I’m a linux/unix guy, I’ve always had heated debates with my “Windows” friends about how good the unix environment is and how the terminal can do magical things.. But today I was hit on the face, real hard. This guide show us the steps to make powershell as good as if not even better than bash is some ways.

As part of my internship project I had to learn about HTTPS, how it works and how to use HTTPS to secure SOAP based web services written in java.

So one more week just flew past! Progress: not much.. I spent the whole week studying..

So, the summer vacation has started, finally! But no relaxing this time around. I’m doing an internship at a company called Lexmark . The first week here has been pretty interesting.. the people here are cool, friendly. The work environment is also awsome, there are no restrictions or visible structure in the organisation. Very different from what my perception was about an Information Technology company.

As I mentioned before our college network has this squid proxy which makes us spend more time configuring our tools to bypass it than doing any actual work. My goal this time was to get ssh working behind the proxy.

To serve static files for django use whitenoise .

This will require you to add an environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE="jhinuk.settings" to your Openshift app. To do this follow the instructions here

In my college they use squid proxy with only a few open ports. This doesn’t allow us to use the irc clients. The solution is to use some application like XChat through Tor . But most irc servers block tor exit nodes. Freenode is also not an exception. But it does allow access through tor. To get connect to freenode through tor follow the instructions here and also here .

Ok, following the instructions on Lifehacher I’ve managed to install android app runtime called ARChon on chrome. And the thing works great! :D

Here are some screen shots:

So I have got my django app running on Openshift. (how to run django app on Openshift ) Now I wanted to automate the deployment of the app from a Github repo. The tool people use to do this is called Jenkins. So here’s the rundown of what I have been able to achieve.

Openshift is a new app hosting service from RedHat which offers a great free package. Till now I’ve used Heroku to host some apps and its great but it doesn’t provide any free database (well it does but you’ll have to enter your credit card details which in India few people have). Also the filesystem of heroku is such that it refreshes every 24hrs deleting every thing except the repo. So heroku is great for testing but hosting something with somesort of a database is not possible unless you pay.

So, I’m going to give a final shot at blogging. I’ve used Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr previousl but have never been able to be stick to it. Being a regular blogger has been on my todo list for like forever. But till now I’ve only written a post or two in each platform.