Update: Site moved onto greener pastures (actually bluer!)

Here is a fresh start and a fresh URL to start it with:


z0ltan.wordpress.com

Now let's start lisping ;-).

Peace!

A few tech blogs that I really like (or have liked... and maybe will like!)

I do my usual stuff at work as a programmer - snooze, code, get high on coffee, sink low on morale due to lack of a decent pool table (and maybe a pool to boot!), self-immunize against weird teammates, vilify moronic management, rant about non-functional AC and the dysfunctional personal life, get hot and cold in the face in the course of the same discussion with a colleague (kinda reminds me of that episode of "Friends"...you know, the one with Chandler (a.k.a Toby) and Bob, especially the part where he trashes his own place), muse aloud on the merits of Design Patterns without actually having an opportunity to use them anywhere at work, crib about cafeteria food, ogle at the usual suspects (a rare and fast disappearing breed), have my concentration destroyed by the blinking chat boxes (I wonder why I never resolve to logout of them?), swivel around on the perfectly unergonomic, back-sweat-inducing chairs, channel mind-numbing 120 dB music pounding through the cranium via the headphones, read proggit, download petabytes of work-unrelated software, print enough copies to supply the Yomiuri for a year, harvest enough E coli in the loo (and more in the e-cafe*) to provide my physician with a spanking new Porsche( remember that episode in "Friends" where Joey assembles a load of cartons to simulate a Porsche to impress the ladies?**), have way too much time on hand to be writing this blog in office, astutely (and dispassionately) observe my IQ take such a negative exponential drop as to make the Stock Market seem a mere candy shop, give in to the the (yes, stuttering here with Diabeticistic Excitement Reverse Palsy or DERP***) rabid urge to stop here for fear of dropping the aforementioned curve to negative... *snip*


Here are some of the blogs that I do read to ensure that I remain clinically insane and soporifically unchallenged. Pop the cervezas d00ds!

Steve Yegge

Raymond Chen

Steve Vinoski

Marc Andreessen

Joel Spolsky

Timmy z0ltan Jose

Hahahaha... gotcha! The last one is the one that should have come first! Alright... not yet!

Have fun. Or at least a muted semblance of the shaded precursor to the imaginary fabric of the bleary facade of the pale illusionary imagination of wistful fun. That a deal?
Excellent!

(*A pejorative, debasing, denigrating, derogatory, dubious, grotesque, degrading, jocular, insipid and gut-wrenchingly disappointing euphemism used for a room with chairs, tables, a water-cooler, two coffee-machines, a wash-basin and on a statistical average - four imbeciles.)
(** It seems to me that the show "Friends" has so explored the nooks and crannies and nuances of relationships that almost anything that one comes across can be connected in some way or the other with some incident that was depicted on that epic sitcom. Hmmm... nice, spanking new theory. Interesting. Wait for updates on this one.)
(*** Naaw, just messing with your mind... oops! brain... dang! neuron (?))

Back from the future

It has been over a year since this blog saw any activity of any sort. Meanwhile, my other blog has been the apple of my eye... well, figuratively speaking. It has even got some technical blogs which rather belong here. There had been many a reason for the hibernation that this blog had to endure. Most of all, the abject lack of free time, due to other ahem..ahem.. pursuits which would be fair to say, are over and done with now. I plan to start blogging regularly here hereonin. In keeping with the season (that I myself have placed myself in!), here is a brief roadmap to give an idea of the sort of blogs that are upcoming in the next few weeks:

1. C, Java, Perl, Python, SQL, JavaScript, Scheme, Common Lisp, PHP.

2. Struts, Hibernate, Spring, CSS, XML, XSLT, HTML, JSON.

3. My personal website (PHP + Symfony + MySQL mostly).

4. An online forum (Python + Django + PostgreSQL most like).

5. Algorithmics, Datastructures, programming puzzles.

6. Miscellaneous crazy stuff (What is life without being a bit cuckoo eh? ;-) )

Peace out.

My Experiments with Django... with interesting results!

So I was all ready to try out this beautiful framework called "Django". (Funny, always reminds me of the great guitarist Django Reinhardt). And so I go to the homepage of Django and get version 0.95. I decided to test it all out on my Windows box before trying it out on good ol' unpredictable Linux (okay,okay GNU/Linux). So far so good.

