Ever have a problem spelling out the letters of your name over phone and pause awkwardly to make up words for each alphabet? I often do.

I wrote a tiny javascript program – phonetic speller to help memorize your Alphas and Charlies.

The Phonetic Speller uses the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet .

They actually live (socially) in the kitchen and/or den area anyway, so what better place to spend your time working than with lots of light and room for equipment and your library?

by David Allen “Ready for Anything”.

continue the meme.

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

webgen.py is a simple static website generator written in Python.

The source code is available on github - http://github.com/btbytes/webgen.py

Webgen.py is a static website generator. It is written in Python and the source is Free and Open Source. You can download the source code from github.

Features

• No external Dependencies.
• Choice of Markup Languages - textile, markdown
• Syntax highlighting with pygments
• CSS Layout framework - YUI CSS Grids
• Styling with Sinorcaish

Installation

$ git clone git://github.com/btbytes/webgen.py.git

Usage

• Set author name, baseurl and output directory options in config.py
• Run $python webgen.py

Customisation

Make layout customisations in template.html. Refer to YUI Grid documentation to understand the grid layout. Grid builder is handy to create layouts visually.

Instances of webgen.py usage

• Zed Shaw (src)
• Steve Johnson

The more I use web.py, the more I appreciate its compact libraries. Web.py's database library is very handy in writing scripts that do the manipulation and heavy lifting. Let's cut to the chase and see how to use web.py's database library.

Consider the simple use-case of normalising all the tags for articles stored in articles table to a standard format of lower__case_words (often called a slug). The current tags have a mix of upper case words and whitespace, which does not look very neat (Ah! geek OCD).

import web
db = web.database(dbn=os.environ.get('DATABASE_ENGINE', 'mysql'),
                  db='devdb', user="user", passwd="passwd")


def cleanup_blog_tags():
    tags = db.select('tags')
    ccount = 0
    for t in tags:
        name = t.name
        slug = slugify(name)
        print name, slug
        db.update('tags', where="id=$id", _test=False,
            vars={'id':t.id}, slug=slug, name=name)
    print '%s tags updated' % (ccount, )

def main():
    cleanup_blog_tags()

if __name__ == '__main__':
  main()

Software Projects

Code snippets

A collection of snippets that I consider to be useful are: notes/gist and http://github.com/btbytes/sandbox. The uncurated list is — http://gist.github.com/btbytes.

Project Euler

I have solved a few problems out of 190 or so mathematical problems available on Project Euler in Python.
Try solving these problems to sharpen your math and programming skills. Another exercise is to solve the same problem using different programming languages. I have observed that Functional programming techniques are very valuable while solving these problems.

Apps with source code

Simple applications written to explore/demonstrate new web frameworks like Django/Grok/Pylons/Google AppEngine.

Sookti

The Quote Server. Written using Python/Pylons, Elixir, Mako templating. (Inactive)

Python Recipes

• A script to generate SQL create table statement given a CSV file
• Random Password Generator
• ARFF to SQL importer using Pyparsing and SQLAlchemy
• del.icio.us feed for you blog (myghty)

Pylons Recipes

• Running Pylons with NGINX

Django Snippets(feed)

• Django Registration with GMail account
• Ordering Models in Django Site administration screen

Postscript is a programming language originally developed by Adobe to describe images in a device independent manner.

Postscript is a stack based language (see also, Factor ), and it uses Reverse polish Notation (RPN). So, to multiply 12 and 10, you would write 12 10 mul. I'd dabbled with Factor before, but without having an actual problem to solve in the new language, it is hard to get rid of old ways of thinking, which, in my case is Python.

The best thing about learning PS is graphics. I did not play with Logo when I learnt programming in school, but PS is giving me that chance :p

PS is so different from all the other languages that I know, it is actually fun and engaging.

Here is the first program I successfully wrote using Postscript.

Yin-Yang (earth and heaven).

%!PS
% Draw Yin-yang

/inch {72 mul} def
/rad2 {1.5 inch} def
/rad1 {3 inch} def
/Times-Roman findfont 50 scalefont setfont

gsave
    5 inch 6.5 inch rad2 90 270 arc
    5 inch 3.5 inch rad2 90 270 arcn
    5 inch 5 inch rad1 270 90 arc
    fill
    5 inch 5 inch 3 inch 270 90 arcn
    stroke
    %draw the small white circle
    1 1 1 setrgbcolor
    5 inch 6.5 inch 0.45 inch 0 360 arc
    fill
    %draw the small black circle
    0 0 0 setrgbcolor
    5 inch 3.5 inch 0.45 inch 0 360 arc
    fill
    % show message
    2 inch 9 inch moveto
    (Hello Postscript!) show
grestore
showpage

Grab the output pdf.

Hardware

• Apple Macbook (c.2007)

Operating System

• Mac OS X (10.4) (laptop)
• Ubuntu GNU/Linux (homepc)

Editors

• Aquamacs - a port of Emacs for Macintosh computers.
• Vim (mostly while logged on to remote servers)
• Textmate - my first paid software.

Online services

• Flickr - photo management
• Webfaction - web hosting
• Google Apps - for email
• Google Reader - news reader

The rest of the apps I use on my Mac are here on iusethis.

This is a Processing.js implementation of one of Edward Tufte's graphics, as demonstrated earlier by one of my favourite datavis blogs: Juice Analytics.

The graphics below is not from an image file. The graphics is drawn on to a canvas element.

Note: View source of this page to see the javascript+processingjs code which renders the graphics.

Currently, only Firefox 3.0 beta editions and latest webkit enabled browsers can render this graphic.

Update 4/Jan/2009: the text does not show up on Safari and Chrome (webkit browsers)

Source code: tufte_processing.js

Screenshot

In case your browser is not rendering this correctly

I no longer offer python training in India since
moving to US in 2008.

Pradeep Gowda offers on-site training classes in Python programming language. The course consists of one-on-one training sessions which combine lecture and on-hands practice. This approach gives the students to assimilate and understand the material. Pradeep’s proven training methods help the students gain confidence required to use Python in a productive, real-life scenario.

The course is designed keeping in mind the requirements of students new to programming (such as fresh graduates) as well as professional programmers who might be proficient in other programming languages (like C, C++ and Java).

Learning Resources

Free full length books online:

• A Byte of Python — a beginner friendly, introductory text on Python.
• Think like a Python Programmer — Introductory text on Python programming.
• How to Think Like a Computer Scientist – Learning with Python — Introduction to computer science fundamentals using Python.
• Dive into python — An excellent book to sharpen your python skills.
• Also see my articles and notes on python

Most people grow out of the little lies parents tell them about sex, death, and cursing. Most intelligent people I know grew out of religious ideals their parents instilled in them. Not in a sense that they teach their children to curse, or that they switched from Judaism to Christianity, but in a sense that they recognized these things as entirely arbitrary. They'll still teach their children not to curse, and they'll go to the synagogue, but they'll do it exactly because they saw through the arbitrary nature of these ideas, and are no longer controlled by them. Once you see that something you do is completely arbitrary, you become free of it, and once you're free there is no value in rebelling against it. There is no conflict in staying religious and recognizing the arbitrary nature of your belief.

- Slava Akhmechet in More on lies

Disclaimer

This is my personal blog. All opinions and thoughts expressed in this blog are represented my own, and not those of people, institutions or organizations that I may or may not be related with my opinions.

My opinions maybe change from time to time as I come to learn more and develop my understanding about the things or issues that I have posted.

Quotations cited or image from the other reference/sites, comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks are owned by their respective owners. I disclaim any responsibility for their contents.

You are free to use material copyrighted by me in this blog by the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License.

I've written few small apps exploring Grok, Pylons earlier. But, Teh has been the most fun to write. After reading Bret Taylor's Experimenting with Google App Engine, and noticing that he had not given the full source code for the app discussed, I set about filling the blanks myself.

The source code is here: http://github.com/btbytes/teh/tree/master You can see the live demo here: http://teh.appspot.com

Observations

• The best thing about appengine is the ease with which you can deploy the application. No databases to initialize, no SQL to write, no wiring of Apache
• Python has always lost a bit of "newbie" ground to PHP because it is non-trivial to get a PHP app running on a web facing server. Now with GAE, deploying python apps is as simple as -- write-> upload -> test. This alone has the potential to push python to new levels of acceptance among developers.
• I hope that hosting services will start offering wsgi enabled servers now that we have seen WSGI in action, on a "google" scale. mod_wsgi should get some more traction.
• If you are familiar with Django, writing apps using AppsEngine will be a familiar exercise, though you might miss the admin interface.
• URL mapping is very simple, in the lines of web.py
• GAE has managed to retain the popular elements of Django (templating, model declaration, form handling) at the same time embracing the minimal style of web.py for url configuration, file layout (one app cab be just a single python file).
• For someone used to RDBMs centric view of data storage, getting used to GAE data-modeling is an unlearning exercise. Zopistas, I see your knowing smile
• Appengine is really attractive for python developers, who can code but do not have the knowledge/resource to host the application themselves. If google prices the app hosting services competitive to Amazon AWS, it can benefit independent developers immensely.

Appengine hosting is still in private-beta and has limitations on file-size, number of files etc., But these should not stop enthusiasts from getting a taste of what is to come.

I've uploaded the code of the django+ajax app that I created during my presentation last week to bangpypers.

Donita is an ajax enabled todo list app written using django, jquery and blueprintcss.

I hope it will serve as a guide for your foray into django programming.

I realised a few days back that my code/data is spread across my workstation at office, macbook and my home-pc and not forgetting the remote servers hosting my website and of course Amazon S3.

How does one keep all of the code/data in context. So many "sandbox" projects, so many snippets of code gathered from failed experiments, one liners gleaned from IRC discussions and online forums...

Today, I reopened Zim desktop wiki on my homepc and I saw nearly 10 pages worth of brain dump I had done after reading David Allen's Getting Things Done. Some nuggets to recover there.Sometime I get this nagging feeling that a good part of my work just leaks away into the dark recesses of time :(

There needs be a way to reduce the interfaces that access this data. * One editor to edit all the information I deal with * One automated shell script to backup/sync data

Perhaps Emacs can be that interface. Time to improve my Emacs chops.

Also, using a remotely backed up version control system to store these files seems like a good idea. The kind of harddisks that I'm getting nowadays in local market do not inspire any confidence at all. Neither do I have the energy to run a RAID array at home. And what is easier than doing svn ci & svn up for data sync/backup?

I'm using Assembla to host my personal files on a svn repository. Assembla gives 100MB of private svn hosting, which looks sufficient for the time being.

PS: Emacs-wiki.el looks like like a credible alternative to Zim.

I've released my first Grok application - Grok Paste. Grokpaste is a Pastebin application written using Grok. It uses Pygments for syntax highlighting.

Grokpaste is a visual clone of dpaste. I've tried to replicate the features hoping that the similarity of features will help people to compare and contrast django and grok while learning Grok.

The code is available via svn from google code

I had fun writing this application, even though I was writing Zope code after almost 2 years. My ZPT was little bit rusty, so I had look it up often. Otherwise, writing python code felt natural and not at all Zopish (whatever that means ;).

What code I did not have to write, in comaprison to other python frameworks I have used so far:

• Object Relational mapping. The objects are stored in the ZODB as persistent objects
• URL mapping. Every object in the database has a unique ID. In this case it mapped out to http://host/app_url/object_id
• Also, the use of ZPT allows for some serious code reuse. While ZPT discourages use of code in templates, it allows you to write one liners, which in most cases is sufficient.

Screenshots

Start Page.

Rendered Code.

I have taken to use reStructuredText wherever possible. I write software specs, migration docs etc., in rst. The only time when I feel unnatural about rst is when I'm marking up tables. Too many dashes and +s in right places.

Here is a bash script to convert rst files to pdf and view it.

    #! /bin/bash
    bname=`basename $1 .rst`
    rst2latex $1 > /tmp/$bname.tex
    pdflatex /tmp/$bname.tex
    evince $bname.pdf
    echo "$1 converted to $bname.pdf"

Euphoria is one of the languages I dabbled in, on my way to python. I StumbedlUpon Euphoria today. It brings back memories of 1998 :). Those days, I was still a C++ head, trying to get my head around Python. The problem, as I realise now, was I had to unlearn so many C++ mannerisms to really "get" python. After an year or so of STL programming, I had started to feel that programming is no fun ;).

It starts!

Update:

It ended well too. I did not continue the blog post because

• My team mates at the hack,Swaroop and Raghu were already blogging about it. Swaroop had a vi window open all day recoding things. There was no point in duplicating what he already was saying ;)
• My Wordpress upgrade was acting up.

The video of the presentation

After reading this post, I had to see whether my handwriting has improved (hah! can it ever?).

I'll go and dig up a double ruled notebook and start practicing my handwriting.

Its been a long time since I blogged. Even I was getting bored seeing the same page ;) So, let me update you about this and that I have been doing.

I got my first ever Macbook. I paid for software for the first time - I'm a proud owner of Textmate, supposedly the editor for Mac. I have been doing a lot of Python(as usual) and Django(not so usual) at work. Keeping myself from using emacs bindings while programming in Textmate was the biggest adjustment I had to do while switching to mac. Otherwise, the terminal is near-by to get rid of any home sickness I might feel for Linux :)

After having read S L Bhyrappa's controversial novel aavarana, I continued to read his biography - bhiththi. I could relate to a lot of his childhood incidents to what I have seen/heard about growing up in rural south-karnataka districts. My wife followed suit and liked it too. Now she is onto daaTu, another novel of SLB which has the distinction of being translated to all the Indian languages.

I went to back to reading Dune novels, this time - House Atreides, the sequel to the original Dune series by Frank Herbert. My sci-fi reading schedule looks full for the next 3 months.

In mood for some science fiction? Look here for a list of popular science fiction recommendations.

Few days back programming.reddit had an interesting  and informative thread on :  Which science fiction books would you recommend to fellow programmers?

I wanted to read The Ringworld by Larry niven. The idea of a "man" made world in the shape of a ring around a sun is very interesting indeed. While reading up on the book, I came across the distinctions between "Hard" and Soft science fictions. I would like to read more of the hard kind. Ringworld looks to be one.
Easylib is not carrying a copy. Neither does Cross word@shopper's stop.

In  the "Top 15 great science fiction" list, I've read  only 6. I've not read H G Wells' Time machine!
Time to make ammendments, eh?

Does anybody have a good recommendation for a bookshop/second hand bookshop which carries Sci-fi?

My module for the django.contrib.localflavor got accepted. This module provides form validation rules for state names, zip codes etc specific to India. It's great to see my name in the list of contributors, however small my contribution may be.

http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/LittleEasyImprovements is a great place to start, if you are planning to contribute to django.

Bangpypers met at the Thoughtworks office today. Actually it was a mini Snakes & Rubies meeting with nearly half of the attendees being BagaloreRuggers

It had been a long time since I attended one of the Geek meetings (I missed out on Barcamp BLR4 to a working weekend :( ).

Anand C, who is currently one of the lead developers for the OpenLibrary.org project, gave a brief presentation on web.py and on the infogami project which powers the Openlibrary.org project.

Baiju M, an active Zope3 contributor, briefed us on Zope Component Architecture.

There was some discussion on the lack of "inline" documentation in Ruby and Javascript (something on the lines of doc and help(foo) in the interpreter and how this makes it a litt..le hard for a newbie to learn Ruby who is spoilt by Python ;)

Darkseid shared his experiences with deploying Ruby on rails applications and some advances in deployment technologies.

It was nice to know that Darkside and Anand also share a fascination for Functional, Dynamic languages (Haskell, Erlang and Scala). Perhaps, future geek meetings can center around Dynamic languages and not just individual languages.

With the mainstreaming of Jruby, Jython, IronPython etc., languages can no longer to considered in isolation.

I had surprising amount of things to say about Zope and Zope3 (to my own surprise!). Perhaps, me finally "grokking" Grok, had something to do with it.

I was ecstasic to see Kannada letters on the book cover of Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation by Sriram Krishnamurthy - Kannadiga, Bengaloorean and Associate professor at Brown University .

SK is also the author of very popular book on Programming - How to Design Programs .

Spreadsheets are often under appreciated by programmers.

But, spreadsheets are in generating and manipulating tabular data. Case in point -- Time dimension generation . One more example

I had written a python script to this, but while trying to generate unique week,month IDs I felt that I had been coding too much for a one-off script. Thats when I dusted my primitive knowledge of spreadsheet functions and came up with this:

• Time dimension generator in Openoffice.org Calc
• Time dimension generator in Excel

Note The download links are fixed. You should be able download the generator spreadsheets.

Spreadsheets are appropriate solution in the BI practice because typically the dimension information is given by business users, most of who are Excel Jockeys ^TM^.

I volunteer at Sampada.net, an online kannada community. Sampada has grown from an one man's dream to a vibrant community of writers, journalists, bloggers and literary enthusiasts. At the last count sampada had crossed 1-million hits/month mark.

One of the benefits of having such a thriving community is the opportunity to contribute to development of Kannada computing (localisation, translation, standardisation, software development). dev.sampada.net is the forum which facilitates developers to get a start on contributing to kannada computing.

Five of us (Me, Hari Prasad, Naveevn, Om and Shashi) met yesterday (5th May) at Ravindra kalakhetra/Kannada Bhavana to discuss the list of tasks to be done on a priority basis. This list is available here.

Some of the major areas where work needs to be done is (from what I gathered from the discussion):

• Fixing Unicode rendering issues
• Getting Kannada desktop to work out of the box on Ubuntu/Debian. Currently, it is possible to get kannada working quite decently on Linux Systems. But, it requires digging through configuration files.
• Improving Keyboard Input methods. Currently, there are two approaches.
  • XIM, which is the default input method used by ubuntu. AFAIK, only Ka-ga-pa input method is available
  • SCIM, method pioneered by Chinese. Currently has only INSCRIPT and Phoenetic input methods available
  • We need Typewriter, INSCRIPT, Ka-ga-pa, Nudi and Phonetic methods available in both XIM and SCIM. This will allow people from any prior knowledge of using kannada computers/typewriters to be able to use Linux to input text.
• A complete, working, *good looking* F/OSS OpenType font. This requires professional help from artists who can draw Glyphs and a FontForge savvy person to convert them into font
• Dictionary: Having a huge corpus of kannada words (something like Dict.org) from various sources can make a huge difference to kannada computing. Having this will allow us to build ASPELL, ISPELL dictionaries for kannada which in turn will allow users to access the dictionaries from inside their applications(eg:OpenOffice.org). To make this happen, existing public domain dictionaries need to be digitized. We have petitioned Mysore university vice-chancellor to allow us the use of Kannada dictionary built by them. (I'll update with the petition form details shortly). Another source is Kittel kosha, a seminal work by Rev. F. Kittel. This dictionary is available only in print format. Even this needs to be digitized.

