Relocating to California for internationals - Part 2

Buying a car Due to the deliberate destruction of public transport, driving a car is cheaper on the west coast compared to taking public transport unless your employer subsidises commute via public transport. Decide ah car you want to buy, Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla are value for money for singles. Honda Accord and Toyota Camry are better for people with families. Specially, who have young kids which require child safety seats....

September 25, 2013 · 4 min      Misc

Relocating to California for internationals - Part 1

This set of articles are for Internationals who have recently relocated to California for a job. I am listing a few things which I wish I knew when I first arrived here for a full-time job. Short link to this page: http://bit.ly/fotb-ca) Hunting for apartment Use craigslist.org, padmapper.com (this also provides average renting prices of the area) and housingmaps.com. Use crimereports.com to check the crime statistics of the area as well....

Personal Finance: Thoughts on peer to peer lending

A year back I decided to try peer to peer(P2P) lending (out of curiosity) will a small sum of money. My net conclusion is that peer to peer lending is not a sensible form of investing. My money is still stuck (and that’s not the only reason why I would recommend people to stay away from it). How it works A lender with say 1000$ will go to a site like lendingclub....

Malkiel's Timeless lessons for Investors

(Notes from Burton Malkiel’s talk at Google in 2010) Lesson #1: Buy-and-hold is still the best strategy Not only timing the market is tough but people who are trying to time the market loose more often than not. Lesson #2: Dollar-cost Averaging Since it is impossible to guess whether the market is going to go bull or a bear, it is better to invest over a period rather than in one-shot....

The Missing Linux Laptop

For the past one month or so, I am looking around for a good personal laptop running GNU/Linux. I was looking for something similar to my current Mac Book Pro My constraints were following Intel processor - 2.4 GHz or better 16 GB or more RAM 15-16" screen since 14" screen does not work for the software development Sleek body - ~1" or less in thickness Good build quality At least 1080p - 1920x1080 resolution the chiclet keyboard and preferably without the useless numeric keypad Preferably running GNU/Linux - porting GNU/Linux to a laptop can end up being painful) Preferably 16:10 or lesser - I gave up on this constraint since it seems all laptops come only in 16:9 nowadays, except Macs and Chromebook Pixel After spending several days looking for the same, following were my conclusions...

Book Summary: The Power of Less by Leo Babuta

The book contains pragmatic advice for dealing with the clutter and noise of the everyday world, which disguises itself in the form of work. The book has two parts. First one focuses on the principles and the second one provides concrete practical advice based on the same.

Android Security related tools

A lot of work is happening in academia and industry on tools to perform dynamic analysis, static analysis, and reverse engineering of android apps. An updated list of the tools can be seen at https://github.com/ashishb/android-security-awesome.

Book Summary: The Start-Up of You

The book tries to reflect on an individual’s professional growth in the contemporary era of fickle employment guarantees. The best part about the book is that it tries to offer pragmatic, as opposed to principled advice, regarding career development and branding.

Vivek Wadhwa: "The next Trillion Dollar Opportunities"

(Opinions expressed here are my understanding of Vivek Wadhwa’s opinion) “The next Trillion Dollar Opportunities” (in this decade) China’s manufacturing and India’s call center business are saturated. The PC industry is dead, Laptop is flat, and mobile is going up. Next trillion-dollar opportunities Proactive health care Preventive care is much cheaper. Expect sensors everywhere (in the toothbrush, toilet, mirror, etc.) to give info based on spotted symptoms. IBM Watson is being trained on medical data....

Beyond Numbers: Dealing with terrorism in India

Let’s start with a small exercise. Trying searching for the list of Sept 2011 victims or for the list of London Bombing victims. In each case, more than half of the results on the first page lead to a list of names along with the photos and life stories of those people. Now, trying searching for the list of Hyderabad blast 2013 victims, you would get a few results like this which lists the names of the people but where are their photos and life stories?...