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Documenting my Dream

Fri, 06 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Everybody has a dream, I am here not talking about that “Dream” to become something, that “Dream” to be someone. I am here referring to the more mundane “dreams” that we have while sleeping.

Yesterday night or I think early hours today I had a very vivid, distinct dream. It was bizarre and mundane but it was full of color. Come to think of it, though some aspects of the dream were very clear, there is a lot that I don’t know. I will narrate the same here, be warned and don’t ask me for details as I am putting down everything as I remember.

I was in Vishakapatnam, it was sometime during the day, possibly before lunch. I was in a cab, possibly an Etios or some other comfortable sedan and had to go someplace in H B Colony. I have absolutely no recollection of the driver, what he wore, what he spoke, what was he like nothing!. It’s very unlike me as I normally notice all the drivers whose cabs I hail.

Our conversation was primarily about how difficult the destination address was. Though we had to go through a road which I frequented a lot in my childhood, the address was unfamiliar. Suddenly google maps directed us to go into a building. On nearing the building it was one of those old railway bunglows, with tall thick whitewashed walls, shining brown tiled roofs. It’s like a close focus movie, as I don’t recall the surroundings of the building. On moving closer, we notice that the building was “Poddar School”, it had wide corridors, going up and down.

Google maps directed us to go through the corridors, down a flight of stairs into what looked like a classroom out of those 3d pavement paintings. There were many students dressed in white and brown, in clusters but at different levels. I even saw the school principal a wiry man in neatly pressed half sleeve shirt and cotton pants conducting a class. The students from other classes were watching me. The driver was figuring his way out, while Google Maps were instructing us to go in a direction which seemed to have no end.

In a blur we were transported to a large iron gate with the imposing building behind us, only there were no children to be seen around.

Suddenly, I woke up and tried to remember as much of the dream as I recollected above. The more I think about it, the more divergence I see between what I felt thought when I woke up and what I recollect now.

Getting Healthy 2

Thu, 05 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Eating healthy is important, but in today’s world eating healthy is hard. With no dearth of choices to spoil you, to wean you off good eating habits, it becomes much more important that we pay attention to what we eat. The following is a cheat sheet to eat healthier.

Stop eating all forms of sugar. There is nothing called natural sugar. If you are not consuming raw fruits which come in fruits, some vegetables like beetroot, sweet potato etc., all other foods which are sweet should be avoided like plague. Even fruit juice, jaggery, and whatever so-called natural sugars are bad.
Stop processed carbs. This includes bread, cookies, all kinds of called healthy and non-healthy packaged food.
Reduce high glycemic load foods. Glycemic index indicates the speed at which glucose enters the bloodstream, lower the index the better it is.
Change (not increase) your carb intake, to low glycemic load foods. eg: chickpeas, ragi/nachni, beans (kidney beans, black beans, white beans), small seeds (sunflower, flax, pumpkin, poppy, sesame, hemp); walnuts, onions, karela, carrots etc.
Eat healthy fats, ghee, butter, paneer, coconut oil, cheese (dairy), curd.
Eat more of and a variety of vegetables
Eat varied food in your diets. How do you know if you are eating varied food? If the food you eat lacks in natural colors you are not eating enough variety.

We lived most of our lives eating things which are mostly harmful, so it’s ok if you binge once in a while. Don’t feel guilty, get back to the above healthy eating.

Ek Ajnabee Haseena Se

Tue, 03 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Soft, soothing music aka the 60s, 70s Hindi melodies is something I love to listen on and on and on. The other day I heard Ek Ajnabee Haseena se a timeless melody from the 1974 movie Ajnabee).

This post is not about that. I wanted to watch the video and searched on my phone for “Ek Ajnabee Haseena Se”, I was pretty surprised to see that the first result was not the original song but a musical video remake. I was a tad disappointed to start with and was furious on knowing that it was actually an advertisement for Doublemint. However, something stopped me from closing the video, it felt vaguely familiar. When I played it I was beeming with a smile and slipped into nostalgia.

