Go learn something new!

Over this recent period of "underemployment", I have been attempting to do multiple things.

The major effort here has been to acquire new technical skills, primarily around data analysis. One thing which I was unsure of was the approach to take, and this is where Coursera has been immensely helpful.

Initially, after I had signed up for a few courses, I was a little doubtful about them -- particularly because I have tended to find classes largely boring throughout my life.

The first couple of courses were quite hard to stick with, especially because I was travelling in India, and access to the Internet was patchy. There was a block of a few days in Bangalore when I was practically disconnected from the world, sustaining myself with the occasional borrowed hour of Internet.

The real turning point was when one of the quiz submission hard deadline coincided with a day on which I was flying out to Bombay. This was after I had used up all my "late submission" days, so missing this would mean the grade getting docked.

The submission was due by 11.30, and my flight was leaving at 13.30 on the same day. The house that I was leaving from didn't have any Internet, and tethering was out of the question on a ridiculously limited short-term mobile data plan. I left for the airport way earlier than I needed to, reached at about 10.00, rushed through all the formalities and finally took a seat at the gate, and connected to the airport Wifi. (On a side note: the number of power outlets in Bangalore airport is abysmally low.)

By this time it was 11.00, and as it turns out, this was just exactly the right amount of time to ram a perfect attempt through (each quiz in the course allowed 3 attempts, with a varying set of questions each time!).

After I boarded the flight, I had some time to think over my actions. I had put in a lot of effort to maintain a solid level of what effectively amounts to imaginary Internet points, and all because I really enjoyed the course I was doing, and was genuinely learning. In pretty much every other class experience before this, the focus was more on figuring out "the system" to maximise test performance, petty one-upmanship and sometimes just remaining awake through a monotonous drone.

It now appears that self-study is the best course of action for me, with the occasional group interaction. Using this approach, I've managed to pick up the fundamentals of R, Python, Django, and git over the last 3 months. Now, all that remains is to focus all of this into an appropriate work environment...

Figuratively speaking

Just a quick post to make a collective note of some of the few graphing libraries I am attempting to try out over the coming weeks. Base frameworks like D3.js and Raphael.js appear great, but might just be involve too much work if all I want to do is throw together a quick few visualisations.

dc.js
A multi-dimensional charting library built to work natively with crossfilter and rendered using D3.js.

NVD3
Re-usable charts and chart components for D3.js.

Polychart2.js
Graphing library that takes many ideas from the Grammar of Graphics and the R library ggplot2, and adds interactive elements for usage on the Web.

Highcharts
Interactive charting library supporting many, MANY types of visualisation!

Chart.js
Simple HTML5 Charts using the canvas element. Currently doesn't support interactivity, but looks great.

Flot
Plotting library for jQuery, with a focus on simple usage, attractive looks and interactive features.

Rickshaw
JS toolkit for creating interactive time series graphs.

YUI Charts
A charting module based on the YUI library.

xCharts
Yet another D3.js based library. Some of the examples don't appear to work currently.

Flotr2
A fork of Flotr which removes the dependency on Prototype and a few enhancements.

Now it may turn out that most of these end up going unused, but hopefully that means I would have found the best fit library and will stick with it!

Editors of the textual kind

The one key component of any computer system I could call "mine" has been a solid text editor. Not a word processor -- most of the time, unless I'm working with "official" (work or school) stuff, I have no need for mixing fonts faces, sizes, colours, or inserting images into the document. I would just like to read information, or type out something without wasting time on bells and whistles.

Kudos to Microsoft for shipping such an absolute lemon of a text editor in Notepad, which couldn't open large text files or acknowledge that text files can be produced and used in non-Windows environments. This pointless truculence spurred on some great little projects in the Windows world.

NoteTab
This was the first ever Notepad replacement I discovered. It wasn't particularly lightweight, but solved the annoying problem of the standard Notepad being unable to handle large or binary files.

Metapad
Metapad was the Notepad replacement I used, while in Windows 95/98. It was super light, opened everything in sight, and the ideal candidate for text file management on my underpowered (and -- although I didn't think so back then -- somewhat ugly) desktop. Syntax highlighting was for wimps, and on the occasion when it was badly needed, SciTE appeared to suffice.

Notepad2
Once I managed to scrape together enough competition winnings and had the security of a job assured (this was in 2004), I decided it was time to get my hands dirty and build my own desktop. While not quite from scratch, some reasonably smart hustling for parts meant I was able to put together a very decently powerful machine at a tight budget. This resulted in Metapad getting the boot from the brand new Windows XP install, and making way for Notepad2 (after a brief period of experimentation). This still-awesome marvel of a tool had a few more text manipulation features, and bundled in syntax highlighting, for the same relative load on the system as Metapad.