There are a lot of interesting, important things to be done for kannada computing. Please log on to dev.sampada.net to know more. Please leave a comment below if you need a clarification/additional information.

Which Programming Language are You?

Via Planet Python

ರಾವಣ ಮಹಾನ್ ಪಂಡಿತ, ಶಿವನನ್ನ್ದೇ ಮೆಚ್ಚಿಸಿ ವರ ಪಡೆದವನು. ತನ್ನ ಅಹಂಗೆ ಬಲಿಯಾಗಿ ಸೀತೆನ ಅಪಹರಿಸಿದ. ಆ ಒಂದು ತಪ್ಪಿಗೆ ಅವನಿಗೆ ಅಷ್ಟೋಂದು ಅನ್ನಬೇಕಾ ಅಂತ ಸಂಸ್ಕೄತ ಮೇಷ್ಟ್ರಿಗೆ ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆ ಹಾಕಿದೆ. ಅದಕ್ಕೆ ಅವರು ಸ್ವಲ್ಪ ಖಾರವಾಗಿಯೇ ಬಯ್ದು, ಕೊನೆಗೆ "ನಿನ್ನ ಹೆಸರು ರಾವಣ ಅಂತ್ಲೇ ಇಟ್ಕೋ" ಅಂತದ್ರು. ಲಂಕೇಶ್ ಅಂತ ಹೆಸರು ಇಟ್ಕೊಂಡಿದಾರಲ್ಲಾ ಅಂತ ಹೇಳುವ ಮನಸ್ಸಾದ್ರು, ಲಂಕೇಶರ ಹೆಸರು ಕೇಳಿದಾಗ ಉರಿದು ಬಿಳುವ ಜನರನ್ನ ನೋಡಿದ್ದ ನಾನು ಏನೂ ಹೇಳದೆ ಸುಮ್ಮನಾದೆ.ಇದು ಯಾಕೆ ನೆನಪು ಬಂತೂ ಅಂತೀರ. ಓದೋಕ್ಕೆ ಪುಸ್ತಕ ಹುಡುಕುವಾಗ ಲಂಕೇಶರ 'ಟೀಕೆ-ಟಿಪ್ಪಣಿ' ಸಿಕ್ತು. ಇದು ಅವರ ಪತ್ರಿಕೆಯ ಸಂಪಾದಕೀಯಕ್ಕೆ ಬರೆದ ಲೇಖನಗಳ ಸಂಕಲನ.

ಲಂಕೇಶರ ನೆನಪು

ಸ್ಕೂಲಿನಲ್ಲಿದ್ದಾಗ ಪ್ರತಿ ವಾರ ಅಪ್ಪಾಜಿ ಲಂಕೇಶ್ ಪತ್ರಿಕೆ ತರುವುದನ್ನೇ ಕಾಯುತ್ತಿದ್ದೆ. ನನಗೆ ಆಗ ಬಹಳ ಇಷ್ಟವಾಗುತ್ತಿದ್ದುದು ಚಂದ್ರೇಗೌಡರ "ಬಯಲುಸೀಮೆ ಕಟ್ಟೆ ಪುರಾಣ". ಪ್ರಸಕ್ತ ರಾಜಕೀಯದ ವ್ಯಂಗ್ಯ ಮಾಡುತ್ತಿದ್ದ ಆ ಕಲಂ, ಬಯಲುಸೀಮೆ ಹಳ್ಳಿಯೊಂದರ ಪಾತ್ರಗಳ(?)ನ್ನು ಕಣ್ಣ ಮುಂದೆ ಕಟ್ಟಿ ನಿಲ್ಲಿಸುತ್ತಿತ್ತು. ಅದನ್ನ್ಗು ಬಿಟ್ಟರೆ, ಉಳಿದ ನೆನಪು ಲಂಕೇಶರ ಮತ್ತು ತೇಜಸ್ವಿಯವರ ಕಲಂಗಳದ್ದು.

ಬ್ಲಾಗಿಂಗ್ ಮತ್ತು ಲಂಕೇಶ್

ಪುಸ್ತಕದ ಹೊದಿಕೆಯಲ್ಲಿ,

ಈ ಹತ್ತೂವರೆ ವರ್ಷದ ಬರವಣಿಗೆಯ ಪರಿಣಾಮ... ಒಮ್ಮೆಯೂ ನಾನು ಕಾಯಿಲೆಯಿಂದ ಮಲಗಲಿಲ್ಲ. ಇದಕ್ಕೆ ಮುಖ್ಯ ಕಾರಣ, ಈ ಅವಧಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ನನಗೆ ಸಿಕ್ಕ ನೆಮ್ಮದಿ ಮತ್ತು ಮಾನಸಿಕ ಚೈತನ್ಯ. ವಾರದಿಂದ ವಾರಕ್ಕೆ ಓದುಗರ ಕಾತರ, ನಿರೀಕ್ಷೆಯನ್ನು ಸ್ವಾಗತಿಸುತ್ತಾ, ಅವರ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ನನಗಿರುವ ಹೊಣೆಯನ್ನರಿತು ಬರೆಯುತ್ತಾ ಹೋದೆ; ನಾನೇ ಬೆಳೆಯುತ್ತಾ ಹೋದೆ ಎಂದು ತಿಳಿಯುತ್ತೇನೆ....

ಎಂದು ಲಂಕೇಶರು ಬರೆಯುತ್ತಾರೆ.

ಈ ಮಾತು ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ ಬ್ಲಾಗ್ ಮಾಡುವವರಿಗೆ ನುಡಿಮುತ್ತಲ್ಲದೇ ಮತ್ತೇನು? ಕನ್ನಡಕ್ಕೆ ಬ್ಲ್ಲಾಗಿಂಗ್ ಎಂಬ technology driven, social journalism ಹೊಸತಾದರೂ, ಲಂಕೇಶರು ಬರೆದಂತಹ grassroot journalism ಹೊಸತಲ್ಲ. "ಟೀಕೆ-ಟಿಪ್ಪಣಿ"ಯಲ್ಲಿ ವ್ಯಕ್ತಿ ಚಿತ್ರಣಗಳಿವೆ, ರಾಜಕೀಯ ವಿಶ್ಲೇಷಣೆ ಇದೆ, ಕನ್ನಡ ಬರಹಗಾರ/ಬರಹಗಾರ್ತಿಯರ ಬಗ್ಗೆ criticism ಇದೆ. ಈ ಪುಸ್ತಕ ತಿರುವಿ ಹಾಕಿದವರಿಗೆ ೮೦-೯೦ರ ದಶಕದ ಕನ್ನಡ/ಕರ್ನಾಟಕ/ವಿಶ್ವದ ಆಗುಹೋಗುಗಳ critical ನೋಟ ಕಾಣಬರುತ್ತದೆ.

ರಾಜೇಂದ್ರ ಚೆನ್ನಿಯವರು "ಡೆಕ್ಕನ್ ಹೆರಾಲ್ಡ್" ನಲ್ಲಿ

The Kannada cosmos is so rich, varied and plural that no intelligent, sensitive, Kannada speaking individual would ever feel maimed or incomplete for being a part of it. This should be reason enough to celebrate Kannada Rajyotsava with confidence and a sense of belonging...

ನಮ್ಮ ಎಷ್ಟೋ ಗುಣಗಳು, ಹವ್ಯಾಸಗಳು ನಮ್ಮ ಅಪ್ಪ, ಅಮ್ಮಂದಿರಿಂದ ಕಲಿತವು. ನಾನು ನನ್ನ ಅಪ್ಪಾಜಿಯಿಂದ ಬಹಳಷ್ಟು ಕಲಿತಿದ್ದೇನೆ. ಅದರಲೆಲ್ಲಾ ನಾನು ಅವರಿಗೆ ಚಿರಋಣಿಯಾಗಿರುವುದು ಅವರು ನನಗೆ ಓದುವ ಗೀಳು ಹಿಡಿಸಿದ್ದಕ್ಕೆ.

ಮಕ್ಕಳು ಹಿರಿಯರ ಅನುಕರಣೆ ಮಾಡುತ್ತಾರೆಂಬುದು ನಿಜ. ನಾನೂ ಅಪ್ಪಾಜಿ ಹಾಗೆ ತಿಂಡಿ ತಿನ್ನ್ಗುವಾಗಲೆಲ್ಲಾ ಪೇಪರ್ ನೋಡುತ್ತಲೇ ತಿಂಡಿ ತಿನ್ತಿದ್ನಂತೆ. ಆ ಚಾಳಿ ಇನ್ನೂ ಹೋಗಿಲ್ಲ. ಈ ಚಾಳಿ ಎಷ್ಟು 'ಖತರ್ ನಾಖ್' ಅಂದರೆ, ಊರಿಗೆ ಹೋದಾಗ, ಓದಕ್ಕೆ ಬೇರೇನೂ ಸಿಗದಾಗ, ದೊಡ್ಡಪ್ಪಾಜಿಯ ರೇಷ್ಮೆ ಸಾಕಣೆ ಪತ್ರಿಕೆಗಳನ್ನು ಓದ್ತಾ ಇದ್ದೆ.

ಹನುಮಂತನ ಬಾಲ ನಾನು ಮೊದಲ ಸರಿ ರಾಮಾಯಣ ಕೇಳಿದ್ದು ಅಪ್ಪಾಜಿ ಬಾಯಿಂದ. ಕುವೆಂಪು ಅವರ ರಾಮಾಯಣ ದರ್ಶನದಿಂದ ಕೆಲವು ಸಾಲುಗಳನ್ನ ಓದ್ತಾ ಹಾಗೆ ರಾಮಾಯಣದ ಕಥೆನೂ ಹೇಳೋರು. ಅದರಲ್ಲಿ ನನಗಿಷ್ಟವಾದದ್ದು ಹನುಮಂತನ ಬಾಲಕ್ಕೆ ಬೆಂಕಿ ಹಚ್ಚೋ ಪ್ರಸಂಗ. ಮುಂದೆ ಕುವೆಂಪು ಅವರ ಸುಮಾರು ಕಾದಂಬರಿ,ನಾಟಕ,ಕವನಗಳನ್ನ ಓದೋಕ್ಕೆ ಇದೇ ಪ್ರೇರಣೆ ಆಗಿರಬಹುದು.

ಪುಟ್ಟಿ ಸಂಚಯ ಬಹುಶಃ ಇದೆಲ್ಲಕ್ಕಿಂತ ಮನಮುಟ್ಟುವ ಉಡುಗೊರೆ - ಪುಟ್ಟಿ ಸಂಚಯ. 1981-84ರ ನಡುವೆ ಸುಧಾ ವಾರಪತ್ರಿಕೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಬಂದ ಎಲ್ಲ "ಪುಟ್ಟಿ" ಕಾರ್ಟೂನ್ ಪುಟಗಳನ್ನು ಕತ್ತರಿಸಿ ಇಟ್ಟುಕೊಂಡು ಒಂದು ಪುಸ್ತಕ ಮಾಡಿ ಕೊಟ್ರು. ಒಂದು ಮಜಾ ಏನಂದ್ರೆ, ಈ ಕಾರ್ಟೂನ್ ಪುಟಗಳ ಹಿಂದೆ ಇದ್ದ crosswords ಮತ್ತು ಕ್ವಿಜ್ ಗಳು. ಈ ಸಂಚಿಕೇನ ಸುಮಾರು ೨-೩ ವರ್ಷಗಳ ಕಾಲ ತಿರುಗ್ ಹಾಕಿ-ಮಗುಚು ಹಾಕಿ ಓದಿದ್ ನೆನಪು.

ಲೈಬ್ರರಿ ಸಹವಾಸ ಬೇಸಿಗೆ ರಜದಲ್ಲಿ ಕಬ್ಬನ್ ಪಾರ್ಕಿನ ರಾಜ್ಯ ಕೇಂದ್ರ ಗ್ರಂಥಾಲಯಕ್ಕೆ ಕರೆದೋಯ್ದು ಬಿಡ್ತಾ ಇದ್ರು. ಅಲ್ಲಿ ಬೆಳಿಗ್ಗೆ ಇಂದ ಸಾಯಂಕಾಲದವರೆಗೆ ನಾನು, ಪುಸ್ತಕಗಳು. ಮಧ್ಯಾಹ್ನ ಸೆಕ್ರೆಟರಿಯೇಟ್ ಕ್ಯಾಂಟೀನಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಮಸಾಲೆ ದೋಸೆ ಇತ್ಯಾದಿ ಸೇವೆ. ವಾರೆ! ವಾ!!

ಹೀಗೆ ನನ್ನ ಪುಸ್ತಕದ ಗೀಳಿಗೆ ಅವ್ಯಾಗತವಾಗಿ ಸಪೋರ್ಟ್ ಮಾಡ್ದೋರು ಅಪ್ಪಾಜಿ. ವಿಜಯ ಹೈಸ್ಕೂಲಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಇದ್ದಾಗ ಭೈರಪ್ಪನವರ 'ವಂಶವೄಕ್ಷ' ಪುಸ್ತಕ ಓದೋದನ್ನ ನೋಡಿ ಮಾತ್ರ 'ದೊಡ್ಡೋರು ಓದೋ ಪುಸ್ತಕ ಈಗಾಗ್ಲೆ ಯಾಕೆ?' ಅನ್ನೋದನ್ನ ಬಿಟ್ರೆ, ಯಾವತ್ತೂ ನನ್ನ ಓದೋದರ ತಂಟೆಗೆ ಬಂದವರೂ ಅಲ್ಲ.

ಈ ಕಥೆಯ ಹಿಂದೆ ಏನಾದ್ರೋ ಸಂದೇಶ ಉಂಟೋ? ಖಂಡಿತ. ಮಕ್ಕಳಿಗೆ ಓದೋ ಹವ್ಯಾಸ ಬೆಳೆಸಿ. ಪುಸ್ತಕದ ಬಳುವಳಿ ಕೊಡಿ. ಪುಸ್ತಕಾನ ಓದಿ ಹೇಳಿ. ನಾಟಕಗಳನ್ನ ನಿಮ್ಮದೇ ಧಾಟಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಆಡಿ,ಹಾಡಿ ತೋರಿಸಿ.

They claim that they can produced water at about Rs.1.7 per litre. Thats far, far cheaper than bottled water selling at Rs.10-12/-

This water maker can be plugged into any 220v power outlet (though, that can be a problem in rural areas where they get 4 hours of power a day :( It can produce upto 20 litres of water per day. The website does not give any details on the pricing though.

This can be a god send in cities, where drinking water is a premium even in big metros like Mumbai.

Also, isn't the bottled water industry a big scam, charging us manyfolds for ordinary tap-water?

An American company has designed a machine which can collect moisture from air even in dry places with humidity as low as 14%.

However, the technology is propreitary. Machines like this can be a boon anywhere in India or third world countries where there is plenty of water in the air but none to drink.

I wish only our engineering students take up projects like this which can make a REAL difference to the world than doing a brain-dead final year projects at a Defence establishment.

Link and slashdot discussion

UPDATE: Now you can buy such a machine in India! See http://www.watermakerindia.com/

ಮಾನ್ಯರೇ,

ನಿನ್ನೆಯ ದಿನ, ತಾವು ನನ್ನ ಬ್ಲಾಗಿಗೆ ಬಂದು ನನ್ನ ಬ್ಲಾಗನ್ನು ಪಾವನ ಮಾಡಿರುತ್ತೀರಿ. ಕಾಡಿನಲ್ಲಿ "ಸಿಂಹ"ವು ಬೇಟೆಯಾಡುವಂತೆ, ತಾವು ಈ ಅಲ್ಪನ ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ ಬರೆಯುವ ದಾರ್ಷ್ಟ್ಯಕ್ಕೆ ಕಡಿವಾಣ ಹಾಕಲು ಪ್ರಯತ್ನಿಸಿದ್ದೀರಿ .

ಒಂದು ಕ್ಷಣ, ತಮ್ಮ ಪಾಂಡಿತ್ಯದ ಪ್ರಖರತೆಯು ನನ್ನ ಕಣ್ಣು ಕೋರೈಸಿತಾದರೊ, ಕನ್ನಡಾಂಬೆಯ ದಯೆಯಿಂದ ಚೇತರಿಸಿಕೊಂಡು, ನಿಮ್ಮ "ಪ್ರತಾಪ"ವನ್ನು ಕೊಂಡಾಡಲು ಹೊರಟಿದ್ದೇನೆ.

ತೆರೆಮರೆಯಲ್ಲೇ ಇದ್ದುಕೊಂಡು, ಕನ್ನಡಕ್ಕಾಗಿ ಹೋರಾಡುತ್ತಾ, ಅಣುಮಾತ್ರ ತಪ್ಪನ್ನೆಸಗಿಸಿದ ಕನ್ನಡಿಗರನ್ನೂ ಮುಲಾಜಿಲ್ಲದೆ ತರಾಟೆಗೆ ತೆಗೆದುಕೊಳ್ಳುವ ಈ ನಿಮ್ಮ ಶೌರ್ಯ, ದೈವ "ಪ್ರಸಾದ"ವೇ ಸೈ.

ಬಸವಣ್ಣನವರು ಹೇಳಿದಂತೆ, ತೆಗಳಿದವರನ್ನೂ ಹಿತೈಷಿಗಳೆಂದು ಭಾವಿಸುತ್ತಾ, ತಮ್ಮ ಪರಿಚಯವನ್ನು ತಿಳಿಯುವ ದುಸ್ಸಾಹಸಕ್ಕೆ ಕೈ ಹಾಕಿದ್ದೇನೆ. ಋಷಿ ಮೂಲವನ್ನೂ, ನದಿ ಮೂಲವನ್ನೂ ಹುಡುಕಬಾರದೆಂಬ ನಾಣ್ಣುಡಿಯು ಮನಸ್ಸನ್ನು ತಳಮಳಗೊಳಿಸುತ್ತಿದ್ದರೂ, ತಮ್ಮಂತಹ ಪ್ರಖರ ಪಂಡಿತರನ್ನ್ಗು ಕಂಡೇ ತೀರುವ ಹಂಬಲವು ಬಲವಾಗಿದೆ.

