From past few months, I have been trying to put something together at work and am using SqlAlchemy extensively. I am just impressed by the dedication and sincerity exuded by this open source project. Its very hard to be not inspired by Mr. Michael Bayer, who is one of the authors.

Just check out the groups and you will see that every single question gets an answer., most of the times as a bonus with related links to documentation and other resources.  Checkout their timeline ; I dont think most commercial projects carried out by teams of people who get paid for their work will be able to deliver so consistently. Every issue you report to the groups are analyzed and if they are true bugs, are ticketed, fixed and released in the next change set. You will also be notified about the ticket number and release version where it has been fixed.

Most open source projects begin being very helpful and active, but eventually they will loose traction and skid off to the "Junk Software Universe" far out into the outer space. But SqlAlchemy is been around for a considerably long time and still hasn't lost the spark. They have kept going and have helped so many people to get something working which otherwise couldn't have been possible.

This blog post is a tribute to Michael Bayer, SqlAlchemy and the community. Not that I am Leo Babuta and I get 50000 diggs per day on my blog, but I wanted to highlight what I have witnessed. 

Cheers SqlAlchemy, Cheers Michael Bayer.

--

“No effort is ever lost”

Karmayoga, Bhagavadgita

I have this amazing friend who has more data than a corporate data center can manage. If you give him a $ for every byte of data he owns, then he will figure in the 10 most richest Indians. Anyway, I got the privilege of copying a subset of his data onto my 500GB harddrive (Obviously, it ran out of space). But I now have over 100GB worth movies and I have a difficult time figuring out what to watch.

I had to do a IMDB search for every title I see and pretty soon I realized its a pain in the ass. I did a small hack to ease my burden and it is here. (http://www.esnips.com/doc/5150768b-1e27-4847-962d-da5b55e8e625/IMDBLookup) I had to put it on esnips because my so called personal website dream has managed to remain one. (here and here).

The zip file has a registry hack, just double clicking will put required info in your registry. It manages to bring up a nice little "IMDB Lookup" menu when you right click on a file. Copy the imdb.py Python script to your c:\windows\system32 folder, so that its there in your system path. Now you are good to go, whenever you see a movie file on your computer, just right click on it and select IMDB Lookup. If the movie title is neat and clear, your favourite browser pops up with IMDB description of the movie. Thats all it is.




IMDB is unfortunately blocked at office, but you can see that URL is valid and perfect. Most probably it will  work for you.

PS : You need Python 2.4 and above( freely available) for this hack. A C exe could have done the job, but.. why bother.

--
If everything else fail, try Python.

Tags: hack python
Current Mood: blank

1. Its business for the hospital, its personal for you.
2. No matter how healthy you were the day before, you shall be deemed a patient by various means. Ex. Hospital Uniform, medicines.
3. You shall witness a sudden spurt of love and emotions among your not-so-distant relatives.
4. Every tom, dick and harry shall visit you and make sure that you have noted their presence. The motivation could be concern, love or.... ah lets not name it.
5. If you haven't ever believed in God, you shall.
6. If you believe in God, you shall feel him.
7. You will be proved highly ignorant of your body and its functioning and you shall wish you had paid a little more attention in the boring biology class so that you could have taken up medicine instead.
8. You will feel the taste of humanity when ward boys, nurses do their service with sincerity and honesty.
9. The ward boys and nurses shall grow more closer to you than your blood relatives.
10. You shall realize - afterall, there is still good in this world. And it is true.
11. You will pledge to live a more satisfactory life, to do more service, to be a little more nicer to people, to smile a little more. And lets hope we cherish that spirit.
12. All of a sudden you will realize how PRECIOUS your health is. I mean we all know and talk about it, but you shall REALIZE.
13. All of a sudden you will realize how delicate and yet how marvelous your body is.
14. All of a (not-so) sudden you will start to see how in body, mind and soul the other person is so similar to you.
15. You will learn to be thankful for everything. To the workers who constructed the hospital in the first place, to BSNL for their mobile network, to the ground floor cafeteria for supplying with much needed food and beverages, to the surgeon's teachers for teaching him so that he could save your life today... I mean you will be thankful for everything.

And if you are lucky enough to realize exactly how valuable is your presence on this earth - you shall remain THANKFUL for the rest of your life.

PS : All the above revelations and possibly more could happen faster and shall be much more gratifying if you have a Mediclaim Policy/Insurance.
PPS : This is not an advertisement for any health insurance provider.

