Day 32 - Game of Thrones Questionnaire; Bias for our solutions; awesome-social-science

Today, I watched this video. That video linked to The Game of Thrones Research Project which is a group of people who have put out a public questinnaire and are keeping the responses open for a period of time. They plan to do something with the results and entries that they are going to get from it. Apparently, this kind of thing falls into the genre of Audience Projects.

There is a longer explanation of what they plan to do with the data, and what they hope to learn from it on this page, and theses goals are mentioned there:

(1) To capture the range of responses that people have to the series, overall... Read More

Day 31 - Handmaid's Tale story revelation at 55%; GC Score visualization prototype

Ah, finally! FINALLY! 55% into the book, Margaret Atwood thought it appropriate to reveal the circumstances that lead to the world that Offred and Ofglen and Of* live in. It was terrifying! I think I can now see where the comparison to 1984 comes from. I can’t really talk about it here without marking it as a spoiler for everyone who plans to read this book, so I would much rather talk about it once I have read the whole book and this particular event has more context around it. That said, this is a great book, I can make that judgement on the basis of whatever I have read till now. It has been amazing! Sure, the author took... Read More

Day 30 - Metakgp meetup to meet the candidates for Maintainer Election March 2017

Today, we had a Metakgp meetup to meet all the candidates in our upcoming maintainer election. So, to be clear, we are not looking for a maintainer for one of our projects, rather we are looking for a maintainer for Metakgp. Their roles are diverse but would include day-to-day management, resolving conflicts between members, making the right decisions with inputs from everyone in the community and pushing the community towards a consensus if the community can’t find it on it’s own, and finally fascilitating an environment where new people would feel comfortable joining and contributing. This role is much better described at the Metakgp:Governance wiki page.

We have a lot of candidates this year. And the process... Read More

Day 29 - MISSED; Waiting for The Winds of Winter (GRRM);

I have made very very less progress with Handmaid’s tale. It’s not that the book is not good, it is Good, but it’s confusing and highly taxing to read. The story keeps shifting into either a flashback, or an abstract comparison with something from Offred’s previous life, and it gets rather hard to keep track if you are travelling or something. I hope to make a lot more progress in the next few hours. I am going to install Abaqus (Ansys is installed, but Abaqus apparently is something that people are more familiar with), so that should give me a few hours of solid reading.

This post was again missed, I keep thinking about whether I should start using Read More

Day 28 - Short post; Nothing here, move along

I don’t really know what to write about. It’s been about 15 minutes since I opened this file and edited the header. No idea has really occurred to me, yet.

The next issue on Github that I am going to target is the subjects.json inconsistency that is bound to happen between all Metakgp repositories.

Basically, subjects.json is meant to be a JSON file that maps subject courses offered in IIT Kharagpur to the name of the subject. Right now, there’s a JSON file that’s used. I can’t be sure that the same version of the file is used in these projects: mfqp-source, gyft. These are the only two projects I can find which use... Read More

Day 27 - MISSED; Some python and regex written for Gyft

ARGH! I missed yesterday. It wasn’t even too tiring a day or anything, anyway, I am going to make the best of this. I am about 8 hours later than when the usual post should have been.

I have not been writing a lot of code, and I hadn’t submitted a pull request in almost 20 days! That’s unacceptable, Jimmy, UNACCEPTABLE.

I decided to remedy that situation today. Gyft is a set of python scripts which lets you login into your IIT Kharagpur ERP account, get your timetable for the semester from there. Before my patch, the only option was to put this timetable into your Google Calendar. You generate a client_secret file and... Read More

Day 26 - Communication on Slack;

Today, I wrote this

START REPOST

Other important things I learnt along the way

Listen to others, think before you start typing

Slack and IM make communication easy … and complicated. Let me explain:

1. Communication is easy if the parties communicating have a common goal, and are putting in a non-trivial amount of effort into keeping the conversation sane, unblocking themselves and getting to that common goal.
2. Communication is easy if the parties communicating have conflicting goals, but listen to the other party and are willing to change their stance if reasonable, technically sound arguments are posed.
3. Communication is easy if the parties communicating have opposite goals, are unwilling to change their stance, but would still comply... Read More

Day 25 - Quarter of the way there!

I am 25% there. That’s one part in four, I just need to do the thing that I have already done, 3 times over. Sounds doable, from here on atleast! I just wish I don’t miss a day in between. I missed one day in between till now, and that was not even the day I was most tired on. In fact, the days that I was most tired on, turned out to be the challenging ones when I struggled to write the 500 words and git add and git commit and git push.

I would like to talk a little bit about the encrypted FS setup that I have got going on, in... Read More

Day 24 - Rambling about the Ubuntu 16.04 bug a little bit more

I didn’t watch Revenant, actually. In the day 21 post, I said I would watch it, but I couldn’t watch it. I started watching it, but they weren’t getting to the point. I had a similar reaction to Avatar when I saw it for the first time, I loved it afterwards. So, I will try again some time soon.

I started the day with this tweet which I thought indicated the end of my troubles with the left click on the mouse not working with a new Ubuntu 16.04 LTS installation on a Dell laptop. It was not, I faced the problem again about 12 hours after the tweet, and I tried this but the problem didn’t fix itself. Interestingly,... Read More

Day 23 - Indian Railways DOS based systems (?); A great trip to Calcutta

Today was a trip to Kolkata for Biswa Mast Aadmi. It was a a GREAT SHOW! And it was a wildly succesfuly trip also. Generally, my plans are foiled because of one thing or the other, today everything worked well. There’s a first!

On my way to Howrah, I had the chance to look at the screen on which the people behind the ticketing counters in the KGP Station find ticket availability between different stations, at different dates and different ticket classes (Sleeper, 3AC, 2AC, etc)

Ticketing is done on Text User Interfaces. Which apparently run using the VT220 Terminal. I discovered this from this incredibly unhelpful answer on Quora.

There are a few... Read More