Yahoo! Babel Fish Vs Google Translate : A Case in Point

I was planning/dreaming to create and host my website and had some grand ideas for it. I started off by trying to setting up an apache server on my old faithful Lenovo Z60m and Ubuntu Hardy Heron. I was facing a rather obscure error in Apache 2.2.9 configuration.

configure: WARNING: Unrecognized options: --enable-rewrite, --enable-speling

Now that was weird and I started sifting through tonnes and tonnes of google results to find a solution. I came upon a Spanish version of Ubuntu forum that seemed to address my solution but the google's corresponding translated page was not available.

So I decided to have it translated through one of the free translators available.
The spanish text was as below

Hola:

Lo primero que debes hacer es instalar los que se llaman Fuentes o de
Desarrollo (devel), que son los que tienen librerias de compilacion y
dependencias para casos como el tuyo, trato de ver que modulos debes
instalar, pero intenta con lo que te dije.

Ademas para instalar desde las fuentes como estas haciendo debes tener



instalado C++ y todas sus librerias.

I first tried on Yahoo! Babel Fish and this is what I got!

Hello: First that you must do it is to install those that are called Sources or of Development (devel), that is those that has bookshops of compilation and dependencies for cases like yours, treatment to see that units you must install, but tries and so I said to you. Furthermore to install from the sources since these doing you must have installed C++ and all bookshops.

It was living up true to its name. I was Babel I could not make out anything out of it.


Then I tried Google Translate. Lo and behold! What I got out of it made sense and it was actually well constructed!

Hello:

The first thing you should do is to install so called sources or
Development (devel), which are the libraries of compilation and
units for cases like yours, I try to see that module should
install, but try what you said.

In addition to installing from sources such as these you have done
C + + installed and all its bookstores.


Encouraged by these results I tried out a few more :

TranStar:

Hello: The first thing you should do is to install so called sources or Development (devel), which are the libraries of compilation and units for cases like yours, I try to see that you can install modules, but what we try I told you. In addition to installing from sources such as doing you must have C + + and all its bookstores.

Athropolis.com

Hello:

The first thing that you must do is to install those who are called Sources or of
I develop (devel), that are those who have bookstores of compilation and
dependencies for cases as yours, I try to see that you owe modules
to install, but it tries with what I said to you.

Also to install from the sources how are you doing you must have
installed C and all his bookstores.

translation2.paralink.com

Hello:

The first thing that you must do is to install those who are called Sources or of
I develop (devel), that are those who have bookstores of compilation and
dependencies for cases as yours, I try to see that you owe modules
to install, but it tries with what I said to you.

Also to install from the sources how are you doing you must have
installed C and all his bookstores.

Dictionary.com Translator

Hello:

First that you must do it is to install those that are called Sources or of Development (devel), that is those that has bookstores of compilation and dependancies for cases like yours, treatment to see that units you must install, but tries and so I said to you.

Furthermore to install from the sources since these doing you must have installed C++ and all bookstores.


It turned out that the Google Translate was more accurate and more 'english' (for want of a better description) than the rest. But one must bear in mind that the context is highly technical and specific to a rather narrow field of computer science and the tiny experiment is no true test at all. Hence any inference drawn from this is in no way representative of the general corpus of data and does not reflect the true capabilities of the translators. Disassociations apart, now I know where to go if I need a technical page to be translated ;) .

Reinstalling Cisco vpnclient on Ubuntu 8.04

I had recently upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 on my office workstation. While this is a quite interesting move, some of my custom installed modules have stopped working or removed. This includes vim, eclipse europa etc. The latest to join the list of broken packages is vpnclient. I tried to reinstall vpnclient. While the installation itself went through fine, when I tried to start, it failed with the following error.

sharmi@sharmi:~/Downloads/vpnclient$ sudo /etc/init.d/vpnclient_init start
Starting /opt/cisco-vpnclient/bin/vpnclient: insmod: error inserting '/lib/modules/2.6.24-16-386/CiscoVPN/cisco_ipsec.ko': -1 Invalid module format
Failed (insmod)

That is when I learnt about the new patch required to run the vpnclient with in Ubuntu 8.04

So to reinstall, I will assume that the vpnclient is already downloaded and untarred.

