IdeaMonk

Shifting time...

2011-01-11T19:06:00.002+05:30

I’m discontinuing my old blogs. The wordpress one on blog.ideamonk.com just didn’t appeal much to me. The blogger one on ideamonk.blogspot.com has been an old mess. Most of the posts were half-baked, outdated, and of less meaning.

So from now on, I'd be posting on http://blog.ideamonk.com

KTHXBAI

Scraping in Python for fun and profit

2011-01-05T16:18:00.000+05:30

Missed out on this one lately.

AudioHover 0.1 - Create audible hover effects in html5 quickly

2010-12-30T21:05:00.000+05:30

AudioHover 0.1 walkthrough from Abhishek Mishra on Vimeo.

Just recorded a screencast of this weekend's hack. AudioHover is a jQuery plugin that makes it pretty easy to add audible hover effects to any element in html5.

Grab the source here.

Its sort of a gift to my friend Ankkit, who is a very creative artist from Shrishti Arts School.

Alarming Expenses

2010-12-25T10:11:00.000+05:30

Too bad, so far, excluding my $182 Amazon AWS misfortune/loot/getting fucked for running a 1.5gig instance with 20gb ebs for some 48+ hrs doing nothing. Excluding anything before Dec 4, so far 11550 has drained out till 24th of Dec. Thats like Rs. 577 out of my pockets per day.


>>> for stuff in zip(too,goo):
...     print "%2d :" % stuff[0],
...     for x in xrange(1, -1*int(stuff[1])):
...             print "#",
...     print
...
24 : # # # # # # # # #
23 : # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
22 : # # # # # # # # # # #
21 : # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
20 : # # # # # # # # # #
19 : # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
19 : # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
18 : # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
18 : # # # # # # # # # #
16 : # # # # # # # # # #
15 :
14 :
13 :
12 :
11 :
10 : # # # # # # # # # #
9 : # # # # # # # # # # # # #
8 : # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
7 :
6 : # # # # # # # # # #
5 : # # # # # # # # # # #
5 : # # #
5 : # # # # # # # # # # # # #
^ date              expense

Luckily from 11 to 15 I didn't have to withdraw much. Sadly the Rs. 1000 I got on 22nd got over very soon by 24th. Around 9k out from my gsoc card around this period, while about 2k from the other account. Paying for my broadband bill I'd be -700 pretty soon. Worst part is this figure is an estimate from withdrawals from my cards, while occasionally I've been taking ~250 / day from home too, mostly for transport. Sucks!!!

Crazy winter this has been, looking back at it I'm like WTF! Why is it turning into a zero-sum game. Damn, I'm hungry too now, and don't really wish to waste this weekend with any half-minded work.

Books on HTC Desire HD

2010-12-23T22:26:00.000+05:30

Just finished reading a Perry Mason after long long time.

Reading books on HTC Desire HD has not at all been a bad experience.

Thanks to Aldiko, the perfect ebook reader for Android.

Eagerly waiting to catch on some Agatha Christies soon.

Some quick 'n dirty review point & scrapy snaps of Aldiko -

The Wooden finish looks professional!

I <3 the night mode, pretty comfortable to eyes in day or night. Common settings are just a tap away.

Moreover commonly done tasks are pretty quick to reach

The awesome shelf view, the in book dictionary is okay-ish, search is quite good.

And a wide array of settings

So, suit yourself :)

Getting back to 2001?!

2010-12-12T21:17:00.000+05:30

Feeling great, staying 24x7 at office, spending more time deep-reading alone at night when rest of the folks go away, rather than just roaming across 100s of headlines of HN. Now that the load of college has dropped by about 1/5th, I'm feeling like back in 2001 again :)

Q1 of BORQ - Mad Libs

2010-10-24T21:08:00.000+05:30

My solution for Mad Libs, I need to practice some more regular expression. Rubular is a great help for people like me. RegExp is in a more free-form in Ruby compared to python, which is quite good for quick experiments on irb.

I wish I could even get rid of the "if"s and make it sexier. Can't think more on this one right now.

