There was this guy who had come in for interviews for a technical role. He passed all the tech interviews with flying colors, the team liked his personality and felt he would fit in well, and the manager was all smiles. In the last HR-style round with the group head, he was informed that the team works on products that are completely owned by the Bangalore-based group and that there won’t be any travel to USA. The guy was taken aback. He told the group head “Sir, please let me go to USA for just one day. If I have a USA stamp in my passport, I will get one crore dowry.”

Needless to say, the guy was not offered a job.

I’m sure you can draw your own lessons and observations from this incident, because it will come into context below, about a discussion we’ve been having on Twitter. It all started with @debabrata who read my previous blog post on the magic of foss.in and asked:

why this ‘5 years limit’ applies to Indian software pro ? In other countries people are happy being programmer after 20 years .

I asked the tweeps for their opinions, and it got very interesting.

@cruisemaniac said: society defined age to get married and settle down = ~27 = 22+5 failing which u’re an outcast! and: also, post that age, ur risk apetite goes down due to family and other commitments…

to which:

@HJ91 said: True. Very true. Outcast is the right word, and its sad. Outcast. Insulting, hurting and pathetic.

Wow, this feeling runs deep.

so I asked:

You mean risk appetite or time commitment? … how does risk appetite relate to interest in coding?

And the replies came pouring in:

@mixdev: One of the reasons why brilliant people end up being (just) tell-me-whatto-do-n-leave-me-alone software engineers

@cruisemaniac: I’d say both… U cant risk a new tech and venture 4 fear of financial security… U want tat cozy safe zone and pay packet.

@cruisemaniac: time is a big costly commodity 4 us… we indians cant afford to spend it at our will with spouses and children at home…

@mallipeddi: It’s very hard to keep getting bigger paychecks yr after yr if you’re a 30 yr old coder. You’re expected to become a mgr/MBA

@abhinav: I believe the reason is our society. We tie success to degrees, and later, more ppl you manage more successful you are.

@abhinav: Where in western societies your idea fails, here it is you who have failed! Our society doesnt appreciate risk takers

@abhinav: Yes, more money, higher status, easy life. And most importantly, more dowry!

@mixdev: Because our goals are set by the society & achieving them also in their control. You get bored faster.

@debabrata: I guess to the great extent our society dictates us what we want to be unlike the west

I found it surprising that the situation why people cannot remain coders in India is almost the same as why people want to become entrepreneurs! It’s like this: The passion for coding will remain only when you’re doing cool and interesting stuff. But big companies (at least in India) want only stability which implies boring tedious jobs with standard languages and libraries. There is no room for experimentation. So the coder will have to move to a smaller company or a startup if he/she wants to continue to like coding (I’m ignoring the case of research laboratories for obvious reasons of numbers).

But moving to a smaller company or startup is, by definition, not encouraged. As @abhinav mentioned, there is societal pressure for more money, higher status, fancier cars and bigger houses. There is nothing wrong with wanting this, but don’t force it on other people! Alas, it is hard to reason regarding this. I remember having a long argument with an uncle of mine, he was, hmm, “strongly” suggesting that I buy a car and I reasoned out why it makes no sense (after all, most peers of mine use the car only for weekend drives, not for everyday commute) but it fell on deaf ears.

So I’m conflicted here: Are there not enough people who are actually interested in coding, or is it that the interested people are being peer-pressurized into “moving up” into managerial roles and hence lose touch with coding? Or are we completely off the mark here?

Update 1: As suggested by Peter, read this entry tited “Stuck in Code” by Ravi Mohan for his tale on this topic.

Update 2: A related article in NYTimes recently titled “In India, Anxiety Over the Slow Pace of Innovation”

The Good

Attending foss.in/2009 felt great for me because I took comfort in the fact that there are still people out there who are passionate about code and passionate about software. That is becoming rarer and rarer off late. I think it’s the “5 year limit” that I have observed in batchmates, most of them don’t want to code any more, and have moved on to so many other fields. While that is okay, the problem is that it has become a fashion to dis IT and software field.

