Thought Outflux | Anirudh Sanjeev

A few months ago, I wrote a patch for Tasque which is a really neat TODO list manager. This allowed you to create duedates on tasks with absolutely no effort

Since my current project (TaskForce) is sort of a TODO list on steroids, I thought I’d pull the patch back out of the deepest corners of gnome bugzilla and use it in my own project, and also decouple it and release it while I’m at it.
It accepts a string, and extracts a task and a date from it.

This is a natural date parser for C# - it allows you to specify a task with a due date and it extracts a valid DateTime object and returns it.

Examples:

I’m pasting the XML documentation of the source code.

		/// Original Task string: "GSoC Proposals due before 3rd april"
		/// The Task is:"GSoC Proposals due" and the due 4/3/2009 3:51:09 PM
		///
		/// Original Task string: "Lab reports due on monday"
		/// The Task is:"Lab reports due" and the due 3/30/2009 3:51:09 PM
		///
		/// Original Task string: "Date at 8PM this saturday"
		/// The Task is:"Date at 8PM" and the due 3/28/2009 3:51:09 PM
		///
		/// Original Task string: "New years' on January 1st"
		/// The Task is:"New years'" and the due 1/1/2010 3:51:09 PM
		///
		/// Original Task string: "Study solid state pysics on tuesday"
		/// The Task is:"Study solid state pysics" and the due 3/31/2009 3:51:09 PM
		///
		/// Original Task string: "Solid state physics test next tuesday"
		/// The Task is:"Solid state physics test" and the due 4/7/2009 3:51:09 PM
		///
		/// Original Task string: "April fools' on 1st"
		/// The Task is:"April fools'" and the due 4/1/2009 3:51:09 PM
		///
		/// Original Task string: "Friend's birthday on Feb 5th"
		/// The Task is:"Friend's birthday" and the due 2/5/2010 3:51:09 PM

Features:
* Extremely robust guessing - if you say “Mid term eval due on 1st”, it looks for the first of next month and adds it.
* Supports natural constructs - if you say “some task due next tuesday”, the task string is “some task”. If you use on/before/during/this/due, those are treated as date descriptors. Moreover if you say “Fix this bug due tommorow”, the task is “fix this bug”. If you say “Fix bug this friday”, the task is “fix bug”.

Usage:
This is written as a simple, uncoupled, highly cohesive class “NaturalDateParser”. Since the name of the class or namespace isn’t mentioned in the functions of interest, you can always extract it and place it in your own code.

To use:

	string input, task;
	DateTime dueDate;
	input = "Mid term evaluations on 6th";

	NaturalDateParser.GuessDateFromString(input, out task, out dueDate); // this has to be in the same namespace

	Console.WriteLine("Output: {0}, DueDate: {1}", task, dueDate); //Output: Mid term evaluations, DueDate: 07/06/2009 11:28:21

Download:
To get the latest version of this class, clone the github gist:
# git clone git://gist.github.com/140483.git
or you can view it from: http://gist.github.com/140483

The code is licensed under the liberal MIT/X11 license. Use it in anything you wish at your own risk.

Unit tests:
I wrote NUnit tests to practice writing the C# tests. If you need to have unit tests for this class, email me and I will send them to you.

One Minute Sales pitch: Conn’r is an open source platform to allow developers to build applications that allow users to exchange realtime information freely between a user‘s client and all the other social contacts from existing social networks – thereby making the humble sign up form redundant. A user with any social network credentials can communicate with another user of the same client as long as they share a common link on atleast one of the many (extendable) supported social networks. This library is being written to prevent companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google to have sole control over being able to write social applications that exploit their friend graph. With Conn’r - anyone can write an application that works out of the box with all social networks.

Let me illustrate with an example. Suppose I want to write a social whiteboard client application – where users can collaborate with friends and come up with new ideas. I would have to create a new network, add a friend graph database, and make multiple architectures, including a realtime comet-based communication architecture. Last but not least, users will have to sign up and ask others to sign up as well – something which will cause adoption percentage to drop.

