Talking with a Lisp

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

2008-06-04T21:51:00.000-07:00

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!)

2008-05-19T01:00:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-18T22:44:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-04-23T04:09:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-09T00:36:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-03T20:13:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-01T08:23:00.000-07:00

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!

BarCamp Bangalore Day 1

2007-03-31T17:51:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the first day of the third BarCamp held in Bangalore. It was also my first BarCamp and frankly, it was a mixed experience. To start with, it was held in the IIM Bangalore (Indian Institute of Management) campus, which by the way was superb (and also superbly far from the city). The campus kind of reminded me of my school days in St. Joseph's (Bangalore) with its thick stone architecture and with the unreasonably high ceilings which actually acted like a sort of natural air conditioner. And thank god for that because it was a blazingly hot day outside.

I missed the first few presentations (in fact it was inevitable to miss quite a few events throughout the two days of the program because there were up to four events being presented simultaneously) because of some commitments in the morning. By the time I reached the venue, it was around half past eleven. I attended a seminar presented by a couple of guys from Washington State University (Dinesh and his colleague) on 'JavsScript as a tool to teach the principles of programming'. Needless to say, that topic brought about a lot of arguments as to the usefulness of JavaScript as a tool for teaching the principles of programming. Some even argued as to whether any programming language ought to be used for such a 'didactic' purpose. Interestingly enough, the presenter even had a slide about the SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) course by Abelson and Sussman which used to be and may still be taught to undergraduate classes in MIT and other universities in the US. The language used there is, of course, Scheme which is a powerful subset of the grand old sire, Lisp. In fact the Lisp which Paul Graham advocates is arguably Scheme and not pure Lisp. It was kind of disappointing because the seminar didn't really cover enough to make any useful augmentation to my knowledge.

The next seminar was more interesting. Yahoo was the presenter and two guys presented a description of an Open Source project called Hadoop which basically is a project for performing extensive search over huge clusters of data nodes distributed over vast geographical distances. They said it had scaled to around 1000 machines to data per name node (which is the main singly redundant controller node for the data nodes) and that they hoped to scale to 10,000 machines soon. Contributors welcome!

The third event which I attended was on a blogging portal which the presenter had developed as part of his eighth semester engineering project and which was now his startup. The poor dude's idea was nowhere novel and he had a pretty screwing session as the audience persisted in torturing him in trying to find out "what" it was that would convince people to use his site and not the other blogging portals out there such as blogspot, livejournal and wordpress. The interface seemed quite slick but there was no actual demo. You can check it out by Googling for "B for Blogs". I don;t think I will be doing that myself very soon!

Then there was a seminar on the "Wiki book" which was an effort by the Indian Wiki groups to publish a book on "Unconference". It sounded like a pure gimmick to me. Especially since they were going to sell it for a price.

The last seminar which I could attend for the day was by a lady named Savita on "Are services companies transitioning to product development"? To be honest, this was the most informative (and entertaining) event of the day. It gave me a lot of insight into the mindset of the Indian technology industry. It was an especially raw nerve point for most of the audience since there were representative from both sides of the argument - services as well as product development. Of course, there is no real product development that happens in India. Just imagine the closest thing that you can picture in your mind! More than the content of the arguments or even the context, I learnt a lot of lessons about the most difficult aspect of doing or even starting a business (read 'startup') in India - the social interaction of Indians sucks! Big time! We as a nation are highly interested in bickering and going to nihilistic extremes in sticking to a single point and trying to bring the opponent down. And like one of the participants in the highly heated discussions said, Indians love to talk and talk and by the time we reach the planning stage, the Chinese (or any other competitor) have already got a product out of the idea, deployed it and grabbed the market! This is true. The only thing an Indian cannot stand more than his failure is the success of his fellow Indian. This is the shit reality of the Indian business ethos. Like I said, it sucks big time. The only way I see to succeed in this environment is to play it smart and what do I mean by that? I think that would be better demonstrated than written about!

