Day 12 - Ubuntu 14.04 LTS installation fails

I run an ancient Ubuntu 14.04 LTS installation. I installed it in December 2014, and I have faced problems in between but I have almost always tried to fix them without having to re-install the whole operating system because frankly, re-installing an operating system is an unbelievably pain. These are the steps that I can think of off-hand:

1. Accept the fact that you have to re-install your OS
2. Start preparing for the re-install, search all the directories like ~/Downloads for files that you can’t afford to delete
3. Figure out what files you want to Back-up depending on how much extra storage you have. Almost everyone I know has exactly as much storage as they use. I am... Read More

Day 11 - Color Constancy, Heroku down, git patch in pu

Information overload. There’s been a lot going on on the Internet today. (This is just the last 1 hour of my time spent on Twitter reading up about “important things”)

1. This just broke, the color constancy thing. (This resurrects The Dress. I saw Blue and Black, re-tweeted this picture, and then I came back to copy the link, and I saw White and Gold. OH GOD.

2. Color constancy came back exactly 1 year after The Dress, The Strawberries have come to haunt us. Not a single Red pixel in this picture, and yet everyone sees Red strawberries. motherboard.vice.com decided to write a great article on this! This is a great article.

   You... Read More

Day 10 - Tartt and Flynn - Some background, and their inspirations

Ah, I am done with All the Missing Girls now! The ending was unexpected. I can’t really say anything else about it here without spoiling the book, so that’s about everything that I can say of the book now. READ IT! The mystery is too good, and understanding the whole thing is satisfying!

Yesterday, I did some research about two authors that I have absolutely fallen in love with after reading their first novel: Donna Tartt and Gillian Flynn. I saw their interviews, read about what they had to say about their respective books (Secret History and Gone Girl). I found this amazing elle.com article which is an interview with Flynn about her book, and this article is so... Read More

Day 9 - More thoughts about All the Missing Girls again.

Ah, another slow day. Most of the time today I spent doing nothing or reading All the Missing Girls. I am of course going to write atleast a paragraph about the progress I have made in the book, because I went from Day 13 or something, to the last three days: Day 3, 2 and 1, etc.

The book has really opened up. While in the beginning I thought that the writing was so cliched with a lot of metaphors and sentences like “She was like that”, “I was the monster”, etc, I am finally understanding what Nicolette really feels like. One particular paragraph which I think is incredibly revealing for her character is this one:

Change your hair,... Read More

Day 8 - mfqp, mfqp-source, Alison from Pretty Little Liars

SATURDAY! Ah, the weekend is here. I am not terribly excited about the weekend, as much as I am about the fact that it is FINALLY here. The last week was mid-terms, and then three days of project work and classes and the routine sinking back in. So, a bit hectic, huh.

Today, I will talk about this project that I have been working on for about 10 months now. It’s called mfqp-source. It’s related to mfqp.

So, mfqp is a previous year question paper search platform. It was built by @amrav. mfqp-source is a way to crowd source question papers from the students who are giving exams in IIT Kharagpur, and get it online, so that... Read More

Day 7 - Veep, Different ways to narrate a story in books

Um, 7 days and already I don’t have anything to talk about from today. I didn’t do a lot today, worked on my bachelor’s project for about 3 hours in the afternoon, a 2 hour class before that, and nothing before that really.

I watched the fourth season of Veep, hence reaching the point where the race is literally tied between Selina and O’Brien. Which means season 5 should be pretty good fun.

The 9th episode which was the one with only the hearings in it, well, that was perhaps the best episode in the TV series! There were so many jokes in it, with Jonah and Richard Splett and the whole hearing with Amy’s dress and the Congresswoman. It... Read More

Day 6 - SHA-1 broken, TRAPPIST-1 has planets, Homeland 6.5 - EPIC EPISODE!

Well well well. That was an eventful day.

I just learned from an @eevee tweet that SHA-1 collision was generated. That was about 40 minutes ago. Before that, another tweet told me showed me the cute gif that Google made for the TRAPPIST-1 discovery. All of this was right after I had just seen Homeland S06E05. I love the episode. I raved about it on Twitter.

SHA-1 collision was on it’s way, I guess? Chrome had already almost deprecated SHA-1 certificates, and apparently Root CAs were no longer allowed to issue SHA-1 only certificates. So, this should probably not affect stuff as much. Git should definitely be affected. I... Read More

Day 5 - Linux, Pendrives and Encryption!

The paranoia of having your hard drive crash on you is devastating, once it bites you. It’s the fatality and the irreversibility of it. Once a hard drive has crashed on you, the only thing that you can do, is take the computer to some repair place, and have the hard drive changed (or if you are sure it’s the hard drive, order a new one online and replace it yourself). Nonetheless, the data that you had is gone. Generally, people say Backup your data and keep it in a safe place.

The problem is that for most people, the hard drives that you do have just do the job. There’s never enough to have 2 copies of anything. If... Read More

Day 4 - Books made into Movies

I didn’t do anything today. I woke up, ate breakfast, prepared for the exam I had, gave the exam from 2 pm - 4 pm, then came back and watched Veep for about 2 hours (time that I should probably have used to read this new book that I got. All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda. This book is supposed to be a mix of The Girl On The Train (Hawkins) which is now also a movie. The movie was great, although the narration could have been a little bit less book-like. They literally copied the chapter names over, put them on the screen, showed us their perspective. The movie was underwhelming in general, I don’t know why... Read More

Day 3 - Rachmaninoff; "Someday" lists on your iPhone

The two topics for today’s post are completely unrelated.

I write this to the background music of the second movement of Piano Concerto no. 2 by Sergei Rachmaninoff, played by Alexandre Tharaud. This is such an amazing piece of classical music. I play the piano, I am rather an amateur at it under Classical Piano playing skills and standards, but I have atleast heard Classical music to some extent, and this particular concerto (much like Mozart’s Early Symphonies, which I will eventually have to talk about because I am running out of things to write about. This exercise will certainly end up making me creative at the very least, I hope) is by far Rachmaninoff’s most famous work. I... Read More