emerge

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“The phoenix must burn to emerge.” ― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

after gone missing for more than 2 years i have emerged back from outer space back to this lively blue green planet. lot of things have changed, both from my end and in the world around me. the geek in me have been shadowed by the responsibilities of a husband and a father. and my work life gives me no more opportunity to be the geek i was. the hacker spirit is long gone and am merely surviving.

this could be another futile attempt to re-emerge, though am no more practicing the craft to be able to write anything of use to anyone. but there are things that i wrote way back that still draws attention of the searching souls and many times prove useful to them. am happy to be of some help, hope i can do much better.

This Blog Is Not Dead

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This blog is not dead, it’s just me who doesn’t post.

I still get an occasional thanks for a very old post and am happy that I could help someone looking desperately for an answer, like I once did.

Life has changed a bit but priorities have changed a lot, what I found curious then have become the way-it-is now and hence my attention have turned towards other things, especially those which have come new into my life. Those who know get the clue, and those who don’t I just hope that I’ll be able to come back in sometime, may be not as much as I was but better than what am.

Till then, singing off…

inpycon09 the success story

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When the first discussions happened, everybody doubted it might become just another conference discussion that will never happen. It has taken the support and sheer determination of quite a number of people to make it happen. We just wanted to try it once, to at least see how the Python community responds to such initiatives and it has ended up being more than encouraging to make this a yearly event. This is the simple story of inpycon09.

When I landed at the IISc campus on a not so chilly morning, the posters were up and I could find a few people waiting here and there in the corridors. When I entered nothing was up yet, other than a few volunteers running around putting posters and direction notices. Slowly people started turning up and I could see more known faces. By 9 AM, there were enough crowd to start the registration counter and soon a long queue got formed.

The conference kit consisted of a notepad, ID tag, a pen and a pycon tee. It was a simple white tee, with a caption in the back. Unfortunately we ended up having a spello in it, which indeed made the tee more special 😉 Halls were fast filling up and when Prabhu Ramachandran was delivering the keynote the benches got filled and people started filling up the foot steps as well. It was a very interesting talk, encouraging everyone to go and give a shot with Python. He had also included his associations with ILUGC and how it helped him. He advised people to become a part of an active LUG. His talk was mostly around SciPy and Mayavi.

As the keynote ended, talks in other two halls started, kicking the normal proceedings of the first day of inpycon. Every hall was running full house and we would’ve had around 300 people attending the conference, especially a big bunch of students of REC, Chennai. Kenneth and Noufal took the Introduction to Python talk, leaving me for the second day. There was actually a balance of talks, not just focusing on web development. And the lunch was really good.

A lot of #linux-india guys had turned up and it was surprising to meet them before the normal foss.in season. The first day ended up quite satisfactorily and gave us hopes for the second day to run smoothly. Though we did not have a huge crowd on the second day, and it being only a half day of scheduled talks, it too went calmly. I took the beginners’ introduction to Python, following by Kenneth taking some advanced topics. There was a white sheet posted with post-it notes to be used to express the feedbacks from delegates and we ended up getting some quite interesting, even contradicting opinions posted about the conference. We welcome the criticisms as it helps us to know our holes and stop it from appearing next time.

On the whole, the beta release of inpycon was a satisfying success, leaving my weekend to have not been wasted and giving us the encouragement to come back better next year, may be in Chennai 😉

ILUGC Monthly Meeting June 2009

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The monthly meeting of ilugc, which usually happens every second Saturday, for the month of June 2009 happened yesterday. There were two talks, Emacs’ org-mode by Ashok Gautham and CUPS configuration in the Configuration Series by Raman P.

As we did not have projector this time, both of them had to resort using the white board, which made them actually finish the talk sooner than expected. Although Raman managed to make the talk interesting by including real life situations he had faced, thanks to his experience, Ashok struggled a bit as his was more a practical demonstration. We should try our best to get the projector for the meet from next time, as well as the speakers should be prepared to do without one.

There was a lot of first timers to LUG meet this time, and one of them is involved in a project developing custom made embedded boards, which they plan to make available for a cost of 3ooo INR so that students can buy and play with them. He will hopefully be demonstrating the board during the next meet, so embedded fanboys mark your calendar in advance.

