Sphinx is a very common documentation tool which gobbles up ReStructuredText and other free-form markup formats and outputs great HTML, PDF and other formats. It is meant for reference manuals and API documentation due to its good integration with source code (especially Python). The libuv book is written using Sphinx so that it looks so good with minimum effort. Sphinx uses make to generate the HTML, which is great. The only problem is that deploying this to Github Pages requires multiple commands to switch branches to gh-pages, pull in the source text, then cleanup the working copy and switch back to master.…

My Raspberry Pi arrived a few weeks ago and I had some problems with getting node.js to build on it. This post is specifically about building node.js from source on Archlinux. All activity and commands in this tutorial are run on the Raspberry Pi, either via SSH or physical keyboard. It is possible to cross-compile on your laptop/desktop for ARM, but I preferred not to in this case. Prerequisites Have the base-devel group installed, you should have a working gcc and friends, along with openssl and zlib.…

I landed in Helsinki on the 26th of June from a connecting flight via Frankfurt. As you’ll see in the rest of the journey, food is a very integral part of my life, and I can’t resist describing airplane food either. So in Lufthansa, on the BOM-FRA flight, they served this decent croissant and omelette with spinach and chicken for ‘breakfast’. Fruits in planes are always shit, and this was no exception.…

(This article was written as a piece of advice in the final edition of Entelechy for the year, now that I will be graduating) Never give advice — a wise man won’t need it, a fool won’t heed it. So rather think of what follows as a crystallization of my opinions, which may serve you well. The last four years of my life have been a period of discovery and extreme change.…

Some of you may have seen Philip Buchanan’s award winning. Autumn Evening entry for JS1K 2012 Love. While skimming the source I saw that he had used Aivo Paas’s JSCrush to compress the code. The JSCrush website is intriguing with the source code minified and then passed through JSCrush itself (so it can be submitted to JS1K). The JSCrush version used in the page, in <script> tags is the JSCrushed version.…

With Go 1 being released, I’ve been playing with the language once again. As a long weekend hack, I created a clone of the literate programming Docco tool in Go – quite naturally called Gocco. This blog post chronicles my feelings about the language, and some rough spots I got stuck in. I started out with a direct translation of the original CoffeeScript to Go. Go is remarkably unlike C and more like high level languages.…

(This was originally published in Entelechy Edition 34, March 2012) With Synapse a few weeks old, the constant Raghu Dixit songs are starting to fade away from the hostel corridors. Except when we hear bands live, or are aware of an upcoming concert, Indian artists aren’t given much ear time. Bollywood dominates too much. But a growing independent music scene is flourishing in India, mainly due to rising economic levels and more people willing to pursue their dreams.…

Recently I have been using Cassandra for one of my projects, and one of the needs is to iterate over all columns of a row. Each column represents an individual data, of type identified by row id, and keeps changing. So I can’t simply use a set of known column names. Using the setRange call on a SliceQuery and setting a large count is also not an option, since Cassandra will try to load the entire set of columns into memory.…

(This article was written for Entelechy Edition 33 (February 2012). The news is slightly old, but posted here so I have a public permalink to the article) When the Internet began over 30 odd years ago, it was an ideal of democracy. Born in universities, where only meritrocracy ruled, it was used by hackers whose ideals were very egalitarian. In its very protocols, the Internet encodes equality. No piece of data is considered more important or more dangerous than any other.…

This incident is about those moments of pure magic that sometimes happen when two individuals have light bulbs go on in their head at the same instance based on a series of earlier shared experiences and context. No, not the soul mate sort. To convey the expression requires introducing you, the reader, to the back story. In essence this post is about me and Naman’s library adventures. It is a set of confessions which I hope will not get us kicked out of the library now that there is a change of guard.…