In the bitcoin economy, time really is money. Every 10 minutes or so, mining machines compete with each other to solve a math problem to win 12.5 bitcoins, a reward set by the bitcoin software. The work is akin to trying out billions of combinations of numbers on a safe. The miner who gets the right combination the fastest unlocks the safe. The more machines you have, the greater your chances of earning coins.
The whole economy around bitcoins (“the stateless digital currency whose total market value has more than quadrupled this year to $70 billion”) mesmerises me. It is as if a whole parallel universe exists — a universe where not just the currency, but the rules and the rulers transcend the limits of the real world. It stumps me though to think that whoever is capable of owning huge wearhouses, being called mines now, that host nearly unlimited processing power will soon govern this universe. And the most prestigious job available would be to tend to the machines generating this power.
Machines at the mine break all the time, given there are 25,000 devices. It’s a game of whack-a-mole: After one is fixed, another broken machine crops up. “I just try my best to check as many as possible,” said Hou, who tends to the machines daily from 8:30am to 6:30pm.
All day and night, using laptops, they monitor the status of the machines, and go into “the field”—the eight buildings that house them—to check on malfunctioning ones.
As a side note, I read this and feel automation is banging on the doors to dismantle the life of these so called miners. This parallel universe will not be run as it is today. Disruption is waiting to happen when everything of a world goes digital.
I have become a big fan of the Mc Sweeney’s publication. Every day brings a new satire, a new angle, new humor to the terrible events in the world. Here’s their satirical take on Mr. President’s horrible tweet. “As you can see on this X-ray, the tumor is currently about the size of a baseball in an all-white baseball league. I could surgically remove it as soon as tomorrow afternoon. However, I will not be doing that. I view this tumor as an important symbol of your body’s history and heritage. Removing the tumor would be yet another example of misguided medical correctness in today’s liberal America. I protest this surgery and refuse to whitewash your rich medical history. The tumor must be kept prominently displayed inside your body.”
This is my personal place, a destination where one can find every thought I ever post on the web, anywhere. At times it originates, and so just exists, here. There are also times when it’s published at someotherplaces first, but is also made available here. It has been in existence since 2008 and just like every year, this time too I wanted another fresh start for this place.
I have already documented all the history behind and the context for the existence of this site and this page. Here, I intend to document all there’s to know about this site.
Before I get to the details, this is what I set to achieve when I began.
A website designed, in and out, to my liking, with every knob controlled by me.
A landing page with a brief about me and the site. One that clearly links to the key content.
Clean and simple experience, while reading a post or navigating the site.
Consistent writing experience, preferably offline, across mobile and desktop.
Source control for the whole place. No fallouts from brain freezes.
I do not believe what I sought out was that complex. So I was confident I could get this working.
Here’s the TL;DR version of what I have achieved. 1.This My old site was built with Hugo — it is extremely simple, highly customisable, well documented and has an active community. It’s difficult to beat all of that. ∞ 2. The look and layout of this site is themed by an extremely personalised port of the original ‘ghostwriter’ theme. I intend to open-source the same soon. ∞ 3. The source for the complete website along with all the posts, as markdown files, resides in GitHub. Every change to this setup is driven as it would be in a standard git project. ∞ 4. Contents from Squarespace were exported into a Wordpress package first. They were converted into markdown files using ExitWP. Followed by cleanup. And deploy. ∞ 5. This site is deployed by Netlify. With continuous deployment and one-click SSL for custom domains possible with minimum configuration, the choice was pretty simple. ∞
Core Engine - Hugo
I had always wanted to attempt a site creation from scratch, but I failed miserably every single time. Given I had ample time before my Squarespace subscription expired, I attempted it again this time. I believe I did not fail. This is a static site, built with Hugo. It was the ease with which I could get a site running on my dev environment via Hugo that convinced me about the viability of this whole project. If you do not believe, just head over to the Hugo docs for a quick start and begin. You will have a site running by step two. It is that easy.
You would have also realised how well document the whole framework is from your visit to the quick start guide. There is nothing that you want to achieve that isn’t documented. In addition, given that Hugo is written in GoLang, it gave me an opportunity to learn a new language. Post that, every need of mine to get the things just right was just a code snippet away.
For example, find below a snippet for fetching a list of random five articles. Yes, it is easy. And a lot powerful.
{{ $pag := where .Data.Pages "type" "post" } } {{ range (shuffle $pag | first 5) } } {{ ....custom.... } } {{ end } }
And if it does turn out that there is some tricky edge case that you just can’t get your head around (or you are being plain, simple lazy), there is a thriving community of fellow users which is extremely active and a lot helpful.
TL;DR: Hugo is simple, highly customisable, well documented and has an active community. It’s difficult to beat that.
Personalising the look & layout
Once I had the core finalised, I shifted my attention to personalising the site. And again Hugo comes with a lot of good looking themes — extremely minimalistic to fully loaded. You will always find the one for your liking there.
If you, like me, do not find one that ticks all the boxes for you, you can select any that is closest and get to personalising. All the themes come with the source code. So if it suits you, let the developer in you go wild.
I began with a theme “Ghostwriter”. It was simple and I could see how it can be extended to enable every aspect that I wanted to achieve. So I began working. After a week of customisation, I could finally see the site shaping up just the way I imagined.
I intend to soon open source the changes I have made to the original theme. I am working on cleaning up the source and committing. All the enhancements and personalisations added to the theme are available at Github. If you like the theme that you see and if you are using Hugo for building your Static website, you can download and use the theme from here.
TL;DR: The look and layout of this site is themed with an extremely personalised and open-sourced port of the original ‘ghostwriter’ theme. I intend to open-source the same soon.
Cushioning against brain freeze
Yes. Commits and port. I am not letting another of my brain freeze moments to spoil all the efforts the put in over the years. Refer the history section I mentioned in my introduction above.