ಆ ನಿಟ್ಟಿನಲ್ಲಿ...

ದೇಹಭಾದೆ ತೀರಿಸಲು ತೋಟಕ್ಕೆ ನುಗ್ಗಿ, ಸಿಕ್ಕಿಹಾಕಿಕೊಂಡರೆ ಮುಜುಗರವಾಗುತ್ತದೆಂಬ ಭಯಕ್ಕೆ ಅವಸರದಲ್ಲಿ ತಮ್ಮ ಕೈ ವಸ್ತ್ರ ಬಿಟ್ಟು ಹೋಗಿದ್ದೀರಿ.

ತಾವು ಬಿಟ್ಟ (ಛೀ!) IP addressನ ಮೂಲಕ, ತಾವು ಅಮೇರಿಕಾ ದೇಶ ವಾಸಿಗರು ಎಂದು ತಿಳಿದು ಬಹಳ ಸಂತೋಷವೂ, ಕೌತುಕವೂ ಉಂಟಾಯಿತು. ಆ ದೂರದ ನಾಡಿಂದಲೇ ತಾವು ಕನ್ನಡದ ಸೇವೆ ಮಾಡುತ್ತಿರುವುದನ್ನು ಕಂಡು ಕಣ್ಣು ತುಂಬಿ ಬಂದವು. ನಿಮ್ಮ ಕರವಸ್ತ್ರ ಕೈಯಲ್ಲೇ ಇತ್ತಾದರೂ, ಅದನ್ನು ಕಣ್ಣಿಗೊತ್ತಿಕೊಳ್ಳುವ ಧೈರ್ಯ ಎನಗಿಲ್ಲ.

ತಮ್ಮ ಕರವಸ್ತ್ರವನ್ನು ಈ ಕೆಳಗಿನ ವಿಳಾಸಕ್ಕೆ ಕಳುಹಿಸುತ್ತೇನೆ:

ಕನ್ನಡ @131.204.128.73

ತಾವು ಡಿ.ವಿ.ಜಿ ಯವರ ಕಗ್ಗ ಕೇಳಿಯೇ ಇರುತ್ತೀರಿ, ಅದರಲ್ಲಿ ಈ ಪಾಮರನಿಗೆ ಇಷ್ಟವಾದ ಒಂದು ಕಗ್ಗ ಇಂತಿದೆ:

ಪಾತಕಿಯೊಳಾಗ್ರಹವ ತೋರೆ ನಿರ್ಮಲನಾರು? |

ಆತುಮದ ಪರಿಕಥೆಯನರಿತರೆ ನಾವು? ||

ಸೋತ ದುರ್ಬಲಿಗೆ ಸಲ್ಲುವುದು ನಮ್ಮನುಕಂಪೆ |

ನೀತಿ ನಿಂದನೆಯೊಳಿರದು - ಮಂಕುತಿಮ್ಮ ||

Photo of DVG's statue in Bugle Rock park in Basavanagudi, Bengaluru

Basavanagudi is the karmabhoomi of kannada literary luminaries like DVG and Masti Venkatesha Iyengar.

Oh! DVG!!

When I was taking this photo, a bunch of kids stood besides me and watched what I was doing. One of them said, “gandhi alveno ivaru?” (Isn’t he gandhi?).

I turned to them and said, ‘Illa kanro, avaru DV Gundappa’ (No guys, he is DV Gundappa).
Understanding hit him then, “Oh! DVG”.

DVG‘s most enduring work is ‘manku timmana kagga’, a collection of poems. Manku timma is a fictional character through whom DVG talks about life, beliefs and in general philosophies for life.
[This is where I realise my shortcoming of expressing myself in English. I know kagga is more than just some words of philosophy, but I lack the words.]

In its intention and depth, “manku timmana kagga”, is comparable to ‘vachanas’ of basavaNNa and sarvajna.

Reading a kagga without explanation is quite difficult for anybody who does not have the exposure to the rich vocabulary and word play of kannada. But, when understood, a four liner can bring much joy.

Consider this:

ಮುದುಕುರುಡಿ ಹೊಂಗಯನು ”ಬಾದಾಮಿ, ಕೋ” ಯೆನುತ |
ಪದುಳದಿಂ ಮೊಮ್ಮಂಗೆ ಕೊಡಲು ಸಿಹಿಯಹುದೆ? ||
ಹೃದಯವೊಳಿತಾಡೇಂ? ತಿಳಿವಿಹುದೆ? ಜಾಣಿಹುದೆ? |
ಸುಧೆ ಬಂತೆ ಸುಲಭದಲಿ? – ಮಂಕುತಿಮ್ಮ ||

A blind, old woman gives a ‘honge’(bitter, oily) seed to her grandson, with full of love and affection, thinking its an almond.
However, if the child eats it, will it be sweet like an almond? no.
The heart may be pure but without understanding and cleverness, the good intention will not help in achieving results.
Was the ‘amrutha’ obtained easily ( a reference to samudra manthana by asuras and devas churning the ocean to get amrutha).

This is comparable to a sarvagna vachana in many ways:

• creates a very visual analogy of a old woman and child
  
• raises a question, thereby making the reader question his own thoughts, understanding in this regard
  
• reinforces the moral with another, well known example.
  

I caught up with Madhu on gChat and the fun ensued.

[To maximize the fun, read the lines starting with me in dharwad/north karnataka accent. ]

me: namaskaarree yappa emmi thwaTada kadeegi hogaavenu?

Madhu: namaskaar namaskaar
hyderabad = emmi thwaTa? ohh konana kunte na? [grin]

me: eh! thats not what I meant, but naDeetada [wink]
hyderabadnaaga yaar mani haaL maaDlikke hogidyo maaraya?

Madhu: haal madlikkanthoo alla. idenu hosa gandha ninna bhaasheli? olledu

me: dharwaDa-da emmi sagaNi tuLidnapa monni dinaa..
heengaatu noDu

Madhu: heege avagavaga tulitiru. dharwad nalli en madtidde?

me: namaga dharwad-ka hogo puNya innoo sikkillo..
emmeene ee kaDi bandittu, bavuTa haarislikka
adeno rajjostava antallapaa

Madhu: rajjostava…hoo pradeep dharwad-taata

me: nee hyderabadnaaga chaDDi haarisdi anta thiLeetu
bhaLa byasara aathu, idenappa hyangiddava hyanagaada antha..

Madhu: hangandre? illa kano negdi jaasti…mai tumba batte hakkondideeni

Madhu: ninne illige bande. banda takshana weather khatarnak change. bari throat infection iddidduu…
eega nedgi, kemmu, jwara.
maatre togonde. swalpa waasi ivaga

me: irlapaa… jwara baro hanga hoDadara andra, nee eno chaDDi harisiro hange kaaNtada
irli biDu

Madhu: olle chaddi hinde bidyalla…yappaa
banda mele sigteeni…eega going offline…tata

me: sigoNu

Printed here with Madhu’s permission :)

Today, on the way back home I stopped at Ankita pustaka, the book shop on DVG Road in Basavanagudi.

I was planning to buy A.na.kru’s sandhyaraaga for some time now.
Sandhyaraga is a classic kannada novel with a social theme written in 1935 dealing with the life of a singer.
The film sandya raga is based on the same book. Rajkumar played the role of the protagonist.

However, what got me interested in Sandhya Raga is a mention of the book on Beechi( a very popular comedy writer) – ‘bulletsu, bombsu, bhagavadgeete’. In fact, beechi’s whole contribution to kannada can be attributed to this one book(sandhya raga).

Beechi was a Police officer in the British government. He was apathetic to everything kannada. But, one day, he was stuck with this book while traveling and he read it with tears welling up in his eyes. The book moved him so much that, he decided to ‘scribble’ all that he knew in kannada in his life time.

So, this one book gave us one of our greater comedy writers of our time. It is this power of kannaDa writing that moves me, inspires me.

I bought three more books

ella ballavarilla – a kannada translation of HY Sharada prasad’s – `The book I wont be writing and other essays’. Sharada prasad was a senior bureaucrat, who served with three prime ministers and was an editor with Indian Express. He is also a kannadiga. I had read good reviews about this book in vijaya karnataka(?).

sanchaya an anthology of poems by da.ra.bendre(dattatreya ramachandra bendre).

A collection of popular keerthanes by purandara dasa – the father of karnataka sangeetha (also known as carnatic music).
I was pleasantly surprised to find that I had heard most of the keerthanas I randomly browsed through. My father even recalls having sung song in a play duing his school days. And to add to the fun, I’m hearing “giLiyu panjaradoLilla”, a composition of purandara dasa, from the movie Amrutadhare being played on DVD downstairs :)

Many more such surprises were in store today. The ella ballavarilla book is dedicated to ‘Ahobala Shankara’, who translated many Bengali classics to kannada. I read the kannada translation of the Bengali classic ‘saheb, bibi aur gulam’ when I was in middle school.

It is one of the books that left a great impression on me. Oh! the joy of reading :)

Note: Ankita pustaka is giving 10–15% discount on all kannada books you buy this year, if you purchase more Rs200/- worth of books.

Happy reading. Dont forget to share your favourite kannada books, the ones that left a great impression on you.

Tags:suvarna karnataka, kannada,karnataka, bangalore,books

The Kannada cosmos is so rich, varied and plural that no intelligent, sensitive, Kannada speaking individual would ever feel maimed or incomplete for being a part of it. This should be reason enough to celebrate Kannada Rajyotsava with confidence and a sense of belonging,

But, he also says,

The result is that Kannada is no longer an individual concern. A complete turnaround from the days of the Karnataka Unification Movement (Ekikarana Chaluvali) when it was everyone’s personal concern.

Prof. PDCS writes:

I want to spend the next several weeks and months writing about these challenges. Perhaps, the time has come for us to ask again the question B M Shri asked nearly hundred years ago: what is Kannada Kattuva Kelasa (the task of constructive work) for our age?

Let us all engage in that conversation. Kannada cosmos is richer than it was ever before with Kannadigas spread all over the world, working in professions and arenas that were not even dreamt when our state formed 50 years back.

Today, is the 50th year of Karnataka’s formation. Fifty years, on this day, Karnataka, the land of Kannada speaking people was formed.

As B M Sree said, “kannaDa kaTTuva kelasa aagabeku”. It is more important to build upon our culture than just retain what we already have.

As a zen saying goes, “what is green grows, what is ripe, rots”. We, kannadigas should stop repenting our missed chances so far and have to look ahead to find newer opportunities for the next millennium.

Let us embrace what is progressive, while rooted firmly in our culture and tradition.

This is a good time for us to engage in introspection, share our visions and stand by each other to build a stronger karnataka.

Jai karnataka.
sirigannaDam gelge, baaLge.

PS: I’m starting a series of blogposts, one per day, for the next 365 days, dealing with kannada and karnataka.

Tags:suvarna karnataka, kannada,karnataka

This dasara, I spent a very relaxed 4 days at my in-laws’ place at Honnavar

Honnavar is a quiet coastal town with kannada, konkani speaking people. One of the main attraction of coastal districts is Yakshagana , an art form unique to karnataka. Though it is very easy for the untrained eye to confuse it with KathakaLi , they are quite unique, with KathakaLi being predominantly Kerala art form while Yakshagana is tuLu and kannada.

The ‘aaTa’ (play) we saw was – “meenakshi kalyaNa” (wedding of meenakshi), a mythological play.

Yakshaganas typically deal with mythological topics, but more often than not, the actors inject political satire to the amusement of the audience.

There are two actors on the stage.

The woman is a princess who has come to attack another king, but meets him before mounting an attack.
The character in red is the king who is teasing the woman about how she is a small babe compared to his age and mocking her inexperience in the matters of war and statecraft.

The clip captures only a small part of that dialogue, but there are interesting things to notice.

Typical of yakshagana plays, the Woman’s role is played by a man!

The man on the extreme left is beating the “maddaLe”, a form of drum. maddaLe is a fascinating instrument and makes me go “wow” everytime I hear it.

The person singing is called “bhagawataru”, and the variation of voice, tone is something to be experienced. Days after I see a yakshagana, I feel like start singing in that style ;)

So, if you are visiting the coastal and malenad districts (Uttara kannada, dakshina kannada, shimoga) of Karnataka, make sure you see at least one yakshagana. Its an experience of a lifetime.

The Wikipedia entry on Yakshagana is a great read.

Some photos on flickr: yakshagana

Tags:suvarna karnataka, kannada,karnataka, yakshagana,karavali,honavar,

A quick search for postgresql on my system using `apt-cache search postgresql` threw up `postgresql-8.1-plr – Procedural language interface between PostgreSQL 8.1 and R`. R is a popular (and very capable) open source statistical application.

That got me curious about all the datamining/statistical/machine learning tools available on a standard ubuntu distro (I’m running Ubuntu 6.10)

So, by running `apt-cache search ` this is what I got :

• Data mining – Nothing! (Not a good start to the experiment ;)
• Machine Learning – ifile and libtorch3
  
• Fuzzy – cl-rsm-fuzzy
  
• Statistics – Quite a few actually, so I’m filtering out obvious false positives
  
• cl-statistics – Common Lisp Statistics Package
  
• dspam – is a scalable, fast and statistical anti-spam filter
  
• ent – pseudorandom number sequence test program
  
• ess – Emacs statistics mode, supporting R,S and others
  
• euler – interactive mathematical programming environment
  
• libbow – Bag of Words Library
  
• libdspam7 – DSPAM is a scalable and statistical anti-spam filter
  
• libnewmat10 – matrix manipulations C++ library
  
• paw – Physics Analysis Workstation – a graphical analysis program
  
• postgresql-8.1-plr – Procedural language interface between PostgreSQL 8.1 and R
  
• pspp – Statistical analysis tool (ed: a take on SPSS?)
  
• python-stats – A collection of statistical functions for Python
  r-base – GNU R statistical computing language and environment
  
• rkward – a KDE frontend to the R statistics language (ed:wow! this is a real find :)
  
• spambayes – Python-based spam filter using statistical analysis
  
• spamoracle – A statistical analysis spam filter based on Bayes’ formula




• Neural Network
  • achilles – An artificial life and evolution simulator
  • dspam – is a scalable, fast and statistical anti-spam filter
  • genesis – general-purpose neural simulator
  • libfann1 – Fast Artificial Neural Network Library (fann)

Of course, some the other open source tools which I have tinkered with, which are not mentioned above are:

• WEKA - Java Machine Learning library
• Orange - C++/Python ML library
• DAP - SAS equivalent (Runs SAS programs)
• GLPK - GNU Linear Programming Kit

This my no means is an exhaustive list of all Open Source Datamining/Analytics toolkits. However, it is heartening to know that these many are just 2 clicks away.

Also, not finding any software while searching for data mining is not very surprising either. Data mining is a process which involves various tasks such as data cleaning, attribute selection, algorithm selection and of course presentation. More over DM is an iterative process which is not tied to any one tool (unlike many vendors would like us to belive.

So, knowledge of a handful of the above tools will go a long way in increasing the skill as a data mining practitioner.

Good luck.

Finally, I succumbed to the temptation and upgraded to Flickr Pro account.

Initially i thought of using Amazon S3 for storing my photos, but flickr is convenient to send photo links to friends/family and of course the Flickr ecosystem keeps throwing up new wonders like Moo.com . All this goodness for just $24.95 pa.

JUploader is a fine open source application that allowed to upload all my photos to flickr. It is certainly better than the Flickr Uploader. The flickr uploader does not allow you to select the `set` before uploading and I got the feeling that it is not retaining the permissions correctly. JUploader did not have any such problems. The UI is quite good.

Perhaps flickr should support Juploader to become the default uploading software.

Of course, the link : http://flickr.com/photos/btbytes/

I am.

with so many web 2.0 application to sign up, managing the username and passwords to each is a nightmare.One approach is to use the same username/password and be vulnerable to be pwned (`owned`/hacked into).The other way to create different passwords for all the signups. I have tried this and fail to recall the passwords for any service which I have not used for over a month. Duh!

OpenID can be a solution though.

The promise of OpenID is the ability to broker your identity through a common server. That common server can authenticate your identity to any number of web applications without requiring you to reveal any user name or password information to the individual applications. From the other side of the fence, to the application, user identity becomes a verified URI instead of a verified user name. I already expect to use URIs to identify things, so that’s a win too.

– Norman walsh

Livejournal (being the inventor of OpenID concept) and Zooomr (Flickr-like service) are the two services that I recall using this. Perhaps in future, sign-up fatigue will keep people away from signing up to new services. Providing OpenID option is very welcome.

My OpenID: btbytes.pip.verisignlabs.com btbytes.com

Wow! an ant named after namma bengalooru :)

A rare ant genus Dilobocondyla was discovered (Sunil Kumar et al, 1997) in urban regions of Bangalore, its first records from the Indian subcontinent. The species then unidentified, has now been rediscovered and has been found to be new to science. It goes with the species name, ‘bangalorica’ in recognition of the locality, Bangalore, from where it has been found

Picture and details – Antlinks

Next time, when you are bitten by this genus, be kind and dont squas h all of them. They too are bangaloreans ;)

Update (Fe, 2010): I no longer run osbasket.com.

Looking for top quality Open Source software like OpenOffice.org, various Linux distributions?

Look no further. OSBasket is here.

I have a problem with blogging software. Its not the technology or the software themselves that are problematic.

Somehow, what I want to say a lot of times does not fit into a "journal" or a "blog" post well.

I tend look at personal websites as extensions one's self. So, it is only natural that websites reflect the different dimension that a person has. Blogs only deal with time.

I have tried to write my own software to manage the this website. I've been able to do it quite easily too. However, the shortcoming is not in the tools but the idea of having to force every single idea into Blog template.

I like the visual idea of websites resembling a spider web. My most productive period with this website; by productive i mean, periods where I wrote, tweaked and updated Useful content; was way back in 2003 when this site was a "Opensource CD shop" selling open source software CDs, predominantly Openoffice.org.

