Noufal Ibrahim : constrained creativity

Bye bye Bangalore

2012-12-02T13:53:38+05:30

After 11 years of living in Bangalore, I’m finally ready to leave.

I came here in 2001 as an employee of Cisco and then moved through a 2 jobs before starting to freelance. I got involved in the local Python scene, helped kickstart Pycon India and met a lot of wonderful people in the process.

On a personal side, I got married and had two kids all while I was in Bangalore.

I met some great people here and have a lot of experiences to cherish. I never really imbibed any of the indigenous culture or language but I quite like the communities I was part of and don’t want to break any ties. I’m also going to make regular trips back to the city for at least the HasGeek events and maybe an occasional training. I will also still be alive on the mailing lists and websites that I’m already active on.

I’m moving back to Kerala and going to be working out of Calicut for a while. I’m hoping to do some work with the student communities at my alma mater and maybe try to kick start a tech. scene in Calicut. I also have some other projects in mind but don’t want to talk about them yet.

I think life’s going to change quite a bit. I’ve rented out a rather spacious house for approximately the same rent as the tiny flat in which I currently stay. Calicut is not as “happening” as Bangalore. It does have a coastline though and nice restaurants that serve seafood. I don’t think any tech. culture exists there and even if it did, it wouldn’t hold a candle to Bangalore. I hope to do more things non tech especially on the religious side - a part of me that I’ve been neglecting too much.

Let’s see how things turn out. As it stands, I’ll be out of here in the last week of December. Somewhere around the 25th.

So long and thanks for all the fish!

Calligraphy

2012-04-28T00:00:00+05:30

Everyone’s got to have a hobby and mine is Calligraphy. Like many people, I enjoy doodling but I’m not very gifted when it comes to drawing so I channel my energy into writing beautifully. I’m trying to develop this into a serious endeavour and this is a post describing how I do it.

My “gear”

I don’t remember how I got interested in this but the earliest calligraphy pen which I got was an Artline calligraphy marker. I must have had that before 1991 so that’s my “starting point”. They’re cheap and fun to use. I then bought a Sheaffer calligraphy fountain pen set which I still have but hardly use. I used to practise on and off but for the past few years, I’ve been seriously at it writing a page a day on the average. In 2010, I bought myself a set of Speedball nibs and a holder. I started writing with a dip pen and haven’t really looked back on fountain pens since then. The nib I use the most is a 2mm flat nib. In Speedball land, this is called a ”C3” nib. It’s used for all the hands I can manage. Of late, I’ve been trying with wider nibs for larger work. I can’t handle the smaller ones yet withoug damaging the paper. I also have a number of flex nibs but lack the skill to write using a Spencerian or Copperplate hands. Someday perhaps. I managed to get my hands on one automatic pen which lets me mess with really large letters. It’s fun but I don’t use it very often. I have tried making bamboo pens but haven’t been very successful so I don’t use them. I also have a cup full of brushes which I practise with somewhat irregularly. A few flat ones to use with resist and to charge my pen when I write longer pieces and a few pointed ones including one rigger - this is particularly awesome when you’re trying to do fancy flourishes. I have a few cheap chisel edged felt tipped markers for quick and dirty stuff. I have 2 brush pens which I sometimes play with but they really require more skill to effectively use.

I carry around a Waterman expert fountain pen for daily use and a Platignum calligraphic fountain pen for doodling. My regular hand, like that of most “digital natives” is horrible but I still enjoy using the Waterman and don’t miss a chance to whip it out and scribble. I used to use Sheaffer Skrip ink but after my last bottle switched to Private reserve velvet black ink. It’s way darker and feels much better. For other colours, I make do with plain old poster colour or water colour since calligraphic gouache is next to impossible to find in India.

For calligraphy, I usually use 90gsm copier paper. It can handle some amount of soaking and is transparent enough to see rulings through. It’s not nice looking enough to do “finished” work but is great for practice. I use cartridge paper when I have to do stuff with paints and colour since it can handle water better. However, it’s rather thick and I don’t have a light table yet so ruling becomes a problem. I have a few other coloured papers which I use when I’m feeling fancy but the 90gsm bond is what I most use. I used to use a lighter 75gsm notebook to practice on and while they handle fountain pens reasonably well, they disintegrate with dip pens and clog the nibs. I bought some real calligraphic paper from an art store during my last trip to San Francisco but I’m too scared to waste it on real writing till I’m satisfied that I’m good enough to do so.

I’ve found Bhaskar art center in Chickpete and William Penn in Koramangala to have most of what I need especially the former. If you’re looking to find stuff, you should visit these places.

My setup

I don’t have a studio like real calligraphers do. I make do with a regular table and a chair with arms on which I rest a drawing board to get the angle right. I keep a sheet of paper stuck to the board on the right on which I drain off excess ink in my pen. I wrote a little Python script that generates PDFs with rulings of dimensions. This works better for me than manually ruling the page. It’s a tiresome job and one that really kills my interest. I’m sure that this violates some ancient rule but I’ve not been formally trained as calligrapher.

I use a wad of older paper taped together as a writing pad. It’s more comfortable than a real writing pad since it “gives” just a little under the nib and produces a nice effect. I hold the sheet on which I write to the ruling sheet using a bunch of paper clips.

My fonts

I’ve practised most with Edward Johnston’s foundational hand. It’s deliciously beautiful and not too hard to write. I also practise a standard uncial script. Of late, I’ve diversified a little into a little gothic. Italics and anything with a pointed nib still eludes me. I also don’t do flourishing very well.

My material

I enjoy reading poetry and most of the stuff I practise with are classical poems. I’m particularly partial to William Blake, S.T. Coleridge, Alfred Lord Tennyson and of course Shakespeare (especially the Sonnets).

My plans

I’m completely self taught never having met a real calligrapher in my life. This also means that I’ve never been judged by someone who knew what they were talking about. I’m not a big believer in autodidacticism especially in areas that are more subtle. I think a good teacher can really help a student along and imbues a certain deeper quality to the experience that can’t be had from a book. The “dead” in dead tree takes on a special meaning in this context. The cyberscribes page has a mailing list that runs “card exchange” events etc. which are nice to get a third party opinion for your work. I also managed to find a university that offers courses in calligraphy one of which I plan to take later this year.

I also want to actually make something and sell it this year or maybe early next year. I don’t plan to make this a career but when someone is willing to pay for the privilege of owning your work, it does say something about all the effort put into it.

Letters are symbols that turn matter into spirit. - Alphonse de Lamartine

Emacsmovies.org

2012-03-24T00:00:00+05:30

I came across a stack overflow question asking for good Emacs screencasts and couldn’t find any on the web. There is a website for Vim screencasts so I thought I’d try my hand at making one for Emacs.

Thus was born emacsmovies.org. I registered the domain at the end of last year in October and have been spending time sporadically developing the tools that I thought I needed to do this.

I spoke to Zed Shaw about his learn code the hard way series of books and screencsts and he suggested that I write a book to go along with the screencasts.

I’ve finally launched the website and the first screencast so if you’re interested in trying out the venerable old editor or an expert who wants to help out with the screencasts, check out http://emacsmovies.org and send me some feedback at noufal@emacsmovies.org.

Moving topic branches in git

2012-01-09T00:00:00+05:30

I hit an interesting situation recent which I’ll try to recreate here in the hopes that others might benefit.

Imagine that we cut a branch called tp1 from our master and did some work on that branch. At the same time, some other work was done and pushed onto master. Our current DAG looks ike this.

Now, while on the topic branch, we do some work and commit them to create this. I’ve used tb2 in the commit messages so that you can identify them easily.