So whole website is a git project. It is currently maintained as a private repository at GitHub. Every change, major or minor is committed. Every milestone is tagged as release. And every major enhancement is pull request. No, I am not taking any risk with myself this time. Here is a snapshot for the effort that has gone in to bring the v1 of this site.
Do I intend to make the source of this website public? Well, initially I wanted to do just that. However, I do want to keep my messy drafts, be it to the posts or the website, just to myself. I could not find a public way to achieve that. So as of now, the source stays private.
TL;DR: The source for the complete website along with all the posts, as markdown files, resides in GitHub. Every change to this setup is driven as it would be in a standard git project.
Migrating the content
Talking about the posts, I had to bring the old entries along from Squarespace. After all, this is also a place for my writings. I would not want to loose any of my old ones1.
This time, though, I did not have the luxury of the out-of-box imports. I had to do it on my own. Well, I did have a couple of points playing on my side.
I have been writing all my posts in markdown format and exporting them as required.
Current setup with Hugo is all markdown driven, where every content exists as a .md file.
So, all I had to do was find a way to export the content from Squarespace as markdown files. I wish it was that simple; it wasn’t. The only option that Squarespace supports for export is as a Wordpress package. However, anyone who has been blogging for even a slightest of time would know Wordpress package should be fine. Because there is nothing to be done with a Wordpress package that no one else has already tried. Just getting markdown files out of that must be a cakewalk. Markdown, after all, is a geek’s solution.
And as I thought, it already is handled. ExitWP is a great tool to migrate a Wordpress blog to a static site. It is introduced as a tool to convert to “the jekyll blog engine”. But that should be fine. Both Jekyll and Hugo use markdown files as content.
After going through the steps as documented at the git repo for ExitWP, I had all the content available as markdown files2. It did need the below minor cleanup.
Images had to be handled separately. All references were to the Squarespace domain. Thankfully, I maintain a credit link with every image to the original one. So I just had to re-download, compress and deploy them.
Front matter needed porting to the Hugo standard. I did weigh in the option to write a script to do that. But then ended up siding on doing it manually.
Post content did need some minor fixing. ExitWP has some issue handling and regenerating the emphasis, especially around symbols (for example, quotation marks, dashes etc).
Deploy the post, test each one from the post link on dev and I had all my content back. Thanks to this effort, I believe I never have to worry about porting out my content ever. Every published copy of a post stays as a raw file with me.
TL;DR: Export contents from Squarespace to Wordpress package. Use ExitWP to convert it into markdown files. Cleanup. Deploy.
Deploying with Netlify
Once I had a site running on dev and tested multiple times to bring it to my liking, I had to start thinking on a place to deploy it. And of course, Hugo has all the possible options well documented.
As my code was in GitHub, the first option I tried was to deploy it on GitHub Pages. I configured Hugo to generate the static pages in a defined directory (configured as submodule for the GitHub pages repository). I built my site, pushed the changes and deployed, and it all looked fine. However, there was just one problem — the deployment workflow was a bit messy. In addition there were few more niggles3.
There is no provision for SSL with custom domains. So they cannot yet be delivered over secure http.
Auto-triggering for build and deploy had to be configured as web hooks.
Given the deployment workflow, publishing from mobile was just out of question.
On reading some more, I found a far simpler option in Netlify. Again I will let the official document explain itself.
Netlify builds, deploys and hosts your front end. It provides continuous deployment services, global CDN, ultra-fast DNS, atomic deploys, instant cache invalidation, one-click SSL, a browser-based interface, a CLI, and many other features for managing your Hugo website.
One might say jargon, but there are key needs I had which GitHub pages just didn’t handle — a couple being continuous deployment and one-click SSL. So I did another deployment with Netlify and again fell for the simplicity of the things involved. No configuration head-ache. No custom workflow to handle the built site separately.
Write Frontend Code. Push it. We handle the rest.
Yes it, indeed, is that easy. It doesn’t matter then where you push to the repository from, mobile or desktop.
There is one issue with the Hugo documentation though. One does not need to trigger a build command with Hugo version number appended in it. Just configure a parameter in the build for the version of your Hugo environment.
Once the Netlify account was created and the continuous deployment for the site setup, I just followed the documentation for using custom domain and setting up SSL. The site was live.
TL;DR: The deployment of this site is handled by Netlify. With continuous deployment and one-click SSL for custom domains possible with minimum configuration, the choice was pretty simple.
Change log
So to summarise, I have first releasable version of this website ready. Built with Hugo. Themed with Ghostwriter. Run with Netlify. And of course, it is just v1.
Musings Et Al. v1: First version of the website with all the clogs designed and working as planned. It hosts below custom features.
Support for write-up section on homepage driven by config.toml
Support for headshot on the homepage
Support for displaying the latest featured post on homepage
Support for link posts (via refs param in front matter)
Support for related post along below the content of a post
Link to the image credit (via imgsrc param in front matter)
As a side note, all my old posts still exist on Wordpress. You can read them here.↩
I did face some difficulties while installing the dependencies. In case you hit them too, just download them from the official sites and have them available in the classpath. It doesn’t matter the approach is crude, it should get the work done.↩
In case you do want to go a head with GitHub Pages, I would suggest you go ahead with the option of deploying from the master branch itself. Hugo documents this as the last option. But I feel this is simpler and a viable option.↩
As I read this, I sat there with a chill down my spine. “Terror is not an unjustified reaction to knowing this virus exists. We have no room to be wrong about this. None. We can be wrong about other things. If smallpox got out, it would be unfortunate, but it has a fourteen-day incubation period, it’s easy to recognize, and we would stop it. Much the same is true with sars. But with flu you are infectious before you even know you are sick. And when it gets out it is gone.”https://twitter.com/statuses/896659144819695617
I was writing the setup page of this site when this thought triggered in my mind. iPad is just a consumption device till you try. Once you do, you will start loving producing content on it.
