Riding the Technology Wave

I’ve been spending the week visiting my parents in my hometown Kolkata. While rummaging through my box of childhood memories, I found a plastic bag containing close to a hundred CDs and DVDs. Each of those discs were labelled neatly and in chronological order.

• ‘My Movies’ #1-#37
• ‘My Music’ #1-#28
• ‘Softwares and Utilities’ 2007 – 13
• A bunch of  Windows/Linux images
• Games. Lots and lots of games. From 100 in 1 games to 3-Disc FIFA!

I was taken aback by how fast we’ve come along. The child in me had convincingly thought that these disc backups would be needed by me for longer than it actually did. Unfortunately their role had been reduced from necessary backups of data to mere mementos for nostalgia trips, like the pages of an old diary.

Back in those days, I remembered how most of our time was spent offline. Post 11:00PM when the telephone lines were free, was the time which could be used by my 56kbps modem to sluggishly connect to the world of information and discovery.

Right now all of my devices are connected 24×7, and they’re constantly communicating, keeping each other in sync. Movies are limited to theatres, and music has moved completely online to Spotify and YouTube. Games have also moved to an Xbox wired to the TV, downloading and updating automatically over wifi.

10 years will seem like a long time for technology to have progressed so fast, unless compared to it’s speed for the past century.

We are near to the steepest edge of the exponential curve of the advancement of technology vs time. Or are have we just begin our ascent?

It feels great to be riding the wave. It feels great to dream about 10 years down the line. It is indeed an exciting time to be alive.

Of Fulfilling Weeks and Self-Assessment

After a long day at work today, having struggled with a critical bug for the past few days, and having finally found a breakthrough to the solution, I return home to conclude what could be considered as a fulfilling week.

I order some food, and tune in to my watch later playlist on youtube. After dinner over loads of jovial banter and jokes with my flatmates, I find myself retiring into the solace of my room.

I switch to the dim lights and put on some Norah Jones to let her voice help me unwind as I recollect the events of the entire last week. I glance at the scribblings on the whiteboard behind my closed door, showing me the incomplete wireframes of a side project. Distant echoes of a train persistently chugging along it’s tracks remind me of being far from home.

There are primarily 5 questions that I ask myself at the end of each work week, that help me assess my personal growth and direction.

1. Did I learn something new at my primary skill?
2. Did I learn something new beyond my primary skill?
3. Did I make full use of the opportunities that I had?
4. Did I expand my network?
5. Am I a better me than what I was last week?

I won’t lie and say that I honestly answer positively to all the above five assertions every week. That would be really tough to achieve, and I am yet to attain that level of self discipline and integrity (if ever). But the few weeks that I do, it gives me immense pleasure and a sense of fulfilment. And that is a really good motivator for the week ahead.

Learning, networking, and grabbing every opportunity that comes my way constitute the core part of how I enjoy functioning. There are often weeks where I end up learning nothing new, or networking with no new people, or missing a lot of opportunities that came my way. Those weeks are boring and make me wonder why time machines haven’t been invented and commercialised yet.

TLDR;

You’re no better than you were last week if you haven’t learnt something new, haven’t expanded your comfort zone, haven’t expanded your network, and haven’t made best use of all/most (of) the opportunities that you had.

 

UX Bits #0 – Flipkart

In Flipkart’s newly designed (and often iterating) home page, we now have these category based horizontally scrolling list of items.

User sees a prominently visible arrow button (thanks to the light shadow) that indicates there are more products on the right. The same is also indicated by the next product slightly peeking into the view (but really not enough, as it probably depends on the image).

User clicks on the right arrow icon and the view gently scrolls to the right. Let us keep in mind that the aim of this carousel is discovery. So it is aimed at a majority of users who don’t know what they’re exactly looking for.

Now here comes the problem.

User clicks on the right arrow icon. The view gently scrolls to the right. User’s eye moves towards the centre of the carousel to see the newly visible products. User’s eye notices that the right arrow indicator is still visible and hence interprets that there are more products. User clicks on right arrow icon again. User’s eyes again move towards the centre of the carousel to see the newly visible products. User will now obviously assume that the right indicator is still visible and user should be able to see more products when he clicks on it. Bam! (See image below)

The right navigating arrow button has just disappeared because user has reached the end of the list. Hence user ends up clicking on the last item in the list mistakenly.