Q2. of BORQ - LCD display

2010-10-24T21:06:00.000+05:30

This is an old one, pretty famously seen on uva, etc. I found Choice to be better than OptParse, as said in Choice docs - it like writing poems for command-line parsing :D

Initially I was doing a string[j].chr.to_i which seemed like a required bullshit, I wish it could've been string[j].to_i but string[i] gives back a decimal. Now one could talk about the C style '5'-'0' conversion to number, but then, that machine dependent (think ascii, ebcdic, etc). The slightly more ruby-ish way - string[j..j].to_i :)

Here's my number -

abhishekmishra@mbp [~/code/BORQ]> ruby q2_lcd_numbers.rb -s 3 9535009187
 ---   ---   ---   ---   ---   ---   ---         ---   ---
|   | |         | |     |   | |   | |   |     | |   |     |
|   | |         | |     |   | |   | |   |     | |   |     |
|   | |         | |     |   | |   | |   |     | |   |     |
 ---   ---   ---   ---               ---         ---
    |     |     |     | |   | |   |     |     | |   |     |
    |     |     |     | |   | |   |     |     | |   |     |
    |     |     |     | |   | |   |     |     | |   |     |
       ---   ---   ---   ---   ---               ---

Surprisingly the PyMos core code is 180 lines while this reaches upto 108. Python => more results per line? The absence of 'end' in python is one big reason for this. Besides I dont find my ruby code so ruby-ish at this stage.

aws, sidework, etc

2010-10-20T21:09:00.000+05:30

Just tried out AWS over a client's account, quite impressive at the ease of launching and terminating EC2 instances. Unhappy to see a Debian based AMI image under quick starts. Cloud billing always scares me :D all for its X factor on usage monitoring, besides who knows who could just plunder your instances with bogus requests, ready to take the risk? (even providers could!)

Good to see EBS volumes, the next thing to try would be RDS, we've to decide over a MySQL instance on EC2 VS Amazon RDS + EC2. Besides the compatibility of RDS + Django. HN has something for me.

Pretty happy to work for my current client, all because I could sense great deal of transparency, openness and honesty in our 3 hr meeting, and quite a comfortable one compared to a previous few where others failed to conceal. Time to brush up some django :)

Another interesting thing was to see SAP in action. MAWN! I generally dislike these heavy enterprise apps, slow, huge, and ugly. Its a mix of closeness and legacy they thrive on.

Blah!

2010-10-20T21:08:00.000+05:30

I believe, to an extent of obviousness that fun experiments and commercial value might not always go together, at least in the same time frame or one is confused about the purpose behind such efforts. For in the long run the former does add to the profit margins, but in quite an invisible way.

Like thunder from the clouds, the bolts jump onto paths undecided, branching into thinner ends, but at last one manages to touch some significant stones, creativity too is one such tremendously energetic set of efforts, of which the one that might click is written in the future, for now one must indulge in the fun.

But anyways, they do have to be clear about what hat do I wear before they offer me one, or else isn't any unclear foo-bar-ish discussion a waste? And that need not be concealed in implications and in vague words of higher order, for the return shall be the same. Some clarity! anyone?

Links for 2010-12-04 [del.icio.us]

2010-12-05T00:00:00-08:00

Usability survey for touch based drawing (html5/canvas)
Fire it up on your iPhone & iPads to participate in a simple 4 step usability experiment.

Links for 2010-10-30 [del.icio.us]

2010-10-31T00:00:00-07:00

AudioHover 0.1 Walkthrough
A jQuery plugin to make html5 audio hovers pretty quickly :)

An short, half cut intro to PyGame, Part 1

2010-10-06T06:26:00.001+05:30

Introduction to Game programming with PyGame Part 1

View more presentations from Abhishek Mishra.

Phew! the quickest presentation I've ever made.

Stopping it from "just leaking" in PyObjC

2010-10-03T17:02:00.000+05:30

*** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0x1040bf0f0 of class NSCFString autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking

Found a way to get rid of these leakages. We need an NSAutoreleasePool to take care of all actions that happen under threads.

So if you have a CPU/disk/network heavy operation in a module that you're importing into say, a window controller, start them under an NSThread like this -


# foo_module.py
def do_heavy_task((callback, arg1, arg2)):
       ...
       ...                   # all heavy ops here
       ... 
    callback(message)

and in the controller -


import foo_module
...
...
class Controller_MainWindow(NSWindowController):
    ...
    ...
    @IBAction
    def btnFoo_Click_(self,sender):
            thread = NSThread.detachNewThreadSelector_toTarget_withObject_(
                'start_heavy_task',self, (self.return_heavy_task, arg1, arg2) )
            
    def start_heavy_task(self, params):
        pool = NSAutoreleasePool.alloc().init()
        foo_module.do_heavy_task(params)
        del pool
        
    def return_heavy_task(self, msg):
        NSLog(msg)
        ...

