Day 22 - Thoughts on Programming Language design

I was discussing Cloudbleed with my friend, Kalyan Kumar. He had this to say about it:

And then … The final problem was that the generated C code didn’t have proper checking for the pointer that breaks the code. Now this kind of stuff are the biggest problems with C.

Secondly, most of the code currently at the core of the system is C. Take anything, finally it will be converted to C, or uses some code that is C.

I don’t understand one thing. People keep blaming C for how it manages most stuff. But when any kind new programming languages, structures that people make, they use C at their heart to work. The new things are... Read More

Day 21 - S3 Outage and Cloudbleed post mortems are out; Revenant!

I am happy to report that the MP3 files not being recognised by Rhythmbox was solved after apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras. I wonder what “extra” packages that package contains that need to be restricted. It definitely installed ffmpeg which is a great CLI utility to cut videos. Anyways, that problem is solved. I am still holding off on installing gnome-shell and trying that out because the mouse thing seems to have sorted itself out (?). It happened only once today.

This great article about Amazon Data Centers is right on point! This comes in the wake of that great S3 outage a few days back. The post mortem for that outage is out, and it... Read More

Day 20 - Handmaid's Tale; Jane Austen plans; Office Space (1999)

“I waited patiently - years - for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we’d say, Yeah, he’s a Cool Guy.” ― Amy Dunne, Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn)

This is one of those inner monologues that Amy has. The Jane Austen reference in this line was incredibly interesting to me. Amy was such a great character! How could you not be curious about what she really meant and what she really wanted Nick to be like? Why did she settle for Nick?

Another question that I had when I... Read More

Day 19 - NPM woes; KGP Internet woes; Ubuntu 16.04 woes;

I had a weird experience with npm install, it’s absolutely weird. I wrote a series of tweets about it. Hear me out again anyway.

I have the proxy for Kharagpur’s network on my computer and in all my setups. NPM typically reads them, or so they say, it didn’t when I first tried npm install, sure, no problem. I do npm config edit it should start working.

But over the past few days, the internet in IIT Kharagpur (more on this soon) has gone from okay to bad to absolutely worse. Right now, it’s probably at it’s worst point.

So, I npm install after editing the config... Read More

Day 18 - A little bit more Big Little Lies; Vault 7 (?)

I kept thinking about Big Little Lies, I completed reading it yesterday and I fell for Celeste White (who is called Celeste Wright in the TV series). Madeline is of course a different kind of a person, the exact opposite of Celeste in a lot of ways, but they are friends still because Celeste doesn’t talk too much, stays silent most of the time, disoriented and always late. Whereas Madeline is talks all the time, takes on people and causes. What a character!

The entry scene for Celeste (Nicole Kidman) in the show, glorious with her forehead frills and lost expression, is good! But it isn’t in slow motion! I was SO eager to see that scene in slow motion.... Read More

Day 17 - Big Little Lies closing remarks; Homeland new episode anticipation

97% done, I can’t really start writing the review for Big Little Lies on Goodreads, but I can definitely say one thing about this book: IT HAD AN EXPLOSIVE ENDING. COMPLETELY UNEXPECTED, and it’s not unexpected in the old fashioned new-character-arrives-and-then-wtf? way, but in a this-ending-ties-up-loose-ends-all-over-the-book way! It would, of course be a HUGE spoiler, so I can’t really talk about it. Which isn’t ideal, but I can bear that!

By the way, this book is now a HBO TV Series: Big Little Lies. For this TV Series, I made some predictions for who would be cast as which character when I had just started reading that book:

For now, I think Kidman is Celeste (from Jane’s description... Read More

Day 16 - zsh, color schemes and auto-mounting partitions with an elegant password prompt

This is part 2 of the installation diary. While the backing up and install process was done, an installation is only complete after everything goes back to normal.

Step 1: shell, aliases, functions. I maintain a good dotfiles repository, which I have improved over time. The bootstrap script is a shell script that does a lot of stuff. I use it in my default User data on Digital Ocean droplets, when I create one, and it works really well! This will install my shell of choice: zsh, and will also install all the other basic things that are definitely required: ruby, node, vim. This gives a great point to start at for other packages that you also need but... Read More

Day 15 - Brand new Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

YAY! Brand new Ubuntu! The installation took a LOT of time. Most of which was spent in partitioning the drive properly. I had a good plan for how to do it, but the encryption thing really got in my way, and took up a lot of time. So, here’s the long and short of it.

At first, I didn’t really know whether the root (/) partition can be encrypted or not. While encrypting that would have been good, I didn’t mind / being unencrypted because it mostly just had installation files and config files and not any personal data.

But a tutorial on the internet, told me that I could actually have encrypted... Read More

Day 14 - MISSED; Age of Adaline, Backing up and nautilus ETAs

ARGH! I succumbed to it. But now I am twice as determined as before to not miss another day. (Technically, I am not missing yesterday because I am going to write two posts at 2017-03-04 23:20 UTC+5.5. But I definitely missed posting yesterday, and I am going to refuse to let that happen!) Also, this post is going to be as if I wrote it last night, that’s the only sane way to write this so that the series will make sense at a later time.

Today is the D-Day for the upgraded installation of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Atleast, it should have been. But it didn’t work out! I couldn’t get the backups on time.

I had to copy about... Read More

Day 13 - Using Ansys Workbench, Tigo and Yelle

Very few times have I said that learning a new project has been fun! Today definitely qualifies!

I had to learn Ansys for something that I need to do for my bachelor’s and master’s theses. Some simulations of loading conditions, and find out the values of stress, where the values are maximum etc. There are two software packages to do this: Abaqus and Ansys. Abaqus wouldn’t install, so I tried Ansys, the instalation was a breeze! IIT Kharagpur has a License Server running on the internal network, so there are no file installation keys etc. The license is on the network, that’s GREAT!

Anyway, switch to Windows 8, a 45 minute or so installation, 5 more minutes to reboot.

Start... Read More