Adventures in Tech

Emacs on WSL2: From Monochrome Misery to Modern Elegance

2025-09-19T16:24:00.000-07:00

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) has come a long way—especially under Windows 11. WSL2 now offers smooth integration for Linux graphical applications, making it feel less like a compatibility layer and more like a native experience. But if you're an Emacs user, you might have noticed something off.

Launching Emacs under WSL can feel like stepping into a time machine. Tiny fonts, washed-out visuals, and a UI that evokes the green-and-amber glow of vintage terminals. Functional? Yes. Pleasant? Absolutely not.

But here's the good news: it is easy to make Emacs under WSL2 look just as sharp and modern as it does on Mac OSX.

The emacs-pgtk build is designed for better graphical integration under WSL. It uses the Pure GTK interface, which plays nicely with WSL’s GUI support.

sudo apt install emacs-pgtk

To make Emacs look great, we’ll use Windows’ rich font library. First, edit your font configuration:

sudo emacs /etc/fonts/fonts.conf

and add the Windows Font directory to the list of font directories:

<dir>/mnt/c/Windows/Fonts</dir>

This tells Ubuntu to include Windows' TrueType fonts in its font cache.

Then we refresh the font cache:

fc-cache -fv

And finally start Emacs, and in the font selection popup, you should see all your favorite Windows fonts. I went with Consolas 14pt, and the transformation was instant. Crisp text, modern aesthetics, and no more squinting.

Vibe coding with Gemini CLI

2025-09-02T17:00:00.000-07:00

For sometime I wanted to build a data explorer for Valkey Cache, and this past long weekend afforded me some time to start the project. Instead of building the application from scratch, I decided to give "vibe-coding" a try. After all, there is a lot of excitement around it now, and I wanted to see for myself how effective it could be.

I fired off gemini-cli in an empty directory, and gave simple instructions of what I wanted to accomplish: a simple key-value explorer for open source valkey, that runs locally on my machine, can load and save CSV data files, and offers the ability to change keys and values interactively. I asked for the app to be built in python, and to use the tcl-tk libraries for the graphical user interface. I chose tcl-tk for a couple of reasons: it is available on multiple platforms, and is a challenge on OSX after Apple deprecated support for it.

The CLI started cranking, and created the directory structure for the application, and asked for permission to download and install the relevant python libraries. After 10 minutes of simple questions and answers, iterations on the interface, and testing that every change produces the correct UI and results, the application was complete. I was impressed with the results: the application did what I wanted it to do, and the code was clear and well documented, similar to professionally written code.

I was amazed with the outcome, and decided to repeat the experiment, but now using a native language. I chose C++, a language I am very familiar with, and very aware of the challenges of using it to build a cross-platform GUI application. The same cycle repeated as the exercise with Python, but this time it did not go as smoothly or as quickly as before.

The CLI chose SFML as the cross platform GUI library, and built the directory structure and cmake files for the project. It then started to generate the code for the UI. During the process it hit multiple compilation errors, mostly due to type mismatches, and incorrect function argument order. What was fascinating during the process is that the CLI discovered errors in the library documentation, and by examining the header files uncovered the argument mismatch and fixed them. However it took many iterations to resolve these errors.

Then it hit another wall with generating the dialog boxes for loading and saving the key-value pairs in CSV format. It downloaded the requisite font files, and an open source library for building dialog boxes that is compatible with SFML, however it struggled with font registration, and getting that library integrated with SFML. After some attempts, I gave it the hint to use a different library for the UI--wxWidgets.

The CLI cleaned up the directory structure, regenerated the cmake files, and proceeded iteratively with the build-test cycle until the application was complete. During the process it experienced some hiccups with type mismatches, type-casting, and ID generation, however the end result was a fully functional application that satisfied my requirements, with clear and documented code, and minimal intervention from me, with very minor modifications to the code. The exercise took longer than the python one, however it definitely took much less time than if I did everything from scratch by myself.

The exercise and the results got me very excited about the potential of vibe-coding. Imagine how many people that have an idea for an application, but don't pursue it because they lack programming expertise or the ability to create supporting assets such as graphical user interfaces, sound, video, or other creative assets. Now with a generative AI coding tool, they can pursue these ideas, and with minimal programming knowledge, build a prototype they can experiment with, and help them refine these ideas. Programming, creative assets, or the toil of boilerplate code would no longer be a barrier to pursue these ideas.

Or imagine a seasoned developer, who wants to accelerate building a prototype, but wants to reduce the toil of learning technologies they are not very familiar with, or accelerate the tedious parts of the task.

The potential is boundless, and the productivity increase is unbounded!

New ASUS RT-AX88U router

2021-07-19T14:11:00.000-07:00

I have been using Asus routers for many years, and have been pretty happy with them. The web interface is superb, and the firmware upgrades are timely and easy to apply, and over the last couple of years have introduced newer features that kept my old router relevant and functional.

After many years of service, my older router finally gave way, and started dropping Wifi connections randomly, especially when under heavy load. The connection drop happens whenever the kids have a Zoom meeting, or my wife and I are on work calls. Turning the laptop/iPad Wifi off and on again did not help, and we usually had to reboot the router to be able to connect again.

Out of curiosity I looked at the CPU/memory stats of the router under heavy load, and could not see any issues. Even when all of us were in video calls, the CPU/memory did not rise about 50%. I could not see anything abnormal in the logs either.

Online I saw that a lot of people had similar problems after upgrading to the latest router firmware, but could not pinpoint if what I had was a firmware issue, or an older router issue.

I decided it might be time to get a new router, and enjoy the newer hardware and protocol support. I wanted to see if I could still use my older router as a mesh router for non-essential devices, so I stuck with Asus. Despite the Wifi connection issues, I have had good experiences with their routers over the years, and I really liked their interface.

I narrowed my choices to the RT-AX88U, and their ROG high-end routers. I could not justify the high price of the latter, and the online reviews were not very good, so I went with the RT-AX88U instead.

