Divyaksh Shukla

Making a custom blogging website from scratch is a big task and how much ever you try to avoid it you may need some server side support to make it easier for yourself I tried going down this lane for a weekend and crreated a custom blog from scratch using react and some related libraries and tools. I got a lot far But then realsised it is much easier to write my blog and thoughts here and post them here as this is easier and also supports html. I would rather convert enable email based posting here and write a python script to automatically post the blogs here. I hope I can use github in some way to post and modify the contents as and when needed. This can be helpful as I can use a deployment script to deploy to the blog or even write in markdown which will be automatically converted to html when I deploy. Although HTML gives the advantage of styling the contents then but it is stll rather a pain to use it in a blog., specially when I want to include code snippets. I hope there...

Oracle Outsidein Technology provides a set of tools and SDKs to convert many forms of data to readable documents. It also holds data extraction and reduction capabilities. Used by multiple firms and tech fronts for more than 3 decades, OIT is a vast product here to stay for a long time. Here, I made a starting attempt on using OIT's Image export using docker. Created a small docker file with the oracle-java8 base image, loaded the image export jars and dependencies, created a few mounting volumes and ran it on a single sample pdf file. An enriching and learning experience for me and my father all the same. This blog shows the steps I took to get image export working on my machine. Prerequisites Docker (to be installed on your machine, you can go to docker's website and download it for your OS windows/linux/mac) OIT Image Export SDK (Get it here ) The image export SDK also contains some sam...

The expense manager apps on the play store are either paid or have in-app purchases or contain lots of advertisements which gets a little annoying. I wanted to make an app that is simple as all the other apps on the play store but be customised as per my usage. Many of the apps on the playstore are either very limited or too bloated (they could have just made tabbed screens 😠) Anyways I wanted an app that could note down the expenses I made and also separate out mode of payment (like cards, cash or online wallets). a feature that is missing in the apps available today Storing a snapshot of the bill is an added bonus. But in my house the whole month's grocery is bought at once from the supermarket. So, the bill is quite huge (its an extremely long piece of paper) and cramming that into one picture would be difficult. So, how about a video of the bill or a panoramic shot of the bill (that would be a lot of work even it is possible). I could also incorporate a message filter tha...

I made a stock collection program on my raspberry pi that web scrapes data from a website to give me stock updates every 5 minutes. All the details are stored as a file system and it is managed solely by a python program and crontab. The script is in python 3 and it is used to track down prices of BSE (Bombay stock exchange) in India. The whole script is available on my GitHub repository. Link: To run it just place the script in a folder and add the cron entry as stated in the README.md python3 stock.py ^BSESN The data is first extracted via BeautifulSoup and the following tags are title = ['h1', {'data-reactid': '7'}] quote_header = ['div', {'id': 'quote-header-info'}] present_price = ['span', {'class': 'Trsdu(0.3s)'}] opening_price = ['td', {'data-test': 'OPEN-value'}] previous_close_price = ['td', {'data-test': 'PREV_CLOSE-value'}] day_range_pric...

I had recently been to a datathon (A hackathon related to data science) in PES University, Bangalore. There my team was given a task to extract data from the National Achievement Survey - 2017 conducted by NCERT. NAS collects data about CBSE schools across states and districts of India to collect data about student achievements and their overall reports. This data is present in PDF formats. We were tasked to extract data from PDF and tabulate it. $ pdftotext is a linux utility to convert pdf to text. By supplying a -layout option the default layout of the data is mostly preserved. I made a python script (pdf_convert.py) to convert the pdf data to text files sequentially. Next I made a script to convert the text files to csv data. So each text file was turned to a record (row) in the csv file. Here is a snapshot of the directory structure of PDF file that we got. . ├── Andaman & Nicobar Islands │   ├── Andaman │   │   ├── Andamans Class - ...

PROBLEM I had accidentally deleted the partition containing GRUB (/dev/sda1) due to which my Linux Mint installed on /dev/sda5 stopped booting.  Solution So, I wanted to reinstall GRUB and edit it to boot my Linux Mint. I wanted GRUB and booting sectors on /dev/sda1 while my OS was in /dev/sda5. (I am using these as my defaults for this blog. Please use fdisk -l to figure out your partition names and numbers). Getting a live USB : I created a new USB bootable drive of KDE Neon (It is a derivative of Ubuntu).  Installing GRUB : After booting KDE Neon, I opened the terminal and created the partition using fdisk. Fdisk :  $ sudo fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 232.9 GiB, 250059350016 bytes, 488397168 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disklabel type: dos Disk identifier: 0x6c778d7d Device     Boot     Start       ...

The new Ubuntu 16.04 LTS released in April 2016 is a great improvement over its predecessors. Its much faster and more fluid than any Ubuntu or Lubuntu distribution I've used. To install ubuntu on a pen drive you can go through my previous posts on this blog. But Beware: Ubuntu 16.04 takes a lot of time to boot from your USB HDD (pen drive). Although, shut down time is very less. I do not know why does it freeze after the GRUB. if anyone has a fix please do let me know.