I don’t know what the argument is against showing favicons in Safari’s tabs, but I can only presume that it’s because some contingent within Apple thinks it would spoil the monochromatic aesthetic of Safari’s toolbar area. I really can’t imagine what else it could be. I’m personally sympathetic to placing a high value on aesthetics even when it might come at a small cost to usability. But in this case, I think Safari’s tab design — even if you do think it’s aesthetically more appealing — comes at a large cost in usability and clarity. The balance between what looks best and what works best is way out of whack with Safari’s tabs.
If that is the reason why there are no favicons in Safari tabs, I believe Apple is taking there quest for design too far. Apple gets blamed for always leaning towards form-over-function. I could see every time why some groups might support the said decision. But this time, I just cannot fathom how someone can find this to be a releasable solution. This is senseless.
I had a lot of thoughts on the whole Google is handling the diversity wrong” memo kerfuffle. Here are some of them. - The memo had the leadership in tricky position. Unfortunately, what played out looks driven from external pressure than “corporate values”. - “No matter how often this all happened, it still hurt” The debate, & the sick views it brings to the fore are damning to all involved. - Why’s this always forgotten — “people may have a right to express their beliefs in public, that does not mean companies can’t take action.”
At times, satire is the best mean to address and comment on a muddled topic. And this one at McSweeney’s by Ben Kronengold takes the cake.
Positions in the tech industry often require long, arduous hours that may conflict with humans’ desire to run home and see if Ozark is any good. Robots don’t have this problem, for they are pushed into coveted jobs for the status that they entail.
This writeup from John Battelle has to be one of the most clear headed, to-the-point and no-bullshit take on the whole “Google is handling the diversity wrong” kerfuffle.
.. that narrative is bullshit, and all rational humans know it. Yes, we have to pay close attention — and keep our powder dry — when a company with the power and reach of Google (or Facebook, or Amazon, or Apple…) finds itself a leader in the dominant cultural conversation of our times.
But when a legitimate and fundamentally important debate breaks out, and the company’s employees try to come together to understand its nuances, to find a path forward …..To threaten those engaged in that conversation with physical violence? That’s fucking terrorism, period. And it’s damn well time we called it that.
A must watch short documentary from WSJ, named so aptly “Behind the Glass”. The story behind iPhone’s journey to existence will keep fascinating us, coming out every now and then, bite-sized.
Such a refreshing edit this published as part of Sunday Review at The New York Times. The contrast between people’s real lives and ones as perceived by their “friends” on social media is so succinctly articulated by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. Especially evident is the side of us exposed to Facebook as against Google (the search engine).
Alone with a screen and anonymous, people tend to tell Google things they don’t reveal to social media; they even tell Google things they don’t tell to anybody else. Google offers digital truth serum. The words we type there are more honest than the pictures we present on Facebook or Instagram.
Sometimes the contrasts in different data sources are amusing. Consider how wives speak about their husbands.
On social media, the top descriptors to complete the phrase “My husband is …” are “the best,” “my best friend,” “amazing,” “the greatest” and “so cute.” On Google, one of the top five ways to complete that phrase is also “amazing.” So that checks out. The other four: “a jerk,” “annoying,” “gay” and “mean.
I just could not have put this is in a better way. The fakeness of what streams at Facebook has always been at the crux of the platform being disliked by a vocal minority, especially the geeks. It won’t be too much of a stretch for the argument to say if it is not fake, it is not visible on the Facebook timeline.
How does one protect oneself from getting miserable at the hands of this streaming pile of curated noise?
Once you’ve looked at enough aggregate search data, it’s hard to take the curated selves we see on social media too seriously. Or, as I like to sum up what Google data has taught me: We’re all a mess.
Now, you may not be a data scientist. You may not know how to code in R or calculate a confidence interval. But you can still take advantage of big data and digital truth serum to put an end to envy — or at least take some of the bite out of it.
Any time you are feeling down about your life after lurking on Facebook, go to Google and start typing stuff into the search box. Google’s autocomplete will tell you the searches other people are making. Type in “I always …” and you may see the suggestion, based on other people’s searches, “I always feel tired” or “I always have diarrhea.” This can offer a stark contrast to social media, where everybody “always” seems to be on a Caribbean vacation.
Yep, the best lifehack I have read in a long long time. Amen.
There is a great edit on Ars Technica about “The secret lives of Google raters”. I found the section on how there always are some people, humans, behind all the AI Google, and Facebook, want to harp about. Following passage is a sheer eye-opener.
UCLA Information Studies professor Sarah Roberts has been studying the lives of raters for the past five years, traveling from California to the Philippines to interview workers. She told Ars that one constant in all their stories is that these workers feel isolated from the companies like Google and Facebook, even though most of their work benefits them. Some say that they know they work for Google, but Google doesn’t know they work there.
Roberts believes that big companies like Google want to keep raters hidden, largely because they like to boast about how many tasks they handle with AI. “Actually their AIs are people in the Philippines,” she told Ars by phone. “Are there algorithms in all these tasks? Sure. Is it 100 percent? Not even close. There’s some kind of profit motive behind these claims [about how] machines and algorithms run the show.”
The plight of these raters is real. For all the advancements in AI and automation, there is always some “dirty” work that’s deemed too unimportant, too trivial, to only be pushed “down” to humans. The trend is disquieting.
“Very few books make me root for the central character. Ove has me hooked.. am with him for a fun ride!” That was my update a third into the book. And boy, did this guy keep me hooked. I was with him as his past unfolded in front of me. I was with him as his present life was amended by some funny, some happy, some sad events. Above all, I was with him as this grumpy old sod grew into a grumpy, but caring, grandad.