The setup was very seamless, and I kept the older network information. I was surprised that most of the Wifi devices connected automatically to the new router, without complaining that the router hardware has changed. For the laptops, and iPads the expected behavior occurred, and I had to re-enter the network information to get them to connect.

It has been about a couple of weeks now with the new router, and so far we had no issues, even under very heavy usage. The router does not break a sweat, and the speed tests for all the wireless modes (a/g/n/ax) show significant improvements over the previous router. Perhaps it is good to upgrade the routers every couple of years to make use of hardware and protocol improvements.

Python on Windows 10

2020-10-21T16:36:00.001-07:00

Last weekend I wanted to clean up my python installation on Windows 10. In the past, I used a combination of Anaconda, Python app from the Windows Store, and Python distributions from python.org. Most of these were older versions that I have not updated in a while since I spend most of my time in WSL.

I started by deleting everything and cleaning up the installs. Afterwards, I downloaded python 3.8 from python.org, and proceeded with the installation. I selected install python for everyone and adding it to the %PATH% environment variable.

After the installation completed everything worked like a charm, until I started installing packages.

I started with installing TensorFlow:

pip install tensorflow

and got a cryptic error that one of the TensorFlow files was missing.

A quick internet search revealed that it is due to a missing setting for long filenames in Windows 10. Following the instructions in this Stackoverflow post to enable long filenames option in the local computer policy, resolved the issue, and the installation proceeded smoothly.

Then I installed keras, and jupyterlab

pip install keras jupyterlab

and tried to run jupyter lab, which failed because Jupyter was not in the %PATH%. Instead of adding another directory to the %PATH% variable, I ran jupyterlab through:

python -m jupyterlab

More keystrokes but works uniformly for any python module.

Now with python and the ML frameworks installed on Windows 10, I can make use of the GPU again. But not for long, since WSL is planning on adding GPU support soon, and there will be no need to live outside of WSL anymore.

Interns at Microsoft

2020-10-14T17:58:00.005-07:00

One of my favorite times at work is when the interns in my organization present the projects they have been working on for the past 10 or so weeks. It is amazing to see what they have accomplished during that period, and its impact on the business.

In my groups, I always make sure that everything the interns work on makes it to production and has visible business impact. The interns enjoy that quantifiable sense of accomplishment and seeing that their work lives in a launched product and improves some aspect of it.

After the interns demo their projects, I schedule follow-up 1:1 meetings with each of them. During the meeting, we go over their experiences during the internship, what they have learned in the process, and how can we make the experience better the next time around.

Their suggestions are always on point, constructive, and actionable. The conversations invariably drift to learning more about Microsoft, and what advice would I give them to have a successful engineering career after graduating and joining the workforce.

I always give them the same advice I give to seasoned software engineers be curious, collaborative, and develop your communication skills.

In our field, curiosity is very important. The field changes very fast, and curious engineers adapt and learn new skills that help them in their career. Technologies that are hot today are obsolete tomorrow, and curiosity and learning guards against that.

I have hired many an engineer that had no formal education in machine learning, distributed systems, or language runtimes, but were curious about the area, and their curiosity drove them to do the legwork, and learn from textbooks, online courses, open source codebases.

Curious engineers are also not shy at asking questions and using these to elevate their knowledge about the subject matter, or help others articulate a design or idea better, which is a big win for the whole team.

In our field, collaboration is also very important. Software development is a team sport, and today’s large codebases are seldom developed in isolation by a single developer. They usually involve multiple engineering teams, and multiple disciplines such as design, product management, testing, and operations. Learning how to navigate that maze and collaborate within and across disciplines is a valuable skill to have and pays off later in one’s career.

Finally, we come to communication skills. Most engineers dedicate an inordinate amount of time to learning new technologies, and forget to develop, and exercise their communication, presentation, and influencing skills. These skills are important even at the beginning of one’s career, and become deal breakers as the career progresses, both for individual contributors and managers.

After our conversation, the interns spend the rest of the week off-boarding, and go back to school. I am always pleasantly surprised when they reach out to connect later, and doubly happy when they decide to join my teams after graduation.

MacOS Catalina, OneDrive, and case sensitive file systems

2020-10-09T09:53:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, I dusted off my old Macbook Air to search for some old family photos. I have not used the laptop for a long time, and it was completely out of charge. I plugged it in, and it quickly booted. Shortly after, I got bombarded with notifications that many of the applications needed updating, and that a new version of the OS was available.

I waited till I found the photos I was looking for, before attempting to upgrade anything. I also wanted to install OneDrive to get my old files to the cloud, so that I can access them from any of my devices, instead of dusting off old computers to get to them.

The MacOS upgrade experience has always been fantastic, and this one was no different. The OS upgrade files downloaded quickly and after a restart and a quick install, the Macbook Air was ready to go. Upgrading the installed applications was also a breeze, however in the process I discovered that a large majority of the applications installed were not compatible with Catalina.

Since I have not used the Macbook Air in ages, it was an easy decision to delete these applications; I didn’t miss them, and in the future if I find I cannot access any of my legacy files, I can always find a converter, or a newer version of the application.

Next, I installed Office. The installation was smooth and quick, but when I tried to setup OneDrive, I got an error that OneDrive cannot create the folder in the location I selected. The error message mentioned that either I don’t have access to the folder, or that the filesystem is case-sensitive.

I checked the permissions on the folder, and made sure that I own it, and have read/write access to it. That did not solve the problem, and so I investigated the case-sensitivity issue.

Turns out that the directory I chose for OneDrive was on a filesystem that was case sensitive. I did not want to change that filesystem, but since the drive had a bit of space left, I fired off the “Disk Utility” application, and created a new volume for OneDrive. I chose “APFS(Encrypted)” format and limited the volume to 20GB.

The install went smoothly after that, and now my old files have a new life in the cloud.

