manki’s weblog

Speed Matters

2012-02-04T17:02:00.000+11:00

I bought a Samsung N150 netbook in early 2011. That’s a tiny little laptop with an Atom processor, 2GB RAM, and a 10” screen. It was tolerable, but slow nevertheless. A few months later, I bought a Galaxy Tab 10.1v. From then on, I started preferring the tablet for any task, and used the laptop only for things that the tablet is not very good at. (Anything that involves typing text or multitasking.)

In December 2011, I bought a Toshiba ultrabook, which is way faster than the Samsung laptop. Now I see that I prefer to use the Toshiba over the tablet. I guess it’s not the form factor that makes me like or dislike a device, but the speed. I just hate waiting for machines.

Moving Eclipse installation to a different location

2012-02-04T13:15:00.000+11:00

I recently changed my username on my laptop from manki to m. I just had to rename /home/manki directory to /home/m and everything worked just fine, except one program: Eclipse. For whatever reason, Eclipse writes absolute pathnames like /home/manki/whatever in its configuration files and when /home/manki disappeared, Eclipse could’t figure out what to do about it.

One nice thing about Eclipse is that, like all Unix programs, it keeps all its data in plain text files. I just had to look for files that contained the string /home/manki and replace those strings with /home/m instead. The directories I had to scan were:

workspace-root/.metadata
~/.eclipse

I used this command to get a list of files that matched:

find ~/.eclipse ~/prog/eclipse-workspace-android \
    -type f \
    -exec grep -l '/home/manki/' {} \;

Once I had the list of files, an easy search-and-replace across all those files did the job. Eclipse opened with no issues, and it was able to find all the plugins and such. I think doing the same would be sufficient to move an Eclipse installation from one location to another.

Grand plans for life

2012-02-02T17:50:00.001+11:00

For a while, all I wanted from life was to just travel and see places. Live in places that look “fancy”. Then at some point I thought I wanted to do something for people of my town. I wanted to start something like a new company and be useful to my society in some way. Just now I had a thought: what’s the point of “being useful” to people anyway? Also, I think I shouldn’t be planning my life so far in advance. I’ll take life as it comes, and go with the winds. At least that’s what I think now.

Quotes from “I’m Feeling Lucky”

2012-01-27T20:06:00.000+11:00

Some quotes from Douglas Adams’ I’m Feeling Lucky:

But you couldn’t work at Google without learning something new every day, even if you weren’t trying to.
Efficiency, I would learn very quickly, is valued highly among those who live to make things work better.
Among certain sets in Silicon Valley, your email address indicates more about you than the car you drive or the clothes you wear.
Larry and Sergey didn’t like renting intelligence when they could buy it. There are only so many really smart people in the world. Why not collect them all?
If search engines were faster and better, they could be integrated into your thought process.
“If we can’t win on quality,” [Larry] said quietly, “we shouldn’t win at all.”
Legend has it that Google grew entirely by word of mouth. That’s not quite true. We didn’t mind running online ads; we just didn’t want to pay for them.
Insecurity was a game all Googlers could play, especially about intellectual inferiority. Everyone but a handful felt they were bringing down the curve.
Things could always be more efficient and cost less, in either time or money.
Google did that to you—made you challenge all your assumptions and experience-based beliefs until you began to wonder if up was really up, or if it might not actually be a different kind of down.
I needed to stop saying “Here’s my concern,” and start saying “Here’s what you need to do to make that happen.”
“You have to say both emotionally and intellectually, ‘I can only work so many hours. The best I can do is make good use of these hours and prioritize the right way so I spend my time on the things that are most important.’ Then if I see something below the line that is broken and I can fix it, it’s important not to try to fix it. Because you’re going to hurt yourself. Either personally—because you add another hour and that’s not sustainable—or you’re going to hurt something that’s above the line that’s not getting the hours that it should.”
“Any technology can do a good job with a hundred thousand queries a day. It’s a lot harder to do it with a hundred million.”
Google’s founders believed down to their DNA that simplicity was a benefit.
Neither Larry nor Sergey had been to business school or run a large corporation, but Larry had studied more than two hundred business books to prepare for his role running Google as a competitive entity. He trusted his own synthesis of what he had read as much as anything he might have picked up in a classroom.
“It’s not an engineering personality to keep quiet when you feel things are going wrong... and being intimidated by people is not very productive.”
“Google engineers were so strong-willed,” [said] Matt Cutts, “that sometimes if we thought that Larry and Sergey were wrong, we just ignored them.”
“We can keep on discussing this for a long time and try to get agreement or we can just go ahead and do at least the part we know.”
“Once you start to see spam, the curse is, you’ll see it everywhere.”
“One thing I learned at Google,” [Matt Cutts] said to me, “is that you make your own cred. If you propose your own initiative, you’re much more likely to do it than if you sit around and wait for someone to say, ‘What do you want to do with your life?’”
Any time you have that rate of growth, you basically have to make software improvements continuously because you can’t get the hardware deployed fast enough.
That’s the best definition of success: if a new system comes out and everyone says, ‘Wow, I can’t believe we put up with the old thing because it was so primitive and limited compared to this.’
‘An order of magnitude is qualitative, not quantitative.’ When you go up by an order of magnitude, the problem is different enough that it demands different solutions. It’s discontinuous.
Engineering lives and dies by its tradeoffs.
I was admitting I couldn’t get something done. At Google, that was not a career-enhancing move.
“Don’t let anything hold you up for eventual delivery,” Cindy wrote in my six-month review. “Figure out the fastest way to get it done. And don’t let your signature high standards slip!”
Larry was so suffused with conviction that he simply brushed aside opposition and ran toward risk without fear or hesitation.
It’s hard to accept that everything you know is wrong, or at least needs to be proved right all over again. [This is Douglas’ reaction when all of his experience seemed useless and/or rejected at Google.]
Search is cheap only when done right.
“What matters is whether we’re doing the right thing, and if people don’t understand that now, they will eventually come to understand it.”
Marissa’s desire to “fix things” as soon as they came to her attention was a common impulse among engineers.
We were the yin and the yang: marketing and engineering, glibness and geekspeak, a gracefully arcing comma in a classic Garamond font complementing a rigidly vertical apostrophe in fixed-pitch ASCII.
Product management gave [Marissa Mayer] a far wider playing field than she ever would have had as an individual contributor in engineering.
I was concerned about becoming “the guy who was always concerned,”
Larry and Sergey’s most sacrosanct commandment: Get it done on time.
Obvious solutions are not the only ones and “safe” choices aren’t always good choices.
Two smart guys working on complex technical problems, it turns out, can accomplish a hell of a lot.
Larry never wanted to give people more information than he thought it was useful for them to have.
We’re Google! Let’s be outrageous and daring and have some fun.
It was our goal to make ads so useful that people would actually go out of their way to click them, even knowing that they were ads and not search results.
“Any chart that goes up and to the right is good,” [Eric Schmidt] assured us.
“You can’t get up and be an asshole about being smart,” Paul [Buchheit] explained, “because Jeff’s smarter than you and he’s not an asshole.”
But at Google the status quo was nothing more than an inconvenience to be improved upon as time allowed.
Scaling by adding staff instead of algorithms and hardware would be a mistake.
“Don’t be evil” is not the same as “Don’t consider, test, and evaluate evil.”
You need to understand how Google works. We don’t have senior VPs. We have Larry and Sergey and everybody else. [This was during Doug’s time, of course. Now Google has VPs.]
“We agreed not to do this,” [Marissa Mayer] insisted. “And you went off and did it anyway.”
“I don’t remember ever agreeing to that,” Paul [Buchheit] replied. “Maybe you said not to, but I never agreed to anything. I’m not really that agreeable a person that I would ever agree not to do something.” [The conversation is about targeting ads based on email contents in Gmail.]
Experiencing something is much more powerful than just talking about it.
“Ultimately,” Paul [Buchheit] said, “that’s a really big advantage or liability for a project. What Larry thinks of the people involved.”

