How I do things

Since 2018, I’ve been walking ~10,000 steps a day. Here’s my journey.

My Goodreads 2020 Reading Challenge target is 50 books. I’m at 45/50, with little hope of getting to 50. (I managed 25/24 in 2019.) The 10 non-fiction books I read (most useful first) are below. The Lean Startup by Eric Reis. The principle of Build - Measure - Learn is useful everywhere in life too, not just in startups. Never Split The Difference by Chriss Voss. Shares principle-driven strategies to convince people. The 4 Disciplines of Execution by McChesney, Covey & Huling. Teaches how to build execution rigor in an organization. A bit long at the end, but the first section is excellent. Sprint by Jake Knapp. A detailed step-by-step guide to running product development sprints that you can follow blindly. How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams. Dilbert’s author shares his strategies for life. Very readable, intelligent, and slightly provocative, but always interesting. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. Written as a story (like The Goal). Talks about the 5 problems in teams and how to overcome them. The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle. Explains the elements of strong cultures - belongingness, shared vulnerability, and shared purpose. Data-Driven Storytelling by Nathalie Henry Riche et al. Shares the latest points of view on telling data stories. My team and I read these chapters as a group. Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek. Inspiring when I read it, but I don’t remember what it said. Deep Work by Cal Newport. Shares tactics to focus. Practical and useful. I also started, by haven’t finished these four: ...

In my current thrust towards greater management responsibilities, I have discovered a mechanism for generating happiness. I set up meetings on important topics. That makes me happy – I’m driving something useful. Often, the meeting gets cancelled. That makes me happy – I’ve more free time. It’s the perfect perpetual motion machine. Comments Vasant 10 May 2016 11:58 pm: Ha ha! Love it. Madan 30 Mar 2019 9:00 pm: Often, the meeting gets cancelled. That makes me happy — I’ve more free time. What a positive thinking Sir Jee !! vikram 5 May 2016 6:04 pm: i am a non tamil .i have a piece of music and i want to know which song is it exactly.This was briefly played in the movie madras cafe starring john abraham.can u just help me wih that song . Kindly ping me to my mail i ll share that piece with you udayamoorthy v 23 May 2016 12:34 pm: That’s Great Idea. Kind of Win Win Situation. Happy to see you in the blog after a long time. I used to view your older posts regularly . All are great. Thanks Regards Uday Chirag 25 Sep 2017 9:03 pm: Haha ! Thats clever :)

My monthly postpaid mobile bills have been in the Rs 2,000 – Rs 3,000 range for some time now, and I spent a few hours dissecting them yesterday. Page 3 had the good stuff. It’s a little hard to figure out, but what the last 2 columns say is that most of my spend is offset by discounts. What’s not getting offset are outgoing roaming calls. Followed by calls to local landlines. For all practical purposes, that’s the only thing that counts in this bill. Everything else is close enough to zero. ...

My blog’s been through a number of phases. Between 1996 – 1999, it was just a website with a few facts about my and some of my juvenile ramblings. Inspired by robotwisdom.com, I converted it into a blog – except that I didn’t know what blogging was and just called it “updating my site every day.” It was mostly a link blog. In 2006, around the time when I moved from Mumbai to London, I reduced my link-blogging and started writing longer articles talking about my experiences. This was a fairly productive phase, and I was churning a few dozen articles every year until 2012. ...

A couple of years ago, my HTC Explorer’s screen died. I bought a Micromax A50. This triggered a series of reactions prompting this post. I have many defects. Like most men, I can’t tell colours apart – like the difference between pink and purple – and am constantly corrected by my six-year-old. I can’t hear two people at the same time – or even in-between each other. I can’t find things outside of my narrow field of vision. I can’t recognise faces, and need at least three one-on-one interactions before I place people. (If you ask me “Do you recognise me?” and I say “Yes, of course!”, I’m usually lying.) I can’t place voices on the phone. My memory is terrible – my wife’s learnt to make me write errands on my laptop. I cannot identify cars – in fact, I couldn’t drive until recently. ...

A few years ago, I ended up losting weight, mostly by dieting. That worked out rather well up to a point: I lost about 20kgs rapidly. But I ended up putting them back on almost as rapidly. What I learnt from this was that dieting made me more short-tempered. It also reduced my metabolic rate. My body would adjust to the hunger and enter a “starvation-mode”, using the limited food ridiculously efficiently. So I’d have to eat even less to continue losing weight. ...

