Classic Logic

Keyboards

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 18:09:29 +0530

(I’m not sponsored by or affiliated to any keyboard manufacturers).

The other day I happened to listen to a podcast where The subject of keyboards came up. The discussion was about whether they can put up with a terrible keyboard at work if they have a huge salary. Their answer depended on how terrible the keyboard is. The money itself was not the sole motivator. The discussion made me think about my own keyboards over the years.

Cancelling Netflix

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 22:27:01 +0530

I cancelled my Netflix subscription a month ago. I was barely watching anything over the last few years. It made no financial sense to keep the subscription.

I signed up for Netlfix in early 2020 with the mobile-only plan that was available here in India. It was not full-HD but that was okay. This plan costs around ₹199 (less than $3 in 2020) per month. That amount was not insignificant to me back then; it took me days to decide whether I should splurge on this. But what is life without a little entertainment?

Summarizing a meeting using WhisperX

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 22:58:51 +0530

I was casually playing around with WhisperX and wanted to quickly document how I summarized a meeting. This is a toy example just to demonstrate to myself how this works. There was no actual meeting. I pulled a publicly available non-serious meeting audio from the internet. Basically you need a .mp3 file; the exact audio format does not matter.

1. Transcribe the meeting audio

In a dedicated python environment, I pip installed the whisperx:

In China, Macau, & Hong Kong

Sun, 05 May 2024 22:00:23 +0530

I recently returned from a sightseeing tour of China, Macau, and Hong Kong. I visited Beijing, Shanghai, Macau, and Hong Kong, in that order.

As you’re probably aware, common internet things like Google (including search, GMail, Drive, Docs, Play Store, YouTube etc), WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, X, or anything else that you take for granted don’t work in China. Most VPNs are also blocked, although people have claimed varying degrees of success with them.

Email Management

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 10:01:13 +0530

I use GMail for most (not all) of my email needs. I’m aware of the risks of getting spontaneously banned from it, but that’s not what I wanted to talk about today.

In this post I’ll talk about how I have automated the handling of non-personal emails (ie., emails not sent by a human to me, such as newsletters, updates from various services etc).

Initially I used to manually label the emails to make it easier to deal with later. After a while I started liberally using the mail-filter feature to automatically label the emails based on who it’s from and the keywords within the message. This removed the need for me to manually label the emails myself, and my inbox stayed a little more organized.

Japanese Restrooms

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 11:52:46 +0530

Toilets in Japan are a contraption in itself. I literally dropped my jaws when I noticed the controls.

First up, the seat is heated! I’ve heard of heated and ventilated seats in cars but this is the first time I’m seeing a heated toilet-seats. I realized that heated toilet-seat is exactly what you need on a frigid morning!

Next is the wiping mechanism. At the press of a button a “wand” extends and sprays water at your, well, hole. In addition to finer adjustments to pinpoint the exact location where you want the water to be sprayed, you can also adjust the pressure of the water. For the ladies there’s a button to spray water from the front. The whole thing just blew my mind.

In Japan

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 11:08:53 +0530

Just landed at Narita International Airport in Tokyo, Japan 🇯🇵.

This is a family holiday trip. I’ll spend nearly two weeks here. In addition to Tokyo, I’ll also visit Mt. Fuji 🗻 , Hiroshima, Osaka, Himeji, Kyoto, and Nara.

Japan wasn’t ever in my bucket list so I’m pleasantly amused to find myself here. Looking forward to viewing the cherry blossoms 🌸.

MX Master 3 Recharge Log

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 17:28:21 +0530

One of my programmer friend’s only regret after buying the MX Master 2 (he saved a few bucks by not going for the MX Master 3 – that’s his choice) was that he didn’t buy it sooner. That, and this teardown article about the amount of engineering that went to it made me buy a Logitech MX Master 3 in August 2021.

Praises have been sung for this fantastic piece of engineering over the years, so I’ll keep that to a minimum.