The technology then was very primitive - my own handcoded PHP and a text-file database for a catalogue. But, the distance between my ideas and their appearence on the web page was very short.

So, now I'm looking at reorganising my website by throwing out all "management" out of the window and concentrate on the content.

I'm tempted to go with plain HTML. The most useful websites(in my line of thought, atleast) tend to be plain and full of useful info without all the gizmos like RSS/Calendar/talkback.

I'm not against the web2.0 features per se. (you know i'm not; i've had gradient images, rounded corners, section specific rss feeds, microformats and what-not on this web site :)

It is just that, I seem to hit a wall when I see "Blog post" window. Perhaps I'm not the blogging kind after all.

The bare bones tech:

I'm considering moving all the content to static pages perhaps using myghty. Myghty will allow me serve simple text files served as web pages without me having to install and maintain a "blog software". I'm the tinkering kind, so myghty is a good choice.

The ideal setup would be... * write a arricle/journal-entry/news-bite in a text editor (emacs) * scp it to the server.

Perhaps the settings on the file (commenting enabled etc.,) can be part of the file itself. The idea of using a database to store simple text file seems to be an overkill to me :)

Pybloxsom does this already. But, I do not want to install and learn yet another "System". A home brewed solution seems to be a better fit.

This is the Mechanical Engineering class of PESIT. 2000.

It was a huge class with > 120 people and typical of any Mech Branches across the country with just Three girls :p

I'm the guy in Blue suit, 5th from right, 3rd row from bottom. Yeah, I had a moustache...

As soon as I saw this post by Grégory Tappéro on planet python I couldn't wait to implement this in my Pylons powered blog.

(Note: To compare the effort needed on Pylons to implement this as compared to Django, I'll follow the same procedure as Gregory has followed, so that you can compare the steps 1-on-1.)

I'm implementing this on my home brewed blog software - Chiselman (unreleased). Please replace all references to chiselman with your proejects name.

What you need

• The ip-to-country data file, 60k entries as a csv file here.
• A set of tiny flags images, which you will put in /public/img/flags/ of your project.

Models

Create a iptocountry.py model file under chiselman/chiselman/models/ folder. Then we edit the models.py file, we need to make the fields match the ip-to-country.csv data file, and to add a method to import this data from cvs to your project database iptocountry table.

from sqlalchemy import *

dburi = 'mysql://user:passwd@localhost/chiselman'
db = create_engine(dburi)
metadata = BoundMetaData(db)

iptocountry = Table('iptocountry', metadata,
                    Column('id', Integer, primary_key=True),
                    Column('ip_from', Integer),
                    Column('ip_to', Integer),
                    Column('country_code2', String(2)),
                    Column('country_code3', String(3)),
                    Column('country_name', String(50))
                    )
class IPToCountry(object):
    def __repr__(self):
        return "%s %s %s" % (self.ip_from, self.ip_to, self.country_name)

def __init__(self, ipf=None, ipt=None, cc2=None, cc3=None, cname=None):
        if ipf and ipt and cc2 and cc3 and cname:
            self.ip_from = ipf
            self.ip_to = ipt
            self.country_code2 = cc2
            self.country_code3  = cc3
            self.country_name = cname

def import_csv(csvfile):
    """ import entries from csv file"""
    import csv
    reader = csv.reader(open(csvfile))
    count = 0
    session = create_session()
    for ipf, ipt, cc2, cc3, cname in reader:
        count += 1
        obj = IPToCountry(ipf, ipt, cc2, cc3,cname)
        session.save(obj)
        if count % 10000 == 0:
            print count
        print count , "inserted. :)"
    session.flush()
    del reader

ip2c_mapper = mapper(IPToCountry, iptocountry)

Imported these into controllers/blog.py where we need them. Attached them to the global c variable.

   from chiselman.models.iptocountry import iptocountry, IPToCountry
   .
   .
   class BlogController(BaseController):
       ...
       @dispatch_on(POST='create_comment')
       def blog_post(self,slug):
           ...
           c.iptocountry = iptocountry
           c.IPToCountry = IPToCountry
           ...

Import data

Then we need to actualy import the data by running import_csv, to do this get to the paster shell. Paster shell is very nice. It is in same league as django-admin shell and serves the same purpose.

Enter the following commands which calls the wanted function.

>>>import chiselman.models.iptocountry as ip2c

#create the table in the database

>>>ip2c.iptocountry.create()
#import data from the csv file.

>>>ip2c.import_csv('/home/pradeepgowda/projects/chiselman/ip-to-country.csv')
# wait for a while the import to complete(> 67,000 records.)

presenting the flags

This where Pylons differs significantly from Django. While Django best practice is to create a filter, you can do with a simple Myghty component in Pylons.

IMO, writing a component feels much more "with the flow" than writing a filter. Somehow creating a filter feels like its more work than writing a quick component. One reason could be that, you can write the code that does the 'filtering' inline with your existing code; see it working and refactor it out into a proper component later.

The code below shows the comment display component which takes care of displaying the comments.

from markdown import markdown
from sqlalchemy import and_, create_session

comment
</%args>

body = markdown(comment.message)
if not comment.web.startswith('http://'):
  url = 'http://'+comment.web
else:
  url = comment.web

session=create_session()
iptc = cc2 = ccname = None
if len(comment.ip) > 0:
  ip = m.comp('ip2long',ip=comment.ip)
  if ip:
    iptc = session.query(c.IPToCountry).selectfirst(and_(c.IPToCountry.c.ip_from = ip))

if iptc:
        cc2 = iptc.country_code2.lower()
        ccname = iptc.country_name.lower()
 </%python>

% if cc2:
  .gif" alt=" flag"/>
%





</%def>

ip2long is the function which converts the ip address from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx format into a integer. I've copied that function verbatim from Gregory's code and made it into a myghty module.

ip
  </%args>

    ip_array = ip.split('.')
    ip_long = int(ip_array[0]) * 16777216 + int(ip_array[1]) * 65536 +  int(ip_array[2]) * 256 + int(ip_array[3])
    return ip_long
  </%python>
</%def>

You can see this feature in action here .

After I started "getting" pylons, I've covered quite a bit of ground.

Chiselman, my attemp at converting this textpattern blog to pylons is giving me a lot of opportunities to learn more about myghty, sqlalchemy and routes. Since blogging tools are a known domain, I'm able to hack away.

To sum up my journey so far, I've been able to do these:

• use sqlalchemy [even in non trivial cases]
• myghty - components, autohandlers, flags, filters
• routes - mostly intuitive, have not bumped into any walls so far ;)
• create RSS feeds for the blog. This took all of 20 minutes. That was awesome. I sort of wrote the Feeds controller while having lunch ;)
• Used Kid templating along with Myghty. Successfully mapped an iCal event to a microformat event. Small, yet satisfying to know that I can use kid whenever I need it.
• got Formencode and SQLAlchemy working with Pylons using Ben's Tutorial.
• use third party libraries - pymarkdown, pytextile, pydelicious
• got yahoo Search API integrated into site search.

Troublesome areas:

• myghty unicode issues in rendering kannada fonts. `.encode('utf-8') is not consistent. :(
• was not able to get formencode working with my comment form. Calling Render('/commentform.myt') renders the whole page inside the existing page. Perhaps, I should try inherit=None flag...

Today I added a recipe to pylonshq.com wiki. My first ;)

Basically, it pulls your latest del.icio.us bookmarks and displays as HTML. It uses Pydelicious to fetch the bookmark as RSS.

See it here.

The best part about the template is, it uses myghty's caching. So, your site does not have to pull down the data everytime from del.icio.us. Without caching, this will add seconds to your page load time.

I remember struggling to setup such a cache with textpattern(PHP) and MagpieRSS for this blog earlier.

Myghty rocks. Absolutely!

PS: The whole thing is a myghty template. So, you can use it even if you are not using the whole of pylons.

ಇವತ್ತಿನ ವಿಜಯ ಕರ್ನಾಟಕದ ಮೊದಲ ಪುಟದಲ್ಲೇ ಮೈಸೂರು ಜೂನ 'ಮೇಸನ್' ಎಂಬ ಚಿಂಪಾಜಿ ಆವರಣದಿಂದ ಆಚೆ ಬಂದು ಧಾಂದಲೆ ಎಬ್ಬಿಸಿದ್ದನ್ನು ನೀವು ಓದಿರಬಹುದು. ಕೆಲ ದಿನಗಳ ಹಿಂದೆ ಮೈಸೂರಿಗೆ ಹೋಗಿದ್ದಾಗ ಅವ ನಮಗೂ ಹಲ್ಲು ಕಿರಿದು ಪೋಸು ಕೊಟ್ಟಿದ್ದ.

Today(30/Jul/2006)'s Vijaya Karnataka carried a front page news item on a chimpanzee named Mason belonging to Mysore Zoo breaking out of his enclosure in and wandering around in the zoo.

I think he must have wanted his day out in the open, especially after having been teased all the time.

He was quite an animated guy when I saw him last time(3 weeks back). More power to you Mason!

After alternately being excited and hitting walls with Pylons, in a moment of clarity, Pylons suddenly makes sense to me.

SQLAlchemy. myghty and webhelpers always stuck me as being very powerful, but I wasnt able to produce anything which "worked" without getting frustrated over small problems which stopped the flow completely. But, the persistence seems to have paid off; suddenly, hours of pouring over documentation has started making sense.

Just keep the momentum going, i've started to this site , written in textpattern to Pylons. You can see the work in progress - http://beta.btbytes.com. I'm calling the port Chiselman, after textpattern's logo.

I'm not thinking of writing another "blog" software. I hope to contribute some code snippets to the pylons cookbook from whatever I learn.

ಕಳೆದ ವಾರ ನನ್ನವಳ ಜೊತೆ ಮೈಸೂರಿಗೆ ಬೈಕ್ ನಲ್ಲಿ ಹೋದಾಗ ತೆಗೆದದ್ದು.

Kenneth Gonsalves has interesting tidbits on usage of language in kannada and tamil movies.

...that in kannada, colloquial language is used and dialects follow the area/community where the action takes place. .... In tamil, on the other hand, 'purity' of language is more important than accuracy or being convincing or natural.

Recently, I discovered Tabblo, a photo management program and a story telling tool. At last, I managed to create my first tabblo out of my visit to Somanathapura, the 11th century temple of the Hoysala kings near Mysore.

Tabblo has flickr integration, so I was able to import photos already uploaded to flickr. Open APIs are cool. I'm impressed with Flickr for keeping their APIs open and thereby NOT locking the users photos.

Anyway, here is the Tabblo. Enjoy maaDi!

Somanathapura is a heritage site in Karnataka. The temple shown here is 900 year old. It was built by the Hoysala kings in the 11th century AD. ... See my Tabblo>

This weekend (10/11 June) I watched two plays at Ranga Shankara. sattavara neraLu (lit. shadow of the dead) and hayavadana (lit. horse face). Both these plays are considered to the best plays directed by late B V Karantha, a much acclaimed director who has directed over a 100 plays in indian languages (kannada,english,telugu, malayalam,punjabi, urdu,sanskrit) with more than half of them in his mother tongue - kannada.

I had been waiting to watch "sattavara neraLu" for a long time because, I'd heard the songs of the play on a CD and I liked the way in which the "padagaLu"(devotional songs) of 16th century poet-saint Purandara Dasa were rendered.

sattavara neraLu is a political drama written by GB Joshi and talks about the power plays in religious institutions.

hayavadana is written by gnanapeeth award winner Girish Karnad. hayanvadana is based on an 11th century Indian folkstory and Thomas Mann's The Transposed Heads. Both the plays were by "benaka" troupe found by BV Karantha.

Celebrated kannada film director nagabharana was the star attraction on both days with his powerful play-acting and stellar stage presence. This is where I should have been going into reviewing the plays. But, I lack the vocabulary ;). I'll simply say that I liked the plays and play-acting very much and would like to do so often in the future.

I have been a regular to Ranga shankara in the last few months by clocking an average of one play per month. I must admit that watching plays is much more entertaining and fulfulling than watching movies. Rangashankara has put in a lot of effort into making the place very organized and professional.

I happened to meet quite a few friends from school,PU and college on the same day, which was a very pleasant experience :)

Tabblo is the newest photo management application on the web and in my opinion far better than Flickr!

Hmm.. I got your attention, I see.

Of course this opinion is formed after playing around it for half an hour. But, first impressions do count.

The things I liked about Tabblo:

• No limit on photo uploads. w00t! (I can only hope this lasts for a loong time ;)

• A Tabblo is a picture story. tell stories with your photos. Narrate your experience with a sequence of photos. Express your awesomeness with a fabulous photo and some zen koans. whatever!

• Very clean and numerous templates to choose from. Customize yuor tabblos to heart's content. This is sorely missing from most online photo apps.

• Uploading works great. Multiple options. I used the flash uploader. Very cool. Have to check out the other options.

• Quick responses - deliberate use of AJAX feels nice. reaaally nice :)

• Tabblo is written in Django Yay!! Django Rocks.

Both Django and Turbogears Developers are excited about MerQuery Full text indexer. MerQuery plans to be the Full Text Indexer[1] for Python frameworks. The developer of MerQuery plans to use Apache Project's Lucene Indexing and search technology.

The first thoughts were, hmm.. doesn't Zope already have a full text indexer already. Yes, it does. Zope has had Full Text capabilities from early days of Zope2. Read this workshop paper given by Jim Fulton at Pycon'01.

Ah,talk of Zope2 makes people give a 1000 yard stare. "Zope is not teh cool" some say. Let that pass and look at whether Zope3 is doing any "cool" stuff. Lucene?

Hoorah! it apparently does!. If you look carefully the recipe was written in 2004. And, the recipe itself is a great tutorial on how to write new apps for zope3.

It was never claimed that it is easy to write Wikis in 20 minutes using Zope3. But then, how many times do you write your own wikis? But, where Zope2 and Zope3 shine is in the non-obvious stuff like Text indexing, fine grained permissions,object publishing and the list goes on.

I'm excited about new Python frameworks like Django and Pylons, but I'm also at a loss to understand cold shoulder given to Zope3. Zope3 deserves better. I agree[2] that Zope.org is not as sexy as TG or Django websites.Going by Zopistas' claim that Zope3 is aiming to eat J2EE's lunch, Zope.org does very little to support that claim.

Zope3 needs a "Message" and Zope.org needs a Massage(Maybe a lot).

[1] Read David Mertz's excellent article - Developing a Full-Text Indexer in Python to understand what a Full Text Indexer does.

[2] Read Jeff Shell's blog - Griddle Noise he is a passionate Zope user.

I bought a Sony DSC-H1 last month. I took the new camera out for a spin in Goa. I had written earlier that, the camera works well with Windows XP. And, Ravi lost no time in pulling my leg over it ;). I'm glad to report that It works great with Ubuntu Linux too!!

Anyway, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Here you go :

Grrr... Sony ships some image manipulation software along with the Camera. called the Picture Package. And it is the most lame-assed imaging software I've laid my eyes upon. Looks like its written in Flash. yeah! go figure...

Anyway, its not available on Linux and I'm glad for it. I use Gimp anyway.

May the new year bring you happiness and success.

ಉಗಾದಿ ಹಬ್ಬದ ಹಾರ್ದಿಕ ಶುಭಾಶಯಗಳು.

Prof Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi has a very good write up on ugadi.

And yes, if you want to know how ugaadi is celeberated you must read "doDDa mane" by H L Nage Gowda. Its a great book about life in "bayalu seeme" (the flat lands of karnataka) and Gowdas.

Yesterday I bought the Sony DSC-H1 camera.

Specs:

You can read the reviews here .

I bought the camera from the Sony showroom on 100 Feet ring road, near Kathriguppe (next to Silicon Honda). It cost me Rs.25,000/- . I am very impressed with the LCD quality, image stabilisation and the awesom 12X zoom.

The Camera connected to a windows XP laptop via USB cable without any hitch. The USB device was recognised immediately without any additional software install and Windows offered to copy the files over to HDD. Smooth. I'm yet to try out the software supplied with the camera. The video recording at 640x480(VGA) looks smooth, and the voice recording clarity is quite impressive.

I also bought 256MB Pro memory stick along with the camera. My only grouse with the camera so far has been the lock-in of sony cameras with their memory sticks and they are pricey too (1GB@ nearly 8000/-)

Canon

I considered buying Canon IS series. But, after visiting nearly 15 shops all over south bangalore and MG Road/Brigade road, the unanimous verdict seemed to be

• Canon cameras are excellent
• we do not stock them ;)
• Poor service etc

I was not deterred by the so called poor service. Most of the time, a high end camera like the canon IS is unlikely to be bought by the hobby crowd and so the chances of "electronic mall" people stocking them are even lesser.

The only place in Bangalore, that had Canon ready was GK Vale in MG Road. But, their list price was Rs.32000+ which was well above my budget.

Konika I also took a look at the Konika model (no?) at Big Bazaar. The sales guy at the Big Bazaar camera counter was very enthusiastic and knowledgeable. Konika is slightly costlier than the Sony but their periperals seemed to be attractive, like inbuilt battery instead of the double AA type cells used by both Sony and Canon. Konika also comes with a free Tripod and has provision to stick an extra flash, which I think is a +ve for a high zoom camera. Also, there was an offer of 1GB memory stick for an additional 2000 on buying a new camera. Both the zoom control and camera control are joystick. However, the build and finish of Konika were not as good as Sony. Also, Konika's LCD is not as refined as the Sony's.

One more from the google stables - Google Pages.

Google pages is a WYSIWYG web pages builder cum hosting service. This kind of services have been around for a long time.(remember your first Geocities pages?). So, what's new under the sun?

First looks:

• The WYSIWYG editor is a good starting point for most people.
• The WYSIWYG editor retains inline styling after editing, this is a good thing.
• produces decent HTML code, but not really W3C compliant.
• works only with Firefox and IE (no opera support yet)
• you get http://yourgmailid.googlepages.com url
• 100MB hosting space (without ads)
• no mention of bandwidth usage
• uploading files is a breeze. files are uploaded to the root of your domain. So, linking to images becomes that much easier.
• more than 40 themes available
• select from 4 different layout schemes
• layout customisation not yet in sight. Perhaps they can just borrow these
• Intelligent URL inserter. clicking on a link in the page allows you to edit it or visit it. pretty nifty.
• Image insertion is a breeze. Upload imaged automatically show up in the Image dialog box. Allow for image sizing. good!
• The AJAXY bits are fast to give a desktop application feel to the whole app. very neat indeed. *The pages are saved automatically every now and then, just like the gmail drafts.