Author, Fredrik Backman, allows the characters to grow and that is the biggest reason the book worked for me. There is no haste in revealing the past or bumping into Ove’s future. Every chapter, a short story in itself, unfolds more of Ove and the world around him. You see Ove as he is. You are slowly led to understand why he is the way he is, mostly via flashbacks. You are made to feel for the guy, made to root for him to not stay how he is. And when that happens, because you are already absorbed into Ove’s life, you are left contented.
Saying Ove is grumpy would be an understatement. He is on the edge always, ready to get worked up. He is disappointed in everyone around him. He feels no one is responsible enough to care for oneself - dependent on others for every little thing. He feels the world around has no respect for rules of the land, doesn’t matter they are chalked out by Ove himself. So he takes it upon himself to make sure people are constantly reminded of that. And that’s how he lives his life - a monotonous, misanthropic one . And as Ove is planning to end his troubles with his life, fate has just the opposite planned for him — to add just enough goodness in Ove’s life to thaw the bitterness.
The book maintains a wry sense of humor throughout. It made me laugh out loud at multiple instances. Especially, the way Ove’s frustrations in other people’s incompetence are worded is an absolute masterclass. The book also maintains a deep sad undertone. It does not ever let Ove’s sulkiness make you hate him.
So be it through his affection towards a young boy in love or forced, but welcome attachment from the lively new neighbor or the unspoken responsibility towards the old, and may be the only friend, Ove always shows just enough warmth to make him the most likable character in a long long time. Or in Sonja, Ove’s wife’s words, “the strangest superhero I have ever heard about”.
Go welcome this guy, and the gang, into your life. He will make you smile, guffaw, shed a tear and, above all, enlighten you towards life. A must read.
It was pitch dark across the town of Diu. The street winding down was deserted as usual. It had recently been washed off its weariness by the unseasonal rain. In a way, it was a perfect setting for one pleasant, romantic walk.
A couple silhouetted against the discontinuous bouts of illumination from the lighthouse nearby. But their walk was no way romantic, may be a tad tipsy rather.
Roy and Joel had been walking down the street for almost an hour. Yet their individual opinions were divided. Joel thought it must have been four hours. Roy, however, opined that he was off by at least 3 hours and 30 minutes.
“No way” bawled Joel, “We must be just debating this for last 2 hours.”
“Again, you are off by an hour and 30 minutes at the least” Roy countered.
“How are you so sure? It’s as if you want to stay here longer.”
“Of course, I do. Don’t you?”
“Well, not in the shape I am now” Joel hit back with his fiery eyes. “Anyway, shouldn’t we be searching for what we are supposed to search?”
“That is exactly what I am doing” replied Roy, peeking at the byroad they were passing by.
“I don’t think we are searching for the same thing, though. If that were the case, you would be peeping minutely down the manholes. Not glancing at the lanes as we pass by.”
Roy just smiled.
Ganu saw the two bodies tottering along. He wasn’t sure if it was their walk or his drunk vision that was unsteady.
One was looking minutely at the footpaths, and in the garbage bins, and over the plant pots. He thought he also saw him once peeping inside a manhole. He was for sure searching for something.
The other, the skinny one, was not searching for any thing, though. “He might well be searching for someone.” thought Ganu.
There was something about these two people that appeared odd to Ganu. They looked unconventionally fresh for the time of the day, the season of the year, and the condition of the city. All were in shambles.
Ganu did not like such clean people. He felt no one should be this clean when he was drowning in his sorrows.
Ganu started following them.
“I think that guy there is following us. Is it ok if he sees us?” asked Joel, in a worried tone.
“How would I know? I too am going through this for the first time. I, anyway, do not think anyone ever has faced this. I think even he would not know.”
“Of course, he would know. He is the one who sets the rules.”
Roy shushed Joel as he heard the muffled voices, the wailings. He walked towards the next alley — there was a gathering of saddened souls.
Roy just smiled, again.
Ganu walked behind them to the crowd and steered himself towards the middle. He saw the back of the skinny one now, looking down at a weeping woman. And just as he saw what lay unmoving on the ground in front of her, he collapsed with his eyes wide open.
“Oh, crap!” exclaimed Death. “Now this hasn’t happened ever.”
He looked at Roy, Joel, and the other souls. “Well people, the only way in now is down. Let’s go search for that key to the heavens.”
Maciej Cegłowski rants on how IFTTT pulled the plug and dropped the support for Pinboard.
Imagine if your sewer pipe started demanding that you make major changes in your diet.
Now imagine that it got a lawyer and started asking you to sign things.
You would feel surprised.
This is the position I find myself in today with IFTTT
This has to be one of the best break-up lines ever used. There is a bit of disdain for IFTTT in Maciej’s tone, but his anger is justified. When your whole business is driven by the content that exists at other freestanding services, you do not govern the terms the said services should operate in.
Maciej has already levied against IFTTT, or as he defines it, “the Internet plumbing that has been connecting” web services - recommending alternativeservices to his users. I, for one, am going to continue with IFTTT. I know they have put a misstep, but am hopeful they will learn from it.
Update: Armin Ronacher has perfectly captured why I feel it is a misstep from IFTTT in his tweet.
The entire point of @ifttt was that they bridge APIs. Outsourcing their entire point of existence to the API providers seems moronic.
— Armin »not the flu« Ronacher (@mitsuhiko) March 29, 2016
Ev Williams suggesting an idea for a new age messaging app to overcome the rush of frantic messaging.
A messaging service/app that only delivers once per day (say, noon). It’s like going to the mailbox and seeing what’s there for you.
It's an interesting idea in principle. But it would not work in reality. Here are my few quick thoughts.
Why Not!
I think it would be interesting to follow the positive effects of this "forced limitation" — things that might make this experiment succeed.
Writing might be fun because people would have time to mature the thought, an idea and word them in exactly the format they want them in.
Reading might be fun because there is no urgency to stay on top of the current happenings. Messages don’t become stale if not consumed and commented on as the event is happening.
