Up to Something
Fossil scm
After using Git and SVN office I have finally started using http://www.fossil-scm.org/ . The thing I like about svn is the server client relation, the non distributed nature of it. It helps in an environment where people aren’t smart. Yes I think you need a bunch of equally smart and responsible people to be using Git or any other distributed source control software. SVN on the other hand is easy for a new recruit to understand, and by extension for me to teach/manage the recruit’s commits. Since the CiMPLE team never grew beyond count 4, bug tracking and code review happened over email and verbal instructions. Few weeks back the svn repo crashed and with it went entire history of commit etc. I am now using fossil which is a distributed src ctrl mgmt sw. Unlike Git it’s simple to install and configure as a server. We run it in server mode and push/pull/sync with one main repo there by using workflow as svn. Bonus is fossil has inbuilt bug tracking + wiki incorporated. So now bugs are issued as tickets. The UI is served via HTTP as fossil runs a webserver. fossil is made by the same guy who make SQLite. Single executable scm written in C.
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1) I desperately wanted this girl to give me a call, and boy she did. At that time I was expecting Shweta an office colleague to call and inform me of a username and password I needed. So I pick the call and said ” Shweta you should have called early I was waiting” in hindi. This girls questions “Who Shweta ?”. Before I realized who called it was too late. Now I call and she doesn’t pick the phone. Girls are strange.
2) Will be working @ TRI till March end now. But not a day more,
3) New CiMPLE UI Design has arrived and it truly take the software to the next level. Sleek and Sexy. The visual designers along with Nikhil have done a awesome job,
4) I desperately want my family to buy a car. We had one when we stayed in Kenya. I relish the amount of traveling our family did. We had lot of fun together. Dad and I are going to pool in and buy one. Have been saving my last 4 months salaries back to back for my share of investment. However after investing for tax shielding plan and the car share my bank balance will become zero. My other monetary saving are in PPF and mom said you remove it “if and only if you are on the verge on dying”. What’s worse is that Mom said so, so I can’t go against the decision. If I do, her life long persistent memcache storage would recall my non-obedience and remind me of the same, forever. Bad analogy, point is I can’t take that money unless she approves. Yeah it’s my money. I am hell bent on buying a car even if it means that I don’t have the money to fill the tank.
5) I have got three opportunities to do freelancing/consultancy/bounty work. One of the bounty work involves solving a technical issue a startup is facing in it’s Qt/C++ based UI. It’s like a weeks job so I will take it up. Personally I want to stop coding in C++/Qt. I don’t take any more pride in doing Qt/C++ coding reason being 3-4 years is too long a time to be doing one thing. Want to move on.
6) Truth is I want to give myself an opportunity to try create a product that is used and makes money. I know umpteen no of ppl who tried to do consultancy along with product development and reached nowhere. My heart is in doing a web application. I don’t know what I am going to do. For when hunger sets in principles go take a walk.
7) I wait for 1st April the first day of my unemployment. What a day to have chosen to make a new start.
Have to make a new django based web app @ office. Excited about it.
Who is the true creator of a software product ? Designer / Developer / Entrepreneur
CiMPLE is a our visual programming language product for children to program robotic kits.
Who created this ?.
This is a very tricky question.
There are three entities involved in this
a) Entrepreneur
It was our founder Gagan who came up with the mandate to make a visual programming language for kids. Lego the market leader has a VPL for programming robotic kit and we need to offer a compelling competitor to it. Can the Entrepreneur say that he’s the creator of the software. Why not ? If it wasn’t for him we wouldn’t be employees and thus by extension there would be no software. Hence you could say he’s the creator of the software.
