Well i feel an urge to write all of a sudden. i have been feeling this urge for a while now but there was a visible blocker on my way. A few months ago i got totally fed up with wordpress. A little negligence from my side and some random cracker decided to use one of wordpress’ innumerable vulnerabilities to exploit my system. I swore then not to ever use wordpress and to write my own blogging engine. I ended up doing that as well, i wrote a really really simple engine that does its work pretty well. Best part was it was static and it was fool proof. only problem, the new blog uses a url schema which is super simple and completely different from my existing blogs schema. End result: i had a brilliant system but putting it will basically kill my existing perma links.
What i needed now is a way to basically maintain my current schema and still serve from my new engine. I needed now a re routing engine, as a simple apache mod_rewrite / redirect solution did not sound appealing to me. so yeah i lost interest and i never got to finishing the blog.
Anyway since i dont see the blogging engine coming out anytime soon i might as well start posting here. got tons to write about varying from sloppy services at restaurants to usability issues at IRCTC to music camps in ooty. Lets hope this post breaks the jinx and gets me to start typing again.

This just happened a few minutes back in the airborne group. a bit of background here, Waseem hurt his toe and is worried on whether it will heal on time for the kodai tournament.

===================================================

So Waseem starts off

Mohammed Waseem

Toe play or not toe play, that is the question! #ShakespeareanDilemma

Like  · 42 minutes ago
Rajdurai Rajan likes this.

Then Kaveri Replies:

Kaveri Murthy Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer…?
39 minutes ago · Like

The conversation goes on:

Mohammed Waseem The discs and cleats of outrageous fortune.

38 minutes ago · Like · 1

Kaveri Murthy ‎’tis consummation devoutly to be wished.  ; )
34 minutes ago · Like

Mohammed Waseem To play; perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub.
30 minutes ago · Like

 

I am bored and i step in

Kausikram Krishnasayee Frailty thy name is Waseem.
26 minutes ago · Like · 1

Kaveri Murthy To grunt and sweat under a weary game,
But that the dread of injury after play
25 minutes ago · Like

Mohammed Waseem The fair Kaveri! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my layouts remember’d.
23 minutes ago · Like

Kausikram Krishnasayee Oscar Wilde: Are the commentators on “Hamlet” really mad, or only pretending to be?
21 minutes ago · Like

Kaveri Murthy ‎Kausikram- All the world’s a stage, and it’s men and women only players.
16 minutes ago · Like

Mohammed Waseem A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes (or copy/pastes). – George Bernard Shaw
14 minutes ago · Like

Kausikram Krishnasayee ‎”What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

#ThatsAlllTheShakespearIKnow #irrelevant

10 minutes ago · Like

 

Finally Captain Cool gets in

Vinay Seshadri K P Karuppu

NOW THAT IS WHAT IS CALLED #WIN

haven’t laughed like this in a long long while

So i am planning to write a new blogging engine:

the plans are as follows:

1) Should be able to import all my previous posts.

2) Should be easy to settup third party apps like disqus.

3) Should be static. i want to write my blog in note pad and run a command that will publish it online as a set of HTMLs.

4) Should be completely templatable.

5) No databases. what so ever.

Now the thing is there are a million static blogging tools out there. my own friend Yuvi wrote and maintained one for so long. Yet the geek in me wants to write one for personal use.

And those of you out there saying why write one when there is wordpress. lets not even get started on the that one.

So yeah hoping to hack with python, jinja and fabric

TL;DR: Its December season! yay! and i managed to go for my first ever live Hariprasad Chaurasia concert.  Thatha at 73 is a marvel to listen to.

The Longer Version:

He quipped saying “its a very simple instrument, there is nothing much about it”, while someone complained about the faulty acoustics of the place, but what he did not tell, yet managed to prove to the point, was the amount of magic it can do in the hands of an artist.  It was a delight to listen to Hariprasad Ji perform, such soul stirring music. One moment it was soft mellifluous and subtle, the other second it became powerful, deep and heavy. It was sheer delight to see him guide you through musical waves, pushing you, prodding you,  then gently holding you while you tread through sweet thoughts of nothing.  You smile, partly because you appreciate the quality of music, but more so because the music makes you to.

The concert had 4 songs, all four equally beautiful and distinct. I did not register the first two Raagas, though the first, from what i remember sounded like Bhairav. The song started in a soft solo with occasional support from the support flautist. Then slowly the Banarasi Mridang kicked in first as soft as the Bansuri and then as the song got to the fast phase, to a very very powerful bass beat. The second song was accompanied by the Tabla player who resembled (and most probably was) Bikram Ghosh. And  WOW! Bikram redefined the term “hammering in rhythm”, towards the Tappa, bit. Sadly, the poor acoustics, which was initially apparent only to the discerning musically inclined, got a little too obvious. Someone from the crowd complained!