What a person writes about and how he words them would be anticipated. Patience is a virtue that is dying a slow death amongst the people socially active today. If forced, it might allow to pull the reins back a tad.
Why Not.
However the limitations would force the user to see the not-so-good side of the social interaction.
Both for writers and readers, the urgency of publishing and consuming would shift from the time of event to the time of publication.
The message delivery time cannot be decided to be a fixed time for all — a sort of broadcasting duration. Because not every person has the same consumption pattern. They vary a lot, making the delivery time further complex.
The behavior is very similar to a daily/weekly news digest. Anticipation lasts in the initial phases, wades out slowly as the unread messages mount up. Rather, the dying patience makes this experiment further difficult to succeed.
Forced limitation is the stick, but where’s the carrot?
Emma Watson gave an impassioned and effective speech at the U.N. headquarters in New York. The address was as part of the launch of “HeForShe” campaign.
Overall speech from the U.N. Women Goodwill Ambassador is a must watch — not only for the fact that it was highly applauded & admired, but for a fresh view towards Feminism.
I was especially gratified to hear her speak on why gender equality is an issue, and a cause of concern, for men too.
Gender equality is your issue too. Because to-date, I have seen my father’s role as a parent being valued less by the society — despite my needing his presence as a child as much as my mother’s. I’ve seen men suffering from mental illness unable to ask for help for fear it will make them less of man.(…) I have seen men made fragile and insecure by distorted sense of what constitutes male success.
Men don’t have the benefits of equality either. We don’t talk often about men being imprisoned by gender stereotypes. But they are. And when they are free, things will change for women as a natural consequence.
If men don’t have to be aggressive in order to be accepted, women won’t feel compelled to be submissive. If men don’t have to control, women won’t have to be controlled. Both men and women should feel free to be sensitive. Both men and women should feel free to be strong.
It is time we all perceive gender on a spectrum instead of two sets of opposing ideals. If we stop defining each other by what we are not and start defining ourselves by who we are, we can all be freer.
Complex topics are rarely worded more succinctly. Respect for Emma Watson and empathy for the gender equality fight has risen manifolds in my mind.
Such a letdown by the finale. Last third of the book completely ruined the build-up — which itself wasn’t too great. But this could have been so much better if the author did not fall for the pressure to jack up the number of pages — the effort, to stretch the story unnecessarily, clearly shows.
It’s all about the impending war. Amish can write battles well. But he struggled to put the battles together into an interesting story. Towards the end it was just a drag. There was no thrill, there was no surprise, there was no story remaining. It was just an attempt to conclude the trilogy, a miserable attempt at best.
There are too many characters, each seeking a closure of his own - leading to too many unnecessary side stories. Further surprising is no character behaves the way you expect them to behave. Parvateshwar doesn’t. _Ganesh_doesn’t. Even Shiva doesn’t - the biggest issue.
Sigh. It is not easy to close mystery trilogies. And the frustration at not being clear on how to do so, for Shiva, shows from the plot that unravels — left me fuming.
Spoilers Ahead
A side note on the overall series, I am completely baffled by how the tile & summary of the novels set complete different expectations than what the actual plot delivers. It applies for all 3 — realised first with “The Secret of Nagas”.
There was no secret of or from Nagas that was significant to earn a title. This one goes further ahead. At least in the second one, Nagas had significant role. Here, Vayuputras just have no f-ing role at all. It could very well have been some smart brahmin who owned the “nuclear” weapon and it would not have mattered a whit. And Oath? Which f-ing oath are you talking about? Plot goes on irrespective of it exists or not. In fact, one Shiva gives Mithra, he so uncharacteristically breaks.
Sigh! Every word in summary is to hype up the mystery. Titles are completely baseless. Not the right precedent this.
A great fun read with extremely witty subplots is how I remember this book. But then I think about it a bit and it is not how I felt throughout.
It is extremely slow, occasionally (just) funny in the initial half. It does have that moment of laugh-out-loud humour in between — but slow nonetheless. So much so that I had lost the interest in between. It was as if jokes were written around characters (mostly caricatures) and thrown in. And the pages filled in describing the fantasy land and the surroundings were too much at times. But that is before the plot picks up and fun kicks in again.
The novel is sheer pleasure after that. I couldn’t put it down and wanted to know what happens next. Frankly, more than what happens, I was interested in howTerry Pratchettwords it. I have realised that Pratchett is a master of witty fantasies. It was not that rare when I used to pause and admire how unnaturally a feeling (like fear, anger , etc.) can be described without sounding stupid. If there ever was a university of metaphors, Pratchett would surely be the founder of that. And he would still be teaching a course on thinking big — weird, but big.
So here I am confounded for the first time after reading a book. Do I like the book, the story or do I like the way it is often spun? And it turns out I find the book to be just OK. But then I would pick it up any day, go back to my highlighted passages and admire the mastery at work.
And just for this master Pratchett, I will pick up another of the Discworld novels soon and start taking notes.
Every time I read an article online that grabs by attention and interest, I am faced with a dilemma. I feel am gaining something without compensating for what is due to the writer or/and the owner of the website.
I run Ads-block extension. Well, the web publishers are themselves to blame. Look at the following tweet from me and I hope you feel the pain (i.e. if you do not, already).
So I am one less revenue node for the ads-driven sites out there.
I will not be able to pay the subscription price for every individual site I want to visit. That’s like watching, and paying for, television channels á la carte. What worsens the web scenario even further is there are zillions of channels out there instead of few hundreds. And everyone might create just that one interesting episode instead of a long drawn series.
So here's the situation as it stands then.
I do not want to see the ads. Majority, including me, cannot pay for subscriptions.
Ads are hated — considered, and rightly so, blots on the web. Subscriptions are costly, unaffordable.
What choice are the web publishers left with then?
