Nirenjan's Space

magicJack and Blocked Numbers

Stardate 56989.3 (Thu Nov 27, 2014 11:42 am) in Rants

So I got the magicJack service for $30 a year, which is way cheaper than any other service, and serves my purpose for the most part. There’s just one hiccup. I can’t call my office conference call number without making additional payments to magicJack, i.e., I need to get magicJack calling credits to make conference calls. I did call out magicJack on this, but unfortunately, the terms of service state clearly that they may charge for calls to conference calls and other numbers. Read more →

Random text plugin for Octopress

Stardate 56788.2 (Sat May 10, 2014 9:57 am) in Code Code, Ruby, Octopress

Why a random text plugin? Just because I can. It’s easy enough to implement and with just a little knowledge of Ruby and knowing how to search the internet for some JavaScript, it’s a piece of cake.

Handling 404 errors with Octopress

Stardate 56782.2 (Sun May 4, 2014 10:03 am) in Code Code, Ruby, Octopress

Building a blog with Octopress can be a bit of a hassle at times. Having converted from Wordpress, I miss the “Page not found” error that Wordpress provides when you get a request for an invalid URL. Thankfully, with Apache, htaccess and a touch of code, you can create your own 404 page.

Semantic Versioning

Stardate 56473.2 (Sat Jun 29, 2013 10:54 am) in Code Code, Ruby

Version numbering is a field on which you could talk for hours on end and still not make any sense out of it. Take package managers for instance; you have a package foo, that depends on package bar - now if it was as simple as that, we’d have no problems. It’s more likely that you’d wind up with version x of foo depending on version y of bar, which in turn depends on version z of baz. So far, so good. Now, let’s update baz to version z1 - OOPS! There are some changes to version z1 that break version y of bar, which means we need to revert to version z.

Stardates

Stardate 56333.7 (Sat Feb 9, 2013 7:41 pm) in Code Code, Ruby, Octopress

Stardates are common usage in the Star Trek universe. You’d easily hear Captain Picard talking in the intro scene, “Captain’s log, stardate 41325.9”. These combinations of numbers are meant to give the viewer a sense of the future, without explicitly stating the exact timeframe in which the show occurs. Of course, we know that Star Trek: The Next Generation is set in the 24th century, but that’s beside the point.