Some highlights of the day - free food (much better than the ofice food believe me!) and of course, the free BarCamp T-Shirt. I don't particularly like the "Yahoo IDC" logo on the back though! More on BarCamp day two in the next blog....

Some good progress made

2007-03-29T02:48:00.000-07:00

So here is the current status of Oontzoo. Python is a tremendously cool language! I seriously do not understand the whole Python-Vs-Lisp argument that seems to have been going on for ages and seems not be ending anytime soon. Lisp and Python are both languages which are extremely powerful, very high-level and flexible enough to be used in a wide variety of situations. I love them both. They are more or less equally feature rich (totally discounting the "Turing Complete" argument which is absolute nonsense) but three areas where Python comes on tops are:

1. A humongous collection of libraries for almost every conceivable purpose.

2. A very active developer community, and above all,

3. Superb readability which implies superb maintainability.

So coming back to OOntzoo (hey, I like it better than 'Oontzoo'... lemme stick to this... just for larks!), I have made very good progress in learning Python. In just a couple of days, I have basically covered the whole core language - the basic syntax, the loop and condition structures, the data structures, exception and error handling, input/output and classes. The only part left is to explore the vast libraries and the APIs for interfacing with C/C++. I should be needing that I believe. I have every hope of completing this process over the weekend, despite the BarCamp being held at IIMB on March 31 and April 1, 2007. I will most probably be attending that and will have to eke out as much time as possible for OOntzoo.
Let's see how that goes!

Project Oontzoo started

2007-03-26T20:43:00.000-07:00

Yes. It is true. I have started Project Oontzoo on March 26, 2007, a very eventful day for me indeed. Now, what is Oontzoo? I am afraid you will have to wait and watch as it evolves to see what it is! Don't blame me if I like a bit of suspense.
Anyway, here is the list of technologies that I am tentatively using for Oontzoo:

Python - The main programming language.

Django - The framework.

Psyco - The Python optimizer.

PostgreSQL - The database.

Subversion - Version Control System.

TRAC - The bug and feature tracking utility.

Pound - The load balancing tool.

MediaWiki - The documentation utility.

Apache2 - The webserver.

C/C++ - The ancillary programming language(s).

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML - These absolutely required!

GNU/Linux - I got that right didn't I senor Stallman?

In my estimation, the whole process (learning, design, coding, testing, deployment) will be completed by the third of July, 2007. I will track the progress through this blog regularly (read on a day-to-day basis).

Oontzoo is more of a learning experience rather than anything else. That is its objective. Anything more will be a bonus.

Python & Django, Ruby on Rails or PHP on Symfony? And why Java sucks...bigtime

2007-03-07T21:46:00.001-08:00

Just over a year back and I wouldn't have had an inkling of what lay beyond Java/J2EE for web development. That's how scarily claustrophobically blind-sighted I was. Many reasons for that - both personal and professional but let me concentrate on the latter :-).
In my extremely humble opinion, the greatest misconception that many students have and which is further reinforced by the half-baked information they are "imparted" in school by folks who, congenial enough in person, are clearly in the wrong profession and also by the lazy and narrow-minded one-track-mindedness of the students themselves, is that when it comes to the web, there is only one way that you can go - the Java/J2EE path (of course, if one can afford to shell out some decent moolah, there is always the MS way - .NET et al). Add to this the tremendous propanganda by SUN ( "We are the 'dot' in 'dotcom' " etc. ) and its lackeys - IBM and Oracle, Java has been hyped and overhyped to death. The plain truth is that it is a compromise. A very bad compromise at that! Portability? By installing a platform-specific JVM on each and every machine, and the size of which is bloating by the day? It's laughable! And performance wise too it is a poor compromise between purely compiled languages and purely interpreted languages. The only reason why Java has survived and indeed flourished is the industry backing that it has received from stalwarts like the two sell-outs mentioned above.
This may seem a particularly harsh review from a novice in the "industry" but then again, one cannot gain "common sense" by being in the industry for five, ten or twenty years. Capisce? I do code in Java and am learning J2EE on my own, but the impression that I have is that it is way too cumbersome to go from initial conception of the idea to the actual deployment in any short period of time. The frameworks hide too much actual detail and add unnecessary gunk in the wrong places. I may do it for my main job, but not for my personal projects.