Another factor was that everything is in the cloud and everything is a website these days, so does open source as a process matter anymore? First of all, the applications are not open source and even if we have the code (rare situation), you and I can’t fix the application/website unless you host it yourself.

But the foss.in community made me remember the joy of coding and joy of hacking.

Kudos to Team Foss.in for making the only community event and only IT event that is worth attending. It was fantastic to see how the concept of workouts had just taken off. And everyone’s been saying that all the keynotes have been fantastic.

In case you are wondering, I’m not the only one who was so enthralled by the event, for example:

See Lakshman’s writeup on the same. And so on.

Bottom line? Shut up and hack!

The Bad

Will miss the direction of Atul Chitnis.

What was missing

What I felt was missing is a discussion on the state of the art of software in each field, not just specific PoTDs. And I think this is more of a community perspective rather than the organizers’ perspective — organizers just provide the platform, community provides the content, as Atul keeps reminding us.

For example, consider my pet topic, the state of NoSQL databases – what’s good, what’s not, is it strange or expected that so many of them have come up in the last 1-2 years and all of them are open source (or at least the ones that we hear of). Taking it a step further, how it affects other fields of software. I’ve attempted to ask this before in a session at barcamp on whether webapp frameworks will adapt to NoSQL.

Similarly, what is the future of compilers, will LLVM + clang replace GCC (as @artagnon was speculating)? Will WebKit and V8 take over the world and leave Mozilla + Tracemonkey behind? Why are there so few projects using AGPL? What does it take to get full database dumps out of Wikipedia ? Will open source phones never take off? How does Eucalyptus help have an alternative with EC2? How does appscale help have an alternative to GAE? And so on.

In toto, I think there are three parts to this and I believe only the third part of which is done well already by the community and organizers: (1) what are the different fields and layers of software, (2) what is the state of the art of open source software in those fields, (3) getting people started and involved. I feel that only when we think on these lines, we will achieve Atul’s stated vision of “open source being the mainstream, proprietary software being the special case”*.

Thoughts?

* No flamewars please. I believe that the world will be better off by having all the infrastructure as open source software and having only the business logic / trade secrets as the proprietary part. At each stage of evolution of software, the stack grows higher, and the infrastructure/open source stack can grow higher along with it. For example, Robot Open Source and the Hadoop umbrella.

Note that the problems listed on the site is not for testing your algorithm skills, there are many sites for that already.

This list was inspired by repeated requests and suggestions from readers of A Byte of Python for homework problems at the end of each chapter to exercise the skills they have just learned. So I thought why not make it applicable to any language and multiple programming skill levels. And it’s a good topic that can be collaboratively worked on with the programming community, à la Stack Overflow.

All the content will be licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 India License so that anybody can reuse this content, especially in classroom situations.

I also had my own specific goals when implementing this side project:

1. Solve the lack of “homework problems” for people to exercise their programming skills, especially in the context of learning a new programming language.
   • I am not trying to replace existing lists but rather focus on making the reader active (providing exercise problems) than letting him/her be passive (reading code listings).
2. Learn how to do website layouts, specifically how to use YUI Grids CSS.
3. Learn how to pick colors for website design; ColorCombos turned out to be useful.
4. Learn to use Google App Engine.

It has been a fun side-project, spending a few hours here and there. It is very far from polished, but the basic functionality works. There is still more to do — adding a search functionality, conforming to standard UI design patterns, caching for the rendered HTML (from Markdown), optimizing the housekeeping code, and so on.

This site itself is a good example on the kind of problems that beginners can work on, but they would not know what kind of problems they can solve and what level of expertise (beginner / intermediate / advanced) would be needed. That is where this list of problems can help.

I request you to spend 5 minutes of your creativity to add a few problems so that beginners and intermediate level folks will have interesting problems to test their learning of a new programming language. Thanks!

It might be helpful to you as well when you’re going to play around with functional languages (Haskell, Erlang, etc.), funky new languages (Ioke), or new languages by big companies (Go).

