Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

October 3, 2025

Garlic scented books

Filed under: Books Related / Reviews,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 5:43 AM

In a desire to differentiate her novel from others (and create publicity) author Jennifer L. Armentrout along with Hellmann’s have released a collectable edition of her newest novel ‘The Primal of Blood and Bone’ which is printed with garlic-infused ink. At first when I read this I thought this is a cool idea. Even John Scalzi made a joke that he is going to print a cheese scented version of his book ‘When the Moon Hits Your Eye’ where the moon suddenly is made of Cheese.

But after thinking about it for a bit, I am not so sure of it. Garlic has a strong smell and while I love eating Garlic, it’s smell is not something I would want to linger in my room. If I buy the book then every time I enter my study there would be a faint but measurable smell of garlic in the room and it would drive me nuts.

If the book is kept in a glass shelf every time it is opened the consolidated smell would leak out and yeah… that is not a pleasant smell so while the idea sounds cool I think people should just stick with the regular book smells. Or maybe pleasant smells like very light perfumes or smell of rain or fresh cut grass.

– Suramya

October 2, 2025

Celebrating 21 Years of my Blog

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

Today marks the 21st year since I made the first blog post on this site on 2nd Oct 2004. So it’s been 21 years that I have been posting random thoughts online and life is a lot different from when I started posting here. Since I first posted on the blog, I have moved to a different continent (and multiple cities), switched jobs multiple times, got married. (Interestingly my wedding anniversary is coming up as well in little over a weeks time as well).

During this time the site has:

Total Published posts : 1,607
Total Published Comments : 793
Most popular post is: “Trip of a Lifetime: Antarctica!” with 47,249 views
The top 3 Countries of blog visitors are: US, India and Russia (Definitely wasn’t expecting Russia to make it to the top 3).

I like having a blog because I control what goes on it and how it is presented. No one can force me to remove a post or penalize me for posting something that the algorithm didn’t like and now that the blog is federated posts here are autoshared and publicly searchable on Mastodon, LinkedIn and Facebook (mostly as FB gives so much trouble trying to autopost). This is in accordance to POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere), which is the practice of posting content on your own site first, then publishing copies or sharing links to third parties (like social media silos) with original post links to provide viewers a path to directly interacting with your content.

Thank you all for reading my ramblings over the years and letting me know that you actually like the stuff I post. 🙂

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

– Suramya

September 24, 2025

No pets for employees because it distracts them from customers

Filed under: My Thoughts,Tech Related — Tags: — Suramya @ 10:20 PM

If you listen to companies online you will hear this common refrain that people don’t want to work or that it is so hard to find good resources. Then you read posts from companies which will make you think “What on earth did I read? and is this guy serious?”. The latest example of this kind of post is from Raymond Guo at Noon AI who posted the following gem on LinkedIn:

At Noon Al, we don't believe employees should own pets Pets demand time and emotional energy that belong to our customers. We once had an employee who had a pet. No surprise, he had a terrible work ethic. Our team's focus is singular: building the world's best Al recruiting platform. Since enforcing this policy, we've cut distractions and boosted productivity by 25%. Dogs, cats, or fish.. they're liabilities when global clients expect instant support. Commitment means no divided loyalties, even to a pet This is the Noon Al mentality. If you disagree, I'd love to see what your revenue is!
No pets for employees because it distracts them from our customers

At Noon Al, we don’t believe employees should own pets
Pets demand time and emotional energy that belong to our customers.
We once had an employee who had a pet.
No surprise, he had a terrible work ethic.
Our team’s focus is singular: building the world’s best AI recruiting platform.
Since enforcing this policy, we’ve cut distractions and boosted productivity by 25%.
Dogs, cats, or fish.. they’re liabilities when global clients expect instant support.
Commitment means no divided loyalties, even to a pet
This is the Noon Al mentality.
If you disagree, I’d love to see what your revenue is!

Or put it another way, we want to suck all remaining joy out of your life because it will allow us to exploit you a little bit more and earn a few extra dollars. If I was told this in an interview or after I was hired I would immediately resign/start looking for another job even though I don’t have a pet and am not planning to get one. If the company is exploitive enough that they are restricting you from getting a pet (which is a personal choice and frankly none of their business) then there is no way they will allow you to have a personal life… The company might make some money in the short term by squeezing their employees but in the long term they will loose talent, and money because people will not want to work in such conditions if they have any other options.