Here are some snaps from the meeting,

Ashok Gautham during his org-mode talk

Ashok Gautham during his org-mode talk

Raman speaking about CUPS configuration

Raman speaking about CUPS configuration

organized search

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Today’s Indian Express carried an article about Kosmix, another search engine but with a revolutionary new idea. We all know that Google has become synonymous to web search that we often call it as googling. May be that verb should get added to the dictionaries.

But, as the article rightly points out, the outcome of a Google search is nothing but a list of blue links, sorted by its PageRank mechanism. Thus, what we see as the result is just the top scoring web pages and not a mixture of relevant and different types of information. The reason is still most top web search engines consider the web to be made of pages, which is not entirely true.

Though we still access a web page to see a content or in original terms the information, the information is not just a bunch of text. And even information as a bunch of text is not of the same type. In this web2.0 era, information is not just in web pages, it is in blogs, it is in Orkut and Facebook profiles and groups, it is in microblogging especially tweets, it is in images posted in Flickr and lot other places, it is in discussion forums, it is in Youtube and other video sharing sites, it is in iTunes and other music sharing sites, and a hell lot of other places and in a hell lot of formats.

For example, when we are searching about a person we just do not want to know his home page and wherever his name is mentioned. We might want to know his personal information, we might want to know his Facebook profile, we might want to know his digital albums, we might want to know the music he hears to or uploads, we might want to know the video he has just uploaded or a video about him or presented by him, we might want to know his last tweet, we might want to know lot of other things. Just giving them as a list of blue links in a page doesn’t help people anymore.

The search results need to be organized and categorized so that the audience can get a big screen picture and not the boring links to click one after another in an endeavor to find the information that one wants. This is what Kosmix tries to do. It organizes the information into news, video, books, blogs, tweets, photos…

For example, search for Manmohan Singh gives me the wiki article about him, videos of him and about him, links for information pertaining to him, images of him, discussion about him, questions asked about him,  news and blogs, and all you want to know about him neatly organized.

As the article mentions in the end, it is now upto Google, Yahoo and other search engine beasts to wake up and take the web search to the next era. We are sick of blue links..

some time no post catching up

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Three weeks since I moved back to Chennai, the first week went off in settling down in the new rented house with packers and movers shifting stuffs from Bangalore, some electrical, carpentry and plumbing works getting done, Airtel broadband getting installed and a lot more. The next week saw me traveling 60 km a day, to work and back home  put together, leaving me all tired to try doing anything else other than having my dinner and catching some early sleep so I can get up early the next morning and go to work. As Internet is under restricted mode at work, no possibility of catching me up on line during day time from now.

Works been sounding interesting so far. Bought a book on Probability and Statistics and catching up some idea so I would be able to perform better at work. Hopefully would start committing code from Monday. I fortunately landed up a day before the CEO came down from US of A, especially for working with our team’s new efforts for some time. It’s been great going though all I have been doing these 2 weeks was to get into the grove with the rest of the team and the code base.

One of the happy things is that I am not asked to work on a Windows machine but a Centos machine with KDE3.x on it. Also that I get some nice breakfast and lunch, and more importantly coffee/tea/chocolate milk any time I want 😉

Traveled over the newly constructed Guindy Grade Separator aka Fly-over few times from all directions and it is indeed wonderful. Hope lot of such projects keep happening to address the worsening traffic conditions of Chennai. As a downside, they reverted back the one-way rule around Ashok Pillar to the earlier problematic turn-any-side so that all those traffic jams is coming back to embrace us back.

Nothing else interesting enough to be blogged. With around a week left for Jaunty release, need to catch with the junta and all the excitement of yet another Ubuntu release.

digging up

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My mom wanted my good ol’ cupboard to be cleaned up and junk stuffs thrown out so she gets some space to use. This little piece of wood built into the corner of my ex-room has served the past 8 years as a store house of all artifacts right from my child hood, though a few things got their place in the “paran” above.

I have my entire collection of Digit and LFY in it, but don’t know what to do with all these mags which I don’t read anymore. I do not want them to be put to the paper wala.

