I published the Tamilnadu district wise literacy map some days ago and @tshrinivasan asked if I can write a blog on how to do it, and here it is now.

On 16th October 2011, I have uploaded a map of Tamilnadu District wise Literacy levels to Wikipedia. It was used in the article about Tamilnadu for a long time, then moved to the Education in Tamilnadu article when a separate article was created. But the map was not in line with the Wikipedia Map Conventions. So, took some time this week and updated the map.

Chetpet Lake has been developed into a nice waterfront park for walking a few years back. It is maintained diligently with water level balanced between the two parts of the lake depending on the availability, grass moved, plants cared for and the walkways washed off the bird droppings everyday morning. It opens for walkers as early as 4.30 in the morning every day. It is one of the places in Chennai, that I have walked into and really felt peaceful.

Cyclone Gaja - this year’s natural disaster which has landed like a stab in the gut for Tamil Nadu.

When I moved the site from Jekyll to Wordpress, I was asked to create a site icon by Wordpress. I was trying to play around with the letter from “t” from my screen name “tecoholic” in a couple of Vector editors using different fonts, handrawn symbols …etc., and finally landed on what I know best. Write a Python script for it. So here it is, my blog icon and the generator. It is just a stacking of “T”s but somehoe looks like the corner of ancient Chinese houses.

Sorting is simplified in Python with sorted(). You can even sort with complex rules.

In situations where you have a list of objects and have to retrieve then in random order, dictionaries can act as lookup tables.

Sometimes we have to deal with external objects and their attributes. getattr() can save you at those times.

Merge or combine dictionaries

Check for existence of a key in dictionary and retrieve its value if present.