1. Update the linux-headers to version 2.6.24-16-386 (also called kernel-headers in some distributions)
• Start the Synaptic Package Manager: System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager
• search for 'linux-headers'. Choose linux-headers-2.6.24-16-386 for installation
2. To apply the patch and install vpnclient
   • Start a terminal and go to the vpnclient directory
   • Download the patch for the vpnclient.
     wget http://projects.tuxx-home.at/ciscovpn/patches/vpnclient-linux-2.6.24-final.diff
   • if patch is not installed, install it with the following command.
     sudo apt-get install patch
   • run the command
     patch < ./vpnclient-linux-2.6.24-final.diff
   • sudo ./vpn_install
   • We are good to go :)

This worked for me :) Hope it helps you too ..

Python is Cool! - xkcd.com

I'm a regular reader of xkcd.com and I have come across some really funny & thoughtful works. I was thrilled to see the comics on python as I love code in python too and believe completely in what the comics depict. And I want to share it with you.

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Solution: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/ode/tools/sendsoap/cline/HttpSoapSender

Of late, I have been involved in evaluating a few workflow engines to see their usefulness for my purpose. One of the candidates was Apache Ode. Just that it was a product of Apache itself qualified it for the evaluation.

I was trying to get it up on a linux box, specifically Ubuntu 7.10. I had it deployed in tomcat and Apache Ode was up and running. I tried testing it with

bin/sendsoap http://localhost:8080/ode/processes/helloWorld examples/HelloWorld2/testRequest.soap


It came back with java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError:  org/apache/ode/tools/sendsoap/cline/HttpSoapSender

Examining the sendmail code , this stood out.
# Add Ode libraries
for f in ls $LIB/*.jar
do
LOCALCLASSPATH=$LOCALCLASSPATH:$f
done

While this is intended to get all jar files in $LIB path, it fails when there is a space in $LIB path.

The path I was working out of was /home/sharmi/Work/trials/apache ode/apache-ode-war-1.1.1
The space in 'apache ode' was the spoiler.
Changing the path to /home/sharmi/Work/trials/apacheode/apache-ode-war-1.1.1 did the trick :)

Budget India 2008 - Mixed Reactions

The Union Budget for 2008-2009 was announced today by the Finance Mininster Dr. Chindambaram. It is certainly a relief for tax payers as quoted by the Hindu

The Finance Minister has raised the income tax exemption limit from Rs. 1,10,000 to Rs. 1,50,000, thus giving every assessee a relief at minimum of Rs. 4,000. The tax rate will be 10 per cent for the income slab between Rs. 1,50,001 and Rs. 3,00,000 and 20 per cent between Rs. 3,00,001 and Rs. 5,00,000. For income of Rs. 5,00,001 and above the income tax rate will be 30 per cent. The exemption limit for women assessees has been increased to Rs. 1,80,000 and in case of senior citizens to Rs. 2,25,000. The Finance Minister has not proposed any change in corporate income tax and in the rate of surcharge. A person paying medical insurance premium for his parents will be allowed an additional deduction of Rs. 15,000 under Section 80D.

While this is certainly a relief, what the action of bringing asset management service provided under ULIP, services provided by stock/commodity exchanges and clearing houses, right to use goods in cases where VAT is not payable, and customized software under Services Tax is to be seen. This would be significant because, people tend to invest mostly in mutual funds and stocks to avail tax exemption through investment.

The Rs. 60,000 crore debt relief package for farmers is a cause of concern only spreads worry and dissent. Don't get me wrong. I do understand that farmers need help direly. What I do see is that every government tends to give debt waivers at every instant possible. This actually creates a mindset that farmers need not pay nationalized banks debts as they will be waivered anyway. What is required is that farmers are able to better utilize their resources, availability of better tools for their job, proper irrigation is available, land fertility is maintained and they have all the basic necessities and facilities like schools, clean drinking water, health care. We are yet to see these reach the farmers. What progress and awareness we see among them are rarely government's efforts but are works of some dedicated individuals, NGOs or the urban progress slowly percolating to their level. But real progress is yet to reach the grass-root levels. All the development works planned by the government are sucked dry before they reach the target audience. Only when the corruption in the system is uprooted and accountability and self-discipline sets in, will we truly see 'India Shining'.

Pitfalls in handling multiple exceptions: UnboundLocalError: local: 'ValueError'

The below code raised UnboundedLocalException for 'ValueError' which is builtin. I wondered how it could be unbounded and tried to figure out what went wrong and this is what I got.

              try:
                #code to do something
                if (condition):
                    raise ValueError
            except  java.lang.NullPointerException, ValueError:
                #code to print exception message
                continue

UnboundLocalError: local: 'ValueError'


This is when I learnt about one of the inner workings of python.

