Dheepak's blog

While browsing through Raspberry Pi’s sub in Reddit, I came across Pi-hole. Pi-hole is an interesting project, claims to be black hole of Ads. I guess the pi in the name refers to Raspberry Pi. As my Pi3 was lying in the corner unused, I went for the Pi-hole installation. Before continuing further on the experience, we need to discuss why the ads are bothering? What’s wrong with ads? I agree the ads are the revenue source of websites.

I’m working in a corporate firm which employs 100K+ employees. As do with any organization of such a magnitude, there are certain rules & policies which cannot be breached. In most of the occasions, the policies really help us navigate without much of the issue. Yet, there are situations which impedes our progress. The impedement I felt was merging PDF files. What’s there to worry about, you may wonder. In our org, we have some version of Adobe Reader to view PDFs.

It’s cool to have a personal website. As a novice, where to start? The cheapest, practical and programmatic option is Github Pages Cheapest - Free to use GH Pages. You may not get a dedicated domain, but you’ll get a name.github.io Practical - You can go for blogger or wordPress for writing a blog post. However, you’ll never get to experience the nitty-gritty involved with running an actual website. Programmatic - Once you started programming, it will be intriguing to learn something new.

As a country, 1990’s are changing times for India. The nation saw some of the interesting transformations, which would be an unimaginable tale even a decade earlier for Geo-political experts. The changes ranges from Economic stance of the country to opening up to private cable channels to introduction of Internet to the masses (the snail-paced dial-ups). The election commission too hopped into the transformation train. From the conventional paper based ballot, the Electronic Voting Machines were introduced.

Sarcasm, according to Google is “ the use of irony to mock or convey contempt”. Interpreting it could be final frontier for AI. Understanding Sarcastic line is a complex process. Depends on lots of variables — context, body language, tone modulation and so on. To be fair there is not proper/scientific way to decode sarcasm. To add to it, degree of closeness is (kinda) proportional to complexity of sarcasm. In one of the scene Deadpool 2 movie, the lead actor was questioned who he is.

Occupation (for-profit) or welfare/charity (non-profit)? This is the question which started a long conversation with my friend over Whatsapp. Why does it matter? Everything depends on the answer. If it’s Occupation, you can tax them for the revenue, likewise you can insure them so they can land safe in times of tragedy. Or if its a welfare, government can take it or some NGOs can chip in with funding from benevolent sponsors.

I’m a big fan of Democratic government. Went to war, in cyber world, with my friends whenever they say Saudi Arabia/China style of government is better than D-government. I’m pro-democracy because I believe in free will of humans. So far, every dictator has ruled the people, crushed the basic rights in the name of religion, communism, socialism et al. We are not animals to be herded by some dictator. On the other end of spectrum, we have democracy.