My experience with ‘meditation’

2012-01-26T20:32:00.000+11:00

The first time ever I even heard of the name of Osho was when I saw this book called “மனதின் இயல்பும் அதைக்கடந்த நிலைகளும்” (The nature of mind and going beyond it). This was almost 10 years ago. The title was interesting, and so was the preface. I immediately decided to buy it. Soon after, I was known as an “Osho fan” among my friends, and I managed to read several books of his.

Soon I realised something: irrespective of how many ever books I read, I know what Osho is going to say: “mediate”. That’s his primary (and arguably only) advice to people. I tried sitting with my eyes closed and watching my mind. It wasn’t easy... I just couldn’t stop the wandering mind. As a believer of “if it’s too hard, you’re doing it wrong” theory, I stopped trying. Though the desire to experience mediation never died down in me.

One thing Osho often repeats is “When I am pointing at the moon, don’t look at my fingers. You’ll then mistake the pointing finger for the moon.” I thought to myself that sitting with your eyes closed cannot be the only form of meditation. I’ll find my own way... I’ll discover the meditation that works for me.

•••

In the last two years, I have been catching myself doing stupid things. Being angry with people who are helping me. Expecting a fight and arguing with someone in my mind. Thinking about some pointless loss and worrying about it for no reason. And more stupid things like these. Good thing is, once you have seen this stupidity, it’s easy to get rid of them. This was probably the beginning of bringing in more consciousness into my day-to-day life.

Last week I happened to listen to a neuroscience professor’s lecture. He was talking about how regulating your breath, being conscious of what you’re doing right now (precisely what Osho recommends you to do), etc. That’s when I decided I’d try to regulate my breathing. Anyone who have tried to regulate their breathing would know that you cannot really do anything else when you’re concentrating on your breath. Someone in the crowd asked him how to effectively do your work and regulate your breathing. The professor gave a tip: make it a habit that whenever you’re walking, you’d breath deeply; when you’re sitting on a chair working, you’d let yourself breath like you always do.

That was a very good tip... and it has been useful to me from the next day. I practice deep breathing when I am walking to work. First day was hard (obviously!) and my whole mind was occupied with breathing. Within a few days it become easier... I can listen to music, think about random stuff while still breathing well. I’m guessing this is going to be an interesting experiment :)

There’s a lot of online resources for learning deep breathing, if you’re interested. Try Authentic Breathing or Wikipedia, for instance.

Daylight savings time

2012-01-16T09:43:00.000+11:00

Daylight savings time is good for one thing: it teaches our kids that time is just another arbitrary thing humans control.

Blogger’s threaded commenting on custom template blogs

2012-01-12T14:22:00.000+11:00

Update: Blogger has an official post about this.

Blogger today introduced the long-awaited threaded commenting feature. It may not work for you even after enabling embedded comment form if you have manually customised your template. Fear not, enabling threaded commenting on your custom template is not that hard :)

Go through your blog’s template and change all occurrences of

<b:include data='post' name='comments'/>

<b:if cond='data:post.showThreadedComments'>
  <b:include data='post' name='threaded_comments'/>
<b:else/>
  <b:include data='post' name='comments'/>
</b:if>

(Make sure you have enabled the “Expand Widget Templates” check box; you may not see the text to be replaced otherwise.) This change will add a “Reply” link after each comment on your blog.

Vision

2012-01-12T11:18:00.001+11:00

The world is full of things we want to see.

Opening a Toshiba Z830 laptop

2012-01-10T07:23:00.000+11:00

Opening a Toshiba Z830 is fairly simple — just remove all the screws from the back of the laptop and the cover would come off with no effort. But there’s one tricky part: there’s a hidden screw at the center of the laptop.

This is a Torx Security screw so you’d need an appropriate screwdriver. This screw is also covered by a plastic piece that you’d have to remove first to even see this screw. Once you have removed all 14 screws, the machine opens up very easily.

Setting alarms on Android using Google Voice Actions

2012-01-10T00:10:00.000+11:00

Do you hate this UI of Android’s alarm clock app? I hate it too; fiddling with the dial to set the time correctly, and to get the am/pm correctly can be annoyingly hard.

