Blab on Noetic Nought

Weekly #28 (2026)

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:34:00 +0530

I’ve decided to start posting weeklies inspired by some folks from the OCaml and the Bangalore Indie Web communities.

I spent a bunch of time over the weekend updating the setup of Orgzly Revived and Termux and my scripts for syncing everything between my phone and my laptop. I hadn’t bothered copying over my setup to my current phone since it felt too brittle after using it for a few months on my previous phone.

With Orgzly being revived and getting continuous improvements, and the availability of LLMs to debug and fix annoying breakages that I don’t want to sink time into, hopefully this time everything will work better…

Hopefully, this will all help me continue to be regular with these weeklies.

Android playstore and F-droid

While working on this setup I stumbled on this site “Keep Android Open”. It is a site which explains the planned changes to Android’s permissions for installing apps. The change seems like an iOS-ification of Android where only apps by developers registered with Google can be installed, even if they are not distributed via the Play Store. I had received a notification from Google about deleting my developer account since it was inactive and I didn’t pay much attention to it. This proposed change is so much wider reaching, though, and needs more investigation.

Phones stand in for earthquake sensors in Venezuela

I read an article about how Google runs an earthquake warning system that’s great for countries without a public-funded earthquake warning system. It’s the first time in a long time that I felt something from Google gave me the “Don’t be evil” vibes. For a company that managed to worsen their search for increasing traffic and ad revenue, this is pleasantly surprising!

Google Summer of Code updates

I’m co-mentoring a student for GSoC again this year. Last week, we submitted his mid-term evaluation and he’s good to go for the rest of the GSoC period.

It’s been an interesting experience mentoring this year, with Zulip maintainers allowing and encouraging students to use LLMs for their work. There’s a detailed AI usage policy here for all contributors, but I think the current breed of LLM agents make it easy to fall into the trap of cedeing control to them, and letting them drive you. It does need conscious effort from contributors to wrestle with the problem they are working on and understand any AI generated code well enough to critic, modify, explain and own it. We have been trying our best to make sure my mentee doesn’t fall into those traps and is making the time and space to be thoughtful and deliberate with their AI use.

Also, I’ve applied to attend the mentor summit for the first time and I’ve been accepted! If everything goes well, I’m hoping to attend the GSoC summit for the first time, in October in Berlin!

Home-built Websites for personal needs

My fitness trainer has built a website for himself using Lovable and Claude! The idea is to ease his workflows to track the progress of everyone who trains at the gym (in person or virtually). I could tell at first glance that the website is AI generated, but it’s pretty cool that he could make the time and was able to build something for himself.

A couple of weeks ago, an architect friend reached out to me to have a chat about a new SaaS startup that she’s working on with a friend to help improve the workflows for architects to go from first draft sketches to proper plans/models. She has a couple of CS students/interns who are “vibe-coding” the first version of their app. They are also training some models for the transformation, I believe.

Whatever qualms and complaints I have about the use of LLMs for knowledge work and all the current buzz and hype around it, I enjoy stories like these of it empowering people to build things they need to improve their workflows. I also enjoyed this thread (somewhat old, now) from Hacker News of people sharing what they are building with LLMs.

Ads on Instagram - BBC Documentary

I watched this BBC documentary on how Instagram allows ads promoting child abuse. Sadly, I’m not surprised by everything that the documentary explained. I’ve previously come across ads that are phishing scams, crypto scams, etc., and it didn’t look like Meta was doing anything to prevent such ads. I wasn’t surprised to learn that they don’t seem to be doing much in this case too. I don’t think these problems are unsolvable if these platforms care to take responsibility, given the tech available today.

Video on the discovery of Nitroplasts

I watched this video shared by Chaitu on nitroplasts, the organelle that lets Eukaryotes fix atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. Until this recent discovery, it was thought that only Bacteria and Prokaryotes can do this, and this is the first instance of an algae (Braarudosphaera bigelowii) that seemed to have “engulfed” a bacteria that can do this, which eventually turned into an organelle (similar to the evolution of mitochondria). This seems like a much more recent evolution than mitochondria and chloroplasts and possible provides a window into how such organelles get formed. And studying nitroplasts in Bigelowii could lead to research that could reduce our dependence on synthetic fertilizers, for instance.

Sid’s birthday

We attended Sid’s (nephew) 4th birthday. This was his first birthday after his little sister was born. He was so excited by all the toys he got, but also wasn’t expecting any of us to bring gifts for his sister. He wanted them all, but understood on adults explaining it.

I like how he was cautiously sharing his new toys with her too. He got a new robot which dances with lights and music to Indian songs. He understandably didn’t want to share it. It had enough moving parts and seemed breakable in his little sister’s hands. His dad tried to explain that his sister is playing with it carefully, and he kept repeating “Of course, she will break it!”, until he saw that this line of argument wasn’t working. He came back later saying, “It is too bright for her” (with all the lights that glitter).

Carnatic Cafe

I usually avoid eating out at South Indian restaurants in Delhi, but in solidarity with Chaitu who ate at a couple of Indian restaruants after we left from his place in Vienna, we ended up eating in Carnatic Cafe. I found the Vada in Vienna to be better than here, but the Rava Masala Onion Dosa was great!

Penguin Bookfair by Hubhawks

We attended the Penguin Book Fair by Hubhawks. I wasn’t aware it had a “Buy by the bag” pricing. The available selection of the books didn’t seem compelling enough to spend more than a few minutes in the small hall filled to the brim with people. Many of whom were trying to fill up their bags to the brim, err.. I mean the zipper, to make the most of the pricing model but frustrated by it.

2018 in Review

Thu, 17 Jan 2019 15:02:00 +0530

Here’s my review of 2018 - my first successful annual review. I remember wanting to do something like this, a couple of times before too. This time, I managed to get started and wrap it up!

I’ve been inspired to write one by a some reviews that I read this year – some of them do it every year.

