The Developer’s Desktop

I’ve released the last of my planned Chrome Extensions today (I had dubbed the project The Chrome Swan). It is called The Developer’s Desktop or Devdesk, for short. It is a productivity extension built for designers, developers, programmers and geeks.

The extension is finally available on the Google Chrome App Store. You can find it here: Developer’s Desktop.

What the extension essentially does is bring you the latest news and the best webcomics to your Chrome homepage. This way, every time you open a new tab, you will be treated to one of Randall Munroe’s best xkcd comics as well as the hottest updates from Hacker News. Also, there are links to other websites such as Mashable, The Verge, Slashdot and Tech Crunch.

In addition to keeping you up to date with the geek world and providing you sufficient dosages of geek puns and romance, the extension also has multiple utilities built into it. It features a to-do list that allows you to add, check off and delete tasks throughout the course of the day. The search bar lets you search the open sourced engine, DuckDuckGo. This way, you can search for something without falling prey to Google’s Tracking mechanism.
The QOTD feature brings you an inspiring quote every day to offer you a fresh perspective of life.

The app also brings you a list of your most visited sites upon request. This ensures that you do not miss out on the latest updates from your favorite sites. There is a Bookmarks link too which brings you a list of your most recent bookmarks.

Finally, Developer’s Desktop also acts as repository of links for some of the most useful websites and apps on the Internet. These links are categorized based on their utilities so you’ll know where to go for a particular problem or task.

This project, like the previous two, is open sourced. In addition to accepting pull requests involving code, I am also open to any kind of design revamp suggested to me.
You can find out more about this in the documentation here: Devdesk Documentation

The CSS Helper Extension

 

CSS Helper is the second in a series of three extensions that I plan on launching this week. I built this extension when a designer friend of mine asked me for a tool that would allow him to look up CSS Properties of various elements on a website without having to open up the console.

Building the CSS Helper wasn’t much of a hassle. All I required was a dose of jQuery and the open sourced qtip2 to build a lightweight app that alleviated all console woes. Using the extension is pretty simple: While on a tab, click on the Extension icon to enable the qtip. Click again to disable.

Unlike the other two projects, I do not intend on extending the functionality of the CSS Helper. I think it is good to go as is.

Introducing Webchromic

 

Back in December 2014, I was doing an online course titled ‘Introduction to Computer Science’ offered by Harvard on the edX platform and taught by Professor David Malan. I remember that in one segment, where he was teaching elementary concepts of Linux, he showed us a comic that humorously illustrated what the command sudo did.

This entire incident may seem extremely trivial but it introduced me to xkcd and the world of webcomics. And since then, I’ve been hooked. It has become routine to start off my day by visiting my favorite sites to check if there are any new comics posted. And this got me thinking. Why couldn’t there be an extension that brought me all the comics I ever wanted to read to my homepage?

I tried searching for something similar on the Web Store first. I couldn’t find anything even remotely similar to what I had in mind. So, I went ahead and built one. The result was Webchromic.

Webchromic is a lightweight Google Chrome Extension that brings the best of the webcomic world to your Chrome homepage. Every time you open a new tab, the extension randomly loads the latest comic from its list of parsed sites. This list currently includes the likes of xkcd, Sarah’s Scribbles, SMBC, Pearls before Swine, Cyanide and Happiness among many others.

I published the extension today and made it public. It is available here: Webchromic- Google Chrome Store.

I understand that my taste of comics may differ widely from other people. As a result, I have open sourced the entire code on Github (You can find it here: Webchromic- Rounak Banik). I’ve also included explicit instructions in the documentation that would allow even the uninitiated to modify the extension and add their own favorite comics.

That said, if there is a comic that you’d like me to add to the official app, please feel free to ping me here or send me a mail to rounakbanik@gmail.com. Reports of any bug found and suggestions for new features are always welcome. I hope at least some of you here find utility installing and using this app.

Here are a few more screenshots of the app:

Lord of the Rings

 

I’m finally done with the Lord of the Rings volumes. It took me over a month to go through Tolkein’s colossal work. And I have a strong feeling that what I’m going to state in this post may fall into the domain of extremely unpopular opinion. But here goes: I found the reading experience to be painfully mediocre.