I am not a fan of remakes, rarely have I seen a remake which can match the original, leave alone upping the game. But here is one, which not only holds a candle to the original but also slightly surpasses it, at least for its massively cheesily cute video.

Go watch it here and get the past rolling…

Getting Healthy

Mon, 02 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Sometime ago, which now seems a long time ago, I stumbled upon a talk titled Sugar the bitter Truth by Dr. Robert Lustig.

It was a mind opener, many unanswered questions for got resolved at different stages of his talk. Since then it has been my mission to explore different aspects of health, primarily experimenting with food. In a series of posts, I will be writing about my learnings, my dabbling with cooking and so on.

Kilter blog has been one of the key resources which helped me in the early days. I gave an interview on their site, about my weight loss story.

Let’s start the series by watching the lecture that transformed my attitude to food. It’s a long video, get your focus ready.

Books I read since June 2017

Sun, 01 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Since moving back to Bangalore have gotten back to reading. Though no where near to the profilic phase in the past, neverthless far better than what I reading in the last two years.

The following is the list of books in no particualr order:

What is Success?

Sun, 10 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last few months since my move back to Bangalore, one thing troubling me is what does success mean to me?

Is it earning more money? How much is more?
Is it earning fame? What is fame?
Is it peer acceptance/recognition? Who are these peers and why should one strive for their recognition?
Is it an accomplishment? What kind of acomplishment? Personal or Public?
Is it achieving something which I felt difficult or the society finds/terms difficult?
The list goes on …

What does even achieving success mean? If I achieved success in societal norms but am personally not happy is that ok? What does happiness mean? Will I be more happy when I get most of the above stuff than not?

Rewriting a legacy application

Mon, 02 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

We have a legacy enterprise product which we are now rearchitecting. It’s reasonably complex product with it’s own idiosyncrinacies. If there were an award for entries in CODESOD, the code in this legacy application would win it a million times. While we are still working on the architecture we set ourseleves a few non negotiables in the re development process.

Cloud Native
Automated Deploy
Testability (Unit Tests, Integration Tests)
Automated code quality checks
No direct access to DB except by the service layer
Ease of maintenance always wins
Imposed/implied constraints in development process over reliane on developer self discpline
Common development tool chain for all involved
Proper naming of variables
Low Coupling, High Cohesion
DRY
Security (not as an afterthought)
Monitorability

Welcome 2017

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome 2017. Every new year starts with a lot of promise and ends with promise for the next year. The action in between is many times forgotten. It’s been a long time since I wrote anything and can feel the rust in the finger tips.

One thing I promise to myself is, I will write more often. There are a lot more that 2017 awaits but let’s unveil it as it happens. For now “Welcome”!!

New beginnings: Embracing Hugo

Wed, 07 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Two years back around the same time, I moved my then defunct site to s3 building on octopress. This post details my experience with the beginnings. This post details my experience with this whole new (at-least to me) of building sites.

In the initial days octopress served it’s purpose. Before octopress my major pain had been in making sure the site was up and running without my intervention. S3 and octopress addressed that issue wonderfully well. I never had to worry if my site would go down, if I have to do an upgrade, if I have to renew my hosting and so on.
One more advantage has been the ridiculously low cost of maintenance. A few dollars an year.
I also migrated many of my earlier posts from some of the many blogs I used to maintain to this domain with ease.
It allowed me to focus on my writing than on small niggling issues with formatting.

The above begets the question, why did I then move away from octopress(I continue to use s3 for hosting).

Even though octopress was great platform, I never could get my head around how it worked.
I like having clear separation of concerns and octopress theming and content were very tightly bound. Switching to another theme was a huge effort.
Octopress 3 was going to address most of these issues, but it has been in the making for over an year.

All the above gave me an excuse to neglect writing and inadvertently let this site rot (just like millions of others).

A few months ago, when I looking to revive my efforts to write, I was looking for an octopress alternative. This had to meet the following requirements.

Separation of concerns, presentation(theme) and content(posts/pages) should not be tightly coupled. I should be able to change the theme with little to no effort.
Decent inbuilt features but very lightweight.
Strongly opinionated in the way it advocates stuff, but has the flexibility to build just more than blogs.