Sher Minn’s visual retorospective
Nat’s month-wise review, with a review of 2018 goals and a bunch of goals for 2019.
Julia Evans has an annual review with a bunch of “conclusions” listing what worked in 2018.
James Clear answers three questions every year - what went well, what didn’t, and what were the learnings.
Sacha Chua’s reviews were one of the earliest reviews that I read, and they inspired so much awe! I may not be able to do as much quantified-self type posts as her, any time soon, but I love them!
Buster Benson does annual reviews on his birthday every year. He gives himself a motto to live-by, each year.

My review isn’t as systematic as any of these. But, I have some inspiring examples in front of me to aspire to. Hope this will start something that I can keep doing annually from now, if not more frequently.

I’ve divided my review into a few different areas - based mostly the time I have spent on them, how important I feel they are, and the extent of notes I have in those areas.

Work

I continue to work on RSR at Akvo.
The most challenging project was to wrangle a legacy permissions system that worked at an organization level to give some kind of user level permissions. The project was plagued with incomplete communication of requirements from our partners, failure to understand the complexity of the legacy code, and weird bugs manifesting in even weirder ways. We eventually delivered something, but I’m not at all happy with the solution, how long it took and how the whole project felt.
The company has been in a cost-cutting mode, and has been rethinking the way the products are positioned - transitioning more into a single solution/experience for our partners. This makes a lot of sense – the focus shifts from building tools to solving problems, which is great! But, I wasn’t particularly happy about how much RSR features in these conversations. Towards the end of the year, our team has managed to get more conversations going on involving RSR, but we need more.
A couple of friends asked me if I’d want to work for their companies, but I decided not to. But, these were opportunities to think more about what I want out of my job and the work I do. This is a work in progress.
I did some mentoring at one friend’s company, and got to know the team and their work pretty well.
I gave an interview at a company that I came across at PyCon which went horribly, partially because I didn’t prepare well and partially because of interview jitters. I was expecting a better interview experience from them, though, given how much I liked their team culture, etc.
I also happened to take my first ever front-end interviews, along with a team mate. I really liked how he led the interviews, and made the interview candidates feel comfortable. I learned a thing or two, including the fact that I don’t know a lot of things that people with a more structured and systematic approach to learning front-end development would know.
I didn’t attend too many events this year, like always. But, I really enjoyed PyCon - especially the Keynotes by Sidu Ponnappa and Armin Ronacher.

Side projects

I worked on a bunch of side-projects this year, some of them abandoned, some completed and found useful, some abandoned after the first version turned out to be not so useful. Most of the stuff was “webby”, and unsurprisingly a bunch of my side-projects were Ultimate related.

Zulip

I spent a quite a bit of my spare time between about March and September contributing to Zulip – mainly as a mentor on the zulip-terminal project, apart from some minor contributions around improving setting up of the dev environment for the zulip-server project. I also facilitated a Zulip sprint during PyCon at Hyderabad.

I also got to attend the Zulip India Summit! It was great to meet a whole bunch of Zulip contributors. I especially enjoyed the conversations with and the presentations by Tim and Greg, mostly around developer productivity.

I’m really impressed and inspired by the amount of care and effort that is put into stream-lining the process of contributing to the project, and the emphasis on developer productivity.

I played around with a little bit of React Native development, but wasn’t able to devote much time to it. I’d like to play around some more with it, this year.

Find Playo Venue

I wrote a simple map based tool to find the most suitably located Playo venue with good ratings, when some of my friends and I were playing a lot of badminton together. I still use it sometimes, but we’ve mostly figured out our “favorite” venues.

moditweetarchive

I built a site inspired by this Trump tweet archive for Modi’s tweets. I used Dash to build it, and it was quite fun, despite a few annoyances. This tweet archive, though, isn’t as interesting as the Trump archive, since the tweets are more calculated and strategic. But, a few things could be added to make it more useful.

The repo is private as of now, but I’m happy to share the code, if anyone is interested.

Blaggregator

I spent a couple of weekends maintaining Blaggregator. I updated Django to 1.11.x which is also something I did on Akvo RSR (my work project), later during the year. I also worked on making the crawl faster by handling dead blogs better, etc.

weblogviz

I tried to get started with learning some Rust, and as an exercise, I started building a tool to analyze Apache logs and show some useful stats.

Org-mode to Zulip helpers

I wrote some Emacs helpers to post to Zulip. I’m quite happy with being able to post longer messages from inside Emacs - this lets me retain a copy of things like my checkins or interesting links in my notes/journal file.

aradhana.org

I tried to help a friend of mine build a newer website for aradhana.org, and spent about a couple of days on it. But, there were other bigger problems which needed attention from my friends, and this site just fell by the wayside.

Abandoned projects

There are bunch of other projects that I’ve abandoned. I may end up spending some time looking into them, this year.

SOTG Calculator

I had the chance to look at the Spirit scoring sheets for a couple of tournaments, in the beginning of 2018, and was utterly disappointed. I always knew that it was a lot of work to get the top scores just a few minutes after the final game, but I found a lot more mistakes than I expected – a lot of them were easy to avoid with just a little automation.

To help improve the situation, I built a simple webapp to compute the scores from a Google Spread Sheet. Finding the initial adopters turned out to be very hard, despite the app making life a lot easier for people. It was disappointing to see people saying they didn’t have enough time to try the app, and instead chose to manually compute everything that the app could’ve done with a couple of clicks!

But, eventually it started to be pushed as the official tool starting this season, and has found a bunch of happy users.

Team RSVP

We used Whatsapp to co-ordinate team practices and to keep track of the players attending, etc. But, this started to get quite spammy, and it was a hassle to have other conversations on the group, while folks were calling in for a practice. It was a nightmare to have people call in for two different events at the same time.

To see if people were willing to switch away to something less spammy, a friend and I started with a simple RSVP app and most people seemed to not mind using it.

