December 2011
2 posts
“Thinkers are rare, doers are rarer, and thinker-doers are the rarest of...”
– Desingineer – the mythical person every Startups are looking for | Brajeshwar
“Learn an industry like the back of your hand. Be able to tell me the names of...”
– Advice for analysts wrt specialization
November 2011
2 posts
“Bottom line: if you value your school more than your accomplishments, you are...”
– Sudburyrob
Emerson - Self Reliance
Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have...
September 2011
1 post
August 2011
1 post
Organization structure matters
Nagappan recognized that although metrics such as code churn, code complexity, code dependencies, and other code-related factors have an impact on software quality, his team had yet to investigate the people factor. The Mythical Man Month is most famous for describing how communication overhead increases with the number of programmers on a project, but it also cites Conway’s Law, paraphrased as,...
May 2011
1 post
April 2011
2 posts
“I’ve been testing the Series 9, and my verdict is that it is a solid,...”
– By WALTER S. MOSSBERG
Apple MacBook Air is value for money.
March 2011
2 posts
1 tag
“Over the last couple of months Google (GOOG) has reached out to the major...”
– Businessweek
Created by MobiTV, Inc. a Mobile Technology Platform
January 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Samsung software strategy (or lack of one)
I own couple of Samsung android phone, earlier generation Galaxy phones. They have seen no official software updates and they run on Android 1.6! I wondered how could Samsung continue to ignore their handsets. I believe there is a good reason why their software update cycle sucks. The answer is in their business model.
For example, Apple when it sells a iPhone doesn’t recognize the entire...
“I wish I’d had the ears to hear in the year or five after graduating from...”
– 43 Folders | Time, Attention, and Creative Work
December 2010
3 posts
Good homepage design
The home page has an identifying logo and contains or has links to:
* a site map
* contact information
* information about the organization responsible
* a site feedback form or pointers to a discussion group
* assurances as to security and privacy
* related sites
* Information on the technology needed to view subsequent pages in the site (e.g. browser versions, necessary downloads, file...
November 2010
0 posts
Machine Learning
This is a list of textbooks about machine learning which are (a) really good, and (b) free on the web. The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction, by Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, and Jerome Friedman (deep coverage of an important subset of the field)
Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms, by David MacKay (very mathematical approach,...
R Reference Material
This post contains pointers to R reference materials, and will be updated. Google search for R Tutorial
An Introduction to R (pdf), from the central R web site, something between a tutorial and a manual
Jo Hardin’s R Tutorial (pdf), shorter
Notes from Thomas Lumley’s two-day short course in R
Video R Tutorial
Short html R Tutorial with implausibly poor colour choice
Short...
October 2010
3 posts
“make yourself into a great hacker: you never have to work on boring projects...”
– Great Hackers
Big Dream
I would like to run a company that does $100 million in sales, before I am 35 years old. Create some wealth through creative use of technology in my corner of the world.
1 tag
Coming tablet price wars
How much does Apple spends on the iPad hardware?
Recently introduced AppleTV has the A4 chip along with wireless chip and 8GB flash memory. This teardown at iFixit shows the internals of this device is very similar to an iPad.
This implies that except the display and associated driving chips, Apple’s cost on iPad could be way below $99. There are median of several estimates for the cost...
September 2010
3 posts
“Justices Sudhir Agarwal, S.U. Khan and Dharam Veer Sharma all seem to agree on...”
– Force of faith trumps law and reason in Ayodhya case
The IKEA effect →
bobulate:
Research shows there’s a relationship between labor and affection. Dan Ariely explains the IKEA effect:
You build something and you fall in love with it. When marketers do sell you a product, their theory is about preference fit. You like pink and I like orange and I like this a little higher and everyone knows their preference. That’s important. But I think the more important issue...
Android Apps: Case for quality control
The debate over the closed nature of iPhone apps and Android apps has raged over several developer blogs and media outlets. But from the point of customers, users care about overall user experience and not how open or closed is the underlying platform. They are concerned about the availability of utilities which would enhance their phone delivered in a consistent and error prone manner.
...
June 2010
2 posts
I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure?...
How to make engineers write concisely with sentences? By combining journalism with the technical report format. In a newspaper article, the paragraphs are ordered by importance, so that the reader can stop reading the article at whatever point they lose interest, knowing that the part they have read was more important than the part left unread. State your message in one sentence. That is your...
April 2010
1 post
February 2010
4 posts
2 tags
Notes on India's default risk
Rating agencies models have come under severe scrutiny in the recent years after their track record on issues related to the sub-prime crisis.
In Financial Express column, Vaidyanathan argues that “When Greece gets a higher credit rating than India, there is a problem”. He observers that current rating of India at BBB- has a greater likelihood of default than Greece at BBB+. While...
Why Private Equity in India?
