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2012 August 3 [Friday]

Rest in peace Lawgon

By SVAKSHA on 2012 August 3 [Friday], 18:03:00 - THOUGHTS

Am breaking a long hiatus from blogging to report a really sad news :: Kenneth Gonsalves, (lawgon on IRC), a long time Free/Libre software (especially INPycon) contributor is no more. When I first saw this mail in my inbox, I could not believe it was true.

My first interaction with Lawgon was via the LinuxChix mailing lists. Back then, I was surprised to see posts from a "nilgiris" domain name and I assumed he was an USA-NRI actively posting on their lists. Later, the Mumbai-LUG list when I had tried to install his "avsap" accounting software ~ it would not work on my machine and I wrote him a mail with the gory error details. Finally, in 2007, I met "lawgon" on IRC, ##linux-india. I was never an IRC person but when he got banned from the channel, I had a long argument with Devdas (f3ew on IRC) about it - mostly because I felt that the rules were not clear, and even more importantly, felt that rules ought to be implemented uniformly, sans cronyism.

A few moons later, I met him IRL for the first time at the first formation meet for Fosscomm and sat next to him through the whole meeting. In my eyes, he was like a father-figure, a person you can talk to freely, someone who didnt see IT and FLOSS as the road to self-publicity, fame and riches. Rather, he saw Libre software as I did - of, for and by the people. It was nice talking to him and hear the stories via the work he had done at NRC-Foss/AU-KBC.

He was someone I respected because unlike some FOSS people, he actually wrote and released his code publicly: https://bitbucket.org/lawgon, and worked within the community, had no illusions or superiority complex about himself. Most of us in the FLOSS community were his kids age and in my interactions I didnt find him patronizing nor elitist in "demanding" we respect his age. Quite the opposite, he never hesitated to ask for technical help from people younger than him, quite ego less. His fiery rants on his blog (http://lawgon.livejournal.com/) always made me chuckle. There are very few blogs I follow and thusfar, I've read every post of his - strong opinions peppered with character. His own.

In his list communication, he could be quite blunt in his comments, and I've had my moments sparring with him on the lists, but if you take a moment to look behind the scenes, his honesty and sincerity towards Libre software showed. I remember his mail asking me not to leave the Mumbai LUG list and my response on the kind of Libre community (the lack thereof) we foster, which, to my surprise, found an echo with him. I remember his long email rant (about someone which I wont get into in public) where he mentioned "...and I'm scared of you" ~ yeah, I too scrubbed my eyes and smiled at his droll sense of humor, as I typed out an apology.

I remember his IRC comment that he wanted his daughter to meet me and my curiosity piqued ~ this was before I had met him in real life and going by the stereotypical Indian fathers attitude, I very much doubted if they would want their daughters to be like me. Or maybe it was his sense of humor - I'll never know!? Some moons later an email asking for some information on "legal rights of women in India" for her coursework, IRC discussions on virtualenvwrapper (he asked me why I wanted to use it and for a moment I thought he was testing me -- I could not imagine a longtime Python developer (atleast a lot longer than me) asking me that, unless he was pulling my leg or if it was an interview question), discussing a recent Python workshop he held at Kerala, and so many other interactions... {Edit1:: His recent mail on the open source business model has some excellent advice for wannabe entrepreneurs.}

I was hoping to meet him at InPycon this year but now the conference wont be the same without him. I hope and pray his family finds the strength to carry on without him and may his soul rest in peace! You will be missed Lawgon..and try not to kickstart a "GPL Vs. BSD" argument in heaven!

2012 March 11 [Sunday]

Programming with Julia

By SVAKSHA on 2012 March 11 [Sunday], 09:46:00 - Julia

Using (or talking) about R makes me want to rant sometimes and if you've ever written a line of Fortran code, you would have certainly wanted to experiment with a new language stack for scientific programming. Yup, I am aware of scipy, numpy, sympy, sage, et al.. and despite their existence, when I came across this language for scientific programming in January this year, sheer curiosity** made me give it a spin.

Starting the year with a scientific language that has clean syntax and some nicer documentation made me feel warm and fuzzy, until, it refused to build due to a BLAS dependency. That problem didnt last for long though, as I was able to pull a fresh commit which had fixed this issue. Its nice to see an active team having interesting (read, sane) development discussions. A Matlab coder has opined thus about Julia while an R programmer has done a comparison between Julia and R.