Unsurprisingly, the app eventually got a lot of features - to make it easy to manage team practices and team resources like photos and training material. It is being used regularly by the team, without too many problems.

As an after thought, may be we have an over-engineered solution, and just asking everyone to use (Google) Calender & Email would’ve worked.

Huddle magazine archive

The Huddle was a good Ultimate related magazine run by Ben & Andy a few years ago. They eventually stopped running it, and the archives disappeared from the original site but are available on the USA Ultimate website which is super hard to read! I wrote some code to scrape the site, and convert the articles into markdown posts and made a more readable version of the magazine here.

I tried to get in touch with Ben & Andy, to ask if they were interested to replace the “coming soon” message on the original site with these archives, but didn’t succeed. Posting it on Reddit and sharing it with my team got some people interested, and hopefully they keep using it.

vquiz

To help my team with understanding rules better, I built a light weight tool to easily create video based quizzes - embed video and ask related questions, use videos to show answers.

To build a question bank, I tried to get some people on the team to volunteer, but it didn’t really take off.

Ultimate Frisbee

2018 was filled with a lot of Ultimate - not just playing, but also thinking, talking and planning.

Our team had a couple of the best tournaments that we’ve since I’ve been playing with the team - not just in terms of the results but in how much fun we all seemed to have together.
I captained the team in a bunch of tournaments. I’m not sure how exactly I got to be the captain – I guess it was just stepping forward for a tournament and offering to spend the time and effort required. It was a great learning for me, and I’ve learned some things about people and leading them that I would’ve taken much longer to learn. I also think I did get better over the course of the year – I got more confident and the team also trusted me much more.
In the past, game time at tournaments has been a big concern. We experimented with a bunch of simple rotation systems – essentially just systems to keep track of how much each person has been playing, and trying to prevent too many imbalances. People were encouraged to bring forth their concerns and ideas during the games, rather than keep everything until the end of the tournament when it is not fixable until the next time!

We had the luxury of being able to try this since everyone on the team had more or less the same skill level, and everyone trusted the system. It helped take players’ minds off playing time, and helped them focus on actually making the most of the opportunities on the field. Most of the complaints about game-time seem to have gone away.
Communicating the reasoning behind a decision is as important as communicating the plan. Often, I’d hear surprising responses to a plan or just generally disappointing comments like how decisions were being made arbitrarily, when we were actually spending a lot of time and energy to try and make decisions. On most occasions, I felt the reason was the lack of an understanding of the reasons behind a decision.
Team communication was another tricky thing that I’ve had to wrestle with. The team still needs to find a balance between communicating over a WhatsApp group or discussing things in person, and the fact that most people are very busy to make in-person meetings with a good attendance happen. We are experimenting with a few things to see what works and what doesn’t.
At tournaments, having a positive environment where everyone is supportive and has each others’ back is the most important thing for me. Irrespective of how much practice we had together and what kind of strategies we practiced, just having a team where everyone is positive and helpful goes a long way.

On the other hand, this positivity is also such a fragile thing that needs to be carefully protected and nurtured. It’s very easy for one negative comment or thought to spread negativity and discontent like wild-fire.

I think as a captain, I should’ve strived harder to safe guarding and cultivating this positivity in the team.
Thanks to some discussions I had with my teammates, I spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to feel like a valued member of a team, and what it means to feel like you are contributing and making a difference. Being chosen an MVP during a game is external validation that you made a difference in a game, but only one or two people get that validation in each game. What about the rest of the dozen or so other people? How can we as a team recognize and acknowledge each others’ contributions to each point or game?

Some of these questions will continue to take up some of my mindspace this year, whether or not I continue to captain the team.

I also took up the role of UPAI’s Director of Technology (aka sys-admin) along with AK. It’s mostly been minor email or slack related change requests, and nothing more. But, it’s been fun to get to know some of the people in the Ultimate community a little better. I also helped organize the UPAI conference.

Writing

I wrote only 8 blog posts, but 6 of them in the second half of the year!
Some friends and I started a Writing Club in July, and it’s been going strong so far. It has not only helped me publish at least one blog post a month, but based on the responses I’ve received, I feel it has also improved the quality of my writing. A lot of credit goes to my friends who read initial drafts of my writing, and gave me really good suggestions on how to improve them.
My journaling and personal note taking improved slightly as compared to last year - I have more notes for 2018, than 2017. And that’s how I was able to write this review post. But, I think the notes are restricted to a few areas of my life, and I can take some actions to write about other things that are important too.

Relationships

I started a couple of Zulip instances with my friends on it – one with my college friends and another with my Ultimate team mates on it. My friends from college went back to WhatsApp, but the other Zulip realm has had some pretty conversations, especially on #beanbags. It hasn’t been super active towards the end of the year, but I’m really happy it exists, and hope it continues to grow this year.
It was good to have some more teammates turn into friends. Thanks to all the Ultimate stuff I’ve been doing, I got to spend a lot more time with some of the people that I previously hadn’t interacted much with.
Tarle, a teammate and friend, passed away. 4 months and he’s still dead. We all miss him a lot! But, we’ve also come together stronger, in some ways.
I’ve tried scheduling regular check-ins with some friends who live far away. They worked for a bit, but seem to be easily swallowed by higher priority things. When they did happen, though, they were quite nice!
Towards the end of the year, I moved houses. The new house is well furnished and has neighbors who mostly mind their business – I had a lot of friends and family visiting, which has been good.

2019 goals/ideas

I want to give having a motto for an year a shot, a la Buster Benson. My motto for 2019 is “Be Deliberate”.