That is when I started looking at the options. Actually it was Paul Graham's excellent essay Beating the Averages where he clearly stated that any language could be used when the code itself was entirely located within the server. And I quote :

"Back in 1995, we knew something that I don't think our competitors understood, and few understand even now: when you're writing software that only has to run on your own servers, you can use any language you want. When you're writing desktop software, there's a strong bias toward writing applications in the same language as the operating system. Ten years ago, writing applications meant writing applications in C. But with Web-based software, especially when you have the source code of both the language and the operating system, you can use whatever language you want."

Now that made a tremendous amount of sense to my logical mind. For a while, I even toyed around with the idea of using Lisp itself but then after a bit of research, I decided that the lack of any decent repository of libraries made it a huge (and I mean huge) amount of effort and time investment. So for now, as far as Lisp for web development is concerned, I would rather wait and see if it matures to the point of feasibility.

Python and Django

That brings me on to Python and the excellent framework Django. Python is quite an old language but it seems to have become a huge favorite with all sorts of programmers - from beginners to the mighty brains at Google. The pros are many - cross platform, Object-oriented, bindings with C/C++/java and powerful enough to quickly create and deploy applications ( from simple CGI scripts to complex GUIs ) in record times! Around 4-5 times faster than in Java and around the same ratio of shorter code. The only drawback(s)? Its pathetic performance which trails even that of Java and yet it is much faster than Ruby. However,I came across this wonderful piece of software called Psyco which practically speeds up Python code by unbelievable factors ( over 100% ). A must have for any serious Python developer, Okay, about Django, my research tells me that it is the best web framework out there, And it is so indeed. I suppose Aaron Swartz' Web.py framework is the
only serious competition. In fact, the whole of Reddit was rewritten from Lisp into Python using this framework. In the words of the authors of the site, the powerful threading capabilities of web.py was a strong reason of choosing that framework. All in all, Django seems the sanest choice for Python. The only nagging problem with the whole setup is
that Python needs a templating language ( which varies from framework to framework ) which is not Python. So one would have to know Javascript and the templating language for the front-end and the use pure Python for the back-end. Not bad though. I suppose the effort would not be much and I agree that it is a cleaner construct. And with Python's rapid development features, the time spent in learning the templating language etc., will be offset by the gain in productivity.

My Rating - 4.5/5

Ruby on Rails

Next up is Ruby on Rails. I must confess upfront that the more I see of this language, the more I like it. Of course, the fact remains that Ruby by itself is not much of a head turner. It is the whole Rails framework which has given it a much needed boost. After all, both Ruby and Python have been around for almost the same time. When I mentioned that I like the language the more I see of it, I meant strictly in terms of the features and power that it provides. Not in terms of the aesthetic beauty of the language itself. In fact, the syntax is even more cryptic than that of Perl. Going by all the research that I have put in ( Phew!!! ), Ruby on Rails is a much more popular combination that Python with Django, but in terms of performance, the Python combo beats it fair and square. The one advantage that it does have is that there is no need for any extra templating language as in the case of Python. This would save me a lot of time, but considering my personal dislike of Ruby's syntax and a slight leaning towards Python's, I would say that it comes a close second, but still second compared to Python-Django. Another important reason is that there are more jobs oriented on Python per se than Ruby. Which is to say, from a career perspective, Python alone provides better opportunity than Ruby alone. RoR ( Ruby on Rails ) does provide more opportunities than Python-Django but till when?