It was a struggle to get to the end of the six books, compiled into three volumes. And the usual thrill and suspense associated with most fantasy books was absent. I felt the majority of the literature focused on describing surroundings than on actual dialogue and character development.

Now, make no mistake, I do understand and appreciate Tolkein’s contribution to the world of literature and the fantasy genre in particular. But Lord of the Rings, when reviewed objectively, didn’t turn out to be such a great book. Personally, I felt more than half the book could have been omitted without making a huge difference to the narrative. Also, Tolkein didn’t seem to have too much of a regard about building suspense towards the climatic scenes of the book. Frodo Baggins and Gollum fighting over the ring in the heart of Mount Doom will always remain one of my most favorite cinematic moments. This monumental scene took place in the first half of the last book. And it was over before I could even start to savor it. And with Sauron gone, it seemed pointless to continue reading the narrative for seven more chapters (practically three to four days).

I’ve always been a fan of Tolkein’s world. Peter Jackson’s portrayal of his books will always be among the few cinematic masterpieces in film history. I strongly feel Jackson’s narrative was a lot more engaging. His movies had significant female characters, something which Tolkein’s books utterly lacked. Additionally, Jackson conveniently removed all the parts that were a pain to read and otherwise unimportant to the main narrative (think Tom Bombadil, Goldberry and Saruman’s conquering of the Shire).

Everything said and done, I’d be stupid if I denied that the books give a valuable insight into how the entire genre of fantasy took birth. Most people I know swear by the books. Maybe it all boils down to a matter of personal taste. And although I did not like the books and may never read them again, I’d strongly suggest you do. It is a must have in every serious reader’s bookshelf.

The Ship of Theseus

 

Personal Identity has always been that one branch of philosophy that never ceased to entice me. And today, I thought I’d write a small piece on the Ship of Theseus paradox, its proposed solutions and the kind of ramifications it has to the contemporary (and most probably, futuristic) world.

The paradox, one of the most famous and hotly debated ones in philosophical circles, was first explained by Greek philosopher and essayist Plutarch who introduced the problem as follows:

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, in so much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

It seems to me that the answer to the aforementioned question is in the affirmative. I strongly believe that both the ships are the same. And the school of philosophers who hold the same opinion as mine will tend to give you the example of the human body.

Human cells are continuously formed and destroyed throughout the entire lifetime of a person. This means that every cell you were born with have perished and have been replaced by new cells. Does this make your 1 year old self and you present self two completely different people? I think not.

And why this is the case is what I’d like to devote the crux of this post on. But before that, consider an alternative scenario where Theseus sets sail and in the middle chooses to transfer himself and his crew to another ship. Will the two ships be the same? I think most of us would believe the contrary. But what if the new ship in this Universe was built of exactly the same materials that was used to replace parts in Plutarch’s Universe? Despite the crew and the ship being exactly the same, the two ships have sharply contrasting identities. One can clearly be shown to not be the original ship whereas the other is a source of raging debate.

So, is my premise wrong? Are the two ships not the same? I’d say no. And to defend my position of what clearly seems to be a case of dissonance, I’d like to explain a concept which I call assimilation.

In its bare essence, it means that for an entity A and B to be the same whilst having entirely different compositions, it is mandatory that the replacement of A’s parts with that of B’s be done in a discrete, step-wise manner.

In the case of the ship, the parts were being replaced one by one. So, when the first plank was replaced by a newer, stronger one, the latter became assimilated to the original ship. It now was as much part of Theseus’ ship as all the other original parts. And by induction, every new piece which was introduced into the ship was assimilated too.

But if you were to take this set of new materials and build an entirely new ship altogether, the process of assimilation would be absent. And that is the primary reason why the two scenarios described above had contradictory results.

Think of it in this way. Let’s say you’ve built a huge Lego house built entirely out of yellow blocks. Now, you proceed to replace each yellow block with a red, one by one. While doing so, you wouldn’t end up with a new Lego house even if the end product is completely red (in contrast to the yellow house you started out with). That’s because each red brick became a part of the house when it was replaced. It assimilated. It became one of them.

But again, a very interesting question could be posed. What if those yellow bricks were collected and another house was built that resembled the original house. Which of the two houses would be the original one?

As counter intuitive as this may sound, I’d still say it is the red one. And this, I believe, arises out of something I call ‘assimilation power’. Basically, when one part is removed from another, one part tends to lose its identity of being a part of the object whereas the other retains it. When one plank is removed from Theseus’ ship, it no longer remains a part of Theseus’ ship. It loses that identity. The rest of the ship, however, retains its identity.

