I had earlier sought suggestions for things to buy from USA which is not easily available in India. After much research, I realised that most of the things in USA are made in China. Well, no surprises there :). After some more serious research, I was able to come up with some items which are not easily available in India, yet have a really good value for money.

This was 6 months ago. Fast forward to the present and the goodies bag have finally arrived. Let me list down it’s contents:

• Leatherman Skeletools CX : One of the lightest multi-tools having a knife, wire cutter, universal bit driver (screwdriver) and bottle opener that fits your pocket. Has 25 years warranty

• Stylus pro: Lightweight ultra-bright pen flashlight made of aircraft aluminium. Uses normal AAA batteries.

• Board games (Pandemic, Carcassone, San Juan): Some of the most innovative and educational games ever developed for children and adults alike are not computer games but Board games. These three are probably the highest rated (at least two-player) and best value for money I could find.

• Pound of Dice 100 Pieces: Are you into RPG games? Need a 20 or 30 sided dice? This might be the cheapest way to get a decent collection of dice. You will never be short of dice anymore.

• Dragon Shield 100 Sleeves : This is for those innovative card games that one might design one day. Need sleeves for your freshly cut card printouts? Look no further.

It is an eclectic collection, matching my tastes; but I hope there is something for most people here.

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Without sounding too cliched, let me say that some of the best things in life are not expensive. Here are some of the best things you can buy for less than Rs. 8K (around $160):

Wifi Router

This is a blessing for those with frequently off working hours calls or if you have multiple laptops. The convenience of being able to work near the balcony enjoying the quiet scenery and sipping tea is divine.

Small Water Heater

This is a pet peeve of mine. Hot water is absolutely essential for a bath. Even in summer. Yep. Nothing gives you a better satisfaction that a hot bath after a warm day. And in Mangalore it’s either raining in buckets or it’s hot and humid. I would recommend that you go for a 8l one if you want a good tradeoff between heating time and power consumption.

Portable Harddisk

I am sure most of us have tried using CDs for backing up all those wonderful photos and songs we have. The problem is – CD are not really great for organising data. It is readonly and once you burn it, there is no way to go back and change it. There are, of course, other problems like limited space and suceptibility to scratches.

Harddisk prices have gone down… a lot. So there is really no excuse for not getting one. There are sub-terrabyte ones at throwaway prices. I recommend the Western Digital’s handy Passport 500 GB.

Ebooks

Can anyone guess what’s the most heaviest thing to transport? Yep, it is undoubtedly books. The weight of a carton of books can exceed that of a TV, Microwave or even a carton full of iron boxes. I think everyone who love books would have had to part with them if they have had to travel a lot. They would have given away most of it to friends or relatives, never to see them back again.

This is sad. I don’t like giving away books. Neither do I want to kill my desire to create a personal library. I suggest an eco-friendly compromise – make a digital library. Do invest in Ebooks and Audio books. I have invested heavily in a collection that I am sure I can use anywhere once ebook readers become more cheaper. For now, I don’t mind reading them on my laptop. And yes, my library weighs less than a kilo ;)

Gamepad

I am a guy who is always tempted to buy game consoles. I have made up my mind a hundred times to buy a playstation or a nintendo, only to find that the latest PC is much better at it. And you know what PCs are always ahead in terms of sheer processing power. Except that they have clumsy input devices. Ever tried to play a racing game with a keyboard? Then you will know what I am talking about.

This is easily fixable. A USB gamepad (which looks like a PS2 Gamepad) comes in for less than Rs. 500. It is a great value for money. It has all the 4 way controls, shoulder buttons and 2 joysticks. Plus it has a built-in vibrator (no batteries needed)! I am planning to go for a second one. Now you can safely give your PC to your 5-year old cousin to play Mario Kart without fearing that he with smash your keyboard to bits shouting ‘Maaario’:)

Decent Mattress

Some one rightly said that we spend one-thirds of our life on a mattress. So why not in a really good one? There are cots in the market all the way from Rs 200 to branded mattresses worth several tens of thousands. Go for a really good branded mattress. It might cost a couple of grand, but you will not lose sleep over it ;)

Portable Home-kit

A briefcase sized kit that contains a small drill, spanners, measuring tape, pipe wrench, screwdriver set etc costs less that Rs. 2000 these days. I think it is well worth the price.

Those were, in my opinion, the best little things that don’t cost you a fortune. What are the ones you feel give you great value for money? Do add in your comments.

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The talk was about creating a simple casual game using Pyglet called ‘FruitCatch’. The source code is really small and very readable. I also compared Pyglet with Pygame and why I prefer Pyglet (in certain situations:)). The demo showed the working game in the end.

