Old habits die hard. Whenever we have to send huge attachments; the wise ones used to say ‘Don’t clog their mailbox, zip it and send it’. Everyone religiously used to follow the rule and every word document, presentation or excel sheet was zipped before sending. The zipped file would be a good 40% smaller. The mails would reach faster and everyone would be happy in the process.

Fast forward to 2009, most people now use Office 2007. The new Office is vastly more ….well…new and the preferred file formats all have changed. There is a x at the end of the all filenames so we have .docx, .pptx and .xlsx floating all over the place (how do you pronounce these anyways?!). The documents are still religiously sent as zipped files. Except there is no 40% reduction. Actually it isn’t even 10%. Why?

Because you cannot zip a file that’s already zipped. Yep…. all the new office documents are already zipped anyways. You can even open them using Winzip by simply renaming their extensions to .zip.

So folks, next time you mail someone, don’t bother to zip it. There is only the added annoyance of the recipient having to unzip before opening the file.

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Tony Collins has compiled a list of Project Management facts which might very well be the ‘Mythical Man-Month’ for the new era. It explains why so many IT projects fail so aptly that I had to reproduce it here:

1. Projects with realistic budgets and timetables don’t get approved

2. Activity in the early stages should be dedicated to finding the correct questions

3. The more desperate the situation the more optimistic the progress report

4. A user is somebody who rejects the system because it’s what he asked for

5. The difference between project success and failure is a good PR company

6. Nothing is impossible for the person who doesn’t have to do it

7. Every failing, overly ambitious project, has at its heart a series of successful small ones trying to escape

8. A freeze on change melts whenever heat is applied

9. There’s never enough time to do it right first time

10. You understood what I said, not what I meant

11. If you don’t know where you’re going, just talk about specifics

12. If at first you don’t succeed, rename the project

13. Everyone wants a strong project manager - until they get him

14. Only idiots own up to what they really know (thank you to President Nixon)

15. The worst project managers sleep at night

16. A failing project has benefits which are always spoken of in the future tense

17. Projects don’t fail in the end; they fail at conception

18. Visions are usually treatable

19. Overly ambitious projects can never fail if they have a beginning, middle and no end

20. In government we never punish error, only its disclosure

21. The most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest

22. A realist is one who’s presciently disappointed in the future

I am pretty sure most of us can relate to these

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Most of you must have read the news that Google finally jumped into the Twitter Bandwagon. In their trademark style, they have chosen to announce this in a cryptic way. Their first tweet was essentially this:

I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010

I will explain in this post how to crack this simple code with the help of some Python one-liners (Google’s favourite language). If you are a Google aspirant (who isn’t? ), this might help you clear the interview. So pay attention.

To most people it is immediately obvious that it is a text encoded in binary. Since each binary word is 8 characters long, it is most probably written in the extended 8-bit ASCII code. In fact, it is and you can read this with a simple ASCII chart.

But they have made it slightly difficult for you by writing in binary. Since most charts would provide you a lookup from decimal or hexadecimal numbers to ASCII representations only. So how do you convert from binary to decimal? It’s quite simple:

This line defines a function decimal which works in a manner similar to how we would manually convert binary numbers into decimal. Each position is multiplied by increasing powers of two from the right. Then, these numbers are added together. for e.g. ‘1010′ will be 1 * 8 + 0 * 4 + 1 * 2 + 0 * 1 = 10.

Next, we split the binary part of the tweet string and apply the decimal function on each part

The result is something that you might have already guessed seeing the first 2 words:

“I’m feeling lucky\n”

Hope you learnt some interesting python constructs. If there are other ways of decoding this in Python, please comment below.

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Q. What’s the Difference between Cloud Computing & SaaS?

A. It is the same as the difference between TV and Cable TV. TV is a technology. However, Cable TV is a business model using this technology.

Cloud Computing refers to an architecture where web applications can scale easily to any number of users. Software as a Service (SaaS) is a business model where computing software is provided in a ‘pay as you use’ model. SaaS is often built using Cloud Computing. But all Cloud Computing apps don’t use the SaaS model.

Therefore Cloud Computing != SaaS

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Have to even seen yourself briefly other than in your own reflection? Have you ever wondered if there are other people who are identical to you in appearance but nowhere related to you? There is a word for it - Doppelgänger. As per Wikipedia:

…They are generally regarded as harbingers of bad luck.
In some traditions, a doppelgänger seen by a person’s
friends or relatives portends illness or danger, while
seeing one’s own doppelgänger is an omen of death. In
Norse mythology, a vardøger is a ghostly double who
precedes a living person and is seen performing their
actions in advance.

There also a Malayalam movie called Aparan based on this concept. It is the first film of the actor Jayaram by the acclaimed Director/Writer Padmarajan. In the film, the doppelgänger truly upturns the protagonist’s life. However, there are no double role gimmicks employed. The presentation is very sensitive and gripping.

In this era of cloning, any part of your body - split hair or even saliva can be used to create an entire replica of yours. Gene therapy may soon make this a reality. Will your clone bring you bad luck as some Hollywood movies predict? Most likely, because most people wouldn’t enjoy the company of someone with exactly the same nature as yours. Even worse he or she will covet the same things you would covet. This could mean you will be competing with your clone in many spheres of your life for e.g. dating. And the winner would be, most probably, based on chance because your skills/qualities are evenly matched. A little frustrating isn’t it?

Whoever said Imitation is the most sincere form of Flattery, most certainly didn’t think of clones!