Now, we realise that these two commits should be on a different topic branch which should be based off master. We look at the logs (while on the topic branch) and see this

(ol)[1] noufal@sanitarium% git log --pretty=oneline 
32abaeefed66ee5165b7e7edddb5604ecdb2fa64 tb2 5
4541e86113cb4ceaf654ed74abe85d477950ed2f tb2 4
84d1f43da8b6d63592627aca6ecd4c7e3df29600 tb1 3
7956bc382d183674208f1b04c3e62d12806c517c tb1 2
a6d74c2cb1e0b7ba456626898fd63a3c0d1fc863 tb1 1
c60c4c22f2eb8d3c7465ad3b138a7d4a3aee3c5f master 3
0c99224a32fcc61e123f94837d971456a2659bb0 master 2
c3522d06410e2a37444ed5759f7a6f4c7b67ad17 master 1

We want 8a94e9cf00aa2df580d7beed8efb52557bdfce16 to be based off the current tip of the master branch

(ol)[1] noufal@sanitarium% git log --pretty=oneline master
755b7823acfa30f60ade5ad6c5c575116c38fe92 master 5
95da533bb52e60497ba5312dcd0540c1bd32db96 master 4
c60c4c22f2eb8d3c7465ad3b138a7d4a3aee3c5f master 3
0c99224a32fcc61e123f94837d971456a2659bb0 master 2
c3522d06410e2a37444ed5759f7a6f4c7b67ad17 master 1

In other words, off commit 755b7823acfa30f60ade5ad6c5c575116c38fe92. How do we do this?

We first create a the new topic branch (lets call it tp2). Our DAG now looks like this

And then we rebase this onto the master branch using the 84d1f43da8b6d63592627aca6ecd4c7e3df29600 as the branching point like so git rebase --onto master 84d1f43da8b6d63592627aca6ecd4c7e3df29600 tp2.

(ol)[1] noufal@sanitarium% git rebase --onto master 84d1f43da8b6d63592627aca6ecd4c7e3df29600 tp2
First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
Applying: tb2 4
Applying: tb2 5

Once this is done, we get

And then we switch back to the tp1 branch and reset it to discard the two extra commits that are now tracked by tp2.

noufal@sanitarium% git co tp1
Switched to branch 'tp1'
noufal@sanitarium% git reset --hard 84d1f43da8b6d63592627aca6ecd4c7e3df29600
HEAD is now at 84d1f43 tb1 3

We get this

Homeschooling in India (part 3)

2012-01-02T00:00:00+05:30

I’ve talked about the my problems with traditional schooling and some alternate methods in previous posts. In this final part, I’ll talk about my implementation plans. My daughter is not yet four and I’m factoring that into my plans here. Be warned though that these are my plans and might not be suitable for everyone. Also, this is more of a statement rather than an opening point for discussions and this will reflect in my replies to comments in any.

Overall plans

No education system is “unbiassed”. As far as I can tell, everyone has an agenda and this makes sense. Every teacher has a world view, opinions, facts and other things which they try to pass on to a child.

I bemoan the lack of emphasis these days on the humanities, on language and on the arts. Skills like writing, talking etc. are being pushed back in schools with increasing emphasis on technology and the need to get into a “good college”. So, this is something I want to pay some attention to. I want to emphasise things like poetry, history, literature and languages. I foresee some trouble but there are some groups in Bangalore that might be able to help. I’ll talk about these later.

Dorothy Sayers’ essay “The lost tools of learning” is a must read for anyone interested in education these days. It’s my starting point. In it, she talks about the trivium) which consists of the three “subjects” of grammar, logic and rhetoric. Primary education consists of teaching kids these skills and that’s my plan as well. This is medieval and there is a modern version of the system in the book The Well trained mind which is my handbook for this trip. It’s very detailed and goes into the ages at which different subjects are to be taught and how. It recommends books and other resources which can be used etc. I’ve not year read the whole thing but I’ve browsed through a copy and am quite satisfied with the overall content.

The second thing which I want to emphasise is religion. My own world view is religious and conservative (although I don’t like pigeonholing ideas in this fashion) and I don’t want to compromise religious education. This is not a fashionable thing to say in “modern” liberal circles but it’s my plan anyway. I’m not going to “justify” this here. That’s not a path I want to go down. Operational religious virtues are best taught by example so the household is the first thing here. Children learn by imitation so that covers most of this. Your kids are going to be as religious as you are. More formal religious theology, requires a specialist to teach so I plan to get a home tutor who will teach these subjects a few times a week when my daughter gets older. This is the way I was taught. There are also a few http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrasahs near my house so maybe that’s an option too. I’m undecided about the details but there’s still time for this.

It’s too early to have a clear view of the entire path but these are my overall aims.

Timeline

I don’t really plan to do any “formal” schooling till about 5 years of age. I’m not a big fan of the preschool, nursery, kindergarten and then first grade trend in cities these days. I do spend time playing around with my daughter though. She can count a little and recite the alphabet. She can handle a pair of scissors to cut out stuff and can generally keep herself busy with a few pieces of paper, a stick of glue, some colours and such things.

I also spend quite a bit of time reading stories to her and discussing them. She picks up vocabulary quite quickly and any stories which have a sort of rhyme (e.g. some of the Dr. Seuss books), she memorises automatically.

One thing I’m deadly against is the television (and by extension the computer). It has a way of eclipsing everything else that the world can throw at you. This is perhaps a tad controversial but I’m generally satisfied with not having a TV in the house and not putting my daughter in front of youtube to watch standard Disney cartoons. We tried this earlier (when she was around 2.5) and that’s all she wanted. The books, the toys, the outside, the pretend games all stopped. Not worth and it The Well Trained Mind is in agreement with me about this.

At 4.5 or so, I plan to start the work with the book mentioned above and to go on with that. It will probably not be possible to do it entirely according to their prescriptions but it is going to be my guidebook.

At about 6, I plan to start formal religious education too.

I expect the subjects to get more and more complex as my children grow older and so after a period of time, I’ll probably take the help of private tutors for specialised subjects and to prepare them for examinations (which are sadly compulsory these days if you want to do anything).

It’s too early to have a crystal clear plan right now but I’ll probably blog about this as time goes by.

Socialisation

This is often the first question that people ask when it comes to home schooling. How will she learn to socialise? How will she get friends? The question is not really a question. These are two separate issues.

The first has been answered repeatedly beforeocialization).

The basic point is that have a child sit without any real guidance in a class of 35 to 40 children of like age is not going to help them socialise at all. They going to imitate their peers and one rotten kid is enough to spoil the rest. The “free for all” jungle atmosphere of the school teaches a certain kind of socialisation that might not always be the best kind.

Real socialisation comes from letting kids interact with a diverse group of people. As a simple example, my own daughter had a “conversation” with a random lady she met in a local lending library about which books were bad and which were good. It’s not that hard and she definitely didn’t need school to teach her this.

It’s important to get them into such groups on a regular basis. To let them speak to different kids and older people. It’s also good to curate their company a little. While it’s important to experience “the real world”, no one wants their kids to learn behaviour from some ill mannered ruffian. You expose them to people with good personalities, their natural ability to imitate will do the rest. This of course, puts a lot of responsibility on the parent but no one said that raising kids was easy.

The second question about friends is more serious. The parents need to find places where the children can play with peers. Local parks, meetups with other homeschoolers, gated communities, neighbours, evening classes for things like art, martial arts, music etc. There are lots of avenues. I myself plan to spend one or two weeks every two months in my native place where my children can actuall spend time with their grandparents and their cousins.

Another point which can rub people the wrong way is that I think it’s good idea to have more than one child. It’s unfashionable these days but I’ve met homeschooling families with a large number of kids and they were delightful to talk to. The younger ones were mature in a certain nice way and not spoilt brats. The older ones too. This is decision that requires some consideration by parents but I think it’s something worth thinking about.

Support groups

Bangalore seems to be, atleast in my research, the ideal place in India to homeschool kids. The http://alternativeeducationindia.net/ducation in India) website contains a lot of information on groups and answers a lot of FAQs. It also covers the question of certifications which I’m not going to repeat here. There is an community of home schoolers on http://indiahomeschoolers.ning.com/ which is a social networking site. Announcements are usually made over there regarding events and meetups. A mailing list called alt-ed-india)http://groups.yahoo.com/group/alt-ed-india/) is also quite active with a large number of homeschoolers on it. Great place to ask questions.

Most home schooling families I’ve lean towards the liberal and secular. However, there are conservative and more religious groups out there too. The muslimhsers group has been very helpful to me. The Kinza Academy too is a useful resource although a tad expensive if you’re in India.

There are also tons of other resources on the web. Like most things on the net, this is a “drinking from a firehose” problem. The above are the sites and lists which I found useful personally. The book I’ve mentioned is an excellent buy too if you’re planning this.

Why not to homeschool?

Finally, if you are planning to do this, here are some reasons not to just to get a proper perspective.