Why all the call spaghetti with start_heavy_task, etc?
The issue is with detachNewThreadSelector_toTarget_withObject_ where I haven't been able to figure out how to pass a module's function as selector and the module as object. Also in this way your foo_module can remain independent of cocoa/objc/Foundation pollutions.

Anyhow, this works out into a clean solution. In case you have all your logical code in the window controller itself, you would find this programmish article extremely useful.

Update: a much better way would be to use decorators :D


def AutoPooled(f):
    def pooled_func(self):
        pool = NSAutoreleasePool.alloc().init()
        f(self)
        del pool
    return pooled_func

Now your start_heavy_task function becomes -


    @AutoPooled
    def start_heavy_task(self, params):
        foo_module.do_heavy_task(params)

How fantastic :D

Links for 2010-10-01 [del.icio.us]

2010-10-02T00:00:00-07:00

BakaBot - AI chatbot on websockets
A proof-of-concept, experimental, fun AI chatbot that uses pywebsockets, pyAIML, and redis backed db.

Reason why HazeNet is as good as hosting your website on a friend's adsl

2010-09-28T14:43:00.001+05:30

Speaking at PyCon this weekend :)

2010-09-22T00:45:00.000+05:30

Here are the slides for talk at the upcoming PyCon India 2010. See you this weekend.

Scraping with Python for Fun and Profit - PyCon India 2010

View more presentations from Abhishek Mishra.

See you there!

Setting up Lighttpd, PhpMyAdmin, etc

2010-09-18T21:10:00.000+05:30

Recently from a tipoff from Suryajith, I decided to try migrate to lighttpd and test it out. I was looking for some more reduction in active ram usage, so that I could also replicate the same on our 256mb vps. Here is how I went about it -

stop apache 2
```
# /etc/init.d/apache2 stop
```

remove all related packages

# apt-get remove apache2  apache2-utils apache2-common --purge

Get lighttpd, mysql, php working with these instructions for Debian. Debian provides FastCGI enabled lighttpd. How awesome!

Now you would need to remap configs if you had virtual hosts, etc. Take a look at /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf for it.
server.document-root = "/path/to/master/doc/root/"
As for subdomains, I have the following -

$HTTP["host"] =~ "blog.ideamonk.com" {
        server.document-root = "/path/to/sites/blog.ideamonk.com/"
}

$HTTP["host"] =~ "www.ideamonk.com" {
        server.document-root = "/path/to/sites/ideamonk.com/"
}

Now get phpmyadmin, if you had it setup with apache2, better remove it with a purge and reinstall. Set it to work with lighttpd when the reconfiguration menu comes up during installation.

Add a url alias for it to the lighttpd config. On Debian, it usually gets installed under /usr/share/phpmyadmin/ . I've setup the following alias globally in my config, so appending /pma/ to any subdomain pops up phpmyadmin. Its good till the while I've just myself on the machine, once you've got may websites on the same box, be prepared to explain why they can't use "/pma/" in their url, or better shift this alias to your support website.Global alias-
```
alias.url += ( "/pma/" => "/usr/share/phpmyadmin/" )
```
PhpMyAdmin alias attached to a subdomain -
```
$HTTP["host"] =~ "admin.myfooservice.com" {
        alias.url += ( "/pma/" => "/usr/share/phpmyadmin/" )
        server.document-root = "/path/to/admin.myfooservice.com/"
}
```

Now if phpmyadmin doesn't show up, you probably have permission issues, while this works smoothly on apache2, I had to assign group id of 'www-data' to all files under /usr/share/phpmyadmin/
```
 $ sudo chown root:www-data -R /usr/share/phpmyadmin/
```

Now you would notice, almost same or more amount of ram usage that your old php-mysql-apache2 setup. Don't be disappointed, Its the php5-cgi processes and their children hogging up more. And so might be the mysql server. You need to limit the php5-cgi processes. Make modification for this in lighttpd.conf, here's my config -

fastcgi.server = ( ".php" => ((
                "bin-path" => "/usr/bin/php5-cgi",
                "socket" => "/tmp/php.socket",
                "max-procs" => 1,
                "idle-timeout" => 20,
                "bin-environment" => (
                        "PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "4",
                        "PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS" => "10000"
                ),
                "bin-copy-environment" => (
                        "PATH", "SHELL", "USER"
                ),
                "broken-scriptfilename" => "enable"
                 )))

As for tuning up mysql, have a look at the linuxweblog tutorial. Here is my configuration.