Unfortunately this is not an uncommon way of thinking. Multiple people post daily on LinkedIn (and other forums) expecting employees to be virtual slaves and have no other interests and work other than to slave away in the office making them money. Take the following post as an example:

Full text below the image
If you take vacations or self-care holidays then you should be fired

About half a dozen times in the past six months, I’ve emailed with a junior person
at a firm who has said blithely “sorry, I can’t meet or talk that week” or “I didn’t
read my email last week” because … wait for it … “I was / will be on vacation.

Look, you can say whatever you want about vacation and time off. You can have
whatever opinion you want about work/life balance. There are a thousand fields in
which to work, a million jobs to have in life.

But if your job title is venture CAPITALIST — if you are looking to invest in high-
velocity, high-octane startups — if you are a junior person at your VENTURE
CAPITAL firm that is seeking to match up with hardcore entrepreneurs — if you’re a
junior person whose job it is to hunt deals and find treasures and make
connections to other VCs and to the startups they fund — and if you are treating
yourself to “phones down” vacations and “self care holidays” — you should just be
fired. That’s it. No exceptions. Just fired

This is one of the more ridiculous ways of looking at things that I have seen and trust me I have seen a lot of them in the past 25 years in the industry. If you are a fresher or junior person this might seem normal to you but trust me it isn’t. You need to have time for yourself to recharge/reset else you are on fast track to burnout. It might not happen immediately but the long term impacts are there (and I am telling you this from personal experience).

My suggestion to my team and juniors is that they should get a hobby that takes them away from the computer for a little while and set reasonable expectations on their work. That is not to say in an emergency they will be required to be there till the issue gets resolved but for most days I tell them to decide what time is the latest they would like to take calls (we work very closely a lot with US teams) and then ask their counterparts to schedule calls before that time.

Expecting folks to work the same hours as a founder/owner for a fraction of the pay & benefits doesn’t make sense (as an employee), Give overtime pay for extra hours worked and then you will see folks put in extra hours if they want to. You can’t get something for nothing remember.

– Suramya

September 19, 2025

Swiss cheese font

Filed under: Interesting Sites,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 10:48 AM

The Swiss cheese has a very unique look and from the first time I saw it in a Tom & Jerry cartoon, I have loved it. Designer Rob apparently loves it as well because he has created a font he calls Swiss Cheese Mono which is a typeface full of holes inspired by the Swiss cheese look.

Introducing Swiss Cheese Mono Font
Introducing Swiss Cheese Mono Font

The font is current in uppercase only and is available for sale at Swiss Cheese Mono font (uppercase only) for $2.99. From the description.

Swiss Cheese Mono is a chunky, sans-serif, monospaced display font created primarily from squares with circular “holes” in them. Currently available in uppercase only.

When Rob posted some images of the work-in-progress font on Threads, many of the nearly 33,000 people who liked the images said the font looked like Swiss cheese. After taking some photos of real cheese, playing around with Adobe Firefly’s generative AI image tools, and finishing the font, Swiss Cheese Mono was born.

I find the font a little hard to read as they are sort of like the images with perspective views that require you to squint in a particular way to see them correctly. So I doubt anyone is going to use it for anything professional (unless it is for food related posts/presentations) but it is still cool to see.

Source: mastodon.social/@cmconseils.

– Suramya

September 18, 2025

Creating a Phishy URL

Filed under: Humor,Interesting Sites,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 9:21 PM

Url shortners have been used for a while now to to reduce the length of a URL to something that can be easily shared online. It became extra popular at sites like Twitter which counted the URL length into the character count for the post (though that was later changed to a fixed number, 23 if I remember correctly). The disadvantage of such shortner’s was that they converted phishing links into a shorter URL that looked legit and the only way to figure out if the link was valid was to access it which could be risky due to Zero day exploits etc. This made life ‘interesting’ from a security controls perspective as it makes it harder to control/restrict such urls.

So someone decided to take it the other way and create a re-director that converts regular URL’s into a really fishy looking URL

This is a tool that takes any link and makes it look malicious. It works on the idea of a redirect. Much like https://tinyurl.com/ for example. Where tinyurl makes an url shorter, this site makes it look malicious.