I wish that all these revelations shall come to you all without every having to visit a hospital.

Tags: hospital, life
Current Mood: calm

I had never woken up on time before. But this day I was up well before the alarm time @ 3:20 a.m and surprisingly my wife was too. We all got ready in silence; the ride to the place was painfully long though my father-in-law drove as fast as he could, in fact the fastest as far as I can remember. He usually never misses noticing a hump on the road, but that day the car galloped over it and he blamed it on dim light. Nobody replied though.

We reached the place “Trinity Heart Foundation” around 4:45 a.m. I thought I was calm and composed, for my external conscience I was. But I could feel my heart pound in my chest and could do nothing about it. No amount of “deep breath”ing, no amount of “Hey, I am perfectly calm” affirmations could stop it, I eventually gave up.

We rushed to the ward number 312. There he was, sitting naked except for a small strip of cloth tied around his waist. His whole body was yellowish and wet with a solution they just had smeared. He had numerous miniature cuts on his chest and upper back, blood oozing out in small droplets. The red blood combined with the yellowish solution had created its own peculiar shade. I remembered my childhood; I would mix red and yellow to paint skies creating effect of sunrise or sunset – by far my easiest paintings.

Well, this was no painting – I wish it was, but it wasn’t. It was agonizing for me to watch him like that; I couldn’t avoid scolding that bastard who shaved off hair on his chest and back. The doctor hates even the smallest hair bud, eh? He said, his skin was burning but otherwise his face was calm, his hair was neatly combed, he had a kind of glow in his face and above all – he was smiling. It was my father, 55 and about to go under the knife, with all grace and calm I could only dream about! I am now impressed that I was still holding up.

They say you should live everyday as though you would be dead on the next. This kept running through my mind in an infinite loop and I don’t know why. My mom, who broke out crying 3 days before for the mere thought of my dad undergoing an angiogram was now calm and composed. In fact she had developed confident acceptance, optimism and courage in those 3 days. My brother seemed tensed but was holding up. My wife was dealing it with ‘Elegance’, with a subtle reassurance – god I love her.

It was 5:45 a.m, the stretcher arrived. I hugged my dad; I felt his steadiness of mind flow through me. This was not a case when the patient who is supposed to undergo ‘Bypass Surgery’ would cry, howl and crave for reassurance. I remembered the day he underwent angiogram. Everybody had told me that it would take 20 minutes approx., after which a doctor would come and call you in, show you the imaging on a computer, you give a green signal for angioplasty, they go back in and come back out in the next 45 minutes, you pay a bill of around 1.5 Lakh and take him home. Everybody is happy; that’s it, it was that simple and that is what I had hoped for. But as usual in my case, it can’t be that simple. I had a surprise waiting for me, it was more than an hour and nobody came out. Later a doctor walked out for lunch - perfectly normal, and all he told was the chief doc was busy and would call us once he is free. I was pissed off, I barged in and found that my dad was moved back to the CCU. Oh wait; they haven’t even done the angiogram? So much for my optimism, they had done it, doctor was back in his cabin and they had moved the patient back. I had to wait a good 30 minutes before I was called in.

It is in times like these, I really really really hate having a so called ‘know-all’ elder at my side. My dad’s elder brother had fallen to my side and wanted to accompany me to the doctor. I have great respect for him, and I know he likes my dad very much. But hey, I don’t want him to do my decisions. We sat in the doc’s cabin, and he said “All 3 blocked, its better to go for a CABG (Coronary Artery Bypass Graft)”. Whamo! Though I had seen a real life video of CABG procedure, I had hundred questions in my mind – My dad is a diabetic, hypertensive; will he be able to recover? Is there no other alternative? How many stents would it require for an angioplasty?.... And there goes my uncle.. “Doctor, please go ahead with CABG. If you remember, my wife had an angioplasty here 10 months back. I am planning to bring her for another checkup…”. For god’s sake, this isn’t about his wife. If I think back now, I am sure I was a bit rude on him to ask him to keep quiet for a moment and let me clarify my doubts. But I guess, it was required for that moment.

Well, that’s how he was scheduled for CABG. Everybody said not to break this news out to my Dad but I couldn’t help laughing. My Dad is one of the bravest and the most courageous men I have come across. I went back into the CCU and he asked me “When will they do the Bypass?” He knew it, had accepted it and moreover he knew he will be fine after the surgery. This will power is required to make his way back from the OT to normal life.

