Harsh J » Personal

Gotta post something

Harsh — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 09:08:40 +0000

So here it is.

Wishing whoever reads this a better time ahead, as you replace those old calendars. And continue doing what you do best.

Interesting Articles for October 28th

Harsh — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 08:24:56 +0000

	Shared The first direct image of a baby planet being born! (maybe!)(but probably!) \| Bad Astronomy.
	Shared Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Angry Birds”.

Interesting Articles for October 21st

Harsh — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 08:23:37 +0000

	Shared Comic: Deciphering Academic Presentations.
	Shared Monitoring OpenJDK from the CLI.
	Shared Empirical Software Engineering » American Scientist.
	Shared Meet the First Person to Get Mummified in 3000 Years [Wtf].
	Shared No Tip for You!.

Interesting Articles for October 14th

Harsh — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 08:23:39 +0000

	Shared Why Should Engineers and Scientists Be Worried About Color?.
	Shared Calories are bastards.
	Shared Problembot.
	Shared The Blue Field part 3.
	Shared Photo.

Interesting Articles for October 7th

Harsh — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 08:23:30 +0000

	Shared Mercury’s hot and cold south pole \| Bad Astronomy.
	Shared Berlios is dying.
	Shared Berlios is dying….
	Shared How Did Researchers Manage to Read Movie Clips From the Brain? \| 80beats.
	Shared Diving Expedition Finds New Life in the Dead Sea.
	Shared Minimum Viable Personality.
	Shared Experiments with Mechanical Turk.
	Shared Stunning Finnish aurora time lapse \| Bad Astronomy.

Running a local CGIProxy web proxy server on OSX

Harsh — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 06:19:38 +0000

What is CGIProxy?

It is slightly ancient today, but CGIProxy still appears to be one of the good web proxies (non-transparent, CGI-based proxy script) out there.

Also, being essentially a PERL script, its easy to set it up with an existing Apache2 install. Thankfully enough, Mac comes with its own Apache2 server well integrated and the work required to edit and configure it to run PERL scripts is trivial.

Some reasons why you might want to run CGIProxy locally would be to test a local website for how it handles session data, or to even use it generally to filter content over your network, etc.. I had the former need while working with Hadoop‘s web applications as part of what I do on a daily basis at Cloudera.

Here’s how to setup CGIProxy locally on your Mac OSX (or earlier/later):

Setup Apache2 to allow Perl and CGI execution

Over Applications – System Preferences – Sharing, disable ‘Web Sharing’ if it is running. This stops the Apache2 web server that may already be running.

System Preferences - Sharing

Sharing - Disable Web Sharing before we configure Apache2

With that out of the door, we should be able to edit out our Apache2 configs without any issue. With your favorite text editor, I use vim below, edit the file /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and append the following lines to it somewhere along the end:


AddHandler cgi-script .cgi

This would let Apache be able to interpret files ending with .pl as CGI-scripts.

Configure /etc/apache2/httpd.conf with Vim

The next steps is to configure and allow execution of such files via your user account, which we can do by editing yet another file named /etc/apache2/users/.conf. For instance, on my setup, the file is called /etc/apache2/users/harsh.conf. Modify the ‘Options’ configuration to allow CGI Execution:


Options Indexes MultiViews ExecCGI

Configure /etc/apache2/users/"Username".conf with Vim

With that done as well, we’re now ready to setup CGIProxy.

Setting up CGIProxy

Fetch the CGIProxy tarball, which is about 170 KB strong. Extracting this would provide you a script called nph-proxy.cgi. Place it in the ~/Sites directory of your Home.

Place the CGIProxy script into the ~/Sites directory

We’re done with installing CGIProxy.

Running CGIProxy

Now that we’re all set, we’ll just launch the Apache2 web server again and get to using the CGIProxy.

Head back to Applications – System Preferences – Sharing and enable ‘Web Sharing’ to run the server. Once up, you’ll get the public links to your homepage.

Enable Web Sharing under System Preferences - Sharing

Head to /nph-proxy.cgi (For example, http://localhost/~harsh/nph-proxy.cgi) and you should see a properly functional, local CGIProxy ready for consumption. Hit it with a URL of choice and set some options you want it to use, and you’re off. Also look into the script with a text editor to see further configuration options.

