From arunrocks.com:

Web Development is now getting dominated by frameworks. After the initial hype of Rails, Python based frameworks are getting more popularity especially after the release of Google App Engine. Nobody seems to be interested in building websites using PHP, even if they are highly experienced in PHP. This could mean two things:

1. There will be more demand in Indian IT companies for PHP skills similar to Perl scripting skills these days
2. There will be soon be a viable competitor to the immensely popular Wordpress blogging platform from the Python/Ruby world

I have nothing against Wordpress. In fact, it is one of the easiest tools to deploy. But with tools like cPanel, deployment could be no longer a deciding factor for blogging platforms.

Coming back to the topic of Python Web Frameworks, there is a multitude of options. I have used some of these framworks and found them to be ‘pythonic’ in different ways:

• Django Well documented. Tightly Coupled and ‘Batteries Included’
• Pylons Extremely flexibility to Plug and Play components. ‘Fun to Hack’
• web.py Great for beginners. Entire framework ‘fits in your head’

Pylons looks most appealing to me. So far it looks like the underdog largely overshadowed by Django’s presence lacking the marketing or love it deserves. A few weeks back I would have complained about the lack of Pylons tutorials on the web. A google search brought up several links pointing to the wiki tutorial. As many have pointed out, the wiki tutorial is too long and complicated for beginners. It would easily put off a beginner. It took me quite some time to realise that the best place to start learning Pylons is the Pylons Documentation itself and the best Pylons tutorial is the Flickr Search. Going through the documentation is almost feels like reading a book with every concept explained in detail.

Pylons currently seems to the having an edge over Django for enterprise application due to its well tested interface with SQLAlchemy. Django seems to be having a fairly recent branch for SQLAlchemy integration. Pylons typically uses Python eggs and VirtualEnv for deployment which is might seem a little complex to beginners, but once you try it once it is actually quite convenient. Most of the installation can be done from the command-line and it will be nearly an independent sandbox for Pylons development. However it might take sometime to understand other aspects of using python eggs such as uninstallation and creation of new eggs. I haven’t had much success with making a portable version of my Pylons installation on Windows though

My favourite templating engine is Genshi because it is very designer friendly(which also means it works with the tools a Designer has, not just that it is easy for a Designer to learn). I can easily do all HTML designing directly on my Genshi templates because they are valid HTML or XML documents. Almost all of Genshi’s logic can be hidden away as attributes which is a great idea. In fact, the templates are even valid XML which makes the creation of valid HTML pages a much more natural experience. Almost all XML tools and even HTML tools like Tidy will work flawlessly on Genshi templates due to these reasons.

Once you get used to Genshi’s templates, you might even use them for static web site designing. I am sure it will save you a lot of time whenever those last minute ’sidebar redesigns for every page’ pops up.

If the over-descriptive title was not enough, this is another one of my tips to use my favorite editor - Emacs. Some of you really liked my earlier post on Emacs tips on Windows, so here is one more tip to improve your productivity.

Most of the time while editing a document, we need to quickly browse the folder of that file. Add the following lines to your .emacs files and so that by just pressing function key F12 you can immediately view its corresponding folder:

A nice extra is that the opened explorer will have the current file automatically selected. Press F12 once in a while, it quickly becomes addictive

Ittesbin is truly a spectacular time each year. It feels like college all over again. And many would swear that’s not always a pretty sight. Sleep deprived zombies can be spotted around the campus at midnight tired from practice sessions. There are also the worker ant types who would be trying to collect every scrap they could get their hands on for making variety of props. And there are also the insomniacs who are just there to have a preview of the show and blabber some profane advice under the pretext of ’suggestions’.

Whatever it is, Ittesbin has always been an explosion of homegrown on stage entertainment within Infosys Mangalore. However from this time on, they introduced a new off-stage event called ‘Video Making Competition’. The theme was ‘My Infosys, My Mangalore’.