Some time back, I read this interesting post at xkcd, a usual for these guys.
It made me realise, for the zillionth time, passwords are mess. This medium of authenticating a valid, and a human, user has overstayed its welcome. The way it is beingused is not secure. Well, can you blame the poor souls who are made to remember the crazy letters every time they want to get something done online? Moreover, they are forced, as a security policy, to change and then remember the new passwords every some time. Sigh! Indeed, passwords are mess.
You need more proof? Try searching for the phrase “passwords should die”. This farce has to be one of the most cursed phenomenon out there.
But then what are the options?
Make browsers/OS’es handle the password generation and management: This is one of the oldest and most recommended solution for this issue. The problem is such machine generated passwords are usually random Strings; hence they are extremely hard to memorise. Good password managers can negate that need. However, they become a hinderance in an environment where there are multiple machines involved (for example, work vs home environment). Moreover, the security aspect of these are hotly debated topics.
Recommend ways for easy to remember, difficult to break passwords: An option that is evaluated a lot these days. The xkcd post linked above recommended one such way. It also opened a lot of threads discussing and analysing the accuracy and feasibility of the same. There were articles and papers written on understanding and improving on the suggested way. The problem is, eventually, it is a human, the lazy ass, who will decide what the password would be. What would end up happening is instead of ”password1” being a common password, it would be ”mypasswodiscommon”.
Go Biometric: Apple introduced a working and, debatably, secure implementation of biometric authentication in TouchId. By bundling it as a core feature of iPhone, Apple made it reach to the masses. Tons of articles were written detailing how it can solve the password problem altogether. Though possible, issue remains this would not happen until biometric authentication comes bundled across all technology devices, even the low-end mobile phones. Passwords remain the standard, and only acceptable authentication method till then.
Make passwords die, altogether: Finally, we come to the most interesting option that can be driven by the application developers themselves and not the users of the application. I feel, this will eventually become a reality.
Password-less Authentication
A lot has been said on this front too. There are articles and even open source frameworks, like Passwordless that want to target this by providing application developers ways to replace their login forms with password-less access. At high-level, key steps involved to achieve this are
Make a user just mention his userid/email address
Generate a one-time token for him
Deliver it to him
Authenticate him with the generated token
These are pretty standard and well accepted steps. However the issue remains in the 3rd step, how should these tokens be delivered. Whichever mechanism one selects will become the single point of threat to the whole system going haywire, be it then email (what’s the password for email account then?) or SMS (phone is lost, what now?). The hacker news thread on one such suggested system is nice rundown for the probable issues.
Now that thread is more than a couple of years old. Today, the best option would be to deliver the token to the device which has biometric authentication enabled. As an example, I really like the way Apple has enabled the two-factor authentication on Apple Id. It displays possible devices where the token can be delivered and asks the user to select one. Once delivered to, say, an iPhone, only the user who owns the iPhone can access it by authenticating himself with TouchId. This same mechanism can be applied for delivering the secure tokens of web/mobile applications too. There, the delivery problem is solved.
However, given that majority of the users do not own an iPhone or a similar biometric authentication enabled device, this method cannot become the primary way of authenticating users.
So even though I believe that, in John Siracusa’ words, on an infinite timescale, all applications will have password-less logins, we are some years away from realising that dream.
Ok, so what till then? This is what I would like the applications developers to do to make this password mess a bit less itchy for me. Decide first, do you really need me to secure my profile via a password? User forums/discussion groups, I am looking at you. I will give leeway to banks/financial apps to make me remember and enter the password. For all others, please make this process simple.
When a user visits the first time, ask for his email id/mobile number. Next, make him choose a word, an image or, preferably, a set of words/images to remember as “password”.
For every subsequent visit, just ask him for the email id or mobile number. Even better, just do not ask him anything. Maintain his profile information in cookie with expiration set for a longer timeframe.
Give him the options amongst which lies his password and make him “select”, not enter, that as the password. He gets a couple of chances, else make him fall back to one-time token.
If he does not remember the chosen password, or chooses not to, a click on a link sends him a token on email/mobile which he used while registering.
I believe this will ease the burden from majority of the people of maintaining the passwords without making them any less secure. Passwords can’t die yet, but at least they would be a little less painful.
This novel has left me with a lot of thoughts. First off, I am totally confused on what I really feel about this. It is one of the most difficult books I found to review. So I just won’t. I do not think I would be able to word my thoughts well. Well, they are confused.
So I would instead refer to one review that I completely concur with. Thomas has done a great job reviewing this at Goodreads. Here’s how he describes the style of prose in the novel, the “survival” journey of Mark Watney.
Watney discovers a problem. Watney worries for a sentence or two. Watney comes up with a solution. Watney enacts the solution with minimal struggle. Watney celebrates. Rinse and repeat.
There, Thomas has described what goes on in 75% of the pages. Sigh! This guy Watney is an unbelievable genius. No trouble or challenge is big for him. He glides over every challenge as one would with a game of toys. Actually that’s exactly how Andy Weir, the author, writes this; as if he is Andy from Toy Story spinning an action-drama around Woody during his play time. Throw anything at him, he would have the smarts, the resources and the luck with him to soar out of it. And you know right that at the beginning of every log Watney writes.
There lies the novel’s biggest drawback. It just has one tone, the tone of success. And you can’t build a thriller if the reader is just not thrilled for the protagonist.
To sum up, this is what Thomas has to say.
My overall thoughts on The Martian center on its lack of introspection and repetitive descriptions of action, its disconcerting lack of characterization, and the drought of struggle each of the characters underwent. Watney faces a difficult situation, but I at no point in my entire reading thought he would suffer, based on his Pollyanna tone.
Completely agree. I do not think Andy Weir wanted to write a thriller about a Martian. He wanted to jot down his thoughts on what will it take scientifically for a guy to survive on Mars. And the novel is a breezy light log of these thoughts. You can skim through it without getting involved, like any science paper/theory you read.