Upgrading from WSL1 to WSL2 on Windows 10

2020-10-06T12:00:00.000-07:00

I have been using WSL1 for a long time now and have been extremely pleased with it. After setting up Cygwin/X server, I don’t have a need for running Linux in a VM anymore. With the new Windows update, WSL is changing to support GPUs and GUI applications, so I decided to upgrade my install to make use of these improvements once they are shipped.

The upgrade path is easy: you can choose to configure a new WSL2 environment, or you can migrate your existing one. I decided to upgrade my install, since I had a lot of packages installed, and did not want to reinstall and configure them in a new environment again.

First, I started by getting everything I have in my Ubuntu environment up to date:

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade

Then in a windows command prompt, I updated my default WSL environment to version 2:

wsl –set-default-version 2

WSL2 requires Virtual machine platform support, and if that is not enabled, you can easily enable it through the control panel or searching for “Turn Windows Features On or Off”, and enabling the Virtual machine platform feature.

After the installation and a reboot, I upgraded my Ubuntu environment (you can list the environments through wsl –list –verbose). In my case, my environment name is “Ubuntu”

wsl –set-version Ubuntu 2

This starts the conversion. After that completes, in a bash window, I did an Ubuntu release upgrade:

sudo do-release-upgrade

The release upgrade asks a couple of questions about packages and configs; I chose the maintainer’s version, and after everything was completed, I was ready to go.

I needed to do a couple of changes to enable X11 different from what I’ve done for WSL1:

In my ~/.bashrc I added the following lines:

export DISPLAY=$(awk '/nameserver / {print $2; exit}' /etc/resolv.conf 2>/dev/null):0

export LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1

And in my Cygwin/X Xlaunch wizard, I enabled access from everywhere, and added “-listen tcp” to the extra arguments.

And everything worked like a charm!

School and Chromebooks

2020-09-17T12:03:00.002-07:00

This year schools shifted to remote learning because of COVID-19. Before the semester started, our school district planned on a hybrid approach, where students attended schools physically a couple of days a week, and studied from home for the rest of the week. The thinking behind the plan was to balance the students’ exposure vs the benefits of in-person learning, however as the virus situation did not improve by the school start, the district abandoned the plan and opted for a full-time at home learning schedule.

Before the school started, my plan was to have the kids use their iPads to access their learning materials. They were comfortable with their iPads, knew how to use a web-browser, and switch between applications well. As school start neared, I started thinking that they would benefit from a bigger screen, and a decent physical keyboard, so I began to look for reasonably priced laptops that would do the job. As I started looking late, and I think a lot of parents had similar ideas, almost all the laptops that I wanted to get were out of stock, with a month out expected delivery time.

A friend recommended looking at Chromebooks instead. They are reasonably priced, and powerful enough for schoolwork. They have touchscreens, and good keyboards, and more importantly they are well integrated with the Android system and have good parental controls. I gave it a try and searched online for reasonably priced Chromebooks.

Again, most were out of stock, but I was lucky to stumble upon the Acer Chromebook 15. At $350, with reasonable memory and disk storage, a touch screen, and a keyboard, it was a good deal. And luckily it was in stock and shipped in 2-days, just in time for when the school started.

When it arrived, I was impressed with the build quality for the price, and the features the laptop had. Setting up Chrome-OS was a breeze, and when I used my son’s account for the laptop, Chrome-OS automatically enabled Parental Controls, tied them to my Google account, and Parental Link app. App purchase approvals were a breeze afterwards.

Next, I installed Microsoft Teams—the school uses that for classes, video conferences, and homework submission. I prefer having the application installed, instead of using the web-based application, however after a couple of tries, my son ended up using the web-based one. On the iPad, he became familiar with browsers, and switching between tabs felt more natural to him, and that carried over to the Chromebook.

It has been a couple of weeks now with the Chromebook, and everyone is happy. The battery life on the Acer is great—about 12 hours on a single charge, with good usage during the day for video conferencing, and educational games. The CPU is reasonably fast, and the thing is always on, so booting up is instantaneous. I forgot how satisfying that feeling is, when you want to do something, open the laptop lid, and you’re instantly ready to go. Perhaps I am justifying getting one for myself.

Office in the cloud

2020-07-09T08:59:00.001-07:00

Over the last month I have been using the web version of Office applications. I switched over from the desktop versions not because I was dissatisfied with them, but I switched because I wanted to be on the bleeding edge and get a preview of the new features quickly. I also did not want to update the desktop applications every day to get the new features, and the web apps relieved me from that burden.

As I used the web apps daily, I found that I did not miss the desktop versions. Sure, the web apps have their quirks, and living on the bleeding edge with preview features does not help. However, in this case, the plusses outweighed the minuses.

For one, I did not miss the ability to work offline, as I am almost always online and connected to a high-speed network. I loved that the browser took care of managing my open documents, presentations, spreadsheets, email, and calendar tabs, and automatically restored them when I restarted my computer or updated my browser. I also loved the smaller memory footprint when I opened tons of documents and presentations.

But above all, I loved seeing and using the new collaboration and AI features that made me productive ahead of their rollout to the public.

Offline matching and the catalog from Dell

2020-06-05T08:00:00.003-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I saw an ad on my phone for the new Dell XPS laptop. Out of curiosity I clicked on it, and started configuring a couple of options just for fun. I read a lot of good reviews about the upcoming XPS laptop, how the design rivals that of Apple’s MacBook laptops, and how certain configurations come with Linux preinstalled. I played around with the options, and configured two beast laptops just for fun, then I left and have not thought about it anymore, since I am not in the market for a new laptop, being satisfied with my Surface 3 laptop and all.

A couple of weeks later, I received a Dell catalog for the first time, addressed to me and not to the usual “Current Resident”, that has more details about the XPS laptops, gaming laptops, desktops, and peripherals that Dell sells. The catalog also included a 15% discount, which was a nice touch.

I wondered how I got that catalog, even though I have not explicitly sign up for it, nor request one, nor provide any information while configuring the laptops on Dell’s website. Then I remembered offline matching.

