The Flip side of National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (India)
March 16th, 2009Find the guest post on Shivku’s blog at http://blog.shivku.com/2009/03/flip-side-of-national-rural-employment.html
Hack now or Back off! - Open Hackday India 2009
February 11th, 2009Ever thought of transforming the way the internet works? Ever wanted to radically change the user experience for the good? Ever thought of a cool service that if existed, would have made your life heaven? Or ever thought of that little feature you would have liked to see on a Yahoo! service? Here is your opportunity to put those ideas to limelight.
Hackday India is round the corners. So, what are you waiting for? Get Hacking!
Yahoo! is just back after the University hackdays at IIT Mumbai and Delhi, where students displayed their fresh ideas, and is looking forward to get more from a open set of people through the open hackday.
Last hackday that happened in the end of 2007 was the first one in India, and had a pretty good response from the hackers. There were hacks on collaborative browsing, maps, delicious, user interface improvements, visualisation of data, and even collaboration tool for surgeons. The hack ideas normally vary across a huge spectrum. You could find links to some of them from various hackdays across the world from here.
Hackers, don’t worry about faltering in your duty of making your valentine happy on Feb 14 if you have to come to hack your dream out. You could indicate via Hack-a-Valentine, and bring your Valentine along for the party at the Hack venue from 7-9 pm.
Venue: Taj Residency, Bangalore
Date: Feb 14, 15 2009
Hope to meet you there, Hacker!
Open Feature Suggestion for Laptop Designers
December 24th, 2008There are laptops that have rotatable LCD panels. Whereas I dont see panels that can be raised and lowered.
I have a feature suggestion to make. Look at a monitor like HP LP2465 in which height can be adjusted. If there would be a vertical scale like thing inserted into the LCD panel of laptops, over which the panel can slide up and down, it would be a helpful feature. When we keep our laptops on our lap (or on a table such that our elbow is at right angles which is a nice position for our hands), we normally end up looking slightly down to see the panel, which imposes some strain on our necks when we work for long hours. 
If we could adjust the height, it would provide us the comfort of looking straight.
Just drew in a few mins to bring out the idea better. Second and third images show how a laptop with such a feature might be helpful, while the first shows how we as users look downwards to see the panel. Since the panel can be slid over the scale, first image is just one another possible position(when the LCD Panel is not raised at all. ie., the position immediately after opening the lid).
One major problem might be to balance the laptop when the panel is extended, since the Centre of Gravity would have shifted, and also making sure that users dont break the scale over which the panel slides by accident. Hoping to see the comfort of looking straight and working on the future laptops.
Twitter! Placement of Actionable Elements matter
November 10th, 2008
Twitter Showed me this in the friend requests page. I just noticed that there is high probability that a user clicks the block link instead of Accept link, given the small gap between the two, and the chances for a slip of mouse pointer on laptop mouse pads, where the user would tap to click. It would have made much more sense to keep the block and Decline link closer instead, though Keeping the Block link away would be better(say in the second line. “If you dont want to receive any more follow requests from X, <link>Block X</link>” would be much better in my opinion, as in that case, the link would come down to the second line, and stay away from the other two.
மரப்பாச்சி (சிலேடை)
July 7th, 2008நட்ட இடத்தில் நின்று
கிடைத்த நீரைத் தின்று
சாய்த்த திசையில் சாய்ந்து
பொய்த்த மழையை நொந்து
மாட்டுக் கிரையாய் போகும்
சிறு மரம்.
Writing Ruby Map-Reduce programs for Hadoop
May 13th, 2008I wanted to make some crawlers that I wrote in ruby to run faster. Thought of running it using hadoop, and just started trying out using Hadoop Streaming for the purpose, and thought of sharing a short how-to on it since there might be others looking for it.
Hadoop Streaming facilitates users to write the map and reduce code in any language and run it on a Hadoop grid easily.
