Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

September 22, 2020

American Demon (Hollows 14) by Kim Harrison

Filed under: Reviews-Urban Fantasy — Suramya @ 11:01 AM

American Demon (Hollows 14)

by Kim Harrison

Description:

What happens after you’ve saved the world? Well, if you’re Rachel Mariana Morgan, witch-born demon, you quickly discover that something might have gone just a little bit wrong. That the very same acts you and your friends took to forge new powers may have released something bound by the old. With a rash of zombies, some strange new murders, and an exceedingly mysterious new demon in town, it will take everything Rachel has to counter this new threat to the world–and it may demand the sacrifice of what she holds most dear.

Buy From:

Rating: (4/5)

Review:

This book was a surprise because the previous book in the series ‘The Witch With No Name’ had the feeling of being the last book in the series when it was released back in 2014 with the Happy ending and all that. This book takes place events of the previous book & the happy ending depicted at its end. Since it’s been 6 years since the last book in the series was released I was happy that the book had a summary of the major event’s, players etc at the beginning to refresh my memory as otherwise I would have been lost trying to understand the plot of this book.

Between the Elves trying to retain power & wipe out the demons and the vampires trying to regain their souls Rachel’s hands are full. Plus the fact that she needs to hide from the Goddess while trying to solve her problems is just the cherry on top that she needs. However, with the help of her friends she navigates this mess nicely. The story is fast paced without feeling too rushed and there is a lot of grey area that Rachel needs to navigate.

The book is a good read but I would recommend reading (or rereading) the previous book before starting this one as this book will make a lot more sense if you do that.

Thoughts on a AmItheAsshole forum post and the racism it implies

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:15 AM

There is an interesting Subreddit, called r/AmItheAsshole (AITA) where people who are not sure if they behaved correctly in a given scenario can post the details of their experience/behavior and ask the Internet for a ruling on whether they behaved correctly or not. The questions can range from “AITA for not cutting my hair for my Sister’s wedding” to “AITA for burning my wife’s Ex-Boyfriend’s pics”. I don’t subscribe to the channel but there are folks I follow on Twitter who do follow and every once in a while they post links to specific posts which are usually way out there (the picture burning I referenced earlier is from one such post). Today I ran across a post where the poster was trying to justify his actions/behavior where he accused his GF’s Indian friend of cheating because she beat him in Scrabble and he couldn’t accept the defeat without assuming that she cheated. The whole post is below for reference:

So my (M23) GF (F23) has this Indian friend (F18) called “Priya”. Priya came to my English speaking country (relevant later) a year back to study. My girlfriend absolutely adores her and Priya soon became my GFs “best friend”. I’m doing English literature and she’s in science (also relevant).

Recently, she invited my GF and I to her place (fluid restrictions here), and had made a bunch of Indian food for us, got some wine. I ate well, the food was good and was having a good time. My GF had apparently bought Priya a scrabble set because Priya had mentioned she loved the game, so GF suggested we all played scrabble.

I was really excited because I knew I’d decimate them both easily. We play, and as the game progresses, it wasn’t me who was leading but Priya. She was making these huge words like “maladies” and “ostensibly”. I was pretty sure she was cheating.

She got up mid game to go to the bathroom and spent about 3 minutes there. I’m pretty sure she was googling words in there. So when she came out, I jokingly told her I knew she was cheating and she asked me what I was talking about.

I told her I know that she’s cheating, and that it’s impossible for someone who’s literally lived only in India all the time to be so good at Scrabble and to have such an extensive English vocabulary.

She didn’t say anything to defend herself but just laughed and told me she wasn’t cheating and we eventually finished the game and went home.

My GF however was extremely upset with me and told me I embarrassed her. When I told her I was being honest, and that there’s no way Priya could’ve beaten me without cheating, She told me I’m a racist and that she’s reconsidering her relationship with me.

So AITA?

The verdict of a majority of the commenters on the post is that ‘YTA’ (You’re The Asshole) and racist to boot. This is a problem I have seen many times when I was in the US and have actually had a person tell me in my Freshmen year (1st year of college) that I couldn’t possibly be from India because I spoke good English and people from India can’t talk in English. To which my answer was that I have been studying in English for the major part of my life and most schools in India teach in English so that the kids are prepared to enter the professional world once they complete their education.

Another instance was when a professor decided that I must have copied my homework paper from somewhere because it was too good to be written by an Indian kid in his freshman class. Luckily for me we had to write another in-class essay on a given topic before the homework was graded and returned. When he graded my inclass paper he realized that I had written both of them and he actually told me that he was going to give me a D on the homework assignment initially because he thought I had cheated but changed his mind after he saw my in-class paper.