The python interpretor scans the code block once. if a name is bound to a variable with out being specified as global, it is considered local.
e.g:

x = 2
def func():
  x = 3
  print x
func()
print x

will print

3

2

This is because in func, x is bound locally to the variable containing the value <3>.

But the same function with the small difference will fail with 'UnBoundLocalError: local: x':

x = 2
def func():
  print x
  x = 3
func()
print x

This is again because, the interpreter first scans func. It sees x is bound locally as it is assigned a value 3 within the innerscope. When it tries to execute, the print statement precedes the binding statement. At the point, x is a free variable with no binding. Hence the error.

Now in the case of the exception handling,

The construct is

try:
  #Do something
except Exception, e:
  #e is bound to exception obj.
  #Do something with e

e is actually bound to the instance of the class Exception and becomes a local variable.

Now considering the initial scenario, the ValueError name is bound to the instance of the 'java.lang.NullPointerException' exception. This overrides the scope of the global builtins and makes ValueError a binding to local variable and the binding happens at the except line. So when raise ValueError is called an UnboundLocalError is thrown.

So how to we handle multiple exceptions?

              try:
                #code to do something
                if (condition):
                    raise ValueError
            except  (java.lang.NullPointerException, ValueError):
                #code to print exception message
                continue

For more interesting patterns see here.

Why I love Python

When I met an old friend of mine, he inquired about my work. I replied, rather gushed out, that it was wonderful 'cause I was working in a dynamic language called python. He gave me a quizzical look and asked how could you call work is good because the language is good, for after all language was just the tool. I listed out some of the features of python but somehow I felt it was not sufficient reason. Then we drifted on to to other topics.

Later, I thought back on the issue. Why I fell in love with Python is almost the story of my life. I got introduced to computers in my third grade. That was a time when computers were still rare in schools almost non-existent in homes. Then we just tried executing basic programs already created by our teachers or play games. One such program would get your name as input and print "Hello `name`" as output. I was fascinated! The next two years we spent learning who Charles Babbage was and what ENIAC was. In 5th and 6th grade I finally got to write BASIC programs. We wrote programs to calculate squares, students marks and generate multiplication tables. Normal though it seems now, I was thrilled! With a few lines of instructions, I could make the computer calculate almost anything! I took special pride in the fact that I could express my solution much better than most of my class mates. I had decided I'm going to work with computers in the future.

Then I had to change schools. My new school did not have computer classes until 11th.
When I finally got to go near computers, we started at BASIC and went on to Visual Basic. Things progressed and I got an opportunity do my B.Tech in Information Technology in a prestigious Institution. In our first sem, we had a C course which ended a disaster due to various tragicomic reasons. In our second sem, we got a wonderful Prof Mr. V. Ramachandran, who in a very short span of time, taught us C, C++ and Java, carefully ensuring we understood the underlying design, its implications and relative differences. We liked programming in C. But C++ seemed to be design filled with complications for the sake of complication. Java was relatively better. Most of our projects were done in C++ or Java. So either we spent a lot of time debugging or doing a tour of referencing to write a line of code. Some where in the process, the focus of programming shifted from understanding and solving the problem to getting constructs right and searching for the right class and method. And with that went most of the joy in programming. I still relished classes that dealt with logic like Data structures, networks, distributed OSes but I started drifting away slowly from programming.


Then I joined this cool startup that promised to bring everything under the sun to your handheld. And they used python. That was were I saw Python for the first time and It was love at first sight. The zen of Python captured my heart and all the joy of programming came back to me. Now I did not have to worry unnecessarily abt pointers or obscure constructs and factories. (Don't get me wrong, I do respect C and C++'s ability to get below the hood, but they are just an overkill for most apps ) I could spend my efforts on finding an efficient solution and as and when I reorganize my solution, my code could be reorganized with minimal effort. The coded solutions were mostly optimal but in some cases were optimization was desired, a simple change in construct would suffice. In only one situation, we had to do a C implementation for the bottleneck module.

I have been working for two years now. Python has helped me improve my coding discipline and productivity a lot. I am able to appreciate the value of Linux and vim better. It has also made me more receptive towards new languages.

Thank you, Python!