Competition. The dog eat dog kind of competitiveness you need to get far in some areas comes I think better from the conventional system.
Time. Doing this requires a massive time investment. One parent pretty much needs to do it full time and the other part time. If you don’t have that kind of time and energy available, it might not be wise.
Risk. Doing anything outside the mainstream is risky. Quitting your job and starting your own company is an example that many of the people reading this blog will be more familiar with. This is one such activity and has risks.

Finally

That’s my plan. My daughter is a little under four years old now and I’m spending time in the evenings making plans for when she’s older. I also take the time to visit people who I meet on the mailing lists and go to the meetups. Let’s see where this goes.

Tomobi

2011-12-18T00:00:00+05:30

I own an Amazon Kindle and while I don’t buy ebooks online, I do use the device as a replacement for paper. Before I had it, I used to take hard copies of longish articles so that I could read them while offline. The Kindle is a great replacement. You can covert almost any format into something it can support using calibre and then read it at your pleasure.

There are many articles on the net which I’d like to read but don’t have the time to do so. It would be nice to have a Chrome extension that would allow me to convert the web page I was viewing into a .mobi file which I could then drop onto the Kindle and read it. There is an extension that does exactly this called ”send to kindle”. I’ve used it and it works nicely. Due to Javascript restrictions on executing commands on the local machine, this uses a service hosted on Google AppEngine. As far as I can tell, it receives the page URL, fetches it, does some processing and then sends the processed document to youremail@kindle.com which will convert it into the Amazon proprietary .azw format and sync it to your Kindle when you get online.

This works fine and has been in the market for quite a while now which makes it quite robust. If you know me personally, you know that I’m a little paranoid about giving out stuff to third parties. The approach above requires that Amazon and the klip website (which is the one where the app resides) know about every page I visit and convert. Amazon even has a history of documents you’ve converted. Not nice.

So, I rolled out my own. Tomobi is a chrome extension to send the current page URL via HTTP to a web app that converts it into a .mobi file and keeps it in a directory. It currently just works for me and is not tinker free to get up and running. Details are on the github page.

Let me know if you like it.

This project was called mobify but I renamed it since that’s the name of a company.

Showkeys

2011-11-30T00:00:00+05:30

As part of a larger plan to do some screencasts, I wrote a simple program to display keystrokes called showkeys. It is similar to key-mon but has less features and a different design that I prefer.

key-mon is more modern looking and tracks mouse as well as keyboard input. It’s prettier, is themable and on the overall, something that fits into a modern desktop better than showkeys. Showkeys has it’s own advantages. These are

It doesn’t rely on gtk.
It outputs stuff to the screen directly using libXosd and so doesn’t require a separate window. This makes is work better with tiling window managers like Xmonad (which I use).
It displays a history of keystrokes which is useful while doing a screencast. Key-mon does this but in an ugly way and doesn’t remember modifiers.

It’s been a while since I coded in C so it’s probably rusty. The program uses the X record extension to capture keystrokes from the X server and then puts them on the screen using libXosd.

Licensed under the GPLv3. Source at https://github.com/nibrahim/showkeys. Feedback welcome.

Git training post mortem

2011-10-25T00:00:00+05:30

These are some thoughts on the recent git training which I conducted here in Bangalore.

I’ve done several corporate trainings before and spoken at local events but I’ve never conducted something like this before.

Organisation

I’ll first talk about the organisation. The dates were bad. I didn’t consider Diwali. I had other plans for the last week of October and early November and after that is DroidCon so I just dropped it on October 22rd and 23rd. A lot of people went back home for the holidays and so the attendance dropped. Quite a few people told me explicitly that this was a problem.

The venue was overpriced for something like this. I don’t want to give out actual numbers but this place is designed for more “corporate” style events and has “corporate” prices which someone like me can’t afford if I want to keep doing this on a regular basis. However, no one really complained about my prices. I explicitly asked about this in the feedback forms and no one really complained about the prices. I asked some third parties and they generally said that the price was low. A typical open source style conference here charges between 1000 and 2000 INR. I charged 5500 for the training and with the low number of people and personal attention, I guess it was worth it for the participants.

I created the slides using landslide and added a macro to display command output on the slides. I kept paper notes for the complex parts like discussions of the merge algorithms and some more involved examples. This was useful. I tried to use the whiteboard which the venue manager provided but it was too unstable and I couldn’t really use it.

Content

The morning of the first day was mostly introductory stuff. While I generally feel that git is easier understood from the inside out, you’ve got to start somewhere. Create a few repositories, commit files, view logs, diffs etc. The usual version control stuff. After that, I spent some time talking about the index which is something that git users have to be aware of.

Day 1 morning

After this we dived into git objects. Blobs, trees and commits. I went over these trying to drive home the idea that git is internally organised like a file system. We used the cat-file command to dig into the various objects and then went into the .git directory to actually see what’s happening. We tried running some commands to see how the repository was changing so that people actually understand what’s going on when they do stuff like git add etc. I used a few scripts using grit which outputs files that can be understood by dot. These draw the commits over time and the various heads which help people understand how commits are made. I also had some scripts that actually draw the DAG as it grows over time and pictures like this help people understand how this takes place. We went on with this for quite some time and the morning session of the first day got over.

Day 1 afternoon

Then we started the business of branching and merging. I tried to emphasise the lightweigt nature of git’s branches and the fact that they’re private unless published. I tried to spend an equal amount of time on the actual implementation of graphs as well as their uses. We discussed merging, fast forward and true. We supplemented all this with examples and exercises but I’ll come to that later. We mentioned rebasing and then stopped.

Day 2 morning

We spent about 45 minutes on a recap of what happened the previous day. After that, we dived into the business of rebasing and after that spent time talking about merging. We sidetracked a little talking about the diffing and merging algorithms and I tried to explain why merging works better in git than it does in subversion. We then talked a little about how git does merging (including the internal implementation). After this, we started with collaboration. We just mentioned remotes, bare repositories, and tracking branches and then stopped for lunch.

Day 2 afternoon

Here, we paired up and spent time actually pushing and pulling changes to a remote. I set up a bunch of bare repos on my machine and created an ad hoc wireless lan which everyone used to collaborate. I tried to cover details of different workflow styles, refspecs, an important gotcha of pushing discussed here and when everyone was satisfied, I wrapped up by discussing a bunch of useful leftover commands like bisect, archive, cherry-pick etc.

Things to be improved

I didn’t like the way I created the exercises. I think they needed to be highly stuctured (no ad hoc stuff at all). Also, I need to seriously rethink them. I didn’t have a “list of commands” section. I didn’t think it was a good idea and introduced commands as we needed them but I wonder now whether that was the right way to do it. I didn’t give any homework. One of the participants suggested that I should have. I didn’t cover any of the bridges (git-svn etc.).

I should have advertised a little more and given more gap between the announcement and the day of the event. I should have booked a cheaper venue. I should have chosen the dates more carefully.

All things considered, I think it went well. If anyone here is interested in a repeat, I’d be happy to do one in December or so. Please holler. :)

Git training

2011-10-07T00:00:00+05:30

I am offering a training on the git version control system on the 22nd and 23rd of October 2011 at The Millenia. For details, please visit the training page at http://nibrahim.net.in/trainings/git.html.

Please spread the word.

Homeschooling in India (part 2)

2011-10-03T00:00:00+05:30

Part 1 of this article discussed my problems with the current education system. Why I don’t like it and why I don’t think it makes sense to put ones children through the ordeal.

In this part, I hope to discuss alternatives in the Indian context. In the third part, I hope to talk about strategies and my own plans on how to implement them for my children.

Alternative education

No one really wants anything bad for their kids. All parents will attest to this. They put their kids in reputed schools, they buy them the best of things and generally try to provide something good for their children. These days where families are smaller and more nuclear, children are being spent on even more than in the old days of joint families. One of the most important things that parents invest in for the sake of their children is their education. They want their children to be equipped with mental and academic skills that will ensure a well paying job and success (for some definition of the term). This is all well and good.

The problem is that unlike maybe half a century ago, sending your kids to a “good school” is neither sufficient nor necessary for these things. I can speak more authoritatively about the IT profession than about others since that’s my own area. Smaller companies have been started up locally, new markets have opened up and the internet and other technological advances have empowered people to do things by themselves. This article does a good job of explaining the job market and makes some predictions as well. On the contrary, like I discussed in the last article, there are downsides which might disadvantage them.

