January 2009

It’s been a good movie month for me, and I’ve managed to nudge closer to my target of watching the IMDb Top 250. But one tool I had in the past, that I sorely miss, is twofifty.org. It’s a now-defunct site that kept track of the IMDb Top 250, and let you strike off the movies that you had watched. You could see which movies you hadn’t seen, keep score, and discuss the movies. Since it’s demise, my movie watching slowed down as well. Earlier this month, I set up a similar site at 250.s-anand.net. It has the same basic function. You can log in, strike out movies that you’ve seen, and keep track of what’s left to see. For the more technically minded, the source-code is at two-fifty.googlecode.com. ...

I just finished Stephen Few’s book on Information Dashboard Design. It talks about what’s wrong with the dashboards most Business Intelligence vendors (Business Objects, Oracle, Informatica, Cognos, Hyperion, etc.), and brings Tuftian principles of chart design to dashboards. So I took a shot at designing a dashboard based on those principles, and made this dashboard for InfyBLOGS. You can try for yourself. Go to http://www.s-anand.net/reco/ Note: This only works within the Infosys intranet. Right click on the “Infyblog Dashboard” link and click “Add to Favourites…” (Non-IE users – drag and drop it to your links bar) If you get a security alert, say “Yes” to continue Return to InfyBLOGS, make sure you’re logged in (that’s important) and click on the “Infyblog Dashboard” bookmark You’ll see a dashboard for your account, with comments and statistics The rest of this article discusses design principles and the technology behind the implementation. (It’s long. Skim by reading just the bold headlines.) ...

I’ve recently switched to Python, after having programmed in Perl for many years. I’m sacrificing all my knowledge of the libraries and language quirks of Perl. The reason I moved despite that is for a somewhat trivial reason, actually. It’s because Python doesn’t require a closing brace. Consider this Javascript (or very nearly C or Java) code: var s=0; for (var i=0; i<10; i++) { for (var j=0; j<10; j++) { s = s + i * j } } That’s 6 lines, with two lines just containing the closing brace. Or consider Perl. ...

Here’s the fastest way I’ve found to install Ubuntu on a USB flash drive, for my Dell Latitude D420. (Pendrivelinux.com is a great resource for this sort of thing.) Ingredients One large USB flash drive like this one. Not less than 4GB. I’d suggest 8GB or more One CD (not a DVD) Ubuntu 8.10 desktop CD ISO IMGBurn or any other CD burning software Direct Internet via LAN cable (without proxy, without wireless) Installation ...

This vacation, I took a session each for class XI and XII at my school, Vidya Mandir. The subject was Computer Science (the only one I can teach with some confidence), and the topic was networks. It was an experiment, in two parts. The first was to understand how students of this generation interact with the Internet. (I'm twice as old as them, so I guess they qualify as the next generation.) The second was to see whether I'd leave them far behind, or they'd leave me far behind. ...