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Reddit had a heated debate about the AJAX paging pattern. The debate sidetracked into the benefits of Paging. Nobody seemed to mention the excellent greasemonkey script Autopagerize which is proof that the concept works brilliantly. I find it one of the most indispensable Greasemonkey scripts available today.

The idea is simple. Assume you are reading a blog in blogspot.com. When you scroll towards the end of the blog, Autopagerize realizes that you are really interested in reading more blog posts. In other words, soon you would click on ‘Older Entries’ links. This would have caused a fresh page to load. How terribly annoying! Instead, Autopagerize will silently load the older posts in the background and seamlessly add them to the end of the page. By the time you finish reading the second page, the third page will be added to the end and so on and so forth. This results in a smooth and breezy browsing experience, which has to be experienced to be believed.

Installing Autopagerize

Autopagerize uses greasemonkey plugin and hence works only if you have Firefox installed. The steps are quite simple:

1. Install Greasemonkey
2. Go to Autopagerize script page and click on ‘Install this Script’ button
3. Visit any of the supported sites e.g. stackoverflow.com or a blog like simblog
4. If the page supports Autopagerize, a green square will appear at the top right of the page. Scroll to the end and it will momentarily turn blue to indicate that the next page is loading in the background.

How does Autopagerize work?

Autopagerize works on all kinds of sites which have pages. But how does it manage to understand the structure of them all? The answer is the community maintained SITEINFO database which is the result of hundreds of hours of effort.

Autopagerize is turned on for a particular site if its URL matches the url property. Once the page is loaded, it searches for the next link based on the xpath provided by nextLink property. The next page’s content is identified by the pageElement property. Anything which is not part of this content is discarded. This content is then appended to the existing page either by appending as a sibling to the existing pageElement or if insertBefore is defined, it is inserted before the element identified by insertBefore property.

How to Add any Website to Autopagerize?

Note: This is not for the faint of heart. It involves opening and working with some code (to the extend of editing some regular expressions).

So you would like extend the Autopagerize experience to more and more sites? Don’t worry, you have come to the right place. For this section you would need to install the excellent Firebug plugin. Firebug’s javascript console is the best interactive XPath debugger I am aware of.

Read the rest of this entry »

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It is the first Onam in our flat and we thought, why not go full traditional? The floral carpet took a couple of hours of dedicated effort in the wee hours of morning. So, was it worth the effort? Check it out:

Math Behind the Scenes

Well, there is a bit of geometry involved in a pookalam unless you are willing to spend a lot of time improvising. Like a good piece of engineering, a good design was essential. Here are some of the mockups made using Inkscape:

The Sadhya this time was at Prestige Hotel. Was pretty good with 3 different kinds of Payasam. Now time to munch some banana chips

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This is a quick workaround for people who are using easy_install to install Python Imaging Library on Windows. Many people faced issues while doing this. I found a simple workaround for this.

You must have tried the following

Now you will need to go to your site-packages directory (typically at C:\Python\Lib\site-packages) and change one line that starts with ./PIL-1.1.6-py2.5-win32.egg to simply ./PIL and change the sub-directory named similarly to PIL

Now your imports should work

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Unfortunately, there is no way to escape the tremendous hype surrounding the latest Batman film ‘The Dark Knight’. It spoils a viewer’s experience by raising the expectations to an unrealistic level. Unbelievably, just after I saw the film yesterday, I realized that even the hype couldn’t prepare me for such a fantastic experience. Christopher Nolan’s creation not only appeals to the average film goer but also to the critics establishing a new benchmark against which comic book films will be judged against. In fact, the term ‘comic book movie’ will no longer be understood as a euphemism for ‘bunch of crap appealing to the comic book fans’ anymore.

This multi-climatic, multi-layered, and multi-thematic film is an excellent cinematisation of an epic struggle between good and evil. Through excellent dialogues and almost heart stopping action sequences, the story unfolds rapidly and constantly keeps you guessing. While most action films try hard to come up with one clever climatic arc, Nolan’s Joker gives the audience a maddening parade of climatic moments one after another.

Joker - Best Villain Ever

The biggest highlight of ‘Dark Knight’ is undoubtedly the character of Joker. Though many phsychotic characters have appeared in Hollywood, Heath Ledger’s Joker is path-breaking in many ways:

• He is an absolute. There is a no background story. He himself gives multiple interpretation of his disfigurement. No attempt is made to humanise or even demystify the character.
• His disfigurement makes him a freak, which he further relishes and emphasizes with make-up. His unkempt and battered appearance is hardly scary, but add the body language and intonations of a psychopath and the result is disturbingly real.
• He is arguably not an evil character simply because he has no moral compass. He master-minds situations which involve dire outcomes yet leaves the details to chance. He, in his own words, is Chaos. He proves that sanity or civility is based on the illusion of order that humans have created. The absence of order brings out the latent insanity in everyone. It is in this chaos that Joker thrives.

As Joker aptly tells Batman in a memorable scene - What would I do without you? You complete me.

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Note this currently works only if you have Firefox installed

The Hindu is is one of the newspapers I have great respect for. I am allergetic to fresh newsprint, so I have no choice but to read their online edition even if I have subscribed to the print edition. But their website badly needs a redesign. However, in this Web2.0 era you are not at the mercy of the site admins to do something about it. You can improve your browsing experience in 2 steps:

1. Point your firefox to the Greasemonkey add-on page and install the add-on. Now restart Firefox before you go to step 2. Don’t worry all your open tabs will be restored.

2. Go to the Hindu Printer Redirect Script and click on the Install this Script button

Voila, start browsing Hindu, for example this page and enjoy the difference!

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