Tech Talk

I hate to think I have good ideas, but this one might be worth exploring. Yesterday was a major network outage in our lab. There was some upgrade going on in the computing facilities so the networks kinda went for a toss. This is not a big issue in research facilities because at very few instances can such outages lead to larger problems. Almost nothing ever happens in a day or two. Ok, the MTechs/BTechs are different, but they have classes. So no network is not something that’d affect them.

I forgot that I was idle because of no network and went to the library to renew my long due books. Like a fool, I was carrying five books only to find out that the network at the library ain’t working and they cannot transact. Yeah, perils of a networked infra-structure. But there is a second point to this. Could the library have continued without stopping work? If not fresh issues, could they have at least handled renewals and returns, new memberships et al?

At first thought, no. But with a slight improvement in infrastructure: yes. All the machines are latest with very good hard drive capacities. If the library software was capable of caching certain details and work offline, library is independent of the network. And library was not alone.

You get the idea? I knew of a team that was interested in these lines. But they split. Ok, I come from there too. But the goal there was slightly different from this. Of course, this is not for a toss. I still need to verify with them that they are over with this. Again, I have done no research whatsoever to see what products already exist in this space.

I have this age old machine in my hostel room. It is a 800MHz Celeron with 256M RAM. That is a good combination for CLI guys like me. It runs debian sid. Its primary purpose is documenting work over night, practicing a couple of scripts, occasional programming and movies. I use the gui only when browsing shares over dc, internet and movies. For movies I use no window manager. Default WM shifts between icewm and fluxbox.

I have installed iceweasel and dillo from the repository. Using iceweasel used to kill my machine. I can’t open a second tab and the machine resource monitor graph is mostly clamped to the top 98%. So, you know what time I spend on the internet after I get to my room.

Anyway, last weekend I downloaded firefox 3. Believe it or not, I am able to run firefox 3 along side django test server and emacs without saturating the machine resources. And even otherwise, I am able to have at least 3-4 tabs simultaneously open on my machine. I almost can’t believe this. Now I am really wondering if I ll update my firefox 3. I am just scared it might become memory hungry when they finally release it.

Tags: firefox_3, debian, resources, efficient

I am trying to learn and use this technique for problem solving for some time now. I’ve heard quite a few people say that it works great and all that. Maybe it does. I don’t have enough data to substantiate either way. Today I stumbled upon this useful web tool that can create a mind map for you online. They call it bubbl.us. Maybe you’ve heard of it or maybe you are already using this, but this is entirely new to me. I just created my first mind map of things that I need to complete this month. I am not posting it here, because it is as chaotic as my thought process. Good, that gives me confidence that I have mapped my mind (mindlessly).

Tags: rambling, mindmap, bubblus, web

After many futile and failed attempts to create a decent looking page, I decided I am not the right guy to do css. So, all my pages are taken from opendesigns.org or oswd.org. They are doing a good job and why kill myself with an unknown devil?

But the small itch to do my own work remained, until yesterday. I was so jobless that I went and created my own template. Extremely simple looking, uses images (:-( ), css. I think it is standards compliant. I haven’t yet checked it. I don’t even know what it looks like on IE. I ll get a uniform look between IE and firefox and then perhaps test for compliance.

You can take a look at the design here. I am not sure if I have seen it earlier. If you know another page that is fairly similar, do let me know. I’d be a good boy and provide a link back!

Blogged with Flock

Tags: web, new_design, css

Had no internet yesterday. And this is not the first “no-internet” days after I changed my ISP. Incidentally, I changed the ISP because of “no-internet” weeks. Anyways, this no-internet day seems to do me some good. I was really wondering how people on the move with laptops and mobiles for internet manage to blog, if they do that is. There had to be some offline editors such that you can publish when you have a connection..

I was not alone and there are people who have thought on these lines. Some links I found are here and here.
And with google I found these tools.

• Qumana
• Drivel
• Bleezer
• ScribeFire

Each has its own set of goods and bads. Just trying out drivel, bleezer and scribefire. Qumana is for Mac and Windows, neither of which I use now! Should see what I end up with. Wondering if it is any good to try and write my own offline blog editor, for the heck of it ?!