My Rating - 4/5

PHP and Symfony

At last we come to arguably the most popular web development technology - PHP. Let us also consider the commonly used framework - Symfony. There is no doubt that PHP is the easiest and the smallest of the three - Python, Ruby and PHP, especially developed for rapid web development. However, the places where it suffers terribly - performance ( the worst of the three combinations ), security ( a major major drawback ) and a not-so-friendly developer community as the Python and Ruby communities. All in all, not as much potential for the future as the other two.

My Rating - 3/5

So the overall winner (again) in my most-humble-but-well-researched opinion
is Python with Django. Here is an instructive little video from Google Techtalks but presented by one of the creators of Django - Jacob kaplan Moss.

Enjoy creating the next web!

Some Discoveries... and a bit on Time Management

2007-02-15T03:15:00.000-08:00

It feels like a long time since I visited my own blog here and it has indeed been over a fortnight past the last post which was about Eric S. Raymond and how much I admire the person. One of the things he mentions in the "Jargon Lexicon" as part of his commentary on the whole Hacking folklore is that a Hacker is characterized by someone who, when faced with a new problem and even otherwise, can literally devour tons of voluminous books - specification manuals, tutorials, code, architecture, design and what have you, hours at a stretch and
books on end till he has sufficiently mastered the domain to be able to solve the problem in an elegant and efficient manner. Now that is one aspect that I am afraid I have not been able to inculcate in myself till now. Not for lack of ability but due to lack of time or more honestly, due to lack of time-management. In short, my time management has been utterly ludicrous over the past month.

In my first few posts, I had laid out a charter of goals to accomplish - such as the 20% projects.
I confess that not much work has been done in that respect. Here are a few lessons that I have learnt from the whole experience merit sharing :

1. Never force yourself to stick to a draconian time schedule.

This may seem trivial but it can either make a successful project or lead to self-loathing despondency. Don't set unrealistic goals when attempting something especially ambitious. Consider all the other parameters and factor them in with enough buffer so that the task gets done. For instance, attempting to write a Linux Device Driver is a noble decision. However, it is well impossible to write one when the specifications are obfuscated by the vendor. Reverse engineering is a task that requires not only expertise but also dedicated effort that many working people just cannot afford to expend on a 20% project. A sound theoretical knowledge is absolutely essential and I would suggest creating some sample drivers for simple devices would bolster one's confidence enough to attempt writing one for a more complicated device. This is the approach that I have taken and will be logging the progress here as promised.

2. Beware of turning something that fascinates you into a bugbear

Now everyone knows that one can excel in something that one truly enjoys. This is common sense, right? Okay... what not many people realise is that there are a multitude of ways in which one can manage to turn these same enjoyable pursuits into something that you start loathing. A veritable bete noir. And that would be a real shame. Chiding oneself when one slips a schedule (for whatever reason), being stymied by some extraneous factor (In my case, the whole problem of unconfigurability of sound on my Linux notebook) however banal, expecting too much out of too less time are just some ways in which the whole process of learning and working on something that you find extremely enjoyable is turned into something that you fear facing and start avoiding as if it were the Devil Incarnate! Believe me, it can happen with anything that you consider - no matter how intriguing or challenging. The solution? Take it cool. The world ain't gonna vamoose if you ain't gonna finish that piece of software now or ever. Just set some broad deadlines and a very flexible and loose schedule and enjoy it all the way. In most cases, I bet the results would surprise you in how much more you achieve than what you had originally planned.

3. Leave time for other activities.

In short, you have a Life. If not, get one today! Seriously, work (even if you are a Hacker-par-excellence-in-extremus who lives and dies for coding) is not everything. It is most of it, but there should be space and time for other wholesome activities. Sleep, take your girlfriend out, surprise your parents by staying home and actually spending time talking to them, go for a long ride, meet up with friends and just go plain crazy... the list is endless my friend. For me, I do most of the above ;-) ...