b) Designer
Nikhil is our Product and Usability Designer. He spend weeks observing, understanding current workflow and techniques using which children program our robotic kits. End result three design concepts mocks. One of them became CiMPLE. Kids in India get exposed to a programming as part of curriculum in standard 8th-10th for the first time. Mostly C++/Java. If you take a look at CiMPLE you will realise that unlike Lego Mindstrom, scratch, scribbler we are a mix of Actor model and procedural programming. This hybrid suit them well as it maps line by line to textual C++/C code. In no way whatsoever is it a rip-off or influenced by any VPL out there, and if you compare CiMPLE with other you would find it different that others. So it is fair to say if it wasn’t for Nikhil this product wouldn’t have been conceptualized the way it’s. So isn’t he the true creator of the software ?. Take a look at Nikhil’s selected paper on Designing for children that he presented at Indian Design Center to understand what goes inside the head of a Designer.
c) Developer
Hello people, if it wasn’t for C++ code that the developers of this product wrote (which include me), it would be just that concept, vapourware, on paper, perhaps in your dreams. May be the designer could create a flash video and show the concept in motion. It’s the developer who puts life in the concept and makes it a reality. The Intel inside runs binary and that’s where we come into picture. Hence it’s the developer who is the creator. And lets not forget compiling to all fancies of the designer. That includes changing color codes again and again, making widget spacing and sizing acurrate to the pixel.
So who’s the creator. No brainer - The Team. Spoken like a True Manager 
. It’s univerally acknowledged that manager have nothing to do with creation of solutions.
Entrepreneur vision -> Designer’s concept -> Developer’s code == Product Creation.
Yes when it comes to total share in creation let us accept the developer has the major share …
Why am I writing this ?. Coz some Manager dude @ a conference was going gaga over how he is responsible for creation of three products at his company. This post is for him.
It’s We not I.
Zettair - Indexing content for search
If you ever find the need to index some GB’s worth content in txt/html give Zettair a try.
Advantages
1) Unlike Solr/lucene you don’t end up spending time configuring,
2) Up and running in 8 commands, (Assuming everything goes right :p )
$ wget http://www.seg.rmit.edu.au/zettair/download/zettair-0.9.3.tar.gz
$ tar -xvf zettair-0.9.3.tar.gz
$ cd zettair-0.9.3.tar.gz
$ ./configure ; make ; make install
$ zet -i
$ zet
>> <Enter your query>
3) Command line interface for building and searching index,
4) It’s in C, so it beats the shit out of Lucene/solr (Java) when it comes to indexing time by factor of 3 in my tests.
Disadvantage
1) Crashed for a file, (The bug seem to be in the html -> text convertor)
2) Can index only text and html.
3) Index cannot be build in parallel using multiple machines.
I am currently using it create indexes on news content of past 12 hrs every half and hr from 356 sites in total with a 2-depth crawl i.e. Front page stories. It takes six minutes to index approx 500 MB.
Look Ma … It Works
Below is a small video showcasing the ability to simulate CiMPLE VPL Program. Idea is that a kid can see how the code behaves/works without actually burning it on the bot. It’s not complete and since I will be leaving TRI it’s not going to get shipped as a physics engine is missing. I really enjoyed working on this.
CiMPLE code Simulation from Ankur on Vimeo.
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1) Ford Figo interiors and spec is out. It’s the most spacious of all B Segment cars. It has the same space as ford fiesta. Now I hope they don’t screw up the pricing.
2) I check out beat and it’s one small car, same width as spark. I don’t like the design.
3) At workplace there is complete revamp of VPL underway, so tons to coding to do from Feb 2 week onwards. It’s not an iterative step but complete rewrite. I think I will have to devote 2 weeks of march as well 
,
4) Check out MongoDB it kicks ass,
5) The time has come back to pay taxes,
6) I just helped a new SINE startup on this small product that they are working on. Was fun. (No coding)
7) As part of the house clean up I counted I have 700+ books in my house, promise not to buy any more books this year not more than 10.
5 Centimeters Per Second
Beautiful Emotional Realistic are the words that describe this movie. Beautiful is the illustration, animation, the story is very emotional. If you have ever tried to make a distance relationship work while @ school, or still think about the ones you loved and lost and still remember this is for you. By the way it’s an anime.
