Full migration/clone of linux installation to a new system(Without reinstalling)

I'm switching to a new laptop, but don't want to have to install Archlinux again. So instead of re-installing I will try to copy all files and hope the system will work. In this blogpost I will describe the steps and issues I encountered while doing so.

Status: Succeeded!!!!

Summary …

Only use worker when required on heroku with Django/Python

For a mobile project I required a background worker which sents an email with 300 generated QR codes zipped together as attachment. This costs quite some time so we need a background worker to execute this task.

I wanted to achieve the following result:

• When the user wants to generate …

Using Sendgrid with Django on Heroku (How to find your Sendgrid password on Heroku)

While setting up sentgrid I was searching for my password of sendgrid, but coudn't find it. You can get it in the following way:

heroku config --long

Which will show the parameters:
SENDGRID_PASSWORD, SENDGRID_USERNAME

After you get your username don't forget to add it to django settings:

EMAIL\_HOST = 'smtp …

Django Custom View Decorator with Arguments

To make my life easier I made a simple decorator which checks if the parameters are present in the request.POST or request.GET and returns a response if they are not.

It accepts a list of parameters in string format and will loop through each parameter to check if …

Simple function to return json in Django

Just a small code snippet I use when I need to return json, comments are welcomed.

from django.http import HttpResponse  
from django.utils import simplejson as json

def json_response(dict_to_convert_to_json):  
    return HttpResponse(json.dumps(dict_to_convert_to_json),
                        mimetype="application/json")

To use it in your view you just do it this …

Chinese New Year 2012

The Chinese New Year aka Spring Festival is the most important festival in Chinese culture. All the people travel back to their hometown, because most of them are working/studying in cities far from their own hometown. That means all train tickets are sold the day they get available and …

Importing a SQL dump in postgres

I always keep forgetting how to import a SQL dump into postgres and found it always hard to find the right documentation. So I thought lets share it:

psql -d dbname -U username -f dumpfile.sql

This should also work with files created by pgdump.

Installing fastboot for Ubuntu (Linux)

mkdir ~/fastboot  
cd ~/fastboot  
wget http://xt720.ru/Tools/fastboot  
chmod +x fastboot  
sudo ./fastboot --help

Reference: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1121420

I tested the above with Ubuntu 11.10, but it should work on any ubuntu version I think.

Trying to install scrapy with pip lxml error: command 'gcc' failed with exit status 1

Just tried to install scrapy with pip / easy_install, but when it comes to installing lxml it will give the following error:

gcc -pthread -fno-strict-aliasing -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O2 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fPIC -I/usr/include/python2.7 -c src/lxml/lxml.etree.c -o build/temp.linux-x86_64-2.7/src/lxml/lxml …

Ubuntu 11.10 error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.0.9.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

A quick solution is to install the libssl 0.9.8 package with the Following command:
sudo apt-get install libssl0.9.8

Thanks to Rob who commented below and provided an answer on Stackoverflow

I just upgraded from ubuntu 11.04 to 11.10 with a fresh install, by keeping …