True Detective Season 2

Warning: Spoilers for True Detective Season 2 follow. Proceed only if you have completed it. Season 2 was not as strong as previous one but it did stand on its own and had some good acting and great music.

August 13, 2015 · 2 min · Ishan Sharma

Ghostery Causes Blank Popups in Firefox 40

If you just upgraded to Firefox 40 and get blank popups, Ghostery may be to blame. I was getting blank popups anytime a page opened a share or save dialog (tried Twitter, Pinboard and Facebook). Here’s what I was seeing when trying to share anything: After some troubleshooting, I disabled Ghostery and everything works like a charm now! Of course, this means that you won’t have protection from tracking in between. I’d suggest using Disconnect till Ghostery is fixed. ...

August 12, 2015 · 1 min · Ishan Sharma

Enabling Developer Mode on Mac

If you say ‘No’ to Xcode’s prompt to enable developer mode first time, it will ask for your password every time after that. Want to get rid of that? Good news: It’s one command away!

June 27, 2015 · 1 min · Ishan Sharma

Who killed Stannis

Brienne of Tarth wasn’t responsible! No, not Melissandre. The responsible people were: Show writers! I just watched the Battle of Ice (outside Winterfell) again and the way they handled this was very very stupid! First, I love the show and I understand that they have time and budget requirements. But that doesn’t mean that they can just go and butcher a character like that. I have read it many times on reddit and also feel from watching the show that show writers hate Stannis. He’s a much better character in the books. ...

June 26, 2015 · 2 min · Ishan Sharma

5 Useful Apps for New OS X Users

Recently got a Mac? Or looking for nice apps to save time and increase productivity? Look no further, here are 5 useful apps that you must try out!

June 7, 2015 · 3 min · Ishan Sharma

Why Stannis Baratheon Has Best Claim To Iron Throne

Spoiler alert: This post contains show spoilers. Only proceed if you have watched Season 5.

June 4, 2015 · 4 min · Ishan Sharma

[Windows Issue] php.exe works but php doesn't? Here's the fix!

I just lost 47% of my hair trying to figure out a simple problem. All this for a simple 2 minute solution. I wanted to run composer and for that, I wanted to install PHP manually. (There’s no need to. As far as I have read, it should work well with WAMP packages like EasyPHP and WAMP Server). So, I diligently followed the simple instructions, installed composer. Typed composer to run it and bam, powershell threw this error message at me: ...

February 21, 2015 · 2 min · Ishan Sharma

Why You Should Never Set Your Mail Client To Use Dedicated GPU

Or why my laptop was overheating! In March, I wanted to replace my Dell which was good but was giving frequent blue screens. I was tired of endless blue screens and wanted something good. I am a gamer as well, so I ended up with two options: A Lenovo laptop with high end specs. A HP ‘budget gaming’ laptop with AMD stuff. Now, I would have happily gone with Lenovo as it could beat HP any day but there was one major issue: ...

November 16, 2014 · 2 min · Ishan Sharma

Dear Ubisoft, At Least Try Next Time

Ubisoft, Ubisoft, Ubisoft. Seems like they are competing with EA for the throne of ‘Most Hated Company’. It is hard to believe that the company that made game series like Assassin’s Creed, Prince of Persia and Far Cry is now focusing on money more. Even that is nor a problem. But now, they are not even optimising their games well and then blaming it on others. Recently released Assassin’s Creed Unity has several performance issues including missing textures. Take a look: ...

November 15, 2014 · 2 min · Ishan Sharma

HR is NOT Your Friend

I just went through a letter to Amazon Executives from Kivin Varghese. It’s quite long at 29 pages. You may read it here. Here’s a summary: Kindle team wrote buggy software and Kivin’s manager, Munira, didn’t listen to anything about improvements. Personally, you can get an idea of her incompetency from the fact that she didn’t give priority to fixing delay of 5+ seconds on an ad. Kivin tried multiple times to bring this to her attention. “JEFF BLACKBURN, THE SVP OF THE GROUP AND DIRECT REPORT OF JEFF BEZOS” points out the delay. Munira still says it is hard to fix. When Kivin has a plan already. Kivin talks to higher authorities. Munira’s starts criticizing him after this. Kivin asks HR for transfer. HR is friend of Munira, tells her. He’s put into a training program that stops transfers for 12 months. Kivin figures out a bug in ad program that causes an advertiser to overspend. Basically, $10 gets credited to thousands of people who didn’t even see ad! Kivin wants to be transparent. Munira asks to spin this as good news. Kivin refuses, tries everything, gets fired with 2 week severence package and 18 month non compete clause. Kivin sues. Now is the best part: Turns out Munira had falsified her education. Her resume said she had Bachelors and Masters from Stanford. Number of actual degrees she has from Stanford: 0. Apart from the dramatic tale, the key lesson is something I found in Hacker News dicsussion: ...

November 13, 2014 · 3 min · Ishan Sharma