Sector Six

2003-06-29T02:46:00.000-07:00

Moved the server from Nepal to UK. Things should be faster now. Also I have more control. Has been quite a hassel though trying to move MovableType manually. Check out the weblogs and the photos at: http://weblogs.shrestha.net.np and http://photos.shrestha.net.np respectively. My techno and personal weblogs GrayGarden and LonelyLane, too.

2002-09-24T09:41:00.000-07:00

Finally got my own bloggin system up and running. Check it out. I will not be making any more posts at SectorSix.

2002-09-17T19:27:00.000-07:00

Had quite a few things to post. However, the inability to have attachments in the post makes it difficult. So I am looking at alternatives. The first one is to switch to Live Journal. The second one is to write my own simple engine.

Anyway, was looking at a few things as I browsed. One is a nice perl article on web templating engines. While it ends up discussing perl alterantives, I find the overview of the architecture nice. Templating Comparision

Another nice article is the new algo for spam using statistics and probability. Should try the python implementation. A Plan for Spam. The nice thing about is its success rate and zero false positives! It really locks on and adapts to individuals mails.

2002-09-05T10:15:00.000-07:00

While I don't have a credit card to buy books from sites like Amazon or the money for such expensive books, I still find the site pretty helpful with its reviews. It helps me what books I would really want to buy. The cheap edition books that are available here in Kathmandu often tempt me to buy them all so the reviews help me decide the ones I definitely don't want to buy.

Tomorrow I am going to Educational Enterpises and definitely buying Understanding Digital Signal Processing by Richard G Lyons. I didn't want to buy it earlier as I had two DSP books and one softcopy book that was highly recommended. However, the positive review and must read comments of most have suggested that I go and buy this one too. Since, I really want to be good at DSP I don't mind a few extra books.

2002-09-03T20:24:00.000-07:00

Released Headlines even though I have not updated the web site. It was surprising to find that there were five users who were tracking the project and expected to be notified. Guess some of them must have even waited over a year. Also update the freshmeat account of headline.

Will update the webpages soon.

2002-09-03T02:31:00.000-07:00

Headlines 0.6.0 is ready for release. However, I have not been able to update the web site yet so did not release it on 1 September, 2002 as I had planned. I guess this will my final version of Headlines. Looking for a new project administrator.

2002-08-30T18:24:00.000-07:00

Spent the time working on Headlines. I must say I am improved a lot in Java. In one evening I rewrote the complete data model and its view for the headline tree. Something that would have taken me at least three or four evenings a year ago.Working on Headlines in Java also reminded me how compact and easier Jython is. Well, I am going to go through the plugins, modify them and do a final (may be) post of Headlines.

What is suprising is that there are still people downloading Headlines. An average of 20 downloads a month. I also need to modify the Headlines site. Need to put a simple index page. May be use cgi-bin and write everything in Python. Anyway, a static web page is equally fine.

2002-08-29T21:55:00.000-07:00

Planning to make a final version of Headlines. My first open source Java program. Will refine it. I want to move the future versions of the program to Jython. Should be more fun and much more compact.

2002-08-29T09:11:00.000-07:00

Got my FreeCherryPy account. I think I will make a weblog in CherryPy and try it out.

2002-08-29T08:59:00.000-07:00

I am searching for a blogger client so that I can write my entries when I am online and it will post it when I get online automatically. Looks like I will have to write my own app! The Jericho looks nice but it doesn't have offline posting. I could write it to a file and then post the file. But I just think I don't I really need its GUI. I will just use the library to write my own stuff. More of a script that will do the actual posting in the background when I am online.

2002-08-28T23:26:00.000-07:00

Learnt more about Lycoris. So it is a customised version of KDE. Hmm, no wonder the similarity in the widgets. So may be it will not be so fast after all. I find KDE slower than GNOME on my system. By the way, I run icewm. It is a speed demon. Since we don't customise the desktop and the menus so often I don't mind editing the files to modify the configuration.

Anyway, I am downloading Lycoris Desktop/LX and giving it a shot. May be it would be something worthwhile when pitching the complete Linux solution to companies.

2002-08-28T08:42:00.000-07:00

Wow, the desktop/lx from Lycoris looks cool. Trying to be a true desktop Linux. May be I should download it and give it a try. The screen shots seems to be a cross between the bright colours and style of XP and the widgets of KDE.

Need to look at some reviews.

2002-08-27T10:24:00.000-07:00

Enjoying fooling around with CherryPy. Was having a hard time deciding the web framework to use with Python. Webware looked cool since it was most similar to servlets and JSP. However, I wanted to try others. I love the way CherryPy makes programming web apps more like normal apps. Just love the url to class instance/function mapping. Really enjoying this function, mask and view business.