There are many such examples, but they mostly have one common denominator: it is usually a White Guy who is offended by the fact that a non-white person beat them in something that they perceive is their forte. I loved the expression on their faces when they realize that they are not the best and it was especially fun in college because after the first year I was writing for the college newspaper & had published articles as well in recognized magazines, so when they found out about my articles it was always a priceless expression.

Have you faced similar issues in your life?

– Suramya

September 21, 2020

Flesh and Fire (Vineart War 01) by Laura Anne Gilman

Filed under: Reviews-Fantasy — Suramya @ 11:24 PM

Flesh and Fire (Vineart War 01)

by Laura Anne Gilman

Description:

Once, all power in the Vin Lands was held by the prince-mages, who alone could craft spellwines, and selfishly used them to increase their own wealth and influence. But their abuse of power caused a demigod to break the Vine, shattering the power of the mages. Now, fourteen centuries later, it is the humble Vinearts who hold the secret of crafting spells from wines, the source of magic, and they are prohibited from holding power.

But now rumors come of a new darkness rising in the vineyards. Strange, terrifying creatures, sudden plagues, and mysterious disappearances threaten the land. Only one Vineart senses the danger, and he has only one weapon to use against it: a young slave. His name is Jerzy, and his origins are unknown, even to him. Yet his uncanny sense of the Vinearts’ craft offers a hint of greater magics within — magics that his Master, the Vineart Malech, must cultivate and grow. But time is running out. If Malech cannot teach his new apprentice the secrets of the spellwines, and if Jerzy cannot master his own untapped powers, the Vin Lands shall surely be destroyed.

In Flesh and Fire, first in a spellbinding new trilogy, Laura Anne Gilman conjures a story as powerful as magic itself, as intoxicating as the finest of wines, and as timeless as the greatest legends ever told.

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Rating: (2/5)

Review:

This is a book that I have read multiple times and I had loved it. This is the book that got me interested in Wine Tasting & the whole field of making Wine. I actually seriously considered doing a certification on Wine Tasting at one point in time.

I felt like reading something light and ended up picking this book again to read. Have you ever have it happen that you love a book and then you notice something in the book that completely spoils it for you? That’s what happened to me with this book.

I love the world setting and the details on how the magic works, however what destroyed the book for me was the fact that it appears to justify slavery as something that is required to raise people above their station & gain the power of magic. I didn’t notice it the last time I read the book but this time it was glaring enough that I couldn’t finish the book. Example quote from the book on this subject:

Vinearts did not appear full-blown from the earth, after all. It was an ironic gift from Sin Washer: generations of trial and error had proven that only the deprivations of slavery, the removal of all family ties and comforts, pushed a man to the point where magic would surface. Even now, he could not coddle the boy, or risk ruining him. The skills were inherent and easily proven by the first test, but the refining of them required a combination of elements. . . .Like the grapes themselves, a Vineart must be stressed to produce the finest results, grown in poor soil and subjected to the elements in order to shine.

Someday he would explain that to the boy and set him on his own course, to acquire and scour his own slave population for the ones he in turn would train, to carry on their tradition. But that day was years to come, assuming the boy survived. For now, they would begin as always.

This was not at all needed and this one paragraph ruined the book for me. If it didn’t have the slavery justification then I would have rated the book at 4 or 4.5 but with this in there, I don’t think I can rate it above a 2.

Diffblue’s Cover is an AI powered software that can write full Unit Tests for you

Filed under: Computer Related,Computer Software,Interesting Sites,Tech Related — Suramya @ 6:19 PM

Writing Unit Test cases for your software is one of the most boring parts of Software Development even though having accurate tests allows us to develop code faster & with more confidence. Having a full test suite allows a developer to ensure that the changes they have made didn’t break other parts of the project that were working fine earlier. This make Unit tests an essential part of CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery) pipelines. It is therefore hard to do frequent releases without rigorous unit testing. For example SQLite database engine has 640 times as much testing code as code in the engine itself:

As of version 3.33.0 (2020-08-14), the SQLite library consists of approximately 143.4 KSLOC of C code. (KSLOC means thousands of “Source Lines Of Code” or, in other words, lines of code excluding blank lines and comments.) By comparison, the project has 640 times as much test code and test scripts – 91911.0 KSLOC.

Unfortunately, since the tests are boring and don’t give immediate tangible results they are the first casualties when a team is under a time crunch for delivery. This is where Diffblue’s Cover comes into play. Diffblue was spun out of the University of Oxford following their research into how to use AI to write tests automatically. Cover uses AI to write a complete Unit Test including logic that reflects the behavior of the program as compared to the other existing tools that generate Unit Tests based on Templates and depend on the user to provide the logic for the test.