So, what does it all mean?

• bad news for small web hosting providers
• good news for end users who want to put up simple webpages

Whats missing?

• ability to add RSS feeds/OPML to the page (eg: show off your flickr photos, del.icio.us bookmarks, cocomments?)
• integration with google base
• import calendars (iCal?)

Note: You can sign up for Google Pages if you have a Gmail account already. If you need an invite, Contact me

Update:

• looks like they got dugg and slashdotted. So, they are not accepting new accounts. Check back in couple of hours...

After playing around with Turbogears, Pylons and Django, I've gone back to Django. Why not -

Turbogears : Somehow TG does not appeal to me. It has all the right stuff, but I don't grok it very much.

Pylons - I was very happy to discover Myghty as well as Routes , but pylons is not yet ready. Atleast not ready enough to produce a simple CRUD app in an hour.

Django - I'd played around with Django when it was initially anounced, but was thrown off by all the magic stuff. The new "magic-removal" branch has made Django very much Pythonic. The admin interface is a great plus to get the website live without having to code the "input" parts.

I'm going to stick with Django for quite some time to come. I'm still interested to use SQLAlchemy/Myghty/Pylons. Perhaps in another 3 months time...

In the meanwhile, I've started porting the Django Stuff over to the Magic-removal branch of Django.

ನಮಸ್ಕಾರ,

ನಿಮಗೆ ಗೊತ್ತಿರುವ ಹಾಗೆ ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ , ಒಂದು ಮುಕ್ತ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶ. ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಮುಕ್ತಕೋಶದ ಮೂಲಕ ಕನ್ನಡ ಸಂಸ್ಕೃತಿ, ಸಾಹಿತ್ಯ, ಪರಂಪರೆಗಳ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ತಿಳಿಯಲು, ತಿಳಿಸಲು ಉತ್ತಮ ಅವಕಾಶವಿದೆ. . ಈ ನಿಟ್ಟಿನಲ್ಲಿ, ಕನ್ನ್ದಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯಾದ ಸಂಚಾಲಕರು ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಪತ್ರಿಕಾಗೋಷ್ಠಿ ಮತ್ತು ಕೂಟವನ್ನು ಆಯೋಜಿಸಿದ್ದಾರೆ. ತಪ್ಪದೆ ಭಾಗವಹಿಸಿ.

ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮದಲ್ಲಿ ಭಾಗವಹಿಸಲು ಆಸಕ್ತಿ ಇದ್ದಲ್ಲಿ ಈ blogpostನ ಕಮೆಂಟ್ ವಿಭಾಗದಲ್ಲಿ, ನಿಮ್ಮ ಹೆಸರನ್ನು ಸೇರಿಸಿ. ನಾನು ಆಯೋಜಕರಿಗೆ ವಿಷಯ ತಿಳಿಸುತ್ತೇನೆ

ವಿವರಗಳು ಇಂತಿವೆ

ಅಂತರ್ಜಾಲದಲ್ಲಿರುವ ನಿಮ್ಮ ನೆಚ್ಚಿನ ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯದ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ತಿಳಿಯಲು, ಚರ್ಚಿಸಲು ಮತ್ತು ವಿಚಾರ ವಿನಿಮಯ ಮಾಡಿಕೊಳ್ಳಲು ಶೀಘ್ರದಲ್ಲೆ ಒಂದು ಅಧಿವೇಷನ ಏರ್ಪಡಿಸಲಾಗುತ್ತಿದೆ. ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಸದಸ್ಯರು ಹಾಗು ಆಸಕ್ತರು ಒಂದೆಡೆ ಕೂಡಿ ತಮ್ಮ ಆಭಿಪ್ರಾಯಗಳನ್ನು, ಅನುಭವಗಳನ್ನು ಹಂಚಿಕೊಳ್ಳಬಹುದಾದ ಈ ಅಧಿವೇಷನದಲ್ಲಿ ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶದ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಸಾರ್ವಜನಿಕರಲ್ಲಿ ಅರಿವು ಮೂಡಿಸಬೇಕೆಂಬ ಉದ್ದೇಶವನ್ನಿಟ್ಟುಕೊಂಡು ಒಂದು ಪುಟ್ಟ ಪತ್ರಿಕಾ ಗೋಷ್ಟಿ ಕೂಡ ಏರ್ಪಡಿಸುತ್ತಿದ್ದೇವೆ. ಈ ಬಾರಿ ಬೆಂಗಳೂರಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಈ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮ ನೆಡೆಯುವುದು.ನೀವೂ ಈ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮಕ್ಕೆ ಬನ್ನಿ, ನಿಮ್ಮ ಮಿತ್ರರನ್ನೂ ಕರೆತನ್ನಿ. ಬರಲಿಚ್ಚಿಸುವರು ದಯವಿಟ್ಟು ನೊಂದಾಯಿಸಿಕೊಳ್ಳಿ.

ಸೂಚನೆ

• ಪ್ರವೇಶ ಉಚಿತ.

• ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮಕ್ಕೆ ನೊಂದಾಯಿಸಿಕೊಂಡು ಬಂದಲ್ಲಿ ನಮಗೆ ಸರಿಯಾದ ಸೌಕರ್ಯ ಕಲ್ಪಿಸಲು ಸಹಾಯವಾಗುತ್ತದೆ.

  ಸ್ಥಳ: ನಯನ ಸಭಾಂಗಣ, ಕನ್ನಡ ಭವನ, ಜೆ ಸಿ ರೋಡ್, ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು. (ರವೀಂದ್ರ ಕಲಾಕ್ಷೇತ್ರದ ಪಕ್ಕ) ದಿನಾಂಕ: ಏಪ್ರಿಲ್ ೨, ೨೦೦೬ , ಭಾನುವಾರ ಸಮಯ: ಸಂಜೆ ೪.೦೦ ರಿಂದ ೮.೦೦

* ತಾತ್ಕಾಲಿಕ ಕಾರ್ಯ ಸೂಚಿ*

ಮೊದಲನೆ ಅವಧಿ * ಪತ್ರಿಕಾ ಗೋಷ್ಟಿ : ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ, ವಿಕಿಮೀಡಿಯ ಸಂಸ್ಥೆ, ಮೀಡಿಯವಿಕಿ, ವಿಕಿ ತಂತ್ರಾಂಶ, ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ೧೦೦೦ ಲೇಖನಗಳ ಮೈಲಿಗಲ್ಲು ದಾಟುವಿಕೆ ಇತ್ಯಾದಿ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ವಿಶ್ಲೇಷಣೆ. (ಸುಮಾರು ೩೦ ನಿಮಿಷಗಳು) * ಅಲ್ಪ ವಿರಾಮ : ಕಾಫಿ/ಚಹಾ ವಿರಾಮ (೨೦ ನಿಮಿಷಗಳು)

ಎರಡನೆ ಅವಧಿ

• ಸಂವಾದ ೧ : ಇಂಡಿಕ್?ಯೂನಿಕೋಡ್? ಏನಿವು? (೪೦ ನಿಮಿಷಗಳು)
  • ಸಂವಾದ ೨ : ನಿಮ್ಮ ಗಣಕದಲ್ಲಿ ಇಂಡಿಕ್ ಮತ್ತು ಯೂನಿಕೋಡ್ ಅಳವಡಿಸುವುದು ಹೇಗೆ? (೪೦ ನಿಮಿಷಗಳು)
  • ಅಲ್ಪ ವಿರಾಮ : ಲಘು ಉಪಹಾರ ಮತ್ತು ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಸದಸ್ಯರ ಅನೌಪಚಾರಿಕ ಮುಖಾಮುಖಿ (೨೦ ನಿಮಿಷಗಳು)

ಮೂರನೆ ಅವಧಿ

• ಸಂವಾದ ೩ : ದೊಡ್ಡ ಸಹಕಾರ ಯೋಜನೆಗಳಿಗೆ ವಿಕಿಮೀಡಿಯ(೩೦ ನಿಮಿಷಗಳು) *ಸಂವಾದ ೪ : ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಬಳಕೆದಾರರ ಹಾಗು ಸದಸ್ಯರ ಅನುಭವ ಕಥನ(೩೦ ನಿಮಿಷಗಳು)

ನಾಲ್ಕನೆ ಅವಧಿ

• ಚರ್ಚೆ: ಮುಂದಿನ ಹೆಜ್ಜೆಗಳು, ಹೆಚ್ಚಿನ ಜನರು ಈ ಯೋಜನೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಭಾಗವಹಿಸಲು ಕೈಗೊಳ್ಳಬೇಕಾದ ಕ್ರಮಗಳು ಇತ್ಯಾದಿ.(೩೦ ನಿಮಿಷಗಳು).

Google is beta testing Gmail for your domain, where your email@yourdomain.com can now be hosted by gmail.

This is good because:

• gmail is familiar :)
• squirrelmail provided by most ISPs sucks big time.
• search instead of sorting into folders
• threaded messages,
• Woo.. Ajaxy goodiness

the bad?: * Google owns one more part of your life :(

will you succumb to the lure?

ನೀವೂ ಬಹಳ ಕನ್ನಡಿಗರ ತರ ಟಿ.ಎನ್. ಸೀತಾರಾಮ್ ಅವರ ಮುಕ್ತಾ ಸೀರಿಯಲ್ ಇಷ್ಟ ಪಟ್ರೆ, ಈ ಸಂವಾದ ನೋಡಿ.

Trac is a fantastic Tool to manage bugs. However, once the number of users starts increasing, there will be need to have common patterns in filing bug tickets. This is basically to ensure that the developer does not have to talk to the bug Reporter to understand what the bug is about.

Joel Spolsky's Painless bug tracking gives an excellent proof of concept.

Trac has almost all of the fields that are listed in that list.

In the same article, Joel goes on to say -

Every good bug report needs exactly three things.

1. Steps to reproduce,
2. What you expected to see, and
3. What you saw instead.

This pattern is very useful in getting the Reporter to give complete and accurate information to the developer. Also, the developer can easily jump to the "BUG" part of the report and understand the exact problem without having to search for it.

So, how do we make it easier for the Reporter to adhere to this pattern without expecting him to remember it?

A simple hack to Trac would do.

You will have to modify the trac template - and put these lines near the description textarea tag.

JS:

HTML:

The above nano-hack was useful to me in two ways. One, it allowed me to look at trac's internals, and to my relief it is not at all scary. That should help us in extending trac as and when we need it. Secondly, this small hack will make the comprehension of bugs slightly better. :)

PS: I took a look at FogBugz. It has a lot of bells and whistles and looks neat. There are a quite a few reports which make the application look professional. some of them can be easily written for Trac too.

A Trac Dashboard anybody?

What does it take to develop a web based application today? what are the skills that a web developer should have to be reckoned as complete?

My work involves programming on the Plone platform. In the last month or so, I've tried to make a laundry list of skills that makes a "modern" plone developer.

Note: This is not bare minimum requirement. But, having all these skillsets makes you very valuble indeed.

Without much ado, here is the list

• Python Programming
• Structural programming
• Dynamically typed languages - strenghts and weaknesses
• Object oriented programming
• Advanced Python Programming
• multiple inheritence, Mixins, functional programming...
• Development practices
• Debugging
• understanding of coding styles
• Source code management - Use of ; CVS or SVN
• Software Configurartion Management - Trac?
• Extreme Programming concepts and practices
• Good understanding of - Why XP?
• Test driven development
• XP life-cycle
• paired programming
• Writing Unit tests / Regression Tests
• Selenium tests for client reviews and UI testing
• continous builds - why and howto
• Zope platform
• Perisistent Object Databases - differences with RDBMS models
• Inheritence / Aquisition
• TTW(through the web) development
• Plone as CMS platform
• Users and Roles
• Customisation through the web
• adding/managing content
• User management
• workflow management, TTW
• templating and Python scripting
• Plone as a development platform
• File system based development
• creating new content types
• overriding plone defaults - advanced customisations
• Setting permissions programmatically
• creating custom workflows
• awareness of existing plone products
• Front end development
• very good understanding of xHTML and CSS standards
• empathy for accessibility guidelines
• Cross browser compatibility issues
• DHTML and Javascript
• AJAX
• graceful degradation
• usability

Yes.That is a long list. Being a web developer requires you to be good in atleast 70% of the things listed above. Usually, a team can be sliced as - good python developers, good front end developers, good UI developers(DHTML, AJAX). But, at no point can any one of them afford to be not aware of any of the above skills.

Many a times, developers do not come with all the skills required to sustain the rapid development cycles of XP in the demanding environment of web technologies. But, XP itself provides a solution to that. Paired programming helps in mixing and matching the skillsets of developers. In a tyical two-week xp cycle, there will be enough opportunities for symbiotic learning between developers of the XP pair.

Even though the list looks prohibitive, it is also exciting. The so called 'web 2.0` technologies push the bar higher and higher, some times in a matter of weeks (Yeah. I've not even talked of social applications, multi media and P2P ;) ). But, thats the fun of being in the most happening field - web technologies.

Note : If you are looking to work in such a team, and you feel comfortable with a good number of above skills, contact me.

This is a bookmark of my often visited sites on the internet. It also might help you get a picture of my interests and likings.

You can ofcourse see my full list of bookmarked sites at del.icio.us/btbytes.

Many a times I'm asked to recommend a Linux Distribution by friends. My usual recommendation is SimplyMEPIS or Ubuntu.

However, if you want a 'second opinion' try out this Linux Distribution Chooser .

No prizes for guessing what Distro I was recommended. SimplyMEPIS. However, I'm currently using Ubuntu at home and kubuntu at work.

• ಕ್ರೀಮ್ ಬಿಸ್ಕೆಟ್ ನಲ್ಲಿ ಕ್ರೀಮ್ ಇರುತ್ತೆ.... ಆದ್ರೆ, ಬೆಣ್ಣೆ ಬಿಸ್ಕೆಟ್ ನಲ್ಲಿ ಬೆಣ್ಣೆ ಇರುತ್ತಾ ....

• ನೀನ್ ಬಸ್ಸಲ್ಲಿ ಹತ್ತಿದ್ರೂ... ಬಸ್ ನಿನ್ನ ಮೇಲೆ ಹತ್ತಿದ್ದ್ರೂ ಟಿಕೆಟ್ ತಗೋಳೋದು ನೀನೆ...

• ಟಿಕೆಟ್ ತಗೊಂಡು ಒಳಗ್ ಹೋಗೋದು "ಸಿನೆಮಾ ಥಿಯೇಟರ್", ಒಳಗ್ ಹೋದ್ ಮೇಲೆ ಟಿಕೆಟ್ ತಗೋಳೋದು "ಆಪರೇಶನ್ ಥಿಯೇಟರ್"

• ಸೆಲ್ಲಲ್ಲಿ ಬ್ಯಾಲೆನ್ಚ್ಸ್ ಇಲ್ಲಾ ಅಂದ್ರೆ ಕಾಲ್ ಮಾಡಕ್ಕೆ ಆಗಲ್ಲ.... ಮನುಶ್ಯನಿಗೆ ಕಾಲ್ ಇಲ್ಲಾ ಅಂದ್ರೆ ಬ್ಯಾಲೆನ್ಸ್ ಮಾಡಕ್ಕೆ ಆಗಲ್ಲ.

• ಟ್ರೈನ್ ಎಷ್ಟೆ ಫಾಸ್ಟಾಗಿ ಹೋದರೂ, ಕೊನೆಯ ಬೋಗಿ ಕೊನೇಗೇ ಬರೋದು.

• ನಾಯಿಗೆ ನಾಲಕ್ಕು ಕಾಲ್ಗಳೆ ಇರಬಹುದು; ಆದ್ರೂ ಅದಕ್ಕೆ ಕಾಲ ಮೇಲೆ ಕಾಲ್ ಹಾಕಿ ಕೂರಕ್ ಆಗುತ್ತಾ?

Via - ಕೊಂಕಣಿ buddies

ಸಂಪದ ದಲ್ಲಿ ನಾನು ಬರಿಯ ಪ್ರೇಕ್ಷಕನಾಗಿ ಅಲ್ಲಿ ಬರುವ ಲೇಖನಗಳನ್ನು ಓದುತ್ತಾ, "ಮೇರಾ ನಂಬರ್ ಭೀ ಆಯೇಗಾ" ಎಂದು ನನಗೆ ಸ್ಫೂರ್ತಿ ಬರಲಿ ಎಂದು ಕಾಯುತ್ತಿದ್ದೆ. ಆದರೆ, ಇತ್ತೀಚೆಗೆ, ಅದೇಕೋ "ಕಾರ್ಯ ಮೊದಲು, ಮಾತು ಆಮೇಲೆ" ಎಂಬ ಉಕ್ತಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಬಹಳ ನಂಬಿಕೆ ಉಂಟಾಗಿದೆ. ಅದಕ್ಕೆ ಇವತ್ತಿನಿಂದಲೆ ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ ಬ್ಲಾಗ್ ಶುರು ಮಾಡಿದ್ದೇನೆ.

ಈ ಸಂವಾದದಲ್ಲಿ ಚರ್ಚಿಸಿರುವಂತೆ, ಕಂಪ್ಯೂಟರ್ ತಿಳಿದಿರುವವರು, ಆದಷ್ಟು ಹೆಚ್ಚು ಹೆಚ್ಚು ಮಟ್ಟಿಗೆ ಅಂತರ್ಜಾಲದಲ್ಲಿ ಕನ್ನಡದ ಬಳಕೆ ಹೆಚ್ಚಿಸಬೇಕು. ಇದರಿಂದ, ತಾಂತ್ರಿಕೇತರ (non-technical?) ಕನ್ನಡಿಗರಲ್ಲಿ "ಇಂಟರ್ ನೆಟ್ ಕೇವಲ ಇಂಗ್ಲಿಷ್ ಬಲ್ಲವರ ಸೊತ್ತು" ಎಂಬ ತಪ್ಪು ಅಭಿಪ್ರಾಯ ತೊಲಗುತ್ತದೆ. ಕನ್ನಡಿಗರಿಗಿಂತಲೂ ಕಡಿಮೆ ಇರುವ ಎಷ್ಟೋ ಭಾಷಿಕರು ಅಂತರ್ ಜಾಲದಲ್ಲಿ ತಮ್ಮದೇ ಆದ ಅಸ್ತಿತ್ವವನ್ನು ರೂಪಿಸಿಕೊಂಡಿದ್ದಾರೆ. ಕನ್ನಡಿಗರು ತಮ್ಮ ವಿಶ್ವಮಾನವ ಸ್ವರೂಪಕ್ಕೆ ಕಳೆ ತುಂಬಲು ಅಂತರ್ಜಾಲ ಬಹು ಉಪಯುಕ್ತ ಸಾಧನವಾಗಬಹುದು.