Now, back to the stretcher – We all wished him good luck and prayed for his health and long life. He assured us; he will be back and will see us in the evening. Then it was all hurried, we went to the elevator, reached second floor, saw him into the Operation Theater and the door was locked.

My heart was still pounding and I could feel it ram into my chest walls. I was scared that the lady at the Blood Bank will refuse to take my blood because of high blood pressure. We still had to give them 3 units of fresh blood and we all went to the blood bank around 6:30 a.m. My brother and my cousin had no problems. But as expected, though I was externally calm and composed my BP was 135/92. I guess the lady understood my plight, asked me lay down for a while, checked my BP again and told me it was back to normal. But I was sure she lied to me (it must have been still on the higher side), anyway I donated 350 ml of blood and it just came gushing down in 2-3 minutes. Thanks to high BP!

We came back to the hospital, gave them the fresh blood units and waited. I was doing pray-walk to the OT-walk back to the balcony-pray in a loop for the next 4.5 hours. I was so busy doing this; I didn’t even notice the main surgeon walking out around 10:10 a.m, his briefcase swinging by his side. After a minute long realization, I ran down three floors to catch him but he was nowhere to be seen. Everybody was angry on me as though it was my mistake the surgeon was so busy he didn’t even tell us how it went.

The OT doors opened around 11:00, they told us the operation was successful. I couldn’t talk to anybody, walked back to the balcony, stood staring at the polluted skies thanking god for everything. We caught a glimpse of him as he was being shifted to the CCU – his head was turned to his right, mask on his mouth, pipes running in and out of his body like snakes and big glass jars containing different colored liquids in a trolley.

What I still can’t make sense of is that, how a hospital can change the entire outlook of a patient. A few hours ago, he was a perfectly normal man, he had thoughts, he spoke, he felt, he knew about his relationships. Now here he goes, completely oblivious to everything – his machinery has been repaired and his brain is put to artificial sleep. We are all but a pile of flesh, blood and bones. It is that 3 pound mass between our shoulders that causes all this illusion. Hats off to the creator!

I have hazy recollections of the next two days. It pretty much consisted of bribing the guard at the ICU door, being afraid of causing an infection, trying to take a glimpse of my dad lying on the bed, supplying food and water and staying awake all night. He was shifted back to the ward on the third day. The post surgical phase of Bypass grafting is the most crucial period, utmost care and precaution needs to be taken. He was struggling to breathe normally, he couldn’t get up on his own and his lower lungs had collapsed. Slowly and painfully he grew stronger by the days and a week after the surgery we brought him home.

Here he is, courageously fighting pain and discomfort, recovering slowly from the surgery. Hey Dad, you are one of the bravest and courageous men I have ever come across. Hats off to your strength, persistence, optimism and steadiness of mind, Dad! I wish you good health and many more happy years ahead! Cheers to you and cheers to life!

And by the way, my BP had come back to normal a few days after the surgery.

Tags: cabg, dad, life
Current Location: Bangalore
Current Mood: calm

You are The Sun

Happiness, Content, Joy.

The meanings for the Sun are fairly simple and consistent.

Young, healthy, new, fresh. The brain is working, things that were muddled come clear, everything falls into place, and everything seems to go your way.

The Sun is ruled by the Sun, of course. This is the light that comes after the long dark night, Apollo to the Moon's Diana. A positive card, it promises you your day in the sun. Glory, gain, triumph, pleasure, truth, success. As the moon symbolized inspiration from the unconscious, from dreams, this card symbolizes discoveries made fully consciousness and wide awake. You have an understanding and enjoyment of science and math, beautifully constructed music, carefully reasoned philosophy. It is a card of intellect, clarity of mind, and feelings of youthful energy.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

Tags: meme
Current Location: Noida
Current Mood: blank

The best problem solving algorithm I have ever seen. ROTFLOL!!



---
Arthur : "You know at times like this I wish I had listened to my mother"
Ford : "Oh, what did your mother say?"
Arthur : "I don't know, I didn't listen"

Tags: fun, problem
Current Location: Noida
Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: Babel fish translating the poetry of a Vogon

Its been raining here since I woke up in the morning. Its so beautiful, even the concrete giant apartments have managed to look little sexier. I spontaneously had an idea, and without much thinking I did it :

Me:

Dear xxx:
 
I am planning to resign. I would like to discuss this with you, please let me know your convenient time.
 
