ per year from most of the domain name sellers unless you try to get an already purchased domain name. Not limiting your choice to .com names, you can also try other top level domains like .net .org .name .info, etc. At the time this blog is being posted, godaddy.com is offering .info domain names at 0.99$ per year. Once you make a payment to the domain namer provider using your credit card (in most cases) you will be provided with an interface to edit your name servers. Lets see how to customize this to point to your website in the next step.

Web hosting
The next and the most important step is to get a webhosting space. These are the servers which are actually going to host the files of your website. Its a matter of personal preferance for choosing hosting provider. There are free services like 110mb.com or paid services like godaddy.com. In most cases of personal websites, i would suggest to use a good content manangement system or a blogging tool if your site is mainly for posting blogs. Lets see the options available in case of hosting blogs. You can register for an account in blogger.com and use the service provided by it and have your domain name direct to it, or you can install your own blogging software like wordpress, typepad, etc in your webspace and set it up all completely by yourself. If your site is going to host lot more stuff than just blogs, you can opt for an elaborate content management system like opencms, drupal etc.

Then its all left to your own imagination.. Enjoy. Post your queries if you need assistance. Happy to help.

mmsganesh Tech blog, website