Getting into Google's knowledge graph
05 Oct 2015
Years ago, I was forced to go through a series of audio lectures by Professor Steven L. Goldman on Great Scientific Ideas That Changed the World. It was part of a undergraduate course, so I had to listen, read and understand the lectures. Turned out, it was one of best things I did during graduation. I recommend anyone interested in learning history of science and how it evolved and shaped our modern world to go through the lectures. If you are more of a reader than listener, transcript of those lectures is available in PDF which you can read on your kindle or print out and read on paper. It will be one of best things you’ll read about our modern world and how science played an elementary role in building it.
I wrote a vagrant file for local setup of jekyll for this blog last week. One really annoying bug that bothered me was that in spite of installing ruby2.0 package, bundle install command was failing on different bundles again and again with very obscure errors. Digging in deep revealed in spite of installing ruby2.0 only, /usr/bin/ruby was pointing to ruby1.9. I thought I was at fault first, but after some retries concluded, either of ruby, ubuntu or jekyll screwed up. Ruby 2.0 is requirement for jekyll, so symlinking /usr/bin/ruby2.0 to /usr/bin/ruby solved the issue, but if anything else depended on ruby1.9 in ubuntu, it would break. I didn’t really care because all I wanted with my ubuntu/vagrant vm was running jekyll so I could preview my blog before pushing it. Today after some google search I found it was indeed a bug by Ubuntu itself. You can see a lot of bashing going on at Bug#1310292: installing ruby2.0 results in ruby 1.9.3-p484 as default version. It feels good to find bugs in such big scale, quality software. You find satisfaction in knowing you aren’t the only one introducing stupid bugs in production.
Ever since I graduated, I have been very very interested in building distributed fault tolerant systems and I read a lot about them. In my part time, I also work on some hobby projects to get better understanding of modern distributed systems. Over the time, I have made a good collection of useful resources such as papers, lectures and other readings. Here’s my collection on distributed systems shared with public via Google drive. Hope it helps someone interested in or working on distributed systems.
Vagrant makes life easier and keeps your machine clean. I have made a vagrant file for github pages and am sharing it here so you don’t have to scratch head and says some nasty things to ruby and gems as I did.