Netflix Asks Me to Buy New Device

Sun, 12 Jun 2022 01:20:43 +0530

I have been a happy customer of Netflix for over two years even though I don’t even watch it enough to justify what I pay (and where I’m from Netflix is substantially more expensive than other streaming platforms). But I figured it’s fine.

I usually watch Netflix via a ThinkPad running Linux, connected to an external monitor. I’m old school.

Yesterday I decided to watch a movie that will soon be removed from Netflix. I signed into my Linux laptop and went to netflix.com (the page loaded fine), and from there clicked the login link.

Manual User Authentication in Laravel

Sun, 09 Jan 2022 15:31:13 +0530

Laravel comes with a flexible user authentication mechanism which I highly recommend. Occasionally though, you have a good reason not to use what comes with Laravel and instead roll your own user authentication mechanism. The Laravel documentation does a pretty-good job of documenting what I’m about to do. This post is just a concrete example.

This is roughly what I’ll be doing.

Define my own table for managing users, via a migration.
Create an eloquent model for the users
Modify users provider to use our model for users
Implement signup, login, and logout

Not that it matters, but I used sqlite3 database while doing this. Things should work exactly the same with Postgres and MySql.

DFS Subtlety

Tue, 29 Jun 2021 22:50:34 +0530

I’ve been brushing up my algorithms knowledge during my free time. My preferred way to do this is working on Steven Skiena’s excellent Algorithm Design Manual.

Depth-first traversal of graphs have struck me as being subtle. In this post I’m jotting down the subtleties involved in discovering back-edges, so that I don’t have to re-think it every time.

Here’s a python implementation of the DFS routine using pseudocode from the book:

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def depth_first_search(graph, vertex, parent, state):
 state[vertex] = VertexState.DISCOVERED
 process_vertex_early(vertex)
 for adj_vertex in graph[vertex]:
 if state[adj_vertex] != VertexState.DISCOVERED:
 parent[adj_vertex] = vertex
 process_edge(vertex, adj_vertex)
 depth_first_search(graph, adj_vertex, parent, state)
 elif state[adj_vertex] != VertexState.PROCESSED and parent[vertex] != adj_vertex:
 # adj_vertex has been discovered before
 print("back-edge from {} to {}".format(vertex, adj_vertex))
 process_edge(vertex, adj_vertex)

 # we have processed all our adjacent vertices (if any)
 # therefore we are processed
 process_vertex_late(vertex)
 state[vertex] = VertexState.PROCESSED

VertexState is an enum with UNDISCOVERED, DISCOVERED, and PROCESSED states, denoting whether we have discovered and completely processed a vertex in our depth-first traversal

Book Review: Atomic Habits

Sat, 29 May 2021 22:15:25 +0530

I normally shy away from self-help books because they rarely work for me, but I decided to give Atomic Habits by James Clear a shot because it was recommended to me over a year ago by an esteemed colleague of mine, and he was a living example of how the ideas from this book transformed his life.

The first 50 pages present the core idea of Atomic Habits – our habits and small changes (however insignificant they may be) can have a profound impact on our lives. The next 150+ pages talk about ways to create and stick with habits.

XKCD Post Counter

Sun, 28 Mar 2021 15:34:06 +0530

It was a lazy Sunday afternoon and I was going through XKCD. I wondered how many posts XKCD has in total. The neat thing about XKCD is that their URLs are clean, and all their new posts get a number that’s one higher than the previous post. The site itself is very minimal and straightforward; apparently no weird frameworks doing magic.

I randomly typed https://xkcd.com/5000/, and it gave me a 404.

I didn’t want to randomly try a bunch of URLs to find out how many posts there are. So I decided to write a quick script that would do a binary search to find out how many posts there are. Binary search because a brute-force linear search of – who knows, 4000? – URLs would be inefficient both for me and whoever owns XKCD servers

Number Lock Brute Force

Sun, 14 Mar 2021 11:00:02 +0530

While cleaning his wardrobe a family-member discovered his old bag with a built-in number lock. He forgot the number and was contemplating detroying the lock to open it.