What are the alternatives? Well, the first thing is to accept that there are other ways to educate our children. The methods available and approaches are varied and diverse as the kids themselves and just like it’s impossible to “outsource” parenting, it’s impossible to disconnect ourselves completely from the education of our children. If we take an active interest and role in this, new options open up which I’ll try to discuss below.

A couple of provisos before I start. Firstly, “Mainstream education” is clearly defined. There are classes, grades, syllabi etc. “Alternate education” on the other hand is hard to neatly pigeonhole so this list is not authoritatively categorised. Secondly, some of these are mainstream but I’ve chosen to list them here as alternative simply because they can contain some of the damage of the regular system and because they’re fast becoming alternative approaches. Thirdly, these categories are not mutually exclusive. People can do more than one at a time. The divisions are just for didactic convenience. I’ve tried to list them in increasing of order of “away from mainstream education”. Finally, I don’t want to be misconstrued as blaming other parents who have chosen something different from what I plan for their kids. Like I said earlier, no parent wants something bad for their children.

Being involved with a school

Many parents “outsource” the education of their children to a school. They don’t check what’s happening and have no idea what’s going on there. Children are incredibly adept learners and a conventional school atmosphere is a place where they can pick up a lot of things, not all necessarily healthy. A parent sending her child to a school should be actively involved with the school. She should know the childs teachers and what he’s learning on a day to day basis. School is mostly a machine for disseminating government approved factoids. It is the responsibility of the parent to make sure that the larger framework of education is taken care of.

Children (especially younger ones) learn by imitation and in a large classroom where the teacher is a remote person in one corner of the room, children learn by imitating their peers all of whom might not be very good role models. Other issues like abusive or unqualified teachers who actually harass and hurt children should be dealt with. Harsh punishments for simple “offences” like, for example, eating during class hours shouldn’t be taken sitting down by any serious parent. Parents should stand up for their kids. At their ages, the only person they can truly depend on are their parents and they should feel confident in that. The “teacher” of today is not the “guru” of matha pitha guru devam. They’re paid employees who work for an institution that charges a truck load of money to educate children. Parents should take them to task for things which they find are harmful to the development of their children.

On the more positive side, parents should understand that the syllabus as prescribed is not sacrosanct and if the child shows interest in other subjects, that should be encouraged. They shouldn’t be horrified at the idea of (for example) taking a few days, a month or even a year off school to do something else constructive. Many of the schools rules are arbitrary and while they may be enforced in a draconian way inside the campus, the parent and child should understand that it’s not really an ironclad law and treat it that way.

The child should find an older mentor who shows them the wonders of the world in their parents. This requires a considerable amount of effort but no one said that parenting was easy.

The basic idea here is that the parent should engage with the school and child and work daily to offset the harmful effects of mainstream schooling.

Alternate schools

A lot of schools have come up which range from ones that employ a different system of education (e.g. the Montessori method) to ones that are much more radical in what and how they teach (e.g. the Centre for learning in Bangalore).

Like I said earlier, “alternate school” doesn’t capture the myriad of options here. The basic idea is to find a community or a group of like minded students and parents and to travel along with them. Ofttimes parents are worried about external factors like examinations. Being in a group helps to answer such problems. Options like Montessori schools allow parents to liberate their children from some of the harmful effects of conventional schooling but still remain somewhat in the mainstream.

This is not a “one size fits all” solution and it’s best for parents to actually check the schools they’re considering to see whether they align with their philosophies of education before they send their children to them.

Home schooling

A third option which many parents adopt is to ”school” their children by themselves at home. Children are taught by the parents and often write standardised exams as private candidates. They then “integrate” back into the mainstream at some later period or simply stay outside it all their lives.

The methodology varies from parent to parent. Some prefer a regular “study time” system where their kids study subjects in a manner similar to a conventional school. Others prefer a more relaxed approach. The basic idea is that the parent takes over the responsibility of educating their child. Some parents prefer to follow an existing syllabus and textbooks. Others prefer to create their own. This is often done by religious people to make sure that their religious teachings are properly taught to their children. Contrary to what Richard Dawkins says in the God delusion, I don’t consider teaching religion to children a form of child abuse but that’s a topic for another day. Sometimes, especially with older children, parents take help from a professional tutor to teach a subject that they’re not familiar with. Most times, a small group of parents collaborate on something like this and teach the children together creating the environment of a small one room school.

This requires an enormous amount of effort and at least one parent who dedicates a fixed amount of his or her time to teach the children. The approach has disadvantages and advantages which I’ll discuss in the third part.

Grading, exams etc. are all upto the discretion of the parent and vary from person to person.

Unschooling

Possibly a more radical approach, unschooling is an “approach” (for want of a better term) which recognises the innate learning ability in a child and lets them learn based on real life experiences. There are no formal “classes” or “study hours” but the parents expose the child to various situations (e.g. household responsibilities, play etc.) which gives them opportunities to learn skills and acquire knowledge in whatever way and at whatever pace they are comfortable with.

Understandably, this scares a lot of parents. What about exams? What about joining college? Will they learn what’s necessary to handle themselves in real life? The people who often go for this are those who don’t particularly care for walking on the trodden path. They often don’t look for accolades like “certificates” and “awards” but try to lead their lives by a personal code.

My own personal preference lies somewhere in between the last two items mentioned above. I have, based on my own background and experiences, a list of subjects that I think the children should learn and learn well. I have others that are desirable but not that important. My plan is to semi structure the important ones on my list and prioritise those and to provide enough space for them to explore. I will elaborate on these ideas and how I plan to implement them in the next part.

Homeschooling in India (Part 1)

2011-09-06T00:00:00+05:30

This is a dump of all my thoughts and resources I’ve been able to gather about homeschooling/unschooling children in India. I’ll try to make this structured but no promises. Also, much of this is opinion based on my worldview e.g. I’m a religiously orthodox Muslim and this was considerably affected my views on the whole matter. I welcome comments on points where I’m factually incorrect and also on opinions which others disagree with. None of this is meant to be judgemental but I do have strong negative feelings about the attitudes some parents have towards their kids and the current system of education which our children are put through and so it’s possible that it will be misconstrued as finger pointing.

This is going to be a multi part article. This is the first part and talks about my own educational background and what prompted me to think about this whole business.

Background

I first put my daughter (who is now 3.5 years old) into a small school in Bangalore a stones throw away from where I stay when she was 2. This was for two to three hours a day mostly to play with kids of the same age. Given the fact that we live in Bangalore, it’s hard to get kids to play with unlike in a village. As far as I can tell, this helped her overcome her aversion to strangers and excessive attachment to her parents. I had seen parents running around like chickens trying to get application forms from “top schools” and didn’t want to join the race. I actually bought application forms for a school near where I stay (Presidency, Kasturi Nagar) and then decided to drop it and let my daughter continue going to her current school when she was 3 (which is when kids “graduate” from play school to nursery). This is the situation right now and at the end of this academic year, I have to “enroll” my daughter into kindergarten somewhere.

A little background about my own inclinations might be relevant here. I was brought up in Oman. I studied at Indian School, Muscat from kingerdarten to ninth grade after which I had to come back to India. I finished off my school at Ansar English School, Perumpilavu and then did my engineering at NIT, Calicut. The first school where I studied was quite good. There was just one school for Indians in the country and so it was well funded and could offer good facilities to students. The second school was my first brush with the disaster than education is in India. My college was decent since it was extremely relaxed with rules and I had the freedom and resources to explore whatever I wanted.

My parents were never too hung up on us being the topper in class or getting high grades or getting into the best colleges. They were never strict with homework and attendance either. I fondly remember a couple of episodes when my father stood up for me against some of my “teachers” when they went overboard with their insistence on completing homework etc. They were also non insistent on a particular career path for me. Academic inflation wasn’t was bad as it was then as it is now and a professional degree was a reasonable guarantee that you’d get a well paying job. This was something I got from them but there was no “my son has to be an engineer” attitude which is all to prevalent these days. Another thing was that my parents used to spend a lot of time with me and my work. I remember studying about the internal combustion engine the first time and my father promptly got an old unused generator from his workplace along with a cool spanner set and we took it apart to study and see the innards. Much more 3D than a textbook. There was also an undercurrent in the house which was anti “marks for marks sake”. All of these things are part of my world view and the subject of this post.