And just to prove the point, Chaurasia decided to play Yaman, that powerful and strong Raag, which he played, with such softness and tenderness, something that mere words cannot explain. Bikram accompanied with even more softness,  every touch of the Tabla was soft, distinct, and harmonious. Even during the closing of the song , when the song had picked up speed, you could feel the pulse, yet it was sooo soft and tender. WoW!

And finally there was a thukda in Pahadi, with a nice folk touch to it, a nice feel good way to wrap up an evening that was a musical connoisseur’s treat.

P.S: thanks to Ash and Pudiyador for the amazing company

Tomorrow i will be joining a set of well respected coders, designers and architects as a mentor for #in50hrs a rapid “idea to product” sprint organized by the startup centre. By this time tomorrow a lot of teams would have started writing code to give life to their product ideas. So before the day starts i thought i would enumerate a set of tips that the teams will find useful for the codeout.
Get Your Version Control Ready

Yes we know that you are writing a prototype and it is a proof of concept, and you may dump the entire codebase to write the product all over again after validating your idea. All that is fine! But I still think you should go with a VCS. Your entire codebase will be in a state of flux the next 50 hours and you dont want to get into a situation where the only way to get back to a previously working state (which was say a few hours ago) is by pressing a sequence of Ctrl + Zs. I suggest you setup a no nonsence local repository like Git / Bazaar / Mercurial. Additionally these VCSs also help you in merging code bases automatically and hence improving your teams productivity.

Have a Process Of Development

Never forget the  two golden words of development: Incremental Development and Iterative Development. Try to break down your ideas into Minimum Marketable Features. In other words break down your ideas into logical chunks that make business sense and then start implementing these pieces one at a time. This is the essence of Agile / Lean development. Dont get scared by the use of process jargon here, the reason why I insist you must follow some kinda process against a no process ‘cowboy style fire at will’ coding is because, you are extremely time constrained. This breaking up of features and piece wise implementation will ensure that on the worst case scenario you will have a product with most of the features implemented against a situation where you will have a huge piece of code that is hopelessly broken and that essentially does nothing. In other words this is a sure shot formula to ensure that you have atleast something ready for demo hour. I would suggest you to also have a look at this presentation that my colleague Siddharta had done for the previous in50hours.

Use an IDE that works for you

Lets face it you need an IDE, notepad is not going to get you anywhere. So decide on the IDE you are going to use right now. Make sure you know it enough to work productively. More often than not I have seen people deciding in a whim to use an IDE that they have never used before. I have done this heinous crime myself (a lot of times), and all these times my productivity sucked. I not only had to face the intellectual monster that would become my codebase, but I also had to tackle at the same time the challenges thrown at me by a new IDE. Trust me its just too much to handle. If you really are wanting to try out a new IDE during the code sprint atleast make sure you get yourself used to it in what ever little time is left until the start of coding.

Tests

Yes you read me right. I said tests. I am not talking comprehensive functionality / acceptance tests written in selenium here. But simple unittests. Every modern language worth its penny (yes even Google go) comes with a unittesting framework. Make sure you use it to test, if not all your interfaces, atleast your core business logic. I would go to the extent of asking you to do a bit of TDD on the business logic bit. Its going to take you a little longer to write the test cases and the code. But hey it ensures that your core business logic is bug free. Besides this also ensures that you are testing your product through the development in a systematic manner, instead of testing all of it at the end of development  in a shoddy haphazard manner that will put you in the “oh god let this work – shit let me fix that bug” vicious circle.  You wouldn’t want to go into demo hour with a product that is not systematically tested out, would you? Murphys Law always will follow.

Stacks and Standard Libraries

Look and use standard libraries as much as possible. They help you a long way in reducing the amount of code you need to write. Assuming that you will be writing a product for the web / mobile space, I am pretty sure you would have already decided on what language you will be using for the backend and I am also assuming you have considerable experience in it. If you are going to try out a new language then the quick advice for reasons stated earlier: Don’t. So yes I hope you will be using as much of existing code as possible. That way you can concentrate on writing your business logic instead of worrying about implementing an HTTP server.
And as far as the fronted is concerned I suggest you use jQuery. Hands down.
I will refrain from commenting on the stack that you should be using to develop your product. All databases are awesome, all servers are good. You really should not be thinking about mecached and rabbitMQ and finally windows is a big OK. I would however recommend you to use a language that is elegant, that favours rapid prototyping and that is easy to debug (read as: not PHP). In case you do want to write it only on PHP then all the best to you, I have written considerable amounts of PHP to know that it is NOT the language for prototyping.
Finally, make sure you remember to keep your code clean. Remember to Reduce, Reuse and Refactor code as much as possible in the next 50 hours to create the product that you always wanted to create. All the best!