The lock had only two 10-digit combination; 100 possible numbers – brute force is feasible!

The lock opened on 55.

This lead me to contemplate the design of the bag and the number lock. Why would anyone design a number lock with just two digits? Anybody who steals the bag can find the correct permutation in less than 3 minutes – blatant illusion of safety.

How to setup OpenProject via Vagrant

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 08:33:22 +0530

I had to set up OpenProject locally on my machine for certain tinkering I’ve been doing.

I chose to install OpenProject inside a Vagrant box to keep my native machine clean. Went along with hashicorp’s Ubuntu 18.04 LTS box rather than an official release because the former was already in my machine which meant I did not have to do any additional downloads.

Installation and configuration of OpenProject was straightforward thanks to their excellent documentation here.

Laravel Artisan Command to Create Custom Classes

Sat, 06 Feb 2021 11:06:40 +0530

Here are the steps to create an artisan command that will generate custom classes and interfaces that follow a pre-determined template.

For Laravel projects I write utility classes and interfaces to abstract away the logic; these files go into subdirectories within app/Utilities/ (of course it can be anything). Let’s say you want to write FooUtility for something. My usual workflow is this:

Create a directory Foo inside app/Utilities
Create two files FooUtility.php and FooUtilityInterface.php inside app/Utilities/Foo/.

Vagrant Hiccups

Sun, 31 Jan 2021 15:50:06 +0530

(This is not a criticism against Vagrant; it has been a useful tool which I would continue to use it and encourage others to use as well.)

This post is a note of the minor hiccups I faced while setting up Vagrant, and the steps I took to solve them, so that I can refer this later if required. This will be a living-document which I’m hoping I would have to update only rarely.

7000 Years From Now

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 23:24:20 +0530

I don’t remember how I got there, but while having a virtual conversation with friends in a Signal group, I wondered how life in the year 7534 would be like. Will there be cars? Will people be teleporting instead? Would America still exist? Would people have conquered other planets? Or would the entire earth as we know it be destroyed by then?

As I’m typing this, I realize 7534 is only a little over 5500 years from now (2021 + 5500 + change) instead of 7000, but I won’t bother changing the title of this post or anything. And for some reason, 5500 doesn’t seem as far off as 7000. That’s probably because it isn’t.

Working with Homestead

Sat, 19 Sep 2020 08:17:29 +0530

Homestead is a convenient way to work with Laravel. It keeps the native OS installation uncluttered with packages such as MySQL, Apache, Laravel, Composer, and so forth.

This post is a quick-start to set up a new Laravel project using Homestead. It covers:

Mapping project directory from your host machine to your virtual machine
Creating a new Laravel project
Making the Laravel project accessible from your browser

Detailed steps to set up Homestead is documented extensively in the official docs. I recommended getting the bigger picture first.

Reboot

Tue, 08 Sep 2020 21:42:21 +0530

It’s been unacceptably long since I last blogged. I won’t even bother making up an explanation.

However, I’m planning to get blogging again.

By now I have forgotten how Hugo worked. So I’m going to have to get up to speed on that. This post is actually just to see if the whole build pipeline for this hugo site still works. Honestly at this point I have no idea how that works.

Build OpenGL Projects Using Gradle

Fri, 23 Nov 2018 22:53:50 -0700

This article is primarily written as a note to self so that I can refer to this years later if the need arises.

Also, this ain’t a tutorial on OpenGL or Gradle. I’m an expert at neither. I’m just documenting what worked for me.

This article assumes you have some familiarity with OpenGL.

There are excellent resources for learning more about both of these, such as the OpenGL Wiki for OpenGL, and official Gradle tutorials for Gradle.

Open Source: Contributing Back to the Community

Fri, 09 Nov 2018 10:33:00 -0700

It’s no secret to people who know me personally that I’m an open-source enthusiast. However, I haven’t been contributing back to the community as much as I should have.

