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Alvin Sim Posts

Symlink Me, Windows!

Microsoft Windows has this feature called symbolic links since Windows Vista. But, I am guessing not many are aware of this feature, nor did I. It wasn’t until I had a need for it and tried searching if there were any 3rd party applications which provided this feature. And I found this How-To Geek article. Eventually, I found other articles on this subject. What are symbolic links? Symbolic links are pointers referencing to another file or directory at a different…

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Coding Music With Sonic Pi

Sonic Pi Lately, I have been playing with Sonic Pi. In a nutshell, it is a music synthesizer. But instead of toggling knobs, switches, keys and what not, we write code. Ruby code to be exact. Sonic Pi was created by Sam Aaron. A bit of history now, if you have not heard of him, he, together with Johnathan Graham, was Meta-eX. They performed live coding music. Besides that, they also did tech talks to promote coding and music to…

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Tip-of-the-day Tips

We know it inside-out. Or do we? In our day-to-day life, we use a number of things or tools to get things done. Here, I want to touch mainly on software or applications, which we use almost everyday in our computer, smartphone, or tablet. Source: Windows 95 Tips, Tricks and Tweaks If anyone noticed, especially softwares on a desktop computer, there will always be a “Tip of the day” or “Did you know?” pop-out window. Most of us find it…

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Diagrams With PlantUML and Emacs

Starting With Dia When I had to draw UML diagrams, the tool I first used was Dia – an open-sourced diagraming software. Dia is a great tool. I have not used Microsoft Visio before, so I cannot compare what short-comings it has compared to Visio. The other tool I tried was yEd. I did not feel comfortable using it, and always went back to using Dia. Couple of years ago, with a new job, I had to draw lots of…

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Remember Me, Subversion

Every three months, my workplace’s network domain will prompt to change our password. And this tri-monthly exercise would affect all the other intranet sites and systems, namely Subversion (SVN). Now, this is not a major problem because the organisation uses single sign-on via LDAP or Active Directory i.e. you can access the other intanet sites or systems with the same User ID and password. But recently, I noticed SVN doesn’t remember me, even when I clicked on the “Save authentication”…

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I’m Now Licensed Under Creative Commons

Well, this website actually, including the blogs posts. Everything published here is now licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. In short, this means that you are allowed to (including for commercial works) share any of the blog posts published here with anyone. use any of the blog posts to produce any form of works. There is just one request: Please provide a link back to the content and reference me as the author. You can do it…

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Windows Tips – Move Window Between Multiple Monitor(s)

Most of us now have additional external monitor in our workspace. Having more than one screen, which I find, makes one productive, especially when you need to reference data on another application. Using Alt Tab to switch between applications is not the best thing to do. Prior to this, to move a window between monitors, I would use the mouse and drag it to the other screen. I have been doing this for years. I see other people doing this…

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FreeBSD – Install Python 3 and Pip

I am starting a Python web project, and taking this oppotunity to learn django or flask. Development work will be done in my FreeBSD VirtualBox virtual machine. Before I started, I checked if Python was already installed. And yes, it was already loaded with version 2.7.12. [alvinsim@freebsd ~]$ which python /usr/local/bin/python [alvinsim@freebsd ~]$ python –version Python 2.7.12 [alvinsim@freebsd ~]$ But, I wanted to develop using Python 3. So, I searched if there was a port for it. [alvinsim@freebsd ~]$ psearch…

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From Vim To Emacs

Disclaimer: This is not a “Vim vs Emacs” type of blog post. I wrote this to share my thoughts of using both of them. Vim Vi or vim (Vi IMproved) is a text editor. It is installed on almost all of the *nix systems. You can choose to use it with the GUI, or, use it in the terminal or command prompt. I started using vim at around 2006/07. This was at one of my previous jobs where the servers…

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Automate It!

Image Credit – Eugen Stoll (Creative Commons License – CC BY-NC 2.0) Machines are wonderful. They help us to be productive by doing the things we don’t want to do or can’t do, whilst we can focus on other important things. Yes, I am LAZY! I write scripts or let services, like IFTTT (If-This-Then-That), to do things for me. This is how I automate some of my daily routines. 1. Script to update source code from repository, build and deploy…

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