The power of Procrastination

Sitting down contemplating yesterday, I was wondering sometimes we try to rethink over things a lot of times. Is it really that we are trying to rethink, refine, master, etc. our idea or simply we are trying to find an excuse to procrastinate! Sometimes I find several examples in daily life where procrastination leads to results 10 times magnified to the effort we could have taken at the correct time.

Example, I had to make an investment declaration for which I had to retrieve my username and password. I was delaying it day-by-day. Yesterday I just happened to realize that the date for entering my investment declaration closed on 15^th. More Advance tax would be deducted from my salary next month and then I will have to file for a reimbursement, which is a more tedious job than retrieving username and password. L

There have been instances in history as well where being fast makes you be ahead of  others by 10 steps. We have the example of Apple’s iphone. Have you ever contemplated why is the Apple’s iphone a huge success? Apple offered the iphone six months ahead of the market competitors. The Apple’s 4G iphone model was leaked and the the bloggers worldwide had a huge spike in their web traffic. Still 5 Billion 4G iphones were booked in advance. How was Apple able to beat the market. By staying 10 steps ahead of the market.

One might have a mind blowing idea and one might think that this would be a once in a millennium idea. But somewhere, somebody might also have got the same idea. The only question comes is who does it first.

I myself working on raveportal have often thought of ideas but I feel the urge to procrastinate. I think, ok, fine, I’ll implement this later. I’ll complete my movie first and then see what happens. Well, there are a lot of sites that are constantly running, and with the constraints of time I work in, the other people who have dedicated their full 60 hours a week to their websites have an edge on me. It’s often said “Work Harder as well as Smarter”. To avoid procrastination is also working smartly.

If you think of something to do, you have to be implement it on the go. There can be no delays. If there are delays, somebody else wins. There are a lot of Social Networking sites that have better design than what facebook has, but it was facebook that went live first with its novel idea and the results are to show for everybody.

I am not gonna preach how to stop procrastinating. Sorry guys, I am not good at it. But yes, you’ll find millions of tutorials on youtube to avoid delaying things. I have only stated what my experience has been with things and also a few I have observed. If this can influence a few people in a positive way, I would be more than proud. J

Till then cya!

Humans or Search Engines?

Today I did some reviews of websites. Trying to learn from some of the existing websites.

 

A good look at the website revealed that most of the websites have been made for search engines and not for humans. As a webmaster, I too am culprit of such a crime of making my website optimized for search engines. But well, it is a part of every web startup these days.

 

Sometimes Forum Masters create websites for search engines. They try to put in catchy titles, Meta-Descriptions, etc. etc. But let us go back and check, how many web sites have become that huge after the search-engine revolution? Yahoo, Rediff, Google, AOL, Alexa, Amazon, EBay, etc. did not use the search engines to market themselves. They used the power of their product to become successful.

 

Also flashy titles won’t get you anywhere as the search engines have become smart enough to filter bogus titles from the webpage content. So go ahead and try to attract visitors initially, but remember its quality that counts, everywhere. Today the attention span of a user has become very small. You need to make something very appealing to have the visitor hooked to your website.

Will keep sharing a few more tips here and there. I would appreciate people reading this to come forward and share their experiences as well.

Basic UNIX commands for daily use

Following are the UNIX Commands one need to know that are very frequently used.

1. ps –eaf | grep `whoami`

ps gives the process status.

-e flag displays all processes

-a flag displays all the processes except for processes that are session leaders.

-f gives a full listing i.e. Parent process id, process id, command-path, duration, etc.

The output is piped to check which process has been owned by the current user logged in.

2. Searching for files containing multiple patterns.

grep –l “<pattern-1>” *.* | xargs grep –l “<pattern-2>” | xargs grep –l “<pattern-3>”

Suppose in a particular directory you need to search for files containing patterns <pattern-1>, <pattern-2> and <pattern-3>.

-l  option in grep lists the filenames only that contains the pattern. Without the –l flag the output is in the format

<filename1> :<Line-containing-the-pattern>

<filename2> :<Line-containing-the-pattern>

<filename3> :<Line-containing-the-pattern>

3.Finding a file with a particular name

find . –name “<file-name>” –print

This command finds all the file with filename as <file-name> recursively starting from the parent current directory.

One can also do pattern based file searching.

E.g. To find all the files starting with pattern rave use the following command

find .-name “^rave*” –print

4. List all files sorted by name and time modified.

ls –lrt

5. To open a file in read mode using vi editor

view <filename>

6. To convert a file from dos mode to binaymode

dos2unix <source_filename> <destination_filename>

Remember this is a utility, if dos2unix is not installed on your box you can use the following

awk ‘{ sub(“\r$”, “”); print }’ <dosfile> > <unixfile>

7. To change the ownership of a particular file

chown –r <new-user> <filename>

P.S. You should be logged in as the current owner of the file or as root

8. To view the current crons scheduled.

crontab –l

To edit the list of crons use
crontab –e

9. To delete blank lines from files

sed ‘/^$/d’ <input-file> > <output-file>

or

grep –v “^$” <input-file> > <output-file>

10. Steps to get a file from another Unix Box using sftp

1. Navigate to the directory on the current box you want the file to be placed
2. sftp username@<BOX-IP>
3. System will prompt for a password. Enter the password
4. On the remote IP navigate to the directory where the file is present
5. get <filename>
6. File will be transferred. Type bye/logout/exit

The commands to be executed are in bold.

Try using these commands. They are really helpful. I work with these commands nearly everyday.

Tags: Command-line interface, Computer file, File Management, Grep, Linux, Unix, Working directory, Xargs

The Power of Backups

The processes we find in the IT Industry in our day-to-day lives have been born out of the basics. We as software engineers think it very fashionable to deride the processes that are forced upon us. But dissecting these processes and taking out the very core of these, shows us how intrinsically these processes are related to the basics of Software Development, Testing and Deployment.

 

In this article I am going to talk about the power of backups. I had just started developing a web application when suddenly the webserver on which the application was hosted broke-down. No points for guessing all my code and database was gone from the server. The WebHosting company provided me a backup that dated a month back, and back then I did not have that much of a data on the website, but now when the Web Server crashed I had a lot of data on my website. It was not only the data, it were the answers posted by the users which were lost. When I lost the data, I felt a feeling of self-guilt, how could I make such a careless mistake of not taking a backup of the data that is so important. From a websites perspective its only a database which can be restored, but from a visitor’s point of view who is re-visitng your website, it’s a matter of pride for him/her. One would feel a sense of disregard. One actually took the pain of typing in a review, post, article, advice, etc. on your website and then if he/she revisits to check if there is any response on it, he cannot find his post.

 

To all the webmasters who wish to run or run a database-driven website, please back up your database daily. I myself as a visitor to your website would not like to find my comment untraceable. Because something I write on your website comes from my mind and my heart.

 

Now this makes the very foundation of introducing a process of taking a DB Backup daily. Customer is KING, please remember. Just remembered, need to take the DB backup of my own website. Will keep sharing the information related to website running and maintaining, hope everyone has something to gain from them.

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