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

Day 2 - A book and a movie

I completed reading Down and Out in Paris and London today. It’s a book by George Orwell. I am yet to write a review on Goodreads.

It was a good book, I plan to give it a 5/5. Mainly because it had some really profound lessons on poverty, not on poverty, but on how poor people get by, and why the motivations behind why people continue to remain poor and how society treats poor people, and how poor people treat each other. It’s like the unwritten rule book of poverty in the 1940s.

I took a lot of time for me to finish this book. It was a 200 page book and the primary reason I... Read More

Day 1 - Why write and The Unreserved (movie)

The 100 day project. This is what it says on the website:

It’s a celebration of process that encourages everyone to participate in 100 days of making. The great surrender is the process; showing up day after day is the goal. For the 100-Day Project, it’s not about fetishizing finished products—it’s about the process.

Um, okay. What should I do, though?

Choose your action

Oh, that’s easy. I will write. (Actually, I will blog.) What is a blog?

A blog (a truncation of the expression weblog)[1] is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (“posts”). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological... Read More

Cutouts, really Just Another Link Aggregator

I use Pocket. And I love it, I love the offline sync functionality that they have. It is incredibly useful whenever you are travelling or going somewhere without Internet access (God Forbid!). But there is one thing that I have never been able to get over, about Pocket, and it’s that although, it’s a great store for articles until you read them, once you have read them, it’s not a good store at all. For one, all stored articles take up space on your mobile, tablets etc. Next, the tagging system doesn’t really work that way. Going into the Read / Archived section will show you a list of Links, and there’s no way (except... Read More

Updating Node to node 4.x

Node 4.x was released. Hmm, now that is a huge jump! I have been using Node 0.10.32 and Node 0.12.7 for most of my time in Node till now. I have known that a fork called io.js has been around for some time now, and has version numbers that have reached 3.x.

When I realised that Node had updated it’s version to 4.x, the first thing that I thought of was that I had to update, and then I realized another thing: Backward compatibility. I have written about 20 Node modules, published on npm and they probably depend on close to 60-80 modules themselves. So, for everything to work perfectly, all of these 100 modules need to be written... Read More

Switching from Chromium to Firefox!

So, one of the few things that almost everyone does after their mid-term exams are over is chill out!

I chose to do this using my browser as well! I was browsing GitHub repositories to contribute to, solving and creating issues on projects I maintain and running music in a tab using YouTube.

Lately, I had been slightly irritated with the RAM usage of Chromium. It uses about 70% of Memory and 50% of CPU. I still stuck to it because of the great plugin community around Chrome, the really tight integration with most of Google’s services. I liked the Checker Plus for Gmail plugin for Chrome, and this was very important for me. But, enough was enough!

Note: The... Read More

check-pnr-status, The easiest way to track your PNR numbers

Mid-term exams are almost over. One more paper to go, and there’s enough time to study for that. So, I worked on the project that I have been working on for about a week now.

My ultimate goal for building this CLI module was to basically ensure that I didn’t have to visit the IRCTC website whenever I wanted to check the status of all the tickets that I have booked. (After the ARP for booking tickets was extended to four months, I can book tickets for February 2016 today!)

Thus, a lot of tickets, and a really really slow website. But there’s one thing that’s not slow, or atleast not as slow as the website itself. The API... Read More

Internship at TinyOwl Mumbai!

Update: I didn’t really end up doing this internship because on January 12, 2016, TinyOwl revoked the internship offers that it had made to 7 people in IIT Kharagpur due to internal turmoil. I don’t have the heart to remove this post because this is exactly how I felt at the end of the interview, and I want this to be out there for other people searching about TinyOwl.

So, this post is long overdue. On 30th August, 2015, TinyOwl visited IIT Kharagpur to recruit interns for their internship program, during the months of May-July, 2016.

The first thing I noticed when I saw their intenship notification form on the ERP, was that they used... Read More

Mentorship in Production!

Finally, a Rails application in production. And already, we have started facing problems! Whoever said deploying and maintaining web apps is more than half of the job, was definitely right!

In this post, I hope to outline exactly what lead to the deployment, and how we handled it, and what lead to the present wall that we are facing.

I am not sure if I wrote about this before, but still, a short introduction about the Mentorship Portal. It’s a Rails application, that we had written last semester, between January and March, and had hoped would take the whole Mentorship Programme run by Students’ Alumni Cell online. It did exactly that, and everyone registered. The... Read More