Archive for August, 2008

Olympics 08.08.08

Friday, August 8th, 2008

I am watching Olympics 2008 live from Beijing and I have one line to say first. They have created something that I’ll never forget. Zhang Yimou is a is really a talented cinematographer. Each of the visualization, the huge LED display with full color, people floating around symbolizing the angles/messengers(I hope I am correct), the lights that are lifted from the floor to display Olympic symbol and the huge display depicting the printing press. What is remarkable is that a lot many of these were completely mechanical. The projection on the ceilings and everything is simply remarkable.

I’ll get back to watching it :). Will post updates when I see more stuff.

PHP to python. Why?

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

Well.. let me give a background first. I have been working with PHP for quite some time(>3 years) on various projects from small 500 lines to more then 20K lines. I like to keep up with the latest (or should I say hot since python is in no way “latest“) trends. Lately there has been quite a lot of buzz around “which language” is the best for web development. I thought may be it is time to experiment! Firstly I am ignoring Ruby/Ruby on rails completely. I just never got to like it much to put in extra effort. The hosting for ruby can be quite expensive and I like to have complete control on my code(down to last for loop :) which I dont think ruby on rails provides. If I am wrong, someone please comment and set it up for me.

Coming back to the comparison, I really am not the right person to judge which is better. But I know for sure: Even if I can do everything possible on web through PHP, there is one thing missing. The clean structure. For those who say that there is an “object oriented” way to go about to do things in php, I would like to say that php was never designed to be used that way. There are far too many inconsistencies in php to use oop at a large scale. I came across one more funny thing about it today on Google reader. The post can be found here.

So coming back to my situation, I got introduced to python about a year back in a completely non-web-development setting. The basic syntax and structure does not look or feel like it is good for web development. But it was so clean that I wanted to code in it! But how? I had heard about Django but had never tried to use it. From its description, It felt like it would be really handy to use django if I want to develop something in python. And so I started. About a month back, I did tried to use it. To say it in one line, I could not get it to install. The pages on django website are far too long to fit in my somewhat small brain. I could never get over with the problems compatibilities.

For some reason, my love for python has not gotten over yet. I’ll try to begin using it one more time. This time I have a project that I would like to do with it and so will try to be more careful.

I guess I’ll post soon how it went.

Going back to India

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

No dont worry. I am not doing it tomorrow(or for that matter in near future :) )

Many people have been asking me lately what my plans are now that the masters is almost getting over. I dont think I have any great plans but only a vague idea of what I want. One of the questions that is asked persistently is whether I will stay here in US or will go back to India. Today, someone mailed me an interesting article[PDF] (a local copy can be found here)that relates to this situation. It was an interesting read and a good insight into why one would go to India or stay in US.

Although I have not yet figured it out, I will do so some day soon enough.