Link: http://codinghomework.appspot.com

Use cases

1. Every time a user wants to send across content that doesn’t fit into an email, the user has to then decide between using .doc, .docx and .pdf formats. This implies additional software that needs to be installed on the recipient’s computer. This is unnecessary because browsers already do a fantastic job of rendering content, why should that be outsourced to other software simply for the reason that they don’t have a common document format?
   • Think product help documentation, resumes, small galleries of photos, and so on.
   • PDF is pixel-level which means it is good for printing, and HTML/MHT is presentation-level which means it is good for viewing while still maintaining full fidelity.
2. Because there is simply no good “File → Save As” solution. This is especially useful to store pages offline so that the user always has access to them, e.g., the Markdown text formatting syntax, and so on.
3. Print to PDF is abysmal because most websites don’t have appropriate print stylesheets. Currently I’m using the Aviary “To Image” bookmarklet to save pages and preserving decent presentation at the same time. However, saving the document as an image means that I cannot search for text. If only the browser had a proper “Save As” solution, then we would have the best of both worlds.
4. The future is full of small screen devices — Netbooks, Chrome OS, CrunchPad, iPhone, Android, etc. Do you see PDF readers or office suites on all of these devices? Unlikely. But what they do already have are web browsers. So why not have a browser-native document format that works across all these platforms.

Format Possibilities

The MHTML format is already adopted by IE and Opera. Firefox has the UnMHT addon and also has alternatives such as the Mozilla Archive Format. Safari does not support MHTML but instead has its own .webarchive format.

Each browser supports its own file format, clearly demonstrating that there is a use case for storing documents in single files. The gap is whether browser vendors can agree to adopt a common format. That would mean that the file format would actually be useful since it does not need assumptions on the platform/installed software of the recipient.

What I’m hoping for is the browser vendors to bring the vision of the MAFF file format and KDE WAR file format to life.

Extensibility

• PDF is read-only by design. The new file format could support highlighting and annotating features such as those present in Scrapbook addon.
  • Use case: The highlighting feature means that I can save an online article, mark the parts that I think that are relevant and important and send the annotated file to a friend via email.
• If the new file format has a container structure (zip, tarball, etc.), then we can include images, videos and other multimedia, just like the office suites’ formats. Continuing that line of thought, can all the browsers adopt one of the office suite file format standards? What if every browser had “Save as DOCX” and “Open DOCX” options? DOCX is appropriate because it is a ISO standard and it will be interoperable with the most popular office suite out there.

Summary

The wish is that the “Save as MHTML” feature will bundle the webpage into a single file, which can be stored, transmitted, and viewed later using any web browser. This will also be useful for small-screen devices of the future which have browsers but not necessarily have dedicated format readers and office suites. If a container structure format is used instead of MHTML, then features such as highlighting, commenting, multimedia, etc. can be added.

I hope this sparks a discussion about whether this idea has potential and could be something useful, or is completely unnecessary.

Update 1: Thanks to “Rik|work” on irc.freenode.net#webkit, got to know about two open bugs in the Webkit bugbase which exactly talks about this — Bug 7168 – Support reading of MHTML (multipart/related) web archives and Bug 7211 – Support save as “Web page, complete” in Firefox format, and as pointed in the comments to the latter bug, Chromium/Google Chrome already supports this! So it is not an outlandish idea as it seems

Update 2: Thanks to “Mardeg” on irc.mozilla.org#firefox, got to know about the this proposal from Alexander Limi called Making browsers faster: Resource Packages.

Update 3: Thanks again to “Mardeg” for pointing out these filed proposals in Firefox – Bug 18764 – Full rfc2557 MHTML multipart/related support in browser (filed in 1999!) and Bug 40873 – Save as rfc 2557 MHTML; complete webpage in one file (filed in 2000!).

Update 4: Continuing the discussion with “Mardeg”, it seems there is already a format that can solve this purpose – SVG. It is supported in all modern browsers and Google is working on svgweb which is a JavaScript library that any website can use that enables IE to render SVG using Flash Player behind the scenes. Very interesting! If only IE natively supported SVG along with browsers and word processors having a “Save as SVG” option, this pain point would just go away.