ಈ ನಿಟ್ಟಿನಲ್ಲಿ ನಾನು ಏನು ಮಾಡಬಲ್ಲೆ? ಎಂಬ ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆ ನನ್ನನ್ನು ಕಾಡಿತ್ತು. ನನಗೆ ಬಹಳ ಆಸಕ್ತಿ ಇರುವುದು "ಓಪನ್ ಸೋರ್ಸ್ ಸಾಫ್ಟ್ವೇರ್" ಮತ್ತು "ಮಾಹಿತಿ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನ"ದಲ್ಲಿ. ಇದರ ಬಗ್ಗೆಯೇ ಬರೆಯಲು ಪ್ರಾರಂಭಿಸುತ್ತೇನೆ. ಚೆನ್ನಾಗಿ,ಅರ್ಥಪೂರ್ಣವಾಗಿ ಮೂಡಿಬಂದ ಲೇಖನಗಳನ್ನು ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯಕ್ಕೆ ಹಾಕುವ ಯೋಚನೆಯೂ ಇದೆ.

   ಸರಿಯಾಗಲಿಲ್ಲವದು ಸರಿಯಿಲ್ಲವೆನುತ್ತ |
   ಹರಡಿಕೊಳ್ಳಬೇಡ ಮುಳ್ಳನು ಹಾಸಿಗೆಯಲಿ ||
   ಕೊರೆಯಾದೊಡೇನಂದು? ನೆರೆಯಾದೊಡೇನಿನ್ನೊಂದು? |
   ಒರಟು ಕೆಲಸವೊ ಬದುಕು - ಮಂಕುತಿಮ್ಮ || 

A lot has been said and discussed in detail about how PHP and RoR have stolen the thunder from Python. For the record, there is nothing wrong with Python framework. If there is anything missing from Python, 1) "Loud" marketing ;) like RoR and 2)ubiquity of PHP.

Python is still the big brother of dynamic languages in terms of adoption. Ruby has to go a long way to beat Python in sheer number of libraries/applications. My suspicion is : the success of python in other areas could be masking its achievements in web frameworks.

As David Hansson himself pointed out, Ruby's popularity today is mostly because of Rails. Ruby is little known outside RoR and to some extent, Java circles. So, marketing is not the biggest concern for Python, though we could use some heavy guns on our side.

That leaves Python battling on two fronts. 1) Quick and easy web apps(scripts) - PHP. The biggest advantage of PHP is its ability to produce demonstrably working code within hours. 2) Framework driven applicationsor services - Ruby on Rails. Python has quite a few web frameworks which are mature, capable and cool [2]. The need of the hour is educating the users about hte choices and giving an easy way to ramp up their skills.

One of the major pluses for quick adoption of PHP has been the availability of cheap and ubiquitous PHP hosting services. Also, PHP lets you get to the task of coding without much ado. But, its not the same with Python frameworks some how. Unless you have a hosting provider who is actually knowledgeble about python frameworks, you will end up hosting your blog/site in PHP most of the time.

So, I set out to find out about one such framework.

My shopping list: * must work on most cheap php hosting servers * should be easy to start with. My first use of PHP was to do 'templating' - nothing more than couple of require_once statements. Nothing can beat that simplicity to get started on web programming. * a easy to use templating language. I like ZPT a lot. Kid is interesting too. But, I would settle for a templating language that allows me to mix code and HTML freely without me having to jump through hoops. * If i want a dynamic site tomorrow morning, can I use this framework? But, next week I want to add a e-commerce module....

I looked at turbogears. It is a very nice framework no doubt (I'm writing a personal project using TG). But, I wouldnot recommend it to an absolute beginner. Especially to someone from PHP or non-web-programming background.

Myghty could be a better fit that way[1]. I managed to install it on an ordinary php hosting server. I like the way in which the templates(components, as they are called) work. Myghty is inspired by HTML::Mason, which is reputed and proven to be a solid templating framework - Amazon uses it.

I'll post my gains/pains with Myghty and other python frameworks as I progress.

My quest is to find the python framework which allows me a newbie to be productive from word go.

Related Links:

• [1]. A good introduction to Myghty
• [2]. Comaprison of popular python web frameworks
• [3]. Discussion thread on Myghty

If you are a Bangalorean, and are looking for a good library, I recommend that you check out EasyLib. They claim to be the The first internet enabled library. Well, that claim could be true for Bangalore atleast :)

The best part is that, they have a very good book courier service. I get my books the very next business day after booking.

It works out well, if you are a voracious reader. I'm reading the Robot seris by Isaac Asimov. (Finished "The Caves of Steel" and "The Naked Sun", last week)

I was surprised to find 11 (yeah! eleven) books of Robert Heinlein . The only bookstore that stocked had RAH books is The CrossWord.

Easylib is a good find. And its much easy on the wallet.

I'm reading "The Amulet of Samarkand" by Jonathan Stroud. Hope to finish it over the weekend.

"""
Jython-WEKA data mining example 
Author: Pradeep Kishore Gowda 
This Program demonstrates the use of Simple Classification
 Algorithm (Using j48 decision Tree) on Iris Data set 
"""
import java.io.FileReader as FR
import weka.core.Instances as Instances
import weka.classifiers.trees.J48 as J48
# Load Data File
file = FR('iris.arff')
data = Instances(file)
"""
The sample data reads like this 
@relation iris
@attribute sepallength numeric
@attribute sepalwidth numeric
@attribute petallength numeric
@attribute petalwidth numeric
@attribute class {Iris-setosa,Iris-versicolor,Iris-virginica}
@data
5.1,3.5,1.4,0.2,Iris-setosa
"""
#set the class Index - the index of the dependent variable
data.setClassIndex(4)
#create the model
j48 = J48()
j48.buildClassifier(data)
#print out the built model
print j48
# you do not have to call the j48.toString(),
# My guess is Python's default __str__ method calls
#.toString Internally. ?
# let us classify an instance and verify the result
myinstance = data.instance(0)
klass = j48.classifyInstance(myinstance) 
#0.0
#what does 0.0 mean?
print data.attribute(data.classIndex()).value(klass)
#'Iris-setosa'   

Update: This thread on wekalist gives a similar example.

WEKA is a data mining library written in Java. WEKA implements many Machine Learning Algorithms for Classification and some Clustering algorithms. These algorithms are well supported by a nice set of data pre-processing utilities. WEKA also has GUI interface called the explorer and a Drag-and-Drop build tool to create custom applications.

However, WEKA does not lend it self for fast prototyping. That is, If I have a dataset, and want to see the result of using various algorithms interactively, or change parameters on-the-fly, it is not very convinient in Java.

It would be a good to have an interpreter where I can play around with data and algorithms.

Jython comes to the rescue. Jython is an implementation of the high-level, dynamic, object-oriented language Python written in 100% Pure Java, and seamlessly integrated with the Java platform. It thus allows you to run Python on any Java platform.

This means, we should be able access all the WEKA methods and classes from Jython because WEKA uses only Sun's Java libraries (including SWING).

Lets see how to do that:

Step 1 : Download Jython 2.1 from www.jython.org

Step 2 : Run the downloaded jython21.class file with java.

java jython21

The Graphical installer will ask you for the installation location. Choose any suitable location. My installation location is /home/pradeep/jython-2.1.

Step 2 : Download WEKA and unzip the zip file into a suitable location - /home/pradeep/weka-3-4-6

Step 3: Configure Jython

Open /home/pradeep/jython-2.1/jython and change the paths accordingly

#!/bin/sh
###############################################################################
#
# This file generated by Jython installer
# Created on XXX by pradeep

"/usr/bin/java" -Dpython.home="/home/pradeep/jython-2.1"
-classpath "/home/pradeep/jython-2.1/jython.jar:/home/pradeep/weka-3-4-6/weka.jar:$CLASSPATH"
"org.python.util.jython" "$@"

Above,

1. /usr/bin/java is the java runtime executable
2. /home/pradeep/jython-2.1 is the home of jython installation
3. the string following -classpath is the list of all the libraries that you want available inside Jython environment.

Step 4 : Testing the setup.

$/home/pradeep/jython-2.1/jython
Jython 2.1 on java1.4.2-02 (JIT: null)

>>> import weka
>>> dir(weka)
['name', 'associations', 'attributeSelection', 'classifiers',
'clusterers', 'core', 'datagenerators', 'estimators', 'experiment', 'filters', 'gui']
>>>

Now you have access to all the WEKA methods and libraries.

I'm giving a talk on Delivering Educational Content on the web with Plone CMS at Foss.in/2005.

Date : Tuesday, 29th November 2005.

Place : Torvalds hall, Palace Grounds, Bangalore map

Time : 12:00 - 12:45

To say that, the speaker line up is impressive is an understatement. :)

Python related Talks :

• Creating websites using Python and TurboGears by Swaroop

• Advanced Python Programming by my collegue Jacob Abraham.

The ruby folks have done a great job in getting a whole track for themselves. Rock on!

I use Trac at work. Trac is one of the best things I discovered after we started practising Agile Methodologies. Its as if trac was written with Agile Teams in mind.

We use it write XP User stories, User Acceptance tests, file bug tickets and maintain To Do Lists, Technical Glossary and some times we even capture the whiteboard discussions with a mobile camera and post it as a wiki page, so that the discussion is available for reference. With Trac, we are able to capture all the artefacts of the XP cycle. Its amazing how useful the Trac Wiki is proving to be. I especially like the Todo Lists.

A lot of newly hatched Open Source Projects use trac.

Newsforge is carrying a good piece on Project Management with Trac.

Oh! by the way, Trac is written in Python :)

I use pinboard.in for storing my bookmarks md5-38650a42d269917be01da1da507d0570

My del.icio.us bookmarks (I no longer use this service). I have moved all my bookmarks to pinboard.in/u:btbytes

Sampada.net has given Kannadigas a birthday gift. Podcasts! The very first podcast is an interview with Shri. Purnachandra Tejasvi, emiment Kannada writer. Listen and enjoy.

I believe in the power of podcasts. They have the power to create Citizens' Radio. I only hope that in the coming days many more such podcasts are made available.

TUX Magazine is a good starting point if you want to get into Linux. Slowly.

The magazine is focussed on new users to linux and avoids all kind of jargon and geekery typically expected of a Linux magazine. TUX magazine is very end-user-oriented, with little or no programmer or sys admin related content. Instead, concentrating on informing the user on the software available on Linux and how to make best of use them through sections like Home Plate and TUX explains. Linux advocacy and the Business angle are covered in the Suited Up section. P2P is conversation section including readers' letters, editorials etc.,

TUX mag seems to be pro-KDE. A lot of their articles talk about KDE apps, and in the recent edition, the editor makes no bones about why the magazine focusses more on KDE.

Good News

I was pleasantly surprised to know that TUX magazine has gone free. (they are no longer have a printed version). However, their recent edition (pdf only) has maintained the same quality and well-put-to-gether ness of earlier issues. All the previous issues are available online.

The Website - http://www.tuxmagazine.com

The site is a very good extension of their magazine. The site has managed to maintain the same level of approachability as the magazine.

You can subscribe to TUX magazine here

India

Brought to you by pratibha75, quizling and teemus.

Which states in India have you been to?

World

Comments:

Sumeet on 2005-04-10 20:08:00 said :
Hi there.
Was just looking around as to where all the meme I created has propagated to. :)

Thanks for putting it up!

regards,
Sumeet.

I took the Ecological footprint quiz from earthday.

The quiz is based on national consumption averages and is meant to give you an idea of your Ecological Footprint relative to other people in the country you live in.

Ecological Footprints document a given population's consumption and waste production expressed in biologically productive land and ocean areas necessary to maintain these services. By aggregating data on the consumption of various resources and on the ability of the earth to provide them, the Ecological Footprint accounts provide a means to compare various components of consumption and ultimately serve as an indicator of sustainability - or, in the case of deficits, of unsustainability

This is my Ecological footprint

Clearly, I consume Three times of resources an average Indian consumes. Shocking. That being a vegetarian(almost) and laying off packaged foods. Sigh!

Via reddit

Do you really need an MBA from a college to be a successful manager/entrepreneur?

Some people think its not a necessary condition for you to be a successful manager/entrepreneur. Below are the list of books, which could possibly give you same insights into runnig a business.

The Personal MBA is an attempt to aply entrepreneurial spirit to learning. This ChangeThis Manifesto gives you a brief overview of each book.in the program.

These are the books in the program. As you can see I have a long way to go before getting my Personal MBA.

1. Mastery by George Leonard
2. Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham & Donald O. Clifton
3. DONE . Getting Things Done by David Allen
4. DONE . The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
5. What the CEO Wants You to Know by Ram Charan
6. Profitable Growth Is Everyone's Business by Ram Charan
7. On Competition by Michael Porter
8. Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne
9. Seeing What's Next by Clayton M. Christensen, Erik A. Roth, Scott D. Anthony
10. The Essential Drucker by Peter Drucker
11. First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman
12. The One Thing You Need to Know by Marcus Buckingham
13. The Essays of Warren Buffett by Warren Buffett & Lawrence Cunningham
14. Poor Charlie's Almanack by Charlie Munger
15. The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course in Finance for Nonfinancial Managers by Robert A. Cooke
16. Essentials of Accounting by Robert Newton Anthony and Leslie K. Pearlman
17. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu Goldratt & Jeff Cox
18. Lean Thinking by James Womack & Daniel Jones
19. The Substance of Style by Virginia Postrel
20. The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
21. Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
22. The Marketing Playbook by John Zagula & Richard Tong
23. Purple Cow by Seth Godin
24. Free Prize Inside by Seth Godin
25. DONE . The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
26. DONE . The Bootstrapper's Bible by Seth Godin
27. Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler
28. On Writing Well by William Zinsser
29. DONE . How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
30. Influence by Robert B. Cialdini
31. The Little Red Book of Selling by Jeffrey Gitomer
32. Flawless Consulting by Peter Block
33. Real Estate Principles for the New Economy by Norman Miller & David Geltner
34. Getting To Yes by Fisher, Ury, and Patton
35. Principles of Statistics by M.G. Bulmer
36. A Primer on Business Ethics by Tibor Machan & James Chesher
37. Brand New by Nancy F. Koehn
38. American Business, 1920-2000 by Thomas K. McCraw, John H. Franklin, and A. S. Eisenstadt
39. The Little Book of Business Wisdom by Peter Krass (Editor)
40. Re-imagine by Tom Peters
41. The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun
42. The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch

MVC was one of those acronyms that I heard everywhere, with a vague sense of I know it; without being able to pin it down.

This explanation by Mark Pilgrim of Dive into Python is the easiest one to digest.

Interestingly, towards the end of the blog post, he says: > This (Asynchronous message passing between the View and the Model layers) doesn’t work for standard multi-tier web applications, because the view is generated as HTML and sent to the client, where it sits dumbly until the end user does something to initiate an action. > So the model can’t asynchronously tell the view that something interesting happened, because the view isn’t listening.

This is no longer true. (The article was written in 2001, before AJAX became popular). With XMLHTTPRequest, this limitation can be circumvented.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Rails developers are so excited about AJAX. So much so that they have integrated AJAX into the Rails framework.

A refrain often heard about web applications is the 'speed' of response. Even with a broad band connection, the web applications do not feel like desktop applications. Then, how come gmail is so snappy and fun to use, compared to the rest of webmail providers and even desktop equivalents? The answer is AJAX.

AJAX stands for Asynchronous Java Script and XML. Its a collection of technologies including Javascript, Dynamic HTML and XMLHTTPRequest. The main idea behind using AJAX is that, web pages are clumsy when it comes to data intensive user interaction. Using a clever combination of Javascript and a Microsoft pioneered technology called XMLHTTPRequest, the web developer can fetch the data with outthe user's direct input and change the behaviour of the User interface dynamically.

For instance, when you are signing up for a new online service, you might be asked for your country's name. Once you select the countries name, typically, the browser submits (asks you to click a button somewhere) this information to server, the server sends back a list of states/provinces in your country. In the mean time, you are left twiddling your thumbs. In contrast, a AJAX enabled webapp, will send out the country code silently to the Server while you bat your eyelid and fills up the 'provinces' list with relevent entries. All this happens without reloading the page.

Where is the XML? When the browser requests for a list of states, the server will send back the data in XML format. The client will then parse that data to whatever form necessary and render it as HTML. However, XML is not the be-all and end-all of data transfer formats in an AJAX implementation. XML suffers from poor human readability and verbosity. An excellent alternate is JSON - JavaScript Object Notation. JSON is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate. Since it is a subset of javascript programming language, it is quite native to Javascript(read speed). If you are a Python programmer (like me), you will appreciate the fact that a JSON object looks a lot like a Python Dictionary. JSON and AJAX are a potent combination that can make web application development a joy, as I found out in my current project (more about that in later posts).

How does the magic happen with the Interface? If you have used an AJAX application, you will notice that the page you are seeing changes with your input. Applying good AJAX practices, a chore like Registration page can be made much more bearable. We all love one page sign-ups right? This is possible by manipulating the DOM(Document Object Model) of the webpage. A well formed html document can be traversed much like a tree using Javascript. And nodes/elements of this tree can be replaced, new nodes added/deleted using Javascript. Even the Styling attributes of elements can be modified using Javascript. Today, with AJAX developers can do 'Flashy' stuff, without having to learn new tools and more importantly, without sacrificing accessibility and portability.

