Shantanu's Blog

Amazon Redshift is a fast and powerful, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud.

http://aws.amazon.com/redshift/

In other words, your scaling issues are over once and for all. If you are using MySQL and finding it difficult to manage growing data, it is the right time to switch to Redshift.
Welcome the "James Bond" of Database world!

Auto MySQL Backup is a shell script that helps to automate the back process.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/automysqlbackup/

Here are 7 easy steps to create backup of any database.

1) connect to the server.

2) Download the package:
wget http://tinyurl.com/c52x3sh

3) Extract files:
tar xvfz automysqlbackup-v3.0_rc6.tar

4) make sure you are "root" and then install:
sh install.sh

5) create backup folder:
mkdir /var/backup/
# this backup location can be changed as shown below

6) Make changes to user name / password and the DB that needs to be backup:
vi /usr/local/bin/automysqlbackup
  CONFIG_mysql_dump_password='admin'
  CONFIG_db_names=('drupaldb')
  CONFIG_backup_dir='/var/backup/db'

7) Run the script to take the backup:
/usr/local/bin/automysqlbackup

Here is how you can have a Drupal site in 4 easy steps using cloud Formation service of Amazon Web Services.

1) Log in aws console and go to CloudFormation Management Console. Click on "Create Stack" button.






2) admin/ admin is the default DB user name and password. You can specify the instance type (for e.g. m1.small)




Within a few minutes the site is ready!

This however, does not give you shell access to the ec2 instance. You need to create the drupal site based on a template in order to gain the root access.

http://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/aws-cloudformation-templates/

Use the template that says: "Single EC2 Instance with local MySQL database"
You will be allowed to specify the kye pair that can be used to connect to the ec2.

This applies to Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress etc. Amazon ec2 instances are a bit costlier than the shared hosting. But I think aws is a good choice considering the host of features offered, reliability, support and brand.

Python has excellent support for unicode.
Here is how we can declare the string to be utf8


#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf8 -*-
print unicode("私","UTF-8")
a = unicode("प्रभाकर", "UTF-8")
b = u"प्रभाकर"
print len(b)

hotmail and yahoo mail were good. Gmail is much much better. But it still lacks the flexibility that I am looking for. for example, these are very simple tasks but takes a lot of time. The reason is that we do not have direct access to the emails. We have limited choice provided by the user inferface and if our needs outgrow, there is either no way to do that or a lot of programming is involved that adds to the cost of doing business.

* Print the subject line of the last 20 emails sent to with someone@company.com
* Download all versions of the last 2 attachments exchanged with someone@company.com
* Download all attachments with a file name that contains the word 'proposal'

context.io provides RESTful email API that makes my life easy. I can now do whatever I like with my email. The web is finally becoming interesting again! It feels like we are in the late 90's or early 2000's. This API will free up the valuable data stored in the form of emails and allow us do things we never thought possible.
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The following code will fetch the subject of emails sent to client@company.com

from contextIO.ContextIO import ContextIO

api_key = 'abcdefg5'
api_secret = 'abcd8ef2ghijklmn'
mailbox_to_query = 'shantanu@gmail.com'
api_client = ContextIO(api_key=api_key, api_secret=api_secret)

response = api_client.contactmessages(account=mailbox_to_query,to_address='client@company.com',limit=20)
for message in response.get_data():
    print 'Subject %s' % message['subject']

'''
_____

Let's assume we need to find all the communication sent to the client. I can do simple search
to:client@company.com

That is not enough. I need to find the mails sent from my account as well as what others have sent.
to:client@company.com in:sent
to:client@company.com not in:sent

More info:
http://context.io/docs/2.0/accounts/contacts/messages#get
'''

response = api_client.contactmessages(account=mailbox_to_query,to_address='client@company.com',limit=20)
for message in response.get_data():
    if any('\Sent' in s for s in message['folders']):
        print 'successfully sent by me'
        print 'Subject %s' % message['subject']
    else:
        print 'someone else has sent mail to him'
        print 'Subject %s' % message['subject']

# get all details like subject, date (unix time), message ID, labels, from - to email addresses along with photos (personInfo)
    for mykey in message:
        print mykey,  message[mykey]
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installation is easy:

git clone git@github.com:contextio/Python-ContextIO.git
cd Python-ContextIO/
python setup.py install
cd example/
python examples.py