Notepad++
Ah, what can I say? This is the most indispensable tool for anyone using any flavour of Windows. Syntax highlighting, code-folding, lightweight project management, session management, powerful regular expression searching, file comparison, and an FTP browser. Everything anyone could ever want when dealing with text files, and then some more, aided by the rich ecosystem of available plugins. It's still around, being actively improved, and a permanent fixture on any Windows install I have to use.

Honourable mentions
EditPlus and Textpad -- these two somehow kept cropping up on a lot of other tech people's computers, and I had cause to use them sporadically. It was a little weird because these weren't free tools, but the nag screens were easily dismissed and no functionality was crippled. I would call them the WinZip of text editors -- mostly competent, gets the basics right, nags you to buy, but gets out of your way if you don't want to.

Current situation
gedit (the Notepad++ equivalent for Ubuntu) in the GUI, and vim otherwise. Not much exposition is called for here, except perhaps for smirking at emacs.

How programming lets me know I'm getting older

You're hammering away at a particularly hairy bit of code (or any other problem). You know exactly what you want it to do, but are just struggling to translate it into the right language. After hours of wrangling with convoluted logic and endless cycles of edit-build-debug-rinse-repeat, you throw your hands in the air, give up and walk away.

And then suddenly, while cooking dinner, or watching a movie, or in the shower thinking of what manner of pasta to snarf down for lunch, or simply just on the can focussing on your business -- it hits you. A brilliant solution to the hair-puller-outer, so elegant and so bloody simple you wonder how you never thought of it in the first place.

You scribble a quick note in your head (or Evernote, or a notepad, or whatever) and suddenly nothing else will do except firing up vim and set things straight right away. You do it.

The final turn on the safe -- maybe something audibly goes "click" in your head -- and it's done. You step back and marvel in the beauty of it. You can feel the mystery briefcase glow on your face, a la Pulp Fiction. All is right in the world again. You are the master of all you survey - there is no mystery you cannot solve, no stream you cannot ford.

You are also not me.

Maybe I am slowly gathering up enough work experience, or maybe I'm just getting older and my mind is atrophying, but while the initial frustration and subsequent elation are still very firmly in place, the "eureka!" appears to be happening a lot less these days. Instead, what I find works most of the time is just plugging away at the issue, continuously breaking it down into smaller bits, and gradually piecing the solution together from these little digested chunks.

"Solution epiphanies" strike about two or three times out of ten, down from 6-7 out of ten from back in the day [when we wrote our code with styluses on papyrus and prayed to Ra to compile it into machine code via heliography]. The adrenaline and oxytocin rush is still phenomenal, but I find myself needing them less and less, since I can be more objective about the side effects and just more productive overall.

I still end up getting celebratorily hammered over the next weekend though.

You're doing it right

Dear Maciej Ceglowski: You're doing it right.

It is quite a breath of fresh air to see someone who's built a product, marketed it to the right audience, charged money from the outset (and thus not falling into the "users first, money later" trap).

I signed up for Pinboard (just out of curiosity, and wanting to see if my shiny new credit card did USD payments) pretty much the same day it was launched on Hacker News, and it became the first ever online service I paid money for. A mammoth sum of ~$1.

And since then, for this one-time joining fee, Pinboard has continued to add numerous features -- both asked and un-asked for -- while stamping out bugs nearly as quickly as they were discovered. And because it was making money, there wasn't a need to slather it in advertising or the atrocious amounts of social gunk that seem to crawl across pretty much every "Web 2.0" site now.

The Pinboard blog sees some brilliantly detailed posts and insights on technology (both site- related and otherwise), the site itself offers a spartan, uncomplicated and flexible API, and now -- this is what motivated me to pen this screed down -- the database schema behind the site!

This is how quality products are built - the real secret sauce is the execution; the actual idea and technical implementation detail can be at any point in the simplicity-complexity spectrum. It really is quite awesome to see someone basically give you everything you need to clone their product/service. The level of confidence in your own execution and delivery capabilities underpinning such candour and openness is a refreshing departure from the current clusterfudge that is "intellectual property".

Once again Maciej, you're doing it right, and I thank you.

Not really life with a dumbphone

One of the worst things on the Internet is attempting to outgeek geeks. Only one thing is worse, and that is trying to out-hipster hipsters.

For the uninitiated, I'll try to define "hipster" (in its Internet sense) a little more concisely than Wikipedia and UrbanDictionary.

A hipster is someone who actively rejects the mainstream, and a large part of the reasoning is that the idea of a "mainstream" seems to run counter to their need to stand out from the teeming, unwashed masses who have seemingly been brainwashed into their 'preferences'.