Cover has now been released as a free Community Edition for people to see what the tool can do and try it out themselves. You can download the software from here, and the full datasheet on the software is available here.


Using Cover IntelliJ plug-in to write tests

The software is not foolproof as in it doesn’t identify bugs in the source code. It assumes that the code is working correctly when the tests are added in, so if there is incorrect logic in the code it won’t be able to help you. On the other hand if the original logic was correct then it will let you know if the changes made break any of the existing functionality.

Lodge acknowledged the problem, telling us: “The code might have bugs in it to begin with, and we can’t tell if the current logic that you have in the code is correct or not, because we don’t know what the intent is of the programmer, and there’s no good way today of being able to express intent in a way that a machine could understand.

“That is generally not the problem that most of our customers have. Most of our customers have very few unit tests, and what they typically do is have a set of tests that run functional end-to-end tests that run at the end of the process.”

Lodge’s argument is that if you start with a working application, then let Cover write tests, you have a code base that becomes amenable to high velocity delivery. “Our customers don’t have any unit tests at all, or they have maybe 5 to 10 per cent coverage. Their issue is not that they can’t test their software: they can. They can run end-to-end tests that run right before they cut a release. What they don’t have are unit tests that enable them to run a CI/CD pipeline and be able to ship software every day, so typically our customers are people who can ship software twice a year.”

The software is currently only compatible with Java & IntelliJ but work is ongoing to incorporate other coding languages & IDEs.

Thanks to Theregister.com for the link to the initial story.

– Suramya

September 20, 2020

Its Doctor Who’s 57th Anniversary

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:07 PM

57 Years ago on 19th Sept 1963, we first met the Doctor and the TARDIS. The adventures of the ‘Madman in a Box‘ have kept generations of viewers entertained. I read my first Doctor Who book in 1991/1992 (I think) and have been a fan ever since. I spent a lot of money and effort to find the old Target releases and even managed to get a complete collection of most of the available Doctor Who TV episodes. My personal favorites are: 10th Doctor, 4th Doctor/13th Doctor & the 9th Doctor. The 11th Doctor was a bit too hyper for my tastes and never managed to like the 12th Doctor much. I really love the 13th Doctor as she has some great stories and amazing acting. However the 10th is a clear winner thanks to David Tennant who set the bar so high with his amazing acting and portrayal of the Doctor that he replaced the 4th Doctor as my favorite doctor right from the start of his regeneration.


The TARDIS in its first Television appearance

Doctor Who is one of the longest running shows on television, and there are a lot of amazing quotes that have come from it. Some of my favorite quotes from the show are below:

The Tenth Doctor : Look at these people, these human beings. Consider their potential! From the day they arrive on the planet, blinking, step into the sun, there is more to see than can ever be seen, more to do than – no, hold on. Sorry, that’s The Lion King… – The 10th Doctor

This is just a funny absolutely non-relevant quote from the 10th Doctor and I just loved it. The cherry on top was that this was said during the Doctor trying to stop the enslavement of Humanity, which is what most other series would treat as a really serious topic.

“The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don’t alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views.” – The Fourth Doctor, The Face of Evil (1977)

This is so true. People always try to change the facts to suit their personal views and that never ends well…

“You know that in 900 years in time and space I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important before. – The 11th Doctor “

Everyone is important and that’s the lesson the 11th Doctor is trying to reinforce for us.

“We’re all stories in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?”

“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint – it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly… time-y wimey… stuff. – The 10th Doctor”

There are a ton more quotes that are awesome but I don’t have the space to duplicate them all over here. So you can check them out: here & here & some more here.

Well this is all for now. Will write more later.

– Suramya

September 19, 2020

Darkened Blade (Fallen Blade 06) by Kelly McCullough

Filed under: Reviews-Fantasy — Suramya @ 6:10 PM

Darkened Blade (Fallen Blade 06)

by Kelly McCullough

Description:

Aral Kingslayer has nothing to lose – and only justice to gain. Torn apart by the death of his goddess, he must avenge her in order to save himself from being lost forever….

It’s been nine long years since the death of his patron, Namara, and exalted assassin Aral Kingslayer desperately misses the thrill and glory of being a higher power of justice. Now he is haunted by the ghosts of the past – and by the ghost of the lost goddess herself.