Update 5 (Oct 19, 2009): Looks like MHT is indeed not an obscure file format, Zoho Notebook has “Export to MHT” and “Export to HTML” as the two export options for notebooks and pages.

I started using Twitter as an experiment, and it was the first and only social network I really participated in. It was great because I actually made new friends that I went on trips with, got the opportunity to follow the thoughts of interesting people, and whenever I was in a quandary, I just had to holler a question and would get plenty of answers and advice in return.

But I was uneasy because I was feeling jaded. I thought it was because of the typical “overdoing it” reason, but there was more to it. It was affecting my ability to think critically/deeply about a subject.

Why am I thinking so much about a social network? As David Allen once said, “Pay attention to what has your attention.” And clearly, Twitter had more of my attention than it should have.

Since my attention span was reducing from books to blogs and then blogs to tweets, I was being converted from “from a thinker to a clicker”.

So I’ve gone back and started reading books and paying more attention to offline friends. And I’m not alone on this, many people have expressed similar opinions.

Getting your Fix

I think of this situation as getting your fix. Think smoking vs. coffee. Both are stimulants. Both are legal. But since smoking actually affects others, people have to go outside to indulge in it. Hence, it is less convenient. Probably that’s why there are more people addicted to coffee. Because it is more convenient. There is a sufficient barrier to smoking. Even though this analogy may not be true, consider reading blog posts vs. reading books. There is a sufficient barrier of attention to the latter, that is why more people prefer reading blog posts. It is more convenient. The same for reading blogs vs. tweets. The latter is more convenient. Then, going down this path, your ability to think becomes restricted to 140 characters. Twitter gives you that instant high that you published or read something, which means you lose persistence which is required for longer reading, hence tend to think a lot less and quick wins prevent you from going after bigger wins.

The problem with the shorter fix is that you will indulge in it more often and it will have lesser stimulation in the long run. Consider the difference between, say, having a 5-day 9-hour work week with 2-day weekends vs. having 6-hour work everyday with no weekend and no holidays. Which one would you prefer? This is how I argue that a book once in a while will give you more stimulation than a hundred tweets. For example, consider the signal-to-noise ratio – only tools like filtrr.com can filter out #ipl talk, etc. whereas a book would give a broad understanding about a particular subject. In the long run, it is more enriching to go deeper into subjects, not to be “restricted” to a buffet of subjects.

As a sort-of substitute for Twitter, I’ve shifted to a del.icio.us network. After all, most of Twitter is sharing links and delicious doesn’t have the downside of frivolous tweets. Also, delicious shows how many people have bookmarked a link giving another indicator whether something is worth reading or not, and even better, they are tagged appropriately so I immediately know the topic to expect for an article, instead of “This is cool <insert link>.”

The Attention Psychology

Let’s think about attention in terms of psychology, which I am trying to understand a little about from The Mouse Trap blog:

Maximizing utility

U = E x V (where U is utility of act; E is expectancy as to whether one would be able to carry the act and if so whether the act would result in desired outcome; and V is the Value (both subjective and objective) that one has assigned to the outcome.

Maximizing Predictability

While selecting an action we maximize reward and minimize punishment, basically we choose the maximal utility function; while choosing which stimuli to attend to we maximize our foreknowledge of the world and minimize surprises, basically we choose the maximal predictability function; we can even write an equivalent mathematical formula: Predictability P = E x R where P is the increase in predictability due to attending to stimulus 1 ; E is probability that stimulus 1 correctly leads to prediction of stimulus 2; and R is the Relevance of stimulus 2(information) to us. Thus the stimulus one would attend, is the one that leads to maximum gain in predictability. Also, similar to the general energy level of organism that would bias as to whether, and how much, the organism acts or not; there is a general arousal level of the organism that biases whether and how much it would attend to stimuli.

As per my understanding, the first part means that because we expect much utility about something, it’s perceived utility is higher, making it’s value higher. And because Twitter gives that dash of randomness that we desire, it’s utility is much higher than it really is.