Probably this analogy would help convince you more if you aren’t yet. A person excommunicated from a nation (say, the United States) does not remain an American anymore. But all the other citizens of the nation continues to. On the other hand, an immigrant that enters a nation naturally becomes an American.

So, hypothetically, if all the current residents of America were excommunicated one by one and replaced by a new immigrant up to a point of time when all the original residents are banished, which country would be America? The one of the immigrants or the one formed by the excommunicated? Again, I believe the answer is the former.

I do understand that what my line of reasoning may not seem that potent. Particularly, the concept of assimilation power and loss of identity upon removal are some things that I’m not entirely sure of. But again, as it is with almost every question in philosophy, I do hope this encourages some healthy debate. I do not have a lot of comments on my blogs but this time, dear reader, please do make it a point to share your opinions, however polar and contrasting they are to mine.

Finance and Dystopia

 

I don’t know why but it gets really hard to do anything once you’ve progressed to the middle of the summer vacation. It took an immense amount of effort to do something that was even worth mentioning here in spite of there being a post drought for almost a week. Nevertheless, I did finally manage to read up Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (the only book I hadn’t read in Goodreads’ Top 10 entries in the Best Novellas list). The book was a pain in the beginning. It took time to get used to Burgess’ lingo. The issues the book raised were definitely worth some thought but overall, I’d consider it a one-time read.

I had thoroughly underestimated the vastness of Udacity’s Intro to Artificial Intelligence course. I must have spent over 15 hours on it cumulatively and I’m not even halfway through. But the amount  I’ve learnt is immense. AI is seriously something I see myself pursuing and studying in the future. Up until now, I’m done with 10 units of the course with 12 more to go. Hopefully, I’ll follow up with courses which treat its sub branches in depth.

Rommel Rodriguez’s Everything You Wanted To Know About Business and Economics presented a lot of useful information about the Indian Economy and the working of Stock Markets. The writing wasn’t exceptional but it is one book I can fall back on if I needed help with almost anything to do  with money.

Lastly, I’ve started reading Philp Pullman’s His Dark Materials. The Golden Compass has turned out to be a pretty interesting and easy read so far. I hope series lives up to its third place on BBC’s Big Read List.

Introverts, Instagram and Twitter

 

tweet bird chick hatching

I have slacked off in the past few days. I haven’t done tangible stuff which must be evident from the sheer lack of writing material (and hence blog posts) for the past one week or so. It’s about time I returned back to being productive again and not repeat the gradual vegetation I go through every vacation.

That said, I finally got myself an iPod Touch. And for the money, it’s one of the few Apple Products that is actually worth it. The camera and the music are brilliant; pretty much the only reasons I got the device for. I read Nick Bolton’s Hatching Twitter which chronicles the history of the micro blogging site. Although it shared a lot of elements with Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires, it was nowhere nearly as good. But the book could be a symbol of hope to all those people who believe you have to be a prodigious programmer to build products that could revolutionize the Internet (and/or the world). Sometimes a good idea, perseverance and dedication towards bringing it to life can do the trick too.

My latest addition to my collection of read books is Susan Cain’s Quiet. I remember watching a TED Talk by Cain on the importance of introverts in today’s noisy world. The book was a genuinely interesting read and I was able to connect deeply with some of the things she had to say. Most of all, some of my traits which made me brand myself anti-social weren’t things I was supposed to be worried about in the first place. Cain says it’s perfectly fine if you refuse to socialize and prefer to shut yourself with a book rather than party with people. And for someone like me who has gradually shifted from people to books in the past few months, the fact comes across as extremely reassuring.

 

Irrationally Yours

 

It takes a certain amount of audacity to openly challenge the merits of a theory that has earned its creator a Nobel Prize in Economics. But that is exactly what Dan Ariely does in discrediting Gary Becker’s Simple Model Of Rational Crime (SMORC) in his book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty. I became a fan of the former MIT Professor’s writings, theories and experiments when I read his book Predictably Irrational a few weeks back (See Human Behavior and Irrationality). I was a little skeptic about reading his later works. For one, they had lower ratings on Goodreads and I had a feeling I wouldn’t experience nearly as many ‘Aha!’ moments if I read them. Going through more all of Malcolm Gladwell’s major works, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast And Slow and Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, I thought I had covered the majority of ideas existing in the nascent field of Behavioral Economics. I was wrong.

