Software blooper

Phone numbers aren’t supposed to be written in scientific notation

Smiling Tambura

Beautiful Soup

Beautiful soup is indeed beautiful!

I wanted to parse an HTML page containing a table and import it into a MySQL table in an automated way. Upon my friend Kumar’s advice, I came to know about Beautiful Soup. Today was the day to explore Beautiful Soup. Being new to python, I had to do a bit of python reading side-by-side. Finally, I was able to successfully pass an HTML file to my script and get a CSV output.

f = open("input_file.html","r")
g = open("outfile_file.csv,"w")
soup = BeautifulSoup(f)
t = soup.findAll('table')
for table in t:
    rows = table.findAll('tr')
    for tr in rows:
        cols = tr.findAll('td')
        for td in cols:
            g.write(td.find(text=True))
            g.write(",")
        g.write("\n")

This script parses a simple HTML table without looking for any special tags or anything. Now that this is working, I have to make this more stronger and parse an uglier table, my task for tomorrow.

Photo Session

Recently, some of us went around on a photographing spree. The subjects weren’t natural wonders or astronomical objects. They were professors. Yes. I tried my hand at taking professional portrait shots of professors for putting up on the department website. The idea was inspired by the photo on this webpage.

This was one of the shots that I took.

After a bit of GIMPing (mostly along the lines of this), I managed to get the photo to look like this.

I was impressed with the result. So, I decided to take one of mine also. That resulted in this.

Drupal and Clean URLs

The default unclean URLs that Drupal provides with question marks lurking around, could be annoying. But it does offer an option to have clean URLs. I couldn’t find a neat tutorial to do this and this was not of great help either. So, let us see how to get this done.

Step 1

Check whether the rewrite module for your apache is enabled. Assuming you have an apache2 installation, you can do this by

ls /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/


If you don’t find rewrite.load, it means that the rewrite module is not enabled. Drupal’s clean URLs feature requires this module to be enabled. If you have a Debian based machine,

sudo a2enmod

Which module would you like to enable?
Your choices are: actions alias asis auth_basic auth_digest authn_alias authn_anon authn_dbd authn_dbm authn_default authn_file authnz_ldap authz_dbm authz_default authz_groupfile authz_host authz_owner authz_user autoindex cache cern_meta cgid cgi charset_lite dav_fs dav dav_lock dbd deflate dir disk_cache dump_io env expires ext_filter file_cache filter headers ident imagemap include info ldap log_forensic mem_cache mime mime_magic negotiation php5 proxy_ajp proxy_balancer proxy_connect proxy_ftp proxy_http proxy rewrite setenvif speling ssl status suexec unique_id userdir usertrack version vhost_alias
Module name?rewrite
Module rewrite installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload to enable.

This can also be done like this (say for a non-Debian based OS):

cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled
sudo ln -s ../mods-available/rewrite.load rewrite.load

There! We have enabled the rewrite module for apache.

Step 2

We have to edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default. Look out for the following lines.

<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny

Change AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All. Save the File.

Step 3

Make sure that the .htaccess file under your Drupal installation folder has the following lines

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
</IfModule>

Step 4

Restart the apache server

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Step 5

Go to your Drupal administration page for clean URLs and enable them.