Neenas Marriage, Cochin Trip and Bannerghatta NP Visit.

Neena's Marriage, Cochin Trip, and Bannerghatta NP Visit

Austin and I went to Cochin to attend Neena's marriage. It was one of the shortest marriages I have ever seen. The entire marriage ceremony took just 30 minutes to complete. This was my first time witnessing a Malayali marriage.

After the marriage, we went to the Cochin Harbour to spend some time. At Cochin, I discovered that they use boats as a mode of public transport! That was quite interesting.

Back in Bangalore, this weekend, I visited Bannerghatta National Park with Vaishnavi, Shiva, and Dad. Vaishnavi wanted to see the new Butterfly Park opened at BNP, but after the Grand Safari and Zoo visit, by the time we reached the Butterfly Park, it was already 5:30 PM, and it had closed. Next time, we plan to visit the Butterfly Park exclusively.

During the Grand Safari, I managed to capture some great snaps of tigers. The cab driver helped me with some of the shots, and he even captured a few himself. I paid him Rs.10/- for this extra service. :-) However, I wasn't entirely satisfied as I had hoped to improve my photography skills with some wildlife shooting.

Scrmabled

Tihs is a pelicaur pproetry that if the fsirt and the lsat ltteer of the wdros rmiean the smae, and the rset is scbelmard, then you mhigt siltl be able to ierreptnt it. Tihs is very fnnuy. :-)

Inrpeisd from jwz scrmable: http://www.jwz.org/hacks/scrmable.pl

Comments

lisp where r u on the lisp challenge?

Re: lisp Not started yet. Left after the first reading. Will get back and gain speed from this week onwards.

Re: lisp

CLIPS> (print "hello,World")

[EXPRNPSR3] Missing function declaration for print.

CLIPS>

:-( Will come back tonight and try again.

I on Linux, using clips.

Re: lisp lets c.

Re: lisp Well, started today and effectively at the 3rd chapter. :-) more to go, well, began to feel the path ahead. lisp is a totally different beast unlike C or python and its going interesting.

Re: lisp :-) ur real conceptual difficulty will lie in macro. lemme know what u think when u get there.

Clerks II dude u shud really 'Clerks II' asap. i know u love lord of the rings and i just hate it. i like star wars. there is a beautiful LoR vs SW srguement in Clearks II that i really enjoyed. u shud see the movie.

Announcement - pyljvim 0.0.3 Released

pyljvim is a LiveJournal plugin for Vim. With this plugin, you can post to LiveJournal directly from Vim! :)

In fact, I am posting this entry from Vim.

You can find it here: pyljvim on Vim.org

Installation is straightforward, and the usage is simple as well.

Thanks, Senthil

"Contemptuous lights flashed across the computer's console." -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Comments

Very interesting way to use Vim, very nice. ;) As I can understand, Python must be installed (on Windows, of course)? Well, I think I'll try it. Thanks and good luck.

Interesting, but would it be possible to preview before submitting an entry?

Thanks. Yes Python must be installed on windows to work. This version relies on python to do the posting, but I would like to convert it to vim scripting itself so that vim should be enough. btw, support for unicode is also poor in this version.I would like to add the unicode support in the next release. The intial release had a bug, where I stored my credentials in the file and zipped it, I have uploaded a new one and it works fine. :-)

hmm.. preview as in converted to html? Nope, It is not possible. I did not feel the need for it, but as you say, instead of preview ( I never preview!) but verifying the syntax be a good thing to TODO? What do you say?

Nice to hear about the native Vim scripting instead of Python. I don't mean that using of Python is the wrong way, but the Vim scripting might be much better in this case. :-) Well, support for Unicode might be useful too. But it's not an urgent matter. Maybe it would be more pleasant to use the usual 'iconv' for text converting (with 'on-the-fly' converting, too), or not? Another question is this — the saving of the user's drafts. For example, one have wrote some stuff and have not published it. What about the draft, whether it's stored in the one's home directory or elsewhere?