There are offline matching data companies, that collect customer activity in the offline world, such as purchases associated with gift and loyalty cards from grocery stores, gas stations, brick and mortar retailers, etc., where names and addresses are available, and use a bridge between the online-offline world to match the activity online with that offline. The bridge can be an email address, a third-party cookie, swap ID-match, or a hashed ID, etc., and after bridging, the data on the customer activity is holistic. I bet that’s probably what happened, and I ended up getting the catalog.

Windows 10 May Update v2004

2020-06-04T09:48:00.002-07:00

I upgraded all my devices to the Windows May update, all but my new Surface 3 laptop. Whenever I checked manually for the system updates, I got nothing, apart from the occasional Windows Defender updates. For a week I checked religiously, and when I did not get any notifications, I started searching online to see if there were any issues with my device.

It turns out that there were. There is an issue affecting the Surface 3 laptop, and other devices that use an always on, always connected networking. The issue blocks the update for these devices, per the Known Issues and Release Problems page since it leads to random restarts or crashes. The issue is currently under investigation, and once resolved, the surface will get the update. I will wait till then.

Interestingly there are recommendations online to circumvent the block on the Surface, by using the Update Assistant Tool, or the media creation tool. I don’t recommend either, unless you enjoy bricking your laptop. Luckily the assistant tool checks to see if there is a block on the device before applying the update, and if there is, it fails the update protecting the device.

WSL and X11 applications

2020-04-28T10:10:00.001-07:00

I have been using the Windows Subsystem for Linux for a long time now and have been pretty pleased with it for text-based applications. When I need to use a graphical application, I fire up Hyper-V with a full Ubuntu install, and mount my local drives to access my directories and files. The heavy-handed solution worked well for a long time now, but over time I found I was installing the same set of programs I used frequently in both places. There must be a better solution. If only I could run graphical applications on WSL.

Turns out there is a way. I searched for a free X11 server that I can install on Windows 10 and found a couple that were highly rated. I also remembered that when I used Cygwin long time ago, it came with its own X-server, and wondered if I can install that separately, since with WSL I did not need Cygwin as a whole. It did, and I installed Cygwin/X server and fonts.

After the install, I ran Xlaunch, which ran a configuration wizard to start the X-server. I passed the extra parameter

-listen tcp

to the server to allow for remote connections from WSL. In the bash prompt, I exported the display

Export DISPLAY=:0.0

and tested the install by running xterm. Viola, I can run graphical applications now on WSL, and I don’t need to duplicate Linux program installs between WSL and Hyper-V.

Upgrading my desktop

2019-11-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

At Microsoft we get to refresh our desktops and laptops every couple of years. Most people jump at the opportunity to get the latest equipment, but I usually don’t. I don’t like migrating from an older machine to a newer one and delay the refresh for as long as I can, preferably until the equipment dies, or goes out of compliance.

After approving many equipment upgrades for my team this year, I decided to upgrade my monitor. I always had a single small monitor for my desktop, and never liked the dual monitor setup, or what I jokingly call the “flight simulator” setup with 4 monitors—three side by side, and one on top. My team swears by the productivity increase of seeing everything they need at once, and I believe them.

However, for me I was weaned on Unix terminals, Emacs, and command line tools, so I learned to live within the confines of a small screen. Nonetheless, getting a larger and crisper display was appealing, so I took the plunge and ordered a 38-inch monitor.

Of course, when I got the new monitor, my computer graphics card was too old to drive it. Instead of getting a newer and more powerful graphics card, our admin suggested refreshing the desktop, since mine was very due for recycling. I concurred and got a new Dell desktop. I plugged in the new monitor and booted. I was pleasantly surprised by how quiet the new machine was, how much faster it booted, and how smooth and crisp the new display looked. Overall a good start.

I was disappointed however that it had less memory and storage than my older computer. The new behemoth came with 16GB of RAM, and 500GB disk. My laptop—strike that, my phone has more memory and storage than that. I asked our admin for a 1TB SSD, and 2x8GB of memory. Installing the SSD and the memory was a breeze, and I booted the computer.

Sadly, nothing. No Sound. No picture. The screen was blank, and I had no clue what happened. I noticed that the power button was flashing different colors, so I went online to the Dell site to figure what was going on. Apparently, the computer communicates error codes by blinking the power button LED. I had to count how many times a color repeats and look at a table online to figure out what the error is. Mine turned out to be a bad memory configuration. Oh boy. The computer came with 2 memory sticks pre-installed, and I added 2x8GB memory sticks in what I thought were the right location.

Buried in the Dell manual for the computer was a table that shows the memory configuration for 32GB worth of RAM—one 8GB memory stick in every other slot. I put in the 2 8GB RAM sticks in the correct slots and booted again. No luck. Same blinking error code.

I tried other memory sticks to no avail, so I gave up, and booted the computer without the extra memory. The computer worked like a charm, with bigger storage, but with 16GB of RAM. I proceeded to install everything I had on the older computer and migrating my files.

In the afternoon, I complained to our admin about how can the new machines have less memory than the older ones. He looked at the computer order, and the order showed 32GB of RAM. What?

I remembered long time ago when I bought an AMD K6 based computer, that the computer shutdown after 3 mins of use. When I investigated, it turned out that the manufacturer did not install the processor fan correctly, and the CPU overheated and shut down to protect itself. Could I have a similar problem here? I wondered if my Dell computer had a loose memory stick.

I opened the computer one last time and examined the memory sticks. Sure enough, one was loose. Each stick was 16GB of RAM, which explained why when I installed the 2x8GB they did not work. How did a loose memory stick pass quality control?

I installed the memory stick correctly, and it was not loose anymore. I booted the computer and got my 32GB back. Teaches me to ask for a new monitor that required a new computer.