The second part means that we want to know more about the world in order to have lesser surprises, and hence we tend to read more and more, especially if it is information that we perceive as relevant to us.

Bottom line: I question whether more and more information and more and more immediacy is really necessary/required for us?

Think of all the great things that have been achieved whether it is a motor engine or a music stereo, would it have been created if the to-be-creator was constantly distracted and with low attention span? Where is the time to get inspired if we’re always mentally tired?

Why Can’t We Concentrate?

I will finish up with excerpts from this excellent article on Salon called “Why Can’t We Concentrate?”:

Here’s a fail-safe topic when making conversation with everyone from cab drivers to grad students to cousins in the construction trade: Mention the fact that you’re finding it harder and harder to concentrate lately. The complaint appears to be universal, yet everyone blames it on some personal factor: having a baby, starting a new job, turning 50, having to use a Blackberry for work, getting on Facebook, and so on. Even more pervasive than Betty Friedan’s famous problem that has no name,” this creeping distractibility and the technology that presumably causes it has inspired such cris de coeur as Nicholas Carr’s much-discussed Is Google Making Us Stupid?” essay for the Atlantic Monthly and diatribes like “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future,” a book published last year by Mark Bauerlein.

You don’t have to agree that “we” are getting stupider, or that today’s youth are going to hell in a handbasket (by gum!) to mourn the withering away of the ability to think about one thing for a prolonged period of time. Carr (whose argument was grievously mislabeled by the Atlantic’s headline writers as a salvo against the ubiquitous search engine) reported feeling the change “most strongly” while he was reading. “Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy,” he wrote. “Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text.” For my own part, I now find it challenging to sit still on my sofa through the length of a feature film. The urge to, for example, jump up and check the IMDB filmography of a supporting actor is well-nigh irresistible, and once I’m at the computer, why not check e-mail? Most of the time, I’ll wind up pausing the DVD player before the end of the movie and telling myself I’ll watch the rest tomorrow.

… What this commonplace crisis comes down to is our inability to control our own minds. You may, like Traister, need to buckle down and write, or you may, like Carr, pine for the deeply engaged style of reading we bring to books and New Yorker profiles. You may, like me, realize that your evening will be more enjoyable and more enriching if you commit to the full 110 minutes of “Children of Men” instead of obsessively checking out your friends’ Facebook updates or surveying borderline illiterate reader reviews — or, for that matter, browsing through the “Seinfeld” reruns in your Tivo Suggestions queue. In many cases, the thing we wish we would do is not only more interesting but ultimately more fun than the things we do instead, and yet it seems to require a Herculean effort to make ourselves do it.

What to do? For most people, bailing on the Web or e-mail or cellphones isn’t even feasible, let alone practical or ultimately desirable. (I shudder at the thought of living without my beloved Tivo.) Besides, modern life really isn’t making us stupider: IQ tests have to be regularly updated to make them harder; otherwise the average score would have climbed 3 percent per decade since the early 1930s. (The average score is supposed to remain at a constant 100 points.) And IQ measures problem-solving ability, rather than sheer data retained, which has grown even faster over the same interval. Each of us knows many more people and facts than our counterparts of 100 years ago; it’s just that the importance of those people and facts remains somewhat uncertain. Knowing a little bit about Lindsay Lohan and Simon Cowell (two people I recognize despite having no active interest in either one) can’t really be equated with knowing a bit about Marie Curie or Lord Mountbatten. We have more information, but it isn’t necessarily more valuable information.

Winifred Gallagher’s new book, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life argues that it’s high time we take more deliberate control of this stuff. “The skillful management of attention,” she writes, “is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience, from mood to productivity to relationships.” Because we can only attend to a tiny portion of the sensory cacophony around us, the elements we choose to focus on — the very stuff of our reality — is a creation, adeptly edited, providing us with a workable but highly selective version of the world and our own existence. Your very self, “stored in your memory,” is the product of what you pay attention to, since you can’t remember what you never noticed to begin with.

