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“I need the address.”, the immigration official shouted at her, as she, a septuagenarian Indian woman, with her limited English, repeatedly, pointed to the paper containing the phone number of her daughter.

Day 1 - Reach the Outpost Camp (3.8 miles, 10.4K ft) Day 2 - Started at 8 AM Reached consultation lake at noon Reached trail crest at 2:20 PM Reached summit at 6 PM Returned to Outpost Camp by 11:35 PM Day 3 - Head back to Whitney Portal Conditions It was all snow covered - knee-deep snow in some places. 99 switchbacks are not possible under such conditions, so, we climbed up the chute. The trail is dangerous beyond trail crest, don’t go alone. Do ...

Users won’t buy a phone till they know that their basic set of apps is available on the device. That pretty much rules out players like BlackBerry 10, Jolla, Ubuntu OS, and Firefox OS. Even Microsoft is still struggling. OEMs like Samsung, HTC, LG, and Sony have been hit hard by the commoditization of Android. Google makes money from Google Play, cheaper phones imply more users. So, the commoditization of Android OEMs is good for Google. These OEMs have to customize Android as per Google’s requirements which have increased over time. They cannot manufacture a competing version of Android (like Amazon’s Fire Phone) either. This leaves us with iOS and Google-experience Android duopoly. The only way to break that duopoly is Samsung, which is big enough that it can convince major developers to develop apps for its devices and throw money at marketing to reach out to end users. It can make money from selling devices as well as selling apps (via the app store). A completely open-source OS can pull open-source developers from GNU/Linux and Android to develop it. A completely open-source OS can convince other OEMs to use it and in lieu, they can partner with Samsung on app store revenue sharing. It remains to see what Tizen’s delayed launch eventually leads to, but it’s a matter of survival for Samsung. ...

The book is an interesting take on what it takes to attain a happy marriage and why only ~30% of us end up in happy marriages. The book is divided into three sections - what is love, why we fail in the game of love and what can we do differently to succeed at it.

At a local bus stand in Mexico After I explained to my mother that to ask for time in Spanish (Espanol), she has to start with ke time se (Haryanvi), replace time with hora and reverse se to es. She turns to her left and asks the mexican mujer (woman), ke [que] hora es. The mujer shows her watch and tells the time in espanol, which of course was incomprehensible for us.Las dos mujeres (The two women) then laughed. ...

For android projects, some engineers use Android Studio (new), some use Eclipse with ADT (old), few like me still savor command line, this blog post is about handling (building, installing and testing) android projects from command line. To create android project Sh 1 2 $ android create project --target 4 --name TestAndroidApp --path ./test_android_app --activity Main --package net.ashishb.TestAndroidApp --gradle --gradle-version 1.0.+  ... After changing to directory test_android_app (cd test_android_app), fix a bug ...

While the book is overall a good one, unfortunately, it contains a lot of generic financial advice which I decided not to include in the summary. Choose a sound financial lifestyle Borrowers borrow money from the future in the form of credit loans till the lifestyle collapses, consumers consume money paycheck to paycheck, keepers focus on accumulating wealth over time. The focus on net worth mentality over paycheck mentality actively works in keepers favor.

The book talks about various psychological tactics used by compliance practitioners like salespeople, waiters, car dealers, and fundraisers to influence us into saying yes to something to which ideally we would have said no. The author went and took sales jobs as a car salesman and waiter to see these tactics in action. He referred to these tactics as six weapons of influence. Each of them forms the basis of a chapter in the book. Weapons of influence Weapons of influence consist of identifying fixed action patterns and exploiting them. Compliance practitioners use them as a basis for influence.

Android Before 2008, smartphones OS market was fragmented. There were a few big names like Palm and Symbian, but most phone manufacturers were doing their custom operating systems. For example, Motorola alone had five operating systems. In 2008, Google came out with an open-source smartphone OS. Mobile phone manufacturers like Samsung, Motorola, and HTC, embraced it and made short-term profits till they got commoditized by a standardized OS controlled by Google. On the other hand, Nokia and Blackberry decided to ignore and badly lost market share. Eventually, they embraced it as well, albeit, in different forms but it seems its a bit late. The only winner (till now) is Apple, who was simultaneously working on iPhone and has held its ground well primarily, due to superior UI design and user experience on iOS. ...

The book is an impressive collection of unusual stories aimed at promoting a non-conventional way of approaching problems and solving them.