I went off twitter for a week. I was bored and tired of my timeline. Reading ‘The catcher in the rye’ made me realise how much I dislike phonies. My twitter timeline is full of phonies. Fake outrage & intellectualism, snobbery, stupid attention-whory humor, trolling – is what my timeline is full of these days. Need to get rid of these blogger turned twitter celebrities.

Love.

Last week I was told that I had once said that I’d never fall in love. That was such a stupid thing to say.

Work.

I got an unexpected promotion recently. This new three word shiny designation makes me slightly uncomfortable. Anyway, these titles and peanuts mean little.. what matters is the work. If you love your work, if it makes you feel like owning up, if you get to learn & grow, what more do you need.

Life.

How do you come to terms with the fact that dreams you’ve invested in so much can never come true. A new dream, a new hope?

Programming.

I’ve been playing with python, virtualenv, django, gunicorn, celery, nginx since last few days. It makes me feel good. I’ve also been working on HTML5 video, which leaves me frustrated at times. This reminds me of a point made in Code Complete,

how you spend your programming days will depend on where you are on the technology wave

Kaylee.

I like Kaylee Frye from Firefly for her chipper, bubbly, never say die, cheerful attitude. I wish I had a friend like her. I wish everybody gets a friend like her.

Agneepath.

Until recently I hadn’t watched a movie on the day of its release. Agneepath is an average movie. I watched it for the music. I’ve been a big fan of Ajay-Atul’s Natrang. The music was good. I loved `gun gun guna` and `deva shree ganesha`. Picturisation of `shah ka rutba` was disappointing; as my compatriot said, “it looked like Comedy Circus”. The only moment I felt connected was during the brother-sister reunion, thanks to the lovely `abhi mujh mein nahi`. I don’t even want to mention that chickengunya song, I like the Marathi version though.

Meditations.

Whenever I feel depressed or sad or frustrated or angry, I think of Meditations. I read a page or two if I have my copy of it nearby. It helps me look at things from a stoic’s perspective.

There are couple of other interesting things happening.. but until they are executed successfully, no one gets to know about them.

I had to cross the busy main road to get to the bus stop. So I put my mobile back into my pocket and was waiting for an opportunity to cross. A car, lorry and few bikes were approaching. Crossing at that moment looked tough. The usually cautious me was now all excited, thanks to the mood changing tweet; I decided to cross the road anyway.

I was midway when I realized that I had misjudged; crossing was impossible at the speed the car was approaching. Every time I find myself wrong, I go into a shock, curse myself and feel bad. The thought that the car would run over me was secondary to the outrage for misjudging. Instead of moving out of the way, I stood there perplexed for a second. And then there was the sudden realization that I was going to die if I stood there doing nothing.

With all the happy-happy things I had planned for next few days, dying wasn’t what I wanted. I turned and jumped to move out of the way but it was too late. The lorry hit me; the front wheel ran over my gut; rear wheel over my legs. I died on the spot. As I was moving out of my body, I remembered Yoda’s words..

Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things. You are reckless.

It’s a PITA to remember password for each and every website we use and so, people with brains came up with an open standard protocol called OpenID. Google, Yahoo!  are famous among the many OpenID providers. If you disregard the technicalities, ‘Sign in with Facebook’ is similar to OpenID in terms of the end-user experience.

Apart from “it’s not a open standard” rant, my problem with ‘Sign in with Facebook’ is that it wants to share my private information with third party websites.

When all I want is to login to use your website, why do I need to share my friends list & other information, give you permission to access and post data? I don’t want to share my information with your stupid website. I am apprehensive about what you might do with this data. And, I don’t like it. I, just, want, to, login! Can you please provide more options?

I like “login with Google“. It’s simple and minimal, it’s OpenID and it does not share my private data with others. It serves the problem of remembering too many passwords for too many sites.

I love how Stackoverflow handles their login. It provide me with multiple options to login and is neat and elegant. I hope these new and upcoming startups learn from them.

