Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

May 22, 2021

The Programmer Move: Automating everything has a logic behind it

Filed under: Humor,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:48 PM

In the past few weeks I have seen this joke multiple times where they talk about programmers automating something in 10 days that could be done manually in 10 mins. It does seem funny and people love to think that programmers like doing things the hard way. At times this is true but not always. There is a reasoning behind why we spend 10 days automating a 10 min task. When people look at this they don’t consider the frequency of the task i.e. how many times we are doing that 10 min task. Most of the time you will find that the 10 min task was being done fairly frequently and wasting a lot of time.


Programmers move

When I evaluated candidates for automation in one of my previous companies we had a calculation we used to determine if a process was a candidate for automation. We looked at the time required to complete, complexity of the task (ease of automation), the frequency at which it was done (hourly/daily/weekly/yearly) and the resources freed if automated. Then we looked at how long it would take to automate the process. Looking at the two values we would take the call to automate or not depending on the return of investment from the automation. So, if we had something that was only 10 minutes but done daily then spending the 10 days to automate would probably make sense. On the other hand if the task was a one-off or done yearly then it wouldn’t be a candidate for automation.

Programmers love to automate things. I have automated most of the tasks that I do frequently for system maintainance etc. However not every task needs to be automated and assuming that programmers are doing it just for the heck of it is a disservice. But it is funny. Take a look at a Rube Goldberg machine if you want to see this taken to the extreme, where everything is automated in a manner as complicated as possible.


Rube Goldberg machine: Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin

– Suramya

May 21, 2021

Magnetic Computers: A step closer with a new cheaper magnetostrictor alloy created

Filed under: Emerging Tech,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:44 PM

As of today computers work by setting bits (zeroes and ones) in silicon chips that require electricity to function. There is also work happening where folks are using Quantum particles to store and process data (in Quantum Computers), then we have optical computer which performs its computation using photons. Except for the first one the rest are still in early development stages. Now we have a new contender in play that uses tiny, changeable magnetic fields to form the zeroes and ones that make up the invisible bedrock of all computers.

A magnetic computer leverages the “spin wave”, a quantum property of electrons; in magnetic materials with a lattice structure. This involves modulating the wave properties to generate a measurable output. The advantage is that this uses very little energy and generates almost no heat. In order to generate this field efficiently we use alloy’s that act as a magnetostrictor. Historically the best magnetostrictor rely on using rare-earth materials which are expensive and mining them generates a lot of toxic waste.

Researchers at University of Michigan along with Intel have created a new alloy that acts as a magnetostrictor by mixing Iron with gallium which is a lot more easily available and is cheaper to mine.

The University of Michigan researchers are hardly the first to use gallium to make magnetostrictive materials, but their predecessors had run into a pesky limit.

“When you go above 20 percent gallium, the material is no longer stable,” says Heron. “The material changes symmetry, it changes crystal structure, and its properties change dramatically.” For one, the material becomes much less shape-shiftingly magnetostrictive.

To get around that limit, Heron and his colleagues had to stop the atoms from shifting their structure. So they crafted their alloy at a relatively chilly 320 degrees Farenheit (160 degrees Celsius)—thus limiting its atoms’ energy. This locked the atoms in place and prevented them from moving about, even as the researchers infused more gallium into the alloy.

Through this method, the researchers were able to make an iron alloy with as much as 30 percent gallium, creating a new material that’s twice as magnetostrictive as its rare-earth counterparts.

This new, more effective magnetostrictor could help scientists build not only a cheaper computer, but also one that doesn’t rely on rare-earth minerals whose mining generates excessive carbon.

This makes allows them to create a system that could compute 0’s and 1’s using magnetic fields in a cheaper and more efficient way than traditional computing. For basic operations, this new system would only need power to change the bit value on the system and once the value is set they don’t need power to keep the value. Unlike silicon which requires power constantly without which the values are lost.

The field is still in it’s early phases so we don’t expect to see devices using this technology for the next few decades. But the base is being built and the new systems will be here sooner rather than later.

The research has been published in Nature: Engineering new limits to magnetostriction through metastability in iron-gallium alloys
Thanks to PopSci: How shape-shifting magnets could help build a lower-emission computer for the initial link.

– Suramya

May 20, 2021

Thoughts on NVIDIA crippling cryptocurrency mining on some of its cards

Filed under: Computer Security,Computer Software,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 8:11 PM

You might have heard the news that NVIDIA has added code to it’s GPUs that make them less attractive for cryptocurrency mining by reducing the efficiency of such computations using a software patch. On one side this is great news because it means that GPUs will be less attractive for mining and be available for gamers and others to use in their setup. However, I feel that this is a bad precedent being set by a company. In effect they are deciding to control what you do with the card after you have bought it. A similar case would be a restriction in your car purchase to stop you from using it on non-highway roads. Or to stop you from carrying potatoes in the trunk.

