Baiju Muthukadan's Blog

I thought just to write something now. Today is Ugadi [1], a few days back only I heard this word. This is a festival in Karnataka and some other parts of Deccan region of India. I am from Kerala [2], we have a similar festival coming up in next month called Vishu [3] . So happy Ugadi to all ! . Today is leave for my company [4], so we got 3 days consecutive leave. I could have gone to my home, but for some reason I postponed it to next week. One reason is that my wife's final year exam is starting today, so I though let she study :) Remember my last post about Zope 3 [5], I wrote there that Zope 3 is evolving. Today morning I came to office to explore Zope 3 and Buildout. (I don't yet have a laptop, so office is the only place where I can do some coding) I am sitting alone in this big office now, oh! what a silence !! Today I manged to run a Zope 3 application solely from egg [6] Oh! I cannot write anymore, I think I am feeling loneliness now. Hmm.. better to go to ...

This is my first blog entry in this year, so, Happy new Year!. I implemented one proposal by Jim Fulton and committed to trunk two weeks back [1]. I moved to bangalore on 1st january as part of my new job at ZeOmega [2]. Then... well, today evening I attended BangPypers meet [3]. Now I am in an internet browsing center near BDA Complex at Banasankari 2nd Stage in Bangalore. This is for the first time I am coming to Bangalore. I want to write more about this place and life. OK, will do it later. [1] http://wiki.zope.org/zope3/LoadingConfigurationFromTheZopeAppEgg [2] http://www.zeomega.com [3] http://bangpypers.org/

Promode has written a good blog entry here: http://pramode-ce.livejournal.com/42465.html . As he said, my intention was to motivate the engineering students to learn Python. I got around 90 minutes. Promode's talk was also included lots of Python, because Python is used in Phoenix (http://nsc.res.in/~elab/phoenix/). It was a really interesting talk, event hough electronics was not my area of interest, I really enjoyed it. I welcome all those who attended this talk to Kerala Python User Group, more details are here: http://kpug.zwiki.org/FrontPage Hmm.. I mentioned Zope 3 too :)

Today I had one Talk on Python at Vidya academy: http://vidyaacademy.ac.in/ I am writing this from their library. Now helping them to install Koha. This is my first Python talk, will write details tomorrow.

I am Baiju M from Kerala (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala) A relatiely new Python programmer, hmm.. now two years :) I am working for a small company based in Calicut, before one and half years (when I joined here) our main language was VB. Now for almost all projects we are using Python, now we are Python Powerd! . For our GUI apps we are using PyGTK and for web we decided to use Zope3 (not yet started though). I hope this is enough for now.

Today is another Sunday, I spend with Zope3 again. First I thought to experiment with Zissue Tracker, but only few renaming done so far. But I wandered through many blog entries related to Zope3. Also, I created a page to aggregate my Zope3 works. http://zissue.berlios.de/z3/

Philipp von Weitershausen, the author of "Web Component Development with Zope 3" has given a list of entry level articles here: http://www.worldcookery.com/Appetizers My article is too listed.

Two year back I was a Koha (http://www.koha.org) consultant, may be the first Koha consultant from India. I did two successful installations, but later when I got a job I stopped my consultancy works. Actually I got many offers from all over India to install Koha. But I found it will be very difficult to support many clients alone. Though two of my customers was happy. Yesterday (Sunday), I visited one of customer. They required few changes in OPAC. In five hours somehow I completed that work. I was constantly referring perlintro, perlretut etc. I think it will be very difficult for a Python programmer to do Perl programming. I have written a document and scripts for ISIS to Koha migrators: http://www.kohadocs.org/CDS_ISIS_to_Koha.html (ISIS versions are distributed by UNESCO since late 60s. and there lots of installation world wide.) Hmm.. now I will get back to office works, I got lots responses for my Zope3 article, so I will improve it.

I created few views and wrote some unit and functional tests, though learning very slow still... I was very excited when my first functional test got run. Now I am catching up with Test Driven Development, but documention is still poor. Subversion repository is here: https://developer.berlios.de/projects/zissue/ I am also planning few simple Zope3 apps, so that I can easily make my first stable release. Day after to morrow is our election to 'Panchayath' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchayat

Yesterday was Thiruvonam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onam) And I didn't made any progress in Zope3 learning, Also I was wondering about this problem: http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope3-users/2005-September/001031.html Today only I got a solution: http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope3-users/2005-September/001038.html Just to track my development, I created a project at BerliOS: https://developer.berlios.de/projects/zissue/ I have committed the source to Subversion, to check out: svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/zissue/trunk/zissue So far only few interfaces, today I will create one view for Comments, and I have to figure out how to handle attachments (implement IFile, how?).

For last 9 months my company was developing an enterprise application. Our main language was Python. Its going to implement all over India by next few months. Next month we will start our new project, Java will be our main language. Now I started refreshing my Java. And this is one thought came to me today, when I looked into Strings in Java. One of Python's primary design principle is that: "Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules." That is, the language should avoid having privileged features that you can't reuse for other purposes. The consequence of this principle is, more generalisation of syntax and semantics of a language. In Python : (of course, there are better ways) age = 9 print "He is " + str(age) + " years old." In Java: int age = 9; String s = "He is " + age + " years old."; System.out.println(s); Concatenating string and integer like this is possible in Java, because it is a "spec...

To I came to my office very early to do some urgent works, but I completed within two hours. And then started going trough lots blogs found in planetpython.org and some mailing lists. Now I am leaving..

I was in Mumbai last week, I went there as part of my company's work.

As I said yesterday, today I went to 'Chaliyar'... I wanted to make it a daily routine.

Usually I wake up at around 7.00 am, In my child hood I used to take my bath at Chaliyar river. I don't know how many months back I went to 'puzha'. Hmm.. tomorrow I will go there. Around 8.00 am I will reach our bus stop. Most of the time I will catch the bus at 8.04, the other choices are at 8.16, then 8.37. After 25 to 30 minutes, bus will reach at 'Mukkam' town (This is the small town I pass in most of my journy). From Mukkam to REC (now NIT) it will take about 15 to 20 minutes.

Day before yesterday (saturday) I attended a workshop by Swaroop (http://www.swaroopch.info/archives/2005/01/30/blogging-from-calicut) and Pradeep (http://www.btbytes.com/) at NIT Campus.

I installed Debian sarge in two machines in our client site. It was really cool.

Sometimes today I will go to city (Calicut) to install GNU/Linux in our clients office, this is the first time I am installing Debian outside my office, I hope it will be a success.

I live in a small village called Pathanapuram, its located at Malappuram disctrict in Kerala (India). I am the joint secratary of Kiranam Library, Arts and Sports Club. We arranged a medical camp with Malabar Eye hospital (Calicut). At 6.30 am I got up from bed, and reached the spot at 7.15, My first tesion was the talk I have to give at end of inauguration session, hhmm.. I got to complete it in few words. There were total 273 patients for testing their eyes. For the time being, this is enough.

I was working day and night from august to november, I don't know whether it is just because of that I felt ill for few weeks, I am still not fully recovered, but this not why I am not blogging, In fact I never thought about blogging seriously. Ok, today I will write about my last saturday's program in my village.