… Gallagher deserves credit for calling our attention to attention itself, specifically to the way it works neurologically. In essence, attention is the faculty by which the mind selects and then zeroes in on the most “salient” aspect of any situation. The problem is that the brain is not a unified whole, but a collection of “systems” that often come into conflict with each other. When that happens, the more primitive, stimulus-driven, unconscious systems (the “reactive” and “behavioral” components of our brains) will usually override the consciously controlled “reflective” mind.

If you’ve read so far, thanks, because you’re one of the few people who still have a healthy attention span. Half of the people who didn’t read probably found it “too boring” (which means it exceeded their attention span) and the other half didn’t read it because there were no bullet points or pictures.

BUT I’m still not saying that you should give up Twitter, you just have got to be careful on how you use it (duh!). All you have to do is just remember when was the last time you read a whole book every time you tweet

It is the same kind of problem being faced by, say StartupBuzz.org which, I am guessing, wants to be the Hacker News of India. There are indeed topics that apply only to startups in India, from “Startup Morning”, to India’s first in-taxi magazine. Such interesting events and ideas are worthy of discussion.

There is value in such a community, but again, how to build it? StartupDunia has already put its thoughts on the subject but the question still remains.

Here are some of my thoughts.

Does it require credibility?

• Hacker News has Paul Graham and YCombinator behind it.
• ProBlogger Forums have ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse behind it.
• And the most recent example of StackOverflow.com that has Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood behind it.

So the question is whether there each community should be backed by up by a credible person who has a reasonable authority on the subject?

Does it require an offline face-to-face presence?

• Would the Headstart Network have taken off without all the Startup Saturdays?
• Would the OCC mailing list have taken off without the Sunday meetups?
• Would chat.proto.in have taken off without the big showcase events that made proto.in famous?

(On the same note, I want to point out that there are other startup events that I’ve come across are not communities, they just happen to have good publicity. I just wanted to draw out that distinction.)

Would StartupBuzz.org have taken off it was started by the existing Headstart/OCC/proto.in communities instead of a standalone presence?

Does it require a news site?

• How did StartupDunia, Pluggd.in, Trak.in and others take off?
• Why does TechCrunch have 2 million readers?
• Why doesn’t, say, the Steve Pavlina Forums have the same kind of numbers?

Is building a readership/community easier for news sites?

Does it require a blog?

How did Lifehacker.com, Groklaw.net, and others take off?

Is community building intertwined with building a blog?

For example, consider SmashingMagazine and its related forums, ProBlogger and its forums, TechCrunch and its comments section, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky are famous bloggers and so on.

Does it require specific social engineering?

I found the Joel Spolsky’s talk on StackOverflow very interesting from this perspective.

He talks about how they took into account that “Environment and UI influences behavior.”

He talked about the 9 things they used as core of the design of the site, and this specific design leads to the high return-rate on the community site. And I can attest to the fact that it does indeed work. It is a brilliant piece of social engineering. But then again, as he says, this particular model works only for professionals in such a field, and in this case, programmers.

Do watch the talk for more insights.

Are there some specific guidelines for it?

I am yet to read Yaro Starak’s “Membership Site Mastermind” or Chris Guillebeau’s “279 Days to Overnight Success” guides, but I see that they touch upon this topic in detail.

Maybe they’ve already solved this question?

Your Thoughts?

What are your thoughts? What do you think it takes to build a community?

• How did IndiaMike.com become so popular among travelers in India?
• How did BroadbandForum.in become so popular among internet users in India?
• How did PagalGuy.com get so many MBA students?

Is it sheer good content and number of years? Or being the first-to-market? Or is there more to it?

I’m surprised that many people do not know or use this resource and community. Just a brief search over there would answer so many questions that programmers have.

For example, there is a suggestion on my skribit page:

“how to give back to the open source community”?

And this question has 20 votes!

I wonder why this question to me, then I remembered this suggestion popped up soon after I wrote “Why use Creative Commons license?” where I had written “The book was intended to be a contribution back to the open source community. We constantly keep taking and taking – whether it is using Linux, Vim, Firefox, or countless other software, so it felt great to be useful to the community in return.”

I guess I had it coming.