I dug up the first copied of the magazines which I edited and/or co-authored during my school and college days.  I find them to be totally amateurish and unprofessional now, especially the type facing. But those are precious, and the very experience got me my first job.

I had an entire collection of science and maths books from my schooling. I even picked up one to brush through probability and statistics which I very much need now. And in the deep bottom of all these were all the marriage invitations of my cousins.

I discovered my notes which I had made during my non-academic learning process, especially on microprocessor programming, Matlab, PHP, Python, HTML and CSS, ABAP and lot more. I also found all my puzzle books that I had bought during those days when I attended at least one test/interview every week for getting my first job.

One of the magazines actually had pictures of my college department staffs, super seniors and seniors, and I was trying to figure out how many of theirs names I still do remember. Well, I could remember most of the girls’ names 😉

Finally, I moved up two bags full of (may be around a dozen+) books from the cup board to my existing book shelf, realizing that I will be finding it hard to accommodate the books I buy in the future 😛 I have 3 books on Red Hat Linux and 4 books for C++ (I have 4 books on Python as well, all from O’Rielly) now.

wireless usage – february and march 2009

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The day I read a blog post about setting up vnstat to monitor network usage, I had one setup for my wireless network which I normally use at home. It’s been running for the past two months and been providing some interesting stats on my internet usage at home. Here are some snapshots as of today,

Monthly

vnstat-monthly

Hourly

vnstat-hourly

Daily

vnstat-daily

Looks like my typical use of wireless at home happens between 4 PM to 10 PM on weekdays, maximum being 6PM to 8PM. During weekends am using extra internet as I usually leave my mail client and messenger/IRC on most times. Well, this is just my usage at home which obviously happens in the evenings. Will also have a watch over wired interface which might give day time usage at work.

PyCon India 2009 Discussion #1

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DateTime: 03 Mar 2009 9.00 PM (+5.30 UTC)

Location: #bangpypers at irc.freenode.net

The first IRC discussion for the PyCon India proposal happened in BangPyper’s IRC Channel. A large number of Pythonistas participated in the discussion and contributed invaluable ideas, suggestions and concerns during the course of the meeting. To our own surprise, the channel recorded it’s highest ever head count even before the officially announced timings. A quick summary of the topics and points raised during the meeting is as follows,

What?

The important topic of discussion was the theme for the PyCon India. People shared their views on what they wanted PyCon India to be.

  • A few people also raised concerns about using the name PyCon, as the name carries a huge value among the international community and any attempts to even make a localized version of it should stand up to the same quality.
  • The target audience for the conference was also discussed. Most people felt that the need for catering to newbies can not be neglected, but at the same time it’s should not just be a beginner level event as well. The conclusion was more on the lines of addressing the interests of already existing python programmers, let them be beginners, novices or seasoned hackers.
  • There was also a stress on giving importance to Indian speakers as this being an Indian version of the PyCon
  • The rationale behind the conference is to encourage Python and to display how PUGs help to spread Python within India (quoting Ramakrishna Reddy).
  • Baiju suggested having each day of the 3 day conference for one type of audience, the first day catering to beginners with tutorials, workshops and beginner talks; the second day filled with developer talks for audience who are already working full time with Python, and the third day being a code sprint.
  • The next main topic getting discussed was whether to have one talk after another or to have parallel talks running at same time.
  • There was also suggestions to have separate tracks for Python for web, system programming and for developing desktop applications.

When?

While it was unanimously decided to have the PyCon India during the first half of September, a majority vote went to 3rd, 4th and 5th of September leaving out the Sunday for people to get back to their real life. This now becomes the tentative dates for PyCon India, to start with looking up for venues on these days. Depending upon further developments happening on other related fronts, the date will get finalized.

Where?

Again it was unanimously decided to have it this time in Bangalore. Future PyCon(s) might happen in other cities, but the first one is surely to happen in Bangalore considering the fact that BangPypers is leading the effort, as well as concentration of organizing Pythonistas seem to be maximum in Bangalore comparatively (agreed, this is debatable on other fronts).

How?