When Namara calls upon Aral in a dream to seek justice for her death and the ruination of her temple, Aral must obtain the help of his fellow former Blades and his Shade familiar, Triss, to pursue the vengeance he knows Namara deserves. Even if it means attacking Heaven’s Son – and going against one of their own – in a bloody battle of epic proportions…

Buy From:

Rating:

Review:

This is the final book in the Fallen Blade series with Aral finally working with all the surviving Blades to avenge the murder of his Goddess by the Son of Heaven. The novel was a satisfying end to a good series and addressed most of the ongoing open threads in a way that made sense. The dilemma Aral faces while going against the Son of Heaven is beautifully presented and his struggle seems real.

It is good that the series ended with this novel as otherwise it would have felt that the author was dragging the series just for the sake of it. After the last book, I was more than ready for them to go against Heaven’s Son. That isn’t to say that there isn’t scope for further stories in this universe, the ending has the scope for many many more stories to be told between the last chapter & the epilogue.

Check if out if you like epic fantasy & a troubled hero. Good read overall, though I still prefer his WebMage series more than the Fallen Blade

How to Toonify yourself

Filed under: Interesting Sites,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:57 AM

While surfing the web I came across ‘Toonify Yourself!‘ that allows you to upload a photo and see what you’d look like in an animated movie. It uses deep learning and is based on distillation of a blended StyleGAN models into a pix2pixHD image to image translation network.

It sounded interesting, so I tried it out with one of my pictures and got the following results:


Original image

Toonified Image

I quite like the result and am thinking of using it as my avatar going forward. What do you think?
Thanks to Hacker News for the link

– Suramya

September 18, 2020

Hackers – 25th Anniversary thoughts

Filed under: My Life,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:01 AM

15 September 2020, was the 25th anniversary of one of my favorite movies which also happens to be one of the most iconic movies about hacking ever released: Hackers. I first saw the movie in late 1999. I was introduced to it by Jerome who was my RA in college at the time and it has been one of the most fun and phenomenal movies on hacking that I’ve seen.

Yes, the video depictions of hacking are corny since there are no 3d file systems that we have to navigate and when we open a file it doesn’t give a 3D psychedelic video with equations floating around, but the overall concept and the whole mindset of what hacking actually means is very accurately depicted in the movie. For example, a lot of hacking involves social engineering and right in the beginning of the movie Dade/Crash Override social engineers a security guard to get access to the computer systems for the TV Network he is trying to take over. There are tons of quotes in the movie that cover/reference the core of the Hacker identity in the 90’s. Some of my favorites are:

We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons.

[- Razor & Blade. While demoing Phone Phreaking]

We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals. Yes, I am a criminal. “My crime is that of curiosity.” I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto.

[From the Hackers Manifesto]

“Hackers of the world unite!”

“Hack the planet!”

These are all things that we grew up with, and refer to core hacker identity/mindset in 90’s. It actually surprised me to find that the original hacker manifesto was no longer easily available and had to resort to visiting the Internet Archive to pull up a copy of it. The movie gives you a good idea of what the original definition of hacking was: learning for the sake of learning & curiosity. It encouraged/inspired a whole generation of folks to go into computers & hacking. I remember this quote from one of the kids I watched a movie with in college, and he basically said, “watching this movie makes you want to go learn computers so you can do cool stuff like this instead of the boring ass programming crap we have been doing.”.

I saw the news of the movie’s 25th Anniversary on my twitter feed 2 days ago and since I was feeling nostalgic I watched the movie again yesterday night. And I’m happy to report, I still love the movie. Yes, there are parts of the movie that feel dated e.g. where they are all running around with floppy disks & CRT monitors and the phone couplers! and it’s corny to see everyone being on skateboards/rollerblading all the time. But overall the movie itself doesn’t feel dated in fact even the graphics from the movie have aged quite well.

The movie got a lot of flack on it’s release for being “dubious,” “unrealistic,” and “implausible.” A lot of the visualization was just plain silly (but really visually awesome) like the super cool looking 3d visual file systems that the protagonists have to navigate or the really cool looking 3D visualization with floating equations that come up when they try to view the ‘garbage file’.

Yes the movie is not accurate, but what movie is? I mean, it is at the end of the day a fictional story to tell people, have a great visual and audio extravaganza. All of that is not meant to be an accurate representation of the hacking process because honestly speaking, watching people type for three hours will probably be one of the most boring movies that I could think of and interestingly even with this visual extravaganza the movie was a comercial failure when it came out and it’s only over the years it’s become a cult favorite. There are other movies like ‘the Net’ or Sneakers that also covered Hacking/hackers but none of them had the lasting impact Hackers did.

Always remember: “This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. “

#hacktheplanet

– Suramya

Drawn Blades (Fallen Blade 05) by Kelly McCullough

Filed under: Reviews-Fantasy — Suramya @ 9:56 AM

Drawn Blades (Fallen Blade 05)

by Kelly McCullough

Description:

Aral Kingslayer’s past is never more than a shadow’s breadth away in this Fallen Blade novel from Kelly McCullough.