End results -

top - 05:18:13 up 5 days,  2:55,  1 user,  load average: 0.07, 0.08, 0.07
Tasks:  20 total,   1 running,  19 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.2%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 99.8%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   1048576k total,   107480k used,   941096k free,        0k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,        0k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
19711 root      15   0  6800 2516 2064 S    0  0.2   0:00.01 sshd
    1 root      15   0  1980  584  552 S    0  0.1   0:01.01 init
 5435 www-data  18   0  8216 2148  924 S    0  0.2   0:00.02 lighttpd
 5437 www-data  23   0 34428  10m 7288 S    0  1.0   0:00.07 php5-cgi
 5442 www-data  15   0 50416  23m 4740 S    0  2.3   0:12.70 php5-cgi
 5443 www-data  16   0 50368  22m 3984 S    0  2.2   0:00.70 php5-cgi
13684 ideamonk  15   0  4344 2940 1300 S    0  0.3   0:00.16 bash
13945 root      15   0  1692  580  484 S    0  0.1   0:02.19 syslogd
16193 root      18   0  2352  580  576 S    0  0.1   0:00.00 xinetd
18118 root      15   0  5272 1028  676 S    0  0.1   0:00.24 sshd
19702 ideamonk  15   0  2256 1080  880 R    0  0.1   0:00.00 top
19715 sshd      15   0  6616 1352  928 S    0  0.1   0:00.00 sshd
24555 root      15   0  8264  684  520 S    0  0.1   0:02.13 sendmail-mta
25719 root      15   0  2036  756  692 S    0  0.1   0:00.15 cron
28000 root      16   0  8016 2648 2188 S    0  0.3   0:00.01 sshd
28104 ideamonk  15   0  8168 1528 1052 S    0  0.1   0:00.20 sshd
28112 ideamonk  18   0  3316 1860 1248 S    0  0.2   0:00.00 bash
32444 root      20   0  2488 1068  956 S    0  0.1   0:00.00 mysqld_safe
32506 mysql     15   0 45548 4848 3068 S    0  0.5   0:01.32 mysqld
32507 root      23   0  1628  460  456 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 logger

About 90 - 107M average ram consumption on my vps :D
You can notice php5-cgi threads taking up 10-25M, without them you can have a static page server with around ~50M ram usage!

Update - Trying further more I realized that I have too many unused php5 modules installed, for instance php5-imap, php5-snmp, etc. I decided to remove then all and let phpmyadmin dependencies pull php5 and bare minimum modules. Now the php5-cgi children take from 5M to 16M with idle ram usage around 60-70M :)

Getting Python + OS X together

2010-09-11T21:11:00.001+05:30

Since a week I’ve been looking for ways to create Mac apps using Python. Here are a few important tutorials/articles which got me my setup -

Many tutorials show up CocoaPython option in XCode’s ‘create new project’ wizard. It wasn’t there in XCode 3.2.3, so I made myself believe that I need to get something, and so began my exploration.

At first I decided that it would be cool to be able to write a pygame app and turn it into a portable binary -

Thanks to kontinuity setting up PyObjC on Python 2.6.5 is a cakewalk
Now you need pygame, which is another recipe in itself. Grab the pdf guide here. Clear instructions that work
Py2App would fail looking for
“/python2.6.5/lib/python2.6/site-packages/py2app-0.5.3-py2.6.egg/py2app/apptemplate/prebuilt/main-x86_64”

Just copy the main-fat file in the same path as main-x86_64
Test py2app over a small pygame example/script. Now the app would fail to load up. Have a look at the ‘Console’ -

If using setuptools, just set the argv_emulation under OPTIONS as False to pass through.

Also don’t forget to add ‘zlib’ to includes in case console shows errors related to a zlib import.
Now you have your working pygame+py2app setup. Also if you’re looking for Physics engines, I would recommend you go for PyBox2D. Though PyBox2D’s documentation is sparse and examples lacking, it is something that works compatibly with py2app.
I also tried pymunk, though it builds up and works fine, but the py2app generated binary always dies out in a segmentation fault. Pretty unreliable for py2app as observed on OSX 10.6.4. Also you would have to put in libchipmunk.dylib manually into app archive after every build.

