Entries by Anurag

At times you may need to trace a ruby program's execution flow. Ruby's set_trace_func comes handy there.



When saved in a file called trace.rb and executed with $ ruby trace.rb, it outputs

2011-12-15 00:33:26 +0530 c-return trace.rb:3 set_trace_func Kernel
2011-12-15 00:33:26 +0530 line trace.rb:5
2011-12-15 00:33:26 +0530 c-call trace.rb:5 puts Kernel
2011-12-15 00:33:26 +0530 c-call trace.rb:5 puts IO
2011-12-15 00:33:26 +0530 c-call trace.rb:5 write IO
*** Hello World
2011-12-15 00:33:26 +0530 c-return trace.rb:5 write IO
2011-12-15 00:33:26 +0530 c-return trace.rb:5 puts IO
2011-12-15 00:33:26 +0530 c-return trace.rb:5 puts Kernel


3 (b) No Conflicting Uses. You may not use the Flixster API to develop (or instruct any third party to develop) a service that may reasonably be deemed to be directly competitive with Flixster’s products and services, unless you have been specifically permitted to do so in a separate written agreement with Flixster prior to the undertaking of the development and launch of such service.

Dear Rotten Tomatoes, what's the point of launching these APIs then?

My Android phone doesn't support DivX/XviD. To play videos on it. I need to convert them to MP4. Taking a note for myself if I need it later.

$ ffmpeg -i input_video.avi -f mp4 -vcodec libx264 -acodec libfaac -s 400x240 -ab 128k output_video.mp4

400x240 is the phone's screen resolution.

[Edit] Good parameters for high quality MPEG4 encoding:

-mbd rd -flags +mv4+aic -trellis 2 -cmp 2 -subcmp 2 -g 300

Two months back Mumbai's autorickshaw and taxi drivers went on a strike, demanding a steep increase in fares. While earlier the fare calculation was simple, after the new fare structure came in place, autorickshaw fare calculations became relatively complex.

I started http://rickfare.com on the day new fares came into effect after seeing the new complicated fare structure. Over time, friends pitched in for their cities and I added New Delhi, Ahmedabad, Pune and Navi Mumbai. Today Rickfare.com is accessed by thousands of commuters over a wide variety of mobile devices including iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, HTC and assorted Nokia handsets.

I'd like to thank Ashish Mehta, Atul Jha, Kartik Mistry and Kamaleshwar for helping out with auto fares of their cities

This post is a note for self. I always keep forgetting how to extract mp3 audio file from any video clip.

$ mencoder videofile.avi -of rawaudio -oac mp3lame -ovc copy -o audio-output.mp3

This is an awesome companion to the youtube video downloader - youtube-dl.py

During the recent server migration, I shifted svn services from http to https. Everything seemed to work fine, except for this error while creating branches.

frodo$ svn cp https://svn.xinh.org/svn/project/UberCool/trunk https://svn.xinh.org/svn/project/UberCool/branches/1.0
svn: Server sent unexpected return value (502 Bad Gateway) in response to COPY request for '/svn/project/!svn/bc/15/UberCool/trunk'
svn: Your commit message was left in a temporary file:
svn: 'svn-commit.tmp'
frodo$

Googling around a bit helped. I'm using HTTPS over Apache + dav_svn module. This issue can be fixed by enabling mod_headers module in Apache and adding the following line at the end of your VirtualHost.

RequestHeader edit Destination ^https http early

After a long long time I got a chance to go trekking again on 22 Nov. Sankshi fort is located near Alibag, off the Mumbai Alibag highway. Difficulty level is easy to moderate, but it involves about an hour of walking.

Article on Sankshi fort from Maharashtra government website.

The name Sankshi is said to have been derived from a chief named Sank who is traditionally believed to have been the lord of the fort. See below.] (T. Pen) also known as Badr-ud-din, or Darghaca Killa from a tomb or dargah of the saint Badr-ud-din at its foot, lies within the limits of Nidivali village about five miles north-east of Pen. read more...

We assembled at Panvel ST depot at 7AM, waiting for others to join in, and finally left Panvel at 9:15 after having breakfast at a restaurant across the road. Since the bus started from Panvel, everyone got seats, and I dozed off to sleep.

We got down at Balavali Phata and marched towards saint Badr-ud-din's dargaah. The route is cool and covered with dense trees, but full of giant spider webs. The photographers among us took half an hour to capture the arachnids and buffaloes on camera.



We reached dargaah in less than 2 hours, relaxed and moved towards the Sankshi hill. There's a GI water pipe that runs to dargaah at the base of the hill from a water cistern at the top of the hill. Some walk in the jungle, struggling with the itchy bushes, a rock patch and we were at the top. After exploring for half an hour, we came back down to have lunch at the old dargaah structure that looked beautiful and wise in white color.

It was a nice little trek (microtrek ) and we were back to panvel around 6PM, without feeling tired at all! Complete pictures from trek to sankshi fort are available in my flickr set.

Trek to Gorakhgad can be counted as one of the most luxurious treks in the Sahyadri range. We left Mumbai on Saturday 4th July 2009 at 2300Hrs. It rained heavily whole day so many participants dropped out at the last minute since the train services were badly affected. As a result, the bus we hired had several seats empty and lots of place for us to sleep.


We took NH-222 from Kalyan and stopped at Dehri. Trek began at 3AM in the moonlit sky with torches. In about 2 hours we reached the base of Gorakhgad mountain and started climbing upwards in the light of dawn.

After exploring the top, taking pictures, having breakfast and walking in the clouds we were back to the highway before noon. After Gorakhgad we switched to picnic mood and started our trip to the scenic Malshej ghat.


It was an amazing trip and it seems i've taken several pictures that can make it to next year's calendar. The complete pictures from trek to gorakhgad and malshej ghat are available in my flickr set.

Another TODO item ticked off a while back! It wasn't what I had originally planned, but the goal has been achieved nevertheless.

I didn't know I made myself a bucket list, long before watching the movie.