I’m not sure I know exactly what this entails, and I’m sure I’ll get a better understanding of it, as the year goes by. But, here are few things that I think would be good starting points:

Choose what I read more deliberately, and read for understanding rather than just information. Keep better notes of the books I read.
Go back to using Howdy or creating check-ins with more people, and making sure that they happen. Prefer meeting in person or audio/video calls, rather than chat.
Journal more about feelings and thoughts, especially when making decisions, rather than just about events. Journal about more areas of my life rather than just “work” related stuff.
Consider hiring an editor to help write better blog posts, and improve writing style. Getting reviews and suggestions from my Writing Club friends has been good, but this would be a level up.
Look for mentors in other areas of life - especially those where I feel like I’m plateauing.
Pick side projects more carefully. One thing that I would be deliberately thinking more about would be working on side projects that pay.
Write quarterly posts to document my improved understanding of the theme – Be Deliberate – and to track progress I’m making on these goals.

Thanks Kartik Krovvidi and Shantanu Choudhary for reading drafts of this post, being excited about it, and useful suggestions to make it better.

HT interactives

Thu, 28 Sep 2017 00:46:00 +0530

I recently discovered the interactives by HindustanTimes, and thoroughly loved some of them. It felt like a fresh breath of air amongst all the other Indian data driven journalism that I have been coming across in the recent past.

The visualizations are a lot more interactive than some of the other Indian publications. These remind me of NYT’s interactives, which are amongst the best you’d see, while more often than not exploring data in the Indian context. I really like that they explore a variety of ways of doing these visualizations, and don’t just fit the data into one of the many standard options available in a visualization library.

It feels like they are willing to take their time to do these visualizations, and are willing to collect data from multiple sources, and combine multiple datasets to tell a story. I also like the fact that the visualizations and the articles are more open-ended, allowing users to interact with and explore the data, rather than trying to come up with an article full of conclusions with a click-baity title. The fact that one of the sections is called Just for Fun speaks to me.

The data and the code used in most of these interactives is open and available on GitHub, which is nice!

On the whole, I think they are doing pretty good work, and I shall be on the lookout for even better stuff from them. I’m sure I’ll pick up a thing or two from their work, in my projects. Hopefully, other teams doing similar work will also learn from there and produce more good stuff for greedy readers like me.

Back, Hopefully

Fri, 01 Sep 2017 22:47:00 +0530

I haven’t written anything here for almost a year. I needed to break the silence. So, here we go with a not-so-useful post showing how frequently I have been posting to this blog, to get a sense of how long this break has been in comparison to other silences in the past.

Neither the code below, nor the plots are very insightful. But, I just hope this will get me started on the path to blogging more regularly. See you around!

Parsed post content

I wrote some code to parse the content of the blog, and each post object looks something like this:

{'date': datetime.datetime(2010, 3, 17, 18, 30, tzinfo=<UTC>),
 'draft': False,
 'tags': ['blab', 'life', 'poem'],
 'title': 'Just another bunch'}
Post count: 190

Post frequency by year

import pandas
posts = pandas.DataFrame(posts)
counts = posts['date'].groupby(posts['date'].dt.year).count()
plot = counts.plot(kind='bar', figsize=(8, 6))
plot.set_xlabel('Years')
plot.set_ylabel('# of posts')

<matplotlib.text.Text at 0x7f7d99ee20f0>

<matplotlib.figure.Figure at 0x7f7d99ea7390>

Post frequency by month

# Add a DatetimeIndex to the Dataframe
posts.index = pandas.DatetimeIndex(posts['date'].values)
counts = posts['date'].groupby(pandas.TimeGrouper('M')).count()
ax = counts.plot(kind='bar', figsize=(12, 8))

n = 5
ticks = ax.xaxis.get_ticklocs()
labels = counts.index.strftime('%Y-%m')
labels = ax.xaxis.set_ticklabels(labels[::n])
ticks = ax.xaxis.set_ticks(ticks[::n])

ax.set_xlabel('year-month')
ax.set_ylabel('# of posts')

<matplotlib.text.Text at 0x7f7d99e2f240>

<matplotlib.figure.Figure at 0x7f7d99e2cf98>

Work-flow

I jumped onto the hugo bandwagon too.

I was totally impressed by how fast it is, and have been meaning to try it out for a while, but wasn’t impressed with the built-in org-mode support it came with. This changed when I finally came across the ox-hugo package that does a wonderful job of exporting blog posts from an org file to hugo’s markdown format. I have contributed a couple of patches to it, to make it work better for myself and hopefully for others too.

Also, for this post, I used ob-ipython with the enhancements from scimax and it has really made the whole experience quite enjoyable.

Among other things, I think one of the reasons for those peaks in the second half of 2010, was having a smooth work-flow. My current work-flow feels pretty nice too, and I hope it’ll reduce some of the friction in writing more posts.

Onwards!

What I liked 2016-09-04

Mon, 12 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0530

This week was a busy one, and I didn’t really consume too much web content.

A colleague mentioned that he was reading the book – The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps and it seemed to have some interesting ideas that I’ve never come across before.

The Berklee Indian Ensemble performed at the Bengaluru Ganesh Utsava and I went along with Sunil to their performance, which we thoroughly loved.

I liked some of Chet Baker instrumentals that I listened to this week.

What I liked 2016-08-28

Mon, 05 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0530

I liked this article advising developers on having healthy relationships. Most of it is common sense stuff – “Whether it be a side project or main project, understand that sacrificing relationships isn’t worth it.”

I really enjoyed this article by Priyanka on how she started talking to Auto Drivers. She shares a bunch of stories of drivers she talked to, that makes me wonder how many more such stories just go unheard, because I don’t talk.

@scopatz wrote up a nice argument explaining why @github should add back BSD to the list of licenses shown on the site. It taught me a thing or two about BSD and MIT.

I enjoyed spending the weekend at @_mavin’s place, discussing continuous improvement in life, among other things. Also, had a lot of fun playing Psyche. The game is so addictive, but the app is not all that great. Someone should make a more robust app for this, or something that piggybacks on an existing network service like Telegram or Facebook chat or Google hangouts.

Falling In Love At A Coffee Shop by Landon Pigg is a lovely song, that I discovered this week.

