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 ...

A couple of weeks back, I went shopping looking for a TV tuner card that is compatible with Linux. Googling had told me that “Hauppauge” card was known to be compatible. However, I could not find it anywhere in the market (SP Road, Bangalore, India). On going to one of ...

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 ...

I gave a talk at FOSSConf08 yesterday and came away feeling very disappointed and let down! It was a poorly organized event where total chaos prevailed. My friend Venkat and I found ourselves unable to show our presentation slides because of an overheating projector whose brightness could not out-match the ...

I have a bunch of PDF files for which I wanted to generate thumbnails. On looking around a bit, I found “ImageMagick“. Since I have Ubuntu installed, I did

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

It is not too big ...

The first time I read Hitch-hiker’s guide to the Galaxy, I got bored mid-way and stopped reading. I thought it was one totally pointless non-sensical rambling story. The movie version of it was played recently on ...

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 ...

I just finished watching “Inconvenient Truth” - A documentary film by Al Gore detailing the rationale behind the truth of Global warming. I found the film captivating and moving. I personally believe that human activities contribute to Global ...

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 ...

KNOL

Google has announced “Knol”. In their words

a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it.

… The key idea behind the knol project is ...

I recently bought a computer to use at home for development. Sometimes I have to access stuff (code, pictures, bittorrent) on my machine when I am away from home. I keep my machine running all the time and recently upgraded my internet connection from 128 kbps to 512 kbps. If ...

My colleague got me a tattoo from FOSS.IN which I promptly wore. Go Firefox, go!

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 ...

I have been playing around with Wikipedia data and tried doing some byte pushing on my Dreamhost web space. Since this is shared web space, the processing power and memory available are limited. I was able to create database tables in mysql by parsing the wiki xml dump and some ...

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 ...

I was in the process of trying to understand the classification schemes available in Wikipedia (categories, lists and navigation maps) when I came across this nifty tool. It is very useful to understand the inter-relationships between Wikipedia categories.

You can check it out here: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~dapete/catgraph/

Veveo released a mobile web browser friendly version of the vTap service a couple of days back. The cool thing about this is that it will work on any device with support for a basic browser and realplayer (count most mobile phones in). Since it is meant to enable vTap ...

It has been three weeks since I upgraded to Gutsy from the development repositories. Gutsy got released just a little more than a day back. While going through the news from the blogosphere about this event, I wished Ubuntu had released a “non-brown” desktop. I don’t like brown and ...

  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 ...

I was hosted with “routhost” until April this year when I decided I needed more features like SSH access, build environment so I would be able to download and compile applications and most of all more disk space. After much hunting around I discovered DreamHost. The feature list is astounding ...