I’m sure that if Flipkart does their analytics funnels right, they’ll notice an unreasonably higher inflow from the last product in the list (which should ideally be the least significant amongst the others in the list).

Possible solution:

Do not remove the right button when user reaches the end of the list, instead fade out the right arrow icon that should give the appearance of a disabled button thereby indicating no further products in list. And the button should only be visible on mouse hover over the last item in the list. Hence, problem solved.

With a product that receives a huge amount of footfall on their homepage every minute, stuff like these should be very carefully planned out and iterated over design before making it a public release. Nevertheless, I’m not a big fan of Flipkart’s home page design. It’s not bad. But it’s not great either.

The Question of Balance in AI Advancement

With the Google I/O 2015 keynote having concluded a few minutes back, apart from all the wonderful revelations of the show, I found one common persistent aspect looming around like a shadow behind almost every new feature involved. And that was Machine Learning.

I was not surprised to see Sundar Pichai take a moment to explain about Deep Neural Networks and how the ones at Google extend by up to 30 levels. In fact, most of the rest of his speech was full of indications towards NLP and ML. Obviously, the innovations of the next millennium will be driven by AI.

All this advancement in AI is quite fascinating, but at the same time a bit scary. I recently watched the movie ‘Ex Machina’ which dealt with a multimillionaire genius scientist (Tony Stark – a more realistic one, yet not enough at that) living in recluse at a research facility, who has built a robot with strong AI, and brings in a young programmer at his company to help him find out if it succeeds at Turing’s Test. Well, things become much more complicated soon after and as you might have guessed, going by the trend of AI/Robotics movies (read I.Robot) things don’t end well.

The point that I wish to make here is how much reliant should we ‘optimally’ be on machine learning and AI? At what extent lies the right balance in usage of human intelligence and AI?

Unfortunately my questions become seemingly vague after that. It is just that I strongly feel that there should arrive a point of time where either AI developments forks off into a new branch and stop replacing human brain functionality, because whatever advancement has been achieved by that time is considered to be enough or as I prefer to say ‘optimal’.

I completely agree with all the research, and in fact, I’m personally eager to be at the forefront of Machine Learning and AI developments some day. I would be definitely thrilled to have the opportunity to interact with a robot that passes the Turing’s test. I’m only fearful of how much humankind can choose to become reliant on external intelligence.

After all, you can never truly trust external intelligence, whether it originates from a human brain, or a machine.

Late Night Jitters of Unwanted Work

I often find myself lost between expansive periods of wasted time and an incorrigible bout of productivity loss. And within that abyss, all I’m thinking about is how to come out of it.

Unwanted work is probably one of my biggest weaknesses. That is why I know that I’ll never be able to work at some place where my job satisfaction is zero even if everything else soars high above the ceilings.

It happens. I’ve never really tried to avoid it. I guess that would be because I like to work. I understand the value of work and the experience that comes along with every line of code written. And that is what leads me to my demise. I never say no.

I guess I should start saying no to a few projects that arrive in the future, and believe that by saying ‘no’ to it, I will not be losing an opportunity, but will be making myself available for other opportunities.

I need time for myself. I need time to work on things that I’m inherently excited about. And if that should mean the sacrifice of a few opportunities, so be it!

BSNL New year gift – Github DNS lookup failed

I still remember the days when Facebook went down for an hour or two in the evening, and everybody lost their minds, while some predicted the impending apocalypse.

But I’m not on Facebook anymore. I’ll do a separate post on the why(s) and how(s) for that.

So today while trying to push some commits into my github repo, I found this error:

fatal: unable to access ‘https://github.com/mohonish/****.git/’: Could not resolve host: github.com

I tried it out in my browser, and it showed a DNS lookup failed error. Well this was a first, for github. I opened IsItDownRightNow immediately, which showed that GitHub was up and running as usual.

Now that kind of freaked me out. So it was my ISP’s DNS service that could not route me to Github. What? BSNL? Really?

