I hate working with XML mainly because I find it difficult to read.

There's a popular Python package for parsing XML called lxml which is very flexible, but I found xmltodict much better suited and easier to use for what I needed to do.

We have a inventory management app for Shopify, EZ Inventory, and one of the features we've added recently is XML support. We have a few customers whose suppliers can only ...

I was working on some fairly big features involving new Django models for one of our apps and when I pushed to our staging environment, I got this error during deployment at the database migration step:

duplicate key value violates unique constraint "auth_permission_pkey" DETAIL: Key (id)=(55) already exists

It looks like new records were getting added to the auth_permission table. I was puzzled as I didn't make any changes related to the Django auth app. ...

This is one of those "note to self" again.

I needed to download big file (close to 6GB) from a remote server last night but the Internet connection at my AirBnB was a bit spotty and would drop periodically.

Normally, I'd just use scp and even 6GB of data is no big deal on a fast and stable connection. But with a slow or unstable connection, I needed a way to resume the download.

The ...

This is another note to self as I keep forgetting the syntax.

Basically I needed to use nohup (short for "no hangup") to execute a PostgreSQL database dump while connected to a remote server via SSH. The reason is to make sure the command doesn't get terminated in case I get disconnected from the server as the command could take some time to complete due to the size of the database I'm backing up.

Since ...

Since I almost never use Bluetooth on my laptop, it's a good idea to just turn it off and keep it off by default as it's just another thing that drains the battery and an additional entry point for malicious hackers.

Disabling Bluetooth is surprising not as straightforward on Ubuntu as I would have thought. I was expecting to simply tick or untick a checkbox in the Bluetooth settings.

To keep Bluetooth disabled by default, ...