Recent programming

• All your aliases are belong to you

  I like setting up shortcuts to frequently used commands whether I used Windows or Linux. I use the terminal often and create shortcuts to frequently used commands using “alias” feature of BASH. This has saved me considerable time in the past. However, I recently felt that if I could have a helper [...]

  August 28th, 2009

• Command-line language translation

  Here is a simple utility created using Python for translating text from various languages into English. It uses the Google AJAX API to do this.
  Usage

  prashanth@prashanth-desktop:~$ translate bonjour
  hello
  prashanth@prashanth-desktop:~$ translate guten morgen
  Good morning

  August 18th, 2009

• Extracting relevant text from HTML pages

  Some time back I had done some work on extracting topics from an arbitrary piece of text using Wikipedia data. Recently I thought of a concept to put that algorithm to work. As a part of this project, I need to extract relevant text from an arbitrary HTML page. By relevant I mean the “meat” [...]

  July 27th, 2009

• Clustering Data using Python

  As a part of a project I am working on, I had to cluster urls on a page. After some light googling I found, python-cluster. You can find below a simple python script to illustrate the usage of python-cluster library.

  July 25th, 2009

• Determining the difficulty of Arithmetic Operations

  I am trying to write a program to test my arithmetic skills. The program should pose arithmetic problems involving the four basic operations – addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. When the testing session starts, the program should issue problems of less difficulty and the difficulty should be ramped up gradually. A score should be computed [...]

  July 27th, 2008

• Even a python can be abused

  The first programming language I coded in is QuickBasic. I loved the simplicity and especially the IDE. It made things simple for a starter. Later I discovered Visual Basic which extended the same simplicity and added the “Visual” element with a splendid editor for GUI.
  In between I did some projects using Java, C#, C, C++. [...]

  July 11th, 2008

• Nose – TDD – Python

  What, why
  I’ve been reading up on TDD and it has struck me as particularly useful methodology to achieve “clean code that works”. TDD encourages writing unit tests to cover all the code (because by definition, you write a test before a line of code is written). Because all your code is covered you are freed [...]

  May 22nd, 2008

• N-gram data from Project Gutenberg

  I’ve been working on Wordza.com for which I needed Ngram data from a sufficiently large corpus. Initially, I thought of using Wikipedia data which I already have on my disk, but decided on using Project Gutenberg data as it is more representative of the general usage of English language.

  May 4th, 2008

• Alexa rank: A script to get the rank for any site

  What is Alexa rank?
  Alexa collects statistics about visits by internet users to websites through the Alexa Toolbar. Based on the collected data, Alexa computes site ranking. By examining the Alexa rank of a site, you can get a rough idea of how popular the site is. Many argue that Alexa rank is misleading but it [...]

  April 22nd, 2008

• Selecting a random row from a table in mysql

  I have come across more than one instance when I had to select a random record from a table in a MySQL database. Here is how to do it.

  April 8th, 2008

• Interfacing Python with C using ctypes

  Python is a wonderful “very high level” language with an elegant design. It is an ultimate tool to rapidly develop applications. However, when it comes to performance (speed and memory), Python sucks. It is not meant for performance. So what do you do after building a quick prototype in python if you want it to [...]

  January 7th, 2008

• Topic extraction using Wikipedia data

  In an earlier article, I mentioned that I was trying to use Wikipedia data to do news article clustering to make it easy for me follow news feeds. I have made some progress. I’ve written an algorithm to produce a list of Wikipedia articles relevant to the input text. Input text [...]

  December 21st, 2007

• Language People – Interesting picture

  I like the representation for Logo, Machine Language, Prolog and Ada. Wonder what “N.W” is… (the Modula-2 guy is holding it). I wish python was featured too but the picture says “‘85″. Python did not even exist then!
  original from here

  November 29th, 2007

• Ways to process and use Wikipedia dumps

   
  Wikipedia is a superb resource for reference (taken with a pinch of salt of course). I spend hours at a time spidering through its pages and always come away amazed at how much information it hosts. In my opinion this ranks amongst the defining milestones of mankind’s advancement.
  Apart from being available through http://www.wikipedia.org, the [...]

  October 17th, 2007

• vTap Windows Mobile source code

  Veveo has released the source code for the windows mobile client application. This is great because it gives you a way to fine tune our app to suit your needs. You can sign up for the developer program here to receive updates from Veveo. Get the source here.

  September 29th, 2007

• Word arithmetic puzzle generator

  I was digging through some old code of mine when I came across this script. To me, this script was a demonstration of the beauty and elegance of the python language.
  You might have come across a puzzle like this:
  AID + ICED = IDEA. What digits would you assign to the characters A,C,D,E,I so that the [...]

  August 26th, 2007

• Matrix Desktop

  What you see above is how my desktop looks now. You need to be using gnome to get this working.
  Nautilus draws the desktop (including the icons) for you in gnome by default. We have to tell it to stop doing that, so we can do the matrix animation in its place. Nautilus can be configured [...]

  August 22nd, 2007