What I liked 2016-08-21

Mon, 29 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0530

Vox has a nice short video on shutting up about the y-axis – It’s long past time to say no to y-axis fundamentalism, they say.

The New York Times has a great visual history of which countries have dominated the Summer Olympics.

This story of Dipa by ESPN is an inspirational read.

An old post on a Frameless Geodesic Dome that Bruce Hauman (of Figwheel fame) built himself is very cool!

This article on India’s Gozoomo shutting down shop and returning VC money is heartening and gives me some hope about startups in India.

What I liked 2016-08-14

Mon, 22 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0530

NYTimes has been doing some amazing visualizations for the Olympics and this time lapse visualization of Bolt’s 100m Gold is great!

The History Project produced a book called Partitioned Histories that tries to contrast the narratives of India and Pakistan on their histories using school history text books. What a great idea!

This video about the Sunshine Orchestra being trained and tutored by Rahman and his KM Music Conservatory is touching.

Julia Evans’ posts on how to decide and think about what to work on are great. “Even reliably recognizing good ideas is hard!”, she says, and this resonates with me. Writing a release email as a way to think about why you are doing something is great!

Jasdev wrote about his monthly check-ins with friends. I thought they were such a great idea - simple, yet, powerful. “The only regret I have about these checkins is not starting sooner.”, he writes.

This Vox article on America’s increasing wealth gap along racial lines is really well done and thought provoking.

What I liked 2016-08-07

Tue, 16 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0530

Great visualizations about how global temperatures have been changing in the last ~165 years. If you are still a global warming skeptic, you definitely must see them.

These visualizations of Michael Phelps’ performances at Olympics over the years by NYTimes are great, too!

I came across these delightful videos (1, 2) of girls and boys playing cricket at Haji Public School. Look ma, no sexism in coverage of sports.

This (Telugu) interview of Dr Jayaprakash Narayan is truly inspiring. Also, YouTube recommended his conversation with Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, which was unexpectedly insightful, and covers a wide variety of topics – spirituality, religion, social organizations, politics, socialism vs. capitalism.

What I liked 2016-07-31

Mon, 08 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0530

Lots of Olympics stuff this week!

I really liked this ad - Rukna Nahi Hai - wishing all the Olympians a wonderfully spirited competition, at Rio. Go!

Brazilian marathoner Vanderlei Cordeiro de Lima, the man who lit the Olympic flame, inspires me with his spirit.

This story of Mohan Kumar from Ambattur, a Chennai suburb is inspiring. “Now I am on the relay team. But in the next Olympics, I want to qualify for the individual event. That’s my aim.”, he says.

@vandith recommended the Nike+ Training App to me and I really like it. They have some amazing workouts and pretty neat personalized workout plans.

Coke Studio Pakistan is trying a delightful experiment with their show this time – they are trying to use lights and vibrations to let the hearing-impaired experience the music on their show better!

Sainath’s keynote at Film Writers Association conference was yet another of his thought-provoking speeches. He sends you down a spiral of thought, when he says, “How agonised we are when people die, and how untroubled we are by how they live”. I also enjoyed watching his (long) casual chat from an year ago, talking about his life and influences on him.

David Sassoon the founder of InsideClimate News writes about Non-Profit journalism, the need for it, and how to have more of it. He writes about it in the American context, but India has its own share of troubles. I consume quite a bit of news from independent sources, but don’t really contribute to keep them going. I should turn this around.

A bunch of residents of Urur Olcott Kuppam in Chennai responded to media’s broken coverage of TM Krishna’s Magsaysay award. I really liked how assertive they were about their role in the music festival, its role in their lives, and in clarifying how they see their fishing village as opposed to how the media portrayed it. They don’t mince any words.

You can find my older weekly posts like this here.

What I liked 2016-07-24

Sun, 31 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0530

This week was relatively quiet for me. But, here’s what I liked, mostly from my twitter timeline. If you follow me on twitter, there may not be anything new for you.

This short video on how Nima made it to Ultimate’s most prestigious tournament made me cry each time I watched it. And movies/videos rarely make me cry.

Sacha Chua writes about her baby’s Microphthalmia and says this – “She’ll make an awesome pirate. Or cyborg. Or cyborg pirate. If she wants.” Woah!

I discovered Rains Of Castamere by Krish Ashok and loved it. Some looping happened!

@varungrover wrote argued for using better insults than ‘Presstitue’ and I agree. I have had similar thoughts on the other insults he talks about.

This tweet thread got me thinking about speaking up, and standing up, and how people fail to do it, and what could help prevent these failures.

This picture of kids praying at Haji Public School gave me hope.

What I liked 2016-07-03

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0530

I really enjoyed reading the full judgement given by the Madras High Court in the Perumal Murugan case. The court said something on the lines of: not all art may be for everyone, and if you don’t like a book, throw it away. The judgement also made it clear that it is the responsibility of the state to ensure that things don’t go haywire using appropriate measures, and banning things left, right and center is not the way to deal with it.

This letter that a Law professor wrote in response to a student’s complaint about him wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt is superb!

Gabriel Weinberg’s post with a list of mental models that he found repeatedly useful has been great. There have also been some great comments on it! I wish to keep going back to the post.

Anaghs shared a summary of Brian Christain’s Algorithms to Live By and the books seems really interesting. Added it to my reading list.

This ad by BigBazaar for Eid touched a chord.

Black Mirror’s The Entire History of You totally got to my head, and if you are interested in the future of technology and human behavior, I highly recommend watching this episode, if not all the episodes. Thanks to @9 for the recommendation.

Calvin and Hobbes’ Search is a fun project - search for Christmas, Life and Universe and enjoy the wisdom!

Sowmya Rajendran’s post on how the menstrual cup touched her life more than anything else after the Internet, was an interesting read.

The lights in the audience truly look “amazingly beautiful” in this Coldplay video.

I’ll try and post things that made me happy or touched my heart, each week.

