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A mind slowly grows, Wisdom flows like rivers wide— Each step reveals more. This week has crushed my soul - a bit. I am bewildered by the speed at which the majority in the US is willing to shed constitutional procedures, rule of law, long-standing practices in government. The silence by the ruling party – the Republicans, is deafening. I am despondent, despite consolation, that we are not only enabling kleptocracy, but also cheering on the rise of fascism in the name of “efficiency”. It has been an appalling week. However, I remain a witness to the attrocities, and will continue to read and write about them. ...

New dawn softly breaks, hope blooms with every heartbeat, new life starts anew. Ahh linux. The frustrations and the joy. After a hiatus of 9 years, I have decided to resurrect this blog. Of course, before I wrote anything meaningful it was time for some cleanup. Hugo, the static site generator that I use for this blog, uses the filename as part of the url. The last time I ported the blog from Jekyl to Hugo I made the terrible choice of encoding dates into the file name. Well, as a result, I have a few hundred files with a date prefix thus making the posts immovable. ...

Don’t smoke (Stay quit!!) : Doing great! There is no desire to smoke. After being a smoker for over a decade, I quit smoking last year, and stayed quit. I went to Vegas, smoked incessantly for 3 days, and stopped at the end of the trip – cold turkey. Never went back to it, and quite frankly disgusted by the thought of smoking now. Say yes more often: Did well. I have reduced negativity greatly. This is a good one to keep at for the next year. ...

Searching for symbols The product that I work on, has over 22 million lines of source – most of it a nightmare. I use vim as my editor of choice 1. Both cscope and ctags (integrated into vim), allow me to quickly move between files and lookup definitions of symbols, and help in understanding the challenge-du-jour. Throw in fuzzy find capabilities of the most awesome Ctrl+p plugin, and vim becomes the best ‘IDE’ out there! ...

These are notes from the official Elixir documentation. It a quick walk-through of the unique features in Elixir for someone coming from years of C — a way for me to remember and use as a reference. Summary Types Operators Control Structures Types Atoms Named contants with a value. true and false are atoms. Strings Supports unicode string natively! It’s about time. 1 You can concatenate strings using <>. "hello" <> " world". Anonymous functions Native support for closures – called anonymous functions. Also, functions are first-class, i.e. can be passed as arguments into other functions. Special syntax is required to invoke ananymous functions. ...

After 12+ years, I built a workstation from scratch. Hardware has come such a long way, but that is a post unto itself. Having always worked with Ubuntu and other debian variants it was time to venture into a more lean distro. I picked Arch Linux, on the recommendation of several colleagues. It’s been fun. Pacman and Yaourt are great package managers, and the rolling release model ensures access to the bleeding edge all the time. ...

I set myself a goal to write more this year - in fact, I attempted to do so once every week. This required me to look at my blog, which led to the inevitable: small changes in what it looked like, led to general dis-satisfcation with the current solution I have to publish my blog, which quickly ballooned into a whole host of activities. Let me step back a bit. ...

It has not been a great start. It, however, has been a busy one. Don’t smoke (Stay quit!!) : Going strong! The urge to smoke still surfaces on occasion. I have, however, been able to avoid every time. I must admit that it gets easier, but it always take a bit of an effort.m Say yes more often: Doing ok. I have caught myself a couple of times. Still needs work ...

The word “resolutions”, feels forced. It feels like a ritual declaration of intent, followed immediately by inaction, and eventually concession that it was all in jest. This year, I am going to have some goals. Don’t smoke (Stay quit!!) Say yes more often Read a book a month Write an app a month Blog once a week Goals, feels more friendly, reachable, inviting almost.

In the tradition of joining new social tools on the interwebs, here some thoughts on my experience. The usual steps are: The first few hours – mostly spent exploring the interface, the features, mired in the comparisons between the “old” and the “new” At some point, the lack of interaction and content of previous networks – the constant buzz of twitter, the inane conversations of facebook etc. – forces me tp hunt for connections. Rampant, indiscriminate “friending” of people ensues. ...