The above led me to Hugo. I liked it enough to experiment and within no time was up and running. A few minor hiccups were addressed thanks to some blog posts and basic but functional documentation. In the process I also setup auto deploy using Codeship. Now I just have to write, commit and push and the post is updated on the site.

The following posts helped me a lot in getting to speed:

Lets hope I sustain this momentum of writing often.

Richard Feynman: Knowing the name of something and knowing something

Tue, 29 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I have been inspired by Richard Feynman for some time now. I wish everyone one in this country learns from him. One great nugget of wisdom from this great man, my favorite is, “The Difference Between Knowing the Name of Something and Knowing Something”.

See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a halzenfugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird. You only know something about people; what they call the bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way.

Once you get the true meaning of the above, it is one of those Nirvana moments. Have a look at the video below to hear it it his own words.

Farnamstreet has is little more atriculate on the same here.

Recap since Jan 2014

Sun, 27 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A long long time since my last post. Things have changed significantly since then.

Moved out of Bangalore and JUST EAT. A move more significant than I realised, when I made it earlier this year. Though got adjusted to Mumbai and it’s unique outlook at life, there are few things in the corner of the heart that root for Bangalore. I would not have thought this remotely possible before the move to Mumbai.

Starting from scratch in a new city makes you take note of a lot of things that you take for granted in your life. In a way this move woke me up from a comfort zone that 10 years in Bangalore has put me in. I also came to realise how imporatnt settling down at one place is from getting things done.

I might get into many more details into what a move like this entails and what one needs to keep in mind in a later post, for now will touch upon two of my distinct observations:

Looks as if everyone in the city is always in a hurry to get somewhere. If one is not cognizant enough, they will get sucked into this fast paced life. Have to watch how long I can resist this.
Those of you who know me know, how much I was fond of Mumbai. This time around I don’t get the same feeling of belongingness to this city, which I had way back in 2003. Who changed? Is it me or the city or both?

It’s over 18 months since my last post here. I will recount some intersting slices:

March 2014, we put Aashrita in Discover Montessori. Probably the best place for a kid to spend his/her early life.
May 2014, Seby invited all the Nabler alumni for it’s 10th anniversary. Truly appreciate his gesture. One of the best individuals I have worked with.
October 2014, Launched a complete new look Android App. and an Android delivery app. Probably best showcase to all the effort put by team at JUST EAT in my stay there.
Jan 2014, I moved on from JUST EAT to BigDecisions and from Bangalore to Mumbai.
Sept 2014, revamped this site and built it in hugo away from octopress.

There are many more incidents that happened in this period which shaped my thoughts. Will jot them down over the next few months.

Cutting down on email overload

Sun, 12 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Time is very scarce and especially when you have a two year old kid who is vying for all your attention. Over the past few months it has been very hectic both at work and home. A direct consequence of this is a huge premium on my time (not that it was cheap earlier). On my quest to better manage myself and my time, I am constantly on the lookout for some practical solutions. One of them being optimizing email.

Both my work email and personal email have been subscribed to many seemingly useful content. In the past I used to go through all of them over the weekends or in some cases daily. Over a period of time these mails grew to over a hundred a day in my personal inbox. Even the simple task of selecting them and deleting them would take a few minutes. On the top of it, just looking at the huge list of emails made me postpone the necessary action. Another downside of such a huge list was I also used to miss out on important communication.

It was not very different situation with the work email. Apart from subscriptions, I had 100’s of cron job mailers ending up in the inbox. Though I had filters to skip the Inbox, they were clearly not good enough, and I was too lazy to correct them.

Last weekend I made up my mind to unclutter my life. What it meant was going through all the various emails which have only good to read value and unsubscribe from them or change the notifications to a digest or weekly. Looks like these changes started paying off. Two days since the changes both my inboxes had only mails that I want to look at. There were a few mails which I missed to unsubscribe the other day. Today I cleaned them up too.