Place any link in the below input, press the button and get back a fishy(phishy, heh…get, it?) looking link. The fishy link doesn’t actually do anything, it will just redirect you to the original link you provided.

You can try them out at https://phishyurl.com/. I asked the site to create a link to suramya.com/blog and it generated the following URL:

https://cheap-bitcoin.online/evil-hunter/exploit-jacker/fake_launcher_tool.exe?content=overwrite&id=824e35fe&origin=spoof&payload=%28function%28%29%7Blet+a%3D5%2Cb%3D3%3Blet+sum%3Da%2Bb%3B%7D%29%28%29%3B&portscan=scan&referer=tamper

If you visit the above link, it will take you to the blog homepage.

Source: chaos.social/@FlohEinstein

– Suramya

September 15, 2025

(Not a) Travel Hack: Spending on Credit card

Filed under: My Thoughts,Travel/Trips — Suramya @ 11:50 AM

I am an avid traveler to the point where I have traveled to all seven continents and have a goal of traveling to every country in the world. Obviously this requires money and some of these countries can be expensive to travel to and others are a lot cheaper. So when I saw a screenshot of a so called travel hack, I immediately checked it out and wow this is a bad take. You can see it in full below:

Little travel hack I've learned. You can spend A LOT of money on credit cards but you only need to pay back a very small minimum per month. I literally almost spent $30k this month already and I only need to pay back $80 for the month.
Little travel hack I’ve learned. You can spend A LOT of money on credit cards but you only need to pay back a very small minimum per month.
I literally almost spent $30k this month already and I only need to pay back $80 for the month.

This person doesn’t seem to understand how interest works so even though you only ‘have’ to pay $80 per month, you have to pay interest on the remaining amount. As per google, the average monthly interest on credit cards is 23.9% (as of Aug 2025) so that means that for a 30k debt you would incur an interest of $7,170 per month, reduce the $80 you paid and your outstanding debt comes to $37,090 at the end of the first month. The next month (assuming no further charges) you will owe an additional $8,864.51 in interest and so on. You see where I am going with this?

Instead of taking such a massive debt and end up paying multiple times the money it is better for you to save money (as much as you can) and when you have enough for a vacation/trip take it. Rinse and repeat.

When I first got a credit card my dad sat me down and explained how interest works. His guideline (which I still follow) is to spend as much as you want on the Credit card, as long as you can pay the balance in full at the end of the month.

Travel can be a lot cheaper than you think as long as you are careful and plan for it. Things like taking advantages of sales and traveling just before the season starts (or just as it is ending) can save you a lot of money. You don’t have to stay in the top 5 Star places… In fact Jani and me usually prefer cheaper places because for the most part we only come to the room to sleep. As long as it is clean and hygienic we are happy with it. This doesn’t include the trips where every once in a while we go all out and stay at fancy resorts, but even with them we try to do a package and get any discounts we can.

The other reason we can spend a lot of money on travel is that we don’t have many other expenses and thus can afford to spend a lot of our savings on travel related expenses (and my books and Gadgets & Jani’s Perfume collection 😉 )

Hope that some of you find this useful.

– Suramya

September 14, 2025

There is now a SQL port of Doom on CedarDB

Filed under: Interesting Sites,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 10:06 AM

There is an ongoing joke that if a device can perform calculations and has a display it will be used to run Doom. The same way a programming language is considered successful if Doom has been ported to it. Lukas Vogel, has added one more language to the list of languages that were used to write a port of Doom entirely in SQL with CedarDB doing all the heavy lifting. His blog post (Building a DOOM-like multiplayer shooter in pure SQL) has a full writeup on the technical nuts and bolts of the implementation.


DOOMQL in action

Due to the limitations of the language and backend engine the implementation looks like an ASCII display instead of the the more familiar 3D art & sprites. That said this is an impressive achievement. I think this would be a good way to stress/load test a DB server. Atleast that is how I am going to pitch it, the next time I am involved in the setup and testing of a Database server.

