Month: April 2015

Icons/Font related to Indian Culture

There seems to be a clear lack in availability of icons and icon fonts for using in the Indian cultural context. I realized this when we were designing a wedding invitation and we couldn’t find any free available material. So I am creating a list of known objects with cultural relevance and create them in my free time. All the icons you see here are available in Wikimedia Commons in Public Domain License. Feel free to do whatever you want with it. I suggest you upload your derived works to keep the spirit.

  • Nadaswram – Nadaswaram
  • Mridangam – Mridangam
  • Murasu – Murasu
  • Bullock Cart – Bullock cart icon
    • Bullock face – Bullock face
    • Bullock Full – Bullock full
  • Tea Tumbler – Tea Tumbler icon
  • Catapult – Catapult Icon
  • Garland –
  • Pot –
  • Two hands Vanakkam –
  • Cycle Tyre –
  • Cycle tube Catapult –
  • Mango –
  • Banana tree –
  • Full Boil / Half Boil – Half boil Icon
  • Biriyani –
  • Betel Leaf –
  • Head with towel –
  • Head with ear rings and pottu –
  • Kumbam –
  • Banana Leaf with Food –
  • Kolam (Thanks Pravin) –

If you happen to read this and have an idea of what more could be included, kindly leave your suggestions as comments. Or if you happen to find these icons in some form for free usage post the link.

People’s Mobile

Caution: This is a bit wild man.

Here is my idea.

Open a part of the spectrum used for mobile communication for public non-commercial use

Really!? What to do with it?

My plan is to run a community/volunteer/enthusiast/philanthropist sponsored mobile network which is free for everybody to use. That is, if you could bear the initial installation charges. If we could put enough towers in enough places, we could all talk to each other for free, send messages for free, access internet for free throughout our lives. And we can put an end to all this noise that projects messaging apps as technology disruption, we can engage in more serious pursuit that shout on the road internet for net neutrality, do away recharge coupons, payment gateways like PayTM, freeCharge etc., …… oh my, we can actually do away with a lot of unnecessary stuff.Then, we would have an open internet with all the bandwidth that the technology could offer -say “bye bye data plans”.

Wonderful!

Exactly. Isn’t this the best thing you have heard in a while.

Yay, I am the man from an utopian future.

Sadly this won’t happen – Money.

Getting ready for planet CODE

With the end of TeachForIndia Fellowship around the corner, I am contemplating on jumping into the programming world. So here is a checklist of things that I am going to put up in place and document it along the way.

Get a decent mail ID

Though not strictly related to planet code, I wanted to have a decent email id. The one I used ~~aruntheguy at gmail~~ was created when I was 15 and not so professional. Hence I have moved the mail to arunmozhi.in.

Creating a online presence

These days online presence is mostly Social Media. I deleted my Facebook account and have only Twitter, but that alone isn’t sufficient.

So,
Moved blog from static-site Pelican back to wordpress for easy theming and maintanence
 Created a home page where I can showcase stuff

Customer Research

Making use of a skillset is all about selling it. So what do the buyers look for? Being a follower of Coding Horror I started of with his post on How to hire a programmer.

Here are the things I learnt:
1. Know to really write a program – I pass
2. Should have a portfolio – Need to create a portfolio page
3. Be culturally fit for the role – Depends on the company
4. Answer computer science theoritical/tricky/nerdy qustions – Well you can’t really prepare for them, can you? May be the theory part, but again when was the last time I thought about hash tables, 3rd year of my college?
5. Expect an audition project or a real world problem to solve.
6. Pitch in front of small group – have mixed feelings about this. But good to know this might be coming.

1 is done, 2 requires some work, 3 can’t really be worked on, 4 is subjective on how we look at it, solving puzzles and learning nerdy jokes is not the point, it shows the recruiter how we approach a problem and how much passionate about programming is a person. I will leave them at that. Finally, the points 5 and 6 are subjective to personal preference and circumstances as outlined in the comments by various people. I am sort of going to forget them for now.

Product preparation

I am the product, in case you are wondering. The article cited above and others linked in that article give a general idea about the product.
With that in mind, and my long time personal goals, here is the list of things I have in mind to do:

  1. Learn touch-typing!! Yeah, I am a pecker – albeit a fast one. – Done
  2. Learn Vim to the extent I am not going into v mode everytime to delete a set of words. – Ever learning
  3. Get core commit rights for QGIS – its time to work on itCouldn’t fit in time.
  4. Create a Portfolio/Resume/HireMe page
  5. Learn some tools of trade:
    • Plain text manipulations – Regex
    • Shell scripting
    • Code Editor – Vim
    • Version Control – Git + Github
    • Debugging Tools
    • Unit Testing Frameworks
  6. …….

I guess I will add more to the list as I set the goals. For now this should keep me focused.

Apparix – Bookmarking in terminal

When working in a large code base like Quantum GIS or when dealing with a lot of repositories in the machine, it is always tedious to cd all the way to the folder we require to move to. Enter apparix, an excellent linux tool I found by googling “bookmarking in the terminal”. This blog post has the complete details of how to use it.

Yay, no longer cd goto/project/src/core/of/module1 and again cd ../../../test/number/three. I can simply do

$ bm projectsrc
$ bm test3
$ bm fancypants4

to bookmark my locations and simply

$ to projectsrc
$ to test3
$ to fancypants4

One more tool added in the arsenal to improve productivity.