The Upsides of Irrationality seemed like a sequel to Predictably Irrational. And unlike many of the ‘sequels’ in non-fiction, it had a set of ideas that were novel and different from its predecessors. And although this opinion is not shared by the majority of the 50,000 plus readers that rated Ariely’s books, I thought this was actually better than Predictably Irrational. But I’m probably being biased because of the kind of topics he covered. Ariely’s research on how online dating works and its failure to act as an effective medium gave  me a lot of insights into how to actually approach the concept of social discovery, something that I intend on working on as a long term goal.

As I had done with Predictably Irrational, I am going to summarize the major ideas presented by the book so that the reader (and later on, I) can look it up quickly when necessary.

• Although it may sound counter-intuitive, handing out large bonuses to senior executives decreases their performance. This is because performance v/s rewards follows an inverse U curve. Rewards entail higher performance only up to a certain point and then proceeds to actually hamper it.
• Even though people in the workplace work for money, it is incredibly important that they believe that what they are doing is meaningful and beneficial to a certain group of people. If made to do meaningless tasks, people will slack and perform below expectations, even if they are being paid for performing the task.
• We tend to overvalue the things we create or have believe had some part in its creation. This is probably the reason why we tend to love products which we have customized or had a small role in building (such as IKEA furniture).
• Similarly, we tend to think of ideas that we have generated to be vastly superior. This happens even if the ‘original’ idea has been subconsciously planted in our heads. Conversely, we have a hard time accepting the novelty and brilliance of the ideas of others, especially rivals. This is one of the reasons Sony refused to create its own version of the iPod and chose to stick, rather unsuccessfully, to its rapidly out-dating Walkman.
• We tend to exact revenge even if it ends up resulting in an economic loss to us. The rational economic model effectively disappears in the face of a scorned man/woman. We also tend to turn a blind eye towards who we are exacting revenge on i.e we are unable to differentiate between principal and agent.
• We adapt to happiness and pain faster than we think. Although this may sound counter-intuitive, it is best to experience pleasure over spaced intervals and pain all at once in one shot.
• The parameters on which dating sites match people or which we think are important are effectively useless in fostering happy, long lasting relationships. What people want in their partners and what they say they want are different things. A more effective method of online dating would be having prospective couples experience something on the internet (such as art, music or movies) together and see how they like spending time with each other virtually.
• We tend to be more responsive to pleas which have an emotional connect than statistics. People are more likely to donate for a little girl having cancer than donate for a tsunami relief fund which has claimed the lives of over 10,000 people.
• We tend to make bad decisions when in an unstable emotional state and that bad decision persists and eventually turns into bad habit as humans tend to recall past activities but not past emotional states.

Illustrative of couple representing online dating

Ariely’s third book, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty had him explaining man’s constant struggle towards balancing a cost-benefit analysis of every situation (as suggested by the SMORC model) and his efforts to maintain his self-image of an honest, wonderful person.

What may come as a severe blow to the SMORC model and traditional economics in general is the fact that humans don’t tend to be more dishonest in the face of a larger gain or if the probability of getting caught is reduced. Alternatively, it depends on a variety of psychological factors such as the ability to rationalize, the distance from cash, altruism, moral code reminders etc. I must confess my love for the field of Behavioral Economics increases by the day. I’m pretty sure I’ll be picking up more books on the subject in the near future. It has this uncanny ability of making you feel powerful, of giving you an image of yourself as a person who understands the other far more and far better than the vice versa.

The Struggle For Meaning

 

UNSPECIFIED – CIRCA 1948: Viktor Frankl and his second wife Eleonore, Photograph, Around 1948 (Photo by Imagno/Getty Images) [Viktor Frankl mit seiner zweiten Ehefrau Eleonore, Photographie, Um 1948]

I was blown away. Viktor Frankl’s semi-autobiography, Man’s Search For Meaning is probably the most moving book I’ll ever read. In fact, I’d be incredibly surprised if I came across a book, in my life, which inspired me as much as this one did. At the age of thirty seven, Frankl was imprisoned by the Nazis in the world’s most deadly and infamous concentration camp at Auschwitz. And as he narrates his experience there, he tries to convince us that the greatest suffering, the greatest pains could be borne if we could carve meaning out of it.