After some trial-and-error, I managed to grok its syntax, enough to rewrite an old fortran code in JuliaLang [Julia is still pre-release and I ran Version 0.0.0+1331430882.r69af from Commit 69afb7032d (2012-03-11 07:39:42)]:

#!/usr/bin/env julia
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
#*****************************************************************************
# COPYRIGHT (C) 2012 VidAyer <svaksha@gmail.com>
# LICENSE: GNU AGPLv3, http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html
#*****************************************************************************
# http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_correlation#Geometric_interpretation
# Example, suppose 5 countries have gross national products
# of 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8 billion dollars, resp. Suppose these 5 countries
# (in the same order) are found to have 11%, 12%, 13%, 15%, and
# 18% poverty. Then let x and y be ordered 5-element vectors containing
# the above data: x = (1, 2, 3, 5, 8) and y = (0.11, 0.12, 0.13, 0.15, 0.18).
#*****************************************************************************

gnp = [1, 2, 3, 5, 8]
poverty = [0.11, 0.12, 0.13, 0.15, 0.18]
vectorgnpgnp = 0.0
vectorpovertypoverty = 0.0
vectorgnppoverty = 0.0
costheta = 0.0
n = 1.0

vectorgnpgnp = vectorgnpgnp + gnp[n]*gnp[n]
vectorpovertypoverty = vectorpovertypoverty + poverty[n]*poverty[n]
vectorgnppoverty = vectorgnppoverty + gnp[n]*poverty[n]
costheta = vectorgnppoverty / (sqrt(vectorgnpgnp)*sqrt(vectorpovertypoverty))

# Terminal Out
println("The Vector product value of Cos Theta is: ",costheta)   # correct value should be 0.9208   
println("The Vector product of GNP and Poverty coordinates:  ",vectorgnppoverty) # correct value should be 2.930   
println("The Vector product of GNP is:  ",vectorgnpgnp) # correct value should be 103.0   
println("The Vector product of Poverty coordinates is:  ",vectorpovertypoverty) # correct value should be 0.9830E-01


I was avoiding blogging this code snippet here - code belongs in a DVCS, not in a blog. But I've intentionally not uploaded this program to github because its not fully functional yet -- see my comments within the code. When I cross-check the results from the fortran code (or as mentioned in the WP page --Geometric_interpretation.) I find "sqrt" isnt working as it should -- I need to figure out the syntax a wee bit more, so I'll push this when it works perfectly.


** PS: That it was named after a woman (or atleast I like to think so) isnt what prompted my interest! No kidding!

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2011 July 13 [Wednesday]

E-filing IncomeTax returns in india

By SVAKSHA on 2011 July 13 [Wednesday], 17:31:00 - FINANCE

The Indian government agency that runs the Income-Tax portal  "incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in" has very thoughtfully provided an electronic filing facility for its citizens which enables all tax-payers to file their Tax returns without a trip to the local Income Tax Office. However, their thoughtfulness only extends to Windows users as they have provided the e-forms only in the MSOffice .xls format which will not run any macros on a non-Windows platform. Now, I have not used Windows for many years now and having been forced to pay for a half-baked edition pre-installed on my laptop, I could not wait for my warranty to finish and free up that disk space.

Last week, I found two Open-Office hacks for the ITR forms 1 and 2 at:

  1. http://www.kseboa.org/download/utilities.html
  2. http://freedom-matters.in
However, the Open-Office  supported ITR-2 form from KSEB is borked -- has locked cells which will not work nor retrieve macros in Open-Office and many fields and cells are protected, making it impossible to enter data so that the Tax macros work properly. The ITR-2 form (available from the above link) has some errors in the conversion for Open Office --In Part B - TI in Computation of total income. It does not allow you to enter any figures in the following fields:

1. Salaries (6 of Schedule S)
2. Income from house property (C of Schedule-HP) (Enter nil if loss)
3. Capital gains
4. Income from other sources
This prevents the macro from tabulating the Total (Example: A + B +Total of (I) for all fields), due to which its not possible to tabulate the final tax payable.

Does anyone know how to get locked cell macros to work in Open-Office? All help and pointers to get these hacks working on Open-Office would be a big help. TIA.

PS: FWIW, I had asked this question on the local LUG list, which was a waste as one list member, who didnt read the question, chose to focus his undivided attention on the terrible mistake I made -- used the word  'company'. Thereafter, it was a fun exercise in "I-am-the-loudest-jerk-and-bully-here" ad hominem and logical fallacies. Yeah, total WIN on the technical help scale. The smartz knocked my socks off! 

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