The Godfather

I generally don't pick business books unless it is highly recommended. "Delivering Happiness" by Tony Hsieh was recommended by a manager at one of my previous workplaces. Tony Hsieh documents the story of Zappos, an online footwear retailer until it's acquisition by Amazon. The primary focus of this book is …

Khushwant Singh, a noted author pens the biography of Ranjit Singh, referred to as 'The Lion of Punjab' by the Sikhs. He was the first king to have unified the Punjab and built a huge empire. The book documents the events in Ranjit Singh's life chronologically with a lot of …

Randy Pausch's "The Last Lecture" may not be as evocative and stylish as Paul Kalanithi's "When Breath Becomes Air" but is heart-breaking nevertheless. He was a professor at the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that later metastized into the liver. Randy delivered …

"An Era of Darkness" sprung out of a popular lecture by Shashi Tharoor in London. This speech was appreciated by a lot of Indians even across the political spectrum but caused some stir amongst the English. To address these, the author deemed it fit to write a book as it …

Lisa is on the cusp of adolescence while she is put up for adoption by Nazi authorities and finds herself in the home of Hans and Rosa Hubermann. She is confused as to why she has to live with her foster parents when her mom is alive. After settling into …

I had the requirement of extracting hospitals from OpenStreetMap into Postgresql so that some data analysts could run some scripts off it.

I fired up an AWS EC2 server (t3.large) running Ubuntu and installed the awscli package and configured it using my AWS Key and Secret Key.

sudo apt-get …

I have been using Mutt, a text-based email client for ages for some self-hosted email that I use internally. Someone recently asked me to share my .muttrc and so here goes:

set editor = "emacs -nw"

set mbox_type=Maildir
set mbox="~/Mail/Inbox"
set spoolfile="~/Mail/Inbox"
set folder="~/Mail/"
set …

"History is written by the victors" goes a famous quote. Every reading of history should be treated with some scepticism. "A People's History of the United States" written by Howard Zinn narrates history not through the government's propaganda but through common people's movements.

The book opens with Christopher Columbus' armada …

I recently acquired a beefy bare-metal server and wanted to run a bunch of services within VMs based on KVM managed by libvirt. Only ports 80 and 443 for these VMs would be exposed and the rest of the ports (say SSH) visible only from the internal network.

Initially, I …