Let’s say you have a website that does some heavy lifting. This means that you have designed a backend and hosted it on your web server. Now, you might want to run some processes periodically like generating thumbnails or enriching data in the background. The reason for this is that we don’t want to interfere with the user interface when you run these processes. It should happen somewhere in the background and it should happen automatically. Unix-based systems have a great program for this called ‘cron’. It allows tasks to automatically run in the background at regular intervals. You could also use it to automatically create backups, synchronize files, schedule updates, and much more. So how to we set this up? Continue reading “How To Schedule Tasks On Linux”
Tag: OS X
How To Install PIL On Ubuntu
Let’s say you want to play around with images in Python. To do that, we need a Python package that can handle all the image manipulation. Python Imaging Library (PIL) is one of most popular libraries that is used to process the image data. Actually, people use Pillow now, which is a modern repackaged version of PIL. It has a lot of nice functionalities and it works well. Let’s see how you can install PIL on 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04. Continue reading “How To Install PIL On Ubuntu”
How To Take A Screenshot On Mac OS X
One of the many good things about Mac OS X is the built in support for taking screenshots. But then again, in this day and age, what operating system doesn’t? Well, this is where it differs a little. I am sure most of you know how to capture a screenshot on OS X, but there might be situations where your requirements change a bit. There are many different ways to capture the content being displayed on your screen. Each one of those methods has something different and unique to offer. These methods are very handy at times! I have described a few different methods here. Let’s see what they are. Continue reading “How To Take A Screenshot On Mac OS X”
Why Do We Need CocoaPods?
Linker errors are painful to deal with. When we are working on our Xcode projects and when we almost done with everything, these linker errors pop up to make their point! Even if we can see the libraries right there in the GUI, it still can’t find that library. Sounds familiar? Why do we have to set linker flags in more places? Wouldn’t it be easier if you could just start developing your project without having to worry about these things? Say hello to CocoaPods! CocoaPods is a library dependency manager for Objective-C projects that solves all these issues. CocoaPods is a ruby gem that downloads all the third party libraries you want for your project, and links everything so that you don’t have to. Continue reading “Why Do We Need CocoaPods?”
NTFS Write Support On OS X Mountain Lion
If you have noticed, Mac OS X doesn’t support writing onto NTFS disks. But not to worry, you don’t have to install any third party drivers to enable this. Mountain Lion 10.8.3 already has native write support for the NTFS. OSX Mountain Lion does have built-in support for NTFS, and it can read and write. However, Apple does not enable it by default. Continue reading “NTFS Write Support On OS X Mountain Lion”
How To Reset The Admin Password In Mac OS X
So you have finally gotten yourself in this situation! You have a Mac in front of you and you have forgotten the admin password. You don’t have the cd either. What we do we do now? Well, as it turns out, there is a simple procedure to reset the admin password: Continue reading “How To Reset The Admin Password In Mac OS X”
OpenCV On Mac: How To Get It Up And Running?
OpenCV is a computer vision library used extensively by people in the computer vision field. Until a couple of years ago, OpenCV was a bit hacky and the usage was not very straightforward. But determined efforts by multiple companies finally standardized the process and now it is nice and clean. Computer vision algorithms are computationally intensive, requiring lot of processing power to run in real time. Before OpenCV came along, the efforts were very fragmented and repetitive, and there was no standard library as such. Hence Intel decided to do something about it and came up with OpenCV. The advantage of OpenCV is that the algorithms are highly optimized and the library is available on almost all the popular platforms. I have outlined the procedure below to get OpenCV up and running on your Mac. Continue reading “OpenCV On Mac: How To Get It Up And Running?”
Git Is Gone In OS X Mountain Lion
This blog post is for a very specific group of people who cared enough to notice that git command line tool is not working on their brand new MacBooks with Mountain Lion! If that sentence didn’t make sense to you, then you are probably at the wrong place. I got my new Mac last week and I wanted to clone some code from Github. So I opened the terminal to clone it and behold, “git” is apparently not a recognized command! I have already installed the latest developer preview of Xcode (version 4.6 DP3), so what went wrong here? It turns out that we need to manually install the git command line tools. We still live in a world where git is not an integral part of all the systems! Xcode 4.6 doesn’t install the command line tools by default, and Git is one of the tools included in these command line tools. Anyway, there’s a simple fix for it. Continue reading “Git Is Gone In OS X Mountain Lion”
Perpetual Enigma 