What I liked 2016-07-10

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0530

Airtel’s response to @karthikb351’s write up on how they are sniffing and censoring CloudFlare’s traffic in India was funny but sad, though, not totally unexpected. For instance, see @kingslyj’s version of how this might end.

I loved this interview with Amanda Palmer where she talks about her stolen Ukulele, Music, her dad and her baby and her love for life comes across, like in everything else she does. ‘I want to get a couple of T-shirts printed for me and the baby that say: “We are determined to enjoy ourselves”’, she says.

A year old but inspiring article on Serena Williams, shared by @baali. I like how she says, she’s opening the next door for the next person, like the many people who opened many doors for her. @baali also recommended this song from Neerja as background music, and I loved it!

Pierre buttin’s screenshot art is amusing and gives a sense of how distracted he is, each day of the week, and how distracted we are, as a people.

We were walking through the fields and bushes in Hampi and stopped at the gate of a private property. A bearded man with a calm look on his face asked us “Do you know where you are headed?”. And then let us walk across his beautiful nature home to the other side, where we found this amusing sign.

Finally, this Nike India ad on Women in Sport is great!

What I liked 2016-07-17

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0530

@9 shared this story about Peter Norman. Woah, so inspirational!

This conversation with Amitav Ghosh on his latest book The Great Derangement is pretty scary! He says, “You know that this great derangement is ultimately going to lead to a great unraveling, but to see it working itself out, day after day, in the news, it’s so terrifying. I mean, it’s here, it’s happening. You may not see it a direct connection between the events happening in the world today and the climate in general, but that relationship does exist. In Syria, everything started with a great drought. The Middle East, this entire Mediterranean region, is going through a historic drought. And if you think about how this tumult in the Arab world began, it was with protests over food in Tunisia. So what we’re facing really, if you like, is a catastrophic convergence of natural impacts and human impacts.” I ended up buying the book at Bookworm.

This IndiaSpend article on how quotas have helped the disadvantaged caste students is a really well written article, with informative charts.

Kenneth Reitz released Episode-2 of Import This, a podcast that I wasn’t aware of and ended up listening to Episode-1. I really liked the discussion on being considerate to others in communities that you are part of. The quote that this episode ends with, “Software is all about the people. Don’t dismiss them. Don’t dismiss their experience.”, resonated well with me.

Julia Evans’ how to be a wizard programmer sketch is rad! (tweet).

I watched the movie Blind Side (2009) with friends, and really liked it. SJ and Oher together, they are a blast!

Assist time

Tue, 14 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0530

I sometimes hang out on #org-mode or #nikola and answer questions. I usually am not able to answer off the top of my head and I look up docs or dig through the code. Sometimes, we find ready-made documented answers, but other times we end up contributing some documentation, filing an issue, submitting a patch or hacking up something for that super-special use-case.

Until now, I looked at this time as IRC time, which loosely translates to distraction time. But, I’m usually learning about the tools I use a little bit more. Even when I’m not, I’m helping someone do something they want to do. Sometimes empowering them to fix future problems on their own. And indirectly making the user community a wee-bit happier, and possibly the software a tiny bit better.

This isn’t limited just to helping someone on IRC. Helping out a co-worker do something that they are new to, or just adding a comment or editing a Stack-overflow answer may end up in the “distraction time” bin, just because you weren’t doing something on your TODO list. It needn’t be.

Taking cue from scorers in Football, I decided to call this time assist time and to try to start seeing this time as (semi-)productive. Naming helps.

Effortful things

Sat, 11 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0530

That dense book you want to read but has been lying on your desk while you procrastinate on twitter. You know you’ll have to tune everything else out, and read slowly, word by word, trying to understand and make sense.

That vague blog post idea swirling in your head while you look at cat pictures, one after another. Distilling your thoughts and putting them down for general consumption is a lot of thinking and effort away.

That ${cool_programming_thing} that a talk got you excited about so long ago. But, watching talks and intending to start using it is all you do about it. You know its going to take a fair amount of reading, thinking and time, before you can really use it well.

Like all those squats and lifts you dread, these things are building your muscle. The thing about building muscle – it needs effort and feels like so much hard work.

You can’t build muscles effortlessly. Go do those effortful things! Only if you care about those muscles, anyway.

Stepping AFK

Fri, 03 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0530

In the past few weeks, I noticed three instances where I was forced to take a break exactly when I was ready to jump in and write some code to fix a bug or add a small feature. I had to step out of the house and take a walk to meet someone, etc.

I ended up getting ideas during the walks, which significantly changed and simplified how I would’ve implemented things, if not for those breaks. Even if I did end up zeroing down to those solutions, I am pretty sure it would’ve taken a couple of not-so-good attempts and much longer than it did.

Context switches are usually considered to be expensive for programmers, but taking a break at the exact time when I had all the required context loaded into my head seemed to help. It was also probably helpful that I was taking a walk, and there wasn’t really any other inputs or outputs competing for the space in my head.

This got me thinking about doing this more deliberately – I’d love to hear about any experiences or any experiments any of you have done with this. Also, I’m reminded of Rich Hickey’s Hammock Driven Development talk and I wonder if this is a smaller/different version of it, and makes me want to try out the things he suggests more deliberately. If any of you has thoughts and suggestions, I’d love to hear from you!

PyCon India 2016 - Propose a talk

Tue, 31 May 2016 00:00:00 +0530

CFP for PyCon 2016 is open and you should propose a talk!

There has been a lot of discussion on trying to improve the talk quality at the events. As my bit of contribution to this, below is a re-hash of some good advice from the internet on why you should give a talk, and how to submit a good proposal.

Why?

You needn’t be an expert on a topic. If you have enough experience about something to help make the next person’s experience with it better, you are good.
Its a great way to find people who are interested in the same things as you are and to get to talk to them. If you are an introvert, you should definitely be speaking!
Proposing and giving a talk is about thinking about something hard enough to refine your thoughts, and being able to explain it to others. Its a useful skill to hone.

