Day 50 - HALF WAY MARK, tweets_analyzer repository

HALF WAY THERE!

I have been writing a daily blog post for the past 50 days. A lot happened and through that time, and I will probably write a summary of all of it once I am totally done with the #100DaysOfWriting challenge.

Today, I ran the x0rz/tweets_analyser repository using a Twitter API key and I must say that the data that it threw out was very very fun!

Of course, I first analyzed my Twitter account: @_icyflame

In the timings that I have tweeted in most over the past 1000 tweets (in 372 days or there abouts), I have NEVER tweeted between 3 am - 4 am and between 5 am and 7 am. I would have believed... Read More

Day 49 - Western Groups in the wee hours, MFQP PR 30, Homeland finale

Today is going to be an interesting day. My day isn’t over yet, not in theory anyway. The Western Groups Interhall event is going to happen in about 4 hours(?) from now. There’s no way to know when it would happen.

I finally opened PR #30: Add ability to pre-fill the search bar from URL param. This particular change has been on my fork of this repository for quite a long time. It should find it’s way into the repository’s master branch soon. The most important functionality that it would add to MFQP would be the addition of mfqp as a search engine in Chrome! So, typing mfqp TAB query ENTER should complete the search. Earlier, the... Read More

Day 48 - Updating my RSA keys to 4096 bit after reading Gert's article

I came across this article yesterday, which urges everyone to move from RSA to Ed25519, EC-based public keys. Totally legit article, and covers all possible corner cases.

I was using 2048 bits RSA keys till now, I have updated them to a 4096 bit key now. An Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server refuses to accept Ed25519 keys. When specifying the pubkey protocols that it understands, it says rsa, 535, blen and one other suite. The OpenSSH version is 6.6, and the post says that anything about 6.5 should support Ed25519 keys. I need to investigate this.

There is a sherr size difference in the RSA keys and the Ed25519 keys. Although both afford the same amount of security,... Read More

Day 47 - Updated About page after 2 years, Homeland 6.11 complicates the TV show more

I updated my About page. I should have done that a long time ago, I last updated that page on March 31, 2015. That’s two years and 1 week before today! A HUGE amount of time in which my outlook about a lot of things has changed. I glanced at the diff again and I noticed the change in the tone of the text in that page. Having written history to compare yourself to past selves is an interesting experience, sometimes my past naivete intrigues me in the same way that understanding after learning something, it’s hard to imagine a time when didn’t know that thing. I am pretty sure that whole situation is called something, I don’t know what... Read More

Day 46 - Re-watching Seinfeld on Amazon Prime - The Stall and The Stake-Out

I set a goal to read 40 books this year on Goodreads at the start of this year. Last year, I read 30 and I did that pretty peacefully (December was totally free and I crammed about 5 more to go over the goal to 35). Now, I am “on track”, which means that if I don’t finish the book this week (week 14 of the year) then I will be “behind the schedule”. THAT is going to happen. This sounds so much like the iconic Taken scene:

This was a completely new take to action cinema, the hero always used to RUN for the person being kidnapped, reach there on time, or after.... Read More

Day 45 - r/place shuts down after 72 hours, WHY was it created?, Emma is an ENIGMA

If you didn’t know about r/place, I will give you a lowdown on it. It first started as an empty canvas apparently. When I went to it, there was a lot of pixel art there already. Anyone can place a pixel anywhere, with one catch: you can only place a pixel once every 10 (later 5) minutes. This is how the canvas looked at the very end, about a couple hours ago when r/place crashed and the whole project was ended. Initially, I thought this was a social experiment to prove that there are more constructive art-makers on reddit than there are trolls who only want to destroy everything good and honest. Was it, though? I... Read More

Day 44 - Learning vim, installing plugins and spending time on tooling

So, yesterday I wrote a couple of scripts. These are mainly to make the counting of the posts easier. Till now, in the month of march the post number was simply the date + 11, but now and going forward it will be pretty hard to keep track of this number and at the same time save a few keystrokes in opening the editor and typing the number in, removing the TODO tags from the template. Anyway, the ruby script was fun to implement. It probably doesn’t need to be this big(?), I just wanted to be sure that I would get the right date for the post on the first attempt itself and I won’t have... Read More

Day 43 - MISSED; Clock issues on Windows-Ubuntu Dual Boot

Ah, this is going to be my sixth MISSED post. The irony of it all is that yesterday, I really had a topic to write about. A topic that a friend asked me about earlier in the day and one that I have faced many times myself. Uh, irony.

Managing your Clock on Windows-Ubuntu Dual Boot

Switching over to Windows and seeing the wrong time or switching to Ubuntu and seeing the wrong time, it’s all pretty irritating. It keeps happening, there’s no easy way to fix that, this is my recipe. It’s pretty easy, I think.

1. Turn off the Update time from Internet option on all your operating systems
2. Boot into Windows, and open the registry editor. (Read More

Day 42 - Taping your webcam, open ports, the WHY of it all

I have thought long and hard about the topic that I plan to write on today, Privacy. I taped my laptop’s webcam about 2 weeks ago, it afforded a renewed notion of security, for the past 2 years, I have had it obscured because the lid of my laptop is mostly closed. But now, I am all in. When I think about the doors that I have left open for attackers, I want to be sure that there’s nothing obviously wrong that I am doing. Before my recent Ubuntu re-install, I had the package openssh-server installed on my primary computer! YEAH. Port 22 was open, it was behind a router and I used it to connect to... Read More

Day 41 - MISSED; Progress with Emma; Comparison with Aisha;

Ah, finally, I made some real progress with Emma (Austen). The characters are realy panning out, this book is far easier to read than I would have thought of, she writes in a simple style, and there are a few complex sentences here and there, but most of them are conversational and easy to understand!

I learnt some archaic spellings that I believed were typos, hilariously. choose was spelled chuse and show was spelled shew. Very very surprising!

I am almost immediately reminded of this movie:

A 2010 Hindi movie with Sonam Kapoor as Aisha and Abhay Deol and some other good actors. Aisha is definitely inspired from Emma, she’s rich, good looking, doesn’t want... Read More