|  Nupur - you are and always will be!!! “You are not beautiful” These harsh words have to be endured by almost every girl/woman at some or the time of her life – unfortunately it is the chauvinistic setup of the society we live in. However it is not just male chauvinism which is at play here but something which angers me much more, though this is in no way tolerance or acceptance of MCP behaviour by men.
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| Here's a recount of my week long trip to Paris. If memory serves right, I shall recount each day's events in chronological order. It's going to be a tad long, so those of you with a life and better things to do, should skip read :-)
Day 1
Our trip to Paris began almost uneventfully. At the airport, there was some nervousness on my part, whether my luggage would be allowed as cabin baggage or not (we were flying el-cheapo airlines, that charge for checked-in baggage and have smaller-than-normal cabin-baggage specifications). Thankfully, I managed to squeeze it in, without being charged extra. The flight itself was alright, except that landing felt like travelling on a Haryana Roadways bus.
We stayed at one of my flatmates' father's studio in cité universitaire, pretty much in the central zone of the city. It was a tiny but functional little apartment, overlooking a nice park and the Université De Paris. Incidentally, if the parisians ever see someone with a t-shirt that says, "University of Paris", they'd know immediately that he's a tourist. There's no such university in Paris! The Université De Paris is a huge hall of residence for international students living and studying at various schools (École), in and around Paris. It was first built as a hostel for students from the US and subsequently enlarged to accommodate other nationalities.
Day 2
Our first trip was to the Louvre. It's huuuge. They've got more paintings, carvings, sculptures, vessels than you can shake an artistic stick at. It's estimated that if you actually took the trouble to read through all the accompanying text of all the exhibits, it would take you about 4 months to get through the Louvre. This is not counting the travelling exhibits and the special exhibits! It helped that one of us was french, so he could translate and even provide some extra tidbits about some of the exhibits. We spent about 4 hours walking through the halls, before we gave up to hunger and exhaustion.
We then walked over to the Conciergerie and Sainte-Chapelle. The Conciergerie is the place where Marie Antoinette was held before being executed. She was held there for some months, after her hubby was executed. Of course, it held other prisoners too but not quite as famous. It's basically a small little castle-like thing, with several rooms. On the wow-scale, it has the same rating as Elephanta caves in bombay. For the price, it's actually a big let-down. Sainte-Chapelle, on the other hand, is quite a nice building. Built in the 13th century by Louis IX, for use as his royal chapel, it houses the 'Crown of Thorns' and the 'True Cross'. This made it one of the most important holy places for christendom, in the medieval times. The stained glass windows are quite beautiful and the 'rose window' particularly so.
We finished the day with a boat trip, which takes you down the Seine and you get to see all of the big monuments, from a whole different perspective.
Day 3
We went to the Panthéon. The Panthéon hosts the crypts of famous sons and daughters of France, those that have contributed to its cultural, scientific and political legacy. Rosseau, Dirdot, Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, the Curie family, René Moulin (famous leader of the Resistance) are all buried here. It's a nice, huge building with paintings depicting several incidents in the history of early Paris, the revolution, and (most interestingly for me) Focault's original pendulum by which he proved that the Earth actually rotates. The Panthéon was actually conceived of, as a church dedicated to Saint Genevieve, by Louis XV, but subsequently it became a temple of France's intellectuals.
We walked across some streets to gaze at La Sorbonne. There is no real university system that binds together all the colleges that are housed in the building or even share the "Sorbonne" name (which is why "Université de Paris" is wrong). The Notre Dame de Paris is but a short walk away, from La Sorbonne. The Notre Dame is an impressive piece of architecture and the pictures (mine) don't really do it much justice. This is where I really felt the need for a good camera and a good set of lenses. The Notre Dame is still a practicing church and one isn't allowed to go into the section where the actual prayers are held. Actually most of the chapelles and churches that we visited are practicing churches with decent attendance (unlike the English churches).
We had lunch at a café (most of Paris lunches and dines in cafés on the roadside) and then walked on to visit the Pompidou Centre. Named after an ex-president, the Centre Georges Pompidou is a gallery of modern art, a public library and a centre for music and acoustic research, all rolled into one. As far as modern art goes, it's nice but not very much nicer than San Francisco's MOMA. So, I wasn't very impressed. My french flatmate left by the evening train to meet his family and it was left to the three of us, to navigate the weekend and Paris on our own.
Day 4
One of my flatmates like shopping and hence we went to the Grand Magasin, which is basically french for -- lotsa shops. It's a shopping neighbourhood with lots of kutti-kutti shops as well as a couple of malls. I'm rarely happy going shopping and this one wasn't any exception. All shops, once you get into the big brands territory, are the same all over the world. Thankfully, we toddled over to the Paris Opera House. The POH is widely recognized to be one of the most beautiful opera houses in the world. Again, the lack of a decent pair of lenses was painfully obvious.