I took charge of our team and penned and directed a video over a period of three weeks (yes, almost whole of April!). It was a massive covert operation to shoot almost all of Mangalore without other teams getting a whiff of it. To see the result click on the link that follows

Click To Play

It was a fantastic learning experience and I felt it would be only fair to share my production notes for all those aspiring film makers out there. Here goes my post-mortem:

• When I started I just didn’t want to make another documentary video, I wanted to make a movie. Slowly everyone got excited with this idea. From church scenes to playing cricket, people pitched in a lot of very filmy but very large scale ideas. We were basically a bunch of movie crazed folks.

• I invented some camera movement using a tripod and paper sheet to create a dolly effect used in movies. Worked quite well

• We didn’t want blood to look like ketchup, so we did a lot of research. I tried different easily available chemicals due to non availability of corn syrup. We ruined a couple of vessels at home in the process. But in the end, with lots of food color and cornflour the effect seemed to work.

• The crab was spotted in an unexpected place. I had picked the wrong angle to shoot the bridge scene and it was near a open field. I came across this crab on my way back. I followed it for a long time while the rest of the crew was waiting for me to shoot the sunset at the bridge before the sun sets!

• Voice intonation is never right because its very difficult to emote with voice more than with the visual. Voice is mostly too loud like a studio recording due to suppressing lower freq by an inferior mic. This stands out.

• Made a evening shot look like a night shot by color correction

• We faced a lot of problems while shooting:

  • Bharat Mall people refused to permit us to continue shooting without a letter. we got the letter but only 3 days later
  • At the beach the camera and backup camera failed 3-4 times due to various reasons and the sun was setting fast. It was Murphy at his best.
  • Getting hospital ready with no white bedsheet, we got a towel to cover the person and the nurse helped us to setup the drip and stand
  • Takes and retakes especially for the emotional, angry scenes. Most of the time the entire crew will be in a jolly mood and I will be brooding.
  • Getting all the people on location. Sometimes we need to revisit the site because the people are not there. Sometimes because I got too carried away after the last shot and blurt out “Its a packup, folks!”
  • Very little time to experiment with the equipment. I had started shooting the very next day I got the cam. I was learning as I started using it.
  • The video cam (JVC Everio, world’s first hard disk drive camcorder) is not good at low light. we used still camera in such cases and it shows
  • Shooting in a non std video size. The 16:9 video size was not supported by many encoders and applications.

Movie making is like Software Development. The final product is purely dictated by time, there is never a perfect release. Everything has to be managed to fit in the available time without compromising the quality. There are lot of areas where I feel I could have improved like lighting or visual effects. But the shoe string budget and lack of time (almost all of us were slogging with aggressive deadlines at work) were the constraints. But the constraints themselves led to creative ways to overcome them.

In a way the language of cinema requires a different way of thinking. The shots, scenes and transitions are the alphabets, words and punctuations of the language of movie making. I was surprised I was able to almost easily pick it up. The end product rarely deviates from the original written script. But I do realise that there is still a long way to go. And this is definitely not my last attempt

Bonus Tip: Uploading to Youtube

The videos produced by the JVC camcorder are in .MOD format which are nothing but .MPG files. The finally edited MPG file was too big for upload both in terms of video file size and resolution. But if I compressed it to say Xvid it would be recompressed by Youtube. Also they don’t add the black bars automatically, making my 16:9 videos squashed to fit the 4:3 aspect ratio.

In the end I had to download the latest windows build of mencoder and use the following 2 commands which resized the video, added the black bars, gave me the best results:

As you can guess from the length of the commands, it took me a long time to figure out. So its worth mentioning it here for reference

Some good links on transcoding

1. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9005
2. http://forum.videohelp.com/topic346256-240.html
3. http://forum.videohelp.com/topic345987.html
4. http://dinsdalepiranha.wordpress.com/2007/10/16/how-to-make-a-video-for-youtube-with-linux/
5. http://www.digital-digest.com/articles/MeGUI_H.264_Conversion_Guide_page1.html
6. http://news.softpedia.com/news/Convert-Movies-with-subtitles-for-your-PSP-on-Ubuntu-67806.shtml
7. http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Mencoder_Introduction_Guide
8. http://web.njit.edu/all_topics/Prog_Lang_Docs/html/mplayer/encoding.html
9. http://videogeek.shacknet.nu/index.php?entry=entry070930-082742
10. http://mcebuddy.com/forums/p/312/1259.aspx

Here is a belated valentine’s day greeting from both of us.

