Prashanth Ellina » books http://blog.prashanthellina.com In Pursuit of Truth Sun, 28 Nov 2010 09:35:27 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Rendezvous with Rama – Goodbye Mr. Clarke http://blog.prashanthellina.com/2008/03/25/rendezvous-with-rama-goodbye-mr-clarke/ http://blog.prashanthellina.com/2008/03/25/rendezvous-with-rama-goodbye-mr-clarke/#comments Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:18:10 +0000 prashanthellina http://blog.prashanthellina.com/2008/03/25/rendezvous-with-rama-goodbye-mr-clarke/ I am a huge fan of the science fiction genre. Arthur C Clarke is one of my favorite science fiction writers after Isaac Asimov. It saddens me to have learnt that he has passed away. Most people get reminded of “2001: A Space Odyssey” when they hear the name Arthur C Clarke. I get reminded of “Rendezvouz with Rama“, a brilliantly conceived novel that set my imagination on fire. For all the Clarke fans out there, “Rendezvouz with Rama“.


Rendezvous with Rama
Rendezvous with Rama

Rama interior – somewhat inaccurate


A short film




links

The ramans always do things in threes!

]]> http://blog.prashanthellina.com/2008/03/25/rendezvous-with-rama-goodbye-mr-clarke/feed/ 2 All NCERT text books! http://blog.prashanthellina.com/2008/02/06/all-ncert-text-books/ http://blog.prashanthellina.com/2008/02/06/all-ncert-text-books/#comments Wed, 06 Feb 2008 15:43:16 +0000 prashanthellina http://blog.prashanthellina.com/2008/02/06/all-ncert-text-books/ I recently came to know that NCERT was providing all the text books (class 1 – 12) for download. However, I found their interface hard to use for browsing through. So I wrote a crawler in python to get all the books to my webserver.

Along with storing the books, I generated thumbnails for every chapter. Navigation pages have also been generated to help browse through the books easily. You can access this dump here.

The crawler code is here.

These are the steps to run it yourself.

# scrape ncert site to get details about book pdf urls
python get_ncert_books_data.py > ncert_books_data

# create a directory to store all downloaded files
mkdir ncert_books

# download all the pdfs and cover page images
cat ncert_books_data | python download_ncert_books.py ncert_books

# generate thumbnails for each pdf (requires ImageMagick)
find ncert_books/ -iname "*.pdf" > all_pdf_files
sed -i "s/^/0\t/" all_pdf_files
python generate_thumbnails.py

# resize the book cover images
python resize_image_thumbnails.py ncert_books

# generate the navigation pages
python generate_navigation_pages.py ncert_books



For the thumbnail generation to work, you will need ImageMagick. Read this for more information.

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