All said, this is a nice fleet of thoughts, dreams of Andy Weir. The efforts that Andy Weir has put in that “included extensive research into orbital mechanics, conditions on Mars, the history of manned spaceflight, and botany” for the novel shows. A one time read for sure just for that. Just don’t look for a thriller in this and you should be fine.
I read a paperback recently; an incident that made me realise how wrong I had been to believe one will always feel nostalgic towards books with real paper. There indeed was a time when I used to look down on eBooks as format. I knew I wasn’t alone, the debate was on. I used to think reading them is futile, a fleeting pleasure. A pathway for a lazy few; the ones who do not appreciate the feel of a paperback in their hands.
That was before Kindle happened.
EBooks all the way
It was gradually that I started rejoicing eBooks. It was via the Kindle app first, mostly on my iPad. The built in dictionary was one of the most useful feature that pulled me in. It helps a lot when a person, not well-versed in English, can simply select a word to fathom its meaning. No need stretching out to fetch a dictionary and scan for the word. Either that or to make some broken sense out of the sentence without knowing the word. Not an experience one can call satisfactory.
There was another feature that I benefitted from the most, sync to the furthest read position. Be it an iPad, iPhone or the Kindle web reader extension, be it home, office or a lengthy queue of a supermarket, my book was always available, synced to where I had left it earlier. There is some relief in not maintaining a physical book and the nosy bookmarks. They are played with, they are misplaced, they are lost. They even are hinderance sometimes, often when you are in-fact reading. (Isn’t that generally a time one holds a book anyway?)
eBooks came handy. But there was still an issue I faced. iPads were heavy, iPhones tiny. Paperbacks (mostly) are best by size and weight. You hold them, read even at a stretch and don’t feel you have lost a limb. With iPads? Well, they really are not made for reading in long stretches. Not at least the iPad 2, which I own. Most of the time is spent in finding the perfect surface for resting the iPad on. Not really a painless experience. Inadvertently, I ended up reading on iPhone more.
Welcome Kindle
Kindles, the hardware, had just recently launched in India. I knew there were benefits to them. For one, they were made with reading as sole purpose. So they were designed to be best fit by size and weight. I had heard somanystories of how it changed people’s reading habits, made them read more. I knew I wanted one. A bit of research, a bit of playing around with them. I decided I wanted one. For reasons of mine (which I would go into someday), I settled on the Kindle, 6″ E Ink Display (Prev. Generation) with page turning keys, the non-touch screen one.
And the reading experience has never been the same again. I am reading more, I am reading longer. Surprisingly, it has made my wife too into an avid reader. A person who rarely considered reading as her hobby, she spends good amount of time finding and reading books. Paperbacks, ones with real pages, could never do that. eBooks did, especially Kindle.
So coming back to a paperback, it did turn out to be a painful experience. Holding the book was troublesome. Bookmarking was troublesome. Turning pages was troublesome. Wanting to read the book at office was worthless. At one point, I wanted to stop reading it in between, buy an ebook version and continue. The nostalgia, induced by the scent of real pages, can only take you so far. eBooks, for me, have ruined the pleasure of the physical books. Kindle has owned me now; and I can never go back.
Dark, Psycho Thriller with neither Mystery nor Thrill.
I started reading this book wanting, assuming, it to be a suspenseful thriller. I was unaware it is more of a sociopathic, twisted whine-fest. Some can call it a character study, narrative of flawed minds. For me, though, it is all whining. Sick. Sorry!
First. You get thrilled only when you long for some character, root for the happenings surrounding their lives. Gone Girl presented none too me. None of the protagonists, neither Nick nor Amy, interested me. They are too twisted for me to care for them. There was a time I wanted them to just get rid of one another.
Second. Plot progresses at unbearable pace. Not slow. “Unbearable”. It is either stagnant when author is flaunting her literary chops, narrating “character study”. Or it progresses to next sub-plot or twist way too conveniently. Nothing is believable here. I could not connect to, sympathise with or even imagine any of the events. Slow, lazy unwinding, I don’t mind. This broken, staggered recital I have problem with.
And then there is the crazy middle and end. [spoiler] When you make me read ~250 pages of whining, only half way into the book, you better not tell me it was all setup. Nothing you read is true.[/spoiler] The end is dragged so much that I was just turning pages to make sure it ends. I just didn’t care how. There is no buildup, there is no climax. It just ends abruptly. Not left open, but left carelessly unresolved.
Sigh. Anyway one can say I should not have read this after all, it is not for me. This dissection of human psyche, especially the twisted one, is not to my taste. All I recall is I have never kept looking at the percentage-read mark so profusely ever. And that’s where Gone Girl failed me.
So, I finally watched Interstellar yesterday; after days of, literally, closing ears and eyes on every mention and reference of this word. It is difficult, not to know anything you usually want to know first-hand about. No one else to blame though; I should not leave the decision of ruining a movie or a book to others. That call should stay only with me after experiencing it. This post is about my experience of watching the movie I waited so long for.
Experience, yes. About the movie, no. There are too many intelligent posts already written about it. Reviewing it, explaining it. The plot, the science, everything. This is not a post where I intend to do any of that. This is post where I intend to jot down my thoughts of going through an extravagant experience like Interstellar in India. I want to do this especially given I was watching a movie after a break of more than a year & half. I wanted to see how technical advances have improved, if so, the overall movie going experience.
So here it goes.
Experience of booking a movie has improved since I last did it. Apps have improved a lot. I was pleasantly surprised when the app supported adding the movie ticket to Passbook as an event entry pass. Nice effect and effort of customizing the app to the platform it runs on. Surprisingly, and sadly, not many try to do that.
