Nigel Babu

Blog

  • Pycon India 2013

    Finally, I made it to a Pycon India! The last 2 years, I’ve been pulling a sankarshan. I walked in just in time for Kenneth Reitz’ keynote. Kenneth talked about writing an API from his experience in writing and maintaining requests. There was good deal of information about coding practices, managing contributors, and avoiding burnout. Key things I remember: Documentation, documentation (yes, I’m repeating it again, because it’s important!), clean APIs, extendability, and learning to say no (without being a dick).

    A conference is not just about the content, it is also a great opportunity to catch with people I’ve known online and don’t meet that often. For instance, I met haseeb at the registration counter. Later, I met Runa and Sankarshan. I don’t think I’ve met Runa since conf.kde.in in 2011! And I hadn’t met Sankarshan at all. Other usual suspects include Kushal Das, who I’m glad to report did not have any sort of untoward accident (and I hope I didn’t jinx it), Souvik, Sneha, Noufal, Devi, Anand, Ramki, Vivek and so many more people that I can’t even remember all their names!

    As is usual, I spent more time in hallway conversations than in actual sessions. After the keynote, I sat in two sessions, the first one was Applications of Python in Robotics by Lentin Joseph. He actually had a robot on the table when he was presenting which got me hooked on to the talk. I don’t have a lot of experience in hardware, so all the information was a little dry for me. Lentin did a demo at a conference AND IT WORKED! Well, sort of. The robot tracked the yellow ball and moved (albiet slowly, because the table cloth didn’t offer a lot of traction).

    The other interesting session was Let’s talk testing with Selenium by Anisha. I’ve known the Selenium project ever since I started contributing to Mozilla, though, I haven’t actually used it. Anisha’s session was information packed and made it look easy as well. In the coming weeks, I’m going to take a look at it to see how I can use it at the day job.

    Before I left Pycon, I was convinced to join the PSSI (Python Software Society of India), though I couldn’t stay for the AGM.

    Ah, I forgot to mention that hanging out with friends in town for Pycon started on Friday evening. I met, among others, Sengupta and Harshad of Instamojo (they’re hiring btw, if you’re into python, get in touch with them!), Jaidev, Parth, Bala, and Nivedita. We met at Egg Factory and we were chatting and making twss jokes.

    Overall, Pycon 2013 was a great conference and I look forward to many more years of attending it 🙂

    Pulling a Sankarshan (verb): The act of purchasing a conference ticket and not attending the conference. Tickets may be refunded.

  • Two Casualty Visits in 2 Weeks

    I finally have a few weeks where I haven’t visited the hospital (knocks on wood) and it’s probably safe to write about it. It’s been an interesting few weeks after I got back from London. My sleep cycle hadn’t quite reset back to normal. I was going to bed pretty late and waking up late, whereas I’m notoriously a morning person.

    Visit 1

    I went to bed quite late Sunday (July 21st) and woke up quite late too. As soon as I woke up, I threw up. I’ve always been taught that vomiting is dehydrating and I should drink water. I felt extremely weak anyway, and I had water mixed with glucose powder. A while later, I woke up and threw up again. This kept happening throughout the day, I’d drink water, lie down, and a few hours later, I’d throw it up.

    Around evening, I went to the nearest medical store and got an anti-vomit. That didn’t seem to help, so my friends (Thanks lut4rp and GnrlMxms!) got me to the nearest hospital. The doctor in the Casualty got me on IV fluids and gave me an injection. They also checked my BP and temperature. Turns out I had a fever of 102 F, and my BP was low. Somehow during all the mess of throwing up, I hadn’t noticed that I was feverish.

    The doctor gave me the option of being admitted or going home after the IV fluids was done with medicines for a few days. Since I live alone, I preferred to stay at the hospital. A few days that involved lots of IV fluids, and blood and urine tests later, I was discharged on Thursday. Seems to have been just a viral fever.

