After a brief hiatus with both writing down my thoughts and attempting to recover the old Ghost blog’s contents, decided to leave things as is and move on. A certain something I’d do well to implement in life otherwise too. As a Ctrl-F5 moment, decided to write something from scratch and used the NodeJS HTTP server I wrote a few months back along with a markdown to HTML converter to set this blog up. Given content here is rather simple in both nature and extent, this should do instead of the rather bloated Ghost install from the last time. ...

The start to the weekend opens up with breaking the early schedules and this one somehow did not feel bad the way it happened. What did however feel weird, was how the entirety wrapped up, late in the evening. A certain sense of remorse over what has been lost over the years, my dogged sticking to things that have yet to come to fruition which lay at the heart of some of those losses, has gotten rekindled. ...

Had a fair long break from writing about vedAnta proper now. So, in an attempt to break the hiatus, wrote a bit on the stature of saguNopAsana as held by vivaraNa school from prakAshAtmayati’s pa~ncapAdikA vivaraNa, and its untenable nature. There is a bit I realize that can be extended out on the avidyAkalpita jnapti that I put out around the middle, which can be countered with asatyAt satyasiddhi, but a better rejoinder there would be the sublime one from veNkaTanAtha’s asatyAtsatyasiddhibha~Nga. ...

Over the last few months, there are few things that I learnt the hard way. But one stands apart from all, in how it has come back to help me in immediate use/work. Three years back, when we moved from using AWS to DigitalOcean, our focus was singular - costs. At a point when pinching pennies was very much a valid thing to do, it made a lot of sense. A savings of $2.5 when the base cost is $5 after all, translates to one more box provided for each two provisioned. ...

“You know, I did lie to you a bit”, her voice in the middle of the night did put him through a vortex. A moment’s pause later, her deep gaze into his eyes unwavering, she continued. “With each time I expressed myself, I felt I cheated a bit”; the more the statements, more indeed was his confusion and yet constant around, his smile. “After all”, she said, “is it not the water lily that blooms at the sight of the moon?”; his face a bit brighter now seeing where she was headed. ...

A couple of years back someone has suggested in a seemingly concerned tone that a good schedule would do me a lot of good. The irony was not in the suggestion, not the least in how I could deal with it. It lay in who did. Fast forward to today and I am reminded of a certain context from bhagavad Gita. In one of the statements Krishna makes, he says even the least of beings would mock you leaving the war front. Ramanuja while commenting on this explains capable and incapable of beings (समर्थानि असमर्थानि च भूतानि). ...

What then is the next progression in writing one's own CMS/Blog engine for whatever the joy? That was the question that was running at the back of my head as I sat down watching the oddly timed rains in the evening. Until last week, I had been using couple of modes to create new posts, in terms of decreasing orders of pain - adding markdown files manually committed to the repository and using Github’s web interface to create a new post from the drafts. ...

Long story short, created a virtualenv clone for NodeJS. Provides a flow that borrows from the convenience of both n and virtualenv Rationale At crisp, NodeJS powers our article content extraction services. A cause of concern during development/ deployment has been version maintenance. With containers, smaller team bandwidths meant high maintenance costs. Currently, n powers most of our NodeJS versioning requirements. It has been convenient for the most part since it installs a non-intrusive binary at /usr/local. The missing part with n was with a single version’s use between two packages with different needs. ...

The last few weeks have been taxing with things that wrap up, and preparing for what’s ahead in every sense. Part of the former has been running long with cold storage and consolidating things. A major concern with most of the operations has been wherever we introduced Node into the mix. Or, to be precise, the node modules black holes; the obvious joke of most tech-meme circuits. Where it became particularly problematic was the amount of n-th degree dependencies’ modules. A certain repo that we were working with added up to about 600M. Most of it coming from the nested, never ending chain of node_modules, this is a certain pain in the neck. ...

The beauty of ascertaining issues that are sporadic is their providing sensible defaults. Odd word choice in a sense, but I’ve come to agree that a sensible default take with firefighting is calm. Add to that, a singular focus. The redis cache issue we had got solved over the weekend thanks to switching to a newer hosted Redis infra on AWS. Now, that raises another question - do we know what the RC was? ...