Mahboob's Journal

On this Eid holiday weekend, my post is on getting this whole thing about existentialism right. For long, it has been gnawing on my brain cells and it’s time to let it out in words. First of all, being a person of faith means I’m an existentialist. But I don’t want to, at least for now, juxtapose Islamic tenets and way of life with existentialism. I might do that in future writings. Suffice here to say that religion has always been existentialist having most, if not, all the elements of how I’m going to define existentialism.

If you thought social media is there to enable you to know about what your friends and family are doing, then it will be ironical, maybe even unbelievable, to know about a site that enables you to meet your friends because you only meet them online. That’s precisely what LetsDine does. It’s founder was the first speaker at the Startup Saturday event of 15-Jul-2013 that was held at LaMakaan. Theme this time was convincing you first customer. Here’s what the presenters talked during the event.

As mentioned in a previous post, I am working through two chapters, 7 and 8 of Matthew Russel’s eminently fun-filled book Mining The Social Web (MTSW). As a first step, I took a go at blogger posts. Example 8-1, blogs_and_nlp__get_feed.py gets blog posts from their feeds and saves them in json format.

Attended the book reading session of Love Stories #1 to 14 by its author Annie Zaidi at Lamakaan on 30-Jun-2013. The event was compered by Dr. Fatima Shahnaz . The evening started off with Annie reading from the bucket story, and it’s about a woman watching a gecko, which Annie has to explain in the story, is a house lizard. There you go. The disconnect with the average reader starts right there. How easy is to attract an average reader into a woman’s story conveyed in pieces interspersed into her thoughts about the gecko? For people like me for whom a love story is a Sagara Sangamam, we sure get a page turner. Of course without reading more than four lines per page.

Too many encounters with Big Data happening these days -- through articles, newsletters, and even books. Big Data is the Big Buzz. During JavaOne 2013 Hyderabad, I realized that using the words “Big Data” in the title of your presentation is a sure way of drawing crowds; in fact, one of the sessions was about jvm tuning but was named Big Data and performance or some such thing, and needless to say the room was full and folks had crammed even the standing space. Intellectual dishonesty, I abhor. The starting point for getting into Big Data space is of course data analysis, which is but a fancy word for applying stuff that you learn in college courses on statistics. So I wanted to get my hands on to a few things in data analysis. As is my habit, to take a dive into a subject, I first scour for books. Online, of course.

How often do we encounter the terms copyright, trademark or patent but don’t really understand what exactly they are or the differences amongst them. The theme of the last Startup Saturday, intellectual property rights was very apt as it sought to explain the nuances surrounding these. As the chief speaker Ddharaniikota Ssuyodhan of DataHub said, this is a very vast area and his intent was to at least make us think of various mechanisms of protection, if not give indepth knowledge during the session. It was a very interactive and very informative talk and when I entered, the question being discussed was, what can be considered copyright? Similarly, during the course of the talk, he asked questions and the audience gave their own answers, which usually were right but not fully comprehensive.

Attended yet another book launch event -- that of Sandhya Amirichetty named “Petals From My Heart” at The Oxford Book Store, Park Hotel on 19-May-2013. I first noticed a small item about it in The Indian Express. The I searched online but did not find many hits. There was but one post on raedleaf’s facebook page. So my immediate impression was that this must be a resourceful (read rich) person who really doesn’t need to use cost-effective social media-types marketing mechanisms.