About I'm Varun - programmer, travel enthusiast, collector of adventures, and serial comma lover. Living in sunny Sydney, Australia. Contact me Linkedin - @vnaik Github - @varunnaik E-mail - me [AT] vnaik.com Instagram - @varun_naik_ About this website This website is built with Zola using a customised Lightspeed theme and Edward Tufte's ET-Book font. This site uses no Javascript (except…
Patrick Suskind, 1985 This is a gripping book that thoroughly captivates from beginning to end. It concerns Jean-Baptise Grenouille, an orphan in 1700's France. Grenouille is a genius and psycopath possessing a superhuman ability to smell, to dissect scents and intuitively combine scents into new and irresistible combinations. An often underrated and overlooked sense, this book underscores…
Kate Grenville, 2017 In this book, Australian author Kate Grenville looks at fragrances - present in everything from perfumes to deodorants to dish soap to scented garbage bags, and examines the evidence - or lack thereof - for their safety. Kate points out that nearly 17% of the population has some fragrance sensitivity that results in breathing difficulties and other health problems. And yet…
As Docker becomes more and more popular, the number of security exploits found is only likely to go up. It is quite important to configure a Docker container properly to prevent major security problems, yet this is not often done in practice. The following rules of thumb should help harden a Docker container and make it more secure in production. Do not run Docker as root. If you are in the habit…
Handling time when developing can be tricky. Time calculations depend on imprecise and variable physical features (eg. leap seconds to account for the rotation of the earth) and socio-political features (eg. time zones) and this means there could be several pitfalls between expectation and reality when working with time. First, an introduction to certain time-related concepts. UTC UTC provides a…
With an increasing number of breaches, intrusions, and data thefts, securing a web application is extremely important. On the other hand, programmers often do not have a strong grasp of how attacks work and how to mitigate them. This post attempts to close that gap a little. CSRF Cross-Site Request Forgery is an attack where a third party forces a user to execute actions against a site where they…
Tim Marshall, 2015 This book examines how a country's decisions and actions are influenced primarily by its geography - natural landscape features, neighbors, and topography. Drawing lines on a map while disregarding the topography and the geographical cultures in an area is asking for trouble. The book looks at ten maps, including Russia, The United States, China, The Middle East, Africa,…
C.J. Chivers, 2010 This book explores the political and economic conditions that gave rise to the assault rifle - with a focus on the AK-47 - and how assault rifles have shaped war and security around the world since the end of the cold war. It starts off with a short history of automatic weapons - starting from the earliest ones like the Gatling gun - and its effective use by colonisers to…
Installing packages with npm, pip and the like is such a routine part of software development that we rarely even pause to think about it, often installing packages as recommended by an answer on Stackoverflow without a second thought. However, there is a growing trend of extensions and packages being taken over by hackers and advertising companies. [1] [2] [3] [4] [8] [9] This means installing…
Nicholas de Monchaux, 2011 This book explores the history behind the space suit used for the Apollo missions and how an unconventional (for space exploration) company that manufactured girdles and bras went toe-to-toe with the top engineering and technology firms of the era for the contract to make the Apollo spacesuit - and won. Early spacesuits were clunky and hard to move in, not very…
Eric Schlosser, 2013 This book explores, in depth, a topic that many of us don't really givee a thought about - the safety of nuclear weapons. The concept of 'safe' nuclear weapons sounds like an oxymoron - after all, these are weapons designed to kill thousands, or even millions of people. But because nuclear wars are rare, and nuclear weapons are common, people are more likely to…
The Dutch artist M.C. Escher is one of my favourite artists. His surreal depictions of recursion, self-reference, and infinity strike a strong chord with me as a programmer. This is an attempt at creating artwork inspired by his famous self-portrait, using Javascript and ThreeJs, Pixel Shaders, and a phone camera. First, the result: A sphere that 'reflects' the image from your webcam.…
Marc Levinson, 2006 When we think about how technology has shaped civilization, we often think of glamourous technologies - such as the Internet, the microchip, or the light bulb. However, mundane, everyday stuff - such as the barbed wire fence, or in the case of this book, the humble shipping container, has had a much bigger impact on humanity than people realise. The shipping container brought…
Jack Weatherford, 2004 A very insightful book that illustrates how much Genghis Khan was responsible for laying the foundations of the modern world. From the separation of church and state, religious tolerance, the postal system, a unified calendar, and cannons, to the creation of the basis of modern China and Russia, Genghis Khan had a major impact on civilization. While his conquests and…
@media (max-width: 500px) { figure { margin: 0 auto; } } I recently came across this interesting geometric pattern that involves squares (trapezoids, more precisely). This is an exploration of this pattern. All illustrations on this page are programatically generated in your browser. View source to see more. This pattern is made up of several alternating squares, each containing a number of…
Using a phone to verify identity - eg. when signing up for a service online - is quite common these days. This typically happens by sending an SMS to your phone with a code that you type into the website - two factor authentication. One reason companies do this is to make it harder for people to create throwaway accounts to spam the service, although this is often done also for security. While…
OVATION OF THE SEAS, March 12 2020 An RTL-SDR radio dongle can pick up all kinds of interesting radio signals using cheap hardware that connects to a laptop or Raspberry Pi over USB. The dongle and associated software allow accesssing these signals programatically using Python or your language of choice. The RTL-SDR website lists several signal types including military aviation satellite marine…