Rahul gives unsolicited advice

I am currently living in Ongole, Andhra Pradesh (AP), India. The nearest airport is outside Vijayawada, AP. It takes me 2:30 hrs to get there - 2 hours to get to Vijayawada on a good day and 30 mins to get to the airport on the other side. I was traveling last weekend and I needed to figure out how to get there and back - can I park the car overnight at the Vijayawada airport or do I park the car at a relatives' place in Vijayawada and catch a cab to/from the airport? The Vijayawada airport website was of no use. I tried calling a bunch of phone numbers listed on the website and none of them worked. And there was no conclusive answer on the internet as to whether or not overnight parking was available. The only hope I had was this article from Jan 2020 which stated how much it would cost to park overnight. So, for the next person who is searching on the internet, trying to figure out if overnight parking is available at the Vijayawada aiport, I hope this helps. As of October 2021...

I realised yesterday that this blog has been active (well, active by my standards) for over 10 years now. I started posting in July 2011. I'm not entirely sure why but that made me happy. Very happy. There have been ups and downs and I don't post regularly. I don't know what I was on in 2015 but I posted 113 times that year, the most in an year so far and this year was by far the worst, with only 5 posts. What can I say, there are times when I feel like I have a lot to say and times when I don't. I've changed how this blog looks a number of times and I decided to use the Wayback Machine to look at how this blog has looked over the past decade. Here's how it looked in April of 2013. I was, and still am, a big fan of Batman and the background image is by Yale Stewart who created the JL8 comic strip. The "title" or name of the blog has also changed over the decade and I guess I called it "The Nameless Journal" in 2013, for whatever reason. Not...

 The books on my bookshelf that I haven't touched yet, some of which I bought 2 or 3 years ago. Showa : A History of Japan - 1926-1939 Bottle of Lies : Ranbaxy and the dark side of Indian pharma Big Billion Startup - The untold Flipkart story I do what I do Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds Everybody loves a good draught. I've read this twice but I need to read it again this year. Vagina problems - Endometriosis, painful sex and other taboo topics The impatient woman's guide to getting pregnant The 7 habits of highly effective people On Writing by Stephen King . It improved my writing the first time I read it and that was a while back so I need to read it again. Good Strategy, Bad Strategy Being mortal The inner game of Tennis . This too I've read once but I don't remember much of it now. You can be rich too The invisible man The body The making of the Atomic Bomb The hour between dog and wolf The once and future king . This was a gift. As y...

 I just finished listening to this amazing special series produced by the folks at HBR IdeaCast podcast on "The Rise and Fall of Carlos Ghosn". If you didn't know, Carlos Ghosn was the CEO of three automotive giants at one time - Renault + Nissan + Mitsubishi. This was before he was jailed for hiding his income from the Japanese authorities. He subsequently escaped from Japan in a crate meant for musical equipment in a private plane to a country which doesn't have an extradition treaty with Japan. Here are the 4 parts to the special series - Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 and Part 4 . Fun-fact : I met Carlos Ghosn. Seriously. Back in college, I was part of the Extra Mural Lecture team at my alma mater, Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) and one of the speakers who we invited was Mr. Carlos Ghosn. Here's a blogpost by students at the Department of Management Studies (DoMS) at IIT Madras from that day. I can't find better resources at the moment.

For those of you who don't already know, I'm a big fan of the podcast Planet Money by NPR. I haven't listened to them in a while now because I wasn't making time in my daily routine - until a couple of days back. And today, I came across this gem of an episode. Oh, by the way. I've also become a big fan of the US Television Show Jeopardy over the past year. I hope that helps you understand why I loved this episode.

I've been thinking about Product Management in FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) for a while now and I just spent most of my morning reading up on it. Here are a few good articles I came across :  Why Product Management is Open Source’s Fatal Flaw - An interesting article (from 2008!) that used an example from the Pidgin FOSS IM Client (I've heard about this in college) to discuss where Product Managers fit into FOSS projects and why there is a need for more Product Management in FOSS. No Such a Thing as Open Source Product Manager - Here's an article from 2005 that questions whether or not Product Managers add value to the underlying product. The anecdote about a FOSS competitor beating out software from Microsoft (where Product/Project Managers are involved) feels like an outlier rather than the norm. Rules for product managers at open source companies - Here is a more recent article from 2020 that tries to layout exactly where Product Management can help an open s...

At work, I am part of a team which maintains the Enthought Tool Suite (ETS). ETS includes a number of open source Python packages which are the foundation of the desktop applications we build at work. One of those packages is enable , a 2D drawing library. Yesterday, I came across this issue on enable regarding a python module ( kiva.fonttools.sstruct ) which wasn't used anywhere in the enable codebase at the moment. "... at the moment" is important here because the enable GitHub repository has been evolving for over 10 years now and we don't know if at some point in the past, kiva.fonttools.sstruct was used somewhere in enable. Before we decide on removing the python module from the codebase, we need to understand when it was added, who was using it and how and when the dependency on enable.fonttools.struct got removed from enable. Only then can we confidently remove the module without worrying about unexpected repurcussions. So, I started digging. The first thing ...

It's a good thing I didn't just blindly close the hundreds of tabs that I have open because I just read this beautiful, amazing and thought-provoking piece by Esquire (which has some amazing long reads BTW) on a wall street hedge fund betting that american shopping malls were going towards a crash . It was amazing and fun to read but at the same time there's a deeper and sadder issue of the impact this has on the people. I'm not talking about the people impact of the bet itself but the fact that a bet can be made in the first place. Two paragraphs nicely sum up the issue. “A well-documented historical pattern is that fraud thrives in boom periods and is revealed in busts,” the university researchers wrote, adding that end investors were unaware of this hidden risk, a deception akin to buying a Ferrari secretly outfitted with a rusted-out Kia engine. It could be argued that CMBS had been a magic trick all along, with big banks one step ahead, luring investors to pick a c...

A month or so back I remember coming across the Big Bang AR app by CERN . I ended up searching for and installing a bunch (A BUNCH) of different apps made by CERN and NASA. I am not too happy with the HiLumi3D app ( on the app store and on the play store ). It was slightly buggy and not exactly information but the Big Bang AR app blew my mind. It was made in collaboration with Google so understandbly, the app itself works and looks much better than the HiLumi3D app. I also loved the content itself in the app, along with the small amount of additional reading. I'm in awe of what people are doing with AR for science education and communication. One day, I hope to be able to join the party.

In the previous blogpost, I linked to the code that Guido used to visualize the PEG parser now used in CPython 3.9. The code lives in the GitHub repository - pegen . I use Windows as my daily driver and right off the bat, this is a problem because the visualizer uses the curses standard library package - which only works on Linux/Mac OS by default. There are apparently Python packages I can install to get it to work on Windows but I didn't try that approach. A brief search on PyPI led me to the windows-curses package, which might be the solution. I switched to the Ubuntu WSL I have setup on my Windows machine. Once on Ubuntu, I needed to install Python. Specifically, I wanted to install Python 3.9. For that, I had to add the deadsnakes ppa to the apt repository list. Once I did that, I needed to install Python3.9-dev and Python3.9-venv. venv to be able to create a virtual environment and install the necessary packages. Python3.9-dev because one of the requirements needed the de...