The next step is to start looking at Inbox zero. Though I don’t subscribe to various methodoogies of inbox zero (tried many without success), I believe in the concept. Over the next 30days my target is to reach inbox zero on both personal (mandatory) and work (stretch). Will update on how it went on 12th Feb 2014.

DNS not resolving

Mon, 18 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I moved ramjeeganti.com to this current place on s3. In an earlier post I mentioned about moving my site to amazon-s3 and octopress. Shortly after the move, I found that the domain “ramjeeganti.com” was not at all resolving. Shortly there after I found that my google apps has not updated the mails for over a day, though it was allowing me to send mails. This made me suspicious and I finally figured out that the dns nameserver entries had to updated.

The domain registrar where this domain is registered failed to update me on the nameserver change. I just had to update the nameservers to fix the issue. What is more interesting is in the process of root causing the problem, I came across multiple tools which can help in figuring out the issue.


#bash dig - DNS lookup utility
dig ramjeeganti.com
; <<>> DiG 9.8.1-P1 <<>> ramjeeganti.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 43592
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 4, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;ramjeeganti.com.       IN  A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
ramjeeganti.com.    28485   IN  A   216.239.36.21
ramjeeganti.com.    28485   IN  A   216.239.32.21
ramjeeganti.com.    28485   IN  A   216.239.38.21
ramjeeganti.com.    28485   IN  A   216.239.34.21

;; Query time: 299 msec
;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1)
;; WHEN: Tue Nov 19 09:21:04 2013
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 97

###Use another dns server (google in this case)
dig ramjeeganti.com @8.8.8.8
; <<>> DiG 9.8.1-P1 <<>> www.ramjeeganti.com @8.8.8.8
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 6444
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 3, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.ramjeeganti.com.       IN  A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.ramjeeganti.com.    21600   IN  CNAME   ramjeeganti.com.s3-website-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com.
ramjeeganti.com.s3-website-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com. 60 IN CNAME s3-website-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com.
s3-website-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com. 60 IN A 203.83.220.122

;; Query time: 591 msec
;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
;; WHEN: Tue Nov 19 09:21:41 2013
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 133

#bash nslookup - query Internet name servers interactively nslookup > ramjeeganti.com Server: 127.0.0.1 Address: 127.0.0.1#53 Non-authoritative answer: Name: ramjeeganti.com Address: 216.239.32.21 Name: ramjeeganti.com Address: 216.239.38.21 Name: ramjeeganti.com Address: 216.239.34.21 Name: ramjeeganti.com Address: 216.239.36.21 > set q=mx > ramjeeganti.com Server: 127.0.0.1 Address: 127.0.0.1#53 Non-authoritative answer: ramjeeganti.com mail exchanger = 30 aspmx2.googlemail.com. ramjeeganti.com mail exchanger = 10 aspmx.l.google.com. ramjeeganti.com mail exchanger = 30 aspmx5.googlemail.com. ramjeeganti.com mail exchanger = 30 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com. ramjeeganti.com mail exchanger = 30 aspmx4.googlemail.com. ramjeeganti.com mail exchanger = 20 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com. ramjeeganti.com mail exchanger = 30 aspmx3.googlemail.com. Authoritative answers can be found from: > set q=CNAME > ramjeeganti.com Server: 127.0.0.1 Address: 127.0.0.1#53 Non-authoritative answer: *** Can’t find ramjeeganti.com: No answer Authoritative answers can be found from: ramjeeganti.com origin = whiz.mercury.orderbox-dns.com mail addr = ganti.r.gmail.com serial = 2013110501 refresh = 7200 retry = 7200 expire = 172800 minimum = 7200 > set q=any > ramjeeganti.com Server: 127.0.0.1 Address: 127.0.0.1#53 Non-authoritative answer: Name: ramjeeganti.com Address: 216.239.36.21 Name: ramjeeganti.com Address: 216.239.32.21 Name: ramjeeganti.com Address: 216.239.38.21 Name: ramjeeganti.com Address: 216.239.34.21 ramjeeganti.com mail exchanger = 30 aspmx2.googlemail.com. ramjeeganti.com mail exchanger = 10 aspmx.l.google.com. ramjeeganti.com mail exchanger = 30 aspmx5.googlemail.com. ramjeeganti.com mail exchanger = 30 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com. ramjeeganti.com mail exchanger = 30 aspmx4.googlemail.com. ramjeeganti.com mail exchanger = 20 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com. ramjeeganti.com mail exchanger = 30 aspmx3.googlemail.com. ramjeeganti.com nameserver = whiz.mercury.orderbox-dns.com. ramjeeganti.com nameserver = whiz.venus.orderbox-dns.com. ramjeeganti.com nameserver = whiz.earth.orderbox-dns.com. ramjeeganti.com nameserver = whiz.mars.orderbox-dns.com. ramjeeganti.com origin = whiz.mercury.orderbox-dns.com mail addr = ganti.r.gmail.com serial = 2013110501 refresh = 7200 retry = 7200 expire = 172800 minimum = 7200