I (try to) pass no value judgement on hipsters, as sometimes I can come across similarly (being a Bieber-hater, for e.g., although I try to convince myself that it's because he's shite.)

And yet, when I try to draw on other people's experiences in a life with a dumbphone, I come across examples that are either not really dumbphone enough (GPS? Music? Podcasts? WTF?), or way too smartphone-hating.

The problem with the first linked post is that the blogger's reaction is a little extreme. He tries out a Moto Cliq tied to T-Mobile, and after a terrible first experience, continues to do the exact same thing! He then moves on to a Huawei Comet (again with T-Mobile), and has an even worse experience, promptly pronounces renunciation of smartphones, and goes for an LG "feature"-phone. Which can still do GPS, music and podcasts.

So it's not really "life with a dumphone", but more like "life with a non-shitty phone and service provider, but let's start small". He's basically gone hipster without knowing it.

My issue with the second linked post (in two parts, One and Two) is that it is phenomenally hipster, in that it denounces the typical smartphone user as being a socially inept person in real life, who dumps all over real-world relationships, based on a survey done by a phone systems company ("81 percent of survey participants said they would prefer being single and keeping their smartphones!", "on average, an adult spent nine hours a day playing with a smartphone and only about 27 minutes per day talking with their significant others!") Except that the study it cites was an April Fool's gag, as confirmed by the company in question on their blog. There's an important lesson in there about getting your data from the right sources, as well.

After having to forcibly live with a "proper" dumbphone, it is a little strange that there is such little chronicling of such experiences. Ah well, if the mountain will not come to Muhammad...

Showing the URL protocol in the Firefox address bar

A fair amount of people seem to be using Firefox Aurora.

Unfortunately, the latest Aurora 7.0a2 build (as of tonight - 12th July, 2011) has enabled a 'feature' as part of the Firefox team's efforts to copy Google Chrome's efforts at being different: they have gone and disabled showing the "http://" (the protocol) part of the URL.

I was dreading the day this would come to my beloved Firefox - but fortunately, Firefox retains the ability to make quick, under-the-hood changes using about:config.

Here's how you go about ensuring your URL bar isn't screwed around with:

1. Go to about:config
2. Find the value called browser.urlbar.trimURLs
3. Double-click and toggle it's value to false

And that's that!

Suspicious Gmail IMAP Activity

Quick note for future reference: if your Gmail activity window shows frequent IMAP access from the United States IP 67.220.123.24, don't panic (as I did initially).

It's just your Nokia phone polling Gmail for new mails. That IP resolves to em.outgoing4.messaging.nokia.com.

Just FYI. And FMI.

Horrendous privacy fail

Quiptxt.com had a really popular iPhone app that let users send pics of themselves to other users via their servers. Except these pics were supposedly made 'private' by the following genius algorithm:

1. Save image in a URL thusly: http://pic.quiptxt.com/[arbit 5 characters]
2. Don't tell anybody else about it

So basically, anyone could just go to any random pic.quiptxt.com/[5 chars] and chances were pretty good that you'd end up seeing a photo someone sent to someone else. Which was thought to be private, hence was pretty much uninhibited.

Folks on Reddit found this out, and quickly whipped up a script that scraped all the images off that site, and found out one more really interesting thing - the site stored the users' real name along with the pics. This spurred on the hundreds of thousands of jobless intarwebs folks to neatly cross-reference these names with profile pages on Facebook and Myspace. So now junta could, if they were so inclined to (and many were), put a face to the dirtybits in the photos.

Moral of the story: If you don't want your pictures of a 'questionable' nature ending up in undesirable places, do not send them across the Internet. If you must, then verify a few hundred times that it is truly private, then ask your friendly TRUSTY neighbourhood geek to do the same. Then think again a few hundred times if you truly wouldn't mind if the picture(s) ended up in places you didn't really intend it to. After all this, consider the downside of that scenario happening. If you (think you can) can live with it, or shrug it off, or ride it out, then go ahead and hit 'Send'. If you think it won't really matter some time in the future, you are being stupid. At best.

More of the same

India is now on the "trading naughty list" for government-mandated use of open source software.

From the report (scroll to the end):

The industry is also concerned about moves by the government to consider mandating the use of open source software and software of only domestic origin. Though such policies have not yet been implemented, IIPA and BSA urge that this area be carefully monitored.

We like capitalism. But only if it works in our favour.

Why I like Windows 7

It's just... nice.

Reality Distortion Tautology

When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, they held a company-wide town hall meeting, which saw this gem of an exchange:

Someone from the audience asked whether Apple was concerned about cannibalization of business from the iPod with the introduction of the iPhone, and Steve answered that if there's going to be cannibalization of Apple, they want it to be by Apple.

Tell us this, oh Lord Steve (albeit 2.5 years later): How would it be cannibalization, if it were by some other company?

