Education
Kid Project: Making paper
Jan 24th
I was trying to explain paper-recycling to my daughter, then thought it is best we do it together. Thus came about a weekend project to make paper from waste papers. Although the end result was not that great, I think she understood the concepts.
She was super excited and did most of the steps herself, including taking the pictures.
Here is a pictorial guide to making your own ‘hand-made’ paper.
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- Cut some waste paper
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- Put the paper and some water in a blender
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- Make a smooth pulp
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- Add some corn flour or glue for binding
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- Pour in a sieve to remove excess water
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- Use a sponge to remove as much water a possible
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- Flatten it
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- Dry it on a non stick surface
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- Press it,weigh it down and let it dry.
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- When it dries, you have your own home made paper.
3 Idiots – The nitpicking
Jan 1st
I watched 3 Idiots yesterday, and could not resist reviewing it. This review is not about how great the movie is. There are several of those on the net.
Let me be quick in saying that my family and I loved the film and think it is one of the best movie. It is a good take on the state of education in the country, a subject I feel strongly about. This is also not about Chetan Bhagat, although the nit-picking could apply to Five Point Someone as well. But I haven’t read it, so can’t say.
I expected more from Aamir, the perfectionist.
I was born in 1978, the same year that Farhan Qureshi (Madhavan) was born. So I felt more connected to the movie than the current generation. This also means that the college period depicted in the movie was the same period I was in college, which is roughly 1995-1999.
So what?
Well you see, a few of the things shown in the movie are, let’s say, futuristic.
Mobile Phones
Mobile phones were launched in India after 1994. The call charges in a ‘scheme’ were 16 Rs. incoming/outgoing. They were not mainstream until 2000 when charges began to drop. Even then, in 2000, I was the only one in my MBA college to have a mobile phone, and that too was given to me by my employer.
So showing engineering college students carrying a phone, pre 1999, was a bit of a stretch.
Mobile Internet
Even if you think ‘chote’ (Rancho) was rich enough to carry a mobile, the movie shows mobile internet being used in the hospital for video conferencing.
- Internet in 1999 was the good old modem based dialup internet at blazing speeds of 56 kbps. Broadband Internet was unheard of until 2005.
- Mobile Data Cards / USB Modems were launched in 2008/2009.
- Even then, I don’t think the speed that Airtel EDGE gives is insufficient for video conferencing. I don’t know for sure, since I am not using one.
Scooter
The scooter that Pia (Kareena) drives looks most certainly like Kinetic Flyte, which was only launched in 2009.
Bottomline
With a little research, which Aamir Khan is known for, the film could have been more realistic. Anyways, if you haven’t seen the movie, please do, it is really good.
P.S. Happy New Year.
Django Flowchart
Dec 9th
Based on my current understanding of Django, this is how a user request is responded to.
- User requests a page
- Request reaches Request Middlewares, which could manipulate or answer the request
- The URLConffinds the related View using urls.py
- View Middlewares are called, which could manipulate or answer the request
- The view function is invoked
- The view could optionally access data through models
- All model-to-DB interactions are done via a manager
- Views could use a special context if needed
- The context is passed to the Template for rendering
- Template uses Filters and Tags to render the output
- Output is returned to the view
- HTTPResponse is sent to the Response Middlerwares
- Any of the response middlewares can enrich the response or return a completely new response
- The response is sent to the user’s browser.
Please leave a comment if I have got something wrong.
Week with python & Django
Dec 6th
Spent the last week picking up Python and Django. Notes to self and anyone else who wants a quick start on Python/Django on Windows. Most Linux flavours already come with most tools needed for python development.
Requirements:
- Installed ActivePython 2.6
- Installed Komodo Edit
- Installed Python Win32 Extensions (not sure why, but was recommended in some blog post and the project itself does not say much of what it does. Stuff like this gives me the heebie-jeebies.)
- Installed Pinax, which in turn installed Django.
- Installed PyQt4
- Installed Eric4 (uninstalled after using it for 10 minutes)
Problems faced:
- Pinax installation was a bit flawed, it could not install all dependencies. Worked around by manually installing (pip install else easy_install)
- Windows 7 was not passing command line arguments to .py scripts. Had to hack registry and add %* to the end to make it work. See the Key and value below.
Getting started:
Python: Like everyone else, I followed and recommend “Dive Into Python”. But more importantly, this page of titbits is amazing extract from the book and quickly brings a Java dev up to speed. I should blog about ‘Python for Java developers’. Time spent 4 hrs.
Pinax: Stopped at the installation step. Will delve further after understanding Django better.
Django: Followed the tutorial, then the Django Book, and finally the Django Docs for a deep dive. Time spent 8 hrs.
Django is surely one on the best documented project and also very straight forward. It suits my style of writing code and I did not feel like giving up in few hours, like the experience I had with RoR. Will surely blog about Django more.
What they don’t teach you at Engineering school
Nov 8th
This is an experimental post. If it doesn’t render correctly, leave a comment.
I was brainstorming on the skills a software developer does not learn at school, which are essential for work and some which are needed for career growth.
Below is an embedded mind map, followed by an embedded public wave. Please feel free to contribute to the wave. If you do not have a wave account, here is the static version.
You can pan / zoom / expand / collapse the map below to get a better understanding.
Boo gotchas for beginners
Aug 30th
Unlike what I mentioned in my previous post, I ended up trying Boo first. I will delve on the reason in another post. The objective of this post is to document the problems I had getting used to Boo syntax. None of the problems were big, just some missing punctuations 
And I did not face any issues with the significant space.
Empty array vs. Empty list
An empty list is
[]and an empty map is
{}And empty array is
(,)as it would cause ambiguity with a function / closure.
