I was working on a project a couple of weeks ago which involves Celery for processing tasks. I wanted the Celery process to run in the background as a service but it didn’t come with a Windows service installer, we will have to write our own. Since we were still just working on a proof of concept, I didn’t want to spend too much time on this at this point and then I realized I …

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 …

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 …

Over the weekend, I had to do a new build of the mod_xsendfile module since I put a custom fix for the issue I was having. As it turns out, however, compiling Apache modules on Windows is not very straightforward at all (Linux, on the other hand, you just simply type apxs2 -cia some_apache_module.c).

After lots of Googling and trying different approaches, I finally got it to work by doing the following using …

My co-worker was wondering last week whether an old Windows domain user account was still being used by someone. Having managed Windows domain environments at my previous jobs, the first thing I did of course was go to Active Directory and check the LastLogonTimestamp attribute. This attribute is stored in the Active Directory database as a Large Integer so it will need to be converted to a normal date format to make sense of it. …