Apple users are gullible

MediaPost is carrying an article about a study done by a mobile ad network called Quattro Wireless, which looks at click-through rates on online advertisements via mobile devices.

The results:


The article itself also mentions that the total number of ad impressions were the highest for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

So basically, iBlahWhatever users are more likely to click on ads, or in other words, fall for marketer-bait. QED - these folks are gullible and like to splurge on shiny thingummies. As, it would appear, are gamers, but that was never in question :-)

Tech fundoo

"Tech fundoo" is term first made known to me by Krishnamurti (G, not J). It appears to me to be the Indian form of a hacker, as defined in its 'original' form.

I have always felt that I was tech fundoo, and sometimes attempted to back it up with a few blog posts. But most tech fundoo I have felt was, curiously, NOT when twiddling with hardware/software innards or some arcane Linux-y fundaes. These two occasions, by some weird coincidence, involved the use of the Character Map in Windows XP.

The first time was when ant poop had eaten into my laptop's keyboard circuitry, rendering some keys useless. As Murphy would have it, one of these alphabets had a double occurrence in my Windows password.

Living in a relatively boondocky area in Chennai then, rendered me completely unable to get a USB keyboard, so some other ingenuity had to be thought of. Which is when I used a cybercafe computer to look up the Alt code for the missing alphabet of my password, and used this to peacefully log in to Windows. Such technological satisfaction. Such tech fundoo-ness. Ah!

The second time was the previous night, whilst waiting to board a Jet Airways flight from Bombay to Bangalore. (Aside: This was via Jet Airways Konnect, but Travelocity losers never informed me of this in any manner throughout the booking process, or in the e-ticket. And I would rather go hungry than pony up Rs.100+ for a sandwich that wouldn't be enough for Kate Moss.) The waiting area at the boarding gates of the domestic terminal at Bombay Airport has 4 Internet kiosks. Two of them are your standard kiosk fare - LCD screen, hobbled laptop keyboard with touchpad. The other two are touch-screen LCDs, one of which was switched off. The other one was running, and logged in to WinXP, but had no keyboard, and no apps running! This explained why people would wander near this terminal, scratch heads for a few minutes, and walk away. So the question now was: how were we to check up on cricket analysis/bulletins?

Easy. Fire up the Character Map, click-select 'cricket' letter by letter, open up IE, focus on search box, Page > Paste (This took a couple of minutes to figure out - IE8 is frickin' counter-intuitive!), Go. Bam, reading Cricinfo!

Happier still this made me, when after we were done, the stream of people to this kiosk increased. As did the subsequent head-scratching and walking away. We did end up slightly miffed that we'd forgotten to erase the browsing history, so an enterprising kid fired up the browser and used the History to get to CricInfo.

Occam's Razor takes a while to slit one's throat though - I realised much too late that happy online-ness could have been attained via the free airport wi-fi on my trusty Nokia N82.

Still. I am tech fundoo.

Nice

Computers never get old. They just become incompatible with the state-of-the-art.

Well said, sir.

IE8 the Interwebs!

Open source: enabling the small-time entrepreneur

Many people by now have heard of Gogola, the "Google-inspired" golawala on Linking Road, Bandra.

But what is this?

A Firefox window



An Apache webserver



Go FOSS!

Miscellany

** It is possible to have a "the best fifteen minutes of my life" over and over again.

** New addiction discovered.

** Old addiction re-discovered.

** Why should Microsoft, Apple and Canonical be fighting tooth and nail to recruit LA Laker Lamar? 'cos OdomOS would be bug-free :-)

** Being without the Internet for an extended period of time is painful. Being on the verge of getting a connection for a week is moreso :-(

** The damn POTUS comes on television way too often, hence I would vote for Obama because he appears more presentable on TV. Image is everything.

** The tech world is bubbling with news about Microsoft decentness, be it Windows Media Player 12, Secondlight or the INR 15k price-tag on the Xbox 360 Core system.

** The Wii has flown out of one's list of desirables. Primarily due to price gouging by Nintendo, the lack of a decent TV comes in a distant second.

** Hooray! Wikipedia search has spelling suggestions!

Do you really want those people?

Do You Really Want Those People? (Score:4, Insightful)

by John Hasler (414242) on 1:55 Monday 29 September 2008 (#25186841)

2007: "IT? That's sooo 2000! They all lost their jobs in the dot-com bust! Finance is where it's at!"

2008: "Finance? That's sooo 2007! They all lost their jobs in the Wall Street bust! IT is where it's at!"

Is Google female?

Via Slashdot (like most of my recent posts):

Let's just hope Google (and her telco partners) don't f*** it up.

Extending that thought - can brands themselves (and not the image they project) have gender?