The later half of the discussion was taken up by what are the things to be done to move forward. It was decided to have a formal CFP being made soon, as well as having an Open Review process for the submitted proposals using the software used for PyCon. Ghose B has been put responsible for getting the software in place, while Svaksha and Ramdas share the responsibility of Media and Publicity.

Other points which popped out during the discussion are,

  • Whether to have stalls? If so who all can be given a stall?
  • Whether to have delegate fees? If so, what would be the ideal fee?
  • Corporate presence during the conference

As this was the first ever discussion on the idea of having PyCon India, no conclusive decisions were taken other than few stances. Each of the above discussed topic will be subjected to further iterative discussions as things mature and progress further.

The next meet of IRC discussion is currently to happen at #bangpypers in irc.freenode.net on 10th March 2009, 8.230 PM IST. If you want to participate in the discussions, please be there. We are open to all kinds of ideas, suggestions, concerns and criticisms. Please feel free to poke us at #bangpypers anytime or drop a mail to BangPypers mailing list.

Even if you are not a Pythonista, please help us by spreading the word among your friends, colleagues, your HR and your company. Some of them might be really interested at some aspect of this conference.

PyCon in India

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PyCon is the annual conglomerate of Python community at various places around the globe. It is an occasion which brings together the developers, users and business community around Python, serving as a platform to interact and share each others’ views and experiences.

There was always an idea to have once such conference in India, but the need for it has become stronger of late in the BangPypers mailing list that has given to numerous threads of discussions going on in the mailing list. Also a formal proposal is getting drafted as well as open discussions happening in the wiki were people can pen down their opinions and ideas.

The month of September has been proposed for the tentative time for PyCon India to happen, but it is still under discussion. The few hot topics among the on-going discussions are whether to have tee-shirts available or should we have more useful stuffs like Python cheat-sheet given as a part of delegate kit. Also, what’s the level and mode the conference should take up being the first such event in India is also a point to decide upon.

Baiju also raised the idea of inviting Guido to open up the conference, as they would be having an opportunity to meet him during the PyCon in Chicago to happen soon.

Another point to remember is that PSF doesn’t want numerous PUGs in the country to have their own PyCons, which means all PUGs within India should put their heads together and organize a PyCon in the country together. This means we can have the PyCon each year at a new location, and the decision can be made during the current year’s PyCon about the next year’s venue. As the initial discussion has started in BangPypers, the beginning will most probably happen in Bangalore.

I know only three active PUGs in India, the BangPypers, the ChennaiPy and MumPy (which is pretty infant comparing the other two). If you know of any more PUGs, please enlighten me up so I can keep them on the loop as well.

Please feel free to add your thoughts in the wiki. We will soon select an organizing committee, and despite it we will need lots of volunteers and lots of sponsors. If you are in a company using Python and would like to participate and/or sponsor in this wonderful event, then please join the BangPypers mailing list or poke us in #bangpypers in irc.freenode.net. We will soon try to have a dedicated mailing list running up for all discussion relating to the PyCon.

If you have any more points to add to this post, please drop a comment to this post and I will consider adding  it 🙂 Let’s all make the PyCon happen in India. Python, FTW!! 🙂

happenings update for Feb09

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There are too many things happening so I thought of summing them together..

  1. freed.in 2009 at Delhi
  2. FOSS Meet at NIT Calicut
  3. fossconf 2009 at Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai

But I wouldn’t be attending any of them. I always plan to attend freed.in but keep missing it. It’s been 2 years since I went to NIT Calicut as well. And this time am missing fossconf as well, being the first time I miss an event by my home LUG.

Besides the conferences, there seems to be lot of User Group activity in Bangalore. Today, both ILUG Bengaluru and BangPypers (Bangalore Python Users Group) met separately at Thought Works in the afternoon. GNU(s) grazing is also pending for sometime now. CIS is also organizing a talk on “The Internet and Illusions of Space and Liberty” by Kiran Sahi during the beginning of March.

now the time is 1234567890

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We are fast approaching the point when the Unix time becomes 1234567890, and to add more pepper to this it’s going to be on V`day.  To know when it exactly happens in your time zone try the following command in your shell,

date -d @1234567890

For me it is on Sat Feb 14 05:01:30 IST 2009