This all comes back to the old story about DRM and how it is being used to restrict us from actually owning a device. With DRM you are essentially renting the device and if you do anything that the owner corporation doesn’t agree with then you are in for a fun time at the local jail. DRM/DMCA is already being used to block farmers from fixing their farm equipment, medical professionals from fixing their health equipment and a whole lot more.

Cory Doctorow has a fantastic writeup on how DRM works and the problems caused by it. DRM does not support innovation, it actually forces status-quo because it is illegal to bypass it.

I have an old X-Box sitting in my closet collecting dust, I want to run Linux on it but that requires me to break the law because I would need to bypass the DRM protections in order to install a new OS. Today we are ok when they are blocking cryptocurrency, what if tomorrow the company gets into a fight with a gaming company and decides that they will degrade the game performance because they didn’t pay the fees for full performance. What if tomorrow they decide, to charge a subscription fee to get the full performance from the device? What is to stop them from degrading or crippling any other activity they don’t agree with whenever they feel like? The law is in their favor because of DRM, laws like DMCA (and other such laws) make it illegal to bypass the protections they have placed around it.

This is a slippery slope and we can’t trust the corporations to have our best interest at heart when there is money to be made.

There is more discussion on this happening over at HackerNews. Check it out.

– Suramya

May 19, 2021

It’s not your right to do whatever you want, whenever you want

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 4:20 AM

It’s unfortunate that we have to say this, but way too many people believe that they have a right to do what ever they want all the time. That is why we have folks driving drunk, or refusing to wear masks, or not get vaccinated. You have a right to your opinions but you can’t endanger other people. Which is why people are required to pass a driving exam before being allowed to drive and can’t drive drunk.

It is not your right to not get vaccinated. You have to do it because it is required for the health and safety of the public. In India there was a growing movement of Anti-vaxxers because people are idiots and they feel that they know more than everyone else. My cousin told me a story about a guy in their village, he was taken to the hospital to be vaccinated and refused to do so. He basically told the staff to get lost and came back without getting vaccinated. Now, a month later the covid cases in India spiked along with the news coverage of the deaths and lack of oxygen supply. Now this same person is running around trying to get a vaccine because he is now scared out of his mind. Same is happening to the other anti-vaxxers.

The only solution for the pandemic is to get everyone vaccinated. It is your duty to get vaccinated and convince all around you to do the same. It is not your right not to be vaccinated.

– Suramya

May 18, 2021

Protect your computer from Russian malware by installing Russian Keyboard on your system

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:59 PM

Adding a Russian Keyboard to Protect against Ransomware sounds like an urban legend or fake news. But apparently there is a sound reasoning behind it, basically the authorities in Russia don’t prosecute for cyber crime unless a Russian company or resident files a complaint. So by ensuring no Russian computers are infected the various Ransomware authors keep themselves safe from investigation and prosecution.

There was various ways to check if a computer in in Russia but the easiest option is to check if the computer has the Russian/Cyrillic keyboard installed. Apparently this includes Ransomware like DarkSide which infected the Colonial Oil pipeline earlier this month. The full list of exclusions are as below. Simply put, the malware checks for the presence of one of these languages on the system, and aborts teh install if any of them are found.


List of excluded languages

Will this protect your system against all malware? Of course not. But it is a good step to do if you are running windows and there is no harm in having an extra language installed on your computer. (Unless you are one of the rabid anti-russia type folks).

Brian’s post has a lot more details about this Ransomware and some of the other protection steps that you can take. You can check it out here: Try This One Weird Trick Russian Hackers Hate

– Suramya

May 17, 2021

IBM’s Project CodeNet: Teaching AI to code

Filed under: Computer Software,Emerging Tech,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:58 PM

IBM recently launched a new program called Project CodeNet that is an opensource dataset that will be used to train AI to better understand code. The idea is to automate more of the engineering process by applying Artificial Intelligence to the problem. This is not the first project to do this and it won’t be the last. For some reason AI has become the cure all for all ‘ills’ in any part of life. It doesn’t matter if it is required or not but if there is a problem someone out there is trying to apply AI and Machine Learning to the problem.

This is not to say that Artificial Intelligence is not something that needs to be explored and developed. It has its uses but it doesn’t need to be applied everywhere. In one of my previous companies we interacted with a lot of companies who would pitch their products to us. In our last outing to a conference over 90% of the idea’s pitched had AI and/or Machine Learning involved. It got to the point where we started telling the companies that we knew what AI/ML was and ask them to just explain how they were using it in their product.

