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 [...]

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

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.

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 [...]

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++. [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

 
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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]