When can you count on public transport while traveling?

Ashish on June 12, 2021

I love taking public transport while traveling. One, not only, gets a chance to see the lifestyles of the locals but also becomes more familiar with the new area. So, when can one count on public transport while traveling? Peru and Ecuador had great public transport, both short and long-distance. Dominica had mediocre, Aruba had just one bus going around the island’s outer road. Hawai’i has mediocre. The Dominican Republic has great public transport for both short and long-distance. So, why is this the case?

Here’s my general rule of thumb:

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Indian accent

Ashish on May 2, 2021

About 50% of Indians use Hindi as their primary language. Hindi/Devanagari is fairly phonetic except when it starts to import foreign words. And that’s why many Indians, with Hindi as their primary language, end up with incorrect pronunciations of foreign, mainly English, words. Let’s look at a few specific categories of mistakes.

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Things to do in Aruba

Ashish on April 21, 2021

Aruba

Aruba, a small Caribbean island 29 km north of Venezuela, is a part of the ABC islands – Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao, which forms the Dutch Caribbean and is a part of the Netherlands. It is famous for its white-sand beaches.

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React Native

Ashish on March 6, 2021

There are tons of hyped-up claims surrounding React Native that are worth addressing.

The reasons why companies run for React Native are usually,

  1. We already use Javascript for the website and now, we can build apps in that as well.
  2. We can use one codebase for Android, iOS, and web apps. Or at least, Android and iOS apps.
  3. Facebook uses it

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Android: Catching NDK crashes

Ashish on February 6, 2021

On Android catching Java exceptions is easy via UncaughtExceptionHandler. Catching NDK crashes is a bit more convoluted. Since the native stack is probably corrupted, you want the crash handler to run on a separate process. Also, since the system might be in an unstable shape, don’t send the crash report to your web server or do anything fancy. Just write the crash report to a file, and on the next restart of the app, send to your web server and delete it from the disk. I ended up using jndcrash package for this.

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Egypt in 8 days

Ashish on January 3, 2021

Egypt, locally known as Misr (मिस्र) is world-famous for its pyramids and ancient polytheist temples. I made a trip to Egypt in Nov 2020, during the COVID-19 era. Given the general lack of tourism, it was a great time to travel since I didn’t face any queues and in many temples, I was the sole visitor.

Very few people outside of the tourism industry understand English, so, it is good to make yourself aware of a few basic phrases. The equivalent of “hello” is  “As-salamu alaykum”.  To ask for a price, say “bekam da“. And of course learn the common numbers like five (hamza), three (thlath), ten (ashri), and twenty (ashrin) since these are what you will encounter on the street. And “I don’t understand Arabic” is “Ana mish fahem al Arabee”.

As a vegetarian, I did not face any problems finding food since Falafel and Ful sandwiches are aplenty and available for cheap (1-5 EGP per sandwich). The national dish Koshari is neither delicious nor nutritious. The Egyptian Pizza, Feteer, however, is darn delicious.

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Docker: Be careful about the scratch image

Ashish on December 8, 2020

After I wrote my previous post, some suggested that I can cut down the image size further by using a “scratch” image. And that’s true, “scratch i”s a reserved 0-sized image with nothing in it. And utilizing a scratch binary image did cut down the size of the final Docker image from 13MB to 7.5MB. Pretty good, right? Except the image cannot do an SSL cert verification because of the missing SSL certs!!!

Failed to reach google.com: Get https://google.com: x509: certificate signed by unknown authority

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