4. Never ever wait on an idea.

Ideas are ephemeral property. Either you implement and stake claim to it or someone else will take it, thank you. You get an idea, start working on it immediately, keeping all the points above in mind of course. And the best reason is that average ideas come from brainstorming sessions, good ideas come from dedicated study of the domain and great ideas come while one is least expecting it. The winning move is not to lose it!

Okay, I have been evangelising long enough for one day. I have started work well and truly and I am following my own principles listed above. Look for a lot of activity on this little nook of the Web ( pun intended). Peace.

Why I like Eric S. Raymond

2007-02-02T22:57:00.000-08:00

I first came across the name Eric S. Raymond around 4 years back when I came across
this quiz question : "Who is the author of 'The cathedral and the bazaar' and 'Homesteading the Noosphere' ?" The first reaction was - "What author names his works with such fuzzy-brained names?" And the answer was, a Genius. That's what he is. Not in the sense that the word conjures
up - of a bespectacled, hunching, hirsute monomaniac as that portrayed by the movie 'A beautiful Mind'. No. The first thing I realized about ESR ( as he is commonly known ) is that he is a 'cool' hacker. One who was fortunate to have actually experienced the Hacker Revolution first hand and who actually has no fear of speaking out his mind. Take one look at this blog http://esr.ibiblio.org/ and you will need no further explanation.

The first work that I read ( and enjoyed tremendously ) had ESR's involvement was the Jargon File ( also known as the Jargon Lexicon ). It made me sure of the fact
that ESR is indeed the historian of the Hacking Commununity. Officially maybe not, but his works such as The Cathedral and the Bazaar and Homesteading the Noosphere illustrate this fact clearly and also the fact that he is a very lucid thinker who can present his ideas in a most direct and forceful manner.
Plus he is a veteran Lisp hacker ( or LISP as he calls it, being part of that old tradition ). So my respect for him grows even more! I highly recommend a thorough reading of the aforementioned essays to any serious student of the Hacker and UNIX cultures. I just finished my second reading
today!

There is a God in Heaven after all!

2007-01-22T21:26:00.000-08:00

I originally thought of posting this on my general blog ( thelittlenook.blogspot.com )
but since I had created thistechnical blog with the express intent of posting technical
ideas, writings and my own progress along the Project Plan that I have formulated for
myself ( see previous post ) I imagined this to be the perfect place for this.

I had vented a lot of fire and brimstone in quite a few posts over a couple of weeks
regarding the absolutely pathetic service that Linux and nVidia had provided for sound and sound recording. I cannot blame the first party with a straight face. After all, it is completely free! nVidia, on the other hand, cannot escape the noose by any strecth of reasoning. They charge a lot of money for their hardware, flaunt a non-existing Linux-friendly service on their website and then provide some totally useless generic drivers which do not work on their own hardware! It had been a totally exasperating experience I tell you. The only good lessons learnt from this experience are :

1. I learnt to be more independent in terms of technology. The mantra is, "If it ain't
there, make one yourself!". Thus my Device Driver project.

2. Just because you pay for something does not mean that you will get good service. I have all the best feelings for nVidia's hardware but unless they want to go the way of the mammoth, they had better start looking outside their tunnel vision to see what the customers really want in terms of service.

Anyway, just so that it could be helpful for thousands of other hapless budding programmers out there, exasperated to find out that the $1000 hardware they just bought won't even run their favorite OS ( read Linux ) properly, here is a bit of background on my problem and the solution that I found out entirely by chance.

System configuration :

Compaq Presario V3149AU laptop with AMD 64 bit Turion X2 processor,
1 GB DDR2 RAM, nVidia GeForce Go 6150 card with upto 128 MB shared memory
and a 120 GB hard disk.

Problem :

The microphone ( both the external mic and the built-in ones ) were non-functional in Linux. I had tried Fedora Core 6, Slamd64 and Fedora Core 5 with some of the latest kernels ( 2.6.18-1.2768.fc6 on the Fedora Core 6 but similar versions for the others as well ). In short, the speakers work fine and I can hear audio but there is absolutely no mic input. So that means I cannot record my voice using the mic or even through the Line-In.

