I've recently renewed my US passport while traveling in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I actually still had about 10 months left before expiration but I decided to renew it earlier as some countries require at least 6 months validity before they let you in. I didn't want to wait until the last minute.

Since Malaysia allows for up to a 90-day stay for tourists from the US, I figured this would be a good place to …

My Chrome recently got updated and a new feature that was introduced which I found very distracting and annoying is "Tab Hover Cards", where it displays a pop-up box whenever you place your mouse cursor on a tab.

To disable this function, type this in the URL:

chrome://flags/

Then search for "tab hover" and set the settings to "Disabled":

If you use the Brave browser, the steps above will also work.

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 …