How?

Talks are entertainment. Pick a topic that you are excited about and fascinated by. Let it be a general topic that will have a significant number of people interested in it.
What you want the attendees to be telling their friends about your talk, after they go back. Make it the objective of your talk.
Submit a complete, clear and compelling proposal. Show the reviewers that you are willing to put in the effort to prepare for and to give a great talk. Here are a bunch of proposals to see and learn from.
Submit an outline along with your talk. Show the talk can be delivered in the given time and will be interesting. Include an indication of how much time you intend to spend on each part of your talk.
Choose a good title. The title is what catches the attention of your audience when they are trying to pick a talk. Avoid buzz words.
Get feedback. Like any writing, feedback can be helpful at all stages – brainstorm while choosing topics to getting critique on the full abstract.
Convince the reviewers that you can give a well-rehearsed and entertaining – link to previous talks you’ve given, include links to any testimonials you’ve received from your audience, etc. If you don’t have a previously recorded talk, give a small talk to your friends or colleagues and have it recorded.

References

PyCon US has some good advice on how to submit a proposal and most of it is generic enough for you to use for PyCon India, or any other conference.
These posts (1 2 and more) by Jesse Davis are so so good!
I also liked “The Talk on Talks” by Zach Holman.

Thinking about Data Ethics

Wed, 25 May 2016 00:00:00 +0530

Earlier this month, a researcher made a dataset containing the profiles of about 70,000 users public. He didn’t really see a problem in doing this because he felt he was only presenting already publicly available data in a more usable form. was only presenting it in a more usable form.

Yesterday, I came across this quote in the very first chapter of Allen Downey’s book Think Stats which I liked a lot, and reminded me of this incident.

I hadn’t looked at the OKCupid data release and the discussion around it much, but I went back and read this article by a social media researcher who thinks a lot about these things.

She puts forth a lot of interesting ideas to think about ethics. Some things that stood out to me are:

Ask yourself how the person whose data you are using feels about the data.
Taking a ‘what if’ impact approach to thinking about data and ethics.

Also, you needn’t really call yourself a researcher to be actually doing experiments with (or analyzing) “big-data” and discovering and putting out facts that have an impact – however big or small. You should really go read the article, whether or not you are a researcher using data.

Incidentally, there is a meet-up on Data Ethics this weekend in Bangalore. I’m excited to learn and think more about this, and talk to others who care.

Level-up Tools

Mon, 23 May 2016 00:00:00 +0530

Thanks to a friend I got an upgrade to our still-being-setup kitchen. I now have a non-stick pan along with a few more new additions. I would previously use a bowl that people usually use to boil milk etc. for making whatever I did. The non-stick pan feels so great! It has made it a lot simpler to make some of the things I used to, because its non-stick. And it has vastly expanded the possibilities of things I can make, by virtue of being flat and wide based. The pan is such a great addition to my kitchen paraphernalia, and it adds a new dimension to the kind of things I can make. I’m not here to write a user review for it, though.

What are such tools in other things that you do, that drastically changed the way you did something, or added a new dimension to the kinds of things you could do, tools that make you feel like you have a new super-power? Learning to write Python (after starting off with C) seemed to give me so much power allowing me to focus on the problem, rather than fussing over the low level details. Sasha mentions in this post how using a Spaced Repetition System like Anki drastically improved her efficiency because she could focus on thinking about higher level things rather than trying to recall or search for what method or function to use to do something.

What are some such level-up tools for you? Is there a systematic approach to discovering tools?

blog-admin and Nikola

Sat, 21 May 2016 00:00:00 +0530

Another post about blogging.

blog-admin now supports Nikola, thanks to yours truly. blog-admin is an Emacs package by CodeFalling that lets you view and manage your (static site generated) blog from within inside Emacs.

Nikola’s command line utility is pretty nifty and does a bunch of useful things. I had a few utility functions to do common tasks like create new post and deploy blog. This worked well, but moment I came across this blog-admin’s tabular view, I was sold!

org2blog (a blogging tool I used previously) had a tracking file that kept track of all the posts I made, and I used it quite a bit for navigation – thanks to org-mode’s search functionality. The tabular view of blog-admin is even better! I really like the fact that the author has tried to keep the package generic enough to support any blog, and adding support for Nikola has been quite easy.

The filtering functionality is crude, but good enough for a start. One thing I want to add is a preview functionality for drafts. Showing some (writing) statistics would also be nice – No. posts in the last month, total published posts, etc. No promises, but you may see some of these things, soon. :)

Tedium in work-flows

Thu, 19 May 2016 00:00:00 +0530

I use Nikola for generating this blog. When creating a new post, it prompts for a title, and creates a file for the post.

Often I’m starting off with only a vague idea that needs to be fleshed out before it can be published (or discarded). It is quite difficult to come up with a title at this stage. I just want to start a draft and write things down!

I could use a “draft-title” and change it after finishing a post, but this feels tedious – requires 3 steps – change the title, post filename and post slug. The last two steps are optional, really, but I feel they are important especially when the original title is very different from the new one.

Being forced to come up with a title before anything else, feels tedious and, adds to the effort required to start off a new post. I shouldn’t really be worrying about the effort required to change the title of an unwritten post, but it happens subconsciously.

To work around this, I now have a “re-title utility” in my editor that takes care of all the tedious details. I can start with a random title, like Draft-1, and change it when I’m done with the post. I feel this is going to lead to a lot more drafts, at the very least, if not published posts.

Another work-flow related thing I came across recently was @Malabarba’s issue on CIDER (an IDE for Clojure in Emacs). The REPL takes a while to startup and this caused him to not use CIDER for running tests, if there wasn’t an already open REPL.

