A JVM Lover

It's nothing but beautiful to look back to your past self. Today I visited my private blog after a long time and uncovered some nuggets from the early 2010s. It's not a long time ago, and the posts never felt so great when they were written either; but like they say, old is gold ! Anyway, this post is to keep a record of the fact that for the longest time until it's inception until today, this blog was named "electrokavalam's fun with technology" and its url electrokavalam.blogspot.com Since Blogger allows the name (and yes URL too !) to be changed, I took the liberty of re-purposing this blog to it's current form instead of starting a new one.

Today, during lunch time I had a conversation with my friends and CP and PG on chess. Both of them are chess enthusiasts. They explained to me that chess is a game with lot of heritage, it is one of them rare games that you can pursue throughout life, chess has no generational barriers, and most of all it has engaged millions of curious minds over the centuries. There are a lot of books written on chess. So, what is the best way to get started on chess ? All you need is a personal computer and you can get started immediately. But my friends strictly warned against taking hints from the computer while deciding your moves. Make it a point to play just one game every day (For a long time in the beginning, your game will likely last only for a few moves; in that case play for a fixed time, say, half an hour). Concentrate not on making smart moves, but focus on avoiding blunders ! That's the sure way to reach mastery. /// Once you have reached that level of mastery, then you can th...

These days, both at work and at home I run into problems because of what seems to be a slow internet connection. Unfortunately there is no way of ascertaining that as I have no easy and reliable measure of the Quality of Service that I am getting.  Probably the service providers might be able to do that, but its definitely not in their best interest to share with the rest of the world how many times their network failed. Similar story goes with the cellular communication system. There was a time when the calls dropped frequently; but it was difficult to place the due blame on the network provider because there was no measure of network quality that was available to a consumer. I think a Quality of Service monitor that can be placed in the end user's hands is definitely a great subject for research and development. Probably it will fit the bill for a good student project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGBfsdCNsE This interview done by Doordarshan really touched me. We need doers like Raghu Rajan who also think positively.

I was Googling for the potential applications of data science. My search was inspired by the fact that India has a government data portal - data.gov.in . Soon, I was delighted to find that since my last look at the topic, something new has happened. It is - http://www.opendata500.com/ - which is really a list of 500 companies who have created businesses out of open government data. Now, that is very encouraging ! Because, like many I too am a believer that any sustainable human endeavor should also make economic sense (there are a few but, very important exceptions).