There were downsides too. All my hindi teachers from the fourth to the ninth grade were from the northern parts of India. They all had a certain contempt towards the south Indians, none of them could speak english coherently (which was supposed to be the medium of instruction) and I have, on multiple occasions, been on the receiving end of nasty remarks from them that were pointed at my faith. I had a natural inclination towards science (especially chemistry) and maths and had a very low opinion of the humanities and the need to study them. Something I’ve come to regret and am still trying to remedy.

Views on education

I have a dim view of the quality of education that’s available to our children and in this section, I’ll try to summarise why.

Content

I think I can summarise my views on education saying that over time we’re slowly replacing “education” with “vocational training”.

I define the former as something which is designed to take the rough uncut gem that is a child and polish her into a diamond that the family, society and mankind can be proud of regardless of what she applies herself to. The idea is to teach the child skills which are necessary to interact with the people she’s going to meet in her daily life, to teach her to think clearly and express her ideas well, to teach her to write and most importantly, to teach her to learn. In a world where the pace of changes in increasing rapidly, the ability to assimiliate new concepts quickly is becoming supremely important. An educated child might not be able to work out complex mathematical sums in her head. She might not be many of the things that “smart kids” are these days but she’d have a certain grip on reality that others don’t. She’d have an area of interest that she pursues with a passion that most others don’t.

The latter is “training” on specific skills that are designed to make you employable. This is not a bad thing in itself but it’s not a substitute for education. Training is a quick thing you can get at a course if you need it for a specific purpose. If the education is the ability to write, then training is the pen with which you do it.

This general trend has cost us a lot. Things like public speaking, writing, art, history, poetry don’t really count for much when the aim of a childs life (and the life which most parents want their children to live) is to get into IIT. Schools and the board have responded to this by altering the syllabi to emphasise maths and science much more than the arts and other softer skills producing people who are little more than cogs in the system. The problem with such people is that they have no idea of who they are in the larger society around them. They have no idea how to respond to the scams and opportunities that the world is throwing at them. They’re afraid of anything except the beaten path (which is sadly no longer a guarantee of a financial success). Their self worths are often derived from external criteria like the opinions of people in authority, grades, certificates etc. They’ve been taught that “learning” is over once they’ve left college and now it’s “time” to “work”.

Quality of teachers/teaching

Structured formal education has become a huge business and like many things that have been tainted by the promise of great profits, the original aims are lost. A school near my house charges 93000 INR as annual fees for kindergarten. The silliness of the situation would make me laugh if I didn’t know how parents are eager to pay this kind of money to give their children “good education”.

Schools often advertise their marble lined floors and air conditioned classrooms rather than the quality of their teachers. Many schools have designer uniforms that cost a bomb. I know a kindergartener who wears Adidas shoes as part of his uniform.

The quote “those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach” is very true these days. Many English teachers can’t spell properly and teach Shakespeare even though they haven’t read a single one of his works. This is something I know personally and not just hearsay. This is especially a malaise when it comes to teaching humanities. They’re supremely important and it’s not possible to impart love of poetry to a child if one doesn’t have it already. The teacher in question is genuinely incapable of teaching the subject to the child and no one seems to care.

Parent involvement

“You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.” said Khalil Gibran to parents. School is a form of outsourcing education as I see it and I think it’s harmful. It’s even more painful in households where both parents work till late in the evening and most of the childrearing is done by a maid. Parents are not a part of the childs development in many of these places and this really damages them. Given how high living costs are, this is a sad reality that many parents have to deal with but the long term costs are, in my opnion, considerable.

I think parents should be deeply involved with their childrens education. It should be a priority in their lives. They should have an active say in everything from how to what and when.

Schools, of course, state in their prospectuses that they believe that parents are a part of the childs educational process. I couldn’t agree more. However, this is actually translated into “our teachers are too lazy to spend time teaching the hard stuff and will send it all home as homework”. Children sit late into the night to get their homework done and don’t have much time for anything else.

The system

I don’t like the classroom. Think about it. There’s a teacher standing far away saying something and you’re in room of 35 to 40 people all of the same age. You hear what’s said, take down some things in a book and switch contexts every hour or so. It’s a criminal offense to talk, eat, go to the toilet or do anything of the sort. There are right answers and wrong answers and nothing in between. I don’t like the idea and I think it does a lot of damage to children.

It’s also very rigid. There are a few subjects which are compulsorily taught. There’s very limited freedom to explore different avenues and even if you have it, you have to do so in one hour intervals.

Agendas

A state run education system where parents send their children to can be dangerous. Incidents like this where a minister edited the books to paint him and his party in a more positive light have far reaching consequences that our narrow minded politicians cannot see. Another problem is the trend of saffronisation of education. All of these are because of the disconnect between the people who decide what needs to be taught and the people who are educated.

Conclusion

So, I’m more or less convinced that the current educational system is not really an advantage for children. I think responsible parents should understand the tradeoffs that are made when they send their kids to one of these schools and make decisions. In the next part, I’ll ty to outline what I plan to do and the resources which I’m planning to use.

My org mode PIM setup

2011-07-17T00:00:00+05:30

This post describes the way in which I’ve set up org-mode to track my work and life in general. It’s broken down into a couple of “sections” and I’ve linked to the relevant parts of my config on my github account. I’ve tried to be a little verbose to explain how things work so that you can try this out if you’re inclined. If you hit any snags, mail me and I’ll try to help you out.

All this is stuff that I use on a daily basis. I’m not as organised as I like to be but I mostly practice what I’m about to preach in this post. This covers only the PIM part of my setup. I also use org for some authoring which I haven’t discussed here.

Also, my emacs configuration files are in need of cleanup. They’re functional as far as config files go thinking of them as “programs” makes me retch.

History

I’ve messed with quite a few ways of keeping myself “organised”. I took a course on the Franklin Covey system and for a while, kept my weekly and monthly sheets up to date. I tried a bunch of programs that helped me track time, keep notes and organise myself in general. None of them really worked and in retrospect, there were a few reasons

They were hard to “Get back into” - Everyone makes mistakes and stumbles when trying out a new system. If it’s hard to reset and get back into the flow when you mess up, the inertia is hard to beat and you end up ditching the system altogether.
They were hard to tie up into other spheres of my life - Like most people, I get todo items, information etc. from various source (e.g. email, phone calls, personal conversations etc.). While your system needn’t be omniscient enough to track it all in a single place, it should be powerful enough to do most of what you need so that your mental strain is reduced. A smaller variant of this problem is the inability of most software systems to integrate with the rest of your work.
I’m lazy, disorganised and a disgrace to humanity - No point denying this. But once I realised and accepted it, it’s given me a set of constraints to work under.

I tried GTD but the “process” doesn’t work for me (although I will admit however that it was better than the Franklin Covey strategies). It did however solidify my ideas of what I wanted out of a task tracking system. I’ll try to summarise below

One place for to look for things. I don’t want to have to wade through sheets of paper and jump through programs just to figure out what I have to do. Did I pay this months rent? Have I paid my utility bills? What work do I have to do today? What was that website with the colour pickers that I used last week? All should be in a single place.
Should be quick. If someone tells me something that’s I have to work on (later or immediately), I need a way of grabbing it immediately before my attention deficit addled brain discards it. If software, I want the kind of thing where I can develop muscle memory and forget about the mechanics of doing things. I especially value this given my email reading experiences with mutt which is still in my opinion the fastest way to read and reply to emails.
Should never get lost. I don’t want to end up doing the “Did you ask me to do that? Damn. I was sure that I had starred that email” dance.
Should be “fun”. Being a tinkerer, I like stuff that’s fun to do and with a few knobs and wheels. If they’re missing, I’ll probably get bored and give up.
Flexible. If I want to, from tomorrow say, start tracking habits, my system should be flexible enough to accommodate that.

So I flirted with the idea of writing some command line scripts to do this kind of thing and found todo.txt which “worked” but didn’t really cut it for me.

My suite of “productivity tools” consisted of something called “gtimer” (I think) which was a simply app to keep track of time spent on projects, EmacsWiki (the precursor to Emacs muse) and TomBoy to keep notes (thereby violating the one place only rule), a notebook and pen to track todo items and a couple of ad hoc thing like starred emails etc. to keep track of “projects”. No, it didn’t work. Yes, I wanted something better.

