Powershell on steroids!

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. Thanks @Ananyo for the link. ‘Ar kono dabi nei, windows bhalo’

HTTPS: Securing java web services

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. Why do we need HTTPS? The document transfer protocol of choice for the internet, HTTP uses a plain text format for transfering data. Hence anyone who is able to intercept the communication channel(MITM attack) can view everything that is being transmitted by the sender and receiver.

Lexmark: Week 2

So one more week just flew past! Progress: not much.. I spent the whole week studying.. Progress: Week 2 Got a pretty good understanding of SOAP and WSDL Got and overview of the tls/ssl protocol and how the whole certification system works.. but the protocol is huge and would need some more time and fiddling to wrap my head around it. Wrote a very basic soap service, secured it with https.

Lexmark: Week 1

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. The good parts: KFC for lunch on the first day Free Coffee and Lunch There are Bean Bags in the office!

ssh and git through tor

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. Most git repositories provide ssh links. So to get git working I needed to get ssh working first. A simple nmap showed that there are 4 ports open on the proxy server one of them being the ssh port: 22.

Django static files in Openshift

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

IRC through tor

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. ###Note: Don’t use the sasl script in python for XChat.

Tying out ARChon: the android app runtime for chrome

Ok, following the instructions on Lifehacher{:target="_blank"} I’ve managed to install android app runtime called ARChon{:target="_blank"} on chrome. And the thing works great! :D Here are some screen shots:

using jenkins on openshift

So I have got my django app running on Openshift. ([how to run django app on Openshift]({% post_url 2014-12-29-django-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. First of all I havent been able to automatically build the app for deployment. What I’ve been able to do is setup a jenkins server, create a new job which receives an event from Github notifying a modification, after receiving which it simply pulls the changes from Github and pushes it to the Openshift server running the django app.

django on Openshift

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.

Another attempt at blogging.

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. Well here’s a new blogging platform and a final attempt. Jekyll seems a good option for me as it minimises the friction of blogging a lot.