You can download the game source code and presentation slides (PDF) here. I’ve shared this with the organisers as well, so it will be put up at the http://in.pycon.org/ site as well

UPDATE: The video of the lightning talk is now available and has been added below:

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You might suggest a lot of ‘diff’ tools which can do the job in either Word or Textpad. The issue was that they were working with Excel spreadsheets rather than text files and I couldn’t find any free or open source solution for them. So I ended up creating a new tool called Office Diff. Interestingly, it handles not just Excel, but also all the Office 2007 and 2003 file formats plus PDF and HTML formats as well. It features an intuitive GUI interface and is completely written in Python.

The next best thing was to open source it. I am using the BSD licence. I found sourceforge a good choice because they support Bazaar, my version control of choice at the moment.

Please visit Office Diff homepage for screenshots and check out the first release.

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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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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:

decimal = lambda s: sum(int(j) * pow(2,i) for i,j in enumerate(reversed(s)))

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

tweet = "01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010"
print ''.join(chr(decimal(s)) for s in tweet.split())

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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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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…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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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.

First, ensure that Firebug console is activated for your site. Visit the page you would like to Autopagerize say http://www.adobetutorialz.com/articles/2751/1/Professional-Web-Layout-for-Business-Solutions. Click on the firebug icon and enable the Console by checking the first check box (as shown in the figure). Click on Enable. Now the page gets refreshed and the Console appears.

Next, go to the Firefox menu item: Tools -> Greasemonkey -> Manage User Scripts. Select Autopagerize from the list and click on Edit button below.

Turn on debugging by changing line 26 (could be different for you) to var DEBUG = 1. However I could make debugging work only after adding the following 3 lines further down, say after line 85.

if(unsafeWindow.console){
   var GM_log = unsafeWindow.console.log;
}

Scroll to the line that starts with var SITEINFO = [, which is around line 40. Copy and uncomment the 6 lines of sample code provided by the author as shown in the figure.

Now, give the appropriate XPATH values to the property variables "pageElement" and "nextLink". The "url" variable is a simple regular expression and an example link for the fourth variable (this variable is purely for documentation). Save this file and refresh your page. If the XPATH values are correctly found the Autopagerize green square icon will appear on the page, else there will be some error on your Firebug console like:

nextLink not found

Debugging Autopagerize or Shit, Nothing Happens!

As you might have guessed, the last step I mentioned earlier is not so easy. This is where Firebug can help you. Before you start read some XPATH tutorials on the net to familiarize yourself with the XPATH syntax.

One killer feature in Firebug is selecting any element of a page and copying the XPath value of that element. On the Firebug window click on Firebug's Inspect button and mousing over the page to outline that page element (see fig).

Click on the page element you are interested in and the details of the element appear on the firebug window. Right clicking on any item in the breadcrumb at the very top, you will see a Copy XPath option (see fig).

Now go to the console tab of Firebug and test the XPath by using the $x function. Paste the XPath as an argument to this function and you should get an HTMLElement as the result (see fig).

You will need to find variables: "pageElement" and "nextLink" this way. This is not an exact science and involves a lot of trial and error. Here are some tips I found after several hours of testing:

1. Escaping - You will need to add a backslash '\' before each special character like '/' or ". This is not required in the Firebug console, however.
2. Single Quotes - It is best to use single-quotes as the outer-most quotes in the Firebug console
3. Firebug gives Absolute Paths - You will find that Firebug gives XPaths based on the position of a child element, which is likely to break even if the smallest change is made to the page. Try to avoid relying on positions.
4. Use attributes - The best XPaths use the classname property or id property of an element or its parent.
5. No Array Results - The XPath must always return a unique element. If an array of elements are returned, it will not work.
6. Watch the Console - After you enable debugging the console provides useful error messages. This helps in identifying the problem.
7. Read Examples - It is always best to check the huge SITEINFO database to understand how other users have tackled similar or tricky sites.

For the site we were using as an example, the following code should work:

{
  pageElement: "\/\/table[contains(@class,\"ViewArticlePanel\")]",
  url: "^http:\/\/www\\.adobetutorialz\\.com\/articles",
  nextLink: "\/\/div[@class=\"ArticleNavigation\"]\/a[contains(text(),\"Next »\")]",
  exampleUrl: "http://www.adobetutorialz.com/articles/2751/1/Professional-Web-Layout-for-Business-Solutions"
},

Hope this gives you enough information on Autopagerize and improves your browsing experience!

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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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