For all my readers, I recommend visiting the microsite I had made earlier. Now it is written entirely in web.py. Thanks to my new website host, A Small Orange, I can create and host python based applications. I agree that there is no need to design a new blog in python again, but it is a great way to learn a new (anti-) framework. Web.py applications are really small and easy to understand and therefore, has less bugs.

Guess what, Jeff Atwood owns an ASUS laptop model (W3J) that is similar to mine (F3J). He is full of praise about the decision. Considering I took at least 2 months (the standard duration for yours truly to zero into an buying decision) to arrive at the decision, it seems well worth now :).

I use a fairly powerful laptop at home. It’s not exactly a gaming laptop but it has a pretty powerful gaming card (ATI X1600) and uses dual core (Duo T2300E) processor. In short its a great machine to play classic Sega/Nintendo games of yesteryears’ through emulators. Increasingly I have been concerned about the life of my laptop keyboard which I have found, unlike the desktop keyboards, could be quite easily jammed (especially if your 10 year old cousin is banging on Enter key yelling ‘MAAARREYO’).

Somehow I had this intuition that a gamepad-like input device can solve this problem. After a couple of minutes of googling I found that my guess was correct. I could find that it is easily available in cities like Mumbai/Bangalore and it is quite cheap too. But I was not sure if I can get in in Mangalore so I searched the usual places and a few unusual places like gadget.in. I had the following criteria for my gamepad (or joypad or game controller as it is called in some places):

• Must have the basic set of buttons for playing Nintendo and Sega games
• Must have a joystick. This is the basic advantage of gamepads over keyboard+mouse
• Must be cheap so that I can probably buy more if I need to host a mini game party
  Plus, it must have decent looks

The prices range from Rs. 450 (Chinese make incl. Shipping) to Rs. 1100 (Logitech Dual action) online. I also read accounts of people who went for Logitech and lost their calibration in a few months and accounts of people who have been using cheap gamepad for the last 3 years.

Finally, I could get a decent gamepad with vibrations and dual joysticks from Mangalore (Saibeen Complex, Lalbagh) itself for Rs. 350. It is a Chinese model called PU850 and is autodetected by XP when plugged into the USB port (though it comes with a mini CD with drivers). It has all the features I wanted. As regards to looks, decide for yourself

Don’t they go well with each other :D? I have played only a few games with it so this is a quick review but here is what I found:

• It is small and light for my hands alleast. It is fully powered by the usb (no batteries)
• Almost all emulators detected it out of the box
• Sega Genesis games work well with the joystick in Analog mode. I use the 4 shoulder buttons and right joystick in most cases.
• Nintendo Gameboy games work well with the left D-pad or HAT switches. It seems to be over-reacting to the joystick. Could be an emulator problem though. I found it more easier to hold it tilted forward when playing these games.

All in all, it has been a good value for money. I can now literally sit back and play my game collection with much better controls and stop worrying about my Pandora.

Launchy is a great productivity tool and a cool way to impress your friends. You can launch any application by pressing a hotkey (say Alt+Space) and the first few letters of the application for eg: typing ‘gi’ will display the GIMP icon and pressing Enter will launch GIMP. You can download Launchy from its website and its beta is pretty stable (and gorgeous) on my XP laptop too.