If a developer uses Connr to handle all the communications instead, all a user has to enter his/her credentials for any major social network like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google, FriendFeed. The Connr framework will identify all of your friends and send them to a confidential server (which will also be open source). Since the server has also got information of all the other Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, etc users available, it looks for all the relevant connections and connects the users using a jabber bridge.

To illustrate roughly how conn’r works, I have drawn up a rough flowchart. It’s largely self explanatory, and you can download a high resolution version of it or the original .dia source.

The framework does two major functions:

1. Determine social connections, and find out which of them are connected to the same Connr server.
2. Abstract a jabber connection by making sure that clients are compatible and to send data of unlimited sizes.

To write an application like Google Wave – with realtime communications between all your friends will become absolutely trivial. We envision a new wave of applications where any user is not limited by what social applications his network provider builds. You can build desktop client apps which use this functionality but also build web-based applications which do not involve a sign up procedure.

The development team:

The project has finished the planning stages. My friend from college Sanket Agarwal is looking into automating Prosody, a blazing fast lua based XMPP server, which we will use to handle the communications, he will start writing the serverside components to match users from various social networks in either C++ or Scala. My personal involvement so far is only the idea, and part of the C#/Mono client library which was extracted from another file-sharing type project I had tried to build earlier.

We will be hosting all our code on Github and I own http://connr.com so I guess the project will live over there. The name was originally for our anonymous chat project but I feel this one has more steam.

(Image from Flickr user alles-schlumpf. Creative commons by-nc-sa)

I’m not a big fan of twitter since I closed my account a year ago. I was sick last night and watching the Colbert Report because I couldn’t sleep and Stephen Colbert was interviewing Biz Stone, cribbing about the 140 character limit. I had an idea which seemed great when I thought of it - to apply some on-the-fly compression by exploiting text encoding. Now the idea doesen’t seem so shiny after all.

Abstract:
To send upto 420 characters per twitter message. This will be done by processing the large text to fit into 140 characters. The 140 characters will be the same length and will not appear differently to the server, but will be a jumbled mess of text for any human who reads it. But on running an inflation algorithm on the same text, another user can get back the 420 character message.

Background:
Today, we’ll be exploiting the encoding that Twitter uses for it’s text: UTF-8. UTF-8 is variable length from one to four octets for each character. Since most english messages use ASCII character set, only the first octet is used, and any ascii string is utf-8 compatible by default. It’s a fantastic idea that saves space, and allows the full unicode alphabet because of it’s enormous size in case all four octets are used. Most of the regular english content that you read ever uses more than two or three octets.

Core Idea:
Construct a utf-8 character with 4 bytes. The first byte signals the start of a 4-byte sequence(thus having a value between 240 and 244).
Use each of the three octets to store a different ascii character. This way three ascii characters appear as one utf-8 character, thus only one out of 140 characters is used up. To deflate, read one utf-8 character, and interpret each of the final octets as an ascii character.

Technical complications:

1. The first byte can’t be used :(. It has to be a value between 240-244.
2. The second, third and fourth byte can have only 0×80-0xBF (that is 128-191) as the content. This means the size of the character set that we can compress is 64. Sufficient for Alphanumeric characters and spaces. UTF-8 is not to blame here however. A full four-byte encoded character can have 64*64*64 variations (multiply that by 4 considering that the descriptor byte in the first slot can have four combinations), and you get yourself a fine encoding format.
3. Any non-alphanumeric character would be left alone because it won’t fit in the space that we have for each octet.
4. Any string polluted with non-alphanum characters would compress real poorly. Consider ‘http://is.gd/1f4′ or something like that. ‘htt’ will be one character, ‘p’ will be one, ‘is’ and ‘gd’ and ‘1f4′ would be singular characters. The code will have to make sure that we don’t use 4 octets by default, or fill in the remaining octets with blanks and discard them during inflation.

Implementation:
I’m guessing the implementation is easy enough, though text encoding is one of the hardest things for me to get right. I’m going to try to use the System.Text.UTF8Encoding and Sytem.Text.Encoder classes to read the bytes and re-construct a new string. I’ll dump the code here when I feel like it.