A week with the Galaxy Note 10+

2019-09-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

Last week I made an impulse buy. I was at the Microsoft store trying to pass time while my kids were enjoying painting on the surface laptops and playing games on the Xbox. I walked around the store in search of something interesting and stopped at the phone display. The display had the newest family of the Samsung Galaxy phones, preloaded with Microsoft business applications. I picked up the biggest model and started to play with it. I liked its bigger edge-to-edge screen and the quality of the display. I must have enjoyed it very much, because I tried a lot of my favorite sites and applications, and compared how easy it was to read on the bigger screen than on my smaller iPhone X screen. I was so absorbed in the comparisons, that I did not see the sales associate approaching.

She was very cordial, and started to chat about the differences between the two eco-systems—Android and iOS, and that most of the applications that I used including work applications ran on both. Then she mentioned that for a limited time only, Samsung is offering \$650 for my trade-in, in case I decided to switch. In addition, because I am a Microsoft employee, I get a gift card for \$150 if I bought the phone in the store. The deal was so good to pass on, despite the anticipated pain of switching from iOS to Android, as I have been using the former since the first iPhone was introduced. I made the impulse buy, traded my smaller screen for a bigger one that was easier on my eyes, and got a faster phone with more memory and storage for virtually peanuts.

Setting up my applications was relatively easy, and since I had my contacts backed up on Google, restoring these was a breeze. Apart from enrolling at work to gain access to Wifi and internal sites, the process was relatively quick and painless. The most difficult part was fixing the text messages and restoring my photos.

When I used my iPhone, I exclusively used iMessage, which meant that my texts did not use SMS messaging when I texted someone with an iPhone. Despite disabling iMessage before trading in my old phone, other iPhones that I texted before cached that information, and so if anyone wanted to text me a message, that text would be lost. It was time consuming to send everyone I text frequently a regular SMS to indicate I switched phones, and to wipe out that cache. That took a bit of a time, and explaining, but I think now we are in the clear.

The more painful process was restoring the older pictures to the phone. I don’t take a lot of pictures but restoring many years’ worth of photos proved to be a challenge. I backup these images on OneDrive and Amazon cloud storage, but as I discovered trying to restore them to the phone, that I cannot select everything to download. I have to select images one by one, and then download them. This proved to be impossible since I had many years’ worth of images and videos.

I then decided to connect the phone to my computer using the high-speed USB-C to USB-C cables, and started copying roughly 35GB worth of photos and family videos. The process was not robust, and the time estimate for completion was ridiculous—roughly in days. I left the phone connected over night to copy as many images as possible and disconnected in the morning to use the phone for the day. At night I reconnected again to resume the copy, but when I woke up the next morning, I found that the copy failed because of dupes, and the connection crashed.

I tried multiple ways to copy the files to get around the dupes, such as copying a month worth of images at a time, but that did not work. Then I thought of an idea: what if I zip all the picture files and copy one humongous file to the phone that I can unzip afterwards. That crazy idea worked like a charm. The zipping took about 20 minutes, the transfer another 20, and I unzipped the files using the phones built-in file manager application. That took a couple of minutes, and I had my older images and videos intact. I was beyond pleased.

My experiences with the phone over the next week were very good. All my applications worked seamlessly, and I am enjoying the better Google voice recognition and map navigation, to the point where I dictate everything now instead of typing. In addition, despite a slightly heavier usage, my battery life is about 2-days. And did I mention a bigger screen easier on my eyes?

Cars and Tech

2019-07-16T11:19:00.000-07:00

Twelve years ago, when I bought my car, my decision criteria were simple. I wanted a car that is fun to drive, had good reliability, and was gas efficient; traits that were missing in my prior car. I did not put a lot of weight on the technological innovations the car had; I was happy with a good navigation system, a CD player that held multiple CDs, and a backup camera that made parallel parking easier. At the time, almost all car manufacturers provided undifferentiated versions of these capabilities, with minor tweaks to the user interface, which made my selection a lot easier.

Over the years as the technology advanced, these originally innovative features started to feel obsolete. It was almost impossible to upgrade the hardware with newer and faster components, and software did not have a better story. Only if either had issues or bugs, did the manufacturer offer an upgrade, through vehicle recalls or maintenance, or through map update CDs on a yearly basis, that captured changes in routes, points of interest, and changes because of new construction.

In the meantime, smart phones became indispensable devices, not only providing the basics of phone calls, text messages, and web browsing, but also the plethora of applications that allowed us to do everything on these small devices from navigation, to listening to music, to watching videos, and playing games. And with the brilliant invention of the car phone holder, I found myself shifting away from the built-in technology systems, to using my iPhone as the primary device for everything in the car.

Sure, it was less convenient to have all the wires hanging from the phone to charge it and connect it with the audio system, interfering with the gear shifter on my manual transmission car, having a much smaller screen than the built-in one, and substituting the on screen controls with the analog ones in the car; but these inconveniences paled in front of the infinite upgradeability of the phone’s software and hardware. There was no need to upgrade maps, or to worry about phone address book integration, to load or unload music CDs, or to worry about what audio book to choose ahead of a long commute or trip. And with the improvement of voice recognition using all these apps while driving became much easier.

I often wondered if it were more convenient for auto manufacturers to forgo building systems for in-car navigation/entertainment, and just have a space in the dash, where you can install or plugin your favorite phone/tablet, and easily integrate with the car’s analog controls. Then both CarPlay and Android Play came on the radar and made something akin to that possible. Car manufactures still build the entertainment and navigation systems but allowed smart phones to use the display and entertainment systems seamlessly.

On a couple of recent trips, I rented cars that supported CarPlay, and even though the car had an up to date navigation system with current maps and points of interest, I found myself using my iPhone and CarPlay almost exclusively, if only for the real-time traffic updates and rerouting, listening to Spotify or my podcasts, and setting destinations through decent voice control using Siri. I believe the trend of forgoing the built-in systems for easily updatable software and hardware platforms such as the smart phone devices will continue, and unless auto manufacturers offer similar capabilities, their built-in systems will become obsolete.