Till now, my focus has been on fixing bugs in existing programs. It all started when I tried contributing to the Linux kernel several years ago. In retrospect, I was biting way more than I could chew. It took me several days of carefully reading through the instructions and code before I was able to submit my first patch. Imagine my thrill when I received an email from Greg Kroah-Hartman himself saying that my patch has been accepted!

XV6 System Call

Tue, 16 Oct 2018 12:01:18 -0600

XV6 is a UNIX-like operating system that’s used in my OS class (and other OS classes across the world) for pedagogical purposes.

Creating system calls in XV6 is something I do frequently as part of my assignments, and in this article I’m documenting how to do that.

Let’s say I want to implement a system call called square that returns the square of of its int argument. (This is just a toy example to show you how the plumbing works; system calls are overkill to find the square of a number).

Things You Should Know About Mobile Networks

Fri, 07 Sep 2018 20:03:59 -0600

Here are some things about mobile networks that I learnt the hard way.

While I was in India during the summer, I purchased the Nokia 6.1* smartphone. It is an Android One device.

In India, your phone and your carrier are two separate independent things. Unlocked phones are the default there. That means, to change your phone, get yourself a new phone and put in your old SIM card. To change your SIM card, get a new SIM card and put it in your old phone. Trivial, right?!

Mozilla 101

Tue, 17 Jul 2018 22:04:11 +0530

It’s been a while since I’ve started contributing code to the Mozilla codebase.

Because I frequently nuke and re-install everything on my primary computer (due to other experiments that have nothing to do with Mozilla), I’ve decided to write myself a reference I can quickly refer to when setting up the local version of Firefox. All of the following were performed on Debian-based distros.

I plan to make this a living document; expect changes here as I learn more.

Moving to Hugo

Thu, 05 Jul 2018 15:33:29 +0530

I hereby announce that I have moved from Jekyll to Hugo.

I originally moved to Jekyll from Wordpress in the summer of 2015 because static sites made sense for my specific use-case. Also, WordPress provided more features than what I need, and because I wasn’t using a self-hosted version, I felt like I couldn’t get the ultimate control that I wanted.

However, to take full advantage of Jekyll and customize it the way I want, I had to know ruby – a language I wasn’t keen on learning; it’s a great language, but I’d rather spend my time learning haskell or lisp rather than ruby.

About

Wed, 04 Jul 2018 13:11:05 +0530

Hey,

My name is Arjun and I’m a software developer in Kochi, India.

Professionally I work mostly as a web developer doing PHP and Laravel, but I have knowledge of other areas of the tech-stack as well. I sometimes contribute to open-source projects, such as Mozilla Firefox.

Recently I’ve been experimenting with functional programming languages such as Haskell, StandardML, and Elm. Because it requires a different mindset than what I’m used to, I find the learning experience a refreshing challenge.

Desktop Entry for Matlab

Tue, 16 Jan 2018 18:50:10 -0700

This article is not about Matlab itself; I just used it as a test example to demonstrate how you can create a desktop entry in Gnome.

However, if you are interested in using Matlab, I highly insist you try GNU Octave. The syntax is highly compatible with Matlab, and I was able to do on Octave everything I was supposed to do on Matlab, without any hassles whatsoever. Octave is free and open-source, and you’ve got nothing to loose by trying it out.

Automatic Markdown Table Generation

Sun, 03 Dec 2017 12:00:18 -0700

Because I had nothing better to do on a Saturday night, I decided to create a list of books I’ve ever read, to post on my personal blog. I know what you’re thinking.

I wanted to include a sequence number, title of the book, and its author. The title would also double up as a link to its amazon page. Because this is a structured data, a table made more sense than an ordered (or unordered) list of books.

Capture Packets Using T-Shark

Mon, 27 Nov 2017 15:34:10 -0700

DISCLAIMER

Snooping on real internet traffic is illegal in most countries. It is your responsibility to follow the appropriate rules of your locality. I cannot be held responsible if you do something wrong.

I did the following activities from a controlled virtual environment.

