Both at Mavrix and Janaagraha we have projects that run in public and private collaboration modes. DVCS plays a major role in easy collaboration. Choosing a great DVCS hosting provider is very important for the success of collaboration. After a few days of comparative studies and research, we reached a point where we had decide between GitHub and BitBucket. I created this table to make that easy for us.

Verdict:

• Place for your startup to collaborate and develop private projects – Bitbucket
• Place for your startup to collaborate and develop public projects – Github takes first place until unless the project is really big and has dedicated developers. In that case Bitbucket is an obvious choice.
• Where you need to be – Github for sure and you will end up at Bitbucket anyway.

References:
1. Choosing a distributed VCS for the Python project
2. Git based source control in enterprise

This song by John Lennon says what I was going through last week. How could he write so well?

People say I’m crazy doing what I’m doing
Well they give me all kinds of warnings to save me from ruin When I say that I’m o.k. well they look at me kind of strange
Surely you’re not happy now you no longer play the game

People say I’m lazy dreaming my life away
Well they give me all kinds of advice designed to enlighten me
When I tell them that I’m doing fine watching shadows on the wall
Don’t you miss the big time boy you’re no longer on the ball

I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round I just had to let it go

Ah, people asking questions lost in confusion
Well I tell them there’s no problem, only solutions
Well they shake their heads and they look at me as if I’ve lost my mind
I tell them there’s no hurry I’m just sitting here doing time

I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go
I just had to let it go
I just had to let it go

As you know I quit Infy last month.It took a while to settle down both on work front and at home. Now that I have settled down, here is an update.

• I am working on Indian music discovery engine at Mavrix, started by yet another outfoscion. Its an interesting story how I met him after eight years and ended up joining Mavrix. Mavrix takes about 60% of my time.
• I also continue to work at Janaagraha as a Technologist. Yes now I am a consultant and not a volunteer. Janaagraha takes about 25% of my time.
• Rest of the time goes for exploring Open Data and data visualizations.

If you are wondering, Yes, I am working six days a week now. I am planning to do the same till the end of this year. Hoping to get lot of interesting stuff done this year. Lets see.

I was bored. So I thought of playing Game of Life. I got to know about it through hacker logo which is the glider pattern from the Game of Life. While playing I thought let me code it processing.js. Game of life is a simple game with no interaction involved once you start with the initial seed.
From Wikipedia:
The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970.[1]
The “game” is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves.

The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, live or dead. Every cell interacts with its eight neighbours, which are the cells that are horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent. At each step in time, the following transitions occur:

1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

The initial pattern constitutes the seed of the system. The first generation is created by applying the above rules simultaneously to every cell in the seed—births and deaths occur simultaneously, and the discrete moment at which this happens is sometimes called a tick (in other words, each generation is a pure function of the preceding one). The rules continue to be applied repeatedly to create further generations.

The initial code was borrowed from Ran Tao’s java based program. I rewrote in Javascript version of Processing. Also added player buttons for more control. Also added a way to start with your own seed through it starts with random seed. One more change to the original Life is that you can introduce a living cell while its playing. Just click on the grid. Its kind of against the actual game, but it seemed more fun to me.

Clear it and introduce your own seed using mouse or just intrude, you are God. Go to full page version its more fun. Source code is on GitHub.

For a project at Janaagraha we need to collect location data. The process needs to be as simple and cost effective as possible. General GPS data collectors are expensive and doesn’t make sense for us to own those single purpose devices. Hence we started looking at mobile phones. We wanted something that can collect the data offline with maps support. Of course Android turned out to be the best bet.

Here are the two mapping applications which we will be using:

The Locus

• Supports GPX, KML (include styles) and LOC files.
• Works with multiple mapping platforms (needs to be online for certain maps like Google Maps, Bing Maps)
• Works with offline maps. The app itself can download the maps for a defined area. The downloaded maps can be shared with other devices. Also supports MBT maps.
• If you are running a map server, you can add your own custom online maps
• Can work completely in offline mode for data collection
• Can’t add custom forms for data collection. The std one can collect Name, Description, Picture, Location, Altitude, Street Address, Category
• Can do standard GPS logging for trips
• Add ons are available
• Both free and paid versions can be used. Available in the market

Maverick

• Can collect GPS data in KML and GPX format.
• Works with multiple mapping platforms (needs to be online for certain maps like Google Maps, Bing Maps)
• Works with offline maps. Use Mobile Atlas Creator to download maps or MAPC2MAPC to convert maps from other formats
• Can work completely in offline mode for data collection
• Can’t add custom forms for data collection. The std one can collect Title, Description, Picture, Location
• UI is clean and easy
• Can do standard GPS logging for trips
• Both free and paid versions can be used. Available in the market

We plan to use OSM as the mapping platform for collecting data since it is free and legally allows us to download maps.

There are many Android mobile applications available for extensive data collection like OpenDataKit and UNICEF’s Rapid Android. But since the above applications worked well in my POC studies, I didn’t dig deep into others. Let me know if you have tried anything like this.