Using Launchy gets pretty addictive and soon you will hate using the Start menu or even Explorer on Windows for opening applications or files. So I took the red pill and started automating the following things with a little help from Python:

• Launching Intranet applications inside Internet Explorer (even if Firefox is your default browser)
• Bringing minimized or overlapped windows to the foreground

Some Necessary Evil

Don’t get me wrong, I hate IE as much as you do. But the fact of life is that many web apps out there “Work best when viewed in IE” (TM). Even if you have launchy plugins to launch the web app, if your default browser is Firefox, it might show incorrectly. Here is the solution:

1. Install Python and Pywin32
2. Copy the following script to the Utilities directory (it will be in the path where you installed Launchy) and save it with a .pyw extension not a .py extension

In the above code replace the URL http://intranetapp/home with the URL of your choice.

Finally, open Launchy, right-click and say ‘Rebuild Index’.

No more Alt-Tabbing around

If you are like me, you’ll have a lot of windows open at the same time. I have tried increasing the task bar height and grouping similar windows feature in XP to manage them. But I always wish I could invoke commonly used open applications like my chat window in just a few keystrokes. Launchy doesn’t index open programs by default, but with some python magic I can show you how to bring some commonly used windows to the foreground:

1. As before, install Python and Pywin32
2. Copy the following script to the Utilities directory (it will be in the path where you installed Launchy) and save it with a .pyw extension not a .py extension

In the above code change the string Microsoft Excel - Expenses.xls with the title the window you would like to summon.

Finally, open Launchy, right-click and say ‘Rebuild Index’.

This works even if the window was minimized.

I hope, finally you can throw your mouse away. Ah… What a bliss!

Many, many moons ago, I used to frequent a long dusty and weed-ridden road with the dreams of a pompous education. While the path opened many doors, the dream still remained a mere mirage. The chasm between IT ‘Real World’ and my Engineering classes was shockingly wide, deep and treacherous. My Govt. Engineering College is still an asylum for Dreamers. Their eyes are still full of dreams and heads full of unfinished ideas.

But after those 4 years, I am not disillusioned. Actually, far from it, I have the fondest memories of trying (perhaps in vain) to try and make a difference, to an educational system gathering dust. ‘Softcorner’ was one such attempt that I had spearheaded. Apart from coining a punningly clever name for a software exhibition. I tried to make the demo’ed software as approachable to the ‘Average Joe’ as possible (You might wonder how many Average Joe’s one would find in an Engg college. Trust me, plenty!!). We designed a mascot character who would explain different technical concepts in a simple language through posters. I had to think how to visualize concepts like Huffman encoding and Data Structures in the language of comics. In fact, some of my friends didn’t know I could draw until that day

Of course, a software exhibition would be incomplete without cool software. We had some bright fellows who were developing pretty interesting software thanks to Pramod Sir, who gave us lots of guidance. But we needed many more projects to make it truly a moderate sized exhibition. I, for one, felt a lot more responsible and wanted to develop 3 or 4 projects in this short time span. Being a little egoistical, I wanted them to be decent crowd pullers as well. In hindsight, a major handicap was that there was no Internet connection, so ‘online applications’ were out-of-question. So in circa 2001, this zeroed down to practically using Visual Basic 6.0.

I had 3 project ideas at that time:

1. A Kaun Banega Crorepathi (KBC) Simulator
2. A Biorhythm Calculator
3. A simple VGA game

My timeline was one week. Please note that I had to manage the logistics of preparing for Softcorner in parallel (I am not going to add ‘meanwhile complete my assignments’, because it wasn’t much of a workload then). All these applications had to look attractive and should be running full screen.

As it turns out, the first project was easiest to code. KBC is basically the Indian clone of the gameshow based on ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’ All the game requires is a way of picking random questions and allowing the player to pick among four alternatives. Regular viewers of the show are quite familiar with the hexagonal interface and gimmicky confirmatory questions by the host like ‘Lock Kiya Jaaye’ or ‘Confident?’. Armed with Photoshop and a GK book, all this went into the design of the game. The whole affair didn’t take that long and within one night, I had the EXE ready (What a productive one night stand !)

But the second project turned out to be the hardest to make, despite being the second time I was developing a Biorhythm application. The date functions and the math never seemed to find a middle ground. I also didn’t have a working Biorhythm calculator to confirm. So in terms of testing, this baby was a nightmare. But I must admit that with its cool sinusoidal graphs and calendar buttons, I was extremely proud of it when it was finished.