Kindle Paperwhite

2018-12-24T09:00:00.000-08:00

I have always been allergic to buying specialized electronic devices that do only one thing, such as the Kindle, the iPod, and fitness trackers. Why buy these when technology evolves so fast that a multi-purpose device such as the phone or a smart watch can eventually do the same thing, but with the convenience of updates that fix bugs and add functionality? So, I was shocked when this weekend I made an impulse buy and got the newest Kindle Paperwhite—a special purpose device for reading eBooks.

I was walking past the Amazon store in the mall and saw that the newest Kindle Paperwhites were marked down by $40 for the holidays. The device looked good in the display, so I went in to look at it closely.

The Paperwhite is small and light, with a 6” screen that is backlit and waterproof. The text was crisp and readable, and in the ambient light, it felt like I am reading a printed book. I was sold and bought it on the spot.

At home I have struggled to put it down. The books are easy to download on Wi-Fi, and in ambient light the reading experience is easy on the eyes, and pleasurable despite the page flashing with every turn. I have used it for an hour for the last 5 days and the charge is still holding up, which would make it ideal for short trips without charging.

My only wish is for a bigger screen Paperwhite, that I can use for technical books and papers. Perhaps that’s my next year’s impulse buy.

On even and odd numbers, and kid's questions

2018-04-08T13:20:00.001-07:00

Kids ask the best questions. Unburdened by prior knowledge or assumptions, their questions are driven by pure curiosity and a deep desire to learn something new. As adults we can learn a lot from how kids ask questions and seek knowledge. And we can also learn or strengthen our understanding of a particular topic by answering kids questions.

For example, my son asked me a question about even and odd numbers, and why we get an even number when we add two even numbers or two odd numbers, and an odd number when we add an even and an odd number. Because this knowledge is drilled into us since our younger years, we stop wondering why.

Intuitively we know the proposition is true, and we can cite a couple of examples to prove it to ourselves. For example, adding 2 and 4--both even numbers, gives us 6, also an even number. When we add 3 and 5--both odd numbers, we get 8, which is an even number. If we choose a mix of an even number and an odd number and add them, we got an odd number. For example, adding 2 and 3, we get 5, which is an odd number. It seems that our intuition is onto something. Sometimes intuition leads us astray, and reality is reflected by something non-intuitive. The theory of relativity—both special and general, and quantum mechanics for example offer non-intuitive description of reality and how things work.

The addition examples above are not enough to gain confidence that we answered the original question. Since there is an infinite number of natural numbers (1,2,3, …etc), we have to find a different way of establishing or refuting the statement without listing an infinite number of examples. The clue is in how we write even and odd numbers.

An even number is a number divisible by $2$. We can write an even number as the product of two numbers, $2$, and another natural number $k>0$ in the form of $n_1=2k$. This number is even, because it is divisible by $2$. An odd number is one that is not divisible by $2$, or one where if divided by $2$ would have a remainder of $1$. Thus, we can express an odd number as $n_2=2m+1$, where $m>0$ is a natural number greater than zero.

Now we can see what happens when we add two even numbers, two odd numbers, and a mixture of numbers. Let’s add two even numbers first $n_1=2k$ and $n_2=2m$. The sum is $n_1+n_2=2k+2m=2(k+m)$ which is an even number.

How about adding two odd numbers $n_1=2k+1$ and $n_2=2m+1$? The sum is $n_1+n_2=2k+1+2m+1=2(k+m)+2=2(k+m+1)$ which is an even number.

Finally, how about adding mixed numbers one even $n_1=2k$, and one odd $n_2=2m+1$. Their sum is $n_1+n_2=2k+2m+1=2(k+m)+1$ which is an odd number.

By working through this simple math, we have gained insight into something drilled into us long time ago. Indeed, kids ask the smartest questions; don’t dismiss them, but use them to learn something new, or understand something you already know better.

The Bystander Effect

2018-03-01T11:43:00.001-08:00

At work, each floor has a kitchen area, with two beverage fridges, containing sodas, milk, and a variety of juices. Beverages are stocked weekly, and often checked for expiry or spoil. Last week, one of the fridges broke down, and to protect the milk from spoiling, someone moved it to the neighboring fridge. The next day I passed by the kitchen, the fridge was still broken, and more beverages started migrating to the working fridge. A week passed, and nothing changed. I realized that we are witnessing the bystander effect in action.

The bystander effect or bystander apathy is a phenomenon where people are less likely to act when others are present, because they assume that in a group someone eventually will. The apathy increases with the number of people in a group. The internet has a lot of examples of the bystander effect, and advice on how to circumvent it when you need to ask for help. Most of the examples involve dire and emergency situations, which highlight the incongruity of the help offered by the group. Interestingly however, we also experience the bystander apathy in milder non-emergency situations, for example when something is obviously broken, and we implicitly assume that someone else in the group will step up and fix it.

The solution to the fridge problem was very easy. I submitted a facilities request, and within an hour the fridge was fixed, and the beverages happily migrated to their respective locations. Perhaps the bystander apathy has its merit; someone eventually will act.

A computer in your hand

2018-02-07T13:01:00.000-08:00

Not so long ago, my laptop was my preferred device to use after hours. Relaxing on the couch, I can check my work email, catchup on the news, read research papers, or enjoy reading books. As technology advanced, I could also stream videos and shows at my leisure without commercial interruptions, that for the last 10 years or so, I had no need for a cable subscription or a TV.

Then came tablets. I was not one of the early adopters, since laptops were sufficiently advanced at the time: they were faster, had a keyboard and a better screen resolution, and the short battery life was not a deterrent. An electric outlet was always close by, and I could still work while the laptop is charging.

Then came kids, and the chaos associated with them. Kids have a natural talent where they know exactly when you need to focus on something that’s not them or when you’ve been sitting down for longer than a minute, and they are compelled to rectify such injustice. This leads to a lot of work interruptions, lots of standing up and sitting down, putting the laptop aside, sometimes locking or unlocking the screen, and closing or opening the laptop lid with the eventual sleep and hibernation. At the time, laptops had longer wakeup cycles, and you could not get back to what you were doing without waiting for a couple of minutes till the laptop became operable again. At this point, the laptop started becoming less convenient, and it was time to shift to the tablet world.