CGIProxy in Chrome

Interesting Articles for September 30th

Harsh — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 08:23:42 +0000

	Shared Samsung Unveils Flexible Android Smartphone.
	Shared Quake 2 Source Code Review.
	Shared Bits Up!: SPDY: What I Like About You..
	Shared Breaking the Speed of Light.
	Shared The Blue Field part 1.
	Shared The Blue Field part 2.
	Shared Avoid Using which(1).
	Shared Panhandler of the Day.
	Shared Two 32-bit hash functions from a 64-bit hash function?.
	Shared How To Properly Create And Burn CD/DVD ISO Images From The Command Line.

Interesting Articles for September 23rd

Harsh — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 08:23:38 +0000

	Shared Vesta’s odd bottom \| Bad Astronomy.
	Shared Tu Parle Bazaar?.
	Shared Java Concurrency Tutorial – Callable, Future.
	Shared jQuery UI Grid And OData.
	Shared Should you launch at a conference?.
	Shared Valve Giving Portal Away Free Until Sept 20.
	Shared Technology Moves in Squares.
	Shared Technology Moves in Squares.
	Shared 15 Things You May not Have Known about Outer Space [Infographic].
	Shared Amazon EBS mySQL, Disk Throughput and the Dual Edge of Software Raid.
	Shared Photo.
	Shared Latitude doesn’t exactly mean what I thought.
	Shared Latitude doesn’t exactly mean what I thought.
	Shared But vs. Though: A Distinction That Matters.
	Shared Android Tutorial: Gestures in your app.
	Shared Hire For The Ability To Get Shit Done.
	Shared CAPTCHA hell.
	Shared job-fails-draw-your-own-conclusions.jpg.
	Shared Dealing with the Python Import Blackbox \| Armin Ronacher’s Thoughts and Writings.

Committer on Apache Hadoop!

Harsh — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 20:02:44 +0000

Just rolled in today:

Woohoo!

Interested in becoming one too? Come spend good days with me at Cloudera. We’re hiring!

Mail me if you are interested, or for any questions you might have!

Interesting Articles for September 16th

Harsh — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 08:23:59 +0000

	Shared Five interesting things about Mersenne primes.
	Shared Five interesting things about Mersenne primes.
	Shared Google Bought Me! The First Two Days.
	Shared Tenzing A SQL Implementation On The MapReduce Framework.
	Shared How I Got My Stolen Laptop Back Within 24 Hours Using Prey [Theft].
	Shared Automatically Customize Mac OS X with a Bash Script: 27 Defaults Write Commands, custom .aliases, .bash_profile, etc.
	Shared Automatically Customize Mac OS X with a Bash Script: 27 Defaults Write Commands, custom .aliases, .bash_profile, etc.
	Shared New domain for Qt announced: qt-project.org.
	Shared Memorable Movie Moment Gifs.
	Shared Piñata for cats.
	Shared Counting magic squares.
	Shared Counting magic squares.
	Shared A New and Improved Moore’s Law.
	Shared 5 years with Canonical.
	Shared Blog – For Indie Jacques Cousteaus, An Underwater Camera.
	Shared Blog – For Indie Jacques Cousteaus, an Underwater Camera.
	Shared Semantic Save – Prototype.
	Shared Men in Black 3 to Hit IMAX 3D Theaters on May 25.
	Shared CSS: Taking control of the cascade.
	Shared ext4 2x faster than XFS?.
	Shared A monospace that looks like a proportional.
	Shared This week in Docs: Format painter, Google Fusion Tables, and drag & drop images – Docs Blog.
	Shared Dash, Google’s Alternative to JavaScript.
	Shared Blog – The Smartphone on Your Wrist.
	Shared Blog – The Smart Phone on Your Wrist.
	Shared Augmented Reality Meets Gesture Recognition.
	Shared Comic for September 15, 2011.
	Shared How to Rearrange PDF Pages in Preview.
	Shared September 14, 2011.
	Shared 17_ways.jpg.
	Shared New species of dolphin discovered.
	Shared Wolf makes a comeback in France.
	Shared Underworld Awakening to Open in IMAX 3D.
	Shared “Years, Not Decades” to Growing New, Improved Tissue From Your Own Stem Cells \| 80beats.
	Shared Paper: It’s Time for Low Latency – Inventing the 1 Microsecond Datacenter.