Nice work saar!

I thought about the Draft thing. It is not yet present. It currently saves the entry with a temporary filename in the TEMP folder. One can retrieve it he remembers the name of the file,but is not implemented as a feature yet.

Thanks for your feedback.

thanks sajith. :) Time for lispljemacs? btw, I did not completely write it from scratch, 0.0.1 was implemented by Wartan Hachturow and I took the maintainer ship from from and enhanced it further. Hope to make it more usable.

Well, there is ljupdate - I often use that.

blogger and vim BTW I am planning something like what you have done for lj with blogger. Blogger and vim :) //Navtej

Re: Barcamp Presentation Hi Navtej, I didn't know that Barcamps are usually for webbased stuffs. I thought it was just a hacker meet, to share things and show 'their cool stuff'. The thoughtworks pulled lot of webbased talks only.

You know what, pyljvim pulled only one person :-) as it was the last presentation of the whole camp. I just went ahead explaining the details to him.

was quite amused at the the topic and took some snaps, got to see if he has uploaded any. Yeah, looking forward to the mini pycon. Hoping to python talks on topics other than web technologies. c u there,Navtej.

Re: blogger and vim yeah,that would be a good idea too. Just see if there if Blogger provides an interface for clients. Rest should be workable.

But, why not move to livejournal itself Navtej? positives are: comment notification( which I requested in blogger number of times,but it did not come up till I moved) and other positive things of open source software.

LJ's community and friends feature is its backbone (IMO).

Whatzup lyf.

I was trying to post entries directly from Vim, but the text is not displaying properly. I need to figure out the problem and fix it. It's been pending for some days now. Once it's resolved, it will be so comfortable to post to LiveJournal directly from Vim.

Reviews

I watched The Departed, and I liked it. It's a very good movie with a good story and excellent direction. It might keep you on the edge of your seat while watching. The actors Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, and others have done an outstanding job. Well, you're going to hear the 'F' word at least 100 times in that movie, but you won't mind it. The movie is a kind of chase where a rat is implanted on both sides (a gang and the police), and they try to find out who the rat is, while both rats are very clever.

FOSS.IN

Visited FOSS.IN today. Well, I was a bit disappointed as the quality of talks seems to be going down. A few were good—I enjoyed bluesmoon's talk, and the intro by Suparna was okay. But the rest were disappointing!

Atul Chitnis, if I were you, I would just pick quality speakers and fit only as many as the schedule allows (one day or two days). I would not compromise quality in favor of "let's do grand" things. But hey, you're doing a fantastic job (a few quality talks spread over three days) for the minor amount you're collecting from the delegates.

Kudos, keep going, but please check for quality now and then.

Hi Atul,

Yeah, I was bit hard in using that word. But my first day's general feeling was about some talks missing 'quality'. The quality we have come to expect at FOSS with speakers like Alan Cox, Nat, Mugiel and Naba Kumar delivering excellent presentations at previous meets.

I replied to your comment on the second day while watching Christoph Hellwig speaking on Linux Kernel, but the connection failed and the reply did not come up.

So the talks which did not particularly impress me (and many of my friends too):

sUSBix - stick to it !:

Seriously dont know what he was trying to say! He didn't have knowhow on the related area as well.

USB boot of Belenix, nearly covered his whole topic with much ease on the last day.

But, you see sUSBBix was the first talk after the intro by Suparna, got to be careful when audience will be flocking for a good talk at the peak timings.

A FOSS Bridge to Cross the Digital Divide

Man, he did not talk anything related to Digital Divide! Explaining about language, search technology etc etc.

Few the panel discussions at FOSS.IN 2005, with sunil from mahiti.org and others were much better!

Open Source Product Documentation Framework

Another guy beating around the bush. Says OSS guys have all the time in the world discussing on forums, having blogs etc etc, so we should provide them a 'wiki' like thing to write! Excellent thought! But why 2 hours!??

