I’m writing a small Python program to connect to a SOAP-based web service using Suds and just ran into an issue with authenticating to our proxy server. I’m able to connect fine if the web service runs on http, but the web service we need to connect to uses https and the urllib2 module threw an error:

urllib2.URLError: <urlopen error Tunnel connection failed: 407 Proxy Authentication Required>

The solution in my case is to upgrade …

I read this article a few weeks ago and I just had to try it. The use of GPUs in high performance computing is becoming very popular nowadays because you get so much computing power at very little cost compared to CPUs. You can pretty much buy a workstation and put 8 NVIDIA Tesla GPU cards in it and you got yourself a nice little supercomputer that can compete with a big CPU cluster or …

We have a computer at work that runs on Windows 7 and I needed to check whether it can connect to our internal SMTP server so I can use it to send emails. The quickest way to do this is to telnet to the SMTP server on port 25 but it turned out telnet is disabled/not installed by default on Windows 7. It gave the message “‘telnet’ is not recognized as an internal or external …

I just logged in to my Rackspace hosted virtual server running Ubuntu Linux 10.04 and noticed that the time drifted almost a couple of minutes.

Type in the command below to sync your server’s date and time to a time server (where ntp.ubuntu.com is the time server):

sudo ntpdate ntp.ubuntu.com

To automatically correct the time drifting issue in the future, you could also install the ntp daemon:

sudo apt-get install ntp

Once in a while I need to download and install Python packages at work and having switched to Linux (Ubuntu) at home, I find it quite annoying now to have to go to a website, download the package I need, then manually install.

Fortunately, the pip installer works for Windows as well, allowing the installation of Python packages automatically with a simple command (pip install package_name). But at work, we’re behind a proxy …