Coming back to Project CodeNet, it consists of over 14M code samples and over 500M lines of code in 55 different programming languages. The data set is high quality and curated. It contains samples from Open programming competitions with not just the code, it also contains the problem statements, sample input and output files along with details like code size, memory footprint and CPU run time. Having this curated dataset will allow developers to benchmark their software against a standard dataset and improve it over a period of time.

Potential use cases to come from the project include code search and cloud detection, automatic code correction, regression studies and prediction.

Press release: Kickstarting AI for Code: Introducing IBM’s Project CodeNet

– Suramya

May 16, 2021

Tiny, Wireless, Injectable Chips created to monitor body functions

Filed under: Emerging Tech,Science Related — Suramya @ 9:10 PM

Injectable chips have long been the boogyman for Anti-Vaxers as they think that people (like Bill Gates) are injecting them with tracking chips to track them and modify their behavior. However, till now this was mostly in the realm of Science Fiction as the smallest chips we had were still quite visible and difficult to power or inject (which is why they were implanted). Now, Researchers at Columbia Engineering have created the world’s smallest single chip system that is small enough that it is only visible under a microscope and is powered using Ultrasonic sound.

This is a great achievement because having injectable chips brings us closer to functioning nano-tech and these chips can be used to monitor physiological conditions, such as temperature, blood pressure, glucose levels, and respiration etc.

These devices could be used to monitor physiological conditions, such as temperature, blood pressure, glucose, and respiration for both diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. To date, conventional implanted electronics have been highly volume-inefficient — they generally require multiple chips, packaging, wires, and external transducers, and batteries are often needed for energy storage… Researchers at Columbia Engineering report that they have built what they say is the world’s smallest single-chip system, consuming a total volume of less than 0.1 mm cubed. The system is as small as a dust mite and visible only under a microscope…

“We wanted to see how far we could push the limits on how small a functioning chip we could make,” said the study’s leader Ken Shepard, Lau Family professor of electrical engineering and professor of biomedical engineering. “This is a new idea of ‘chip as system’ — this is a chip that alone, with nothing else, is a complete functioning electronic system. This should be revolutionary for developing wireless, miniaturized implantable medical devices that can sense different things, be used in clinical applications, and eventually approved for human use….”

The chip, which is the entire implantable/injectable mote with no additional packaging, was fabricated at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company with additional process modifications performed in the Columbia Nano Initiative cleanroom and the City University of New York Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) Nanofabrication Facility. Shepard commented, “This is a nice example of ‘more than Moore’ technology—we introduced new materials onto standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor to provide new function. In this case, we added piezoelectric materials directly onto the integrated circuit to transducer acoustic energy to electrical energy….” The team’s goal is to develop chips that can be injected into the body with a hypodermic needle and then communicate back out of the body using ultrasound, providing information about something they measure locally.

The current devices measure body temperature, but there are many more possibilities the team is working on.

The only downside is that the anti-vaxers are going to use this as proof that the ‘Government’ is controlling their brains or tracking them. Never mind the fact that they can track you much more easily using the phone you carry everywhere or using the camera’s that are now almost everywhere.

The study was published online in Science Advances: Application of a sub–0.1-mm3 implantable mote for in vivo real-time wireless temperature sensing.

Thanks to Slashdot for the link.

– Suramya

May 15, 2021

Providing Oxygen through the intestines in Mammals is now possible as per research

Filed under: My Thoughts,News/Articles,Science Related — Suramya @ 11:53 PM

It takes a certain kind of mind to decide that today I am going to experiment if mammals can absorb oxygen through their intestines. Apparently a some of the aquatic animals like sea cucumbers and catfish, breathe through their intestines and since humans can absorb medicines through their intestines Takanori Takebe, a gastroenterologist from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital decided to do a study to see if they can absorb oxygen as well. So to test this out they basically injected pure pressurized oxygen into the rectums of the scrubbed mice (the mucus layer was thinned) and four of the seven unscrubbed ones. There was an immediate improvement in the O2 levels of the mice, with 75% the scrubbed mice surviving the procedure.

Obviously that is not a great survival rate and the scrubbing procedure is dangerous/involved but it did prove that mammals can absorb o2 with their intestines. So they looked at using perfluorocarbons which have a high O2 level and giving the rats & pigs an enema of the fluid. They saw an almost 15% improvement in the blood oxygen saturation allowing the subjects to recover from hypoxia.

These two tests prove that mammals can breath through their intestine but there is still a lot of study that needs to be done to check for the safety of this procedure. But if things go smoothly we can be looking at a new way to provide oxygen to patients when O2 canisters are in limited supply like the case currently in India due to the Covid crises.

