Moved to a new Site.

Hi all,

I have moved my blog to shelan.org. wanted to explore something new therefore, I changed my site to a static site with the help of hugo.

New blog is at :

http://shelan.org

How to make your presentation effective - 10/20/30 rule

 Have you ever presented yourself in front of an audience ? Then you may have use slides for your talk to make it better.

But did it really improve or destroy your talk?

 Lets find out few facts that may be things you will not like to see if you are in an audience. Because that is the best place to give a verdict about a presentation.

Here are few common errors that i have observed in the presentations which you should avoid. 

1) Too much text in the presentation

How often have we seen the entire wikipedia or at least close to that in slides? Slides are not meant to be read. Believe me if you let the audience read slides you loose attention. You loose some of the audience. Once they are out of your story it is not easy to grab them back.  Maximum 10 words would be ideal. If you can find a single picture which gives the idea at once fantastic use that..

2) Too much slides in the presentation

Do not try to overload the presentation. Usually if have lots of slides then you are at the risk of going out of your time limits.  Be careful not to give lots of ideas in your presentation. Usually i follow a rule of 3. Which means pitch 3 key ideas to the audience and make sure they remember that 3 even after the presentation.

3) Slide formatting.

If you have letters in the slides the text size and the text formatting matters a lot. Text should look great in the presentation screen and not only on your laptop/desktop screen. Use bigger fonts as possible and make sure everyone can see without any effort. Use a proper standard font which looks neat ,well spaced and easy on eyes.

Following video describes a better way to optimize your slides or a good framework. Using 10/20/30 rule.

1) 10 -  slides

2) 20 - minutes

3) 30 - minimum font size.

Just watch this short video and you will understand it better.

http://guykawasaki.com/the_102030_rule/

What you should know if you travel in Paris

 I had  a dream to visit Paris , City of love with a breeze of Romance. It is a lovely city to explore lots of things. But if you are a traveller knowing few things i have experience will make your journey much nicer :).

1) If you arrive in Beauvais airport and you need to find a way to go to Paris city center you can get Bus tickets from here. Because Ryan air which is most of the time cheaper will land only in this airport. Most of the people suggest other airports which is near to Paris but if you can spend one extra hour you can land in Beauvais and come to city center by bus. Because it (flight + bus) may be cheaper than some flight options.

2) Paris city metro is little bit complicated but it covers almost all the areas. It may be cheaper to get Paris 10 tickets options which will give you 10 tickets at once at a discounted price.

http://parisbytrain.com/paris-metro-tickets/

3) Get a metro map and correctly identify zones and lanes. Because there are some connecting lanes which can be confusing a bit. And also make sure you are not going through an exit when changing lanes or metros, Because once you do you ticket become void and have to use another ticket. Some routes combine rail and metro and may be cumbersome to find them. So to make things easier i opted only to use metro even though the ticket is valid for both to make my journeys hassle free.

3) You should visit paris by night which is more beautiful than the day time. I am posting few pics below and you can decide :)

4) Louvre is an amazing place to visit. But it takes time to explore since it is massive. Plan to spend at least  5 to 6 hours of the day there. Make sure you check the timetable as they closes the Museum on time

http://www.louvre.fr/en/hours-admission

How does the confidence look like?

"John Carpenter (born c. 1968)[1] became the first millionaire on the United States version of the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire on November 19, 1999" [1].


The most important part of the show is the last question where he attempted to claim the final prize. Watch the following video which is too good for being a contestant at his final question for 1 million dollars.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carpenter_(game_show_contestant)

How to build Open JDK 9 on Mac OSX Yosemite

I have been struggling lately to find good resources to compile and change OpenJDK. There is a problem with Mac OS Yosemite as it uses Clang as the compiler. But Open JDK 9 builds without a problem. I am adding useful resources here just incase someone finds it useful.

How to build it

1) hg clone http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk9/jdk9 jdk9

2) cd ./jdk9

3) bash ./get_source.sh (This will take sometime to download the sources so be patient. May be few hours sometimes)

4) when you try to issue command ./configure you will get the following issue.

configure: error: Could not find freetype! configure exiting with result code 1

5) You need install Xquartz to eliminate the above issue.

6) type make all to build the system. In the make file you can see different options to build the system.

7) Built image will be available usually at at build/macosx-x86_64-normal-server-release/jdk/

If you are trying on Mavericks i could find the following resource which seems to be useful but did not verify whether it actually works 100%

http://gvsmirnov.ru/blog/tech/2014/02/07/building-openjdk-8-on-osx-maverick.html

What should you do when your mobile phone is lost?

Have you ever lost your mobile phone in your life? I have lost twice and yes it is not a great position to be. But these two incidents had two different implications. When i lost my first phone it was a nokia phone (N71 to be exact) which was quite a smart phone at that time around 2007. Yes i wanted to find the phone but could not the story was over and life went on. But...  Second time i lost a Nexus 4 which is android.

So what is the big deal?

"Oh my gmail account"

When i sensed for the first time that i have lost my mobile phone the first thing that came to my mind was "oh gosh all my accounts are there". But fortunately i have thought about this topic before i lost this phone so the next steps to be done was obvious to me. I think you might be interesting and you may have better suggestions as well. :)

Three important things

1) Android phone has your email account , If you use gmail as the primary account then you might use gmail for most of other online accounts as well. (Facebook , twitter, ebay so on...)

So if anyone can get hold of it then you are doomed, Because anyone can use forgot my username or password reset features to take control of other account.

2) Android phone has all your data :). In this what google does not back up. I think only your life which cannot be backed up restore later.

3) If your phone is not pin protected or not protected with any other mechanism then you are at the highest level of vulnerability.

So what I should do?

1) Change your email address password immediately. This is very crucial and the most important step

You can check login history here. If there is a recent login just after you
https://security.google.com/settings/security/activity?pli=1

2) You should visit https://www.google.com/android/devicemanager. Using this you can erase your mobile phone data (or in other words do a remote wipe out of data).

This will only happen if the device is online.

If you need to locate the device you need to do it before the wipe out using the same above link.

3) You may register a police complaint at last.

Finding the phone is more important. But for someone who needs to protect data, other accounts and also privacy above mentioned steps becomes vital.

If you have other suggestions please do share in comments :)

When should you give up ?

 When should i give up something?

 So you should never give up something until you find something you really want. Yes... Until you find it.. :). We usually draw the give up line on what society believe, Not what we really believe. We often create boundaries on what society believes achievable. Until someone who really believe him or herself step in expand the limits.

We never thought someone could fly until wright brothers flew, We never imagined a world speaking with someone thousand of miles away until Alexander Graham Bell invented the first practical telephone. We may be prisoners of the society unless we brave enough to reach outside.

So When should we give up on something? We should give up on the day we win the game. It seems so simple, obvious but senseless.

Watch the following video if you need to breath a life into what i mentioned.

"It's Not OVER Until You Win! Your Dream is Possible - Les Brown"