Without bothering with lunch, we went back to the Louvre and from there, walked through the Jardin Des Tuileries (The Tuilerie Garden). It was built as the Palais De Tuileries, but during the Paris Commune suppressions, it was destroyed. Now, only the gardens survive. The French notion of a garden is greatly (still) influenced by the Renaissance and all the plants, trees and bushes are neatly trimmed to form regular figures with a pools or fountains forming the axis of symmetry. At the end of the Jardin De Tuileries, is the obelisk that was gifted to Paris by the government of Egypt. It's called Cleopatra's Needle, which is a misnomer since it's got nothing to do with Cleopatra (except perhaps in some romantic writer's imagination). There's three such obelisks, one in London, one in New York and the third in Paris. The ones in London and New York are a pair, while the one in Paris was excavated from Luxor Temple.
The obelisk abuts Champs Élyséés and we walked along the much-sung-about-street all way up to Arc De Triomphe. This is basically like India Gate, with the tomb of the unknown soldier right underneath, except that India Gate doesn't have heroic nude figures pitted against the enemy carved on it. The Arc itself was first created by Napoleon to commemorate all the soldiers who fought with him in his wars.
Day 5
We were all pretty tired and decided to take it easy. We set out only by mid-morning and then got lost on the French train network. After some delay, trying to read directions, notices of train delays and communicating with the police and railway officials, we finally landed up at the Musée D'Orsay instead of L'Hôtel des Invalides. This was serendipitious because the Musée D'Orsay has free entry for everyone on the first sunday of the month, and it was on our to-do list anyway. By which I mean, it was on my to-do list. My two flat mates couldn't care less, if the paintings had been done by BoonMee, the elephant or Matisse. So, I did a quick tour of Van Gogh, Manet, Monet, Degas, Delacroix and came away. One of the galleries was showing Courbert's L'Origine du Monde. Surprisingly enough, it was women who were most excited by the painting; they would giggle, point and pose with it. The men would look and then move on.
After a not-very-sumptuous lunch, we decided to climb the Tour Eiffel. I was all excited at the prospect of climbing all the way to the top. But it was not to be. One can only climb up two stories and then one pays for another ticket and a lift to take you to the top :-(. The view from the top of the tower is pretty good, but I wasn't very impressed. The view from Coit Tower in San Francisco is pretty good too.
Day 6
Return of the french flatmate, and we set out for the La Pigalle. La Pigalle is the red-light area of Paris and I wasn't very keen on going half-way across the city, just to look at Moulin Rouge. But one of flatmates is one of those guys who likes name-dropping in a conversation and he very much wanted to go (just so that he could come back and brag about how cool he was). One of the french girls from our hall had told him about La Pigalle and hinted that cool, macho men go there. So obviously, we just had to go. Once we reached there, all of his coolness disappeared and he didn't want to have anything to do with it. The french flatmate and I were pissed off at being dragged along and so we insisted on going to the Erotique Museum. The guy suddenly became all religious and refused to come in. The french guy pointed out that the museum had erotica as opposed to the porn on the street, but this guy just wouldn't budge. So, we shrugged, left them out on the street and went into the Erotique Museum. We also went to the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur. Apparently, the church was built by funds from some folks who promised God that they would build a nice, big church if Paris was saved from being attacked during the Franco-Prussian war. And for some reason, the prussians didn't attack! Beware the promises you make, you might have to keep them!
We went back in the evening to Champs Élyséés and got ourselves some macaroons. Ladurée is apparently the most famous macaroon-maker in all of Paris, and expensive though it was, I can see why it's famous. The line was pretty long, but the end result was amazing. The macaroons simply melt in your mouth.
Day 7
The last day was reserved for Versailles. Versailles was the royal palace of the kings of France, till of course, the Third Republic put paid to all the kings. Even now, for some particular days, the senate and the parliament comes together in Versailles. Some parts of the palace are pretty well preserved and the Hall of Mirrors is arguably very pretty. But I liked the gardens the best. Maybe because I'm used to seeing grand palaces in India.
That's about it. We came back on Day 8 and then got back into 'real life' :-). I still haven't put up pictures yet, but will do soon. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| As a continuation of my previous post, let me mention what happened with the Thrift experiment I blogged about some time back.
Thrift is broken in many ways. It allows importing definitions from other services but fails to generate working code in such a scenario, so you can forget about having structs or typedefs that you want to use for multiple services.
Next, it includes type specifiers for fields and return values but don't expect any type checking. Those specifiers exist purely for marshalling/unmarshalling hints. The only "help" you get is when the runtime throws ugly exceptions that you, an experienced senior engineer, can comprehend to be due to datatype mismatches.
On the PHP side, it does something super brilliant. It IGNORES namespaces! WTF! So, you can't call out to two services that, God forbid, define classes (Thrift structs) with the same name. Class redef error. Oops!
Next, Thrift totally doesn't allow you to write services in a layered manner. E.g. You want your service to have a request validation layer that verifies a signature, strips it and passes the remaining data on to the next layer that, perhaps, does some quota checks or logging, strips more of its book-keeping data and passes the rest to the implementation.
Super easy with HTTP REST, right? Nawt so with Thrift. Muddle each and every end-point's signature for each service with parameters it doesn't even want to know of. I can't imagine writing services this way. It's sheer sadomasochism.