Thanks,
Harish

Him:

Harish,
This was least expected at this juncture from you, lets discuss.
Regards,

xxx

Trust things will be beautiful as always :)

--
There are three things which people will never get tired of having :
Money, more money and little more than more money.

Tags: intuition, work
Current Location: Noida
Current Mood: amused

God has fixed the bug! I waited for two days to see if the bug reoccurs, but I cant wait to sign off  on that :)

--
Nice Clients will always sign off on the fixes much earlier than others.

Tags: delhi, summer
Current Location: Noida
Current Mood: cheerful

Flashback:

Something must be wrong!

I woke up in the morning (?) to find myself sweating, my bed was wet, the pillow was wet. Damn, was it my roommates playing pranks on me? Did they spill water all over my cot and forgot about it? Neither did I remember having a fever the previous day, in which case this sweat could be taken as a good omen of fever having a nice little send off in the night. Something must be wrong!

I looked outside, the Sun God was already up, I thought he had had a good night’s sleep, judging by how bright and active he was. Ah! I was supposed to reach office little early today, and it was already looking like noon outside. My watch showed just 6:30! Another prank? Or my watch just gave up trying to keep track of time? It doesn't matter; I had already missed the meeting. Guys won’t be happy at all!

I thought, I can give some bullshit about having a jetlag from my previous day’s flight from Bangalore to Delhi! Anyway, I went to the bathroom, just was getting ready to brush my teeth – I was sweating again! I turned on the tap to wash my face, it felt hot. The door felt hot, the floor felt hot, anything I touched felt hot. I knew I had a fever; I should take a leave after all. I lathered up with soap, and before I picked up a mug of water, the lather was gone! It got washed away by itself?

Everybody was still sleeping! God, what’s wrong with these guys? Something was really wrong, I could sense that! I reached office. I was preoccupied with finding a reason to justify myself for being late. On the contrary, the office looked deserted; my watch was showing 8:00. I knew everybody must have gone for lunch. I had screwed up! Can’t somebody gift me Hermione’s time turner?

Well, somebody had gifted me in fact! People started coming in one by one, nobody looked like they came from lunch because I know how people look when they come from lunch – Most of them look like they were mildly poisoned, on Wednesdays non vegetarians look so miserable because the guy who served them made sure that they got the leg piece of the smallest chicken that sacrificed itself for the sake of humanity. My fat manager also came; the US guys were still online waiting for the conf call. It was going fine; I was on time!

I shared this experience with one of the veterans in the office; he gave me that small, paternal merciful smile and said ‘Welcome to Delhi’s summer son!’. After all I was alright, my watch was alright; But nothing else was, everything seemed to have a bad typhoid running high temperatures.

Hmm.. I still can’t give up thinking that something is wrong, and it can be fixed. There is a small bug in the software God is using to run Delhi and its suburban areas. May be I can help him fix that. Or else I have resolved to write all my bogs in eclipse, till God hires somebody or fixes this by himself.

Present:

It’s been a week now, and I don’t think God is making any progress. In the meantime, I continue to live in denial, and I still think something….. just a small thing has gone wrong, and he can fix it.

 

 

Tags: delhi, summer
Current Location: Noida
Current Mood: drained

This will be a a long one...

After an year of hard work, our whole team were anxious and waiting when the customer finally decided to buy the new product. It wasn't easy for anybody, neither for us nor for the client - New product means a lot of change, and a lot of questions about performance and reliability and business usually doesn't like 'new' changes.

However, I landed in Tokyo on Mar 4, 2007; to represent my team and help the client transition over to the new world. I had a room in Keio Plaza hotel in the heart of Shinjuku area. If japanese gave me such hospitality, I knew they would be expecting something unnatural from me. My US managers chose me out of everyone (I thought its because they trust me so much which might be true, but now I have another perspective of looking at it).

Well the D-day had begun on 5 march, with a public relations manager from the client office waiting to escort me precisely at 7:00 a.m. It was a beautiful day, people walking briskly to their destinations with formal suits and overcoats, carrying little briefcases - uncommonly professional. I had worn my first suit too which I had bought a day before for 10,000 bucks. I just arrived at the office and went straight to work, the only social moment being performing the Japanese ritual of handing over the visiting card and bowing.