Now thats cool in case you’re an indie game-dev aligned python charmer with a mac.

For those of you looking for XCode+PyObjC development, the good news is that Python2.5 and PyObjC 2.0 have been bundled in your OS X installation ever since 10.5. All you need to do is to follow what Ioanna has to say about getting the XCode templates in. But remember this would use up python26-apple instead of your goody macports versions and would have its own set of issues along (as in with getting the 3rd party modules up and running)

I couldn’t get all of it working on XCode 3.2.3, OS X 10.6.4, if you too don’t see ‘Python’ under File Templates in XCode, when say you’re trying to add a class through the gui, just follow these -
Goto ~/Library/Application\ Support/Developer/Shared/Xcode/File\ Templates/ where you have copied the File Templates. Create a folder named Python here and move all the “Python NS…” folders inside it.

Happy coding!

ssh -X FTW

2010-08-22T21:02:00.004+05:30

Ubuntu 10.04 image on VMware Fusion with 1 Gb allocated to it gives great almost a native feel in terms of performance. But thats only when you have some ram to give to it, for other times its ssh -X and debian testing on netbook for PyQt work :)

Netbooks are one awesome solution for the need of headless boxes if you're willing to shell out 15-18k. Or even second hand ones for around 12K

Mooo!

2010-08-22T18:17:00.001+05:30

$ aptitude moo
$ aptitude -v moo
$ aptitude -vv moo
$ aptitude -vvv moo

On a dict returning None

2010-08-07T19:53:00.004+05:30

Long time ago a thought came, why does a python dict throw exception, can't it just return a None if there is no key with supplied name.
Well now I understand the point of it, which is very obvious - if a dict has a key "foo" and the programmer has stored None into it, how would one distinguish a non-existant key and the one with None stored into it.

So here is the desired bad extension of dict for the Community Centric Python(CCP) Engineer:

class NoneDict(dict):
      def __getitem__(self,key):
              try:
                      return self.get(key)
              except:
                      return None

l = NoneDict()

l[1] = "Foo"
l["a"] = "Bar"

print l[1], l["a"]              # gives out the values
print l[42]                     # gives out None

Crossroads...

2010-08-07T00:34:00.015+05:30

Another transitory gate has presented itself in front. Again time is what is running out, people and their preconceived notions coming out aloud, saying "this way - the right way".

And I'm stuck with no wish to step into any of those. For the road not taken lies in the hourglass these days.

Doesn't the wind smell the way it did 3 years ago, and the desire to break free feels the same as the one from 5 years ago.

The only difference is that the advisors can be convinced with evidence this time. But that is something that has to be sculpted with precision.

While the pillars that stood tall to be hallmarks of reassurance for these days have shaken into dividends or is it just the state of my own mind? After all there are no two places from where the universe looks the same.

Reanimation ahoy!

Poorly implementing caching in python - eye opener

2010-07-17T06:10:00.021+05:30

So after looking at some slides on caching function returns in javascript, I was keen on trying out so in Python. And LOL I came up with this logic -

fun(val):
  if val in cache.keys():
    return cache[val]
  else:
    do the right thing...

But it seems, though "if val in cache.keys()" sounds very human friendly, it definitely would suck for a very big cache, and so it does in the following test.

I guess I'm not using timeit in the classical way where I would pass some statements in string and ask it to do them for N number of times, but it seems passing some variables from existing code to statement string is a pain, tried global etc, didn't work. Hence a simple time diff test.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import random
from timeit import Timer

class PlainColorParser:
    def parse(self,value):
        rgb = int(value[1:], 16)
        r = rgb >> 16 & 0xff
        g = rgb >>  8 & 0xff
        b = rgb & 0xff
        return (r,g,b)

    def __call__(self,value):
        return self.parse(value)

class NoBitColorParser:
    def __call__(self,value):
        return (int(value[1:3],16), int(value[3:5],16), int(value[5:7],16))

class PoorCachedColorParser(PlainColorParser):
    def __init__(self):
        self.cache = {}

    def __call__(self,value):
        if value in self.cache.keys():
            return self.cache[value]
        self.cache[value] = self.parse(value)
        return self.cache[value]