There’s an easier way: Google Voice Actions.

Tap on the microphone icon of Google search widget and say something like “set an alarm at six thirty am tomorrow” and you’re done! (Or just say “alarm six thirty am”... after all that’s all a computer needs to hear :-)

Samsung Galaxy Nexus: first impressions

2012-01-09T20:57:00.000+11:00

I have been using a Samsung Galaxy Nexus for a few days now. I have been an Android user since the G1 days; there isn’t much I have to say about the software in this post. I like Android and I don’t think any other phone software is a good choice for my usage.

Talking about the Galaxy Nexus’s hardware, it’s an enormous phone. Very wide, but it manages to fit in my hand by being very thin. I like the feel of holding the phone in my hand (disclaimer: I have never held an iPhone for more than a few minutes). Battery life is good; super fast camera doesn’t look like a big improvement, but I’ll know the difference only when I have to use a slower camera. The phone is crazy fast in pretty much everything it does, and fast is almost always good.

One of the things I was excited about was the phone’s higher (than my previous phone, Nexus S) display resolution. Text on the Galaxy Nexus is clearly crisper, and gives a better reading experience. But I can still see “pixels” on the screen... more specifically tiny “holes” on white surfaces. Apart from that I don’t really have any concern.

How we accept gifts in my family

2012-01-08T01:24:00.000+11:00

Since the time I remember, I have never seen people of my family use formal words in conversation. By “family” I mean extended family: everyone who’d come down if there’s a celebration at my house, for instance. If a relative gifts me something, I wouldn’t say “thanks”... that just isn’t the way you accept a gift.

This clip from Aadukalam movie reminded me of that way of accepting gifts. Probably because I grew up seeing it, this seems like a more graceful way of accepting a gift than thanking for it. Even today I avoid thanking people in my family... it just doesn’t feel that good to say thanks :)

(In the video, the guy is gifted a ring. He accepts it just with a remark “it’s good”.)

Fear of life

2012-01-05T20:32:00.000+11:00

Everyone talks about fear of death. But there’s another, likely more serious, fear: fear of life. It’s astonishing how many of us are afraid to take ownership of our own life!

You cannot upgrade Toshiba Z830’s SSD (yet)

2011-12-21T18:54:00.000+11:00

When I saw the Toshiba Z830 in a shop near my house, my jaw dropped. Because that thing weighs just 1.1kg! The only thing that felt inadequate was storage: it comes with only an 128GB SSD. Being the clever thing I am, I thought I can easily replace the SSD with the 240GB one I had. Except, I wasn’t that clever in this case.

Z830 uses an mSATA SSD (to save space), and the largest available mSATA SSD in the market is 128GB (source). So, if you’d need more than 128GB storage, don’t buy the Z830 (or anything that uses mSATA) yet.

Your thoughts betray you

2011-12-21T16:25:00.000+11:00

I have been hating Java since morning. Because I have been reading Java code since morning, and the code is all dumb. Dumb because it’s reams of code for doing trivial things. (This being Google Nonsense Toolkit code doesn’t help either; I keep thinking that GWT manifests everything wrong with the Java culture.)

I know all this negative feeling is because I am just tired and sleepy. Nevertheless it makes me hate Java uncontrollably!

Life has to go on

2011-12-18T20:33:00.000+11:00

Holding a grudge against someone is being stuck in the past. When you hold a grudge against a person, you lose them in your life, as well as losing some of your own happiness/peace of mind. It’s never a good thing.

Rest in peace

2011-12-18T20:15:00.000+11:00

I see people — mostly westerners — that are religiously scientific. The kind that wants to say aloud that religions are all bullshit and science is the only thing that’s worth believing in.

When someone dies, everyone — people who follow “conventional” religions (e.g. Christianity) as well as those that follow the “science religion” — uses the phrase “rest in peace”. Isn’t that “incorrect” for a science believer to use that phrase? I mean, what’s left of the dead person to rest in peace?