This gives me an opportunity to learn some server admin stuff and most importantly freedom to install and use any technology, language I chose to. Now, this is fun!

There are only a couple of apps on appb.in for now. Will be moving few more apps in some days, and probably designing many more.

Later in the night, I had to sleep in the living room all alone. There was a window right across and I could sense the branches of a tree moving to the wind. It was creepy, I felt as is someone was peeping, a thief perhaps. I woke up suddenly; frightened I looked at the window. Everything seemed fine.

And then, I woke up again, in this world.

I’ve seen this happen so may times. In our day to day lives, when things irritate us or when we are high, we make strong statements; And when these statements go out to people without proper context, they are misunderstood.

Another reason for misunderstandings is that we assume things to be either Black or White. With least bit of reasoning, we embrace sides and talk about it vehemently. And there will be opinionated people listening who will be offended by such talk; and there will be arguments.

By nature, we are judgemental, we always look for Yes or No answers. Given a generic question, one cannot answer with a Yes or No; there will be Ifs and Buts. One has to take into consideration the specific issue at hand and the numerous limitations and problems. And when we arrive at our conclusions, we cannot just yell it out at the world; we need to give the context and reasons, because without them people cannot truly understand the conclusions.

~May the Force be with You.

This is bad news for people in countries like China where twitter.com is blocked. They cannot login into 3rd party twitter applications with username/password; they cannot login via twitter.com.

Also, people who access twitter from office(where twitter.com is blocked) will not like closing down of basic auth. But this brings up an opportunity for someone to come up with a twitter web client. The idea is that a user opens an account with an app and authorizes it(to use twitter) when he is at home; later he can log into this app from office and use twitter. Although there are clients like hootsuite which do it, they are targeted at enterprise-y, business-ey people. A simple application like iTweet or dabr would be a hit among the code monkeys.

If built on google’s appengine, the app can use google auth for the user registration part. There are app engine compatible twitter libraries available on github. Build a decent & basic interface and you have your next big twitter app.  So, who’s building it?

UPDATE: dabr has done it.

Apart from entertainment, what do you take from a movie or a book? I believe, Ideas! Ideas that change the way we think, Ideas that change the way we perceive, Ideas that change our lives. Ideas are like seeds, they need proper conditions for germination. Some of these Ideas require that we be mature ‘enough’ to understand them. Matrix wouldn’t have made any sense if you had watched it when you were 10.

Genesis of an Idea:
Years ago, I had fantasised about entering people’s dreams; I’ve also fantasised about reading people’s mind. How did I get these Ideas of reading minds or dreams? Did this Idea come out of pure curiosity or was it planted by some external media(a book or a radio show or a video)? I don’t know. But I remember that “Time Teasers” was the episode that planted the Idea of stopping time (actually, you could move way faster than others).
When we generate Ideas, are we the real creators? Or are there subconscious influences that help us build ideas?

Reality or Illusion:
While Inception gives you freedom to come up with your own interpretations, it also makes you think about the world we live in {like Matrix}; is it real? or is it mirage? Are we Independent entities? Or are there superior entities controlling us? Is there a way we could determine if this weren’t an Illusion? But how could we? Could it not be that the Idea that this world is illusion was planted by those superior entities? How could you believe in Science and Mathematics, they might as well be well thought out concepts that we were made to discover. We could be part of a simulation, created by those superior entities to study their own evolution. All your beliefs could be Ideas and thoughts planted by these superior entities. [wait, in the society that you live in, aren't they?] How do you judge upon the validity or truthfulness of this reality? And how do you plan to validate this method you will be using to validate reality? Your methods of validation could be as Illusionary as the ‘reality’ you are validating. There is no way you could know the truth(if there is something called truth).

Guilt:
DiCaprio’s last two movies have had this concept of guilt shaping the lead character’s role. Guilt: the emotion when our Consciousness judges our actions based on the Moral conventions that we have agreed upon for our Society’s existence, and finds fault with our actions. Most painful of the guilts are not those that break moral conventions but those that arise from one’s actions that affect the way one wants to foresee (his own) future. In these cases, the Guilt is embedded deep inside the mind; Irrational thoughts take over the mind and there is nothing but pain until one comes to terms with reality.

