Thoughts on Rails

I read through the blog at http://weeklysqueak.wordpress.com/2007/02/20/how-open-source-projects-survive-poisonous-people-and-you-can-too/ and watched the video, it offers fantastic insights into the working of a large Open Source project.

Here’s the summary for ready reference… (mostly for me to come back to):

1. Comprehend: Preserve attention and focus.

2. Fortify: Build a healthy community.

3. Identify: Look for telltale signs.

4. Disinfect: Maintain calm and stand your ground.

Today I visited the tomb of Ahmed Shah Nizam, the founder of Ahmednagar with my friend and guide Mr. Crison Coutino.

Ok, so here’s a quick decoding of “Ahmednagar” — Ahmed + Nagar (Nagar = City). Alrighty, “Ahmed’s City”, is what the name means!
It took me 2 hours to travel and shoot and 20 minutes to transfer the photographs from the card to my computer – throw in another 15 minutes for conversion to DNG and copying to designated directories. Add another 3 hours tweaking the files in Picasa. (yes, picasa – not photoshop – that’s another story sometime soon)

There we have it! – A whole gigabyte of historical Ahmednagar!

Coming up soon, on a flickr photostream near you

P.S. I really should learn to remember that now I have a camera that remembers all settings – unlike the point and shoot that forgets everything the instant you turn it off. I clicked over half of today’s photos on ISO 1600!!! Thanks to this foolish mistake I have a lot of photos that came out grainy. And how I was wondering, “Today’s light seems so low – then how am I able to get good exposure reading even at high shutter speeds!?”. I should had guessed. sigh. Too late, I discovered that when the excitement of finding this beautiful monument had slightly worn off

Anyway, a lesson well learnt! My photography learning-through-experience train chugs along as thoughts ride on the maglev super high speed train I think I’m really going to need something wider than this 28mm! Architecture seems equally interesting as nature – and what a coincidence – where I have pure nature, architecture does not interfere and vice versa! (The only exceptions are what I love more – ruins)

Hmm… looks like the PS is getting bigger than the original post – so let us wind this thing up.

Today, me and Amit went on a pleasant evening ride. Came back with a photo of the modified motorcycle handle, and a few more. Tested my new toy – Nokia 6680 for its photographic capabilities – and sadly, due to my aquaintance with better cameras, it miserably failed Well, can’t really help it! I dont feel like uploading photos from the 6680′s camera here. Someday, if I get an exceptional photo, I might think again. Anyway, a review from me is coming soon. I seem to really like the phone except for it’s silly camera!

About my plans for Nikon D50, it waits another fortnight… because I spent some decent amount on this smart phone. I don’t feel very smart now. But well… this is a nice handy tool to show a prospective client a slideshow – about anywhere. and it helps me keep myself running on time – which I usually miss, because I simply forget other things while riding on the train of thought… (that’s how this blog got it’s name – thoughts on rails)

Work stuff: I am working on a project that requires surveys – both in online and paper based format, the results of both will be later collected for further processing. So the idea is to create a software that can store a questionnaire/survey in an open format (think: XML) and convert it to online form (think: XHTML + CSS2 + PHP + XML) and also in printable form (think: XHTML + CSS2)

Later, I need to write a small translation software to convert these responses (in XML) to whatever format the client requires. I am working on the prototype using Python, Qt4 GPL and PyQt4 GPL. Ah, that means good news! The software will be open sourced… but not until I can at least make it do the expected work! If you really really need to satisfy the urge to peek at the code, mail me at harshad dot sharma [at] gmail dot com. At the time of writing, it is in alpha stage… hardly anything works, but pieces are taking shape.
The whole project consists of four modules:

1. Survey XML Generator
   Creates an XML file, which gives the complete document structure, sections, questions and possible responses for each question.
2. Survey Creator
   Generates XHTML/HTML and PHP from the given XML data.
   1. Simpe XHTML, for generating printable survey (CSS will be hand-coded)
   2. XHTML/PHP, for creating online surveys and mailing the responses back.
3. Online Survey
   Takes responses from users and mails them as XML files to a predefined email address, also stores a copy on the server. As for the paper based surveys, we expect to have a bunch of people to sit and feed the gathered data into the online form at the end of the day.
4. Response Translator
   Translates XML to database/spreadsheet format, as required by the client.

Now you know what’s keeping me busy ; Not just that, a website design to go along with the whole survey work… yes that and my own website Thankfully I don’t have a girlfriend to add to the list

Anyway, I guess I will go grab a nap… somewhere in the scale of 9 to 10 in the following Python program

amount_of_sleep = {
1:”very”,
2:”a little”,
3:”some”,
4:”considerable amount of”,
5:”seriously long”,
6:”more than average”,
7:”slight overdose of”,
8:”a lot of”,
9:”hell lot of”,
10:”insanely crazy long”}

for x in range(1,10):
print “I need %s sleep.” % amount_of_sleep[x]

P.S. I just turned back to be greeted with a very friendly bed!!! Oh and here comes a photo from the Nokia 6680

Peace!