New Blog

Hey,

I am now blogging on, http://blog.gaurav.im

See you there.

Visage

To the face that brought smiles to mine, many a times, in the past four years.

Craziness

Sometimes I wonder, if we aren't being crazy enough. Especially me.

I mean, I have done things which are crazy, but those were involuntary acts of stupidity. What I really think I should be doing is, going crazy by transcending my comfort zone. Life is really short, and in the times we are living in, we can't be totally sure if the world won't indeed end in 2012. Who knows?

Why hold back? Unless the outcome can be outright fatal (read: proposing to a girl with a brawny boyfriend), who cares.

Easy to say, let's try that out.

This is why we prefer GMail :)

I had forgotten the password of my Hotmail account. So I tried resetting it by choosing to get a mail delivered to my alternate email account (which was my GMail account, and while trying this, the page told me that a mail will be sent to my GMail account). But I did not receive any emails from them for two days. So I tried resetting it by answering the secret question (the answers to which, I always forget :P ). Luckily, I succeeded. I found one mail from the Windows Live team in the inbox. It read:

Hello, gaurav.menghani@hotmail.com:

We received your request to reset your Windows Live password. To confirm your request and reset your password, follow the instructions below. Confirming your request helps prevent unauthorized access to your account.

Says it all, doesn't it :)

Goals

Just a small update, got selected for Fedora Summer Coding, will be putting up stuff about it later. But for now, some goals that I want to achieve in the next 6 months.

1. Get in shape - (1st October 2010)
Could never go to gym for more than 2-3 weeks at a stretch. Time to make amends.

2. 1500+ on TopCoder.com - (5th October 2010)
This is a long standing dream.

3. Be conversant in Python - (10th November 2010)
It is one cool language I really want to be fluent in.

4. Make it a habit to sleep by 10:00, wake up by 5:00 (and no siestas) - (By 1st July 2010)
Enough of the late nights. Some discipline is essential :P

5. Clean up Grid Computing Framework, make it release-worthy - (10th November 2010)
The code can be scrubbed to a great extent. Several things to be ironed out.

Batch resize pictures on Linux

1. Install ImageMagick
sudo apt-get install imagemagick (On Ubuntu)

2. Run this:
convert -resize 640x480 *.JPG


Voila!

Send mails through Rails!

I was looking for tutorials on how to send mails through RoR. It turns out, it is pretty easy. Check out the Railscast.

If you are using GMail as your mail-server, it uses TLS(Transport Level Security). We need a little modification in the environment.rb for that. Make sure you have Ruby 1.8.7 or later, and Rails 2.2.1 or later. Just change the smtp_settings block. Rest of the procedure will be the same.


config.action_mailer.smtp_settings {
:enable_starttls_auto => true,
:address => 'smtp.gmail.com',
:port => 587,
:authentication => :plain,
:domain => 'yourapp.com'
:user_name => 'username',
:password => 'password'
}