I recently been creating training materials for JavaScript and related stuff at work; mostly presentations¹. For the last few years, I’ve tried to create my presentations in HTML: as a Linux user, I of course can’t use Powerpoint, and I loathe OpenLibre Office, so using it was never even an option.

Back in the day before HTMLized presentations were famous, Eric Meyer created a great tool called S5. I loved it — and still do, but it lacks the oomph of more recent tools (though I admit that I haven’t taken a look at it recently). Anyone who wants to investigate the current landscape should take a look at the Wikipedia article on Web-based slideshows.

Most of my recent presentations have been built using Landslide — a nifty little application that uses some Python magic to transform Markdown-formatted slides into great presentations. It is quite simple to create customized themes for it, with a bit of fiddling. It also has a nice ‘presenter notes’ mode that seems to have been inspired by Keynote. Overall, Landslide definitely is one of the best tools for the job right now.

Another tool that I’ve been investigating recently is deck.js — a more modular approach to creating HTML presentations. It exposes a great API, and has a nice extension system. In fact, one of the extensions, deck.js-codemirror incorporates CodeMirror’s excellent live code editing and syntax highlighting features into presentations: perfect for creating training materials for JavaScript!

The only issue I have with deck.js at present is that it requires me to write in HTML; do-able but I would much prefer writing presentations in plain text. Still, it’s a pretty interesting tool — the next few presentations I create will use it.

Each language ended up occupying a certain part of my brain. To this day, I can’t think of anything scientific or computing related in any language other than English: I just don’t know the right words. Conversely, talking about some topics in English just doesn’t feel right. Oh, and don’t even get me started about different styles of the same language².

I have a lot of fun with language: conversations with my sister, for example, often ends up with us switching languages often in between sentences.

Keep this in mind when I say that the best advice for a novice programmer is to learn as many programming languages as possible.

In random order³, here are some of the languages I’ve learned (and at times, used):

• C++
• Python
• SQL
• ActionScript 3.0
• Common Lisp
• C
• JavaScript
• Java
• Scheme
• Ruby
• C#
• PHP

For most of these languages, I can be considered to be a tourist: someone who has read a basic travel guide and knows a few phrases in order to get around. For others, I could be an academic: someone who studies the language, but never uses it in real life. I’m only fluent in a few of these. I do not consider myself to be a master of any of them.

Still, knowing multiple languages has had a tremendous impact on my career as a programmer; I always end up using a concept learned with one language elsewhere.

It opens up your mind to the possibility of alternate ways to do things. You write better code. More importantly, you begin to understand the value of writing simple code. Understanding different patterns of behaviour in different languages leads you to being able to think out of the box, so to speak.

From a more pragmatic point of view, knowing multiple languages is good for your paycheck. The computer industry moves at a very fast pace. If you are just a one-trick pony, well, you aren’t going to hire-able for long. Sure, there’s still a market for COBOL programmers who work on mainframes, but it’s pretty small.

There are a few drawbacks to being a polyglot programmer: you are always learning, and never quite feel like an ‘expert’ at anything. You may give-in to the temptation of over-thinking and over-complicating things while coding. And, you may not be able to ‘market’ yourself for a job, you may not pass the keyword screening tests of the HR department in large organizations.

The Indian IT industry is at times a strange place⁴. People willing pigeon-hole themselves, saying ”I am a X Programmer“ (replace X with Java/.NET/PHP/etc). Very few of us actually enjoy programming, and most don’t want to learn anything new. I’ve only met a few people who’ve learned languages because they want to; a sad fact that depresses me at times.

But if you do end-up being a language nut like me, the benefits will far out-weight the costs. You just need to actually care about what you do, the rest comes easy.

I need to do something drastic in order to break this habit. Here’s the plan, in no specific order:

• Move my blog off WordPress, and use one of these newly-fashionable static site generators. I think it’ll make me want to tinker with things (more).

• Have been cooking a lot, lately. Write more about food!

• Photoblogging.

• The ‘learn a new programming language and blog about it’ plan.

• Tweet less.

• Stop enumerating things and start doing things.

Well, stay tuned!

indite is a tiny project that Xri and I came up with. I don’t really know how to describe it. Here are a few attempts:

[i]ndite is a little something to help you create stuff. It could be some creative writing, or a humble grocery list (or a hitlist). If you do your thinking better on plain paper than on a text editor, you might like this.

That was from our about page. Here’s another description:

indite is a simple visual playground that you can use to organize your thoughts. It’s open-ended & designed for spatially-minded folks.

Here is what it looks like: Do visit the Flickr page in order to see the notes on various parts of the interface.

Basically, think of it as sticky-notes combined with an iGoogle-like page, and inspired by Apple’s aesthetics. We don’t really know where exactly we’ll end up taking this.

It’s pretty open-ended right now. I use it for taking meeting notes, outlining documents and collecting research notes. Amit seems to like using it as a todo-list. We want to keep it this way: simple, but powerful.

Terminology

The word ‘indite’ basically means “to produce a literary work” (thanks Wordnet!). I really love the name, the application is definitely text-centric. It’s great that we got the domain for it!

