Posts from — July 2007

Yes, today at FIIT-JEE, we had three free periods. Apparently Ashutosh sir(the math teacher) and S.K. Bhatt sir(the physics teacher) had to attend a seminar and paradise. A.K.Choudhry sir filled in for Ashutosh sir. I ensured that I had the time of my life. By the way I got a new book called Beginner Electronics by Keith Bridley. I have done everything from admiring the cover to showing it to everyone in our flats except reading it. I shall start soon. S.K.Rajesh sir apparently had a severe back pain and I thought I would recommend electric stimulation + acupressure + a few more tricks which Dr. Charan (my physiotherapist, well till a few months back) told me of. I decided against it. By the way I have begun dozing off while making trips to and from FIIT-JEE. I will now get back to coding. I might be able to deliver my download script by tomorrow.

So, I’ve volunteered to make NIPL’s wiki. I was itching to try out kid templates some time back last year and I decided to use tg as it supports kid templates by default. After I finished my wiki, it was “weighed” against ikiwiki ( it uses berkeleydb eww!). ikiwiki was going to be lightweight any given day over something so full of batteries like a wiki in tg. So out goes my work. It is over here. Let me warn you, the thing is not as good as a full blown CMS so do not use it over something like moinmoin.

Yes I got my SAT scores a month back and sorry for not having posted about them. Anyway 2060 was my SAT score. The individual marks were:

640 Critical Reading

720 Math (one world class goof-up here)

700 Writing (who would have thought)

Anyway let us move on. Naresh Shah ( someone at FIIT-JEE) called me up soon after the results were declared and bitched about having screwed all his chances of making it to MIT and Caltech and I at my end was helplessly listening to his moaning. After a good 1/2 hour when he decided to hang up, I went back to education (a.k.a coding).

I made a goof-up in the toefl registration. By mistake I registered for the Paper Based Test and got to know from Uniti-Foundation that I had to write the internet based test as ETS planned to kick out the PBT the next year. I then registered for the IBT. What a waste of money. Anyway TOEFL promised “not to” refund me completely and told me that if I sent the ticket back to them within the admission deadline I would be eligible for getting back a small percentage of what I paid.

Anyway more on this later.

I am now working on creating a script which takes a url as an input and then downloads all available mp3s off it. I plan to use the BeautifulSoup module to parse the html. By the way I have no need to use mountcreatingdir.py as the libATA + ICH4 controller conflict has been resolved. Automount works fine now. It was interesting making it though. I shall keep updating this blog with my attempts to create this script. I have also decided to switch to emacs as I have the habit of working on two or more projects at a time.

Well, the URMS at NIPL is complete and I have decided to step aside for the “web designers” to take my place. No matter how hard I try, I end up dissatisfied with my work on making templates. That doesn’t mean that I hate those websites where the creators put in hours of hardwork. I particularly like Jeff Croft’s website. The colors are not too showy and I can read the text without straining my eyes. Jeff Croft worked at LJW, the place where django was created. I suppose it comes naturally to him.

I want to improve my django skills. Recently jburd (IRC) gave me an interesting task, making a search engine for India’s pin codes. I wrote one in seconds and was immediately confronted with a problem, India is a nation with over a million town and villages, who would give me the pin codes of all these places and when would I enter them into my db?

Search engines have to operate intelligently in order to produce relevant results. I remember when someone on IRC told me about the Levenshtein algorithm and showed me an implementation in python.

I then came across an idea. English is not a scientific language. Hence we have multiple spellings for the same name. Let us pick the word “Secunderabad”. I can also write Secunderabad as Sikandarabad or Sickandarabad. All sound the same. To a person who had only heard of Secunderabad but never seen how it is spelt, using a pincode search engine would be a bit of a problem. We can then use a speech application (espeak ?) and obtain a prononciation, then we can rewrite the same in a scientific language (like Hindi, Sanskrit and other Indian languages). We could compare that to the data in our database and get an accurate result. Then use the speech application to find out the possible permutations in english and spit out the results.

I don’t know, but I might have provided myself with an idea for research when I go to college.

Oh, and by the way, I have bundled the pincode search engine here.

I just volunteered for a free shell providing service named NIPL. NIPL stands for Nouvelles Informationzes Positives Libres. I have been assigned the task of creating a User Request Management System. I picked NIPL for the following reasons:

1. I get to serve the open source community directly or indirectly

2. NIPL users are free in the true sense of word. They give root access man !

3. NIPL is maintained by excellent devs and it would be an excellent opportunity to learn from them.

I am using django to make the URMS. Have to go now. I will write again later.