UnxUtil - Run Unix / Linux command in Windows

Life sucks when you are asked to make your script run in Windows, that you have written for Linux and that uses lots of Unix or Linux specific system commands :(

But there is a nice tool name UnxUtil that you can install on your windows and run Unix / Linux commands in the command line. UnxUtil will speed up your development by saving hours.

You can download it from here. After download, just extract it in a directory and add the PATH in your ENVIRONMENT VARIABLE (PATH) (Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Environment Variables).

Thats all!

Use Beautiful Soup for Screen Scraping in Python

What to speed up web crawler / spider development? Try Beautiful Soup, if you use Python.

From their website:

Beautiful Soup is a Python HTML/XML parser designed for quick turnaround projects like screen-scraping. Three features make it powerful:

1. Beautiful Soup won't choke if you give it bad markup. It yields a parse tree that makes approximately as much sense as your original document. This is usually good enough to collect the data you need and run away.
2. Beautiful Soup provides a few simple methods and Pythonic idioms for navigating, searching, and modifying a parse tree: a toolkit for dissecting a document and extracting what you need. You don't have to create a custom parser for each application.
3. Beautiful Soup automatically converts incoming documents to Unicode and outgoing documents to UTF-8. You don't have to think about encodings, unless the document doesn't specify an encoding and Beautiful Soup can't auto detect one. Then you just have to specify the original encoding.

You can download it from here: http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/

Ruby programmers can enjoy Rubyful Soup

Enjoy High Speed Spider development with Beautiful Soup!

Perl equivalent of UNIX / Linux commands

One afternoon I was asked by my boss to write a Perl script that does the same task as the 'egrep' command of Linux. I studied the manual, to understand what 'egrep' does and planned a solution. But next morning when I came to office, I searched google and found a the Perl equivalent of 'egrep' command. It saved me at least two hours. You can click this link for details.

Welcome to High Speed Software Development

Hi, welcome to my blog on software development. After creating love-python (where I discuss about Python only), I have felt the need of another blog where I can discuss about my development experience with other languages (Perl, Java, PHP ...) along with Python. I shall try to write here on various topics that will help you to speed up your development. Various resources that I use in my professional life (and also personal work) that help me to solve a problem quickly will be here. And some fun also. I mostly work in Linux platform, so you are going to find some *nix specific things here.

I would greatly appreciate if you feel free to post comments here.

Hope you will enjoy the blog. Welcome on board!