The game was pretty much DOS based and used Allegro for graphics. It was a variant of “Bouncing Babies” except with Chimps. It had pretty much all the usual features of a DOS game like High scores list, Help screens and various difficulty levels. It was fun designing the physics for this game(isn’t it always so ?), but certainly not eye candy for the masses. Again, adding all the features, took quite a bit of coding in C++.

The D-day finally came and we were all tensed. We tried to market as best as we could. If we pulled-in only the “geek crowd” and some senior lecturers, then it would turn out to be a flop show. So, we tried the simplest trick in the book, attract more girls! It was simpler than we thought, we started distributing some handouts to the ‘target population’ (an MBA term I later picked up) and also some extensive word-of-mouth publicity. The crowds slowly trickled in and soon a bunch of wide-eyed girls are listening intently to a demonstration of ‘Huffman’s Compression Algorithm’.

Being egoistical, as mentioned earlier, I always kept an eye on my 3 projects and the results still astound me. The first project was without exaggeration the star of the show. Many wanted copies of the simulator and wanted to know how it worked(!) They kept pondering over questions like - ‘Why does it repeat some questions?’ (it had some 30 odd questions in its database), ‘How does it make such smart comments?’ (random no: generator) etc. If you have ever seen the original game show, the main selling point is the tension built just before the participant answers the question. The viewers hang at the edge of their seats wondering if the words coming out the person on the hot seat will take him/her to the next higher rung or seal his/her fate forever. Many felt that my simulator could recreate a bit of that drama successfully.

It was an important lesson at that point. Basically, Do your research well before you start coding. Spending Herculean effort on any venture will make you biased on judging the success of the project. But often, simple but effective ideas ‘click’. Probably, I should say one of the best lessons I learnt from GEC.

PS: All images are copyrighted by their respective owners. They are not screen shots of the software mentioned in the article

Most of us love to distribute our python programs to others once you have finished coding a neat little script. For Windows users we package it using Py2exe or cx_freeze. However, many of the end-users will not be happy with a black command window popping up, say, when an error is thrown.

Of course the alternative is to write a full blown GUI application using WXPython or PyFLTK. Even the latter, though quite lightweight, adds several megabytes to the distribution, when all you need is a simple message-box indicating an error or showing some informational text. Clearly, its an overkill for your throwaway python scripts.

This is the kind of problem I typically face and I have found a good solution. The answer is ctypes library which comes as a part of the standard distribution from Python 2.5 onwards. It simply calls the messagebox function from user32.dll (which is always present in a windows installation). With the main problem solved, what remained was to obtain the error text and stack trace.

Let’s see how the code looks like:

EDIT: This is how it looks like in PyMail, one of my scripts-that-grew-into-an-app

The new looks of the site can be credited to the awesome wordpress plugin K2. It handles AJAX search box at the right column (try it out now ), rotates the ArunRocks banner with every page refresh with the pictures that I have shot and of course it has a list of my favourite links at the sidebar.

Of course, banners are not the only artwork that I did. In fact, I have been thinking about having a cool logo for ArunRocks for sometime now. Something a bit symbolic yet not too abstract. So I kind of thought about the name a bit and came up with the one on the left in about 15 mins on Photoshop.

Try to guess what the logo stands for before you read ahead. The inverted music symbol obviously stands for the two ‘r’s (in small letters) in arunrocks. If you haven’t noticed already Arun Rocks clearly hints at my initials. So the double ‘r’s have a double interpretation here. The letters are tilted and obviously ‘rocking’. The red background is also inspired from the same ‘Rock’ theme. This appears as the icon of this site on your browser, also called the favicon

Hi everyone!

As you must have noticed I have upgraded to WordPress 2.0.5 - Ronan which is hardly a month old now. This is due to an unfortunate technical issue on my hosting provider. I have survived the crash by keeping a backup. But have lost some of the latest posts. So bear with me for a while…. till then, enjoy the new cool look of the site