Authoritative answers can be found from:

There are many sites which make life simple for people like me. They do all the necessary querying and show you the results in a pretty way.

Git Cheat Sheet

Sun, 17 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A few months back we migrated from svn to git at office. If there is one thing I regret in my work at Justeat.in, it is why did I not move to git earlier. The move significantly reduced our time to resolve conflicts and release code to production. I will talk about my experiences with git in a different post. I have commited most used commands to memory. In here, I am documenting some of the other commands which I keep looking up once in a while.


###bash Git Cheat Sheet
#List all local and remote branches
    git branch -a
#List all remote branches
    git  branch -r
#List all local branches
    git branch
#Delete local branches
    git branch -d <branch name>
#Checkout a remote branch and track it
    git checkout -b <remote branch name>
#Show the remote root
    git remote show
#Show the mapping between local and remote branches
    git remote show origin
#Set global value
    git config –global user.name “Ramjee Ganti”
    git config –global user.email <email address>
    git config –global core.mergetool meld
    git config –global core.difftool meld
    git config –global core.editor vim
    git config –global color.ui true
#Set project specific value
    git config user.name “Ramjee Ganti”
    git config user.email 
#Set global alias
    git config –global alias.st status
#Set project specific alias
    git config alias.st status
#Show all git operations performed
    git reflog
#Revert to particular commit in past
    git reset –hard <commit>
#Revert changes to a staged file
    git checkout – <file name>
#Commit without invoking pre commit hooks
    git commit –no-verify
#Push a branch to a remote server
    git push origin <branch name>
#Delete a branch from remote server
    git push –delete origin <branch name>
#Configure an upstream repository.(1)
    git remote add upstream git://upstream.url.here
    git fetch upstream
#Change the remote repository
    git remote set-url origin git://new.url.here
#Git Alias to list tags using along with tag
git config –global alias.tag-date “for-each-ref –sort=’*authordate’ –format=‘%(taggerdate) %(tag)’ refs/tag”

These are apart from the basic commands without which we cannot use git. For someone looking for a more coomprehensive git cheat sheet head here

(1): When a repository is cloned, it has a default remote called origin that points to your fork on remote repository, not the original repository it was forked from. To keep track of the original repository, you need to add another remote named upstream.

One month challenge - November 2013

Fri, 01 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

If you look at my other blog properties

Now that the decision to write has been made, the goal that I set myself in the next one month is:

Consolidate all the above web properties into something more manageable.
Try to write one blog per day. (includes a few republish of older entries)

The inspiration for the one month challenge is 30 day challenge by Matt Cutts. I have been trying to get to writing regularly for over three years now, but it has been a no go. One of the main reasons for this not taking off is my lack of seriousness towards this. Now I plan to change that and write more regularly. A step in that direction is to take up writing as the first 1month challenge.

Going through my posts in the above links, it is very evident that the main audience was someone else. At the back of my mind I wanted to be nticed as a blogger(fame?), earn money (adwords?) so and so forth. One thing I am trying different now is the main audience is me. This site is on how I see life.

Now let’s get started…