We are often subject to body searches, baggage inspections, and identity verifications. At malls. At airports. At offices. These are to ensure that no one carries ammunition inside, or goods or secrets outside. In other words, to deter terrorists and thieves. It’s nothing personal, of course. When someone does not know me, I can choose to accept that (or not; the choice is mine). When I’m invited somewhere, however, I assume that I am not deemed a security threat. Therefore, I expect that: ...

[This is a post that I’d published internally in InfyBlogs in Dec 2009. Time to share it.] Last month, my first application went live. I’ve been writing code for 20 years. Not one line of my code has been officially deployed in a corporate. (Loser…) It’s a happy feeling. Someone defined happiness as the intersection of pleasure and meaning. Writing code is pleasurable. Others using it is meaningful. But this post isn’t quite about that. It’s about the hoops I’ve had to jump through to make this happen. ...

I’m not that difficult to scare, and this log message certainly didn’t help: ip223.hichina.com [223.4.183.127] failed - POSSIBLE BREAK-IN ATTEMPT! That’s the message I saw – one thousand five hundred and seventy times yesterday in /var/log/auth.log on one of my Amazon EC2 instances. Someone, presumably from China, has been patiently trying out a variety of SSH keys to log into this system. These were grouped as batches. There were exactly 314 attempts at 8am yesterday, then 314 at 12noon, then 314 at 4pm, then 314 at 8pm, then 232 at 3am today. (All times are in UTC – that is, UK time without daylight saving). Every burst took 9 minutes to run through all 314 attempts. The worst part was, when I tried using SSH this morning, I wasn’t able to log in. (It turned out that I had made a configuration error, but this is the sort of thing that gets me quite worried.) Perhaps I shouldn’t be complaining. I’ve written enough scrapers to make most webmasters cringe at their logs. I remember a few years ago, when I was working on a project at Tesco, and was scraping bestsellers lists from most sites. (Here’s a blog post about it.) We were putting together a prototype to see how real-time competitive pricing could help. The scraper was a pretty mild one. It would visit a hundred links, roughly at the pace of one a second. No images were loaded, of course, just the HTML. One fine day, a few weeks after this had started, I got a call from Andy. “Hi Anand, are you running any scrapers on our books website?” “Yes, why?” “Oh! The site’s very slow. Could you shut it down immediately?” Turns out that not a single page on the site loaded, and it had almost crawled to a halt. Now, obviously, my little 100-page script could hardly cause damage, but it’s easy to understand their reactions. No unauthorised scraping! After a few days of trying to figure out what the problem was, they increased the memory and things went back to normal. Not a bad solution, actually – throw hardware at the problem, and if it vanishes, it’s probably the cheapest solution. But anyway, I’m sure it’s some nice chap who’s just curious to know what I’ve got on my servers. I’d be happy to share some of it. And even if it’s not so nice a chap, there’s little that I can do, is there? Update (1pm India, 3rd June): Actually, I now realise that this has been happening ever four hours since May 29th, as regular as a clockwork. Wish I knew enough UNIX programming to pull a prank… ...

I've been trying out a number of options for hosting recently, and have settled on Amazon spot instances. Here were my options: Application hosting, like Google AppEngine. I used this a lot until 2 years ago. Then they changed their pricing, and I realised what “lock-in” means. I can’t just take that code and move it to another server. Besides, I’m a bit wary of Google pulling the plug. Heroku? Same problem. I just want to take the code elsewhere and run it. Shared hosting, like Hostgator. This blog is run on Hostgator and I’m extremely happy with them. But the trouble is, with shared hosting, I don’t get to run long-running processes on any ports I like. Run you own servers. The problem here is quite simple: power cuts in India. Dedicated hosting, like Amazon EC2, Azure, GCE, etc. This remains as pretty much the main hosting option I’m a price optimisation freak. So I ran the numbers for a year’s worth of usage. I was looking at the CPU cost of a large machine with 7-8GB RAM. Bandwidth and storage are negligible. The cost per hour worked out to: ...

Some slides from my talks on visualising networks. (These are part of a series of talks I’m giving at a number of forums; the one at The Fifth Elephant is open to public.)