Taking Interviews for C++/Qt
1) Is a pain in the *&^,
2) Recruitment folks derseve the money they get for it’s a job I wouldn’t want to do,
3) If you made a layout and put few buttons in it doesn’t mean you know QT,
4) If you have no clue what the event loop is or what Qt Object Model there is a lot that you need to know,
5) Design patterns can be learned if you have good command over Comp Sci Fundamentals. There are ppl who can write an essay on each design pattern but cannot ans simple data structure.
6) How does moc,ui work ?.
7) It’s ok if you haven’t peaked inside the QT code and have most of the time worked at API level only. (Like myself). That shouldn’t stop you from exercising your imagination and telling me how the signal slot mechanism is implemented.
So till now it’s been 25 phone calls and all I got is 4 good candidates. 2 don’t want to work for us, the other 2 we don’t want them to work with us. So I am back to square one. I think I will now look for just C++ Developers with sound data structure and Comp Science knowledge. Not rockers just avg guys would do. However that too is tough.
Some ppl just choke in interviews. I have choked once, as in forgot what null looks in C. But I am sure not all of those candidates choked with the questions.
You don’t code in Qt you code in C++.
SOS - Anyone
Update:
Akshay pointed that Nitin Gadkari doesn’t have a moustache so it probably not him.
Koteshwara said that it could Sanjay Nirupam and Nitin coz both are from Maharashtra.
I now think that this guy is Telgi, the guy caught in the Paper Scam. The visual indication of a hippo and frog doesn’t help. I have send 3 emails and made 2 phonecalls to the guys @ mint. Still no clue/answer. If by this Saturday they don’t release the answer I am going to their office. I want to know what the answers are.
Mint the newspaper came out with a quiz to identify the people based on these drawings . I am to the best of my knowledge sure that I have identified all of them correctly except one. i.e. the no 14th person. The 13th person is Nitin Gadkari the new BJP Chief. Who is that 14th guy ?. This guy looks like Sanjay Nirupam but I really see no relation with Nitin here. If you look carefully you will see that people who are tied down together with a + have some relation. e.g. The ambani bro’s, the FED and RBI Governor, The Twitter Founders etc. The winning prize is 15000 and second prize is 10000. I promise to give you all my other ans if you can tell me who is No13th. Mint folks have still not announced the result so I believe no one got it correct as of yet. Now only if we have a similar image clustering software
Anyone Game ?
Persepolis and Asterios Polyp Review
“Persepolis is a French-language autobiographical graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi depicting her childhood up to her early adult years in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution. The title is a reference to the historical town of Persepolis.”
The illustration is nice, I liked the auto-bio-graphical story of Marjane Satrapi. I was 16 when I left my parents to stay with @ uncle’s place for a year and half and I could relate to few chapters of the book lot more than others. The takeaway for me here is The Story of Iran”. I had never read anything on that country. Most of what we read is what Americans enforces on the world thru the media, there is must more to this country is what the book shows. Being an Indian it’s easy to relate to the chaos, though my generation is yet to see a Political Turmoil in the country say for e.g. Emergency during Indira Gandhi’s rule etc. After seeing the political demonstration video’s in Popular Item on Google Reader yesterday I recalled Marjane Satrapi’s Gandmother’s saying in the book That we never had stability for ages and any would be shortlived. Persepolis is must read, I think women would relate more to the story then men.
“The title character, Asterios Polyp, is a professor and architect of Greek descent who teaches at a college in Ithaca, New York. After a lightning strike burns down the building in which he lives, he leaves the city and takes up employment in a small town (chosen seemingly at random) as an auto mechanic. The novel is interspersed with scenes from his past, including his childhood and troubled marriage, as well as more fantastical scenes (including those narrated by his dead twin brother, Ignazio).”
a) I loved the illustrations,
b) Didn’t like and didn’t attempt to understand the plot,
c) I have come to realize that I dislike books with twins in it take for e.g. The God of Small things by Arundhati Roy.
d) I like the analogies in the book for e.g. the part where in the girl stacks three badges in a pyramid shape and terms one as Love, Trust and Respect and states that this is what keeps it from falling.