The Last Lecture

Mon 08 October 2018 by Thejaswi Puthraya

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 "The Last Lecture" not only as a way of helping students achieve their dreams but also communicating with his kids when they grow up. The lecture became a hit and was viewed by millions, prompting Randy to write a book offering more details that he couldn't accommodate in the lecture.

An Era of Darkness

Sun 30 September 2018 by Thejaswi Puthraya

"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 …

The Book Thief

Sun 16 September 2018 by Thejaswi Puthraya

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 …

Importing OpenStreetMap data into Postgresql

Fri 14 September 2018 by Thejaswi Puthraya

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 …

My Muttrc

Thu 13 September 2018 by Thejaswi Puthraya

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 …

A People's History of the United States

Fri 31 August 2018 by Thejaswi Puthraya

"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 …

Port Forwarding with HAProxy

Sat 11 August 2018 by Thejaswi Puthraya

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 …

Shantaram

Sat 28 July 2018 by Thejaswi Puthraya

Looks can be deceptive. Very deceptive. When some villagers name the protagonist "Shantaram" after his calm nature, little idea did they have of his fierce past. Shantaram tries hard to melt into his surroundings and maintain a low-key but keeps getting into trouble.

Gregory David Roberts, the author, embellishes his …

When breath becomes air

Mon 11 June 2018 by Thejaswi Puthraya

What would you do if you are informed that you are dying (no timeline provided)? Would you continue working towards your dream? Or give up and spend the rest of the time cursing your fate?

Paul Kalanithi is close to completing his neurosurgeon residency at Stanford. He has worked hard …

Mahashweta

Fri 08 June 2018 by Thejaswi Puthraya

Dr.Anand falls in love with Anupama and it appears to be progressing like a fairy tale. After marriage, her husband leaves to England for higher studies and she is expected to follow him shortly. But she is diagnosed with Vitiligo and is shunted out of her in-laws and parents …