indite

Sunday, May 15th, 2011

I haven’t really worked on many personal projects lately; indite is the only one worth pointing out.

indite is a tiny project that Xri and I came up with. I don’t really know how to describe it. Here are a few attempts:

[i]ndite is a little something to help you create stuff. It could be some creative writing, or a humble grocery list (or a hitlist). If you do your thinking better on plain paper than on a text editor, you might like this.

That was from our about page. Here’s another description:

indite is a simple visual playground that you can use to organize your thoughts. It’s open-ended & designed for spatially-minded folks.

Here is what it looks like: This is indite. Do visit the Flickr page in order to see the notes on various parts of the interface.

Basically, think of it as sticky-notes combined with an iGoogle-like page, and inspired by Apple’s aesthetics. We don’t really know where exactly we’ll end up taking this.

It’s pretty open-ended right now. I use it for taking meeting notes, outlining documents and collecting research notes. Amit seems to like using it as a todo-list. We want to keep it this way: simple, but powerful.

Terminology

The word ‘indite’ basically means “to produce a literary work” (thanks Wordnet!). I really love the name, the application is definitely text-centric. It’s great that we got the domain for it!

We call the individual bits of text placed on the screen ‘blurbs’. Well, they are not actually blurbs, but this was the most suitable name that we came up with. Also, I like how blurb sounds, so the name stays.

Usage

  1. Start typing on the page.
  2. Press Ctrl-Enter when you’re done.
  3. You have a blurb!
  4. You can drag it around, if you feel like it.
  5. Type to add more blurbs. Delete them when you no longer need ’em.

Uh, this is pretty much it.

Feature-wise, the one thing I really like about it is the ability to have multiple layers of blurbs. I like having a layer per-topic, usually.

Most of the credit goes to Xri for creating an awesome UI, and coming up with the ideas. I’m only the tinkerer on the project :)

Technology

Right now, it’s a tiny JavaScript app. I wanted to learn more about the Backbone.js framework, so it’s written using that. We created the initial version over a couple of weekend nights (months ago!), and it’s been pretty much the same since then. This also means that it’s long overdue a re-write, but I haven’t really found the time…

Storage is done on the browser. God bless HTML5.

The Future?

I really want to create a back-end for this using node.js, which seems like a perfect fit. I’ve been particularly lethargic recently though, so who knows when this will happen. We have plans though… big plans. Expect something or the other to happen, though.

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Command line statistics

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011

Well, I’m planning to write here more frequently. For now, I’ll be concentrating on sharing small-ish nuggets of information, instead of trying to write an essay-style post.

This post is about fun little statistics I have gleaned by by zsh history file. Note: my history file contains the last 3000 or so commands I had executed.

Lets begin with trying to find out which version control systems I use most frequently:

$ history | grep 'git ' | wc -l
60
$ history | grep 'hg '  | wc -l
264
$ history | grep 'svn ' | wc -l
180

Mercurial seems to be in the lead right now. Hurrah for distributed version control! We use svn for some projects at work, hg for others. No git, because many of the guys are on Windows.

For my own stuff, I end up using either git or hg, depending on my mood. Don’t really have a preference one way or the other.

Videos & stuff:

$ history | grep 'yd '  | uniq | wc -l
71
$ history | grep 'vlc ' | uniq | wc -l
109

yd is my alias for the awesome youtube-dl script that allows me to watch the video in question offline (I hate getting interrupted with a ‘loading’ message when watching anything interesting). It is a resume-able command, so I put in a uniq in the filter chain to just count distinct videos.

grep vs. ack:

history | grep 'grep ' | wc -l
121
history | grep 'ack '  | wc -l
94

ack is something better than grep (command name is 25% fewer characters to type!), for code-related stuff anyway. I still end up using grep for piping & stuff, but all the commands above can be re-written by just replacing the grep with an ack.

OK, that’s it for today. Any of you want to share something?

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On Mumbai traffic, and giving up driving

Sunday, October 24th, 2010

I like to drive, but lately I haven’t enjoyed driving.

Mumbai has the worst traffic of any city I’ve seen… Yesterday, for example, going to a mall 10km from my home took me over two hours; driving on a Saturday and not during peak hours. For now, it seems that the only time I can drive without facing traffic is in the middle of the night—maybe after 1am, as I have got stuck in traffic when driving at midnight.

There are countless construction projects active right now to improve the situation: from creating new flyovers, to building an alternate metro line, building a Monorail, and building pedestrian crossings at major road intersections. Unfortunately, all these projects are being undertaken right now, which means that many frequently used routes are blocked. This compounds the problem, but hopefully the situation will improve in a couple of years, when the new infrastructure is in place.

Thankfully, I work from home, so I don’t have to commute daily. I usually take the car out maybe once a week, as driving to any place close-by is a waste of time.

Which brings to mind the question: do I really need a car? I don’t, really. If I want to travel, booking a cab is a better option than driving: at least one can relax if stuck somewhere.

So, no more driving for me. My sister, who lives in Nagpur, has ‘borrowed’ our family car. Hopefully, she’ll put it to better use…

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