But using the said pass at the movie theatres is still not possible. I searched for the machine or the person to whom I could flash the pass and enter without a physical ticket. Not possible yet, at least not at all the movie theatres. You still have to collect a physical ticket, show it to a person who tears a part of it & hands over what remains as a proof of your approved presence. They do have a machine to collect the tickets though. However anyone, with the booking id, can print the ticket without any validation. He, then, can flash it further as a valid entry pass. Plus it’s heading read ”Booked by Internet”. Sigh.
Multiplexes continue to ruin the theatre experience in India. The aim to maximize the earnings out of the small retail spaces is punishing the viewers. Each “Screen” has a maximum of 8-10 rows, with each sitting 15-20 folks. That limited is a Screen. In such small spaces, we have 3 tiers of convenience, Silver, Gold and Platinum. Like a regular middle class person, I selected the middle-tier. Surprisingly, the distribution is as any corporate evaluates its employees’ performance. 10% are awesome. 10% suck. All others are regular blokes who are just okiesh. Same was the case here; 1 row of platinum folks and 1 row of silver. In between the 8 rows of fools. Platinum folks sat with their necks held high, not because they paid more. But because they could hardly see what rolled on the screen without doing so. Then I do clearly recall a “silver” person turning around and laughing at the “golden” dummy sitting behind; pointing at his silliness to have paid more. Sigh.
Because “Screen”, the hall, is so small, the actual screen itself is made small. And so very close to the eyes. To be frank, except for the darkness and the silver bloke pointing & laughing at the dummy goldie, this was not that much a different experience than sitting a foot from my LED television at home. Interstellar deserved better. Multiplex are to know that. Sigh.
Every movie is to have an intermission. After all , we believe in giving businesses to many. If there’s no intermission, how are the samosa, pop-corn walas to get their earnings? So a movie is abruptly stopped. Usually I feel every Hollywood movie-maker is aware of this fact; so I could find a logical break being put in every movie. But I think the person who is handed this responsibility uses it to break when he has to pee the most. Be it, then, at the most inopportune place, in middle of some secret revealing dialog. Who cares; he has pee to handle.
People still chatter during the movie. That is after they have settled into their chairs after arriving late. Especially when in a group during a Hollywood flick. More so if the said group is all guys surrounded by another group of girls. Some smarty has to show off his knowledge or crack a foolish, unrelated joke. Happens.Every.Single.Time. I literally watched half the movie with my left ear closed to avoid one such Einstein explaining every single scene that unfolded on the screen.
And then the ‘usualities’. National anthem is still played, with half standing in respect and others poking there noses around. Head-shadows of late comers are still seen. Mobiles are still not on silent mode. Samosas and pop-corns are still money-wise costly and taste-wise cheap. Torch-bearers still enlighten the lost and side-tracked, searching for the seats. Sigh!
Anyway, Interstellar was a great movie; it deserves a better treatment than is accorded. Wish I had chosen a single screen theatre, booked a balcony ticket after standing hours in queue and experienced this marvel on a huge screen listening only to the whistle, and not chatter. Or else simply stayed home, catching it on my LED television. A foot away. Sigh!
Agatha Christie, a name I saw at every bookstore and avoided every single time. The books ‘looked’ short, felt they had to be short stories for pre-teens. How wrong was I, to neglect the suggestion not to judge books by cover, by how they ‘looked’.
And Then There Were None has to one of the finest, sharpest and crispiest whodunit mysteries I have ever read. Everything is perfect, to-the-point; all about the main story and the characters involved. Chapters after chapters, new plot twists are revealed. The story never stagnates. No character eats up the pages. No sub-plots are introduced just to thicken the book binds.
But most importantly, there is no single person that knows-all-but-shows-none. Incidents occur and they are presented with all the details visible to the characters involved. Nothing is hidden, made visible only to the selected one, the detective. Because there is none.
The experience reading this gem is amazing. I pride myself to foresee the final mystery way bit early than it actually is uncovered; or even hinted at. This one bowled me over. Almost all the 10 characters were on my criminal radar at some point. None stayed there for significant time though. Even post the final chapter, I stayed stumped, wondering what has been uncovered. Because, frankly, nothing is. This, indeed, is a novel of a kind.
If you love mysteries and haven’t yet hopped this ride, you must. Agatha Christie says this was the most difficult novel for her to write, she took utmost effort to make sure she pens a perfect, unsolvable murder mystery. All I can say is she did succeed.
The novel is an entertaining read overall. Expected given that it is penned by an experienced story weaver. But then it also has those parts that make the experience average, at times.
It starts out promisingly, Strike interested me. So did Robin (sigh!) and their case at hand. Mystery is woven, with the prose heavily studded in the initial part. Studded it felt, given I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It made me know the characters, though very few, more.The main characters and the plot are built perfectly at about a forth into the book. And then it gets stuck.
The mystery that was revealed stays the same; neither does it become more intriguing nor clearer. Lots and lots of characters get introduced, but hardly any new information is unravelled. It was during this time when the prose, that I had initially relished, became a hinderance to my enjoyment. Especially ones that broke the flow of conversation. So unnecessary they felt, so much so that I skipped some paragraphs.
The plot does pick up towards the final third of the book. Unnecessary prose continue. But this is also when the book becomes unputdownable. So much is revealed, in such intriguing a way. And the plot stays interesting till the end. The climax, unlike so many mystery novels, doesn’t feel dragged. The mystery is unravelled in satisfactory a way; a way I do not usually cherish however.
Yes, I do not cherish the style of suspense novels when we do not have the access to the detective’s thoughts. Style where the key information, or the interpretations, are hidden from the reader only to be revealed at the end. The Cuckoo’s Calling presents Strike this way. Satisfactory, but not preferred.
And that’s where the novel lets me down, unnecessary prose, non-preferred style of revealing suspense and too slow a mid-third. Overall, though, for the way the plot & the characters are introduced and the case closed, this is a one-time read for sure.