While I cannot judge direction, acting and stuff like that, I can give an opinion based on how the movie made me feel. It was decent movie in terms of emotions it generated. In terms of ideas, I am bemused that the ideas are being considered completely new and innovative. For me, the high expectations ruined the experience. I was waiting for that “WOW!” moment till the end.

I find no fault with the movie; I find fault with the audience which went berserk over it. Maybe, it was the ‘want’ of the audience to find and associate with something special, something that redefines things around and creates an illusionary world. Or maybe not. I don’t know.

Months ago, there was a twitter account conducting a contest where a scrambled word was tweeted; challenge was to be the first to reply with the correct answer. A new word was posted every hour and to score more points, one had to be watching twitter all the time. It seemed a perfect task for automation(sigh!). It didn’t take much time in hacking code to poll, read and reply to the tweet but I needed a word unscrambler. Being a ‘Hacker’, I didn’t want to write code for that. There were websites that did it but lacked APIs. I plugged in SimpleHTMLdom which provides jQuery like syntax for ‘scraping’ data from websites and my hack was ready.

Prologue

Few days back during lunch time chat, I asked a friend if he could build an app that could return the proper sentence when given a scrambled sentence as input. This reminded me of the ‘twitter reply’ hack I had written months ago and thought I could write code for ‘unscrambing’ words. Just then, I was re-discovering Google App Engine with python so chose it for solving(showing off?!) this.

Action

Straight forward solution to this problem was finding all permutations of the characters in the scrambled word and then doing a dictionary match. There are lots of links on the web that provide word lists. I used one such word list for the dictionary. itertools.permutations and a dictionary-search loop later, I had the required results. This worked fine for short words but as the length increased, it took more and more time.

This solution wasn’t usable; waiting for seconds(and minutes) just to find all the possible permutations is simply stupid(more so if it’s a web application).

Next challenge was to bring down the time taken; somehow convert this exponential(?) problem to linear. Solution to this was simple. For a given word and all other words formed by scrambling the characters in it, the count(number of repetitions) of each character in the word remains the same.

For example: In both god and dog, the characters g,o,d are repeated once.

god => a=0; b=0; c=0; d=1; …. g=1;…. o:1;….

dog => a=0; b=0; c=0; d=1; …. g=1;…. o:1;….

All I had to do was create a data structure that held the character counts (of characters) for each word in the word list. This data structure went into a database and finding unscrambled words became as simple as firing a single query with a where clause to match the character counts. Thus time consuming permutation-generation part was ousted but at the price of storing this new data structure. Time complexity reduced at the cost of Space complexity.

word count integer representation

Fròm then on, it was straight forward coding, uploading and (long, tiresome, boring) waiting for the cron jobs to run for dataset generation+ insertion in GAE datastore.  The app is called wordunscrambler.

Epilogue

As I was storing the character counts as integers in the datastore, it occupied lot of space. Though this wasn’t really a serious issue, I wanted to reduce this space complexity. Solution to this was based on an (very apt)assumption that the character count in a word would not be greater than 9 and it could be represented by a single decimal number(Could have also chosen hexadecimal but I love decimals). The character counts were now represented as a string; the first character of this string represented character count of character ‘a’, second character corresponded to ‘b’ and so on.

word count string representation(second character represents ‘a’ here)

26 integers(which are stored as long in GAE datastore) representing a word’s character-count were now replaced by a 26 character string(unicode). Thus, Space complexity reduced. The site as of now runs this code.

By the way, integer representation of character count has an advantage over string representation in that if we need to find all possible words(taking ‘any’ number of characters at a time) that can be formed fròm given characters, the query could use a ‘lesser than’ in the where clause(instead of character code matching).

PS1: As this was more of a let-me-find-a-solution exercise, google’s help was not taken.

PS2: You could also call this ‘Anagram finder’.