Installation went off without a hitch. The prerequisites had already been loaded (Believe me, the prerequisites list is almost as big as that for GNU/Linux software packages and almost as obscure... my eternal gratitude to the maintainers of the "Cheeseshop" who make my life easier!) and I was ready to take the plunge. I decided to start with the "Django book". In case you haven't already got lost in the pool of URLs already (though it couldn't possibly ever equal that of Slashdot's), you can get this gem of a book here. Excellent book. Take my word for it!

So I start off with the initial pages and I already like these guys! The Awesome Threesome as I would like to call them - Adrian Holovaty (loved his duel with David Heinemeier Hansson in this excellent video), Simon Willison (the soft-spoken Brit) and Jacob Kaplan-Moss (the dude who presented a Django demonstration in Google). Their sense of humor (I suspect mostly Adrian's) is wonderfully to my liking. A bit on the sarcastic-and-yet-almost-self-flagellating-and-still-almost-playing-dumb-and-yet-profoundly-enlightening-humor-which-hits-you-after-you-have-finished-laughing type. You know what I mean? Anyway, to get back to the flesh of the discussion, there I was happily following the instructions in the Django Book and configuring here, tweaking there and everything seemed to work fine. And then I try this simple example to generate a dynamic HTML page which would purportedly return the current date and time to the user and wham!!!! The whole thing throws up an ugly page full of error messages and stack messages and what not (I thought for a moment I could even see Richard Stallman's rotund assets there). I am distraught. I am devastated. I am ruined. Naah... I am just messing around with you. In true hacker fashion, I set about dissecting the error messages, painstakingly tracing the chain of errors back to the source. Ha ha ha... who am I kidding? In even truer hacker fashion, I went straight to the source code and tinkered around a bit. I could find the source of error to be the wrong usage of the "rindex()" method on a non-string (specifically an HttpResponse object). Nothing much I could do about that so straight to the Django users' group where I am directed very politely to an FAQ which described my problem perfectly. So the problem was with the incompatibilities between the Django Book and the Django version!

So I shake it off, download Django 0.96 and get to work all over again. And this time the damn thing won't even install! Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! I wipe off my tears of
half-anguish and half-amusement and set about hacking into the code again. I find that the problem lies in the setup file. The damn thing is supposed to read the directory structure in an OS independent way and yet it does not. So I take the code and change it to hardcoded directory for my specific OS (Windows XP!!!). And voila! magic! the built-in application server for Django works starts humming and gets to work and there is this beautiful HTML generated dynamically and gosh, this really is the beginning of something beautiful! Needless to say, I have raised a "ticket" with the Django folks and thanks also to robin_percy on the Django Users' group for saving me innumerable man seconds of time on trying to hack the Django 0.95 code. For now, everything is running chummily and hopefully I'll have only positive stuff to post about my tryst with Django hereonin!

By the by, know why I love Python? Check this out -

set(word for word in open("words.txt").read().lower().split())

The single line of code above will open the file "words.txt", read all the lines in it, change them to lower case, split them into individual words and return a set of all the unique words in the whole file! Is that cool or what?!? :-)

Andrew Tomkins' Yahoo seminar

I had the privilege of attending Andrew Tomkins' seminar on emerging search technologies on April 5th. The talk was held in the ballroom of the Taj Westend hotel on Racecourse Road - pretty close to my office. Andrew Tomkins is the Director of Search in Yahoo. He has had over eight years experience in IBM prior to joining Yahoo.

He seemed to be more the academic type than the presentation type. You know, speaking mostly in jargon and not shying away from having slides full of mathematical equations which of course, he would not explain! The talk was good but I felt that it could have been a bit more concrete. To his credit, Andrew presented a highly unbiased presentation. I could feel the true spirit of sharing of knowledge in his talk. He presented many complimentary examples from rival search engines especially Google. Despite the topic there were not many revelations as far as search technology was concerned. Not much beyond what could be scoured off the web anyhow. I would have preferred a bit more in-depth discussion on the next level of web search technologies.

