What I'm currently...
Reading…
Through The Broken Glass by T.N Seshan
"Politicians in India fear only two things: God and T.N. Seshan".
This awe-inspiring journey of a boy from Palakkad who became synonymous with integrity in the Indian Administrative Services,
and the guardian of the Indian Electoral System. Truly a once in a lifetime character, and someone I look up to with intense admiration.
Myth = Mithya by Devdutt Pattanaik
An engaging exploration of mythology and its impact on modern life,
Pattanaik sheds light on how ancient stories and symbols shape contemporary understanding.
Quite an easy read, reminds me of folktales my parents told me as a child.
Why I Am a Hindu by Shashi Tharoor
An examination of Hinduism by Tharoor, delving into the philosophical and cultural aspects of the religion.
It questions faith, religion and seeks to answer why we believe in what we do.
The Google Story by David Vise
Great insights into how Google as we know came to be.
Mentions of PageRank brought back memories of BD classes.
I just love the absurd humour and pranks they played in their early days. 10/10 would work there.
Working on…
Automata in Go
Disliked this subject in college because it seemed so pointless and boring.
Then I saw first hand what it can be used for at work and now I've made it my goal to learn how to write
Turing machines, DFAs and more in Golang.
HDFS Cluster
Helped a friend at the Cloud Computing Center with fixing a few old Xeon E7-8830 servers.
We got a couple up and running again. There's just something about sitting in a server room with loud fans,
faulty KVM switches and wondering why pings aren't working that makes me happy.
Building this site
All of this is from scratch, no WordPress involved.
Just about everything is manually built so its taking a while to finish it. On the bright side this page is getting some insane hits.
For a site that is cooler on the backend go check out [Anirudh's website](https://rowjee.com).
Listening to…
Carnatic Music
The side-effects of having musically gifted friends is that you end up listening to a lot of Carnatic music.
I'm not complaining though, it's pretty good. Even went to see a band called Agam perform live.
Watching…
Yes, Prime Minister
Absolutely hilarious satire on Politics which still stands true to this date.
The scriptwriting is brilliant, but fair warning the jokes are very British and very Basil Fawlty.
Will I keep watching this? Yes, Prime Minister.
Researching…
A potential replacement / augment to the gradient based backpropagation algorithm used to train neural networks. Building test benches to test the algorithm on various datasets and comparing it’s performance to that of backpropagation is in progress, but while a CNN was easy pickings, building an RNN is turning outto be a bit of a challenge.
You can find the original paper on ArXiv here or just download it by clicking here
Note : ArXiv is pronounced Ar-Chive. People who pronounce it Arksive are the same people who pronounce GIF as JIF. Don’t be like them. The origin of the name is the word “Archive” , they replaced the chi with the Greek letter Xi (Ξ) because it looks cool.
Learn more about this on the research page
History
The Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker
Lovely book on the Toyota Management principles and how they can be applied to any business. I’m a sucker for business history and this book is a goldmine of information on how Toyota became the behemoth it is today.
Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
This book was probably written by a madman. I’m halfway through and I’m already baffled. The sentences are half a page long, the premise is absurd at best, I’m not sure if I like it or not,and a anything I say about the contents could get me beheaded but I’m going to finish it anyway