Source :The Register: Just because you can render a Doom-like in SQL doesn’t mean you should

– Suramya

September 11, 2025

Thinking about SciFi Voice command Interfaces from a usability perspective

Filed under: My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 10:08 AM

Saw the following post by @tante where they talk about how voice commands have been embedded in our consciousness for years as a really advanced user interface but practically speaking they would be a terrible interface.

Voice commands have been embedded into our vision of computing for a long time: Star Trek did it and it does the whole anthropomorphization thing that tech loves. But from a practical standpoint it's a bad interface: Think of a handful of people sitting in an office yelling at their computers, it would be like working next to people having loud phone calls all day. And who exactly wants every thing they do with their computer broadcasted around them?

“Voice commands” have been embedded into our vision of computing for a long time: Star Trek did it and it does the whole anthropomorphization thing that tech loves.

But from a practical standpoint it’s a bad interface: Think of a handful of people sitting in an office yelling at their computers, it would be like working next to people having loud phone calls all day.

And who exactly wants every thing they do with their computer broadcasted around them?

This is something that has bothered me pretty much since I first watched Star Trek (and how they interfaced with computers) and started working on computers myself. So it was good to see someone else share my point of view on this topic.

From usability perspective, a voice interface is one of the worst ways to interact with the computer, as it is imprecise. The caveat being that it is a good interface from an accessibility perspective but from a general purpose, everyday use I don’t think I would use voice to interact with a computer as it is a very limiting and insecure way to interact with a computer in my opinion.

The way Star Trek thinks about it is that the computer is advanced enough to understand what you are trying to do based on a single line command and then do it for you but we are nowhere near close to achieving that right now and even if the tech existed, imagine sitting in an open office setup where already it is annoying to work because you get to listen into random zoom calls & discussions happening around you. Now think about how bad it would be if we also had to listen to every command that people around you are issuing to their computer (followed by the numerous corrections), I would go mad if I had to listen to it for any period of time.

Another issue to think about when multiple people are working in a small area and trying to interact with their computer: How do you ensure that you are commands don’t accidentally run on your neighbor’s computer? Imagine sitting next to someone logged into a production database while you are connected to a dev database and you tell the computer to wipe all the data in the database. But in addition to the command running on your machine the machine next to you also heard the command and wipes out the entire production database.

In addition there is the whole security aspect of the technology to think about. Do you really want everyone around you to hear what you are working on? (Especially if it is something confidential). Plus authenticating verbally like how they do it on Star Trek is really insecure. In Star Trek when they are issuing a command that requires authentication the person actually just states their authentication code loudly for everyone around them to hear. That is absolutely insecure and easy to bypass. We already have technology that can imitate anyone’s voice really well, so this authentication code could easily be bypassed using similar tech. For example, they could create a Hologram version of the person and have that issue the command or use any of the other similar technology to achieve the same thing. In the non-fiction world, voice modifiers are already good enough to fool most if not all voice verification systems so having a verbal authentication code is not really a very secure way of doing things.

So, while it is cool and looks really futuristic I wouldn’t recommend a voice interface as the only way to work with a computer.

– Suramya

September 9, 2025

Surveilling Your Children with hidden AirTags

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:13 AM

Skechers is making a line of kid’s shoes with a hidden compartment for an AirTag. The idea being that the parents should monitor their movement 24×7. I really don’t get this mindset where instead of talking to the kids and setting boundaries about what they are allowed to do and what they are not, parents put in more and more surveillance systems on the kids to monitor and control their actions and behavior.

Before anyone starts, I know I don’t have any kids but I have enough nieces & nephews that I am tangentially aware of what goes into caring for a kid. When I was a kid, the rule we had to follow was that we had to be home before dark and tell parents where we were going to play. If we shifted locations, one of the the parents was notified so that they could keep the rest of the parents in the loop if required/asked. This was with the expectation that if we abused the trust and broke the rules we would no longer be given such freedom. Almost the same rules are in effect for Vir & Sara as well and they work great. This isn’t to say that there aren’t random checks being made to ensure the kids are not doing something they should not be doing. But the idea is that they are being allowed to make their own mistakes and learn from them.

The more we try to control kids the more they will figure out ways to get around the restrictions. It is better to let them have some freedom (with limited restrictions) than for them to go behind your back completely. I am a supporter of Parental controls on devices (in a limited manner) so that we can block access to certain sites/media etc that is age inappropriate like violent movies or horror etc. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t sit with the kids and explain to them why certain content is blocked till they are older. If you do it without explaining then the kids will find a way around it (I would…) and you won’t even know about it.

