Recent python

• 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

• 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. […]

  February 6th, 2008

• Generating call graphs for understanding and refactoring python code

  I have always been a fan of visualizations as I believe firmly that it is easier to crunch visual information than anything else. Visualizations are especially helpful for finding out patterns in data that are not expected and for patterns that are difficult to express textually in a concise manner.
  The beast
  A couple of weeks back […]

  November 14th, 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

• Drawing on your Desktop

  This is related to the previous post and is meant in part to demonstrate how great Linux is for doing “weird” stuff :). This is what we are
  trying to do.

  The circles in the background have been drawn by the python script below. To get the script running you should have python and pygame installed. […]

  August 24th, 2007