Tech

I've been on Hugo for a while now and I have made a couple of blog posts as well. I am fully using the emacs org mode and am content, to say the least, with the flow. I maintain the website for another friend which is a wordpress instance. I cannot expect them to start using VSCode or Emacs to write their content, let alone set them up with AWS keys and a publish flow. It's just a little too nerdy for them. And that got me thinking. This approach, if made palatable, seems like a brilliant option for a lot of personal bloggers that don't really need all the bells and whistles that wordpress provides. We might have something here. So the rest of the post is sketching out the details of what I think will be an interesting offering. ...

I recently moved my website from wordpress to hugo. It is taking a little getting used to, but I absolutely love the fact that I don't have to leave my editor to update my blog. I was still editing markdown and had to lookup markdown syntax here and there. So today I spent some time to figure out how to get the ball rolling with org-mode in emacs. Turns out, its not that hard at all. ...

Hello Hugo! Today I moved my blog to hugo. Frankly it doesn’t make intuitive sense to run a blog on a static site generator. But when I think about it again, my blog is my expression of ideas. I rarely engage on the comments section. And the best way to let me know your thoughts is still to tweet at me. Given these, it makes sufficient sense to run the blog as a static site. And the site is now stupidly simple. I found a fabulous theme, and am editing the site using markdown on my emacs. This is actually faster than editing on wordpress editor :-) ...

I, accidentally, noticed that my WordPress instance was compromised. Of course, I would be the person to blame for this. It’s not a commercial thing, so I don’t nearly spend enough time looking under the hood. This cost me a couple of hours yesterday fixing and cleaning up the mess. I’ve taken some precautions to ensure I won’t need to look under the hood too frequently but also ensure I don’t sponsor some botnet or click-fraud elsewhere on the tubes. ...

I have an axe to grind with Siri. I use Siri every day to time my yoga routine. These are short reps of 30s poses. It takes about 30 mins to complete them. I searched for a good timer a couple of times in the past and then gave them up altogether once I figured I could use Siri to set up the timer for me. On a good day, it’s all good. But on most days, Siri is deaf. Not just any deaf, she’s so deaf that I’ll be screaming at the top of my voice to get her to effing wake up. Eventually I figured, maybe if I used a headset, things might get better. So I picked up a $75 Beats headset. Excellent headset actually. Stays snug fit in my ear – something the default iPhone headset doesn’t for me. Apparently, I don’t have the generic ear that the rest of the world has. Turns out, though, Siri doesn’t care if I used a Beats headset because it still depends on hearing me properly. Incidentally, Beats has a small button that I can press to summon Siri. The problem for me, though, is that I need to start the timer after I get into the pose. When I am in the pose, I can’t move around my hands much. So summoning Siri with a button is a non-starter. ...

I’ll be 40 in a year or two. I distinctly remember feeling a stomach churn and completely unprepared when I turned 30. I had just finished my MS thesis and joined Atheros. I had a long way to go to have something I could call a career. It was very unsettling at that time. But then things happened and here I am, almost ten years later, still embarked on a journey to identify the problems I really want to solve. ...

I recently finished a course on Coursera. Machine Learning from Andrew Ng. Its been on my radar for the longest time and after several false starts, I finally completed mid last month. But along the way I learnt two things: I still relish math like I always did. I understood the concepts pretty well and am able to come up with correct solutions. I am somewhat terrible at coding them up. Now that’s a big surprise to me. I’ve been writing code for quite a long time now. After learning half a dozen programming languages and spending almost a decade writing code, it is a bit of a shock that I find it somewhat difficult to code up the algorithms. And especially in Octave/Matlab. I got thinking. I have built an entire application with all its shenanigans using python. I have been running it on AWS for at least 2 years now and I haven’t so much as contacted their support for anything other than increasing limits. And yet, here I am unable to code up a simple nested for loop to implement a linear regression model. I realised the problem to be, again, two-fold. ...

So we had to transcribe a bunch of interviews we did earlier. One of the sessions was a good 45 minute long and had a tonne of details. It’s quite difficult to manually transcribe this. But hey, we gotta do this. And then we have to do a bunch more later. The wife was in charge of doing this and she was trying to do manually. Then she had a “eureka” moment and tried to use One Note’s speech-to-text function. But there were tonnes of limitations – the laptop doesn’t hear itself and the phone seems to freeze for a long audio block. ...

I am finally able to write common lisp code. Frankly, though, I don’t think I have arrived as far as Lisp goes. You can take a look at some of my work here: https://exercism.io/profiles/abishek Learning to write code, looking through CLHS for usage and figuring out a workable solution in a near-functional manner is how far I have gotten. I don’t yet know to write a macro. I mean, I know the construct to create a macro. But I am yet to arrive at a place where a macro would solve the problem in a more elegant manner. I am sure the mentors on the site are able to see multiple macros in my code, though. ...

I have been writing web applications for quite a while now. For a more significant part of this experience, I had been developing on top of an existing CMS type environment; moodle, drupal, WordPress, or the like. Very few of these are web applications written from scratch. I typically used PHP when I write for the web because it has the lowest barrier of entry. You can write HTML and then insert your PHP wherever you need dynamic content. I used to hate Javascript, which in turn meant I was not too fond of Ajax calls. So my web applications always submitted forms and handled the details in PHP. ...