Adventures in Tech

Lunches at work are usually nothing to write about, however every now and then, we get an external restaurant that makes a memorable dish. A couple of weeks ago, that was the Cajun shrimp po’boy. The sandwich was relatively simple: a toasted baguette, a big of mayonnaise, some shredded lettuce, and seasoned Cajun shrimp, however the taste was amazing. I had an inkling about the origin of the name po’boy, but the price of the sandwich betrayed that thinking. A bit of research on the web revealed a couple of origin stories. The most plausible and heartwarming was on Wikipedia : that during a 1929 street car workers’ strike, restaurant owners served the sandwich to their striking colleagues for free, jokingly referring to the strikers as poor boys, after which the sandwiches took the name, and in the Louisiana dialect shortened to po’boy.

In an era where most retailers are trying to decrease their physical presence, Amazon is doing the opposite   by opening physical bookstores across the US. I visited one last weekend, and was very impressed with the genius of using the store to promote Amazon services and devices. First, unlike most bookstores that carry books on nearly every subject in the Dewey decimal system, the Amazon store carries a much smaller collection of books that are bestselling amongst customers in the geographical area. There were best sellers in fiction, art, cooking, business, self-improvement, health, children’s books, popular science, and that’s it. The pricing model was genius: if you have a prime membership you get the Amazon discounted price, and if you don’t you pay the book’s list price. My guess is that this will drive prime memberships as store patrons will opt to become prime members to nab the books they like at a discount. Second, the store has prominent displays of the Kindle...

Distributed systems have allowed applications to use more computation power, memory, and physical storage than is available on a single machine, enabling applications to tackle more complex problems. The capacity increase however comes at a cost: accessing remote resources is slower than accessing ones that are local to the machine. The paper “ FaRM:Fast Remote Memory ” tries to address the cost of accessing remote memory, and ways to make it faster. The authors start by acknowledging that the major cost of accessing remote memory is the networking cost between machines through the TCP/IP stack, and that faster networks could do so much. They cite the case of MemC3—a state of the art key-value store—which performed 7x worse in a client-server setup than in a single machine setup, despite request batching. The authors ask the question if the TCP/IP stack overhead is that high, what if you bypass the complex protocol stacks, and use RDMA—remote direct memory access—to access memory ...

I wanted to experiment with TensorFlow, and decided to do that in a Linux VM, despite the fact that Windows Subsystem for Linux exists. In the past I used Sun’s, and then Oracle’s VirtualBox to manage virtual machines, but since my Windows install had Hyper-V, I decided to use that instead. The virtual machine configuration was easy, with disk, networking, and memory configurations non-eventful. However when I tried to start the virtual machine to setup Ubuntu from an ISO, I was greeted with the following error: “Virtual machine could not be started because the hypervisor is not running” A quick Internet search revealed that a lot of people have faced that problem, and most of the community board solutions did not make any sense. The hidden gem is this technet article , which included detailed steps to find if the Windows Hypervisor was running or not, and the error message if it failed to launch. In my case, the error was: “Hyper-V launch failed; Either VMX not present or...

I watched a video interview with the 10 th heir of Twinings Tea Company, that has been merchandising tea for over 300 years. In the interview, among talking about the family history, and the story behind their bestselling tea flavor—Earl Grey—he talked about the best way to brew tea, whether using loose leaves, or a tea bag. To extract the most flavor out of tea, he recommended bringing cold water to a boil, and removing the kettle off the stove once the water starts boiling. His theory is that the flavor is extracted through the air in the water, and continuing to boil the water further, will reduce the amount of air in it. For green teas, he recommends letting the kettle set for 5 mins, then pouring the hot water over the tea, and for black teas, he recommends pouring the hot water immediately over the tea. The heir advised against removing the bag, or repeatedly dunking it in the water during brewing, because that only changes the color of the water, and makes the tea bit...

When I have the chance, I like to walk to my meetings instead of using the shuttle service available on campus. When it is not raining, the walk is very refreshing: I get to clear out my thoughts on the walk, and get in some number of steps for my daily activity.  After one of my meetings ended, I started to head back to my building, only to see that it started to down pour. To my luck, there was a shuttle parked upfront. I asked the driver if she could take me back to my building, and she said she was on her lunch break. As I said no worries, I’ll just walk back, she insisted that she can drive me. I hopped in the shuttle, thanking her profusely for taking the time from her lunch break to drive me back, she insisted it was not a big deal. Such an act of kindness made my day, and it is a great reminder to continue doing good things to others, simply for the joy it brings them.