First I installed the prerequisites: freetds and the python headers:

aptitude install python2.5-dev freetds-dev

There might be some other packages that are needed but that was the only ones I needed to install…. Then I decompressed the latest release from pymssql at sourceforge and installed:

NOTE : for me the latest package did not work so I used pymssql-0.8.0

tar -xvzf pymssql-0.8.0.tar.gz
cd pymssql-0.8.0
python setup.py install

Now you can test it out by creating your own test script and it is as follows :

import pymssql
conn = pymssql.connect(host='<hostname>', user='<username>', password='<passwd>', database='<dbname>')
cur = conn.cursor()
cur.execute('SELECT * FROM tbABCD')
row = cur.fetchone()
while row:
 print "ID=%s, Name=%s, Address=%s" % (row[0], row[1], row[2])
 row = cur.fetchone()
conn.close()

The script ran perfectly…
For more information on pymssql you can view its documentation here…

ASP stands for Active Server Pages and PHP formerly stood for Personal Home Pages and is now known as PHP Hypertext Preprocessor…

ASP is basically a toy from the Microsoft development toy chest and is used with Internet Information Server (IIS) which is a program that runs on Microsoft servers… However, there are 3rd party applications that can make it compatible with a few other servers. ASP is widely used for large companies Web needs…

Rasmus Lerdorf originally designed the PHP parsing language during 1994/1995… Some other major contributors were Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans who rewrote the parsing engine to create PHP version 3… The major NT and UNIX Web servers support it and it is widely used with the mySQL database. Small and medium Web developers use it religiously…

PHP has it’s own language and syntax, the language is simplified due to the programs incorporation of a parsing engine that is especially designed to make short work of translating PHP code into machine language that executes commands… If you were a programmer adept with the C++ language, you would probably be more comfortable using PHP than ASP… PHP uses C/C++ as base language and most syntax are similar to each other… Because a big chunk of programmers are still using C++ language, PHP are by far more popular than ASP…

On the other hand ASP makes use of a language that was dying before Microsoft managed to breathe new life into it… Visual Basic Script is the language used in ASP and was formerly used as a client side scripting language that was in direct competitions with JavaScript… This was back when Internet Explorer was still the #2 browser behind Netscape Navigator… During this era, JavaScript was whooping the pants off of Visual Basic Script with its wide acceptance amongst Web developers…

PHP is very much flexible when it terms of database connectivity… It can connect to several databases of which the most commonly used is the MySQL… Note that MySQL would not cost you a thing to use… But if you were to use ASP, you need to purchase MS-SQL, which is a Microsoft product… This makes PHP very attractive to the independent web developer…

Loading speed is a big factor in maintaining a website… If you are particular about speed, then you need to go with PHP… PHP codes runs much quicker than ASP basically because it runs in its very own memory space while ASP uses an overhead server and is uses a COM based architecture…

In working with PHP, most tools associated with the program are mostly open source software so you need not pay for them… As for ASP, you might need to buy additional tools to work with its programs…

In conclusion, both PHP and ASP have its own advantages and disadvantages… It basically depends on which part of developing a website you are most concerned with… Choosing between ASP and PHP basically depends on your own personal preference… It doesn’t hurt to confer with other programmers or webmasters and research more information on which programming would best fit the requirements of your website…

Truly speaking, I am not that much interested in ASP .NET… All I have is some basic knowledge on C#, Visual Basic and J#. But in the case of PHP, I love it!!! I have been developing PHP applications for more than a year and trust me, it is the simplest and easiest, yet, very powerful and efficient programming language for the web…

Cheers..

Linus Torvalds visits Google to share his thoughts on git, the source control management system he created…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of the operating system phenomenon Linux, tells the story of how he went from writing code as a graduate student in Helsinki in the early 1990s..

Click here to view the embedded video.

First, install the curl package:

sudo apt-get install curl

Next, create a script anywhere in your $PATH, for example tweet.sh inside ~/bin, where ~ is your home directory (make sure ~/bin is included in your $PATH variable, in case echo $PATH doesn’t return it, edit ~/.bashrc and add a line like this: export PATH=/home/USER/bin/:$PATH)…

The script tweet.sh should contain the following:

#!/bin/sh

############EDIT THE FOLLOWING LINES...###########################
user="USERNAME"
pass="PASSWORD"
##################################################################

######################DO NOT EDIT BELOW THIS######################
tweet="${@}"

if [ $(echo "${tweet}" | wc -c) -gt 140 ]; then
    echo "FATAL: The tweet is longer than 140 characters!"
    exit 1
fi

curl -k -u ${user}:${pass} -d status="${tweet}" https://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml >/dev/null 2>&1

if [ "$?" == "0" ]; then
    echo "Successful tweet!"
fi

Replace USERNAME and PASSWORD with your Twitter username and password, and then make the script executable:

chmod 755 ~/bin/tweet.sh

And now test it.. Just use it as :

tweet.sh YOUR MESSAGE

This should be all…

If you don’t want to copy paste the code for tweet.sh then use the following link to download tweet.txt and RENAME it as tweet.sh

Recently, I found a site that let’s me learn awesome command line tricks.. Its called commandlinefu.com

This is a community driven site, where users submit various commands everyday, to do all sorts of tricks and jobs…. Commands get votes from fellow users, and often, better versions are posted…. This makes Commandline Fu one of the must visit sites for geek…s. Commands are tagged, and hence searchable….. The site also has an API and a simple javascript widget, making it ideal for embedding a command in blog posts….. Commandline Fu also provides Twitter and RSS feeds for commands posted to the site, and discerning users can subscribe to commands which have more than 3 or 10 votes…

Do visit and join this site!!!