Author: nigelb

Yearly Review
Success
- Run: As I’ve written before, this year has been a spectacular success with running. I’ve run 800 km and I’ve just bought a cycle. Here’s to more exercise! This years goals are 2000 km of running, 3000 km of cycling, and to finish one full marathon.
- Read non-fiction: I’ve read a few non-fiction books so far and they’ve been enlightening. This year, I’ll try to add reviews of books I read. I’ll be picking up a lot of books based on recommendation from Farnam Street Blog. This year’s goal is simple, for every 3 non-fiction books, I can read one fiction 🙂
Not Quite Success
- Learn C and JavaScript: I didn’t manage the time to squeeze this into my schedule. I did manage to build some things with JavaScript, so it’s a partial win. I will most probably abandon this in favour of learning Rust or Go.
- Cut down servers: When you need automation for personal servers, you know it has gone too far. I’m back down to just two servers these days. This is how far I can go without causing serious outage to how I do things.
- Study: I’m still yet to complete a MOOC course successfully. This one is a challenge for this year to go along with my actual studies.
New Challenges
- Accounting: Last year, I finally got down to getting a regular accounting habit. This year, I’d like to push that to keeping accounts and sticking to budgets.
- Cooking: I’ve been trying (and failing) to cook more and eat restaurant food less. I will be tackling this in a slow and steady manner 🙂
- Android Development: I’ve been using Android for a while and I haven’t yet build anything for it. This year, I’ll be experimenting on building a few apps for personal use, nothing big for sure.
Image Credit: Delhi, India Gate by Arian Zwegers on Flickr.
2016-01-08
Running in 2015
Last year, I missed the Airtel Delhi Half Marathon. It was just after I moved to Delhi and I had no confidence I could run a half marathon anyway. Any race over 5 km looked like a tough deal back then. All through winter, I was lazy because of the cold. It was comfortable to snuggle in my blanket than step out to run. Eventually, I did start running just as the summer started to hit. My first run in Faridabad doesn’t seem like a long time ago anymore. I remember panicking about my ability to finish ADHM if 8 km felt as difficult as it did.
I’ve run quite a lot in the last year. In fact, I’ve got a graph of it. I spent a day geeking out about various graph options to finally arrive at this one 😀
Strava also has a great video which captures my year in running quite accurately!
If I had one thing to take away from this year is to keep running. There are a lot of plans around to start running. Following them religiously doesn’t matter. What matters is you go out to run 3 to 5 times a week, everything else will follow.
Back to ADHM, I was disappointed with my performance this year. I felt like I short-changed myself by not running faster than 2h 10min. I also panicked at the start and ran faster than I should have – I did the same mistake at Faridabad. Now I’ve learned my lesson and hope to not repeat it next year. Next year, I’m hoping to train on a more advanced plan to improve my time. I’ll also have a better base mileage to start and will have lost a bunch of weight. I’ve gone from finishing my first half marathon in 2:46:28 to finishing ADHM in 2:11:21 – an improvement of 37 minutes and 7 seconds. That’s way better than I could have asked for. I already know that I can do better if I start a full 3 to 4 month prep for ADHM in 2016.

I have lofty goals for 2016:
- Run my first full marathon.
- Run a total of 2000 km in the year.
- Cycling a total of 3000 km in the year (oh,I have a cycle now!).
I don’t know if I can do it, but a near miss with 1900 km of running is still commendable!
2016-01-01
Locked In
Last week, I had the funniest thing happen to me. The maid came home when I was cooking. She was pretty distracted and when she left, she bolted the door from outside. I work from home, so there’s often no need to step out of the house for the entire day. I didn’t discover that I was locked in until the next morning when I tried to step out to keep the garbage bin out.
I didn’t want to bother anyone since I had food in the house and there was nothing I needed urgently. Of course, I understand this is a fire hazard, but I figured the maid would come later in the day and unlock me. I later called her and realized she wasn’t coming. I had to call my significant other to open the door. Goes on to say, sometimes the Princess needs to rescue the Prince from the locked tower (I do live on the 4th floor and there’s no elevator).
2015-10-23
Quick SOCKS proxying with ssh
This is mostly relevant for *nix users. OpenSSH has a feature that lets you setup a SOCKS proxy pretty easily. This helps work around blocked sites without too much setup overhead.
Here’s what you do.
```
ssh -ND 10000 user@myserver.com 
```
The -D flag specifies the local port that will be forwarded to the remote server. The -N flag makes sure that after the connection is made, no remote command is executed.
Now, open Firefox -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Network -> Settings. Select the “Manual proxy settings” option and enter localhost into SOCKS Host and 10000 into Port. Press OK. Now when you browse the internet on this instance of Firefox, the traffic should be routed through the server.

I’ve used if often to get around blocks and especially to get around local routing issues.
Remember, if your ssh connection breaks, your can’t visit any websites until you re-establish the connection. After you’re done, set the proxy settings back to the default (“Use System Proxy Settings”).
2015-10-14
Remembering Michael
Michael Bauer, a good friend and a colleague at Open Knowledge for nearly 2 years passed away a month ago. I’m still finding it hard to process that he’s passed away. He’d congratulated me on my run just the day before. And this is the final tweet from his Twitter account.
@nigelbabu well done btw! Now kick it tomorrow as welll!
— Michael Bauer (@mihi_tr) September 12, 2015

I met Michael for the first time in winter of 2013. It was my first summit after starting at Open Knowledge. Michael, Friedrich, Lucy, Tryggvi, I, and a few others were holed up in Rufus’ kitchen getting briefed on Openspending from Friedrich. Over the years, we’ve worked together to deliver trainings and we met each other at the Open Knowledge summits and events. I sat through one of Michael’s trainings last year in Tanzania on cleaning data. I learned quite a lot about cleaning up data from him that day. He got the entire room comfortable about learning new things. I could see their joy in understanding how to use the right tools.

After Michael left Open Knowledge, we kept in touch on #running on irc.freenode.net and Twitter. I’d just started running this year and he encouraged me to do longer distances. As I continue running, I’ll surely be thinking of Michael every day.
At the last summit we both attended in Cambridge, Michael had brought Pink sunglasses and he coaxed me into having this hilarious picture taken. I miss Michael’s infectious energy and silliness.

2015-10-13