Setting up Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on a Thinkpad

It’s been a while since I have setup a brand new computer. I did set up a Mac when I started working in September last year, but that was more of a step-by-step thing where I just started with my existing dotfiles and picked up stuff along the way from people around me who had been working for a much longer time and knew of so many great Vim extensions and tools that I had previously never heard of. Prezto was one of them!

I was going to install Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on an IBM Thinkpad L390. It was released around December last year (or earlier this year?) and sounded like a really good handy laptop for travelling, particularly.... Read More

Ongoing issue with Firefox add-ons due to an expired certificate

Note: This is an ongoing issue at the time of writing (19:30 2019-05-04 JST). The team at Mozilla is aware of this issue and is working hard to fix it as soon as they can. You can track the bug here and on the IRC channel #firefox on irc.mozilla.org.

Detection

The issue started around 6 pm PST on the 4th of May when some people noticed that their add-ons were disabled by the browser, though the add-ons were working just fine just a few hours ago. (Some people had theirs stop working during on ongoing session!) This led to the opening of a GitHub issue and a bug on Mozilla’s bug tracker for Firefox, Bugzilla.

Oh-My-Zsh to Prezto - 4 seconds faster

I have heard a lot about prezto. People who work with me use it and we got into this recent discussion about how slow a curl request inside your zshrc makes your shell. Strangely enough, I hadn’t noticed that it made the shell slow at all. In fact, I was saying that it didn’t make it any slower than without it. I removed it from my zshrc and checked it and indeed, it didn’t make my shell any slower.

A few days went by; I was thinking about this when I was next thinking about why I hadn’t noticed this clear increase in the time. So, I looked at the time my shell took to start up again. It was … interesting: 6 seconds.

YUP. 6 seconds on a machine with an SSD, 16 GB of RAM and an i7 processor. So, what is the problem here?

True Detective Season 1

This post does not have spoilers about True Detective Season 1

When Season 3 started recently, I found myself thinking about what exactly it was about True Detective season 1 that I liked so much. This post is a look into what’s great about that season.

The Plot

A murder mystery in Louisiana that is being investigated by two very different detectives: Rust and Marty. Marty is every man’s man; he has a family, two daughters and some mistakes in his character. He mingles with people well and has a good rapport with the people he works with.

Podcast Review - January 2019

Happy New Year! Let’s jump right in!

• This American Life - The Walls - 5/5

  A fascinating episode! This American Life is one of those podcasts that I listen to rarely, but every time I do I end up with an episode that is absolute gold! This episode came out at the top of the “Trump shut down the government for a wall” news story and debates some of the amazing walls around the world. The conclusion is simple: Walls make us feel safe, irrespective of how big they are, whether there’s another wall on the other side of the wall on our side, whether it actually even exists or has been conjured out of nowhere just to pacify us. This episode also follows the story of a man who has lived all his life with a wall in his home country; A wall that has made his relatives strangers to him and how he reconciles with that. Once a wall is built, it becomes a fact of life and affects the way life is lived around it When put like that, we really see how much power walls have! An absolutely amazing episode!

Podcast Review - December 2018

Note: This post is very delayed (it should have been out on December 27th); It was stored as a note on my iPhone with a set of links. I have added a short summary of each podcast and why I liked like it other posts in this series. Let’s dive in!

• The Daily - Ethics of Genetically Editing Babies

  This is related to the story where a Chinese scientist claimed to have created / helped make (what even is the right word?) the world’s first genetically edited babies. After discussing this case and talking about what actually happened and why it might be suspect, the guest on this show goes on to describe why one or two reckless scientists like this person can actually end up forcing countries around the world to heavily regulate or even completely stop the research into this field because they don’t trust the scientists anymore. I think that that was a very succinct explanation of why things like this are bad, while also keeping in mind that more and more of the things that we consider impossible in our lifetimes will become possible and someone will do them. And our tolerance of innovation might very well be defined by our acceptance or rejection of these ground breaking events.

Podcast Review - Nov 2018

This post might be about 20 days late, but it sure is packed with some of the best stuff that I heard in the last month. There’s a lot of foreign policy and politics related stuff this month.

• The Impact - Plane Crash hospitals vs. Car Crash hospitals 5/5

  This episode is about how every single plane crash automatically starts an investigation. The investigation eventually leads to a diagnosis of what went wrong. Using this diagnosis, the check lists are updated, new processes are introduced to ensure that the chances of the same problem causing another accident goes down signficantly. Whereas, car crashes are rampant and happen every single day. No investigations are done, and it doesn’t seem like the situation is improving. What happens when a hospital applies the Plane crash principal to solve a problem that they realize is too big? It has a lot of subtle points about authority, ego, and how a change in a process, inside any institution, can’t be overnight even if it has provably better results.

Podcast Review - Oct 2018

Note: The only series on this blog is still the 100 days of writing I did last year. I keep starting series and never writing the second post in that series. I really do hope this one is different. Specially because I want to keep track of the great podcasts that I listen to over the years. In fact, just to ensure that I get this done, I am adding this to my calendar. It’s a monthly 2 day event (from 27th-29th). I am repeating it for the next 1 year, we will see how I do then.

I have been listening to a lot more podcasts lately (Courtesy: 30 minute commute to work and random walks around the streets of Tokyo). And I have actually heard a lot more great content that I can believe! It has just been one great episode after another. Seriously. I am not even kidding. I started listening to the serious Ezra Klein Show at a point where I had run out of Daily (NYT) episodes. The Daily (NYT) has a huge list of episodes that I absolutely loved! Here are a few episodes that I highly recommend:

Moving to Japan

So, it’s been a long time since I talked about what’s going on in my life. I moved to Tokyo in September. I came here in the third week of September and started working at Mercari from the 1st week of October.

Mercari is a C2C marketplace (mainly for second hand goods) in Japan. There’s a Mercari product in the US and UK as well. I got the job in IIT Kharagpur’s placements in December 2017. Yes, I have been fairly silent on this blog and everywhere else about the job; primarily because there were a lot of things that needed to all go well for me to actually start working here. Getting the visa... Read More

Offline Advertising - Familiarity

I read a few excellent (albeit old) articles on advertising recently. A few of them were on The Doc Searls Weblog. My main take away from these articles was that offline advertising is not ineffective because an ad run on TV is seen by all sorts of people and is targeted at a cross section of the population; In fact, it is very effective because of that very property.

I recently made a cross-country move (more on this in a later post). I wanted to select a phone contract in the new country. There were several companies and it was all very confusing. I had two references: a contract that my company’s HR people recommended and companies that I... Read More