class CachedExceptionColorParser(PlainColorParser):
    def __init__(self):
        self.cache = {}

    def __call__(self,value):
        try:
            return self.cache[value]
        except KeyError:
            self.cache[value] = self.parse(value)
            return self.cache[value]

class CachedColorParser(PlainColorParser):
    def __init__(self):
        self.cache = {}

    def __call__(self,value):
        if value in self.cache:
            return self.cache[value]
        else:
            self.cache[value] = self.parse(value)
            return self.cache[value]

if __name__ == "__main__":
    t = Timer()
    pccParse = PoorCachedColorParser()
    cecParse = CachedExceptionColorParser()
    ccParse = CachedColorParser()
    pcParse = PlainColorParser()
    nbParse = NoBitColorParser()

    # setup some random data to test
    colors = []
    for i in xrange(100000):
        colors.append("#" + hex(random.randint(0xfe0000, 0xff0aff))[2:])


    def timeDiff(obj):
        start = t.timer()
        for c in colors:
            obj(c)
        stop = t.timer()
        return ((1000000*stop - 1000000*start)/1000000)

    # ---- test poorly cached
    print "Poorly Cached - %.2fs" % timeDiff(pccParse)

    # ---- test exception cached
    print "Exception Cached - %.2fs" % timeDiff(cecParse)

    # ---- test cached
    print "Cached - %.2fs" % timeDiff(ccParse)

    # ---- test uncached
    print "Non Cached - %.2fs" % timeDiff(pcParse)

    # ---- test no bitwise, uncached
    print "Not Bitwise, Non Cached - %.2fs" % timeDiff(nbParse)

So we've got 4 5 classes to represent different ways of parsing an html hex code for color e.g. "#f00f00" into a tuple of (r,g,b) integers. PlainColorParser and NoBitColorParser could easily be functions with no need of classes over them as they do not cache, but to bring them a little equal to other two cached ones, I've bound them in classes.

NoBitColorParser does string manipulations and parses 3 times before returning a tuple. PlainColorParser does better than that, it uses bit shifts and AND masks to filter out content after 1 round of parsing integer from string. PoorCachedColorParser does caching in an obvious way "if its there in cache keys... else ...", and ~~CachedColorParser~~ CachedExceptionColorParser complies to the philosophy of "Fail early, fail often", which is quite interesting :D
but recent findings reveal that CachedColorParser is the right, fast, pythonic way.

What the test does is - generate 100000 random color codes, pick them from a range of 2816 colors (0xff0aff - 0xff0000 + 1). Obviously many colors are bound to get repeated says pigeon hole.

Here's what goes on in an average run on my machine -

abhishekmishra@mbp [~/code]> python pycaching.py
Poorly Cached - 340.23s
Exception Cached - 0.30s
Cached - 0.18s
Non Cached - 0.15s
Not Bitwise, Non Cached - 0.16s

"if value in self.cache.keys():" in PoorCachedColorParser gives you a thumbs down with a sucky performance, obviously not the right thing to do!!! (I was mistaken)

CachedExceptionColorParser gives a sweet 0.30s, "Fail early, Fail often" works :)
But wait, CachedColorParser goes further even a bit more with just 0.18s.

NoBitColorParser is suckier than the Non Cached PlainColorParser, which points out that string ops, parsing integers is one costly affair.

So much for food to my sleeplessness. Oh I remember doing something similar in PyMos too :D.

More updates -

Looking at Dhananjay's code on BangPypers, I think I was too excited to throw in the idion of fail fast in this place, it can albeit be done in a cleaner way. So instead of -

try:
    return self.cache[value]
except KeyError:
    self.cache[value] = self.parse(value)
    return self.cache[value]

You could just write in much cleaner way -

if value in self.cache:
    return self.cache[value]
else:
    self.cache[value] = self.parse(value)
    return self.cache[value]

So the issue was with cache.keys(), which now seems like an obvious slow and shitty way.
New stats reveal that even Try: Except:... fail fast is even not the right way.

Notice the almost double time difference between "try.. except.." way and "if value in self.cache".

Lesson learnt :)

अपने घर के चोर

2010-07-15T00:43:00.008+05:30

You find it to be a sorry ass pussy system 
that fails to respond to situations in time, 
you read up, watch stuff and blame on them for "not doing anything", 
but hardly would it strike to your conditioned imagination 
that they might just be so pre-occupied in doing something else 
that you could have never imagined. 