    Hospital by José Goulão

    Visit 2

    A few days at the hospital really did sap my energy. I didn’t feel like cooking or eating really, so I decided to visit my parents for a few days and work out of there. I should describe my setup, which is pretty relevant to what happened – My laptop is an HP, which is mostly plastic. It sits on a stand that’s also plastic. This whole setup was on a metal table, which was in fact my old study table. And I use a wireless keyboard and mouse.

    I missed work for large parts of July because of being sick and my hard-disk dying while in Cambridge. On August 1st, I woke up bright and early at 6:30 (okay, that’s late for me to be honest). I talked to my mom for a bit and booted up my laptop. I remember sitting down on my chair waiting for it to boot up. My next memory is right outside the Casualty at the local hospital in a car and my mom asking me to get out of the car into the wheelchair.

    I was very confused. My body hurt and I had no idea what the hell happened. When the doctor comes around my mom tells him I got electrocuted. I’m lying on the bed going, WTF. I was hooked up to the ECG and I had a catheter placed and IV fluids again. I think I was given an injection at this point.

    My parents later told me, they heard the chair move and what sounded like me throwing up. When my dad came to check on me, I was on the floor, shaking (my leg was still touching the table). My dad switched off the power and called my mom. I’m told my mom screamed so loudly that our neighbors came running. One of our our neighbors gave me chest compressions and helped carry me to their car. I have no memory of all of this. The one vague memory I have is throwing up. But I felt like that was part of a dream, and we were going on a trip somewhere.

    Meanwhile, in the hospital, a more senior doctor looked at me. He said I looked fine, my vitals were normal, and he’d let me go after the IV fluids were over. They disconnected my ECG and wheeled me to a different bed. Later, I learned, I was part of the area that’s reserved for the most serious patients (gulp). It had an ECG and oxygen supply right there. There were only 3 beds like that and I was in one of them.

    The doctor did let me go after the bottle of IV fluids was over, with pain meds to take if I needed them. I escaped with a scratch on my finger and my neck hurting for a few hours.

    Yeah, it’s been a fun few weeks…

    TL;DR: I was in the hospital twice in two weeks, once for viral fever, and then because I got electrocuted.

  • Sane Defaults for Ruby Gems

    I always rage at rubygems. Every time I setup my OS, I forget that it doesn’t tell me what it’s up to and tries to install globally by default. Here’s how I fix it usually. I create a .gemrc file in my home directory with the following content

    gem: --user-install -V

    And then add $HOME/.gem/ruby/1.8/bin/ to my $PATH. I had to go looking for this right now because I wanted to write another blog post and then I discovered Jekyll wasn’t installed. Sigh. Typical.

  • CIS Anniversary and Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema

    Centre for Internet and Society celebrated their 5-year anniversary with an exhibition at their Bangalore and Delhi offices and a series of talks in Bangalore. I was there on Tuesday and managed to spend some time at the exhibition and attend the talks.

    The exhibition showed off some of the work that CIS has been doing and the work of several independent artists. The bits that are particularly in my memory is Tara Kelton’s work as well as Sharath’s work.

    Later in the day, Lawrence Liang talked about the Encyclopedia of Indian cinema. It was a very interesting talk, especially for me since it encompasses open data, open source software, and copyright issues! A convergence of a lot of my interests 🙂 Lawrence talked about what they’ve built and the problems they’ve faced and how internet as a medium for a film encyclopedia is very powerful, but is limited by the legal issues surrounding copyright laws.

    Indian Cinema

    Indian Cinema Wiki

    On that note, I’ll close with this video about copyright.

    I know Disney is great, but I’m not sure I like them as much after this video.

  • My Banking Woes – Part 2

    TL;DR: All the problems I had with the money transfer is now solved!

    So, I’ve given my employers details to directly transfer money into my account. The money is deposited without needing me to fill up a form. So, I guess they were being all formal when it was sent to their intermediary account.

    Our best guess at this point is that the intermediary bank were missing out on details all the time. And then my bank would have to ask them for more details and then they would send an addendum with the clarification. Meh. Problems solved. Twice I’ve recieved direct transfers to my account and both times I got at the end of the second working day!