Tablets are great consumption devices; you can read easily on them especially with their now larger screens, or you can watch movies, and consume other media. They started with terrible support for producing content: it was difficult to type an email, a document, or even a short sentence on the smaller touchscreen keyboard. With all the error correction, they were much slower than using a real keyboard, and not as convenient.

Then technology advanced again, and dictation and speech recognition became better. Also tablets became smaller, and phone became bigger and more performant, with large amounts of storage. Sometimes ridiculous storage, as my current smartphone has 256GB of space, comparable to my top of the line laptops of yesteryear. As a result, most of my afterhours consumption and production is done on my trusty smartphone, with dictation taking place of typing. The convenience of holding the phone with one hand and attending to the kids demands with the other is hard to describe. Moreover, setting the phone aside to use both hands, and then picking it up again and unlocking the screen to get back to the task at hand is almost instantaneous. Now everyone is happy because of mobility and convenience.

The vision of a computer at your fingertips is not new, but is starting to materialize now, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds with either virtual or augmented reality. Perhaps one day as Ray Kurzweil predicted in his book “the singularity is near”, we won’t have to hold phones or tablets, but instead have nanobots inside our bodies manipulating our neuron connections, and helping augment what we see and feel without using any external screens. A bit futuristic and farfetched perhaps, but sure could beat donning a heavy headset over one’s head. The computer at your fingertips will change to a computer in your neurons, or literally a computer in your fingertips.

Po'boy

2017-09-11T09:30:00.000-07:00

Lunches at work are usually nothing to write about, however every now and then, we get an external restaurant that makes a memorable dish. A couple of weeks ago, that was the Cajun shrimp po’boy. The sandwich was relatively simple: a toasted baguette, a big of mayonnaise, some shredded lettuce, and seasoned Cajun shrimp, however the taste was amazing. I had an inkling about the origin of the name po’boy, but the price of the sandwich betrayed that thinking. A bit of research on the web revealed a couple of origin stories. The most plausible and heartwarming was on Wikipedia: that during a 1929 street car workers’ strike, restaurant owners served the sandwich to their striking colleagues for free, jokingly referring to the strikers as poor boys, after which the sandwiches took the name, and in the Louisiana dialect shortened to po’boy.

Amazon Bookstores

2017-09-07T11:11:00.002-07:00

In an era where most retailers are trying to decrease their physical presence, Amazon is doing the opposite by opening physical bookstores across the US. I visited one last weekend, and was very impressed with the genius of using the store to promote Amazon services and devices.

First, unlike most bookstores that carry books on nearly every subject in the Dewey decimal system, the Amazon store carries a much smaller collection of books that are bestselling amongst customers in the geographical area. There were best sellers in fiction, art, cooking, business, self-improvement, health, children’s books, popular science, and that’s it. The pricing model was genius: if you have a prime membership you get the Amazon discounted price, and if you don’t you pay the book’s list price. My guess is that this will drive prime memberships as store patrons will opt to become prime members to nab the books they like at a discount.

Second, the store has prominent displays of the Kindle, Fire, and Echo devices, with helpful staff that answers any questions you have. Having the devices on display, and allowing customers to hold them and learn how they feel in their hands is very powerful. I was tempted to get a Kindle device despite my love of the Kindle App on my phone and tablet, and a Fire HD for the kids in addition to their iPads.

Third, despite the store being much smaller than typical bookstores, it felt warm and inviting. The store even had some comfortable chairs and couches for people to sit down, and enjoy a book or two.

It would be interesting to see how these bookstores fare when other stores failed. Apple, Microsoft, and now Amazon are proving that properly designed store can work, allowing people to touch and feel the products they are thinking of buying ahead of making a decision.

A paper a day keeps the dr away: FaRM -- Fast Remote Memory

2017-04-14T10:56:00.000-07:00

Distributed systems have allowed applications to use more computation power, memory, and physical storage than is available on a single machine, enabling applications to tackle more complex problems. The capacity increase however comes at a cost: accessing remote resources is slower than accessing ones that are local to the machine. The paper “FaRM:Fast Remote Memory” tries to address the cost of accessing remote memory, and ways to make it faster.

The authors start by acknowledging that the major cost of accessing remote memory is the networking cost between machines through the TCP/IP stack, and that faster networks could do so much. They cite the case of MemC3—a state of the art key-value store—which performed 7x worse in a client-server setup than in a single machine setup, despite request batching. The authors ask the question if the TCP/IP stack overhead is that high, what if you bypass the complex protocol stacks, and use RDMA—remote direct memory access—to access memory on another machine? How would the performance look? The rest of the paper explores that question, and introduces FaRM: fast remote access memory.

The authors start with some background on RDMA. In RDMA, requests are sent between nodes over queue-pairs, and network failures are exposed as terminated connections. The requests go directly to the NIC, without involving the kernel, and are serviced by the remote NIC without the involvement of the CPU. Similar to DMA—direct memory access—a memory region is registered with the NIC before use, and the NIC driver pins the memory regions in physical memory, and stores virtual to physical page mappings in a page table in the NIC. When an RDMA request is received, the NIC gets the page table for the target, and uses DMA to access the memory. Since NICs have limited memory for page tables, the tables are stored in system memory, and the NIC memory acts a cache. RDMA connects to remote machines typically over InfiniBand, but recently RoCE—RDMA over converged Ethernet—is becoming more attractive, with flow control, congestion notification, and a much cheaper price--$10/Gbps for 40 Gbps RoCE compared to $60/Gpbs for 10 Gbps Ethernet.