I used to watch movies with my elder cousins and watched a movie called ‘100 Days’ when I was about 12-13 years old. It is a thriller where one of the characters finds a skeleton of a murder victim in the wall. The movie scared me so much that I went around the house tapping the walls to see if there were any hollow areas in the wall. Then my mom sat me down and explained how a skeleton is nothing to be scared about as it was just like the pit inside the mango that allowed us to keep shape and stand-up. Then they explained why I shouldn’t watch such movies till I was older and guess what I understood and didn’t try to bypass.

If something is forbidden without explanation then people will try it when they are away from supervision. I saw it a lot during college where folks who came from conservative or restrictive backgrounds went crazy with their new found freedom outside their parents control and I still see it in our new hires from colleges. The allure of the forbidden is quite strong unless you explain why it is forbidden…

The more self reliant you make your kids the better off they will be later in their lives (doesn’t mean that you don’t do anything for them and let them figure out everything themselves…) Excess of anything is bad and that includes freedom as well. I traveled from Delhi to Muzaffarnagar (about 150 kms) by bus alone when I was around 15 years years old. That gave me confidence that I have till now about traveling alone… This is not to say that there weren’t any guardrails around me at that time, both the driver and the conductor in the bus were told to keep an eye on my during the trip (and they were known to my grandparents). Similarly, Vir & Sara have flown from Bangalore to Delhi alone (after being registered with the airline as child travelers) and they both are quite confident as well.

I do want to make it absolutely clear that I am not advocating for complete freedom without any controls or limits. Obviously there needs to be some limits and controls for the kids otherwise they will be too spoilt. But like all things there needs to be a balance and putting a hidden tracker on them is way off from being a balanced approach.

– Suramya

September 8, 2025

Using WiFi signals to measure heart rate without wearable’s is now possible

Filed under: Emerging Tech,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 2:23 PM

Currently WiFi is one of those technologies that is pretty much prevalent across the world, you go to the smallest (inhabited) island in the middle of nowhere and you will get a WiFi signal. Which is why folks have been trying to use it for various tasks such as identifying people or as motion sensors etc.

Building on that researchers at University of California, Santa Cruz have created a system that allows them to measure the heart rate using the signal from a household WiFi device with state-of-the-art accuracy—without the need for a wearable. The system called “Pulse-Fi,” was published in the proceedings of the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing in Smart Systems and the Internet of Things (DCOSS-IoT).

Non-intrusive monitoring of vital signs has become increasingly important in various healthcare settings. In this paper, we present Pulse-Fi, a novel low-cost system that uses Wi-Fi Channel State Information (CSI) and machine learning to accurately monitor heart rate. Pulse-Fi operates using low-cost commodity devices, making it more accessible and cost-effective. It uses a signal processing pipeline to process CSI data fed into a custom low-compute Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network model. We evaluated Pulse-Fi using two datasets: one that we collected locally using ESP32 devices named ESP-HR-CSI Dataset and another containing recordings of 118 participants using the Raspberry Pi 4B called EHealth, making it the most comprehensive data set of its kind. Our results show that Pulse-Fi can effectively estimate heart rate from CSI signals with comparable or better accuracy than hardware with multiple antenna systems, which can be expensive.

The ability to monitor the health of any person remotely without the cost of a wearable or extra sensors is pretty groundbreaking. I can see it in use at hospitals, elderly care and nursing homes etc. However, as with all technologies there is a downside as well. Once we have the ability to monitor the pulse of anyone remotely, I can see the various security and government agencies around the world falling over each other to get it implemented as widely as possible. Imagine having this at an airport where you can monitor for abnormal heartbeat or increase in pulse rate to watch out for a suicide bomber (never mind the poor nervous flyer who got tackled out of nowhere or the person nervous about their first date). Offices with sensitive data or intelligence agencies will end up using it as a non-stop lie/threat detector.

But that is still in the future as the technology is still in an early stage and it is not clear how accurate it will be when used in a crowded location.

Source: ucsc.edu: WiFi signals can measure heart rate—no wearables needed

– Suramya

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