We call the individual bits of text placed on the screen ‘blurbs’. Well, they are not actually blurbs, but this was the most suitable name that we came up with. Also, I like how blurb sounds, so the name stays.

Usage

1. Start typing on the page.
2. Press Ctrl-Enter when you’re done.
3. You have a blurb!
4. You can drag it around, if you feel like it.
5. Type to add more blurbs. Delete them when you no longer need ’em.

Uh, this is pretty much it.

Feature-wise, the one thing I really like about it is the ability to have multiple layers of blurbs. I like having a layer per-topic, usually.

Most of the credit goes to Xri for creating an awesome UI, and coming up with the ideas. I’m only the tinkerer on the project :)

Technology

Right now, it’s a tiny JavaScript app. I wanted to learn more about the Backbone.js framework, so it’s written using that. We created the initial version over a couple of weekend nights (months ago!), and it’s been pretty much the same since then. This also means that it’s long overdue a re-write, but I haven’t really found the time…

Storage is done on the browser. God bless HTML5.

The Future?

I really want to create a back-end for this using node.js, which seems like a perfect fit. I’ve been particularly lethargic recently though, so who knows when this will happen. We have plans though… big plans. Expect something or the other to happen, though.

This post is about fun little statistics I have gleaned by by zsh history file. Note: my history file contains the last 3000 or so commands I had executed.

Lets begin with trying to find out which version control systems I use most frequently:

$ history | grep 'git ' | wc -l
60
$ history | grep 'hg '  | wc -l
264
$ history | grep 'svn ' | wc -l
180

Mercurial seems to be in the lead right now. Hurrah for distributed version control! We use svn for some projects at work, hg for others. No git, because many of the guys are on Windows.

For my own stuff, I end up using either git or hg, depending on my mood. Don’t really have a preference one way or the other.

Videos & stuff:

$ history | grep 'yd '  | uniq | wc -l
71
$ history | grep 'vlc ' | uniq | wc -l
109

yd is my alias for the awesome youtube-dl script that allows me to watch the video in question offline (I hate getting interrupted with a ‘loading’ message when watching anything interesting). It is a resume-able command, so I put in a uniq in the filter chain to just count distinct videos.

grep vs. ack:

history | grep 'grep ' | wc -l
121
history | grep 'ack '  | wc -l
94

ack is something better than grep (command name is 25% fewer characters to type!), for code-related stuff anyway. I still end up using grep for piping & stuff, but all the commands above can be re-written by just replacing the grep with an ack.

OK, that’s it for today. Any of you want to share something?

Mumbai has the worst traffic of any city I’ve seen… Yesterday, for example, going to a mall 10km from my home took me over two hours; driving on a Saturday and not during peak hours. For now, it seems that the only time I can drive without facing traffic is in the middle of the night—maybe after 1am, as I have got stuck in traffic when driving at midnight.

There are countless construction projects active right now to improve the situation: from creating new flyovers, to building an alternate metro line, building a Monorail, and building pedestrian crossings at major road intersections. Unfortunately, all these projects are being undertaken right now, which means that many frequently used routes are blocked. This compounds the problem, but hopefully the situation will improve in a couple of years, when the new infrastructure is in place.

Thankfully, I work from home, so I don’t have to commute daily. I usually take the car out maybe once a week, as driving to any place close-by is a waste of time.

Which brings to mind the question: do I really need a car? I don’t, really. If I want to travel, booking a cab is a better option than driving: at least one can relax if stuck somewhere.

So, no more driving for me. My sister, who lives in Nagpur, has ‘borrowed’ our family car. Hopefully, she’ll put it to better use…

Omelettes are truly versatile, and damn difficult to get right. Subtle changes in preparation will lead to large differences in taste in the finished product, so I think making great omelettes is almost an art-form, that I hope to master in a few years.

A “half-fried honey omelette” (as I call it) is a very simple omelette to make, and one of my favorites. Here’s what you should do:

1. Take a pan, put it on medium heat and add a teaspoon of olive oil.
2. Crack two eggs over the pan: don’t mix them beforehand.
3. Try to get your egg whites evenly spread on the pan.
4. Add a tea-spoon of honey on top.
5. Then, gently stir the top, breaking the yolks and mixing it with the honey; spread it but make sure that you don’t disturb the bottom.
6. After a minute or so, your omelette should be almost ready. You don’t want it to become totally solid, the yolks should be a bit watery.
7. This is difficult: try to move the whole omelette without breaking to your dish. I usually can’t do this, you an alternative is to fold it before serving.
8. No need to add anything else (no salt or pepper required). Eat it hot!

OK, please comment if anyone tries making this.

I bought a Motorola Milestone last week, and haven't stopped playing with it yet! I was dying to get hands on an Android device for ages, but none of the decent devices were availabe in India at first; and when they were available, they were either terribly over-priced or obsolete.

I heard last week that the Milestone had been officially launched in India, and I saw that it's price was nearly comparable with international prices. A friend (thanks Neeraj!) got me a great deal, and I didn't waste any time grabbing it.

So far, I'm really impressed with the device. I'm actually composing this on the phone, and I plan to write a series of posts in the coming weeks detailing my experiences. (If nothing else, this should get me back to the habit of writing.) Stay tuned…

Read about it on its flickr page.