Frankl invented an entirely new field of psychoanalysis which he called logotherapy. The second half of the book explains logotherapy to the general audience. Unlike the existing schools of philosophical thought which stated that man’s life is centered around deriving pleasure (Sigmund Freud) or power, logotherapy states that it centered around meaning. We spend our entire lives trying to find the significance of our existence. And this significance changes from time to time but it is what makes us human. It is what keeps us alive. To quote Nietzsche,

He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.

There are three possible sources of meaning: in working for something you feel is significant to your life, in loving another person and in courage during suffering that you cannot avoid. Frankl was one of the very few who was able to find meaning from the third source. In fact, it is what, he says, that allowed him to survive in a place where the chances of coming out alive were 1 in 28.

Some of the book’s quotes are hauntingly beautiful. In conclusion to this post, I’m going to list down the ones I’ve made notes about on my Kindle. For those reading this post, I would seriously recommend you get this book and give it a read. It’s short, will take no more than 3 hours to complete. But it will, more often than not, end up changing the way you look at life.

• The salvation of man is through love and in love
• Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases to be of importance.
• Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death
• No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same
• There is only one thing I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings
• What you have experienced, no power on Earth can take from you
• Suffering ceases to be suffering, at the moment it finds a meaning

 

Pop Psychology

 

I had stumbled upon Gladwell when I spotted his Outliers, as one of the few recurring books in most Business books lists on Goodreads. As a result, I ended up giving it a try. And as I had mentioned in The Secret of Success, it was a thoroughly interesting read. The book make me look into his bibliography and try out his other books as their themes were something I thought I’d be deeply interested in. Fortunately, my intuitions weren’t wrong.

Gladwell’s books effortlessly covers a variety of different fields such as Psychology, Marketing, Economics and Sociology to give us intriguing stories and novel insights into the human behavior. Some have branded his writing as pop psychology because of the kind of reach he has despite writing on a subject that is relatively lesser known. His David and Goliath was an ode to all the underdogs who overcame great difficulties to triumph over their Goliaths. The story of how dyslexia actually helped Gary Cohn become the president of Goldman Sachs and how Frierich’s troubled childhood was majorly responsible for him pioneering an approach towards the treatment of leukemia shows us how our perceived weaknesses can often be turned into our greatest strengths. Everyone saw David’s size as his weakness. But his size gave him his speed which turned out to be the deciding factor in Bible’s most famous battle.

FILE – In this Aug. 15, 2014, file photo, a lighted sign marks the Goldman Sachs trading post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Goldman Sachs reports quarterly financial results on Thursday, July 16, 2015. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

Blink! strongly reminded me of the concept of System 1 proposed by Daniel Kahneman in his magnum opus, Thinking Fast and Slow. Essentially, Gladwell tries to educate us about the extraordinary power of subconscious cognition and how we can learn to control and use its power. Through case studies of the FACS, Blink! tells us of the remarkable story of Ekman and his lifetime effort to categorize facial expressions. By the time he was done, his subconscious could recognize with incredible accuracy as to whether a person was lying, flirting, had malicious intentions, faking etc. This, to me, was the zenith of the power of human intellect. Blink! also made a strong case about how our unconscious also tends to stereotype and create prejudices that lead to ugly outcomes.

The latest book I read, The Tipping Point, was an attempt at explaining the cause of social epidemics. Often, we are amazed by the meteoric rise of a product or a person over an extremely short period of time. Gladwell’s theory that epidemics rely on 3 phenomena: The Law of the Few, The Stickiness Factor and The Power of Context gives a very compelling explanation towards understanding epidemics. Personally, I feel this is one book every person in marketing must read. The insights into some of the biggest hits such as Hush Puppies shoes, Sesame Street and Airwalk will definitely serve as a good guide as to how to go about marketing a particular product. The last few chapters strongly reminded me of Freakonomics as The Tipping Point went about trying to understand the intricacies of suicide and smoking. Overall, these were books I thoroughly enjoyed. And I’ll have to admit that few books have given me so many novel insights and theories as this one has. It is genuinely refreshing to read something that surprises, especially when you’ve read most of the popular literature of that particular genre.