Epilogue

Today, I happened to require a blogger login id and password to comment on a blogger blog. Which brings me back to my old and neglected 'old blog' which i simply don't feel like deleting from public view. After all, this is a VERY small part of my online identity. Its part of the story. As I read the 4 or 5 posts in here, I recall the exact moment and circumstance I wrote them in. Some are nostalgic, some are downright embarassing, and others make me wonder what could have been different since then.

Anyway, click the link below to follow my trail of unthoughts. I moved to a self-hosted Wordpress installation earlier this year.


URL : Vimal can't hack What??

Nokia E51 W/O Camera

Nokia E51 W/O Camera
Originally uploaded by web_guruAish

My next Object du desire.
Soon to me owned and cherished.

[just another Flickr photo blogging test]

An acer gemstone

An acer gemstone
Originally uploaded by vimalg2

I see this 'Blog This' option in Flickr and I clicked on it and typed a little, and HERE i am. Go figure.

the pic looks like my acer 4310 laptop.

Integrating Twitter into the GNOME deskbar: Part 1: Install python-twitter

After encountering difficulties in posting to Twitter from the Bash shell, I decided to poke around more and found this tutorial by Phil Wilson. It uses the unofficial twitter python API methods (python-twitter)

However, I realized that installing python-twitter is a mini-task in itself. The comments section in  the above article also indicated that Ubuntu Gutsy 'broke' certain functionality.

I  use Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10 for its simplicity and ease of maintenance.(not to mention Compiz eye candy :D). I had already installed a ton of python-xxxxx packages from the repositories whenever they looked remotely useful for future dependencies. The following instructions worked word-for-word for me. So, if anything chokes on an obscure dependency on your distro, its upto the reader to look it up in your repositories (sorry guys/gals, i'm just human)

I'm no python Library Guru. However, I'm quite a purist with respect to NOT installing code that clogs up and refuses to be exorcised from my Linux system. Thankfully, Ubuntu repositories give me peace of mind 24/7 in this regard. But in this case, I had to get my feet wet.

Moving on, I was introduced to a little utility called easy_install that was required. Typing 'easy_' and pressing TAB showed me that easy_install was present somewhere in my shell's search path. Apparently, also among the dependencies for python-twitter is a python module(is it a module? citation needed.) called simplejson.

To install it, type:
sudo easy_install -U simplejson
(this assumes that easy_install is present and kicking on your box)

Next, head to the download section of the python-twitter project and download the latest source code archive (0.5 at time of writing)

Extract it using  : 
tar -zxvf python-twitter-0.5.tar.gz

cd into the extracted directory:
cd python-twitter-0.5/

and run the following commands :
python setup.py build
and
sudo python setup.py install
(enter your user password in Ubuntu for using sudo, in case anyone hasn't used sudo before)

and finally to test if the API works run :
python setup.py test

you should see something like a bunch of test results terminated by :

"Ran 36 tests in 0.631s

OK"

This is now officially the first trivially complete python-twitter install tutorial on the internet :D
(for further troubleshooting, in case you're using a different distribution with incomplete dependencies, refer to the comments section of the Original article on philwilson.org.)

Now, to actually see the twitter POST functionality, cd into the python-twitter-0.5/examples sub-directory in your HOME, (you should know how to use 'cd' by now),
cd ~/python-twitter-0.5/examples

and type in:
python tweet.py --username YOUR_USERNAME --password YOUR_PASSWORD this is my test post from python-twitter

My Output was:Vimal George just posted: this is my test post from python-twitter 
Sweet! , your first command line tweet. That wasn't so hard eh?


... to be continued (i.e when I figure out the rest ... :D)
Happy tweeting ladies and laddies; my twitter id is vimalg2

Confessions of a thick-skinned rhinoceros

Confessions of a shameless rhinoceros
Originally uploaded by vimalg2

Oh! where was i?

ah yes! oh yes... A little over a year ago at about the same time, i posted the last bit you may or may not see right below this post.

I was kind of hoping to revamp things and get the posts rolling, quite a bit before I passed that milestone. :-D

Oh well... at least I'm the proud admin of yet-another-neglected-pro-blog-wannabe thats drifting into obscurity. ;-P

After spending quite some quality time and analysing and hacking up the css template(I have no formal web-standards education like thousands of bloggers), i have settled on final 'look'. I like to think of it as Geeky-yet-readable. Pretentious? no!!! Sincere? YES!! :-)

Any comments about blog template and usability/aesthetics tips if any are welcome.....
P.S: If no one's noticed by now, this blog is fed by my flickr photostream. I LOVE Ph0t0-blogging with my Motorola A780.