Google Reader was where I spent most of my browsing time, but now, it’s shutting down. Time for alternatives, but not just for Reader: for all Google products. I’m not sure when one of these might go down, become paid, or become unusable. I just uninstalled Google Drive and Google Talk. but I don’t use it much (I use Skype), so no loss. I’ll leave Chrome for the while, but I’m hearing reports that Firefox is improving faster than Chrome is. Or there’s Chromium. ...

You can play a song on your PC and listen to it on your iPhone / iPad – converting your PC into a radio station. As with most things VLC related, it’s tough to figure out but obvious in retrospect. The first thing to do is set up the MIME type for the streaming. This is a bug that has been fixed, but might not have made it into your version of VLC. ...

In a number of sessions I’ve been to, people ask analysts to make their results more interesting – to tell stories with them. I’m co-teaching a course, part of which involves telling stories with data. So this got me thinking: what is a story? How does one teach storytelling to, let’s say, an alien? Consider this mini-paper. ABSTRACT: Meter readings exhibit spikes at slab boundaries. We also find significant evidence of improbably events at round numbers. Electricity shortage is a serious problem in most Indian states. Part of this problem is due to the inaccuracy of reporting procedures used in monitoring meter readings. Our focus here is not to document or experimentally determine the degree of inaccuracy. We have adopted a data driven approach to this problem and attempt to model the extent of inaccuracy using basic statistical analysis techniques such as histograms and the comparison of means. Our dataset comprises of the frequency analysis 12-month dataset containing monthly meter readings of 1.8 million customers in the State of Andhra Pradesh. We find that a histogram of these readings shows unexpectedly high values at the slab boundaries: 50 (+45.342%, t > 13.431), 100 (+55.134%, t > 16.384), 200 (+33.341%, t > 15.232), and 300 (+42.138%, t > 19.958). We also detected spikes at round numbers: 10 (+15.341%, t > 5.315), 20 (+18.576%, t > 6.152), 30 (+11.341%, t > 4.319). The statistical significance of every deviation listed above is over 99.9%. Further, every deviation has a positive mantissa. This leads us to confidently declare the existence of a systematic bias in the meter readings analysed. You’re probably thinking: “I know why he’s put this example here. It must be a bad one. So, what a rotten paper it must be!” ...

Until 2007, my blog was mostly just linking to stuff I found interesting on the Web. Since 2007, I’ve tried to write longer articles, mostly based on my own experiences. At the moment, that’s unsustainable. Right now, being in a startup, I doing more stuff than I ever have in the past. (That does not mean working more hours, by the way.) My posts, going forward, are likely to be smaller, less original, but hopefully more frequent. ...

Five years ago, I built a song search engine – mainly because I needed to listen to songs. Three years ago, I stopped updating it – mainly because I stopped listening to songs actively, and have been busy since. For those of you who have been using my site for music: my apologies. These days, I don’t really find the need to download music. YouTube has most of the songs I need. Bandwidth is pretty good too even when on the move. But when I do need to download music, this is my new workflow. ...

I’ve returned my laptop, and it’s time to buy a new one. For the first time in my life, I’m buying a laptop for myself. I have a fairly clear idea of what I want: a 500GB+ 7200 rpm hard disk with 4GB of RAM and an Intel Core i7. I thought that would make finding one of those powerful laptops for producing music since I record some stuff too out of hobby. Sheer naïveté. Not a single site let me filter by hard disk rpm in India. (To be fair, I haven’t found any sites outside India that did that either.) ...

I’m writing this post on a one-way flight from London back to India. I’ve moved on from Infosys Consulting, and am starting up on my own. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time. There’s always more freedom in your own company than someone else’s. There’s often more money in it too, if you’re lucky enough. But my upbringing is a bit too conservative to make that bold step. However, given that my father runs his own firm, I figured it was just a question of time for me to do the same. ...

A couple of years ago, I managed to lose a fair bit of weight. At the start of 2010, I started putting it back on, and the trajectory continues. I’m at the stage where I seriously need to lose weight. I subscribe to The Hacker’s Diet principle – that you lose weight by eating less, not exercising. An hour of jogging is worth about one Cheese Whopper. Now, are you going to really spend an hour on the road every day just to burn off that extra burger? You don’t exercise to lose weight (although it certainly helps). You exercise because you’ll live longer and you’ll feel better. I’m afraid I’ll live too long anyway, so I won’t bother exercising just yet. It’s down to eating less. ...