Last nail in Thrift's coffin is custom client and server code for each service. How 1980s is that? I had just two services to deal with and one client for that service and I was driven crazy to my wit's end trying to keep things in sync.
Experience teaches people a lot about some things. Some learning is supposed to be transient and some persistent. It's good to keep checking on the validity of your beliefs once in a while. I did it once with Java when I joined Hadoop. Indeed Java turned out to be a programming philosophy unto itself. One that was all about constraints, inflexibility and programming equivalent of the tunnel vision syndrome.
I did it again with Thrift, this time revalidating what the title of this post says. Data wants freedom. It does not need to be tied to programming language constructs. Exchanging data as objects is bad juju.
Even in the scope of the same language, passing PODs (strings, numbers, arrays, dicts) brings immense flexibility. So much flexibility that the trade-off against type safety is easy to go for. I've been programming without type safety for over 5 years now and except for the first couple of months, I never missed it.
The day you realise that an object is just a dictionary in essence, and that methods can be invoked by their names represented as strings, you'll reach a new state of programming mindset. Or maybe not, but at least I did. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| This isn't the first time I'm writing a blog post to sing praises of Python, the programming language, but still, go ahead and read ESR's quote in my earlier post.
Anyhow, lately I've been busy writing what I call a "web service delivery platform", which is what required me to hack a lot (~125 lines) of Python. While writing this thing, I was just blown away by the way the code was unfolding on my screen.
In a true top-down implementation model, I started with the core logic, fanning out to helper functions and returning to the core. Like ESR, I found my code to get to a working state faster than it took me to work out the logic!
The most notable bit was where I wanted to use a config-dir configuration model like the one used by apache2. The code that I wrote to accomplish this worked in the very first run -- 15 minutes to look up the docs, code up and test. Before that I had to take a 20 minute walk in the park just to decide on using a config dir and figure out its contents. I wasn't even sure if it was doable in 3 hours!
What the heck is this platform shmatform I'm working on anyway? Well, it's a souped up version of the JSON-RPC adaptor I wrote for PHP 3 years ago. Only this time it's for Python and it does way more than what the PHP thing did. I could probably talk more about it on the weread blog once it's done.
One of the good things that came out of it was that I found Werkzeug, a toolkit for developing Python web applications. Unlike frameworks like Django etc., Werkzeug does not create a web application that you can plug your code into. It allows you to write your own web application from scratch without much pain.
Worked well for me since all I wanted was high level HTTP objects and URL comprehension. Werkzeug does a really good job for all of these and its URL comprehension is outstanding.
Well, that pretty much is all the Python praise I had to pour out here. This is a language that excites me the way C++ did, albeit for completely different reasons. Weird thing is, every once in a while, I think there's nothing interesting left in programming anymore and things like these pop up to remind me that this is not the end. | | comments: Leave a comment |
|  Sangita - always a friend! Sangita! If there was anyone in my life I place after my mother it would be her. Even though she is just a year older to me she always held that place of a woman I could go to for comfort. I have known her since I was fifteen. We grew up together, kept in touch for a long long time but as fate would have it, life took somewhat divergent paths about ten years ago.
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| And the Winner Is . . .
The votes have been tallied, the results are in, and we have a winner (two, actually). Congratulations to the newly elected user representatives to the LJ Advisory Board: from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) lj_election_en, it's ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) kylecassidy, and from lj_election_ru, it's nekbke! You can see the full breakdown of results for lj_election_en here and for lj_election_ru here. Thanks to everyone for your participation. | | comments: 174 comments or Leave a comment |
| Over at SANIsoft in the past few days we released two small but very useful bits of code. The code was written to itch the classical ‘I need it’ itch. I do hope there will be more like me out there who would like to solve the same problems.
The links to downloads and demo are on the pages which I have linked above
Originally published at http://tariquesani.net/blog/. Please leave any comments there. | | |
| Last week was a bit of a disappointment. I went to Oxford to attend a talk by Val Harian (chief economist of Google, Haas Professor of Economics at Berkeley) on 'Computer mediated transactions'. Since my research has a tangential interest in economics, I was eager to listen and learn. The talk turned out to be a most uninspired one. It never got anywhere close to being technical and just when I thought he was getting warmed up, he finished! The saving frace was that one of my pals is an oxfordian and he took us around to some good pubs. We went to the 'Eagle and Child', where the Inklings( Tolkien, C.S.Lewis etc) used to meet and the 'Turf' which is hidden away behind some alleys and has no part of it facing any street! Unless you're taken to it by someone in the know, there's no way you'd ever find it.
The other event that I was excited about was an opera that some of us were going to see. It was a performance of 'King Idomeneo', an adaptation of a myth by Mozart. I even dressed up formally, for it! What it ended up being was a screening of the performance of King Idemeneo by the Birmingham Opera Company. A movie of an opera! Bah! I should've been suspicious of a free performance of an opera. 'Twas too good to be true.
Yesterday, a water pipe burst at Jarrett Hall, and so we couldn't wash, cook or go to the loo for a long time.
On the bright side of things, I did get my visa for France, so I'm off this week! Hopefully, this week will turn out better, in terms of matching expectations. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
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