Yaminie’s Underground blog

So I did this audio piece for the storytelling class. And I recorded a story that my mother narrated over the phone. I made her do this in English..The accent was definitely a problem. But suprisingly the issue to comprehension didnt get sorted with sub-titles. I realised that there are so many words that acquire meaning which could be only understood with explaining the context….Like colony, quarters, dacoits… 

This weeks assignment was to work with textmarks ,  a short code service that lets you register your own keyword. All keywords work with the same short code - 41411. The service displays the text on specific webpage when it receives an sms with your keyword. I worked with Mitch on this.

And we created Drawmatic 0.001 alpha…a potential web 2.0 kind of app - So this is how it works…..You send an sms with “draw” to 41411. And you receive a welcome note from Drawmatic…with a url that you can click to upload a picture.Once you click on the link and upload the pic, the pic gets saved in a Mysql database. Then Mitch, who is really cool, makes a sketch of the picture.Both these (original picture sent by the user and the sketch made by Mitch) are put on a web page. The url is sent to the user when he finishes his uploading…

At this point the script displays the user’s picture on the webpage automatically. But the sketch has to be manually inserted in the Mysql database. It’ll be nice if that could happen on it’s own (I think this could be done with a script that checks the sketch folder every now and then and then updates the MySql database)Also this script could then send a response to the user to tell him to check the url…

The ‘very basic’ site is no longer “here” (I will come back and fix it). Here is the link to the upload url     

Marianne’s assignment are usually a lot of fun. We began our storytelling class with assignment to write the entire story of our lives in 400 words (read more entries here)

My mother’s daughter
Was in bucketful full of water
The doctor frowned
Had the baby drowned?
No…but she was such a rotter!

Well not really! The rotter was more for the sake of poetry. But there were bad things. First there was a huge question mark on my sanity owing to the pregnancy complications. Then, I was born dark. Very dark. For a country that still hadn’t gotten over it’s colonial hang-over, it wasn’t such a good thing. I lived with my large extended family. And since my brother was rather fair, they all loved him. (Well, he was also more lovable!). But what would a child know about such politics. The more they loved him. The more I hated them. Again, in a country where big families were cherished, I despised it. For me, it was the life inside the four walls of our room in that sprawling house of 30, that mattered. It was ME, my parents, and sometimes my brother (if he let me play with his toys and friends!). It was a lot about proving myself and seeking approval.

My parents did love me more. Kind of thing that you feel for the underdog. So it wasn’t that bad. We moved out of our joint family system. We had a 3 bedroom apartment to ourselves. I went to a very good school. I did well. I always stood first. I always won trophies. I managed to vanquish doubts about my mental condition. I was done with proving myself. I had to begin finding myself..

Four feet eleven inches tall.
The world so big. And I, so small…
Decided to leave home
And be on my own
To hear my inner voice’s call

Once, when I was driving out of the city with some friends and we stopped on the way to have some chai (masala tea). It started raining and we ran to the nearest shelter. As I stood there sipping my chai and watching the raindrops fall on the muddy ground, I realised how much I loved this.

Living alone, moving from city to city, was how I found myself. Some bits everywhere. I loved rains. Mumbai was going to be my favorite city. Family was important. I was beautiful. My brother was indeed lovable. Life wasn’t fair. But life wasn’t meant to be like that either.

I also found myself a boy. About my size. Which is a whole new other story!

We created a pretty cool thing in pretty much the second week of Mobile Me. So we used a mail parsing script that checked our mail and then connected to our mySQL database and recorded the details there. Also, it saved any attachments in a pre-defined folder and put the link in the SQL database. By using a cron, we were able to run the script every five minutes.

On the other end we used this infrastructure to post to the web server with our mobile devices.  When we finished doing this, a bit of code in the script was supposed to send a response back. The US carriers allow sms/mms to email IDs. So, basically now I was able to text my mail ID and the mail parsing script then saved the details for me.

A simple web page written in php dynamically updated itself with the stuff that came in the database and displayed it.

 I thought this was pretty cool.

Some of the issues we faced were with the auto-response. Apparently the carriers are pretty stringent spam policies and they do not allow texts coming in from a lot of servers. It probably would be possible with some other server. (I was using the ITP’s server). Though I checked, if I sent a mail an email id, i would get the response, but not on my mobile phone… 

We used this capability to make a simple application called Reverse Image Labeler. What we do in this is send out a word every week through emails/blogs or sms. And then people respond with an MMS of what they think best represents the word… They can come back and view their as well as others posts for that word…The url is here 
I worked with Thomas and Midge on this 

(I realise that my web skills are relatively poor…they need to be attended to!)