Posts

Running python on air-gapped systems

Saturday, Jan 13, 2024 | 4 min read
Categories: Developer,
Tags: Python,
How to reproducibly run python code on a system with no internet access.

Helping fix aircraft - from NLP to Bayes Nets

Wednesday, Oct 25, 2023 | 9 min read
Categories: Developer,
Tags: Nlp, Machine Learning,
NLP to help aircraft mechanics reason about maintenance actions

ChatGPT x Tennis - a weekend hacking project

Sunday, Aug 20, 2023 | 11 min read
Categories: Developer,
Using ChatGPT as my coding assistant to help me play more tennis

Remote SSH into your home desktop

Wednesday, Jun 7, 2023 | 3 min read
Categories: DevOps,
Things you’ll need: A dynamic DNS service A router A local desktop A remote computer Audience for this post: people who have used SSH before. Often times I have found myself wanting to access a computer at home while I am traveling. There are options like TeamViewer, which let me control my computer’s screen from afar. But, I want something more convenient over the command line, like SSH. That way I can drop in and out of my home machine without breaking my flow.

Escaping Echochambers

Friday, Oct 20, 2017 | 11 min read
Categories: Machine Learning,
Tags: Machine Learning, Principal Component Analysis, Visualization,
The echochamber effect is a worrisome issue in social media. It risks isolating users in exclusive groups as they repeatedly subscribe to content that reinforces their biases. To keep users engaged, websites expose users to content similar to their history. You will get recommendations for movies you may like, or peoply you may befriend, or communities you may join - all based on some measure of similarity with your profile.

Trials and Tribulations of Maintaining a Hugo Blog

Saturday, Sep 30, 2017 | 5 min read
Categories: DevOps, Developer,
Tags: Hugo, Web Development, Powershell,
As of the writing of this post, I maintain this site using my very own theme created in hugo. Hugo is a static site generator. It takes a bunch of plain text, applies a theme, and renders it as HTML. This is opposed to applications like Wordpress that assemble a page each time its served, to put it simply. This compute once, use many times approach saves on processing time and makes a site more portable.

Algorithms: Balancing

Monday, Feb 6, 2017 | 5 min read
Categories: Computer Science,
Tags: Algorithms, Graphs,
Balancing in algorithms refers to minimizing the complexity of an algorithm by making sure that its constituent parts share the load efficiently. It is not a technique for solving problems. Instead it helps us understand how an existing solution may be optimized. The theory of balancing Say there is a problem of size \(n\). The problem is such that it can be broken down into a sequence of smaller problems. There are many ways the problem can be broken down:

Optimizing static sites with hugo

Monday, Feb 6, 2017 | 3 min read
Categories: Developer, Meta, DevOps,
Tags: Javascript, Hugo, Web Development,
According to httparchive the average size of a web page in 2016 was around 2.5MB. Now this may not seem a lot in this age where the internet is the primary media delivery platform - but it is worth noting that most web pages serve text as their primary content. Looking at the report sheds light on what constitutes an average web page: The HTML content takes up around 50-60kB. Images, understandably, make up the biggest chunk with ~1.

Is cold the new hot?

Tuesday, Jan 31, 2017 | 4 min read
Categories: Physics,
Tags: Thermodynamics, Quantum Mechanics,
Note: This article was originally published on astroibrahim on April 17, 2013. Yes. A few days back, a friend shared an article with me. It talked of how scientists had managed to achieve temperatures below absolute zero. Does it mean that temperature has to be redefined? Has our understanding of thermodynamics been flawed for the past hundred years. No, it turns out. It is all a matter of semantics. Absolute Zero.

Gravitational Slingshots

Tuesday, Jan 31, 2017 | 3 min read
Categories: Physics,
Tags: Gravity, Classical Mechanics,
Note: This article was originally published on astroibrahim on Apr 10, 2013. I always wondered why doesn’t the sun slow space probes down when they are leaving the Earth for outer planets. Isn’t there a risk that the probe might change its trajectory and fall into the sun? There is. You see, the more distant the space probe gets from the Sun, the more potential energy it gains. However, energy must be conserved at all costs.

Testing code with sensitive data

Tuesday, Sep 6, 2016 | 2 min read
Categories: Developer,
Tags: Git, Powershell, Testing,

I recently renewed work on my first ever github project. Over the course of a whole year when that project was dormant, I’d learned some new tricks. I now try to focus on writing tests for my projects. It is immensely convenient when I add features here  and there and need to check the whole code for errors.

Anyways, my project requires API keys to imgur.com. However I do not want to hard-code them into my test.py file. But I also do not want to manually provide keys every time I run tests. So what do I do?

A case study in choosing algorithms

Sunday, Aug 14, 2016 | 3 min read
Categories: Engineering, Physics,
Tags: Algorithms,

This past year, I have been crunching data from dark matter simulations. Data size can get pretty large when it comes to scientific computing. As I write this post, I have a script running on 3.8 TB (that’s right – 3,700 gigabytes) of cosmic particles. At these levels one starts thinking about parallelizing computations. And therein lay my dilemma and a soon to be learned lesson.