Dheepak's blog

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. Eventhough I’m not a big fan of Adobe, there are no alternatives in my workplace that I know of, at least. The version of Reader I’m allowed to use doesn’t allow me to Merge PDFs. Ironically, it’s necessary to merge the files while submitting the PDFs for various official purpose.

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. As like any other new stuff, this was unwelcomed by many, especially every losing party started blaming on the foul play surrounding the EVM. To mitigate the foul play, as a 2nd level defense, the EC introduced VVPAT system. Here, a paper trail is maintained alongside the digital recording of voting.

This is a new site built on Jekyll, hosted on GitHub.

I came across the GitHub Pages. As the flow looks intriguing, I’m trying out this. As a blogger I tried out Wordpress, Blogspot and Medium. The interest to compose a post fizzles out very often. However, I’m trying harder to reverse the trend.

Let’s see how it goes.

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. Responding, he says, “I’m Batman”. The whole theater erupts in laughter. You can understand this if you’re aware of Batman and his punchlines.

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. Governments & leaders selected by the people, for the people. Theoretically, we will be having a better leader under Democracy.