And yet you passive cunt, you take it all for granted
and sleep for the next day to come by,
expecting everything to be normal.

Who knows for everything,
that you quoted the system to be pussy about,
over your cup of tea and a morning newspaper,
there were these "अपने घर के चोर",
thiefs, filling their pockets.


On a side note,
Now that things have become so well connected,
the systems are so well informed, fed by numerous channels,
and fingers just like the ones that typed out this piece of brainf*ck,
clicking out zillions of preferences,
we're not far from the point when
it would be possible to crunch these into
a whole new understanding, meaning, life.

Just that in this spiderweb,
analyzing nodes, reaching from one to another,
predicting their minds and way of thinking has become easier.

So Distribute!

2010-06-30T03:14:00.004+05:30

Sitting with my new (in working-on-linux sense) pen tablet, with nothing much to do, I just scribbled down my newly developed understanding of why should we distribute processing and there isn't much point in increasing CPU speeds these days.

Zoom it to get a clear picture of the problems with just one processor.

Yet another Google Calculator shell in Python

2010-06-28T00:04:00.007+05:30

For the sake of weekend hack and getting rid of some headache of post bangpypers meetup chicken overload of today's evening -

import re
import urllib
import mechanize
import unittest

class GCalc:
   def __init__(self):
       self.browser = mechanize.Browser()
       self.browser.set_handle_robots(False)
       self.browser.addheaders = \
           [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008071615 Fedora/3.0.1-1.fc9 Firefox/3.0.1')]

   def cleanup(self,text):
       strip_tags = re.compile("<.*?>")
       return strip_tags.sub('', text.replace("<sup>","^").replace("</sup>","").replace("×","X"))

   def calc(self, query):
       try:
           raw_result = self.browser.open("http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q="+urllib.quote_plus(query)).read()
           return self.parse(raw_result)
       except:
           return "Failed to reach Google"

   def parse(self, raw_result):
       try:
           result = raw_result.split('''<td style="vertical-align:top" >''')[1].split('</h2>')[0] + '</h2>'
           return self.cleanup(result)
       except:
           return "Not a calculator query"

class TestGCalc(unittest.TestCase):
   def setUp(self):
       self.g = GCalc()

   def test_numeric(self):
       self.assertEqual(self.g.calc("4+5"), "4 + 5 = 9")

   def test_bignumbers(self):
       self.assertEqual(self.g.calc("234623476 * 59999999999"), "234 623 476 * 59 999 999 999 = 1.40774086 X 10^19")

   def test_units(self):
       self.assertEqual(self.g.calc("14 inch in mm"), "14 inch = 355.6 millimeters")
       self.assertEqual(self.g.calc("one acre"), "one acre = 4\xc2\xa0046.85642 m^2")

   def test_cacl(self):
       self.assertEqual(self.g.calc("3 * PI / sin(3)"), "(3 * PI) / sin(3) = 66.7855543")

   def test_facts(self):
       self.assertEqual(self.g.calc("speed of light"), "the speed of light = 299\xc2\xa0792\xc2\xa0458 m / s")


if __name__=='__main__':
   unittest.main()

Fork it here, have fun, curse me for crappy splits :)
Just learnt unittest a bit, ah so easy and useful :D

I guess you can notice the grand theme here - Its just ~ 50 lines of code packed up with a unit test and does the job!

I suggest you better not miss PyCon India 2010 in case you too are eager to do some productivity magic with you/your employees/students/etc.

Adios

DWM-ified

2010-06-21T11:58:00.003+05:30

Arch + Dwm + Conky + Dzen2 + links + vim + irssi (plus ram eaten by chrome, firefox, thunderbird, and eden) otherwise awesome at ~100MB, ideal light & fast setup for my netbook :)

Links for 2008-11-10 [del.icio.us]

2008-11-11T00:00:00-08:00

The Coolest Server Names
Natural Vegetation of India
This is a presentation on Natural Vegetation of India in Flash. Its a complete educative tour of Natural Vegetation of India.
I did something awful tonight!
But the blockbuster processing script was yet to come up... suddenly amidst creating a random color sprinkler shit, I came around something awful... go have a look yourself... words are less to describe it. Watch it at your own risk... watch it as it starts to spin your mind...

Links for 2007-06-30 [del.icio.us]

2007-07-01T00:00:00-07:00

comp sci video lectures