Reading code

2011-12-12T21:02:00.000+11:00

Good code is so simple, reading it often makes you think “I could’ve written this”.

Blissful ignorance

2011-12-10T14:15:00.000+11:00

“Ignorance is bliss” must have been said by someone who can’t quite figure out how to find happiness and wanted to blame it on their “intelligence”.

Wavy waters

2011-12-04T23:01:00.000+11:00

I was thinking about the dreams I had of living with IS and my dreams of travelling all over India when Janaki interrupted me to ask what I was thinking. We were sitting in Thanjavoor Periya Kovil, a temple I had fancied ever since I learned about it as a child. Periyal Kovil in Tamil means Big Temple. The name itself was intriguing and made me wonder how big the temple actually was. I didn’t even know which god the temple was for — it didn’t matter — I just liked the temple for its name.

I had married Janaki the previous week. I wasn’t very excited about the marriage itself, and even less excited about my new wife. My mind was preoccupied with lost dreams. I had always thought IS and I would be living like the young couples they show in movies... the couples that are so happy that you want to be like them. I’d dream that I would be driving my car in a highway with IS sitting next to me and we’ll be talking, singing aloud, stopping to take pictures, staying in random hotels, and having fun travelling around. For two days after the wedding I didn’t feel anything, but as relatives left and the reality set in, I felt more and more miserable.

I don’t even remember what I told Janaki then at the temple. Probably it didn’t matter what I said; maybe she was just making an attempt to start a conversation. When two people new to each other are sitting together, silence can be intimidating. Once they have remained silent for a while, breaking that silence can be even more intimidating. But Janaki was willing to break the silence; she took the first step to make our relationship work, when I was actively resisting every minute of my new life.

Once we started living by ourselves in Madurai, I had to face the reality, and being resigned to everything was not a practical option anymore. Slowly we defined our relationship and defined our own unwritten protocols. I learned to ask her to help me with things. If I felt like coffee, I’d ask her to make one. I’d have preferred to make it myself, but she’d feel bad for reasons I couldn’t comprehend. After a while, asking her to make coffee was not only convenient, but it even started feeling natural.

The real change happened on our first vacation after I had just bought my car. We took the car and visited my father and her parents, and went to Periya Kovil. That was the first temple Janaki and I had gone to by ourselves, so she was sentimentally attached to it. Her face when we were sitting in the temple — content with the life she was living — is still in my eyes. While walking back to our car she held my hand tightly and walked along like a kid with her father... entirely positive about life... or maybe thinking nothing about life and just happy to be holding my hand. I didn’t feel as happy as she did, but I was at peace nonetheless.

Next year I wanted to drive down to Visakhapatnam, which Janaki wasn’t very keen of. She didn’t really enjoy sitting in a car all day and staring at roads. I had always loved roads, and I was always dreaming of being on the road driving my own car with someone I really, really like. Neither of us wanted to compromise on our plans for the vacation, so we had no vacation that year. Janaki was disappointed, but she truly believed that it was all my fault. That was the first blow our marriage sustained. What was lost in that bitterness was lost forever... like a fallen tooth that never grew again.

Next year I planned the vacation entirely based on Janaki’s preferences. The places we went to and the things we did were sure fun, but I couldn’t be genuinely happy about being there and doing them. When you’re faking a smile, when you’re pretending to be happy, it shows, and it hardly ever makes the people around you happy. My dissatisfaction ruined Janaki’s happiness, and that year’s vacation ended up even more bitter than the one that didn’t happen the previous year.

Life went on like a vessel on wavy water. Eventually I realised life is so volatile that judging your future based on your present is always wrong. But I learned that way too late, after our relationship was irreparably broken and we had to separate. Janaki had become too adamant and unyielding and all my attempts to reconnect failed.

I haven’t taken a vacation this year, but I don’t want to travel alone anymore. I sometimes want to start my life all over again... but I don’t have the energy or courage for that. Marriage has turned my life upside down. But certain things never change. Not a day goes by without me thinking that life would have been joyous if only I had married IS.