Once one of the world’s greatest assassins, Aral Kingslayer has finally reclaimed his swords and his soul. But the forces that destroyed his patron Namara twelve years ago are still there, waiting…

In the days before the fall of his goddess, only one other rivaled Aral’s skills, Siri the Mythkiller – a woman who ruthlessly earned the title First Blade. As a friend, Aral owes her his loyalty. As a former lover, he owes her part of his heart. As a Blade, he owes her anything she asks, including his life.

When Siri seeks Aral’s aid, he knows he must go. But as they journey towards the ancient Sylvani Empire, only time will reveal whether Aral can save the former First Blade, or if he will simply fall with her…

Buy From:

Rating: (4/5)

Review:

Drawn Blades is the fifth book in the Fallen Baid series and picks up soon after the previous book ended. Things start off at a quick pace with Siri, also known as Mythkiller coming back in Aral’s life after years of him not knowing if she was alive or not. It appears that by now pretty much all the blades referred, or name checked in the previous books have come back to life and/or become part of the plot in one of the previous books. If the books were less well written it would be easy to get to a point where the additional books become more of the same but fortunately, that is not the case.

And as always, there are a lot of complications in this book, with past regrets, vengeance and regrets coming back and haunting Aral & Siri. We finally get to explore more of the others in this book with a more detailed overview of their society & structure than what we have seen in the past. It was a fascinating view and really expanded the world the stories are based in. They also encounter fallen gods and a whole lot of other way interesting stuff which we can’t go into details because spoilers. Significant changes to how Aral looks at things happen in the book, which really sets up shades nicely for the next entry in the series which I’m really looking forward to reading.

September 17, 2020

Blade Reforged (Fallen Blade 04) by Kelly McCullough

Filed under: Reviews-Fantasy — Suramya @ 11:25 AM

Blade Reforged (Fallen Blade 04)

by Kelly McCullough

Description:

After the fall of the goddess of justice, temple assassin Aral Kingslayer lost his purpose in life and turned to the bottle. That might have been the end of him if luck hadn’t given him a few people to help him get back on his feet—notably the irresistible Baroness Maylien Dan Marchon, who once sought his aid in claiming the throne that’s rightfully hers. Reluctant to resume the role of an assassin, he turned her down.

But now Aral has learned that one of the few people willing to help him in his darkest days has been imprisoned by Maylien’s uncle, King Thauvik. Aral knows he can’t let an old friend die, but the alternative is to return to the life he left years ago. It was the death of Thauvik’s half brother that earned Aral the name Kingslayer, and now he is thrust into a war that will see no end until he lives up to his name…

Buy From:

Rating: (4.5/5)

Review:

The 4th book in the series starts off in a very weird way. Aral is back at the Gryphon which has been destroyed getting drunk, we have no idea how he got there and why Jax & Faran are not there with him. This is never completely explained in the book and it bugged me. I had to check to make sure I was reading the correct book in the series and hadn’t missed any book in the middle. However once I got past that I liked the book, we have an old flame back in Aral’s life making a play for the throne. Plus there is a living legend who has come back from the dead to make things very difficult & dangerous for Jax. I liked how he had to change his whole way of thinking to get through the mission and how throughout the book he is slowly healing himself. Though his struggle with addiction is still a big part of the character. The following paragraph from the book really highlighted the difficultly Aral is going through with his addiction, and I loved it. Its rare when writers get nuances like this rather than just handwaving it away to advance the plot.

I didn’t answer Triss. I couldn’t. It was taking everything I had not to tear out the cork and drink off half the bottle on the spot. I could feel sweat breaking out on my brows and the palm of the hand holding the bottle as I fought with my own desire. Fuck me but I wanted that drink bad. Without seeming to cross the intervening space, I found myself holding the whiskey out over the water, willing my hand to unclench. It wouldn’t, and probably better that it didn’t.

I ignored that and the increased urgency in his voice and used a word of opening to free the cork—a spell where normally I would have simply torn it free with my teeth. Then, slowly, oh so very damned slowly, I turned the bottle over and poured the contents into the sea. It felt more than half like I’d opened a vein and it was my own blood I was draining away, but I did it. When it was empty, and only when it was empty, did I let the bottle fall into the water and sink to the bottom. I watched it all the way down. Then I sat back against the wall of the cavern and dangled my bare feet in the cool water.

The book is the commulation of the previous three books and if you read this without having read the previous books some parts of it will not make sense. However it can be read as a standalone for the most part.

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