I assume that you have installed Hadoop and it is already running the sample java programs that ship with the package well. If not take a look into the official quickstart tutorial. This would also tell you how to use the hdfs commands to copy the input files to hdfs, reading the output, etc.
All you need to understand to write an hadoop streaming program is:
- A mapper always reads records and outputs key-value pairs. The record reader might be anything, but the default record reader splits by lines.
Your Mapper should read each record and output a key value pair. You may choose to use any delimiter to separate the key. But Hadoop by default uses tabspace as the delimiter. If it makes sense for you, you could use the same. - A reducer always gets key value pairs as input and gives key value pairs as output.
- While using Hadoop Streaming, you need to write your mapper such that it reads records from STDIN and outputs the key-value pairs to STDOUT, and reducer such that it reads key-value pairs from STDIN and outputs key-value pairs to STDOUT.
- If you plan to use a combiner, it again would do just like your reducer.
Lets get our hands wet.
mapper.rb
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
wordcount = Hash.new
STDIN.each_line do |line|
line.split.each do |word|
wordcount[word] = wordcount[word].to_i+1
end
endwordcount.each_pair do |word,count|
puts “#{word}t#{count}”
end
reducer.rb
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
wordcount = Hash.new
STDIN.each_line do |line|
keyval = line.split(”t”)
wordcount[keyval[0]] = wordcount[keyval[0]].to_i+keyval[1].to_i
endwordcount.each_pair do |word,count|
puts “#{word}t#{count}”
end
Now that you have a mapper and reducer, just start running your job like below.
$HADOOP_HOME/bin/hadoop \
jar $HADOOP_HOME/contrib/streaming/hadoop-0.16.4-streaming.jar \
-mapper mapper.rb \
-reducer reducer.rb \
-input input/* \
-output wc-output \
-file $PATH_TO_YOUR_FOLDER/mapper.rb \
-file $PATH_TO_YOUR_FOLDER/reducer.rb
I had set $HADOOP_HOME to the root of the extracted hadoop package, and $PATH_TO_YOUR_FOLDER is where you have the mapper.rb and reducer.rb files. In the above example, I had just mentioned the mapper and reducer file names without giving the complete path to the files, and supplied the complete path using -file options. Here, the -file option packs the file - supplied to it as argument - in the job jar file that it sends to all nodes in the grid.If the files preexisted in the grid at a particular path, you could just have specified the full path to the -mapper and -reducer options itself. But it makes no harm using the -file option unless the files are big and the job jar file size would become unnecessarily huge.
Happy Rubying and Hadooping! 
IE8 passed ACID 2 test!
January 26th, 2008This might be a old news for some. But I found it interesting and surprising. Microsoft trying to comply with web standards suggests that the web is going to be a cleaner place sometime very soon.
http://www.vladimirpetkovic.com/blog/ie-8-passes-the-acid-2-test/
Freerice.com
December 16th, 2007It is exciting to see how people come up with innovative ideas. John Breen had come up with this site seeing his son study for SAT. When a visitor answer a vocabulary question correctly, 20 grains(and growing ;)) of rice is being donated to hungry people across the world through UNO.
How? At each page an ad is being displayed at the bottom, and the money that comes through these ads go for the cause.
One highlight is that the questions are adaptive(toughness varies based on how well you answer), which could be very helpful for those who prepare for GRE.
FOSS.IN/2007 Day 2
December 6th, 2007Day two had 4 tracks - Fedora, KDE, OpenOffice, Indic Linux. I was wondering why they had put all non-technical tracks together on one day. Only KDE had technical talks(about Qt4), and I was there.