I had used the Emacs outline mode and hated it but then came across Carsten Dominiks excellent Google tech talk on org mode. I tried it and it was love at first sight. Never looked back since.

Now, let’s get onto the meat of the matter.

Current setup

My org mode files are stored in a git repository that I keep on my private account. I don’t put it up on github since it contains a lot of personal information and I don’t want anyone to clone it and send me a pull request.

The layout of the files is as follows

.
|-- non-org
|   |-- bank-statements
|   `-- invoices
|
|-- official
|
|-- pycon
|   |-- 2009
|   |-- 2010
|   |   |-- IPSS
|   |   |-- logos
|   |   |-- presentations
|   |   `-- pycon docs
|   `-- 2011
|-- specs
|-- training
|   |-- business
|   |-- materials
|    `-- outlines
|
|-- donotdo.org
|-- habits.org
|-- ideas.org
|-- projects.org
|-- projects.org_archive
|-- reference.org
|-- refile.org
|-- scratch.org
`-- toread.org

There are a few parts that are not heavily accessed or modified and they have accumulated cruft.

The non-org directory contains stuff like exported PDFs, .odt files and stuff which contain invoices etc. Mostly binaries. The official directory contains agreements and other formal materials. It should probably be a sub directory of the non-org one. pycon is a top level directory mainly because it was one of my “big” projects and I was experimenting with org-mode features. specs contain org-mode files which are outlines of projects I’m thinking about. It serves as my notebook and doesn’t have anything in that I track. A digital pocketbook of sorts. training contains all the stuff that I use while taking and planning trainings. Course materials (e.g. this was written as an org file), outlines which businesses want, different versions of my training profile etc. donotdo.org is a file that contains a list of harsh lessons that I’ve learnt over time. It might seem silly to put them in a text file and forget them but I find the act of writing it down useful. habits.org is a file I’m trying to use to track a few habits I’m working on. It’s not yet “production” ready so you can ignore it. ideas.org is a bucket where I dump semi-detailed ideas which occur to me. Sort of a cold freezer to search for things to do when I have time. Not necessarily computer related. projects.org is my main file around which my life revolves. Most of this article will be discussing that. There’s an _archive version of the same file which I use to keep older subtrees. reference.org contains phone numbers, links, addresses, things which I would forget if I didn’t write them down. refile.org is my default capture target (I’ll discuss this later). scratch.org is a sandbox file I use to pimp features to people when I’m in front of them and for writing out small things which I can export to different formats. toread.org is a file that stores URLs, names of books, links to videos, movies etc. which I plan to look at. It should really become a section in projects but like I said, the layout needs work.

The first thing I’ll discuss is the refile.org file which is where all tasks land up before they are moved off into the right places. The process of putting them there is something worth mentioning and it addresses point 2 in my list of requirements.

Data sources

Things come into my life via. email, real life (phone + meeting people), the web and while coding (Ah! I should do this, fix this later). This might seem like an oversimplification but it works.

The intention here is to capture things that come in via. these channels into our PIM. Once that’s done, it becomes a regular “item” that can be managed using our regular workflow. The capturing process has to be quick and non-intrusive.

Capturing

Org has a somewhat new system for “capturing” things into org-files. The idea here is to get things into your system quickly rather than think about where to file stuff.

The idea is quite simple. You define a bunch of templates and then globally assign a key which you can hit anywhere to “capture” something.

Let’s take email as an example. Suppose I get an email that asks me to “do something”, I hit C-c r and my org-capture buffer pops up

This allows me to capture the email using any of these templates. If (for example), it’s not a TODO but just something I need to keep track of (e.g. a phone number or an address), I’d hit r. It would allow me to fill some stuff extra information in, annotate it with a link back to the email and add an entry to my reference.org file. Now, it’s safe.

If it was an email asking me to do something (e.g. fix this bug), I’d hit t and it would open a buffer asking for information. Usually, at this time, if I can quickly think of when I want to get to that, I schedule it using C-c C-s and put a date in there so that I don’t have to worry about that later. This would get dropped into refile.org.

If I’m working on the openlibrary code base and see a little bit of code that I need to fix but don’t want to interrupt my current flow, hit C-c r and capture it using o. It captures it as a TODO and drops it into refile.org. This works as a trackable /*TBD*/ in your code. I keep this separate from the regular TODO because it’s work related and large enough to be treated separately.

The j is used when I want to write a diary entry. I’m probably going to get rid of this since I can’t really track or mine journal entries and it’s more fun writing them on paper anyway.

So, at the end of the day, the refile.org file might look something like this

* TODO Fix default assigneed for support cases    
  SCHEDULED: <2011-07-19 Tue>
  Email from George Oates: Fwd: Re: Default assignee
* TODO This task needs more logging
  SCHEDULED: <2011-07-19 Tue>
  [2011-07-17 Sun 14:33]
  file:~/github/nibrahim/openlibrary/openlibrary/tasks.py::@oltask

For real life things which occur while I’m at the computer (e.g. phone calls etc.), I just fire a capture and record it as a TODO. For things that happen while I’m away from my computer, I use a stack of paper pieces I carry with me where ever I go and write down what I need to do. One task per piece of paper. I have a little ritual of putting these tasks into my system every night before I hit the sack which I’ll come to later.

At the end of this process, everything is either in the refile.org file or the references.org file. i.e. within my control. The next thing to manage them properly.

Refiling

At the end of every day, before I crash, I have a little refiling ritual. The bottom line is to empty the refile.org file. If this file has entries in it that are more than a day old, you know I’ve been procrastinating.

org-refile is bound to C-c C-w by default and can be configured to present you with a list of possible trees into which you want to move an entry. My projects.org file used to be a directory of multiple files each dedicated to a different area of my life (e.g. personal.org, work.org etc.) but I moved them all into a single file under different headings.

You can see my refile configuration here. It uses ido to make the refiling process smoother and more “Emacs like”. Here’s what a refiling looks like

It’s asking me where I want to move this item to and offering me the four headings in my projects.org file. I select one and it gets “refiled”.

Scheduling and agendas

Org-mode has an extremely powerful scheduling and agenda system. The basic idea is that you schedule your tasks for a specific day and/or set deadlines for them and then ask org mode to generate a view that prints out what you should be doing today, this week, this month or this year. The scheduling system is flexible enough to handle repeating tasks (e.g. pay rent on 10th of each month), effort estimates, clocking etc.

I personally use just the basic scheduling capability.

So, when I refile, I try to schedule stuff for certain dates. There are some tasks which need to be done “at some time” for which I randomly schedule them a few weeks from now and forget about them till they pop up on the agenda again. Some things are already scheduled while capturing so that’s cool. Some, I know when I will have time to do them so I schedule them appropriately. In any case, the process of refiling makes sure that scheduling is done. The dates needn’t be accurate but tasks should have some date when you’ll look at them.

Once that’s done, C-a a lists out my agenda for the current week (focussing on the current day) and I can get to work. Here’s a sample of my agenda from last month (the capture templates were different back then so it’s slightly different from what you’d see currently).

Monday     20 June 2011 W25
Tuesday    21 June 2011
Wednesday  22 June 2011
  projects:   Scheduled:  DONE Email from George Oates: Support System - bugs/tweaks l [5/5] :tbd:
  projects:   Scheduled:  DONE Email from George Oates: Re: Email setup    :tbd:
  projects:   Scheduled:  DONE Implement email system for support [5/5]
  projects:   Deadline:   DONE Implement email system for support [5/5]
Thursday   23 June 2011
Friday     24 June 2011
  projects:   Scheduled:  DONE Email from Anand Chitipothu: Account validation glitches :tbd:
  projects:   Scheduled:  DONE Fix account validation problems 
  projects:   Scheduled:  DONE Mail Vikas about Org-mode information he wanted
  projects:   Deadline:   DONE Email from George Oates: Support System - bugs/tweaks l [5/5] :tbd:
  projects:   Deadline:   DONE Email from George Oates: Re: Email setup    :tbd:
  projects:   Deadline:   DONE Vitalise Reassign/close case in support system
  projects:   Deadline:   DONE Change =/task= to =tasks=
Saturday   25 June 2011
  projects:   Scheduled:  DONE Integrate habits with capture
Sunday     26 June 2011

Now, you just pick out things to do, do them and hit C-c t to mark them as done so that they move off your agenda.

