all things Love

Damn yaar!  I didn't know this. Astropy can be a dangerous place. There are codestyle ninjas present. Hidden in plain sight. It's not just the PEP8 speaks  from GitHub actions. There are real people in it too. And worse of all they don't allow merging the Pull Request (PR) until we do what they say. All in the name of adhering to modern standards that improve readability. What has open source come to! Really? This and the past week, below listed is what the codestyle ninjas have made me do to my otherwise perfectly working code: (copied without permission from GitHub) TABLE should not be used as a variable name No camelCase anywhere . For example, tableDescription should be table_description . Module level variables as SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE . E.g. BYTE_BY_BYTE_TEMPLATE not ByteByByteTemplate . Regular variables, functions, methods are lower_case_underscore_separated , never camelCase or CapsCase . Private methods start with one underscore not two, e.g. def _split_floa...

So, it's the start of the 3rd week now. I will be virtually meeting Aarya and Moritz again Tom. For the past few weeks now, I have been pushing commits to a Draft PR  https://github.com/astropy/astropy/pull/11835  on GitHub. I wanted to have something working quite early in the project, in order to be able to pinpoint accurately when something doesn't work. This is why I started with directly adding the cdspyreadme code within Astropy. Afterwards, I am also writing the code from scratch. As more of the required features from cdspyreadme get integrated into cds.py , those files and codes added earlier will be removed. About the reading/writing to Machine Readable Table format, in fact I wrote about it briefly in my GSoC Proposal that I could attempt it as an extension. I don't have an opinion on whether or not it should have it's own format classes etc. However, since the title of my GSoC project is to Add a CDS format writer to Astropy , I would prefer to work on the ...

Hi, How are you? So, it's been two weeks of astropy@GSoC work already. Of course I have been damn busy! With the last commit made to the draft PR https://github.com/astropy/astropy/pull/11835 , a few hours back, I have successfully written a basic CDS writer. And voilà it works, albeit without the ReadMe at present! 😁 Note that I am quite unlikely to go into technical details here in these posts. There are two reasons for this. Hhm..., Na I guess there's just one single reason. It would be too repetitive a task to write them. I already write aplenty about those in the GitHub comments and other communications. And of course, the whole codes I am writing during the project are available publicly on GitHub, for the overly curious kind. Moreover, the final report is gonna have more than ample discussion too, because I like to explain myself a lot. 😐 What then is the need to write all that here again? So consider these posts my plain uncouth thoughts, which in any case, I suppose,...

Hey there, How are you? Chances are that you are coming across me for the first time. Nice meeting you too! 😄 Since this is an introductory astropy@GSoC Blog Post, I would keep things brief.                        As you probably already know, my name is Suyog and I am a participant for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2021. Over the course of the next 10 weeks or so, I will be working on the Astropy project under the umbrella organisation OpenAstronomy. During this while, I aim to add a CDS format writer to the Astropy library with the help of my affable mentors Aarya and Moritz.    I had actually also applied for GSoC last summer, however I had failed to pass one of the eligibility criteria, and so wasn't selected. This astropy@GSoC project, therefore, is quite an awesome opportunity for me. I am looking forward to making the most of it and enjoying the time all the same. There are two preli...

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari My rating: 5 of 5 stars It took me a long time to finish reading Homo Deus . And I think the long duration was well worth it. Homo Deus is not the ordinary everyday stale non-fiction that one comes across. It is a masterpiece in its own right. But for the Sapiens , I don't recall having read any other book that stimulated thinking to the degree Homo Deus does. The book starts off almost right away from where its predecessor, Sapiens , ended. A New Human Agenda , that of seeking eternal youth , bliss and divinity , is put forward for the 21st Century. Since the dawn of Humankind, the persistent goal of any population has been to have sufficient food to quench hunger, to have health measures to fight infections and diseases and to be at peace with neighbouring kingdoms. With the advent of the modern technology and the unprecedented progress it has made over the last few decades, the goals have changed now. Rest of the...

The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo My rating: 5 of 5 stars Well, this is my first of both translated Japanese mysteries and in particular, Seishi Yokomizo-san. I was vaguely familiar with the author's name from it being mentioned in some Detective Conan episodes. What I didn't know was how famous this author is in Japan, which googling the book afterwards amply told me. The Honjin Murders is the first book in a series of 77 novels featuring the scruffy looking young detective Kosuke Kindaichi that Seishi-san wrote in his lifetime. Only two of the series have been translated to English till date. The story of The Honjin Murders starts with a cheery narrator, fascinated by a crime committed ten years ago in the remote village of Yamanaza, visiting the location in order to get the material for his book on the same. Soon the reader learns about the Ichiyanagi family, their honjin lineage, the events before the fateful night and the greasome crime. The bride and the groom ...

To a great extent I disagree with the statement that more reliance on technology will surely deteriorate human thinking ability. I find this idea to be faulty and based on some short term focus on human behavior. In my opinion the time period talked of is increased and a broader outlook is taken, technology will more probably become an integral part of our lives. In contrast to declining the human intellect, technological aides like hearing machines and seeing glasses will complement our abilities to interact with nature and greatly enhance our experiences.  Image © The New York Times Company Further, the statement appears dubious when one considers even our own present day experiences. For instance, the other day I saw a live telecast of the graduation ceremony of IIT Bombay on the internet. Owning to the COVID-19 condition, this year's batch had to rely upon tele-conferencing technologies ...