The tedium that people feel effects how they use the tool. Not surprisingly, making tedious-feeling tasks a breeze with the tool also effects how and how much they use it. Subtle variations in a work-flow could make or break it. How do you discover such potential work-flow make-or-break-ers? I think, these things would help:

Use the tool yourself (dog-food)
Talk to (or watch!) people using your tool
Look at work-flows in other similar tools
Thinking explicitly about various scenarios and simplifying or improving work-flows

I’d love to hear examples of this, and any ideas or thoughts you may have on identifying and fixing such things!

Error messages and new users

Tue, 17 May 2016 00:00:00 +0530

I was helping a friend of mine setup his blog and we were trying to use Hexo – a static site generator. We chose a Javascript based tool since he’s trying to learn Javascript. I skimmed through active Javascript projects in this list and finally zeroed down upon Hexo based on its popularity. I promised to help my friend to set this up, but he first tried to do it on his own and got back to me after an hour or so, quite frustrated and almost on the verge of giving up setting it up. I didn’t expect this from a tool that had so many stars, forks, plugins and so much active development.

We finally got it working, but we found that the error messages were horrendous – even for someone who has been using free and open-source tools for a while now. Printing out errors from compiler or interpreter directly along with the stack trace is almost always the worst thing to do for a tool/utility (as opposed to an API or library). The stack trace is definitely useful, for developers trying to build upon or improve your tool. Have a debug or development mode where developers can get all the information they need.

If you care about your users, especially new users, make sure you spend sufficient time on showing human-readable messages. If possible list the possible causes for every error along with tips for troubleshooting.

Cold

Wed, 13 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0530

It was a pleasant Saturday evening in the middle of the winter. Christmas was just round the corner and love in the air. The sun was just setting and everything outside his window was given a fresh coat of snow, tickled by the red, quickly fading light. Not that he noticed. He stared blankly out of the window, looking at nothing in particular. He had just woken up from his afternoon nap; but he’d buy it if you told him he’d been sleeping for a year…

You could see the icy river crawling ahead, from his window. People walking over the bridge, a few camera flashes going off, people stopping over and looking far ahead into the horizon – collecting their thoughts, couples walking hand-in-hand enjoying each others’ company; You could see it all, from up there! But, as they say, you only see what you look for. And he, couldn’t see any of this. His looked out of his window and saw none of this.

He is walking down the same bridge. He didn’t know where he was going; his head at least. His legs did; as always. He was walking down in his regular yellow shirt and black jeans, that you could mistake for a uniform, if you followed him for a few days. Extremely under-dressed for the chilly night, one would say. He kept walking down the main street, lined with shops brightly lit up for the festive season. The pavement bustled with with people walking with a spring in their step – the spring that the festive season and all the love in the air brought to you. Not that he noticed it, or had any of it in his step.

Soon, he’s walking through the park. The park that was built to celebrate time, ticking away furiously. Or to celebrate the time everyone in the world had, to enjoy themselves. He walked past the skating rink, with lots of people having the time of their life, ice skating; and a lot more, awaiting their turn. The first timers, old and young, making up for their inexperience, with their excitement; holding onto whatever they can, to finish each round, to start the next! The veterans, taking the center-stage and showing off their moves! He was barely aware of their presence and just walked on, past all the action.

The music festival; he walked past it too, like the crowd didn’t exist, the noise didn’t, the music didn’t; like there was nothing happening! The fountain “felt” no different. The cold breeze, did sprinkle the water to quite a distance and everybody kept a safe distance to avoid the chilling shower, except for the kids, who found it amusing to run into the shower for a split second and run back madly. How could he walk just by it, and not feel a thing!

The lakefront. That is where his legs always brought him in the end. The brilliantly lit skyline was a delight to watch, but I don’t believe he saw any of it. He just stared into it, blankly. He kept staring, as the night got chillier and the surroundings kept getting more and more deserted. Seconds ticked away, minutes and hours passed by! He stayed on, staring ahead. It didn’t matter how much below zero the mercury had gone. This wasn’t the first night he was spending staring into the nothingness. It turned out to be the coldest night, in a decade. But that didn’t matter to him. Nothing did. Nothing has, for a while now; Ever since he turned cold.

Unread (8,762)

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0530

I am unread. Unlike you, who classify yourselves as well-read or not, I am classified as unread or not. Well, you could call me not well-read too, I guess. I was looked at once, my innards glanced through, and was hurriedly marked as unread, starred and tagged. Given my length, the care with which I was composed, and the flurry with which I was stowed away, I probably contain something important, to be read at the opportune moment, something to be cherished and to be replied to with diligence and care. I felt a sense of pride.

I got composed and sent weeks ago, and have been lying here untouched, since. I get buried deeper and deeper every day, with a daily flood of newer stuff piling up onto me. While my composer, eagerly awaits a reply, (less and less eagerly each day, though) I have lost all hope of being read and replied to. I curse myself for carrying something so important. A thousand other replies have been sent, and a few thousand others composed here, but my turn hasn’t come, yet.

How I wish, it’d be my turn today. How I wish, I could push my way up through to the top of the stack. How I wish, I could see the eager wait come to an end! How I wish, I’m given the attention I deserved, today! Reply, ASAP!

PS: Apologies for all those emails that are still starred and unread, in my Inbox…

Blab on Noetic Nought

Weekly #28 (2026)

2018 in Review

Work

Side projects

Ultimate related projects

Ultimate Frisbee

Writing

Relationships

2019 goals/ideas

HT interactives

Back, Hopefully

Parsed post content

Post frequency by year

Post frequency by month

Work-flow

What I liked 2016-09-04

What I liked 2016-08-28

What I liked 2016-08-21

What I liked 2016-08-14

What I liked 2016-08-07

What I liked 2016-07-31

What I liked 2016-07-24

What I liked 2016-07-03

What I liked 2016-07-10

What I liked 2016-07-17

Assist time

Effortful things

Stepping AFK

PyCon India 2016 - Propose a talk

Why?

How?

References

Thinking about Data Ethics

Level-up Tools

blog-admin and Nikola

Tedium in work-flows

Error messages and new users

Cold

Unread (8,762)