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R programming

Of late, I have been following up with data analytics and learnt R and Pandas (using Python). Somehow, most of the work that I now do is crunching data and representing them in a more fancier way. In a lighter vein, when I am at home, I try to see how my non-work data can be represented as charts and graphs. Here is the first attempt to categorize the list of programmers editors that I had used throughout my life time... This was generated using R and ggplot (ggplot is a great library that allows you to generate different types of charts). Why not excel? Sure, I can do the same in excel as well. But once the data becomes huge to manage, it becomes difficult to monitor each of the cells to see if the formula is right. Sometimes, they get complicated enough that I have to wait for a few seconds every time I make a change in a cell or consider turning off auto-calculation in excel. It is much more simpler to have the processing logic as a source file that you can modify separated from t
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World Tobacco Day - May 31

On my daily commute to my office, my only companion are the various FM radio channels. Most of them were hyping the World Tobacco Day on the 31st of May which included how much a person would have spent if he smokes a few packets to the various health issues. All this was nice until on that same day, where there were a few ads on the same channels sponsored from a tobacco company enticing listeners on their new offerings! Oh what irony!
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On the way to Sholinganallur via the IT highway, a flock of Pelicans have made the backwaters their 'in-transit stay' much to the delight of the commuters. Most of the commuters slow down and some (including myself) visited over the weekends to take a snap of the feathered friends.
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50% off - Bah, humbug!

I had to do some shopping and was lured into a some of these shops by their big bold 'off' posters. But alas, once inside, anything that I touch, the salesman utters "Sorry sir, but that does not have the discount". Not to be out-done, I ask "So what do you have on the discount sale?". He points to a table where there are a 'few' set of shirts that no one would pick up, in violet and pink and fluorescent green. But their prices seems to be barely justifiable even 'after' you apply the discount. Note size of the '50%' and 'Sale' on the poster, where I think the entire wares on discount would comfortably fit in and you will still be able to make out what the poster says. Perhaps there should be some legalization on the size of the '50%' that you can have on the poster to depend upon the number of articles you have on a discount compared to the remaining items. In the end, you end up buying the product at the same price y
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Desktop search vs good old grep

Been installing various desktop search tools like the Google Desktop, Copernic (once free), Microsoft Search etc and after a few weeks / months of usage, eventually felt happier to uninstall them. One of the primary reason I need a desktop search was I needed a tool to quickly search for mails. I would seldom search for files on my machine. But one assumption that we need to keep in mind is that, these search engines are not exact. That is, the engines fetch you results, but they may not be comprehensive. The web crawling spiders that scour the web for data and index them, it is possible thet the server's index may be out of sync with respect to the actual web site as new data would have been posted after the spider index the content. In the Internet, sure, if you have a few sites missed out, it does not matter much. But desktop search apps seem to work in very similar lines. If at some time, for want of speed or to free up available memory, you stop indexing your mails or document
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AJAX - Is it really worth it?

With the onset of interactive web pages that update dynamically the moment you move your mouse over a control, development of an AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) based web site adds to the complexity. For one, they mess up with your browser history and limit your ability to bookmark a particular page as almost all contents are loaded "in-page". The other disadvantage I see is the in-ability of custom scripts to access the site and extract information. For example, I can write a perl script that can access the Indian Railways page and query the arrival of a particular train. If the site used AJAX, it's going to be more difficult. Cellphones that bundle with micro-browsers either lack javascripting or access is usually blocked by service providers leaving you grapping with an empty framework with no actual data in it. Development wise, you introduce a sense of uncertainty into your web-page where when your page looks like it has completed loading, more data is still b
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ssh! Here's the scp

The other day, I was thinking of consolidating all my music collection from various machines and burn them into a DVD as a backup. There were various ways that I could have done the transfer: Extract the music back from the disk originals Copy them using a rewritable media like a pen drive or a writable media like a CD Connect over the network and copy the files I can use Samba as some of my machines are Windows based Setup a FTP server to copy files I can setup a ssh server and securely copy the files to my Linux box That was how I discovered ssh, the secure shell. I had originally been looking at setting up Samba on my Linux box, but was frightened with the possibility of it suffering a virus attach as most of the viruses / botnets would be scanning for a windows PC and this would become a backdoor for entry. The other option was ssh which was simple to setup and quite secure. It basically provides a secure way to connect to a computer that enables the ssh service. You are presented
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