Sahana Community Meetup @ Lisbon

Sahana Software Foundation had its Annual Meeting, Community Bar Camp and a Disaster Workshop at ISCRAM, in Lisbon from the 6th-8th this month. The whole event was fun and a great learning experience. Interacting with members of the community only acquainted through IRC and the mailing list was well worth the 24 hour journey from Kanpur to Lisbon. A special thanks to Google and Sahana software foundation for providing support for travel and stay for the meet.

At the Community Bar Camp, We had a couple of productive discussions on interoperability and the functioning of Sahana Software Foundation. Thanks to the face to face time with the other members of the Eden community - I was able to understand the framework a bit better and work out the requirements for a possible Asynchronous processing API in Eden. The activities for the first 2 days were located at a space, generously donated by IBM Portugal, who also provided us with a huge supply of delicious pastries (Yum!), orange juice and coffee. Evenings were spent in long pleasant dinner sessions followed by late night social meetups at the hotel lounge, supplemented with great wine and amazing ideas/thoughts/people. In short it was a great event with some of the most dynamic and vibrant people I have ever met, who were fun to interact and work with. I very eagerly look forward to the next Sahana Software Foundation's annual meeting, hoping to meet the few who couldn't make it this time around.

Sahana Software Foundation's Blog has a finer and a well written account of the entire event (Click here).


I would like to thank the following people/organisations for making my visit possible:

1) Google and SSF for providing support for Travel.
2) Mark Prutsalis for patiently sending me all the documentation required for the visa.
3) To the unknown person who set the end semester exam timetable at IIT Kanpur, leaving me with the exact time to make it to the event.

This blog post has been long over due - Mostly because, I just finished my Masters in Physics (Yay!) and am in the process of kick starting our tiny private limited (More about this later).

Reading raw disks with python - Windows/Linux/Mac

We have been working for a while on an embedded solution that geo-tags jerks using an accelerometer (I know it sounds funny :)). Not wanting to increase the overhead on our tiny < 16MHz 8 bit AVR and maintain our precise sampling requirements, we came up with a simple filesystem that does the job and this fancy format meant that we needed some code on the computer end to read the sdcard. Took us a while to search out the raw disk file for Windows. The following snippet shows how to search the disk at a particular address - [Our disk structure had the word MOMS at that address.]

tl;dr Snippet to read the raw disk using python on Windows/Linux/MacOSX

Extract POIs from OSM PBF ("Protocolbuffer Binary Format") dumps with python

• I am a GIS n00b - this is my first attempt at handling OSM data.
• This code would have never been written if it wasn't for Chris Hill's excellent parsepbf.py - blog post here.

I looked at OSM to obtain railway station locations in the country for an in-house project we are running.Parsing through their data dumps sounded like an easy job. I grabbed india.osm.bz2 and india.osm.pbf from Geofabrik. Uncompressing the bz2 file resulted in a 614MB xml whereas the pbf was just 26MB. Intrigued by the small file size of the pbf files ( I never read up on google protocol buffers before) I went to the OSM wiki to read up the format and see if any python libraries are available for this. I found Chris' parsepbf script and ran it with the pbf I had. Turns out running the the script without asking it to spit out osm xml was a bad idea - ended up eating all the memory on my machine [ no swap enabled ] and crashing the system.

I modified the parsepbf file to make as somewhat generic class for picking out nodes with specified tags.


Stats:

• It took about 5 minutes to pickout all the railway stations on my linode ( 512MB ) VPS.
• I think a speed up can be achieved by using multiprocessing (?)

Example usage:



Current code can be found here.

Daemonize Selenium-grid with init scripts on Debian

In the process of setting up selenium grid for Sahana Eden CI - I needed to run selenium-grid as a daemon, as I could not find any init scripts for it on the internets, I hacked Jenkins ( Hudson ) init script for this.

The script could be generalized to run generic ant builds as a daemon.