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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 ...

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.

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.

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.

(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. Soon, nanobots will go inside the body for drug release/monitoring. Manufacturing Robotics taking over ( Baxter - 22K robot - will cost 1-2 $ per hour of work after that). Manufacturing coming back to the USA. America is being automated. 3D Printing Current 3D printers 200 (low end) -1500$ (high end). Expect prices.to go down to 200$ for high-end in 5 years => household goods can be printed at home. Finance Square-like mobile payments exploding Bitcoin carries a negative image, expect government-backed digital currency soon. mPaisa in Kenya - 60% of transactions via sms now (25% of Kenya’s GDP). Transportation Robotic drones going to take over for deliveries Self-driving cars are imminent. Computing Big data Internet-enabled devices augmented by high-speed internet (Google Fiber) New UIs - touch-based interfaces, augmented reality (Google Glass) Synthetic Biology We are taking exponential (and not linear) steps in technology and humans are not good at predicting the impact of exponential changes. ...

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? ...

After the Delhi gang-rape case, there has been a sudden upsurge in traditional as well as social media over rape in India. As usual in such cases, the initial reaction is to find someone to blame. And in this case, the onus of the blame has been put on Patriarchal Indian Society - without realizing that more rapes happen in the not-so-patriarchal USA Indian masculinity - “who feel threatened by women asserting their identity” without realizing that rapes happen even with infants, senior citizens, visually challenged, mentally challenged and homely women in conservative villages of Haryana to Kerala. Indian Police - as if police officials are omniscient and should be present before the crime happens Honey Singh - I am expecting a petition against Vatsyayana next This blog post is a collection of thoughts about the same. ...

The book provides a nice summary of economic events of the recent past (~50 years) and builds upon the case for the coming 10 years.

Just completed reading " The Tangled web: A guide to securing modern applications" by Michael Zalewski. The book is surprisingly small given the amount of information it covers about the interaction of web browsers, websites, and client-side web technologies. The book starts with a discussion of what a valid URL could look like ( https://yahoo.com:80@google.com/microsoft.com - think which site is being connected to here) and then discusses several fundamental building blocks of the modern web (like cookies) as well as standard technologies (like Flash) in depth. The issue of the same-origin policy and how it differs from DOM to the cookie to pseudo URLs are explained with amazing clarity. One of the best things about this book is that it makes regular references to RFCs for authoritative answers and the corresponding deviant [and undefined] behavior implemented by the browsers. The book also covers HTML5 security features in detail. While reading the book, occasionally I felt information overload but I think the “Tangled web” and not the book “Tangled web” is responsible for that. ...

The book is 50% story of Jobs and 50% history of the Valley. From the beginning of Apple to it becoming the world’s most valuable company, the book covers everything in depth (and is a bit too long) Some of the key things in the book are Steve Job’s fruitarian diet, journey to India, love for absolute minimalism, extreme (positive as well as negative) treatment of employees, relation with Bill Gates (and Microsoft), battle with Google, battle with cancer and a strong belief that normal rules simply don’t apply to him. The book covers a few major ideas including iTunes store (which brought music online), making of Toy Story, development of iPhone and iPad in detail. At several points, the author clearly illustrates that Apple’s designers and NOT engineers make the rules, for example, during the iPhone 4 antenna fiasco. Overall, it was a nice read, especially, when reading it along with In the Plex which is about Google. ...