Creating a Flexible Robot Controller using Python

Python is portable, so we are using it. Knowledge!

Well,I know from python.org that it is used in industrial automation and I am not wrong in expecting to know in which processes and how python is plugged into ABB. I didnt get an answer for first 30+ minutes I attended.

These were the few talks on the first day which did not particularly get good reception and might have left a bad impression also.

Few good ones were:

Russell Nelson's on hacking, Philip's share of thoughts in contributing to OSS through his libyahoo experience, Suparnas thought software engineering and it ok ( am not into linux kernel so).

Second and Third day talks were much better ( I choose speakers over the topic).

But there is a long way to go before we can think of anything like what CCC does. Tim Pritlove's talk was amazing!

Thanks,

Senthil

Senthil

Bullshit? Bit hard, aren't you? Just how many of the 23 talks that happened yesterday did you actually attend to judge them?

You are seriously telling me that Christof, Harald, Jamal, Sirtaj, Jayakumar, Andrew, Russel, etc. - who all had house-full talks, and that everyone raved about - were "bullshit"?????

Since you made such a sweeping statement, it would really help your readers if you would actually state which talks you attended (you physically could not have attended more than 6 of the 23 talks, of which 2 you have already tagged as "ok"). It would also help us if we could get more specific comments rather than blanket condemnation.

Thanks.

achitnis

Article on Maths

Steve Yegge posted an entry on Maths for Programmers.

That article is very insightful. It analyzes how mathematics can be useful to any programmer at any time.

We have all lost touch with basic mathematics and need to gear up. His suggestion is that mathematics should be learned breadth-first and not depth-first. By knowing different mathematical solutions, we can identify which section a problem belongs to and approach it correctly.

Another suggestion for all of us is to start with any math section on Wikipedia, follow it until we understand it, and make it a daily habit.

Mahatma Gandhi's Letters to Adolf Hitler

I had heard from my friend Ashok that Mahatma Gandhi wrote a letter to Adolf Hitler, asking him to stop the war and teaching him about Ahimsa. I stumbled upon a link discussing that letter in the Wikipedia article on Mahatma Gandhi.

Here is an article that discusses Gandhi's letters to Hitler. We learn that Gandhi addressed Hitler as his friend and emphasized that it was not just words—he truly believed in universal friendship and extended it to Hitler as well. This was during a time when Hitler was suggesting to the British that killing Gandhi would suppress the Indian rebellion.

The article discusses various political instances where Gandhi's ideologies could have been applied. One can notice that the author gives a favorable treatment of Gandhi's ideologies in these situations. The last paragraph of the article was particularly impressive.

To quote from the article itself:

It is not certain that this would have worked, but then Gandhism is not synonymous with effectiveness. Gandhi’s methods were successful in dissuading the British from holding on to India, not in dissuading the Muslim League from partitioning India. From that angle, it simply remains an open question, an untried experiment, whether the Gandhian approach could have succeeded in preventing World War 2. By contrast, there simply cannot be two opinions on whether that approach of non-violent dissuasion would have been Gandhian. The Mahatma would not have been the Mahatma if he had preferred any other method. Our judgment of his letters to Hitler must be the same as our judgment of Gandhism itself: either both represented a lofty ethical alternative to the more common methods of power politics, or both were erroneous and ridiculous.

Finished reading "The Hobbit"

Finished reading The Hobbit today and subsequently became a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien. It was my first J.R.R. Tolkien book. I had purchased it in 2005 and started reading it a few months ago. After some breaks, I finally had time to finish it today.

Tolkien's English is superb! Now, I understand why he has so many fans worldwide. The book captures your imagination and transports you to the world of hobbits. The descriptions of events are vivid and engaging, creating a strong interest in the reader.

Recommended reading for anyone who has not yet explored J.R.R. Tolkien's works.