- April, 2007
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car incident in Bangalore
I had always considered Bangalore to be a safe city. There have been communal tensions in the city, however by and large, I still think Bangalore to be much safer than Delhi.
There seems to be a gang of thieves operating in Bangalore these days and this Saturday one of my good friends was a victim. My friend, Rajiv, had parked his car in the Defense Colony locality, near the 100 Feet Road. This is where the Cafe Coffee Day of the 100 Feet Road, Indiranagar is located. We were away from the car for around 2 hours and when we came back, we saw that someone has smashed one of the windows of the car and made away with Rajiv's fiancee's purse.
Luckily, her debit card did not have much fund and she was not carrying much cash. Unluckily, her PAN card and her driving license were in the purse. This had her particularly worried as the amount of paperwork to get a duplicate copy of these documents is huge. We went to register a FIR with the Indiranagar police station (side note: in case you need to get a complaint lodged about any law and order incident in the 100 feet road, you have to go to the Indiranagar police station and not the Jeevanbeema Nagar police station.)
The policemen there registered a FIR but they were bleak about our chances of finding the purse. They informed us that the 100 Feet road was notorious for this sort of crime and they register 10 cases per day. Their advice to us was not to leave the laptop and purse in the car. It was already past midnight by the time we got the FIR lodged. We went back to Rajiv's place and I crashed out there for the night.
The next morning however brought us some good news. One of the residents of that locality had found her purse near his house. Her resume was inside the purse and he used the phone number mentioned in it to call her up. She got all her documents back, but she did not see any of the cash. We all were quite relived.
That ends the reporting about my daily life.
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enlightening thought
I had a enlightening thought in the early hours of the 28th of March.
create art that is so good that it brings tears of joy to your eyes.
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Release of PythonOnPlanes-1.3.07 aka. SuperSunday release
What is PythonOnPlanes ?
PythonOnPlanes is a rapid development framework for Python which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables Python users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.
See the Features list below to learn more about the framework.
Release Announcement
The Release Engineering Team is happy to announce the availability of PythonOnPlanes-1.3.07 , the latest release of the PythonOnPlanes Stable development branch. Since PythonOnPlanes-1.3.06 release we have made many improvements in functionality, stability, performance, and mod_snake_oil support for Apache web servers, as well as dealt with known security issues and made many bugfixes.
Major highlights in the release include Active Scrum Manager 1, Sanity Preserver 3.13 and Lart 22.21. This is also the first release with the PythonOnPlanes Live CD Installer officially debuting on the x86 platform.
Features
The software development world is moving towards AGILE DEVELOPMENT, WEB-2.OH, GURU PRESENCE and LEAN SOFTWARE. Our Framework is geared to support all these features.
"Out of the box" features available
Out of the box PythonOnPlanes supports
- Sprint Management
- Pair programming using an editor that can be shared by 2 developers. We have named it ALN (Analog Large Notebook)
- LoC2LoC to generate a report on each developer's productivity.
- Active Suggest DESIGN PATTERN (ASDP). This feature will make your refactoring efforts a snap
Beta Experimental Features
These features are not enabled by default and you have to enable them by editing the configuration file.
- Developers' Blog . Each developer in the team is given a blog which he can update. If enabled, PythonOnPlanes will generate a daily report of the developer activity log and post it on the blog too
- CutesyErrorMessages-0.0.1-BETA. This replaces stern error messages with very user friendly messages
GET PythonOnPlanes-1.3.07 IN NO TIME
Download PythonOnPlanes-1.3.07 from <http://pythononplanes.com/>
- March, 2007
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In the A Note To Employers: 8 Things Intelligent People, Geeks and Nerds Need To Work Happily , the author has given this definition of a geek
definition of a geek : Anyone who understands how to leverage todays technology to increase intelligence, productivity and efficiency; anyone who stays up nights working to get better at what they do; anyone whose job is their life - is a geek.
While coming to work today, I was thinking about it and I extended that defination to a hacker
hacker is someone who takes the technology one step forward
As I was thinking about this, lo and behold guess who passed right infront of me - bluesmoon himself. Pure serendipity.