I can still access github through proxy. But that won’t help me as a permanent solution.

I’m going to add the Google Public DNS servers. I guess that might solve it. Will update as soon as this is resolved.

UPDATE (2/1/2015):
http://www.zdnet.com/article/india-lifts-block-on-vimeo-pastebin-internet-archive-others-still-banned/

So GitHub was blocked along with 31 other websites for being used to spread Anti-India content by terrorists. Reportedly, the bad on GitHub was lifted today – which means that BSNL uncles will get the news tomorrow morning, debate over it till next week, and hopefully we’ll have it back by the end of the month.

Sigh!

UPDATE (3/1/2015)
Apparently on adding Google’s public DNS servers, I can access github through my browser, but not through terminal. I wonder why! Hmm…

Real Madrid the spoil-sport!

So you guys achieved ‘La Décima’. Cool. Now stop being the rich kid who goes about buying it all and spoiling the fun of the game.

Avid football fans will know that every  football club in the world is primarily known by the legends who’ve played for them. I know so many people who would have raised irresolute eyebrows on hearing the word Barcelona, if Messi had never played for them. Its natural. Its the reason why so many one-club-player legends like Xavi, Gerrard, Giggs, Schweinsteiger and many others are deeply respected by their fans.

But then comes Real Madrid with all their monetary prowess, and spoils it all. Yes I know that its a dream for every professional footballer to play for a club of that stature and history. The best of the best have always played at Real Madrid. Yet, sometimes I feel that it just spoils the fun.

Any footballing contest would be so much fun if there was a good balance of players in all the teams. Of course that is not possible, but is one of the reasons why EPL 2013-14 season was immensely enjoyed by all. Because it was a season of surprises. Everybody loves it when an underdog team defeats the team that was supposed to cruise by with 3 points on paper.

Coming back to La Liga and Champions League, it seems almost unfair that any team be allowed to exercise so much financial muscle to get the best players from all around the world into a domestic league where there are only two giants (Barcelona and Madrid, (and Atletico, though not a giant)).

The latest news is that Manchester United wants Gareth Bale and is willing to pay 100million. Now look at Real Madrid. They want David De Gea along with that bag of cash, while they’ve almost ready to bring Marco Reus from Dortmund.

Yes it seems wolfish, but maybe its just clever business.

Linux CUPS Printing Error – Filter Failed

Almost every time that you face some kind of error or bug on your linux system and can’t figure out why, there will be at least one person who will have faced the same and have posted it online asking for help. And almost always, there will be a good samaritan who had popped up and dropped an interesting workaround or solution to the problem.

Well, almost every time.

So after having updated the kernel on my relatively new installation of Fedora 20, my HP printer stopped working. I had hplip installed and the printer worked fine previously. I accessed CUPS jobs panel at http://localhost:631/jobs and found the error on the print job to be “Filter Failed”. It didn’t hit me at first, but an obvious cause to the error was a dependency issue.

The solution was simple. I ran hp-doctor which is a self-diagnostic utility by HP, and it fixed the dependencies for me. How cool is that!

I think I should mention my references to people who are struggling with an HP printer on a Linux (maybe Fedora) distro.

Here is the original bug on bugzilla. (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=611255)

Update: Typical good samaritan found on stackexchange. (http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/77139/filter-failed-from-hplip)

If anybody has encountered any other specific errors with HP printers and linux, feel free to approach me. I’ll try my best to help you out.

Peace out!

Exams Y U NO end?

“Sometimes I wonder that with all the progress that mankind has made, why hasn’t written exams been eradicated yet? Shouldn’t there have been some kind of an instrument which the examiner could stick into by brain and tell me that I’ve passed with x % aggregate then and there itself. Its just sad.”

– Me (Stressed before the exam)

Life without internet?

I woke up today morning to find out that my internet connection was down. In fact, all the wired telephones in my house were dead.

I turned on my PC, and suddenly I had nothing to do! No internet!

An hour later, everything was back to normal as the lines were fixed and I was back on the internet.

After 5 minutes…

I still had nothing to do!

<facepalm>