First of all, I would say that the best place to actually learn such a topic would be another book (I bet you saw that one coming!) called Producing Open Source Software by Karl Fogel (which is itself an open source book) to understand how an open source project works right from the technical infrastructure to the social and political infrastructure, how to communicate, and so on. And finally, the chapter on Volunteers explains the different kinds of volunteers that are helpful to an open source project which indirectly means that those who are interested can participate in the projects in one of those roles => You’re giving back to the open source community!

But perhaps there are better suggestions in this discussion on Stack Overflow when somebody asked, duh, How to get involved in an open source project?

Someone also posted another skribit suggestion asking:

hi, can u give me a link on examples with python or projects in python book i am a beginner

Guess what? I already answered that in a discussion at Stack Overflow.

The answer is that there are two projects – the “Programming Language Examples Alike Cookbook” project and the Rosetta Code project which lists vast numbers of example programs in multiple programming languages.

Again, the person could have found this answer already by a simple search on the Stack Overflow website.

For some of the programming queries I had, I didn’t know whom to ask. There used to be an internal algorithms-discuss mailing list when I was at Yahoo!, but whom do I turn to now? The answer again was “Stack Overflow” (which at that time was yet to be launched, so I was waiting in anticipation):

How to convert floats to human-readable fractions?

Let’s say we have 0.33, we need to output “1/3″. If we have “0.4″, we need to output “2/5″.

The idea is to make it human-readable to make the user understand “x parts out of y” as a better way of understanding data.

I know that percentages is a good substitute but I was wondering if there was a simple way to do this?

And someone nicknamed “Epsilon” pointed to me to a brilliantly simple algorithm by David Eppstein which exactly answers this question.

# Usage: ./frap <fraction> <maximum denominator>

$ ./frap 0.33 10
1/3, error = -3.333333e-03
3/10, error = 3.000000e-02

$ ./frap 0.2342 100
11/47, error = 1.574468e-04
15/64, error = -1.750000e-04

Isn’t that amazing? Both the algorithm and the community at Stack Overflow.

If you want to know why Stack Overflow works so well, there is a discussion on that, at Stack Overflow you might want to read

This book is meant for both beginners and advanced users.

For beginners, it walks you through the first steps to learning about modes, discusses about typing skills to be effective and moves on to the editing basics.

This book will definitely appeal more to people who are Vim users already because it helps add a huge number of tricks to their arsenal, whether it is more efficient editing, personal information management, coding your own plugins or making Vim a programmers’ editor.

I hope that fellow Vimmers will find these notes useful. Even though it is in a book format, the writing style is more like a tutorial and is informal, which should be familiar to readers of my Python book.

Both books are under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license, so you’re free to download it, email it, share it and improve it. In fact, the book is on a wiki, so you can just click on ‘Edit’ in the left sidebar of any chapter to improve the book in a matter of seconds. When in doubt, please use the ‘Discussion’ link to add your suggestions and comments.

For those who prefer reading books they can hold in their hand, please consider purchasing a printed copy of the book. This will also help support the continued development of the book.

For those PHP gurus familiar with GeSHi syntax highlighting, I would greatly appreciate any help in improving my vim syntax highlighting source, especially in handling Vim-style comments, etc. Please mail me if you can help.

This book has been in the works for several years, so I’m glad to see it finally in good enough shape for releasing it. Although I haven’t done as many rewrites as I would have been satisfied with, I decided it was better to <insert cliché of “Release Early, Release Often.”>

I dedicate this release to foss.in and GTD principles.

If you visit the blog and the wiki, you will not immediately notice any difference except for the sidebar. This is intentional so that there isn’t a abrupt transition between the two software. After all, the content is more important than how it is being displayed.

But why a wiki?

Ever since I read about Tantek’s personal wiki, I have been fascinated with the idea. Having a wiki of my own to post anything seemed useful. As Tantek said:

“It’s also a place I’ve kept notes or documents that I expect to keep current / update in place, as opposed to blog posts, which are more like snapshots of thoughts in time.”

LifeHack also has a good introduction to personal wikis.

