Wednesday, February 25, 2015

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"


Tuesday, February 17, 2015

How to use python BOTO framework to connect to Amazon EC2


 Python Boto framework is an excellent tool to automate things with Amazon. You have almost everything to automate Amazon EC2 using this comprehensive library.

A quick guide on how to use it in your project

1) Configure your EC2 credentials to be used by your application using one of the followings.

  • /etc/boto.cfg - for site-wide settings that all users on this machine will use
  • ~/.boto - for user-specific settings
  • ~/.aws/credentials - for credentials shared between SDKs 

http://boto.readthedocs.org/en/latest/boto_config_tut.html

2) Refer the API and choose what you need to do.

http://boto.readthedocs.org/en/latest/#currently-supported-services

3) Sample code for a simple autoscaler written using Boto framework. You may reuse the code in your projects quickly. This autoscaler spawn new instances based on the spike pattern of the load.

https://gist.github.com/shelan/b4a3f3ed0ccf9b4777e5

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Perfect Memory.. A Skill developed or a gifted super natural ?

 In the previous post i discussed about the importance of developing a most important gift a human has inside his brain.... the memory.

In this world we have externalized most of the important stuff to external digital world. In a way it has made things evolving faster. We are gathering much more knowledge than earlier. Wait.. Is it knowledge or knowledge pointers?

The most suitable word is knowledge pointers using which we can retrieve knowledge easily. Imagine a world without internet or any other form of knowledge reference. How far can we survive.? We are loosing our capability of retaining information in our brains day by day and making the external storages cost effective at an similar pace.

I am striving to regain that capability if i have lost and see how far i can succeed. Because following video will be one of your eye openers if you are one of the crazy people how would like to travel back to history and master one of the key aspects of a perfect Human being.

This is a Ted talk which you will be fascinated to watch.

"There are people who can quickly memorize lists of thousands of numbers, the order of all the cards in a deck (or ten!), and much more. Science writer Joshua Foer describes the technique — called the memory palace — and shows off its most remarkable feature: anyone can learn how to use it, including him"


Monday, February 2, 2015

Do we need to master memory in Google's Era ?


 If you need any information you just type Google. Simple is n't it? So do we have to bother about memorizing anything this world? Is there a pay back for what you memorize? Can we rely on internet and only just learn how to search and can we be successful?

 I am sure most of the people have forgotten the importance of memorizing things in this information age. But the people who master memorizing things excel more often than people who do not. The simple reason is you can apply only what you know.

As a Software Engineer and as a Masters student in computer science we often think for any problem we can just Google and find answers. But how fast? You may say within seconds you may have thousands of results before you.

But... You need to type go to the first answer and if you are lucky you have a hit.. If not repeat until you find the correct answer. Imagine you have things in memory.... It will not take fractions of a second to retrieve. It will be simply comparing to a cache retrieval to a Hard disk access.

People often think there are lots of information how can we memorize all these things? Yes it is true that in this digital world content is being produced super faster. But you have to be super smart to filter out what is important to you and memorize those things. We often underestimate the capability of retaining information in our brain and lazily forget techniques to master memory.

If you have not read following book is a great source of encouragement as well as a learning tool by a
Memory Champ Kevin Horsley.

Following video is one of his world record breaking videos [Successful World Record attempt in Pi matrix memorization]