Things I don’t do

I’m not a clocking junkie who has to know exactly how much time I spend on tasks. I tried using arbtt to do that for a while and it works very well but I don’t really need or use it.
Custom agenda views. The default view looks fine to me. I haven’t really felt the need to change it yet.

Things to do

Other things which I want to include in my system are

Capturing directly from my browser using org-protocol and maybe a custome extension. Bookmark and schedule for reading rather than dive into that hacker news article in the middle of work.
Some tiny xmonad customisations to capture while outside Emacs. A popup Emacs capture buffer using emacsclient to take something down and close it.
Integrate skype chats with Emacs using bitlbee and erc so that I can “capture” skype conversations for reference or as tasks.
Try some effort estimation to practice my estimation skills.

Summary

So, the bottom line is that you simply capture stuff from various parts of your life into org, refile them appropriately once a day, schedule them and get them done. No more missing tasks or items.

I welcome your comments and suggestions. My Config files are on github and you’re more than welcome to cannibalise them.

If there’s sufficient interest in a formal Emacs lisp tutorial, I can take a conventional class sometime later this year in Bangalore. Let me know.

At PyCon 2011

I’ve submitted a talk for PyCon India 2011 which will discuss my Python development settings for Emacs. It will discuss mostly programming tools but I do plan to spend a little time discussing tracking stuff with org etc. so if you’re interested, you should sign up.

Git training course

2011-01-24T00:00:00+05:30

I will be conducting a public course on Git during FOSSMeet 2011 at my alma mater, NIT, Calicut.

The course will probably be held on Sunday, 6th February 2011 but the official schedule is a more reliable source of information.

The details of the course including slides are available at the training page.

Python extension training cancelled

2011-01-04T00:00:00+05:30

The extension training which I had planned for Jan 8,9th is cancelled due to a lack of participation.

On the other hand, a shortened version of the tutorial has been accepted for PyCon 2011. I will be presenting it over there and if there’s sufficient interest, will put up the slides/material on my site here.

Calligraphic rulings

2010-12-30T00:00:00+05:30

Calligraphy is a hobby of mine and I spend a few hours every week on it. I’ve tried arabic but it’s too hard to do without precise instruments and a teacher. English is slightly easier and the results look somewhat pleasing even if one is not very skilful.

Calligraphic letter proportions are specified using multiples of the width of the nib of the pen being used. Following is an example of the proportions of various parts of a letter in the ”Foundational hand”.

(from http://thecalligraphypen.com)

As you can see, the body is 4 nibs high and the ascenders and descenders are 3 nibs high each.

The only calligraphic pens I’ve seen in India are the ones from Sheaffer. They’re not bad and usually come as a set of 3 nibs. The fine nib is 1mm wide, the medium one is 1.5mm wide and the broad one is 2mm wide. Here is a picture of my broad nibbed pen

One of the things that are necessary to write properly is a ruling sheet. These are similar to the “cursive writing” practice books you must have seen when in kindergarten. The sheets specify the height of the main body, the height of the ascenders and descenders and sometimes the inclination of the letters. They serve as guides when one is writing.

To manually create such a ruling is quite hard and error prone. It’s tedious to actually measure multiples of nib and making sure that all the lines are straight necessitates some good drawing equipment. To save myself some trouble, I wrote a little script which takes a bunch of parameters and creates an A4 PDF with the rulings. The only “documentation” right now is the help message which is pretty sufficient really.

    Usage: ruling.py [options] output_file
    
    Options:
      -h, --help            show this help message and exit
      -n NIB_WIDTH, --nib-width=NIB_WIDTH
                            Width of the nib specified in millimeters. All other
                            measurements are multiples of this.
      -p PARTITIONS, --partitions=PARTITIONS
                            Comma separated list of partitions in each line
                            (specified in nib widths)
      -g GAP, --gap=GAP     gap between lines (specified in nib widths)
      --top-margin=TOP_MARGIN
                            Top margin (specified in nib widths). Default is 2
      -r RULINGS, --rulings=RULINGS
                            How many rulings to draw. Default is 10
      -a ANGLES, --angle=ANGLES
                            Comma separated list of angles (in degrees) for which
                            to draw lines on the page (for pen angle, serifs etc.)
      -t TITLE, --title=TITLE
                            A title for this ruling (usually the font name)

Invoking it like so python ruling.py -g2 -p3,4,3 -n2 -r25 -a30 -t"Foundational Hand" foundational_ruling_sheet.pdf produces this which works pretty decently.

I hope you find it useful.

Update

I’ve repackaged this as a web application and you can access it directly from http://noufalibrahim.name/rulings.

Employment status

2010-12-23T00:00:00+05:30

Its been around a year since I took the plunge. I worked for a few organisations, did a few trainings and generally had an educational and profitable year. I attended two PyCons abroad, conducted one here, met a lot of interesting people, got myself a new laptop, got exposed to a whole gamut of things which were completely new to me (like managing my finances by myself) and generally had a really wild ride.

I thoroughly enjoyed the entire experience and am the richer for it. I won’t deny that there were times when I felt that it was a mistake and almost regretted it but those were transient feelings.

It’s hard to make a “list of things I learnt” since most of them can’t really be verbalised properly. However, if you have some risk taking ability and a desire to stretch your limits, I highly recommend it.

Earlier this month, I got a job offer from the Open Library project (a sub project of the Internet Archive) via. Anand. I accepted it and starting Jan, I’ll be working for them remotely. Lots of challenges, great people, all code is free software, decent pay, and work that has a positive social impact - What more can one ask for?

We’ll probably be setting up a small office of sorts somewhere in Benson town and over time are planning to convert it into a hacker space.

My trainings will still be there. I will make announcements over time. It’s not something I want to give up but I don’t think I’ll be taking any large projects anytime soon.

Python extension training

2010-11-22T00:00:00+05:30

I’m conducting my “Extending Python using C” training on 8 and 9 January 2011.

The training will be conducted at Regus Business Centre, Level 9, Raheja Towers, 26-27 Mahatma Gandhi Road, Bangalore - 560001

You can view details of the course at the info page. To register for the event, please click on the link below

For details on my trainings in general and for schedules, please refer to the trainings page.

Public trainings

2010-11-18T00:00:00+05:30

I’ve always been fond of teaching and have decided to hold public courses on various technologies that I research and use on a semi-daily basis.

I have put up a separate Trainings page which describes my motivation and desires and also mentions way to stay upto date if you want to attend any of the courses that are being offered.

Hyde : An Emacs mode for Jekyll blogs

2010-11-11T00:00:00+05:30

I’ve been working on a simple mode to manage my blog entries using Emacs and Jekyll.

The mode is available at https://github.com/nibrahim/Hyde.

Following is a brief users guide

Usage

Download the all the hyde-*.el files and put them somewhere. Once you do that, add the directory where you put it to your load path like so and require it.

1     (add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/hyde*.el")
2     (require 'hyde)

Operation

This mode is a simply a wrapped for a number of shell commands that are used to create and deploy the site. It doesn’t maintain any local state (in the form of status files etc.) so if you change your repository manually outside it, just refreshing the buffer will bring it upto date.

It’s tailored to the way I work. I keep my posts in a git repository (although I do have a crude DVCS abstraction layer if you’re using hg or any other such system). I make changes, commit them and push the repository to github (you can, for example, see this files source at github). After that, I make the site using jekyll manually and then copy it over to my webspace using rsync. I don’t use any of the git hooks (yet).

Customisation

The variables that you might care to customise are

Location parameters
- hyde-home : The root directory of your blog
- hyde-deploy-dir : The directory where jekyll will generate the site for you to deploy
- hyde-posts-dir : The directory that will contain the actual posts (this is relative to hyde-home and is _posts by default).
- hyde/deploy-command : The command used to deploy the site. scp, rsync or whatever else you might please.
VC parameters
- hyde/vc-uncommittedp : Predicate to check whether the file is uncommitted
- hyde/vc-unpushedp : Predicate to check whether the file is not yet pushed
- hyde/vc-pushedp : Predicate to check if the file has been pushed (inverse of the above)
- hyde/vc-add : Command to add the file
- hyde/vc-commit : Command to commit a file
- hyde/vc-push : Command to push the local changes to the remote end.

