How to queue torrents in Transmission
Written on February 5, 2010.
I have been using Transmission bit torrent client for quite some time. Its powerful, runs in the background, is processor friendly ( maximum that i have seen it use is 5% that too on a P4 1.7GHz system with more than 75 torrents).
But what I find it lacking is its ability to queue torrents. Still at version 1.83 1.92 (which is what I am using currently) and no queuing … 
.Only the Mac version supports queuing.
So in search of the holy grail I landed up at this Transmission discussion forum thread and found this queue script.
Even though the script worked well, I found that the script had some short comings.
I had added a bunch of torrents to seed them, when I found that the script (scheduled to run at an interval of 5 minutes) stopped the newly added torrents which were being verified or were scheduled to be verified before seeding.
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Host ‘HostName’ is not allowed to connect to this MySQL server
Written on January 6, 2010.
I do most of my development work using XAMPP. So I always have a MySQL server up and running.
Recently there was a requirement to develop a Windows Desktop Application in C# with the backend as MySQL. I was developing this on a networked Windows machine and had configured the connection string accordingly.
When i first ran the application BAM!!! i got this error
A little investigation and the solution is what i found below.
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Reliance Broadband – New Auto Login Script
Written on December 18, 2009.
Yesterday morning when i woke up i saw that my downloads had stalled, my net connection was down.
Being a Reliance Broadnet Unlimited Plan customer, i always used a cURL based script to automate my login and reconnect in case of disconnection.
But yesterday morning the trusty cURL based script also failed. A little probing and i found that Reliance had changed its login page altogether and was using a cookie based authentication.
Lacking time I was not able to probe further.
But today i was lucky to find a new Python based script written by Kunal Dua which worked perfectly fine just like the previous cURL based script.
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Replace Pulse Audio with ALSA
Written on December 12, 2009.
With the launch of Karmic Koala, the Ubuntu developers have forced the Pulse Audio down our throat. The net result being a lot of my apps have broken their voice.
For instance just after I upgraded to Karmic, and tried to play my Music collection on Exaile, Rhythmbox, Banshee I saw a strange thing.
The first song would play perfectly fine. Next the OSD would show that the second song has started playing. The progress bar would also confirm that. But there was NO SOUND. It was dead silent. No amount of tinkering solved the problem.
A little searching also suggested that that Pulse Audio was the culprit.
So the only option was to ditch Pulse Audio in favour of ALSA.
The following steps show how to do it :
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Encounters with domPDF of the 1st kind
Written on November 24, 2009.
While working with one of my clients, there was a requirement to generate PDF dynamically.
Since the project was done in PHP, I had to naturally look for something that worked well with PHP.
A little search and I came up with the following options :
- FPDF (http://www.fpdf.org/)
- ezPDF (http://www.ros.co.nz/pdf/)
- PDFlib (http://www.pdflib.com/products/pdflib-7-family/pdflib/)
- domPDF (http://code.google.com/p/dompdf/)
But some of the hurdles were:
- The PDF generated would be using an external style sheet.
- There would be complex table structures.
- There should be no dependency on external library.