Ajay Shah makes a great point in the context of family run businesses that effective management is one of the best reasons for thriving PE industry in India.
To quote him:
This evidence encourages a style of private equity investing: where the investor takes a controlling stake in the firm and brings in the necessary knowledge and human resources to achieve business transformation. This is a lot...
As an hedge fund analyst
What does your job entail?
I am an analyst for a long short equity hedge fund. My main responsibility is to advise my portfolio manager on investment decisions. This involves forecasting earnings and valuing companies based on my primary research.
Do you have any specific areas of focus?
My sector focus is industrials (Capital Goods), which is extremely broad. Within industrials, I am currently...
January 2010
17 posts
1 tag
Android development on Samsung Galaxy:
I got a new phone - Samsung i7500 Galaxy. Looks like it is going to be more fun than my older phones.
1. Samsung i7500 Galaxy runs the Android 1.5 platform. So I downloaded the sdk tools from google and then followed their readme to get started with getting the 1.5 platform specific downloads on my mac.
2. I got the Galaxy skin from rexxar, for better looks. Got eclipse and ran couple of...
Linchpin - Seth Godin - Summary
Quieting the lizard brain
How can I explain the never ending irrationality of human behavior?
We say we want one thing, then we do another. We say we want to be successful but we sabotage the job interview. We say we want a product to come to market, but we sandbag the shipping schedule. We say we want to be thin but we eat too much. We say we want to be smart but we skip class or don’t...
Personal development for smart people - summary
Seek truth with open eyes. Courageously accept your discoveries and their consequences. Rid your life of falsehood, denial, and fear of what is. Make truth your ally, not your enemy. This isn’t easy, but it is correct.
Share your love openly. Connect with yourself and others by tuning in to the connection that already exists. The risk of rejection is overshadowed by the rewards of loving...
2 tags
Future of artists
Seth Godin talk about artists and their leverage in the new connected world.
Today, I listened to Sophie Madeleine. She is so talented. She chose to sell her own music, instead of going the record route of publishing music. It is now possible for quality content to be distributed more easily than ever before. I think the days of studios and arbiters of any art, are counted.
But, India as a music...
2 tags
Clustering stocks in a sector
Quantitative clustering techniques solely rely on grouping a bunch of stocks based on returns and their correlations, seems to fail while trying to classify a set of stocks in an industry. I ran a test on set of 20 stocks from utilities and couldn’t find meaningful clusters just based on this data analysis alone.
Another technique which helped me though was the fundamental classification...
Getting started with quantmod
I got quantmod installed on R at work and home couple of months ago. Here are the instructions for installing them from the R command line.
install.packages(c('xts','Defaults','quantmod'))
Check out the Quantmod homepage for further information.
To quickly whip up an example to check your installation is alright, use this script:
# chart AAPL...
“I’m not a disciplined person. Having bipolar affective disorder...”
– Self Vs. Self: My Law And Disorder
“Live the life you’ve dreamed.”
– Henry David Thoreau (via theimpossiblecool)
“Every day I meet people who have so much to give but have been bullied enough or...”
– Seth Godin
Selling ebooks on Amazon Kindle
Today, I got really intrigued by the Kindle Digital Text platform for publishing ebooks. Amazon recently announce that it would increase the royalty paid for the books to 70%. But there is fine print to this news, this program comes in effect in June 2010 and is applicable only to the content that gets sold in US.
So, the royalty rates are going to stay at 30% for sometime to come or until Apple...
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank...”
– Invictus
Apple Tablet
I wish Apple could make a computing device that would make Wacom Cintiq redundant. Cintiq behaves like a hardware peripheral made by elves and not like a computing device by itself.
My ideal product for touch, brush/tool based computer, follows this premise ‘everything is the screen’. No haggling with the cables and all the other nasty bits.
Apple whip out a product for this, please.
“I have no talent. What I do have is a lot of practice. And I am not talking...”
– I Have No Talent // RailsTips by John Nunemaker
John, thanks for writing this.
“spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a...”
– Walden - Wikiquote
“The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what...”
– The Second Act: Boost your productivity with Hemingway’s hack
“You see people, the alpha males have business degrees. They can be fat and...”
– I fucking code so I’m not a man anymore. The Freehacker’s Union
My year in 2009 was pretty adventurous and difficult at times. Time with family was crucial and helped stabilize emotions. Boo and I are making progress towards our goals. Career has been all over the place, but finally showing signs of direction. Overall my best year so far, making me a better human. Looking forward I am feeling so optimistic about 2010 and I want to be happy with Boo. I know...
December 2009
10 posts
“Do something you’re very passionate about, and don’t try to chase...”
– Jeff Bezos
Walden, Thoreau
Men labour under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a semming fate, commonly called necessity, they are emploed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. Most men, even in this...
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