

Friday, November 30, 2012

ItzUpp! Know the places before you actually visit.

What is ItzUpping really all about?

ItzUpp is presumably, the World's First Online Canvass, Review, and Comment Portal for Shoppers, Travellers, Clubbers, Diners, Drinkers, and Strollers, all around the World! As the tagline of the website says, 'Canvass before you visit', you can actually Canvass i.e Examine and Survey freely and Search Places Around Before You Actually Visit it. And as the world shall see it, ItzUpp will be the world's largest service to find and canvass places around you beforehand. With the growing number of visitors, their reviews, the photographs shared, the what's up news, and the increasing number of businesses, one will be easily able to search for places, read reviews, and look what is up there! This is called ItzUpping !!
ItzUpp comes to you as an easy and comprehensive business directory related to what you are searching. Each of the places returned will have their own Profile pages. You can download the details for future reference. The profile of each location is complete with ratings and reviews, maps, events, and more. It uses the power of Google Places API, Flickr photos, and Facebook social networking plugins. With strategic and core technology implementation using PHP, Apache, SQL, XML, Javascript, JQuery, Fbxml, and several APIs, we bring you the best online experience in searching and canvassing into a place before actually visiting it. With strong integration with the power of Google, you can also see Maps, photos, timings, events, etc from the Google Plus Profile of the location.  Find a club, a good florist, the best restaurant around , and even mobile repair!

And for searches resulting into places in United Kingdom, you can find local eating joints with the ratings and reviews by Government of UK. So, whether you are going to any restaurants, or visiting any business, park, shops, check for the choices of healthy foot outlets in the nearby area. The link on the ItzUpp Place profile that says - 'Local Food Reviews by UK Government' is fetched from Website: http://ratings.food.gov.uk. The UK food hygiene rating data API is under Open-Data scheme of UK, and is valid only for United Kingdom. This Project in no way guarantees the accuracy and effectiveness of data, results, and information coming from different organizations. Neither do we modify or alter any result or ranking that is coming.  But you will get First 30 results from that website. So, it helps you abide by Healthy and Hyginic Eating in United Kingdom!! 

Disclaimer: This Project is still in Experimental stage. The Application uses Google Places API, Flickr photo sharing, and Facebook Social plugins features. The author and this website is in no way connected to Google, Flickr, or Facebook. The results and images shown are the output from respective APIs and photos may have copyrights associated with them. Any dispute should be propogated to the respective service providers.


So, Happy Dining, Happy Boozing, Happy Clubbing.Happy ItzUpping!!!

[I find it a great website, and have personally been trying this for quite sometime now. So, I suggest my readers to make use of this great utility :)]

Saturday, November 24, 2012


Hi All,


How To Tame Python

Or view it on Slideshare Portal on :

Python - Tuple Vs List - Difference/ Comparison

Tuples and Lists have always attracted the learners of Python. And, to the most of employers, the difference between them still maintains favoritism. Searching over the Internet gives you the distinction between them, but to many the language used all over seems to not help much. And worse part is that, not all the differences have ever been published at one place. And the worst of all, sometimes technical slangs have been used, with no direct meaning or examples to make it clear.

Let me start with a very brief introduction to what these Datatypes are about. Following description of List and Tuple is an excerpt from my "How To Tame Python" guidebook.

List is one of the most helpful and versatile data type available in Python. A list contains several items separated by commas. The items are enclosed within square brackets ([]). The list comes with built in functions which can be used to add, delete, edit contents in a list. Any subset of a list returned is also a list. Also note that like strings here also the Index starts from 0 and goes to the Length of the list minus 1.
A typical list can be as simple as :
list=[2,4,8,16,32], or
Or it can be a mix of datatypes for eg.

Tuple again is a data type that is similar to the list. However, elements of a tuple are enclosed within parentheses. [Remember elements in a list were enclosed in square paranthesis]. It is important to mention that a Tuple is a read-only list. Any subset of a tuple returned is also a tuple. Also note that like strings, and list, here also the Index starts from 0 and goes to the Length of the tuple minus 1.
Eg. tup1=(12,'leo',23.45)

After completing my "How To Tame Python" guidebook, addressing this issue was the most immediate task. I am thankful to the memories of my sweetheart, while she was away, that kept me awake till night and motivate me in finding out the real differences. I actually programmed and validated each statement I said below. There are differences in Tuples and a List. I have discussed them in following classes of distinctions. So, here comes the difference between Tuples and List in Python.

Class A:  Usage difference due to Runtime difference 
Tuples are Immutable. 'tuple' object does not support item assignment
Because they are immutable, a Tuple can be used as a Key in a Dictionary.
There may be a slight performance improvement in Tuple.
For eg.
Allocation in a book can be a combination of a page number and line number, eg (x,y)
Similarly, your gps coordinates can be (x,y)
It is a tuple because these things are immutable. As soon as either x or y changes, the meaning itself changes.
And now, some short notes can be added to these locations using a dictionary.

Class B:  Difference in what they mean due to Semantic difference
Tuples are hetrogenous data structure, while lists are homogenous. There is a semantic difference too. Tuples have structure, while lists have order. Tuples (generally) are sequences of different kinds of stuff, and you deal with the tuple as a coherent unit. But, Lists (generally) are sequences of the same kind of stuff, and you deal with the items individually.
Eg 1.
Consider the following two data structures:
>>> time.localtime()
(2012, 3, 7, 11, 45, 38, 2, 33, 0)
>>> range(10)
The first one, a tuple, is a sequence in which position has semantic value. The first position is always a year. This tuple functions as a lightweight record or struct. The second one, a list, is a sequence where we may care about order, but where the individual values are functionally equivalent.
Eg. 2
Consider example of the simultaneous use of both types. If you look the Python Database API fetchmany() method, you will see that it returns the result of any query as a "List of Tuples". The result set as a whole is a list, because rows are functionally equivalent (homogeneous). There is only a order, and no importance which row is what. But the individual rows are tuples, because rows are coherent, record-like groupings of (heterogeneous) column data. We know that first element means what and second elements mean what, and so on.

Class 3:  Usage as Enum or Stuct because of namedtuple() method

This difference becomes more visible as soon as you read about namedtuple in Python
Named tuples assign meaning to each position in a tuple and allow for more readable, self-documenting code. They can be used wherever regular tuples are used, and they add the ability to access fields by name instead of position index. Named tuples are especially useful for assigning field names to result tuples.
EmployeeDetail = namedtuple('EmployeeDetail', 'id, name, age, job, department, paygrade,address')

I have realized these differences after years of coding and using Python. Many of the differences, were always in sub-conscious mind and never came out. It was only when I was completing my "How To Tame Python" guidebook, that the idea of documenting the differences came to my mind. And, after this has been done, I was more than glad to find out that this is the best article over this subject. I have been informed by my friends and readers across the globe that they have found this article very helpful in their projects, understanding the Python, and their Job interviews.

You can also send me your feedbacks on this blog, or to my personal email id: Toughjamy@Yahoo.com
--Mohd Anwar Jamal Faiz