Attempted solutions:

I must have literally scoured the entire Web in search of a solution to this. I could figure out that the problem lay with the sound drivers. On FC6, the ALSA driver was 1.0.12 or some variants of it ( depending on the specific OS and kernel version ). I must say that a lot of work needs to be done on this driver to come anywhere close to even Windows standards. It was excruciatingly irritating when the forums would suggest installing version 1.0.13 and it would not even install because of some error in the driver code itself (!) or incompatibility with the kernel version and when I managed to install the next higher version, 1.0.14, it would just throw up some dummy switches which couldn't capture a jet plane taking off at 10 feet. In short, ALSA sucks! Same problem with Slamd64 and Fedora Core 5. OpenSUSE did not even install on my system. Way to go Novell!

Solution:

Call it serendipity or an example of the practicality of the Chaos Theory, but I had almost given up hope of getting the mic to work at all in Linux till I had finished writing my own driver when I chanced upon this excellent new release of Ubuntu called "Feisty Fawn" ( Herd 1 if I am not mistaken ). I do not remember the original link where I had downloaded it from ( shows the confidence I had that it would work ) but when I took it home and used it as Live CD just for kicks, the sound worked perfectly! The microphone also worked perfectly and I could hear my own sweet voice as it streamed from my vocal cords to the external microphone and into the Line-In of the sound card and as it beautifully made its way in Ogg Vorbis to the Line-Out of the self-same card and from thence to the headphones on my head and into the auditory regions of my brain whence the Ogg Vorbis was translated by the myriad neurons into the most beautiful English words that I had heard in a long, long time!
In short, it works fine! And if you are one of those who has had a harrowing time over some something as banal as this, here is a link to the solution of all your problems... well, related to sound on Linux at least! You can get the Feisty Fawn CD here - Ubuntu Rocks!.

The Live CD takes some time to load so be patient ( that is a third good lesson learnt from this experience ) and when loaded, you can install it like a normal Linux distro - on your hard drive.
And yeah, the kernel is a new higher version... something like 2.6.20.X ... it is Ubuntu 7.04 after all. The main Ubuntu site itself does not feature more than version 6.10. Anyway, enjoy recording and playing sound on Linux!

Starting with a brief Project Plan

2007-01-20T11:57:00.000-08:00

So at last I am embarking on a very important, in fact "the" most important phase of my life. So in accordance with my goals, I felt a nifty little project plan would be in order. Thanks to my Big Guy Vasu for this idea. He really inspired me with this cool project plan that he makes using Microsoft's Project software. The vendor is immaterial here really. The actual planning of the whole project in terms of time allotted, resources and the concept of "base levels" is nothing short of an efficient wonder! Of course, the plan that I have here is very simple and very pithy :

My 20% projects ( a la Google ):

1. Write a Linux device driver for nVidia's GeForce Go 6150 card from scratch. Accordingly, I have to learn the
art of writing device drivers in Linux. I have found some good "free" resources for the same.

2. Develop a Live Audio Streaming web application for Ogg Vorbis format using Lisp. Peter Seibel's "Practical
Common Lisp" and Paul Graham's "On Lisp" are two resources that I have earmarked for this purpose.

3. Develop an efficient semi-automated Code Review tool for JBuilder as a plugin. I need to get some actual
research done on this as it is not a free software.

My intention is to complete the above projects before the first of March, 2007. Starting of course, today - the twenty-first of January, 2007.

My Main Project for this year ( 2007 ):

Project Phreax.

This I intend to complete and deploy by the third of July, 2007.

This should be a very interesting journey for me indeed. What I am going to learn and how I am going to enhance myself as a person is going to be even more interesting. And the best part is, it will be here for all to share and learn from.

- Timmy Jose.