Everything was set, I had a private DSL line, company laptop, VPN Id, everything. The users were already on the new system, and for first 2-3 hours everything was going fine. The system was very friendly, highly responsive and people were happy. But I was anxious and so was the team. Everybody were up, though it was in the middle of the night in US. We had a quick conference call, all the AVPs, the COO on the client side and US managers. It was a path they had decided to take which has no return ticket. Once they are on the new system, once the processing completed for that single day - that was it, they have to live with change, the new system.

The anticiaption was killing me. Though I am very much impressed with what we had accomplished and proud about where we have reached considering how it was in the begining, I still knew places which required attention and according to me were still less than perfect. But, that was a day 2 concern and the client didn't care about it anyway.

I had got atleast 100 calls in 2 hours, requesting security changes, account unlocks and stuff like that, but all that was expected. No major issues still.

And damn, then it started. One of the users couldn't see any fields (Japanese) displayed on one of the transaction screens and the AVP started running around, trying to describe the problem in his English which is usually difficult to understand. I thought it was a major issue, but within few minutes could find out that it was a language setting problem on the user's PC.

Nothing much happened, but I still had the AVPs and CIO standing behind me and watching everything I do on the system. It was criminally freaky.

Phew, another such problem. A user was getting a creep error message, which didn't give me anything useful whatsoever. Then it started happening with all the users, then all the real time transactions gave the same creep error message. And I knew, we had it coming down on us.

I started surfing through the amazingly huge logs, comparing time stamps of when the error occured.. it was like a thriller movie. Just after a minute, I had all the above mentioned people standing behind me, breathing down on my neck and asking me every 30 seconds whether I fixed it or not. Its a beauty of the computer technology that, it doesn't give a rats ass even though the management is stark ravingly mad at you and yelling. To make the situation more interesting, they told me to solve whatever it is in 35 minutes. Of course, I accept they had every right in the world to tell me so; it was their business which was going to dogs.

I wanted to call my US manager, and these guys never let me speak in private; The AVP himself dialled and kept quiet during the whole time trying to smell if theres anything fishy, till I specifially mentioned that he too is in the call. Ok., now its up to managers, let them bark at each other and wonder why pluto is no more considered a planet or something; I was back to work. But its really funny and a great personal dilemma on what information to disclose to the client and what to be kept secret. One wrong word, and the deal goes to hell. Though everybody there asked me everything, all I said was it needs to be discussed with my manager and team; I was being loyal and was ready to pay the price for it.

I came back to my system, and all logs were looking great to me. Nobody could determine what the damn issue was and I had only 20 minutes left in my pocket. I wanted to recycle the server (Of course its a windows machine, and there's no fix better than restarting the application). But anyway, they had decided to backout to the old system in 10 minutes. In the interest of the client everybody agreed to cut back, and in 5 minutes they were back to business. I restarted the application and tried to recreate whatever happend and good lord, things were perfectly fine!!!

Anyway, we had already blown it and the root cause for the issue still refused to reveal itself till we get few sherlock holmes to the scene. But the issue never reoccured once we went back, and everybody told me it was really unfortunate that such a thing had happened. I was amazed on how calm I was, and nothing stuck me the whole day. I was wondering what was there to take personally offending when one of my managers gave me some soothing words of not to take anything personal.

It hit me quite late, not until the next day I went to office. I didn't have anything to do there, my mission there had no more relevance and meaning. Of course, we had managed to find the problem and I could explain to them clearly what had happened, but thats all I had to do. And all the people there were so good and friendly which made me feel very guilty to waste time and do no good to them. They had spent so much on me and I couldn't ignore that fact. Its at such times that one will realize that Business is what that drives technology. Our brainchild didn't see the world and it was really painful to have that sink in slowly.

I wanted to come back and had already requested to reschedule my tickets. But it was much more painful to hear the AVP coming and telling me that he doesn't like to waste my time here and indirectly indicating to get the hell out of here. It does make perfectly logical sense but its painful.

Of course I did learn some interesting lessons and made some observations, may be I'll post it in another blog.

Well enough is enough, I am now eating a bowl of cornflakes, staring at the skyscrappers from my 27th floor room and wondering how the japanese language evolved and whether it had anything to do with the system not working.

--
There's no free lunch.

Current Location: Tokyo
Current Mood: crushed
Current Music: Something which sounds like Shit happens..