--
Thanks to Sumitra for inspiration. Thanks to Nags for inspiration as well as for proofreading the draft of this post.

Android’s “sticky row” of icons

2011-12-04T09:11:00.000+11:00

Have you seen Android home screen? Android’s home screen has a number of “pages”, usually 5 or 7. You can keep different icons and widgets on each page. There’s also a “sticky row” at the bottom; icons in that row are present in all pages of the home screen. In this screenshot, Phone, People, Messaging, and Browser are all sticky, so they are present on all pages of the home screen.

Sticky row sure sounds useful in theory—because “important” apps can be accessed from all pages of the home screen, but I have never found it useful myself. Once I am familiar with the icon layout, I hardly ever look for an icon in the home screen—I simply navigate to it instead.

Let’s say I am on 2nd page of the home screen of my phone and I want to open the browser. Although the browser icon is present on the second page as well, I’d swipe over to the center page (which is the “main” page where I am mostly on) and then launch the browser from there¹. My brain has associated the main page with browser so it’s faster to launch it from there vs. looking for it on the 2nd page.

I believe this how it is for many people: this is why programs in Start menu are easier to find when they are in alphabetic order, but the icons on the desktop when in a familiar order. Only this spatial familiarity makes us walk towards the kitchen without thinking when we are thirsty. Walking to the kitchen first and then figuring out what we want from there is more efficient than doing it the other way around.

Most people won’t look so deep into this, and they don’t have to; it’s the job of UX/interaction designers to evaluate these ideas. Which means, even if the Android team knows by now that the sticky row is useless, they cannot take it away lest upsetting users who think it’s a useful feature. If I were to control whether the bottom row of my Android is sticky or not, I’d make it non-sticky².

Notes:
1. If memory serves right, Android 2.0 (Eclair) was the first version of Android to have a sticky row. I have been using Android from version 1.5 (Cupcake). I got the sticky row feature when I upgraded to a Nexus One a year later. I don’t know how much of an influence this has over my usage patterns. Also, I am still using Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), so I cannot customise the icons in the sticky row. My usage pattern may change when I upgrade to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich).

2. I know Android is open source, so I can control if the bottom row on my phone is sticky or not. But this annoyance is not reason enough for me to hack the home screen app. Not yet.

A geeky Blogger t-shirt

2011-11-30T10:01:00.000+11:00

I’m a big fan of geeky, obscure t-shirts. I am also a big fan of Blogger. So I designed a geeky Blogger shirt for myself :)

Influence

2011-11-27T18:43:00.001+11:00

Is it even possible to read a story without overlaying our own over it? After what’s lost in the narrator’s observation and the reader’s interpretation, how much is left? Do falling leaves laugh at our thousand theories explaining the fall?

Pinch of salt

2011-11-27T15:47:00.000+11:00

Yesterday I wrote a long, detailed, criticism to a blog post, and in the end I wrote this:

I am no big writer, nor a serious reader... so take this all with a pinch of salt.

I read this again today and I am embarrassed by these words. Did I honestly believe that my observations can be off the mark? No, I didn’t. But I almost always downplay my own views and come across less assertive. Pretend I don’t know what I am talking about. What for, I have no idea! One thing I do know is I do this subconsciously. Maybe this is the next thing I should start being conscious about.

Chrome’s Duplicate Tab feature

2011-11-22T09:12:00.000+11:00

Have you used “Duplicate Tab” feature of Chrome? If you right-click on a tab and select Duplicate, a new tab with the contents and history of the current tab is created. I use it in the following case:
- I am on Page A.
- I click on a link. Now I am in Page B.
- I have to do something that requires looking at both Pages A and B.

Now I can duplicate the current tab, which would give me two tabs with Page B. I can press Back in any of the two tabs to get back to Page A.

I stumbled upon an easier way to use this feature today. Instead of duplicating the tab first and then clicking Back on the new tab, I can Ctrl+click on the Back button to open a duplicate tab and go back in history one step. Works with Shift+click as well, but as you may expect it opens the duplicate tab in a new window.