Did you know that you can poke around network traffic using tshark? According to the official tshark man page:

“TShark is a network protocol analyzer. It lets you capture packet data from a live network, or read packets from a previously saved capture file, either printing a decoded form of those packets to the standard output or writing the packets to a file. TShark’s native capture file format is pcap format, which is also the format used by tcpdump and various other tools.”

First Impressions with Go

Thu, 19 Oct 2017 16:20:56 -0600

The upcoming assignments for my networks class require fair amounts of socket programming. C is a double edged sword. Java is too verbose for my tastes. Python, despite all its beauty, is slow. And Haskell is not allowed for the networks assignments.

It was time to pick up a new language.

After contemplating on many alternatives, I finally settled on Go (aka golang). It is

Simple to learn
Statically typed
Compiled
Faster than most other languages
Almost purpose-built for systems and networks programming
Has excellent support for concurrency

Go is a winner for my purposes.

Tree Implementation in Haskell

Sat, 07 Oct 2017 16:36:38 -0600

Let’s implement a binary tree in Haskell.

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data Tree a = Leaf a
 | Node (Tree a) (Tree a)
 deriving (Show, Eq)

The above defines a Tree that takes a value of type a. Because we have not explicitly specified any datatype (such as an Int or a [Char], for instance) and instead defined it in terms of a which can stand for any type, this tree is capable of handling values of any datatype.

UNM New Arrival Guide

Mon, 18 Sep 2017 13:02:57 +0530

Disclaimer: This is UNOFFICIAL. I’m just documenting how things were like for me. It may have changed. I cannot be held responsible if anything goes wrong after following this post.

(An unofficial guide for students from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham planning to study at the University of New Mexico).

If you’ve been admitted to UNM, congratulations!

I studied at UNM twice:

as an undergrad exchange student during Spring 2016
as a graduate student (MS) in Computer Science (CS) from Spring 2017 to the end of Fall 2018.

The Duck Pond at UNM on a bright sunny day. It’s much larger than it seems in the photo.

Using JUnit with Eclipse

Sun, 03 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I set up Eclipse* to work with JUnit, and it took more effort than I anticipated. I’m recording the steps here so that I – or anybody else – can refer to it later if the need arises.

Here’s the environment I used:


OS	Debian 9 64-bit
JDK	openjdk version “1.8.0_141”
Eclipse	Oxygen Release (4.7.0)
JUnit	version 4.12
Hamcrest	version 1.3

The above packages were at their latest versions when I wrote this article.

Introducing JekPost

Mon, 14 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

As much as I love jekyll, one thing I found really annoying about it was the post creation ritual itself. You had to name the file a certain way and type in a bunch of metadata at its top for the whole thing to work. Cumbersome and repetitive.

That’s when I decided to write a script to simplify the post creation process.

It’s actually been a year since I wrote JekPost. It was something I wrote for myself, and had not really thought about sharing it with anybody. There were some minor nuances, but they were things I could live with. After a while I decided that I might as well upload the package to pypi, which in itself was a learning experience.

At the Google Play App Excellence Summit

Fri, 04 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Google Play App Excellence Summit was held on August 1st at Bengaluru, India. Entry to the program was free if you were invited (only invitees were allowed to attend).

I arrived at the venue – Sheraton Grand Hotel – by 8:30 am. The place was already crowded with enthusiastic developers from all over the country despite me arriving an hour ahead of schedule. Breakfast was included; too bad I wasn’t very hungry.

Introducing Snap Event

Tue, 23 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

My first Android app Snap Event was published to the Google Play Store a few days ago.

Snap Event creates calendar events from photographs of the event’s poster.

The app is by no means perfect, but it’s functional and is a proof of concept that the idea works.

Motivation

People say the best way to learn a new programming language or a framework is to do a project with it. Sure you need some familiarity with the basics of whatever it is that you’re trying to learn, but past that stage projects are the way to go.

A Case for Smart Washing Machines

Sat, 08 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The residence hall I live in offers washing and drying facilities to wash and dry our clothes.