Interface

The main interface looks like the following screenshot

The list of posts are presented on top along with a key of what the letters before the post names mean. The post names are also colourised accordingly

The keys you can use at this time are

n : Create a new post (it will be a draft)
c : Commit the current post
P : Push all pending commits (this is only a VC push. Not deployment).
j : Run jekyll and create the new version of the site
d : Deploy the site.
g : Refresh posts (useful if you’ve done something by hand earlier)
p : Promote a post from a draft to a a published post
q : Quit hyde.
RET : Open the current post for editing.

The markdown mode in which the buffers open up for editing is slightly modified. It has a few extra covenience bindings

C-c C-c : Save file and finish editing
C-c C-v : Preview file (this is a markdown preview so extra liquid tags will not work).

It seems to work reasonably well. This post was created, committed and deployed using hyde. There are of course lots of bugs to fix but it’s usable. Here are a few things I can think of

Post drafts
Proper previews (using a local jekyll server)
Status of deployment for the posts to be displayed

Please give it a shot. I welcome your feedback.

First Jekyll post

2010-10-09T00:00:00+05:30

This is a test post to verify the jekyll based system which I just got setup to create blog entries. These are disjointed files and will be assembled together by Jekyll.

The next step is to create an Emacs mode that automates most of these things properly.

Let’s see.

PyCon India 2010 : A report

2010-10-01T00:00:00+05:30

PyCon India 2010 was the second installment of our very own PyCon. A lot of people worked really hard to make this happen and we tried to learn from the experiences of last year and do a better job. The conference was organised by the Indian Python Software Society and was held at the M.S. Ramaiah institute of technology, Bangalore on the 25tr and 26th of September 2010.

We had around 650 people attending on the first day. On the second day, it dropped to around 300.

There were approximately 60 talks spread across 3 tracks and a special track targeted at scientists and engineers conducted by FOSSEE which contained half a day of lectures and one and a half days of workshops.

Our main sponsors this time were ZeOmega and FOSSEE. We also had support from the Python Software Foundation and had smaller sponsorships from TANDBERG and ProjectPlace. Mahiti helped us out with a lot of the logistical issues and we partnered with Vodex technologies to provide offline copies of the presentations. We partnered with DoAttend to help us with the ticketing so that participants could register online beforehand and shorten the queues.

We were able to get David Goodger to come and be our keynote speaker for the conference thanks to help from our sponsors and the PSF.

Like last time, I was the semi-official leader of the entire project. I’m glad to say that it went reasonably well.

Unlike last time, I am listing below the list of people who actively helped out with the event so that it goes on the record (if I’ve missed your name, please drop me an email).

Anand Pillai - Handled Talks and scheduling
Anand C. And Abhishek - Webmasters
Vijay - Sponsor coordinator
Arvind Dixit - Recording and A/V.
Kenneth - Handled creation of society and bank account.
Santhosh - Handled Records (treasurer)
Sree - Swag, Infrastructure, food.
Kunal - Banners, id cards, coupons
Anil and other student volunteers from MSRIT - Ground support and running around
Kunal, Ramki and Vijay - Session chairs

Following is an account of the weekend of the conference.

David arrived on the 22nd. It was his first trip to India and we tried to show him around the place as much as we could.

On the day before the event, there was the looming “threat” of a verdict for a 6 decade old civil case. The local government had initially declared a preemptive curfew on the weekend which would have forced us to cancel/postpone the event. The fear we had is reflected in this blog post. However, the verdict was pushed forward by a week and we were able to conduct the event as scheduled.

Due to work pressure, I was not able to visit the venue on the night before the conference. Sree looked over the place, made sure that everything was working fine. It rained quite heavily the night before the conference. I called all the volunteers who had taken charge of the various aspects and made sure things were in place. The even we were working towards for 6 months was finally going to take place.

The following are my descriptions of the two days. Unlike last year, I wasn’t able to attend too many talks and so it’s mostly just my experiences as a “manager” rather than a delegate.

25 September 2010 - Saturday

I met Anand Pillai at my house at around 600 hours and went to pick David up. We got to the college at around 700 hours and started to get things ready for the keynote. Sree was already there and Anil and his band of student volunteers got things moving quite well. The A/V guys arrived and Arvind took care of doing what was necessary to get them rolling. It started on time without any problems.

Things suffered a little after this. The crowds started pouring in. While Sree, Santhosh and the other volunteers did a great job at the registration desk, a queue did form. People hadn’t taken printouts, they opted for size L and took size XL etc. Some people wanted to register on the spot and started bargaining on the price. The lack of civil sense was… characteristic. However, the queue cleared by around 1100 and things went on.

Wifi was a problem that was reported over and over again. Lack of IP addresses, lack of signal strength and numerous other problems prevented people from using it effectively. This was uncool and we need to figure out a way to do this properly next year. Anand C. had a wireless router which he brought from his house which we set up to help. It did help but wasn’t enough.

Another problem was that one of our halls (the “hitech hall”) was away from the other two halls which were easily accessible. We didn’t stick up maps and the signs were not sufficient. People were wandering around without direction and support at this hall was less than satisfactory. This led to delays and other problems because of which a lot of speakers whose talks were scheduled in this hall suffered. We need to take care of this kind of situation next year. The volunteers Anil had arranged couldn’t all make it since they had placement tests to write and so we were short of people at the venue to help with directions etc.

The caterers messed up with the lunch setup. I don’t like the idea of barking at volunteers since they’re doing the work they are out of their own good will but if we’re paying for something, I expect some amount of professionalism. I was relaxing when Anand told me about the lunch delay. There wasn’t much to be done but they got the tables set up 30 minutes late and the queues grew long and uncomfortable. However, there was still enough time and the afternoon talks didn’t get delayed.

The afternoon sessions went reasonably well. However, there were a few speakers who cancelled their talks without informing us. This messed up our schedules.

I wanted to attend the Zen of Web talk by Anand C. but couldn’t. I missed the celery and twisted talks as well. I missed llvm-py too. I attended part of the ZIO talk by Vijay Kumar and Asim Mittal’s Wii related talk which were both nice. I stayed for Arun R.’s blender talk but was too exhausted and stepped out for a cup of tea. The hardware talks (ZIO and Wii) were well received and I liked the preparedness of the presenters.

We left a little late. I dropped off David and got back home.

26 September 2010 - Sunday

I picked up David in the morning a little late. I had been burning the candle at both ends for longer than is healthy and I was starting to buckle. I reached the venue and saw a significantly lower turnout. My morning talk was postponed to the afternoon since Baiju couldn’t make it due to bad health. I sat in David’s talk for a while in the morning but was too distracted to pay attention. My own talk went okay. Things went mostly well. A few talks were cancelled but we filled in the spots as much as we could.

We ended the day with the first annual general meeting of the Indian Python Software Society. Kenneth chaired it and we had some discussions and motions passed. After that, all of the volunteers headed to a nearby restaurant for a treat and we got back home.

Thoughts

The talk quality was slightly better than last time but it’s still the major sore point (apart from the wifi). We need to be more active with talk screening and give more time to the selected talks so that people can talk better. A separate tutorial day would be good too although that would spill into the weekdays.

I delegated work a lot more than last time. There were large aspects of the conference that I was simply unaware of and completely willing to entrust to the volunteers. This improved the cohesion of our core group of volunteers. That’s a good thing.

During the initial discussions on the mailing list, I put my foot down a few times and that led to some rather bad vibes in the community. In retrospect, I really do sound annoying in that email. This was a bit of learning experience for me. Made me appreciate the kind of balance that real project leaders like Guido and Linus must maintain.

There were quite a few people on the mailing list who brought up completely irrelevant topics during discussions and wasted valuable volunteer time and energy discussing useless topics. This was annoying and it’s taking all the strength I have to stay quiet.

The conference was bigger and better than last years in all respects in my opinion. We didn’t take any steps back but have a lot of steps to take forward. The road is clearer now.

This was a humbling experience for me. To pull something like this off. A foreign keynote speaker, over 600 participants, so many interactions, so many volunteers. I think it went well.

Next years event is slated to be held in Chennai. I will be taking a subordinate role during the event. People are probably fed up of my attitude anyway. :)

See you all there!