So, why is AJAX so exciting? AJAX has managed to excite the web developers of all hues (programmers...designers...artists...usability experts...) by being technology neutral (almost), familiar(JS,CSS,DHTML) and useful(it does make the programmer's life a lot easier). Developing AJAX is NOT easy. It requires the developer to have a good comamnd over a wide set of skillsets and forces him to think in terms of genuine ease of use instead of the old throw-an-ui-at-the-user mindset. At the same it offers the freedom from heavy-duty frameworks like Java and Flash.

The fact that AJAX manages to run on most modern browsers with no additional plugins, makes a compelling case for wider adoption by the developers. We can expect to see an explosion of AJAX applications in near future.

The tipping point for this almost decade old technology came with a clever and catchy name given by Jesse James Garrett in this article.

Some of the popular web applications that use AJAX are:

• google maps
• google suggest
• flickr

See Ajaxian, Ajax Matters,Ajax Patterns for more.

An excerpt from an article written by Sri Chiranjeev Singh, in the “Architectural Heritage and The City Aesthetics of Bangalore”, published in 1988 by T.P. Issar.

“Cosmopolitanism of the Indian sort is rootless: it makes for dull cities. Cosmopolitan Bangalore is dull; it is the non-cosmopolitan Karaga-celebrating, Dasaranaama-singing, Vachana-reciting, Rajkumar-cheering, ragi-mudde, anna-saaru-relishing Bangalore which is interesting.

Bangalore identifies itself more with Delhi or Bombay than the rest of Karnataka. It is quite in character that when Bangaloreans erected a statue of the founder, Kempe Gowda, they showed him clad in Rajasthani upper garment, Punjabi lower garment and Parsi theatre turban. That indeed is cosmopolitanism. Kempe Gowda in life would have gone around in native ‘panche’ (dhoti). His descendants prefer to call themselves Arun and Lohit, not Kempa. After all red is red, called by any name.

Like the characters in the Wizard Of Oz, the city seems to be in search of a soul. For a while it looked as if the Kannada Chaluvali – a militant assertion of Kannadiga identity – would be its Wizard of Oz but that did not happen. The movement degenerated into politics.

With the public sector invasion of the city – at the invitation of the state government in most cases – came more outsiders and more industries. The influx continues. Companies continue to move their headquarters from Bombay and Calcutta to Bangalore. Sometimes, one wonders when the reaction would start.

Architecturally also, the City is cosmopolitan. Every style, from Dravidian to modern, neo-classical to neo-gothic, co-exists along with the PWD-gothic. And then there is Vidhana Soudha, which can only be described as classical Kengal. The best example of this co-existence can be seen in the old Residency complex. There you have the most beautifully proportioned and elegant building of Bangalore flanked by a Charles Corea creation on one side and a PWD on the other.”

Via Prof. Vasant Honavar’s page » http://hulk.bu.edu/misc/karnataka/cities/bangalore/

Comments:

Rk on 2005-06-05 01:16:57 said :
hi pradeep,
new look is just cool!! earlier colors were a bit more, but this is very pleasant. also lot more on the sidebar!

Pradeep on 2005-06-05 03:31:53 said :
Hi Ravi,
thanks :)
Dude, what happened to your new blog?
Till you get your new blog, restart your blogging engines. Use your new ‘Lens’ :)

Rk on 2005-06-06 00:22:49 said :
hi pradeep,
check out new blog!

Article from around 2005-06. Exact date lost

Today Thursday evening I’m going to Ranga Shankara to watch Kannada play oDakalu bimba by master playwright Girish Karnad.
The play features Arundhati Nag . You can catch it on 22,23, 24th of this month. I also have my eyes on “Gokula nirgamana” by pu.ti.na enacted by benaka on Thursday,31 March 2005. Play starts at 7:30 PM. Dont be late!

Update: Some one from Ranga Shankara sent me a BIG poster of the play. Thank you. Hmm… Only if they had sent a ticket earlier in the day, I could have been watching the play instead of writing this update :) [We had to postpone the visit to Thursday as RK could not get the tickets even though he was at the theatre by 4PM]

Interestingly, If you google for Ranga Shankara , you will notice that this site appears just after Ranga Shankara .

Comments:

Ravikiran on 2005-03-23 22:44:04 said :
hi pradeep,
sorry to say…but we can’t even go on thursday as all the tickets are booked. due to corporate publicity ticktes are not available at all…i went today and got hold of last few tickets of saturday(that was the best i could get)...that would be in english…
sorry to disappoint, but something is better than nothing…what say ?
some info on the play: this play is written exclusively for RS and is the first production by RS itself. also, Girish Karnad’s first direction of his own play!
see you on saturday :)
-rk

Article from around 2005-06. Exact date lost

(This post is in Kannada UTF-8 encoding. Please read these instructions , to enable UTF-8 encoding on your computer)

ಬಹಳ ದಿನಗಳ ಪ್ರಯತ್ನದ ನಂತರ, ಇಂದು ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ ನನ್ನ ಪ್ರಥಮ blog post ಅನ್ನು ಮಾಡುತ್ತಿದ್ದೇನೆ. ಕನ್ನಡ ಕೀಲಿಮಣೆಯ ವಿನ್ಯಾಸ ಗೊತ್ತಿಲ್ಲವೆಂಬ ಸಬೂಬು ಕೇಳಿ ನನಗೇ ಬೇಸರವಾಗಿತ್ತು. :)

*ಸಹಸ್ರ ಪದಿಯ ತಳಮಳ*
ಒಂದು ಸಹಸ್ರ ಪದಿಯನ್ನು ಯಾರೋ ಕೇಳಿದರಂತೆ – ನೀವು ಹೇಗೆ ನಡೆಯುತ್ತೀರಿ ಎಂದು. ಅದು ಯೋಚನೆ ಮಾಡಲು ನಿಂತದ್ದು ಮತ್ತೆ ಮುಂದಕ್ಕೆ ಒಂದು ಹೆಜ್ಜೆಯನ್ನೂ ಇಡಲಾಗಲಿಲ್ಲವಂತೆ.
ನನ್ನ ಕನ್ನಡ ಬ್ಲಾಗಿಗೂ ಈ ಗತಿ ಬರುವುದು ಬೇಡವೆಂದು, ಇಂದು ಶುಭಾರಂಭ ಮಾಡಿದ್ದೇನೆ.

ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ ಹೆಚ್ಚು ಹೆಚ್ಚು ಜನರು, ಬ್ಲಾಗ್ ಮಾಡಿದಲ್ಲಿ, ಅಂತಜಾ೯ಲದಲ್ಲಿ ಕನ್ನಡದ ಬಳಕೆ ಹರಡುವುದೆಂಬ ಭರವಸೆ ನನಗಿದೆ.

Comments:

Nayan on 2005-06-16 06:55:50 said :
Nimma prathama kannada blog thumba channagide :)

creative commons is a flexible way of sharing your work of art (literature, fine arts) so that other s can learn, share and build upon your work; at the same time, honouring the original contributor and as a corollary, the subsequent contributor’s contribution to the evolving art form.

This concept is similar to our “janapada” tradition, in spirit, where the original author is unknown, yet the art lives on, for centuries.

However, the creative commons differs by allowing the user to share ‘some rights’ with the author in place of traditional copyright system’s – ‘All rights Reserved’ philosophy.

Keeping this in mind, appropriate word for Creative Commons in Kannada would be kalaatmaka janapada.

note: We need to translate the CC licenses to kannada some time soon.

Article from around 2005-06. Exact date lost

You must have noticed the Indian languages list at google.co.in . Kannada does not figure in that list yet. So, I went and checked the status of kannada translation.
The irony of it is, the main site translation is almost 70% done with another 185 messages left to do.

I’m starting the translation effort today. If you are a Kannadadiga who wants to contribute to Kannada’s presence online please put in a few hours. Later we can follow up with google to update the google.co.in site to have kannada search functionality.

update : if a few of us get together for 3-4 hours we can easily ‘Finish-off’ this task AND we can have fun doing it. Imagine all the guffaws we will be having when trying to translate words to kannada… hmm.. whats the word for ‘Developer’ again? :)

Comments:

swaroop C H on 2005-04-28 12:08:32 said :
Count me in.

pradeep on 2005-04-28 12:13:09 said :
Thats great dude…
lets the words start a-rollin’
:)

Sneha on 2005-04-28 12:34:04 said :
tips to start pls..!!

sunil on 2005-06-15 01:42:40 said :
I will run and join hands who do for my mother language.

Article from around 2005-06. Exact date lost

Yahoo increases the mailbox size to 1GB. While Yahoo! have been pretty nimble recently, especially with the improved search , aquiring flickr, yahoo! API , firefox toolbar , their email service has to go a looong way before they can tempt new users ( No thanks, I already have *6* current and active email IDs :) ).

Some of the things that would make me use more of my existing Yahoo id,

• So, you have increased the email space to 1GB. But whats killer about that ?.
• Integrate y! mail, y! chat and 360 (whenever that’s ready) so that i can search my emails, chats, my blogs ,external blogs i’ve syndicated in my yahoo! . ( Think of Gnome’s Dashboard project here.)
• Integrate Flickr! into my Yahoo! mail search. For example, when I search for bangpypers , i should also get to see the photos of bangpypers meetups, stored in my flickr account or my contact’s accounts. Its the RSS people…
• I’m very keen about seeing the chat session being saved as ‘conversations’ in my yahoo mailbox and being able read/search. No, saving sessions on to the disk some how does not work out.
• Remove all the ads, make the interface really lightweight
• put POP access back; that was the reason I started using Yahoo! in the first place
• Add intelligent search to email ala gmail . This should be trivial to yahoo

After a long time, I’m rooting for Yahoo!. Perhaps, I look to yahoo! as being a competetive underdog. Or, is that because I know quite a few Yahoo!s now?

Meanwhile, google is playing catch up in some areas and seems to be running into problems (302 page hijacking)

Comments:

Ravikiran on 2005-03-24 21:54:34 said :
Rightly said about the pop part of it. That was a painful period when pop was removed, and we went in search of other id(entities).Nothing really matches “pop access” and I would let go any feature for pop(esp with multiple accounts).Pop was the syndication for email!
Ps: yahoo.co.in still gives pop access :)

Swaroop C H on 2005-03-26 00:45:01 said :
Damn, we both talked about mail in the span of a few days.

The Y! Mail team is taking too long to bring updates but I’ve been hearing they’re up to a lot of stuff. Hopefully, it is soon rather than later. I *badly* want a threaded view in Y! Mail.

Pradeep on 2005-03-26 01:42:23 said :
Yahoo! gave a demo of 360 today to some select people. They have integratged chat, photos and of course the blog stuff..
cool! I guessed correctly :)

Kannada is one of the major Indian Languages with 2,000 years of history and the written literature has 1,500 years of varietable tradition. According to the 2001 census, there are 52,733,958 (nearly 53 million) Kannada speaking people in India alone with wide spread diaspora all over North America and Australia .

Going by the crieteria set for recognition of a language as a classical one, Kannada rightfully qualifies for accord of a classical language on all counts – antiquity, ancient body of literature, original living traditions and continuity. Kannada has impeccable credentials as documented by UNESCO in it its monograph on Asian scripts, which ranks Kannada among the major scripts of the world.

Rajya Sabha MP, KB Krishnamurthy from Karnataka recently (28.Apr.2005) urged the Central Goverment to accord classical language status to Kannada, by making a special mention in the House of parliment. The member said beyond its lexical purity, Kannada transends the creative aspects further on to canonises local knowledge systems, and grammatical traditions.

Note: Friends, kannadadigas, if you have more information on the above topic please send a mail to me .

via: deccan herald

Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson . This is a good starting point. Oh! If you have been reading Paul Graham , there is a new essay on writing

How do you distinguish a master prose sculptor, from an ordinary one?
Sarvagna has an answer :

rasikanaaDida maatu | shashiyudisi bandante |
rasikanallada barimaatu kivige koor |
dasiyu baDidante sarvagna

Comments:

aqua on 2005-03-30 10:01:11 said :
hi, am trying to learn kannada. do y know any good website that might help?

Swaroop C H on 2005-03-31 09:25:13 said :
Why not give an explanation to the Sarvagna sayings?

Dilip on 2005-04-03 00:03:25 said :
Hi Pradeep,

I just came across this site which tells about “With so many choices, a quick reference of different search engines”.
http://www.philb.com/whichengine.htm

Noufal Ibrahim on 2005-04-18 15:43:09 said :
Hello there! Been a while since I visited your blog. :)

Emerson is really good. One of my favourites as is his school. He overdoes is at times but is still worth reading. I’d also recommend Throeau who I believe was a student of his.

Tim Bray says : Ten Reasons Why Blogging is Good For Your Career

1. You have to get noticed to get promoted.

2. You have to get noticed to get hired.

3. It really impresses people when you say "Oh, Irsquo;ve written about that, just google for XXX and I'm on the top page" or "Oh, just google my name".

4. No matter how great you are, your career depends on communicating. The way to get better at anything, including communication, is by practicing. Blogging is good practice.

5. Bloggers are better-informed than non-bloggers. Knowing more is a career advantage.

6. Knowing more also means you're more likely to hear about interesting jobs coming open.

7. Networking is good for your career. Blogging is a good way to meet people.

8. If you're an engineer, blogging puts you in intimate contact with a worse-is-better 80/20 success story. Understanding this mode of technology adoption can only help you.

9. If you're in marketing, you'll need to understand how its rules are changing as a result of the current whirlwind, which nobody does, but bloggers are at least somewhat less baffled.

10. It's a lot harder to fire someone who has a public voice, because it will be noticed.

Update June 2008. You might also like to read Aaron Swartz's rationale for blogging, which I find to be reason enough to be worth the time and effort

Comments:

Kiran Jonnalagadda on 2005-03-21 10:37:52 said :
From the applecart-upsetting department: http://the.taoofmac.com/space/blog/2005-03-12

Pradeep Kishore Gowda on 2005-03-21 10:46:10 said :
Hmm…
That was interesting.
I agree that most of what Tim said is US centric. Blogs are still a very niche thing in India. And most employers still don’t get it.

I bought a copy of Sarvagnana VachanagaLu; a collection of >1000 kannada triplets by 12AD(?) poet-saint Sarvagna.

An appropriate ‘vachana’ for the moment

ವದನೆ ಯೋಗಿಗೆ ಹೊಲ್ಲ |
ಬದನೆ ರೋಗಿಗೆ ಹೊಲ್ಲ |
ಕದನವಡು ಹೊಲ್ಲ
ನೆರೆಯಲಿ, ನಿದ್ದೆಗೆ |
ತುದಿಗಟ್ಟೆ ಹೊಲ್ಲ ಸರ್ವಜ್ಞ

Translation:

a fair maiden is bad for a hermit |
so is a brinjal for the unwell |
undesirable is bickering with the neighbour and |
so is sleeping on the edge of a platform.

Forgive my crude translation. Its a joy to read the vachanas in kannada.

Back in 1996, when I first used the internet, Yahoo! was the web. To get anywhere, I used to start at Yahoo’s front page. Yahoo! started out as a website containing links to other websites. Yahoo! classifed sites under the most important attributes of that page. This was, obviously, both human-time intensive and wouldn’t scale well. Other websites tried to copy this model and thus sprang many ‘portals’. The search result s of the day were no more than simple string matches. Most of the times, the results had nothing to do with the topic we were searching for.
The efficacy of the search engine was limited by these two factors:
1. Indexing of web pages by humans was not scalable to keep up with the explosion of new websites.
2. Search was brutal and used no human ‘intelligence’

Google came on to the scene with a simple intention of making search easy and useful. They solved both the above problems by
1. Index every possible page out there (They have one of the most awesome hardware setups in the world)
2. Use ‘human’ intelligence contained in the pages themselves to improve the search result.

So, what is this human intelligence we are talking about?
Every time we create a page, say “Kannada Plays” , we link to various other pages, which contain information related to the topic at hand. By doing this we are increasing the information contained in our wep page, as well affirming our faith in the referred page as being another source of useful information. Google uses this idea to “Rank” websites based on their popularity.

Google’s approach to search in-a-way helped make the internet a better place. At least till the ‘90%’ caught on. Google liked well structured documents, well linked documents, clean URL’s and those pages which tried to be standard compliant. A lot of Search Engine Optimisation(SEO) Companies sprang up to help websites to gain visibility on google . And they made a lot of money on it too. Where ever there is money, greed soon follows. That is manifesting today in form of blog spam, trackback spam and of late 302 page hijack scams. Google is very competitive and the search game is gettting hotter every day with yahoo! and MSN upping their ante. Search is serious business today with billions of dollars in revenue for both search companies and the advertisers. In the internet age, losing visibility is death. So, people will do anything to increase their presence (pagerank?). Where does this leave the ordinary user vis-a-vis finding genuine information? Is there a way out of this seemingly endless cat and mouse game? is there a better way to find useful information other than to use google/yahoo/msn?

Yes, and that is del.icio.us . This site is a masterful execution of one simple idea; the idea that – people like to bookmark what they like, and if there is a way to know what other people are reading on the internet on the same subject, we are increasing the ‘intelligence’ of the system as a whole. There are two basic ways you can use del.icio.us.

1. Use it to store information on useful links, by assigning them ‘tags’. Basically this would allow you to recall any pages by just typing http://del.icio.us/tag/subject . This eliminates any need for you to store the web pages on your hard disk and there is no worry about having to writing down the URL for future reference. This is called ‘tag surfing’

2. Look up people with similar interest. If you notice that 10 other people have bookmarked the same page on an esoteric subject as you, you might want to take a look at what they are reading. Its akin to reading the ‘mind’ without even having to know them! [I agree, that is a little paranoid :)]

Today, when I want to learn more about a particular topic, I still use google. But, the aha! finds are usually from del.icio.us. Does it mean delicious is the answer to our search woes? It seems so for forseeable amount of time. Long run? well.. as John Keynes put it ,”In the long run, we are all dead”. No, the popularity and success of del.icio.us will see ‘link spam’ become a problem. But, again, the solution lies with us and not the system.

In real world, we trust information from people we know. In future, when link spam becomes a serious issue, we may limit our tag surfing to our friends (real and virtual) and their friends. The concept of friends of friends will keep some areas of the ‘semantic web’ hygenic and useful.