There is one dedicated room for the washers and dryers. In the rest of this article, I will be calling this room the “laundry-room”. The washing and drying takes approximately 30 and 45 minutes respectively, depending on the mode you choose. Of course, once the washing is done, you have to manually move your clothes from the washer to the dryer.

Getting a US student visa

Thu, 01 Dec 2016 15:41:51 +0530

Just wanted to write down the process of obtaining a US visa. None of this is legal advice. I’m just posting my own experience. Consult the official US govt websites for most accurate and uptodate information about visas.

People seem to have wrong ideas about the whole process and what happens at the consulate. And for student visa atleast, there is no need to hire a consultant or agent.

I did it twice so far – once for an exchange visa (J1) and the second time for a student visa (F1). So I can only talk from such a perspective; the process is probably different for business/tourist visas, and definitely different for H1B, L1 etc. I applied from India; the process might be different for people in other countries.

Send Emails Using Code

Wed, 28 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Figuring out how to send emails using code is something that has been in my to-do list for sometime. And well, it has finally made it to the top of the stack, and here I am tackling the issue.

Turns out, sending emails using code is pretty easy and straightforward. Yay!

Please do note upfront that this was more of a learning exercise for me to learn how to fire off a bunch of emails to a bunch of people; there might probably be more straightforward methods to do the same thing in a production environment.

Fedora 24 Impressions

Sat, 16 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Though it hasn’t been long since I’ve switched to Fedora as my everyday OS, I’ve become a huge fan of it.

Ubuntu was consistently giving me problems (like, freezes for instance), and that’s when I had decided to make the switch. (However, I reckon the problems I’ve been facing with Ubuntu are more of a Unity problem than an Ubuntu problem).

Never had any deal-breaking issues with Fedora.

And then, there are some nice touches like the small box that pops up when you create or rename a folder. Polished, though not quite in the leagues of the Macs.

The Hacker Way to Download an Entire Tree of Webpages

Sun, 17 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

("Hacker" as defined in The Jargon File).

Have you ever wanted to download an entire tree of webpages onto your computer so that you can check it out later, offline?

Why might you want to do this? Let’s say you’re traveling on an airplane without an internet connection, and you as a developer want to work on that Android app you were developing back when you were in the ground.

If you’re a rather proficient programmer, you might as well go work with it.

Getting Started With GraphLab Create

Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

As part of a machine learning course I’ve been taking on Coursera, I had to get some packages installed.

Since I couldn’t find a one-stop webpage covering all the instructions, I had to go back and forth multiple webpages. And then, after I’ve installed the whole thing, it took me a while to figure out how to run it.

And so, in this single post, I try to explain everything to you.

Keyboard Shortcuts To Toggle WiFi

Sun, 06 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Being developers, nearly all of us prefer minimal use of the mouse (or touchpad).

Now I don’t know about you, but there are cases when I don’t frequently have to browse the internet, and during those times I prefer to turn off my WiFi. At the very least, it would save some power.

But then, there are some cases when I just have to momentarily turn on my WiFi, only to turn it back off after a brief while. And, I kind of figured it’s somewhat annoying to drag around the mouse to the corner of the screen to turn the WiFi on. To me, using a mouse for somewhat mundane tasks like turn ON/OFF wifi seems kind of lame.

In America

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 19:10:18 +0530

Just landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, in Seattle, USA.

I’ll be spending my upcoming semester here in America as part of a student-exchange program; very excited! Just 5 months ago, America wasn’t even in my radar, and now here I am!

Connecting to MySql Database from VisualStudio

Mon, 14 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

As I discovered the hard way, setting up Visual Studio to connect to a MySql database can be tricky. And becuase I had to go through pages and pages of StackOverflow for what turned out to be a trivial solution in retrospect, I figured I’d pen down the whole process.

Note that, I had Windows 8.1 installed as a VirtualBox guest OS in Linux.

Install Visual Studio (if you haven’t already)

Before you do anything else, get your copy of Visual Studio from the official website. The exact version you want to use depends on what all you plan to do with Visual Studio. Keep in mind that not all versions of Visual Studio are free, and some are available for free only for a limited trial period. As for me, I got myself the Visual Studio Community 2013 – ticked all the right boxes. I didn’t go for the latest version as it was giving me minor hiccups.