I will write a quick blogger for the fun of it. I would love to put the html code totally out of the cpy files. Looks like the CherryPy library is fun. Especially the form library should be pretty useful and the way it handles authenticated pages is cool. The idea of protected class instead of protected pages makes it easy to protect a bunch of files.

2002-08-25T19:44:00.000-07:00

After more than a year, we were having another bietnp picnic. Thanks to the hard work put in by the guys like Binod, Gopal, Ajay (3) and a whole others it was quite fun.

Like we always say, "Mahankal at 7 o' clock sharp. So be there by 8 o' clock!" I guess it was more like 9 o' clock when we were ready to leave Mahankal. As we settled down in our seats, we started looking at the familiar and the not so familiar faces! Hmm, so this is the new gang at Davangere. I am sure a similar thought must have run through the minds of the *new* gang, "So these are the -budhas- before us."

Reyesh with our breakfast got on the bus at Kalimati and the rest of the gang joined us at Balkhu. The remaining were coming on their bikes. Since, I didn't really count, I must say there were around thirty-five in the bus.

Before long we were at Dhashinkali Temple. While most of us are religious, none of us were prepared to spend the next three to four hours on one of the four lines. Well, could find a line less that five hundred meters! The result, all of us started being philosophical and saying, "It is the spirit within us and our regards that matter more than the act."

Meanwhile, the usual hardworking gang of Reyesh, Baucha (Prabin), Binod and Niraj were busy preparing the delicious breakfast they are so good at preparing. The great bread and mixed salad was superb. May be the cheese were a little less?! As usual, Prabin Ba was out cleaning and collecting the plastic cups after the breakfast. What an inspiration.

As worried Anil Bajracharya found out, the final destination of fun for the day was at Dhashinkali Resort and the not picnic shade at the temple site. The ten minute walk up to the resort from the bus stop turned out to be more than twenty minutes of steep hike. While the road up to the resort may be counted as road by HMG, Prakash Joshi will confirm that it was no where close to that. He had to leave his cool Chinese Lifan(?) down by the road and hike his way up. His poor timing, he just missed lunch when he did arrive! Hey, he isn't among those who mind that. Why worry about the lunch when Scotch whiskey was freely flowing.

The official programme started with the introductions. The conference hall was put to use. Hey, if we have booked it, why not use it. Don't know about others but I must confess I am pretty lousy with the names. Hey guys, you need to visit the website at http://www.biet.org.np/moin.cgi/PersonalPages and create your personal page for the forgetful bunch among us.

With the end of introduction, the drinking started, and with it the informal -let's have fun- party. The those among us who could beg, borrow or *steal* a swimming costume were in the pool. A few were on the pool board and the rest in small groups around the room with drinks talking about Davangere, jobs and I don't know what. Cards too was part of the great activities of the picnic. Let's get drunk part had started.

Around lunch Anuja Didi joined. Making it a Davangere party. Prakash too joined around the same time.

As usual the hallmark bietnp singing or more appropriately shouting after getting drunk started soon after tea with Anup leading the way. Deepak with his songs were impressive. Reyesh, with his usual table hopping joined in now and then. As usual, we were in our best Davangere behaviour. It is our brilliant manner at the table that prompts Prabin Shakya to take us to Chatamari Cheyn every time we go out, instead of Bakery. Need to lower our standards.

Through the picnic we could see the -manager- Ajay(3) tending to the needs of the gang. Wonder if he really had a picnic! Thanks for being such a great manager.

With all the fun it was difficult to accept it was time to go home. So even though we had earlier asked the bus to come back at 18:00 none of really got into the bus till 20:00.

I must say it was really fun picnic reminding all of us the welcome and farewell parties at Davangere. Sadly, we could have the late night heart-to-heart chats or the next day over the "chitrana-bajji" hang overs!

So long till the next great outing! To all those who came, thank you for coming and making it such a fun. To all those who did not make it, hope to catch you next time and to the guys who worked hard to make it all possible, thank you for giving us a wonderful day in our life!

more about this picnic: http://www.biet.org.np/moin.cgi/BietPicnic

2002-08-21T09:05:00.000-07:00

well, did not really bother with ruby after all.

what is now interesting is the smpp v3.3 protocol. got to write a technical proposal for nepal telecom corporation to integrate sms with bw2i system that we had build for them.

well, i just want to write an xml-rpc interface to smpp and leave writing applications to other guys. java is what i am thinking right now. may be a prototype in jython!

have a basic architecture ready. should start reading the smpp protocol. shouldn't be difficult as it is just another protocol on tcp. actually there is smppapi at sourceforge done in java. if i find a python one that would be pretty cool!

let's see what i can do. since i don't really have time i don't think i could do much about doing the final implementation.