The human intelligence has made a come back into the search game. Interestingly, the technology behind del.icio.us uses the age old social-networking idea to find things faster. Its all in the ‘connections’ you know.

Article from circa 2005-06. Exact date lost

The next Python outing in Bangalore will be the BangPypers meet on 19th Feb.

DONT PANIC!! Python’s don’t bite. They just hug very warmly :). Jokes apart, BangPypers is the short name for Bangalore Pythonistas; a cool collection of geeks from across the IT industry spectrum bound by the shared enthusiasm for our favourite programming language – PYTHON

The evolving agenda for the group is to popularise the python language, learn and share new and powerful features of the language on an on-going basis, contribute to Free/Open Source Software through Python and promote professional use of Python. And last but not but the least, have fun while doing all that heavy crunching :)

The first formal BangPypers meet will be on 19th feb 2005. See the meetup page for venue and time. Please RSVP if you are attending.

I’ll be talking on ‘Functional Programming in Python’. Anand Pillai will be generating new interest on ‘Generators & generator expressions’ and Premshree Pillai will be cooking some ‘yammy’ :) stuff with YAML and pyyaml.

Each talk will be followed by Q&A sessions and a BoF(Birds of Feather) session at the end of talks.

I had contributed an article on Pyrex to March 2005 edition of Developer IQ. Now, you can read it online Speed up Python with Pyrex

Article from circa 2005. Exact date lost

Check out my article on Subversion in Feb Edition of Developer IQ

Article from circa 2005. Exact date lost

Comments:

Satchit on 2005-02-06 02:01:48 said :
congrats dude!

I’m back from Calicut after giving a talk on Python @ NIT Calicut’s Free/Libre Open Source software meet. Me and Swaroop talked about Python for nearly 3 hours. Going by the number of questions that were asked and the students approaching us to talk in the lunch break, I’m sure there are a new bunch of Pythonistas in Calicut :) This was my largest audience so far with nearly 150 people comprising of students and staff.

Later in the day, Shanker Balan talked about the ‘other’ free OS – The *BSDs. Followed by a very energetic and convincing talk on Open Source in India by Atul Chitnis

The NIT Campus is huge. After the urban claustrophobia, the campus was liberating. I’m thankful to Prof MohanDas for inviting us and congrats to Dilip and Praveen on superbly managing the whole show.

Swaroop has two exhaustive posts on the trip . There are some fantastic (read wallpaper-quality) photos as well as the slides of the talk. We were a good team on-stage, delivering the talk. Looking forward to more such gigs. What say dude? :)

Comments:

Swaroop C H on 2005-02-04 09:58:01 said :
Definitely dude! More power to the tribe :D

Rinish on 2005-05-26 06:02:32 said :
Hi there,
what gigs are you talking abt?
has that any things to do with opensource development?
ahh hmm by the way I am Rinish Balan. Iam basically from Calicut, now working at Bangalore as linux admin.I was just checking wether my old site www.conag.org still shows up in google when i search “calicut open source” ;)
sorry if iam disturbing u
But ill like to know is there any development that u are planing to put up at Calicut? I would like to be a support from outside (I am sure you guys won’t need my help ,still !!)
Alright bye
wish all the best

Rinish on 2005-05-26 06:04:24 said :
Rinish here again
please send me replies of this at rinish_balan@rediffmail.com
Coz i wont b comming bak to this page any more

I read Kent Beck s Extreme Programming Explained
more than an year back. Paired programming appealed to me immediately. Gradually, I’m moving towards writing test driven programs. Writing test cases for existing code is a pain. I’m looking forward to Agile India 2005 to learn more about the best practices from the XP/Agile world.

If you are into Extreme Programming/Agile methods, and if you are from Bangalore, you definitely wouldn’t want to miss out on this one. The registrations are open .
Incidentally, the conference is at my college PESIT.
I bought Extreme Programming in 24 Hours by Steward Baird from the new Sapna book shop in Jayanagr IV block. Hoping to finish that book by this month-end.

Article from around 2005. Exact date lost

Choose Python. Choose readability.
Choose the simple over the complex and
the complex over the complicated. Choose
dynamic typing. Choose duck typing.
Choose decorators. Choose generators.
Choose metaclasses if you don’t value
your sanity. Choose to import this. Choose
an almost-fanatical devotion to the BDFL,
unless he comes up with something like
optional static typing, in which case choose
to whine about it in your blog until he stops.
Choose Effbot. Choose Timbot. Choose
wx. Choose to come up with a bloody im-
plementation before spouting off on
comp.lang.python or Python-Dev. Choose
the explicit rather than the implicit. Choose
one obvious way to do it, especially if you
are Dutch. Choose list comprehensions.
Choose Paul Graham’s essays and
s/LISP/Python/g. Choose Jython when
your marketing people choose Java.
Choose speed of development over speed
of execution, but when in doubt, import
psyco. Choose to finish early and laugh at
your colleagues as they waste their miser-
able lives bowing down in subservience to
that sadistic little C++ compiler.
Choose your future
Choose Python.

Pythonistas of Bangalore came together yesterday to herald a new chapter in the history of Pythonic computing. Hooray!

The meetup was organised by Anand Pillai, well known for his column on Python in Linux For You.
Me and Swaroop landed in Barton Centre on MG Road. The only other person we knew was Premshree Pillai ; a Yahoo!, Python chef(look up his recipes in ASPN Python cookbook) and off-late a Ruby convert.
We went up to Ebony in the 13th floor. In the lift, there were 3 other guys, Owen,Suresh from Thoughtworks and Sundar from Computer Associates. We easily deduced that they were fellow pythonistas too. After all, who else, but fellow geeks be out in such numbers on a saturday night.

Anand had already landed a very nice table in the terrace, overlooking the City. I had never seen Banglore from that vantage point before. The evening was chilly but soon python embraced us in a warm hug :)

Ramdas, editor of Developer IQ; Gurupreet from Textual Analytics and Anish from Infosys SET labs were already there.

It was a pleasant surprise to meet Ramdas, after having sent my article on Subversion to him only the day before.

Python! thy name is??
After a formal round of introductions, we got down to the business of setting the agenda for the day. First order of the day was to give a name to the group. The alternatives that came up were.

• Bang!Python
• BaPy (for Bangalore Pythonistas)
• BaPy.py
• and some other names which were really cool, but perhaps you couldnt say it with a straight face ;)
  Ramdas did an anonymous voting and the winner was BaPy.

  Anand suggested that we have Technical discussions and presentations on Python and related technologies from the next meeting onwards. This was well received and Owen graciously offered to host it for the time being in Thoughtworks premises.

  Sundar proposed the idea of, the group to starting a python project. Swaroop backed him with his idea for a CPAN like repository for python modules. We will be seeing some action on this soon!

  Ramdas shared his views on having a good RAD tool in python, lowering the barrier for newbie programmers in adopting Python.

  And ah!! no meetup of geeks is complete without a round of battle between Vim and Emacs guys. Owen, Anil and Anish led the emacs front with me, swaroop and Prem defending Vim ;)

  PyPy, Stackless,SWIG, ahem static typing also were also discussed.

  What really excites me about this group is the depth and diversity. When you have people from Grid computing, Data Mining, Agile Programming, Web application servers background, writers and a magazine editor, the group is really very interesting !!

  We will have a mailing list soon. Watch this space. Swaroop has the photos

  ---

  Comments:

  Satchit on 2005-01-24 00:20:53 said :
  Good to know abt the Bangalore Python group. This will help Python users to share their experiences and knowledge of the language. Looking forward to attending the next meet. btw, emacs rules! :-)

Yoohoo!
At last! after all these years of waiting for a decent internet connection, my prayers seem to be answered.
Tariff info here.
[posted at 1:25 AM on 18 Jan 2005]

Comments:

Srikanta Prasanna on 2005-01-18 10:45:11 said :
Hi,
Suggestion:
Don’t go for the Online
Registration thing for
DataOne. It is no use. I did
that and when I went to BSNL
office to enquire, CO said
“We have not received any
documents of the online
registered customers”. I had
to submit another hard-copy
of the application; and my
waiting list number: 329 :(

My article on SQLite is published in January 2005 edition of Developer IQ The title of the article is Move over MySQL, SQLite is here!!. I had given a talk with the same name at Linux Bangalore 2004

Update: The SQLite article is online at developeriq.com

Article from circa 2005-2006. Exact date lost

Comments:

Ravikiran on 2005-01-12 06:05:23 said :
Read ur article on DiQ. nice article the sqlite has been given on the cd!!

Also noticed that Ramdas shares ur interest
Also I liked his “realistic” analysis and comparision of open source with communalism.would like to know ur views

sindu subhash on 2005-01-26 20:33:19 said :
Hi

I liked your article on Dev IQ magazine. Write similar article on similar technologiues

Good Luck

I’m going to NIT-Calicut (formerly REC,Calicut )along with Swaroop to conduct a one-day workshop on Python and related technologies on 29th Jan,2005, a Saturday.
I’m planning to spend the day-before-the-event sight seeing in and around Calicut. What places do you recommend ?

Comments:

Praveen A on 2005-01-08 23:15:38 said :
Hello, Welcome to our campus. Hope you’d like the beautiful God’s own country and its hospitality.
And Thanks for joining our group.

Praveen A

Pradeep on 2005-01-08 23:27:20 said :
Hi Praveen,
thanks for stopping by.
I’m sure I’ll enjoy my first ever visit to Kerala. :)
I’m looking forward to meeting all you guys in NITC.
Cheers,

Swaroop C H on 2005-01-09 15:46:59 said :
Yo Pradeep,

Here’s my post on the same:

http://www.swaroopch.info/archives/2005/01/09/python-workshop-at-renaissance-2005/

Let’s plan up on some awesome sight-seeing in Kerala… we’re anyway gonna see some snakes in the computer lab.. ha ha :)

Ravikiran informed me that the earlier CSS was rendering badly in IE(Internet Explorer) .So I decided to simplify the CSS further to fit the crappy IE browser. I hope that browser just keels over and dies. Can you imagine! IE wont render a valid W3C compliant CSS!! Argh!!
Please consider switching to a real browser like Mozilla Firefox . Its only a 4.5MB download on windows. Its fast, it is standard compliant, its free, it has loads of features you will not see in IE for another two years atleast, if even that.

Update: IE product manager Jim Allchin says IE wont be updated till their next OS comes out, which by the way, is some where in 2007. In the mean time point your browser to this security page to check how vulnerable is your browser to exploits.

I ran the test on my browser(Mozilla on Mepis Linux), and this is the result.(click on the image for a full fiew)

Zero vulnerabilities. Go beat that now!!

Update 2: Wallstreet Journal recommends Firefox too!

14 MILLION people are already using Firefox. So, you are not risking anything by using Firefox. Ask your sys-admin nicely to install it for you. You MUST use Firefox at home because if a virus hits you:

1. you might not even know that you have a virus
2. you may not know how to get rid of it
3. you may have to pay to get your system de-wormed (sic!)

If you want firefox on CD, ask me nicely. :)

Even better, switch to Mepis Linux . I no longer use windows anywhere; my life is windows free. At work I use Red Hat 9(yikes!, time to upgrade) and at home I use Mepis 2004.3. Mepis is faster, easier and cleaner than windows. Dont even get me started on virus and stuff.
Tell me how you liked this design, and how it renders on your browser. Since I dont have IE , you will have to tell me whether this design works for you. use this form send an email to me immediately. Or, of course, you can leave a comment below.

This is how it looks on my Mepis Linux desktop. Click on the image to see the full image.(Opens in a new window.)

I used this website colour reference to choose the colour scheme.

Comments:

Satchit on 2004-12-31 02:47:11 said :
Nice design. The site looks neat.

Ravikiran on 2004-12-31 21:53:28 said :
Ok sir, I am using firefox ;-) I had already installed it, but for one last time I had used IE to look at your messy site….no offense meant!
Also I am nicely asking for mephis cd…
thnQ for all the knowledge,
RK

I used to enjoy the Sunday Magazine column in the Hindu by V Gangadharan, named “Slice of Life”. In one such article, he wrote how daily routines like a cup of coffee in the morning and the newspaper make us feel “everything-is-alright” even though the front page is carrying news of murders and scams.

Nowadays I do not wake up to the rustle and fresh print smell of Deccan Herald anymore. I turn to slashdot for my daily fix of news, “stuff that matters” comes through my monitor’s screen. Here is my News Roll:

• Slashdot – News for nerds, stuff that matters (yeah, right!)
• Newsforge – news about Opensource and Linux
• OSNews.com – news about operating systems from latest to the esoteric
• del,icio.us – I feel like a kid at a candy store everytime i visit del.icio.us. So many subjects, so many links, so little time…
• google news – something more ‘real’
• boing boing – dash of gossip, irrelevency and cool stuff.
• wikipedia – makes you feel that you are learning something :)

So, how does your News-Roll look like? what sites get you going in the morning? What do you suggest? Leave a note below !!

Get a taste of Freedom! The newest version of OpenCD 2.0 is out. The OpenCD is a collection of best-of-breed Free/Open Source Software collection for the Windows platform.

Software carried in the CD:

Productivity

• OpenOffice 1.1.3
• AbiWord 2.2.1
• PDFCreator 0.8

Design

• GIMP 2.0.5
• Blender 2.35a
• Dia 0.94
• TuxPaint 0.9.14

Internet/Networking

• FireFox 1.0
• Thunderbird 1.0
• Mozilla suite 1.7.3
• Gaim 1.1.0
• Filezilla 2.2.9
• TightVNC 1.3dev6
• WinHTTrack 3.32-2

Multimedia

• Audacity 1.2.3
• Celestia 1.3.2
• CDex 1.51

Utilities

• 7-zip 3.13
• Notepad2 1.0.12
• SciTE 1.62

Games

• Sokoban 1.187
• Battle for Wesnoth 0.8.8
• Lbreakout 2.4.1

4 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi pradeep,
do you know where to get the OpenCD v2.0 in
bangalore?

can leave a comment here, or
mail me at srikanta at gmail dot com

thanks!
--srikanta

1:52 PM  

Dilpu said...

Hello Pradeep,
I have found another GNU based Windows Softwares. The project name is GNUwin. I have downloaded the two CD's . This has got lots of engineering softwares like Sci Lan, Linux CAD, Openoffice also.

9:27 PM  

Dilpu said...

Hello Pradeep,
I have found another GNU based Windows Softwares. The project name is GNUwin. I have downloaded the two CD's . This has got lots of engineering softwares like Sci Lan, Linux CAD, Openoffice also.

9:28 PM  

Anonymous said...

A better collection of Free Software for Windows is available from GNU Generation called GNUwin. It has two cds full of Free softwares for Windows. Many Multimedia and Science applications like xine, octave... in additions to the popular free softwares like openoffice and gimp.
Check their site at
GNUWin -- Open your Windows ! http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/


3D Games

* Celestia
* glTron
* Tux Racer
* BZFlag
* Flight Gear

more...
Computer Security

* Eraser - File Shredder
* GPG - GNU Privacy Guard
* OpenSSL
* WinPT
* Nmap

more...
Desktop Environments

* LiteStep

Development

* MinGW32 gcc C/C++/Java/Fortran Compiler
* XEmacs
* Blender
* Pascal Develop
* SiePerl

more...
Education

* Solfege
* Tux Paint - paint for children
* TuxType

Engineering

* Dia
* LeoCAD
* gEDA - GPL Electronic Design Automation
* QCad

Games

* Crack Attack!
* Free Civ
* Frozen Bubble
* GNU Chess
* LBreakout2

more...
Graphics

* The Gimp
* Sodipodi
* Blender
* povray
* Dia

more...
Internet and communications

* Mozilla Firefox
* Gaim
* Mozilla
* PuTTY
* Ethereal

more...
Multimedia

* VideoLAN Client
* mplayer - a media player
* OpenDivX -- Project Mayo
* winLAME
* Zinf Audio Player

more...
Office

* OpenOffice.org
* XEmacs
* Abi Word
* GNU - Ghostscript
* LaTeX (MiKTeX)

more...
Operating systems

* GNU GRUB
* Cooperative Linux
* DOSBox, a x86 emulator with DOS
* FreeDOS
* Gestor de Arranque Gráfico

more...
Other

* DRKSpider
* WinPenguins
* cygwin - UNIX command line

Sciences and Math

* Maxima
* Octave
* Celestia
* R
* Scilab

more...
Servers and database

* Database Design Tool
* Apache web server
* MySQL - Database
* PHP
* Unison

Utilities

* 7-Zip
* antiword
* gzip
* UnxUtils
* wmfishtime - Fish, Time, Date, Bubbles

more...


And their next version will have
DeeEnEs A Note Adonthell - an open source roleplaying game
Ant Renamer beepage BIND
BitTorrent bochs - an x86 emulator
BSPlayer
Bug Squish CamStudio
cdlabelgen - a free cd label generator
CodeWorker Ek! - Esperanta Klavaro gAlan, Graphical Audio Langague
gcompris GNU VCDImager GNUstep Development Environment
GPS Babel Grisbi, Personal Finance Manager for All Knockin
KOPS libcaca - textmode picture viewer LilyPond
LyX - a WISIWIM document processor nasm - Netwide Assembler NmapWin
Open Watcom Pdf Creator phpMyAdmin
POPFile Automatic Email Sorting using Naive Bayes PostgreSQL scriptbasic a BASIC interpreter/compiler
Space Invaders SpamPal SuperTux - 2D jump 'n run
Synergy TestDisk TeXniCcenter - A free clone for WINEDT
The Mozilla Thunderbird mail project thttpd timidity++
UPX - ultimate packer for executables XOSL - Extended OS Loader ZynAddSubFX

Today, I gave a talk on SQLite at Linux Bangalore 2004.

I had an auditorium full of people. Nearly 110 people in a 60 seater auditorium, many sitting in the aisle and some standing throughout the talk :( . The talk was moved from a 90 seater to a 60 seater hall yesterday for reasons unknown.

We could see full attendance at most auditoriums, especially the 750 seater main auditorium. This is a clear indication of growing mind-share of FOSS among developers. We need to look for a bigger place next time. I would not say a better place, because nothing beats IISc when it comes to ambience.

Lot of people were taking notes while I was speaking. I did evoke smiles a few times [and I did not trip over the cable]. And there were questions in the end. I really enjoyed giving the talk. I would definitely like to go back next year.