The advantage is that anything that can be benefited by many eyeballs can be put up on the wiki. For one, I can send it to people and get their feedback and improvements. Second, people can always stumble on to it via google or yahoo and they can contribute as well.

And then, there’s always all the goodness of MediaWiki such as versioning, ability to undo and rollback edits, good anti-spam features and even generate PDFs, thanks to PediaPress.

All these advantages of the wiki led me to recreate my book into the wiki, and it is already achieving great results. How else would a 20-year old student who lives in the Amazon work on a Brazilian Portuguese translation of a Python book and collaborate with others?

All the content is under a Creative Commons license so that the information belongs to everyone.

I’ll be slowly adding my tidbits, notes and link collections on different topics to the wiki. Of course, they will be always in a state of work-in-progress. Many things can go in there – right from trekking howtos (I get quite a few emails on that, surprisingly) to some entrepreneurship resources in the Indian context, and so on.

However, it’s important to keep in mind is to NOT add to the information overload, but to simplify things and cut the crap out.

You are welcome to add your suggestions and comments on the wiki using the discussion pages.

Later they asked me over email. My reply was “Why Ooty!?”. They replied saying “It doesn’t matter. We’re going for the drive.” Two days later, we three were driving to Ooty on bikes at night.

My descriptions below are in twitter style as an ode to how the trip happened. ( But of course, my usual writing style will resume after this post )

We started off at 8 at night. First stop was some lip-smacking food at Kamat Lokaruchi:

9.10 pm : We’re on the way! 3 twitterers on bikes.

9.25 pm : Getting out of Bangalore is the toughest thing.

9.30 pm : @scorpion032 says 2020 will also be the year of the linux desktop.

10.32 pm : @cruisemaniac and @scorpion032 are tweeting away…

1.40 am : Taking a break.

2.33 am : Admiring the mysore palace…

3.16 am : Sleep getting to me… But we’re taking breaks and having fun. In Nanjangud.

3.20 am : Another break.

3.34 am : Listening to My Sacrifice at 330 am at 70 kmph on bike with the wind in your hair is something to be experienced.

4.10 am : We find a freakin’ coffee day in the middle of nowhere. Waiting for capuccino.

6.15 am : Mudumulai forest.

6.20 am : Animals! Elephant, deer, peacock, mongoose, eagle, woodpecker, … All right there next to us… Thank heavens the elephant didn’t think we were pesky…

6.45 am : Exiting Mudumulai forest.

My favorite photo from this trip (notice the clouds and the bike):

The killer part of the trip was the 36 hair pin bends required to scale Ooty for more than a kilometre of altitude. The bikes started choking. Even the Pulsar bike had issues with the climb!

7.31 am : Ooty has nice scenery.

Rest of the trip was simply crashing for sleep, waking up for food, and sitting in the patio in the cold night discussing everything from Steve Jobs to big company goofups to…

… the guy who was taking a snap with the lens in the opposite direction and never realized it.

The ride back to Bangalore was equally tiring but faster (9 hours vs 11 hours):

It was a picture-perfect trip throughout. Probably because the wavelength of the three guys matched – we were ready for anything and enjoying the ride was the main thing for us. We didn’t have any planning except for the start times of the to and fro journeys leading to doing things on-the-fly.

And I totally cracked up at the geeky humor we shared. For example, not many people would laugh at statements like “Q: What do clinic allclear shampoo and KDE4 have in common??? A: both are bad ‘gooey’/gui things!!!”

The stay was comfortable mainly thanks to Shammi’s Rooms and Cottages for being such hospitable people. Maybe its because they opened just a week before we got there and they’re fresh at these things, but it was totally worth being there. I highly recommend them if you ever happen to go to Ooty.

Bottom line: Twitter is “social networking done right”. Because people get to know each other by their thoughts and not their profiles. The fact that three people got together for a road trip and had awesome fun is a testament that twitter (or if you’re from the Web 1.0 days, IRC) as a network works!

Second bottom line: As Ashwin reminded us, if you want to really understand why people like biking, you have to understand why dogs stick their heads out of the car.