All in all, a good presentation that was undone by the insensible schedule.

Some videos from BarCamp Bangalore 3

Okie-dokie, here are some videos which I had recorded during BarCamp Bangalore 3 and which I had mentioned in my previous post I would be posting soon. Enjoy...

The new Three Stooges @ IIM-B



Lawrence Liang's excellent presentation - part one



ThinFone demo



Lawrence Liang's excellent presentation - Bush spoof



Lawrence Liang's excellent presentation - Van Halen spoof by IIT-M geeks



Lawrence Liang's excellent presentation - Bush spoof part deux



Lawrence Liang's excellent presentation - Backstreet Boys spoof



An inside view of the IIM-B campus

BarCamp Bangalore 3 finale

So today, April 1 2007, was the last day of the third edition of BarCamp Bangalore. Since I had missed some events yesterday, I decided to make an early move to the venue. So my friend Bharath and I arranged to meet up in our old college, UVCE and move to the venue, IIM Bangalore. Around 20 odd kilometers of low grade roads. Thankfully it was a sunday and I anticipated very less traffic. Unfortunately, I had to also reckon in the half-an-hour of delay due to my friend's immaculate lack of punctuality! And I was absolutely right again - he arrived at half past eight sharp. Well, to make it a short story, we managed to reach the venue by nine and I was surprised to see a much smaller crowd than yesterday and none of the events even seeming to be anywhere close to commencing. I could see the first event was scheduled for half past ten and it was by a person named Lawrence Liang on "IP rights and the social factors affecting its perception". Of course those weren't the exact words - a bit of syntactic sugar on my part.

I actually wanted to skip this event and wait for the "juicier" events instead. However, Ravi and Bharath persuaded me to attend it and so after the brief introduction which I may add was held in a true "Unconference" style in the front of the auditorium (which was locked, hence the impromptu session outside) and each presenter had an opportunity to give the gist of his or her event for the day. So far so good.

The first event started and it started off quite calmly and honestly, I think not many people had any expectations from the presentation. Then Lawrence started to weave his magic and the superb combination of humor, slides, audio and visual effects and the strong pace of the talk itself made the lawyer an instant favorite with the crowd and despite stretching his scheduled time by almost half-an-hour, the audience just couldn't have enough of him! It was the best presentation of the two days. I couldn't resist from shooting a few videos of his presentation and I will be posting them on youTube soon. I will publish the URLs here once I am done.

The few other events that I attended were nothing special... got the feeling most of them were merely seeking free publicity of their startups/ventures(mymuv.com which was an absolutely ludicrous idea for a startup) or ego boosting (Kiruba Shankar's podcasting session) or greater exposure of one's job profile for possible employment opportunities (?) (the 'Usability' event held by someone whose name I cannot recall or just wasn't interested enough in to register in my mind the first time). So a pretty tame end for a BarCamp. oh yeah, there was a cheap publicity stunt by a couple of bummers from a startup called Yulop. They probably reckoned that not enough folks would be interested in a presentation called "Citycast" ( or was it "Citicast"? Whatever it was, it was extremely forgettable) so they rewrote the name of the presentation as "How to build the next Google - cracking the Google algorithm". Needless to say, the people were already in high spirits and high on expectations after Lawrence's presentation. So there was a sizable portion of the crowd in the room waiting with great anticipation and what happens then? One of the bummers cheekily informs everyone that it was a mere "April fool's" joke! Quite a prank eh? Most folks weren't amused and began streaming out of the room almost immediately. Who's the sucker now, paisan?

Personally speaking, it was quite an irony that the most memorable event of the BarCamp meant for geeks was a presentation by a lawyer with an awesome sense of humor. And that said, despite the low quality of the technological presentations, I did gain a lot of insight into the Indian mindset, the state of the art in Indian startups, the mood of the entrepreneurial market, my own immense shortcomings (thankfully also the means to alleviate them) and with a huge gain in confidence that I am indeed the best. Or rather will be, but that is in the very near future!

BarCamp Bangalore 4 (BCB4) is scheduled to be held in June this year so you can definitely see me there. And I promise, it will be a very different Timmy, a much better Timmy (I can almost say a radically improved Timmy) there.

Ciao!