2002-08-01T10:21:00.000-07:00

thought of trying out ruby. i had had a peek at it earlier but didn't really do much. reinstalled ruby from my rh7.3 cd. well, looked at the samples. was impressed with less than 500 lines of code for a tk based game of othello.

look at the language construct and realized that it wasn't bad and quite easy. but because i already had worked with other languages and have done some oop it looked okay. the syntax is much reader friendly, that is, it is more natural when reading it. however, i really don't care for multiple ways to do the same thing.

well, every thing being methods and messages to objects does sound nice compared to pythons mix of functions and methods.

however, i did read the ruby vs python comparisons and i must agree that i don't see a reason to leave python in favour of ruby. certainly if you are a perl programmer there are pretty good reasons to go for ruby but for python? not much. in addition, many of drawback of python as mentioned in ruby site have been addressed in newer versions of python.

well, i might still have a look at it but i see no reason to switch to it.

2002-07-22T20:26:00.000-07:00

It has been raining continuously for more than 24 hours. We have had floods in many parts of Kathmandu. Yesterday, I was just plain lazy to go out because of the rain. However, I will go out today. Need to get quite a few things done.

2002-07-07T21:51:00.000-07:00

Have started fooling around with Jabber. Want write a discussion forum on top of jabber using the jabber server as a messaging middleware.

Let see! Need to learn more about Jabber.

2002-07-07T21:49:00.000-07:00

Uploaded a Jython application I had been building to learn xmlrpc. You can get a copy at www.nyatapol.com.np

You need JRE 1.4 to run it!

2002-06-24T07:31:00.000-07:00

Along with my brother, we are planning to build a system in Python for
managing a community web site with emails. All users email their commands and manage their contributions.

Should be fun. Interested? Mail me at axhixh@yahoo.com

2002-06-21T09:30:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder about astrologers predicting our future. Funny, whenever I claim it is just *bullshit* people can come up with instances of how such and such predictions were correct. What I would like to know is if anyone has done a study of how many times the predictions have come true? I believe it is a very small number. People remember onlly the times it has come true as they find it very dramatic. The vast majority of the time it does not come true and nobody is documenting this.

2002-06-21T09:25:00.000-07:00

Hmm, didn't really get the solution to the LookupError. Since I learnt it is because of unicode and I need to include the codecs I use in the final jar, I tried to learn how to do it. Importing codecs or encodings didn't solve it so I just modified the main xmlrpclib.py from Pythonware and made unicode = None so no unicode support is present. It works now.

2002-06-02T08:28:00.000-07:00

Had been trying to fix a LookupError on a Jython script using xmlrpc. The script works fine in the interpreter, however, when I freeze it has a LookupError on all rpc calls that take arguments. I am using Pythonware xmlrpc library. Had been searching for the solution. Trying LookupError and freezing explained about including all codecs as the best solution. Now, how do I go about doing that?

2002-06-02T08:22:00.000-07:00

Of course the World Cup is in full swing. No real work is getting done at Infocom because of the games. It is fun, but I don't think I am as crazy about football. I must confess, it is definitely more exciting than Cricket.

2002-05-15T04:42:00.000-07:00

colour blind:

I just learned that 1 in 12 (8%) men are colour blind. actually colour blind is a misnomer. they just can differentiate the different colours as well as the normal men. check out what they see at http://www.vischeck.com/examples/ and learn more about it at http://www.vischeck.com/faq/

another interesting thing is that it usually doesn't affect women. it is inherited when we get a defective x chromozome. since women have two x chromosomes she needs both to be defective. but she can be a carrier. men on the other hand have only 1 x chromosome so they are affected! hmm!

2002-05-14T09:55:00.000-07:00

didn't do much today! stayed home and worked on the little jython program. jython is really fun. however, i would still love to have a autocompletion feature in jedit for jython!

may be will release the application as open source software once a basic version is ready!

2002-05-13T09:41:00.000-07:00

just wondering 2: do men love their wife more or the mother of their children?

2002-05-12T11:12:00.000-07:00

just wondering, do all men search for their mother when they search for their mate?

2002-05-11T22:38:00.000-07:00

todays is mothers day! hmm, don't still know what i should do for my mother. guess sons are really lousy. read an article in kantipur daily about how mothers with daughters live longer that those with sons. must be true. hey daughters help their mom while we sons just remember about it on mothers day. as my mothers' friends with daughters say, sons only remember when they need something.

i guess being mothers themselves, they are always there for thier parents even after they marry and go away.

funny, how everybody (okay most) want a son!

2002-05-10T21:26:00.000-07:00

Hmm, so this is how it works! On second thoughts, may be modifying the my wiki to have blogs might be a nice idea!

2002-05-10T21:25:00.000-07:00

Testing my first blog! Hmm, if I really like it I will host it on my own server!