Ideally, there should be implementations in each major language - javascript, python, C++, C#, actionscript - which are used to write twitter apps. Ideally, a greasemonkey script can be run which looks for compressed utf-8 text and decodes them in the twitter page itself.

Disadvantages:

1. All clients should necessarily have an inflation script running.
2. Supports only alphanumeric characters+space
3. Won’t be searchable.(unless you re-encode the search query itself)

Closing words:
Die twitter! die!

Anglicizing Indian names in the US is quite common these days. Let’s face it, some names are hard to pronounce. When I was in the US eight years ago I remember mine getting butchered in as many ways as one can count. A few people who knew they had to stay abroad for a longer time did not want to have to spell out their name or correct pronunciation every time they met someone new.

For example, my friend and mentor, Vikram Dendi, who was in the US from his undergraduate times claimed to have shortened it to “Vik” every once in a while when I met him in Bangalore.

Over the past eight years, somehow, people started calling me “Andy”, and it’s stuck surprisingly well. It’s rare to find anyone call me by my given name in college, not for any cultural significance but rather for the sake of convenience. You can’t beat a one syllable name.

I’ve been talking on mailing lists and on IRC more these days and am starting to wonder if I need to regularly use my anglicized name in my online collaborations. The short answer is yes, and the long answer is too boring to put down here.

So I decided I’ll just use my utterly cool domain name which is lying around stale for email. I will be using andy@ninjagod . com for my purposes. So if you can’t remember my name or email address(why would one even need to?), you’ve got somewhere new to fire it off to.

Just because Jerry Seinfeld, George Carlin, and Randall Munroe can be funny whenever they want to doesen’t mean you can.

April fools’ is the time of the year, when everyone thinks they’re being funny but they’re just being dicks. And when someone thinks pictures of cats with horribly disfigured grammar is funny, you know it’s going to get really pathetic. I’m talking about you - the Internet.

A lot of people know that I have a short term memory length of nearly three seconds in the morning. I spend about five minutes reading my feeds in the morning and I was pleasantly surprised to see interesting and breaking news just to get fooled, and this happened six times in the morning.

I’m pretty sure a conversation like this has happened several places in the world at this time:
Billy: Hey grampa, <enter tragic news here>
Grampa: (goes into shock)
Billy: April fools’!
Grampa: Oh god, I find it hard to breathe, there’s pain in my left arm.
Billy: Good one grampa, but you’re going to have to try harder than that to get me.
Grampa: I’m not kidding, get me to a hospital.
Billy: Get more creative than that

The worst of all seems to be that of slideshare. I’d signed up for their service, which I actually think is pretty neat.

I got an email saying: “You’re a slideshare rockstar”(IF you didn’t know already, “rockstar” is the word I loathe the most.) Now that I’m a slideshare rockstar and was impatiently looking for ways to find slideshare groupies, I smelled something fishy.

“
We’ve noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job … you must be doing something right.

Why don’t you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.

Congratulations,
-SlideShare Team“

Every self obsessed half witted moron (a sample set, which, by some freakish coincidence, are all twitter users), decided to blog, twaat, microblog, nanoblog, fermiblog and gloat about their newfound glory. After seeing the pageviews rise and increase hundredfold, they realized that their creative inputs were clearly worth billions. They quit their jobs, brought hundreds of “I’m a slideshare rockstar” Tshirts, maxed out their credit limit knowing that a few minutes on powerpoint would reimburse their investment.

Then they found out that it was a joke with 100x fake page views and everyone got the same email.

Not surprisingly, a lot of people are pissed at slideshare, which is pretty sad because I’m a fan of Rashmi Sinha’s work, which I’ve been following for quite a while now.

There’s a lesson to be learned here, in my opinion:

1. Humour is contextual. A normal person can be clever and insert a few puns into their text, but that’s it. The funniest jokes are internal, the ones that you crack with your buds, and have a lot of context to them.
2. What slideshare did wasn’t “fooling”, it was outright lying. I just hope that it doesen’t get them sued or something.
3. It’s funny to make one or two people laugh. Try it for an entire userbase and you’ll just piss them off.