Connecting to BluetoothDevice using phone's native settings

Tue, 20 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

It took me more than an acceptable amount of time to figure out how to make use of an Android phone’s built-in connectivity program to connect to a remote bluetooth device, and then get the reference of that BluetoothDevice in your app (in your MainActivity, for instance). And I’m kind of guessing I wasn’t the only on earth trying to do the same thing.

The official documentation on Bluetooth – while being pretty good – shows you how to reinvent the wheel and implement your own bluetooth-settings app rather than invoking the existing bluetooth settings which comes with nearly every Android phone out there.

Rebooting Fedora!

Sat, 12 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Remember when I told you about my brief experience with the Fedora? Or perhaps you don’t, coz I had written about that in my older blog. Anyways, to put a long story short, I had switched from a solid Ubuntu installation to Fedora 22, only to switch back to my good old Trusty Tahr in less than 72 hours!

Fedora was just too bleeding edge for me!

However, I’m proud to say that I’ve switched back to Fedora! Or to be more precise, I’ve dual-booted my laptop with Ubuntu and Fedora. The reasons for it are multifold; one thing which I did notice during my one-night stand with this bleeding edge beauty is its performance. A very noticeable bump from what already seemed like snappy performance in Ubuntu (the difference became even more evident when I switched back to Ubuntu from Fedora).

Introducing ShScript Creator

Mon, 10 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This one is a tribute to all the shell programmers out there.

Of late, I’ve been having to deal with a lot of shell-scripts, mostly as part of my academic pursuits. And it’s fun you know, when you really get to know the power of shells..!

However, despite all the fun, I was somehow irritated at having to write down the hashbang everytime I create a new script. And on top of that, I would also have to chmod the file to give it the execute permissions. Blame it on the fact that I mostly use IDEs like NetBeans and Android Studio among others that do half the work for you, like adding in all the placeholders, parentheses, imports etc. Frankly speaking, having to write the hashbang everytime I create the shell script was kind of annoying.

Memory Organization in PIC Microcontroller

Wed, 22 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

(This post is currently undergoing revisions)

I’ve been working with the PIC microcontrollers lately, and I kind of figured I might as well document what I’ve been learning.

The microcontroller I’m talking about in this post is the P16F877A, and keep in mind that whenever I’m referring to “PIC”, I’m talking about this particular microcontroller.

The PIC microcontroller has a Harvard architecture, which in simple terms mean that they have separate memory for both program and data, called program memory and data memory respectively. One advantage of this architecture is that they can simultaneously access both program memory and data memory. In addition to both these memory, there’s also a stack, which I’ll talk about in more detail later.

Blogging The Hacker Way!

Tue, 14 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Just switched over to Jekyll, and I’m finding the experience a little bit different. If there’s any one grouse I have at the moment, it’s that I don’t have a custom domain. I guess that’s more or less okay for now.

First Drive: Blogging with Jekyll

Tue, 14 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

To be outright honest with you, setting up the whole thing took longer than I originally anticipated. But in the end, things seem to be more or less alright as of now. The official docs at Jekyll’s isn’t as helpful as I’d have liked, and I had to extensively look around the web to figure out how to do certain tasks.

Like I mentioned, the one serious grouse that I do have is that I do not have a custom domain. And just for this one simple reason alone, I debated whether I should switch back over to my old site on WordPress. However, upon further thoughts, I concluded that being on github.io domain in itself speaks to the world that this blog is more or less technically oriented.

You're up and running! This should be interesting!

Mon, 03 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Next you can update your site name, avatar and other options using the _config.yml file in the root of your repository (shown below).

![_config.yml]({{ site.baseurl }}/images/config.png)

The easiest way to make your first post is to edit this one. Go into /_posts/ and update the Hello World markdown file. For more instructions head over to the Jekyll Now repository on GitHub.