We interrupt this silence to let you all know that the entire team behind kausikram.in (yeah thats me and me alone) is on a music listening spree and has been visiting the November Fest and has been watching Dewarists Reviews of the show and the fest will be coming in shortly …. until then here is something that you can listen to:

The Dewarists – Kya Khayal Hai By Zeb and Haniya with Shantanu Moitra and Swanand Kirkire

6

Ha. My blog just turned 6 some 3 days ago and i completely forgot about it ! Any way happy birthday to you. Thanks for being my rantlog and thanks for all the Good Bad and Ugly times you gave me.  Thanks for helping me correct figures, thanks for helping me screw up otherwise healthy relationships and most of all thanks for giving me an online identity.

It still gives me a momentary high when someone tells me, “i used to read your blog some two years ago”  :)  i know i have been neglecting you the last few years but hey, i bet you really do not care much and i bet that you are happier without the rants  :)

Sitting in Indigo flight 6E – 302 on way back to Chennai. PyCon Day 2, turned out to be a much more emotional day than anyone of us expected and the lesser spoken about it the better. A few of us did plan to go out for dinner or rather “dhum, dharu aur dinner” as one of them put it, however that did not happen.

There were a few good talks, Raymond’s talk on sub classing was an eye opener. Most of the things he talked about was what we do day to day, only it looked so much more cleaner when he explained it on stage. I came to appreciate a lot of code that I have written. Code that I though was way too trivial to be appreciated for elegance.

There were a few very very controversial talks as well, and that meant a lot of good discussion post talk at the hallway. It was sad however that I could not attend the Django deployment talk that I so badly wanted to. But I got hold of the speaker after talk and we had a quick chat about the various deploy options available for django developers.

I spent the second straight evening roaming the roads of Pune. Partly cross with a useless friend of mine who pulled out of a meetup because he was way too lazy. I ended up at this amazing dessert place called chocolade and had this thing called white chocolade which is something between a very thick milkshake and a melted ice cream. Needless to say it tasted amazing. I spent the rest of the evening trying to find a place that would serve me dinner without having me to wait for more than an hour. Gosh, Pune can get crowded at dinner time. Finally found this place called Aroma cafe where I had some decent Italian Alberto Pasta. Really loved the flavours in it. Thats where I also managed to watch some amount of EPL, ManU Thrashed Chelsea like crazy \m/.

Spent the morning basically lazing around. Did try to put a word across to S, trying to figure out if I could come attend a few TFI classes / speak to the children., unfortunately I did not get a reply in time and had to forgo the plan and head to airport. May be its for the good.For the students I mean. I just realized off late that I can be a very crappy teacher, leave alone being a guy trying to inspire students.

So yes here I am heading back to Chennai after a rather eventful weekend. Looking forward to getting back to Python, Work and Ultimate Baby!!

Am sitting in a cafe in the famous Ferguson college road of Pune. Just took a long walk from symbiosis to this place in a brilliant overcast weather, with a very gentle drizzle, listening to ARR on my head phones. There is something about walking alone in an alien city that I find very heart filling. The sight of random faces crossing you, faces you will never see again in your life, and throwing a smile at them, and getting back a very guarded semi smile in response.

I just finished day one of PyCon India, the speech that I gave was not as bad as I expected it to be, I did justice to Siddharta’s presentation, and yes, I am a bit sad that I had to do it instead of Sid, my mentor and guru, who I listened to the previous day, who fell sick and could not make the trip. And finally to top it all I am now the Secretary of the India Python Software Society

Its rather strange and I have managed to do good on the trip this far. Its funny how though I am a bit of traveler, this trip is kinda unique. I am in a city, I would rather not be in, on a date I would rather forget. I am tempted to make that call, and I just might. But I am seeing if I can hold on, lets see.

The other funny thing is how I am staying in the same hotel and in the same hotel room as last time. The coffee day at FC road has gone, but there is a new barista. What is funny is how In this trip I managed to recognize admire and appreciate all the small roadside shops and sights. Something that I did not do last time. The only memories from last time were the hot chicks on the roads, the restaurant where we had lunch and the pressure of running proto.in in a city completely alien to us. I am enjoying the sights ( ) and smells of this place like never before. PyCon is so much more fun that Proto.in.

Tomorrow, there are some interesting sessions that I would watch out for, but more than that I am looking forward to the staircase chat with the “gang” at pycon, a gang which over the last few years has become warm and cozy, a gang where I am at home discussing everything from Rule number 6, to GIL implementations to NumPy. I will also be meeting Sahil and Deepak. And may be even S, I mean whats could go wrong. Anyway tomorrow is yet another day. I am off right now to roam the streets get some food into my system and have some fun. Ciao.

Some times we really talk very serious stuff. And looking at the transcript after a while,  i can’t help but smile.

conversations with Vinay Seshadri

Vinay: lol.. fact : all girls have their ups and downs.. u can never be sure that a girl is THE ONE
2:58 PM
me: oh i though “the one” does not exist …
6 minutes
3:04 PM
Vinay: nope.. doesnt exist .. they all break ur heart somehow or the other
3:05 PM
unless of course.. The One is allowed to break your heart by definition

talk about definitions