Blogged with Flock

Tags: blog, offline, links, rambling, web

It is not as though I feel strongly about netscape being brought down, but it certainly is a bad feeling. Netscape was the only browser I was using when I had my first PC. Internet explorer was already shipping as part of Windows at that time. It was about 1996-1997 when I got my first PC and about 98-99 when I got the first dial-up connection. I was running Windows 98 at that time. I distinctly remember using Netscape 4.7 communicator and the mail client to receive Yahoo mail. I remember y! was allowing pop access those times.

I faithfully followed netscape to 6.2, and then to some 7 or 8. Until a couple of months back I was using Netscape 9 on linux. Although, 9 is more or less firfox 2.0, I felt good about netscape for no apparent reason.  Anyway, now it is flock on linux and firefox on windows. No, there are no reasons for the choice.

Anyways, ciao netscape.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: netscape, browsers, internet

Yesterday, I completed my second django application. I still don’t want to say I know django, but this time around I learnt quite a bit. This app is for a friend of mine working in one of those big outsourcing firms. I guess I ll post the code for download, once he okays the application. He has already agreed to that. After all, I want to keep that opensource.

Some very interesting learnings from the code are the newforms library from django 0.96. I had about 15 fields in the model and had to generate select boxes with validations. If I did it with the django I knew so far, I’d never have completed. newforms just worked magic. The other was using the calendar from the admin interface, for DateField, in our code. I took the code from this snippet.

The code has some ugly hacks. You’ll guess it at the first look. I ll fix them over the weekend, if I find some time. Already, last week had been least productive here. The only thing that even worked was this django app. So, I won’t get back to this until some of the other more important ones are completed.

There is one more useless detail that needs to go into this – the license. I haven’t decided on one yet, but since I want it to be on my profile, I ll keep it something like BSD or GPL2.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: flock, django, python, technical, web

We had a small tutorial session on preliminary ASIC design flow using synopsys and cadence tools. I was handling the tool demo while my guide introduced the concepts. We used VNC for demoing the tools, since I had set the entire thing on my work station.

One of the professors attending the session wanted to record the setup. I suggested vnc2swf to record the session, since we were not so keen on the voices. We only want to record “what menu, what choice and after what”! Anyways, as usual after a few technical glitches we managed to record the entire session in four SWF files. Interestingly, the combined file size was about 40-45MB. I guess lack of audio did the trick.

There is an internal wiki site where some of these recordings get hosted. We decided to host the files on that wiki, so that others can get to use it also. The problem started exactly here. How do you convert SWF to a flash movie like what they have on youtube? There are a bunch of proprietary solutions on google. I am the only guy who uses VNC for these things and I certainly don’t want to afford a converter!

There is a pyvnc2swf project that is hosted along side vnc2swf. Little did I realize that this project did exactly what I wanted. Power of using python? I was woken up by this forum via google. There is a simple edit.py that does the conversion. The command itself is
$ edit.py -o file.flv file.swf

And mplayer played the flash video fine, so I guess the web flash players would do the same too.

Blogged with Flock

Funny way to call this post! I started learning about django about a month back. My first exposure to this genre of tools was about a year and a half back, when I tried to do some ruby on rails work. The idea didn’t kick off and I kinda didn’t have the patience to understand how RoR worked. At that time, I was not comfortable with ruby. I still am not, but thats a different story.

I started practicing python roughly about two years back. I call it practicing, because if you are some programmer, then python is probably a week of learning. At least it was so with me. But I never managed the web end of python and I did not need it either. Last week, I needed to quickly build a small application to hold all my research work : thought blog, article repo, and an interface to link the two. It was also about the same time that my guide came up with some turbogears project. I got to see the code and found it interesting. In fact the kid templating language in turbogears sort of reminded me of a templating engine called velocity that sakai used to use. I am not following sakai too closely to say if it still is!

Enough of that history. As I started trying turbogears, I remembered reading of django. So, I just stopped turbogears and started django. And my first app is already out in exacly two working days. Whoa, the last time I ever rolled something like that was when I had to meet a deadline and was working on php. This time, there was no deadline, and the actual code that I wrote is far less compared to what I wrote when I did the php work. Ok, that was unfair because the php application was not running a django-like framework. Of course, my main application is still out there untouched. Wondering if I should give turbogears the try! Lemme see which one gets the better.

Thoughts?