FaRM uses a circular buffer to implement a uni-directional channel. The buffer is stored on the receiver, and there is one buffer for each sender/receiver pair. The sender uses RDMA to write messages to the buffer tail, and advances the tail pointer on every send. It also maintains a local copy of the head pointer to prevent writing messages past the head. The receiver updates the head in the sender’s copy using RDMA as well, to create space in the circular buffer. The receiver polls for new items at the head of the buffer, and process them creating space as needed. The authors indicate that the polling overhead is negligible with 78 machines. They found that at that scale, the RDMA writes and polling significantly outperform the complex InfiniBand send and receive verbs. The authors ran a micro-benchmark to compare the performance of FaRM communication with TCP/IP on a cluster of 20 machines connected by a 40 Gbps RoCE network. The results show that FaRM’s RDMA based messaging achieves an 9x-11x higher request rate than TCP/IP for request sizes between 16 and 512 bytes. Another latency micro-benchmark showed that TCP/IP latency at peak request rate is 145x higher than that of RDMA based messaging for all request sizes.

To achieve that high performance, the authors had to do some optimizations. The first was using larger pages to reduce the number of entries in the NIC page tables by implementing a kernel driver for Windows and Linux that allocates large number of physically contiguous and aligned 2GB memory regions at boot time.

The authors also optimized the number of queue-pair data, by reusing a single connection between a thread and each remote machine, and sharing queue-pairs among many threads in a machine.

The authors introduce the FaRM API, which provides an event based programming model, with operations that require polling to complete a task taking a continuation argument—continuation function, and context pointer. The continuation function is called when the operation is done, and is passed the result of the operation and the context pointer. FaRM API also provides convenience functions to allocate and free objects, and support lock-free operations.

The authors use the APIs to implement a distributed hashtable, and a graph store similar to Facebook’s Tao, and evaluate the performance of both.

The experiments used an isolated cluster with 20 machines, with 40Gbps RoCE NIC. The machines ran Windows Server 2012RC, on 2.4GHz Xeon CPUs with 8 cores and two hyper-threads per core, and a total of 128GB of DRAM, and 240GB SSDs.

For the key-value store experiments, the authors used 120 million key-value pairs per machine, and configured the hash stores for 90% occupancy, and measured the performance for 1 min after a 20 second warm-up. The results show that FaRM achieves 146 million lookups per second with a latency of 35 microseconds. The throughput is an order of magnitude higher than MemC3, and the latency two orders of magnitude lower.

For the graph store, the authors implemented a store similar to Tao, and used Facebook’s LinkBench with its default parameters for degree and data size distributions, with a resulting graph with 1 billion nodes and 4.35 billion edges. On the 20 machine clusters, the authors got 126 million operations per second, with a per machine throughput of 6.3 million operations per second that is 10x that reported for Tao. The average latency at peak was 41 microseconds, which is 40-50x lower than the reported Tao latencies.

The authors end by describing some of the systems and libraries that use RDMA to improve performance.

Virtual machine could not be started because the hypervisor is not running

2017-03-24T09:00:00.000-07:00

I wanted to experiment with TensorFlow, and decided to do that in a Linux VM, despite the fact that Windows Subsystem for Linux exists. In the past I used Sun’s, and then Oracle’s VirtualBox to manage virtual machines, but since my Windows install had Hyper-V, I decided to use that instead. The virtual machine configuration was easy, with disk, networking, and memory configurations non-eventful. However when I tried to start the virtual machine to setup Ubuntu from an ISO, I was greeted with the following error:

“Virtual machine could not be started because the hypervisor is not running”

A quick Internet search revealed that a lot of people have faced that problem, and most of the community board solutions did not make any sense. The hidden gem is this technet article, which included detailed steps to find if the Windows Hypervisor was running or not, and the error message if it failed to launch. In my case, the error was:

“Hyper-V launch failed; Either VMX not present or not enabled in BIOS."

The fix here is easy, and buried in another technet article. Simply reboot the machine entering BIOS setup mode, and disable VT-d and trusted execution settings. After a quick reboot, the hypervisor is happily humming along, and the setup of my Ubuntu VM is complete.

On brewing tea

2017-01-30T13:12:00.000-08:00

I watched a video interview with the 10^th heir of Twinings Tea Company, that has been merchandising tea for over 300 years. In the interview, among talking about the family history, and the story behind their bestselling tea flavor—Earl Grey—he talked about the best way to brew tea, whether using loose leaves, or a tea bag.

To extract the most flavor out of tea, he recommended bringing cold water to a boil, and removing the kettle off the stove once the water starts boiling. His theory is that the flavor is extracted through the air in the water, and continuing to boil the water further, will reduce the amount of air in it.

For green teas, he recommends letting the kettle set for 5 mins, then pouring the hot water over the tea, and for black teas, he recommends pouring the hot water immediately over the tea. The heir advised against removing the bag, or repeatedly dunking it in the water during brewing, because that only changes the color of the water, and makes the tea bitter without extracting flavor. On the contrary, he recommends leaving the tea bag still for 3 minutes, and then throwing it away, enjoying the flavorful tea, adding milk, or lemon, but never sugar, as it masks the tea flavor.

I followed his advice verbatim, and while I am not sure if the effect is psychological or real, I drank the best cup of tea in years. No bitterness, no sweetness, just great tea flavor.

Random acts of kindness

2017-01-26T11:51:00.002-08:00

When I have the chance, I like to walk to my meetings instead of using the shuttle service available on campus. When it is not raining, the walk is very refreshing: I get to clear out my thoughts on the walk, and get in some number of steps for my daily activity. After one of my meetings ended, I started to head back to my building, only to see that it started to down pour. To my luck, there was a shuttle parked upfront. I asked the driver if she could take me back to my building, and she said she was on her lunch break. As I said no worries, I’ll just walk back, she insisted that she can drive me. I hopped in the shuttle, thanking her profusely for taking the time from her lunch break to drive me back, she insisted it was not a big deal. Such an act of kindness made my day, and it is a great reminder to continue doing good things to others, simply for the joy it brings them.