The KDE track started with a talk on “The Pillars of KDE 4″ and “How to be a part of the gang”, which I skipped, and started attending from the talk on “KDE4 development setup” by Pradeepto. Pradeepto’s talk explained how to get KDE4 working, and went on to explain how to checkout the svn of KDE4 and start compiling and testing it. There were questions on the size of the checkout, bandwidth issues, etc. Someone in the audience crowd suggested that there could be some way to make the repo available as ISOs, which can be distributed in events. The slides are available here
Kevin Ottens talked about Qt/KDE concepts and Frameworks. It was something that covered the basic concepts of Qt, which every person starting with Qt development should know. This talk should have made the learning curve of many budding Qt developers smoother. The examples he chose were very apt to illustrate the concepts. I would savor the talk for long time. He explained when to use the ‘K’ classes and when to use the ‘Q’ classes, which I think many Qt developers learn only after making mistakes. He also introduced the audience MVC based development with Qt4. The slides of this talk are available here
One interesting talk was that of Girish, which was about Styling Qt4 with style sheets. When I used Qt 3.4, I had to include all styling information in the Qt code while instantiating each object. But with the facility to include style sheets in Qt4, this styling information can be kept aside from the functional code, which is a good practice that Trolltech has adapted from the web technologies. Lot of CSS3 like features are available in the Qt Style sheets, and it also provides cascading as in CSS. Moreover the syntax is very similar to CSS. Slides available here
Piyush Verma, a GSoCer 2007, who extended KDevelop for Python syntax highlighting support gave a talk on “Kdevelop3/4: Beyond C++.. extending the Language Base”, presented a very good content. But he could have made the presentation more encouraging for new contributors to come up than bore people away by speaking in a “I know you know we both know” tone. The slides are available here
The day was satisfying with good talks on Qt (especially Qt4 and its new features).
FOSS.IN/2007 Day 1
December 5th, 2007There were four parallel tracks going on for the First Project Day, viz., Debian/Ubuntu, Mozilla, GNOME and OpenSolaris.
I attended most sessions of Mozilla and one session in Debian/Ubuntu.
The first talk was on Extensibility of Mozilla by Myk. Myk talked about various addons for Mozilla, what they do, and an overview of how it was implemented(whenever the addon was created by him). Some of the new useful addons that I adopted after the talk was Alexa Sparky. Most others were that I already use. The slides are available somewhere in http://people.mozilla.or/~myk/. I too am looking for the exact URL. Please let me know if you have it.
Anant gave a nice, well organized talk on XPConnect. He gave a step by step introduction to get the audience started with a skeleton code generator, and went on to show code snippets to show off the ease of using XPConnect. Slides available here
Next was a talk on writing applications with the Mozilla Framework. It was an awesome talk where Prasad illustrated step by stp on how to build an application using XUL. But it would have been even better if he had chosen the example such that it illustrates how to use both XPCOM and XUL. One new thing that i learnt was that even the applications that are built with the Mozilla Framework have the addon widget, and are extensible. Slides are avaialble here
The last pre-lunch session was regarding Evangelizing for Firefox. Mary showed some interesting pics on how people love firefox, and then introduced Spread Firefox initiative and the events that happen on it to the audience.
Had lunch with a bunch of #linux-india IRC buddies.
Post-lunch, I went to the Debian/Ubuntu track to attend the Debian/Ubuntu package building and maintenance workshop by Baishu and Kartik. Though the content was very good, some audience who were new to packaging wouldn’t have probably understood much of it. It is tough to cater to the needs of everyone, but still the workshop could have been more of a step by step tutorial. The slides are available here
When the workshop on Debian/Ubuntu was over, I dropped back into the Mozilla track, and a couple of short sessions on localization were going on. These talks were by eminent personalities of the Mozilla Community. But just that I wasn’t interested in the topic, I didn’t follow the talks closely. From how much ever I listened to the talks, I was able to get a grasp on how localization happens in the Mozilla Community, and how Firefox3 is going to support localization.
The day ended with a demo of Firefox’s accessibility by Krishnakanth Mane. It was amazing to see that Hindi accessibility works so well. Krishnakanth requested the audience to take necessary initiatives to make their local languages accessible. If any news readers or people good at pronounciation and phonetics are interested in contributing to their own language’s accessibility, please contact krmane at gmail dot com.