Link: A Note To Employers: 8 Things Intelligent People, Geeks and Nerds Need To Work Happily
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visa interview in Chennai
Yesterday I had to go to Chennai for my US visa interview. Chennai is a really sucky city, it sucks even worse than Bangalore
. Here is
an account of the process.Documents required
The vfs-usa.co.in site has a list of documents that you require to bring along with you. If you filled the visa form at the vfs-usa.co.in site, you would have received a printout of the forms D156, D157 and an appointment letter mentioning the data and time of your visa interview.
I had packed in all the required documents the night prior to my departure to Chennai. Due to security concerns you are not allowed to carry mobile, CDs, music player or any electronic device into the consulate building. However, you are allowed to carry books and one polybag with all your documents inside. These people are really serious about security - do not bring any stuff which is prohibited. You will not be allowed to carry it inside no matter what.
Since books were not on their Do not carry list, I took along a printout of the MySQL Internals manual for my inflight entertainment.
Reaching there
The American consulate is located in Anna Salai. Once you get down at the airport, you will find a government operated prepaid taxi counter there. They will charge you 240 Rs. (rupees) for a taxi to the American consulate. The people manning the counter were able to understand english.
Since I was returning back to Bangalore the same day, I had not made any reservations in a hotel for my stay. The taxi driver knew the place and he dropped me infront of the consulate gate. The guards there guided me to the gate through which the visa interviewees had to pass.
Passing time
I reached the consulate by 0900 though my interview was at 1230. There was a average sized queue at the gate. I liked the queue managment system at the Chennai consulate. The guards called out the interview time that was mentioned in the appointment letter and people who were scheduled at that time moved ahead in the queue. Since my interview was scheduled atYou will 1230, I roamed around in the streets to pass time.
It is really a hard job to pass time in Chennai. There were no parks or malls in the nearby area. Since I did not know the city well enough, I did not want to wander far off from the consulate.
After killing nearly two hour, I got into the queue at 1100 hours. I was allowed into the consulate at 1300 hours.
Pre-screening of the documents
Once you are inside the consulate, you have to wait to have your passport, forms D156 and D157 verified. The officers check if you are missing something. They are quite efficient. You have chairs available once you get inside the consulate.
By the time I reached the pre-screening counter, it was already 1430. Unluckily for me, the photograph on my form was not of the correct size. The officer at the counter asked me to get a proper sized photograph and come back again in an hour.
There is a market near the consulate and the shopkeepers there understand english and hindi. I asked around and quickly located a place to have my photograph taken. It was a seedy place and the photographer charged me 200 Rs. for four correct sized photograph. My guess is that he charged me at least thrice the price I would normally have paid.
I hurried back to the consulate and showed the guards at the front gate that I had been rescheduled for my interview and I had originally been called aat 1230. He kindly allowed me to go in without waiting in the queue.
This time around I did not have a problem in the pre-screening part and they asked me to go in for my visa interview.
Visa interview
There was quite a crowd waiting for their visa interview. However, the queue managment was again good here and no one was complaining. There were enough chairs around, so waiting was not too much of a hassle.
You first had to get your fingerprint taken and then stand in a queue to have one of the officers interview you. I was quite apprehensive about the interview as I had heard quite a lot of stories about the randomness of the visa interviewers in rejecting the visas. However, I was quite surprised. The visa interviewers gave perfectly coherent reasons for the rejection of the visas. They were direct, but polite in their rejections. They asked pertinent questions and I do not think that hassling the visa interviewees was their aim.
When my turn came, I was asked a few question about why I was going to US and told that my visa has been spproved and I would receive it in 2-3 days
. I was quite happy and came out of the consulate. The
process ended at 1700.Back to Bangalore
My flight was at 2125. I killed time till 1830 and then took an autorickshaw to the airport. He charged me 150 Rs. and dropped me at the airport by 1915. I walked inside the airport, found an empty seat and tried to get some sleep. Since I had done lot of walking that day, my feet were killing me. I took off my shoes too and then tried to get some more sleep. Pretty soon the boarding for my flight was announced. I got into the the aeroplane, flew back to Bangalore and was back home by 2300.
All in all, it was a tiring experience, but a productive one.
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RIP John W. Backus
The "B" in "BNF" is gone. NY Times has a nice artilce about him and his noteworthy quote is tucked in at the end
Innovation, Mr. Backus said, was a constant process of trial and error.
"You need the willingness to fail all the time," he said. "You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don't work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work."
Link: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies - New York Times
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