But this doesn’t mean that mouth to mouth CPR will be replaced with mouth to ass CPR. (I can hear the sigh of relief from medical professional/emergency care folks).

More details on the study: ScienceMag: Mammals can breathe through their intestines
Full Paper: Mammalian enteral ventilation ameliorates respiratory failure

– Suramya

May 14, 2021

NTFS has a massive performance hit on Linux compared to ext4

Filed under: Computer Software,Linux/Unix Related,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 12:47 PM

NTFS has long been a nemesis of Linux. I remember in the 2000’s getting NTFS working on linux required so much effort and config changes that I stopped using it on my systems as FAT32 was more than sufficient for my needs at that time. Initially the driver was very unstable and it was recommended that you only use it for Read operations rather than Read/Write as there was a high probability of data corruption. That has changed over the years and the driver is stable. However, there is a massive performance hit when using NTFS vs ext4 on a Linux machine and I saw this when I tried using a NTFS partition on my laptop instead of ext4.

I have a 1 TB drive on my laptop along with a SSD. I dual boot the laptop (need it for my classes) between Windows & Debian and wanted to have all my files available on both OS’s. When I last tried this, ext support on Windows was not that great (and I didn’t feel like searching for options) so I decided to format the drive to NTFS so that I would have access to the files on both OS. The formatting took ages and once the drive was ready I was able to copy my files from the desktop to the laptop. While the files were being copied I noticed very high CPU usage on the laptop and the UI was lagging randomly. Since I was busy with other stuff I let it be and ignored it.

Yesterday I was trying to move files around on the laptop so that the root partition had enough space to do an upgrade and I again noticed that file copy and most of the disk operations were taking way longer than I expected. For example there would be a second of delay when I tried listing the directory when it had a lot of files. So, I decided to test it out. My data on the Laptop is an exact copy of the files on the Desktop. I timed the commands on the desktop with the same command on the laptop and there was a significant difference.

My desktop is obviously a lot more powerful than the laptop so I decided to try an experiment where I would run a command on the NTFS drive, then format the drive to ext4 and run the same command. (after copying all the files back). When I did this I saw that there was a massive difference in the time it took to run the command. On ext4 the command took less than 1 second (0.107s) whereas it took almost 34 seconds (33.997s) on NTFS parition. The screenshot for both commands are below:


du -hs command on a ext4 partition


du -hs command on a NTFS partition

That’s a ridiculous amount of difference between the two. So I obviously have to switch back to ext4 which brought us back in a full circle – I still needed to be able to access my files from Windows as well as from Linux. Decided to go a search on the Internet for options and found out that Windows 10 now lets you mount Linux ext4 filesystems in WSL 2. I haven’t tried it yet but I will test over the next few days once I am done with some of my assignments. If there is something interesting I will blog about it in the near future.

As of now, I am back to using ext4 on the laptop and the OS performance is a lot better.

Well this all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

May 13, 2021

Some thoughts on the last episode of ‘The Flash’

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 12:36 PM

One of the shows I’ve been watching consistently for the past few years is ‘The Flash’ and the last episode of the show was a bit weird and I really need to vent about it. If you have not seen the last episode (Season 7 Episode 9: Timeless) yet stop reading because this post has major spoilers for the episode.

Ok since you are still here, I assume you seen the episode. So lets get started. In the past few episode Barry/Flash has been fighting the ‘forces’ and in the last episode Nora/Speed Force killed the Strength Force. This was a big deal. So now Team Flash is trying to figure out how to stop the other forces who are basically Gods from being killed and removing their powers at the same time. Barry decides that the best way to do that is to travel back in time to prevent the forces from being formed in the first place. It’s like they didn’t learn anything thing from the whole Flashpoint fiasco. The entire team opposes the idea but Barry just handwaves their concerns away to say that he is going to do it even if they disagree. He then pulls in the Timeless Wells who would create a ‘bubble’ around the timeline to prevent it from changing after Barry prevents the forces from being born. This would be a huge paradox and the show just ignores it.

Finally Barry & Wells are back in the past and well into the process of stopping the forces from being born when suddenly Barry does an about face for no good reason (Other than to keep the show going) and lets the forces be born. I don’t mind when the characters change their decision because of some discussion or new input but this guy just makes arbitrary decisions and then changes them for no reason. He is like a Yo-Yo with these decisions and it is really annoying.

Then they both come back to the present and because Iris & Barry have a ‘connection’ to the speed force, they are able to bring Fuerza/Alexa back to life. First of all why have they put her on a medical bed if she is dead? Are they planning on doing experiments on her? Or was it just so that she could be brought back to life because the character was needed in the show.

This episode was just lazy writing and this could have been done a lot better. Let’s see what the next episode brings, hopefully it will make more sense.

– Suramya

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