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Review: Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance

Elon Musk has been called eccentric, egomaniac and outright crazy by his detractors.  That said, Ashlee Vance presents a well researched unbiased biography of Musk, after talking to people from all walks of his life, people from both the pro and anti Musk groups. My verdict -> it is an amazing book and very well narrated by Fred Sanders. Yes books these days mean ‘Audible’ to me as I go through my daily morning biking. Musk had a very difficult childhood and came to the US with absolutely no wealth. But his ambition to change the world and his brilliant mind has made him a billionaire today. He has created ‘history changing’ companies like SpaceX, Tesla, SolarCity and many more. Probably history will look back at him and worship him as one of the top contributors to humanity and its survival. The real life iron man. Musk has set out to correct humanity’s path - a path towards sustainable energy and clean earth, and to turn us to a multi planet species. We do...

AI for Everyone

Few days ago, Coursera launched the ' AI for Everyone ' online non-technical course by deeplearning.ai conducted by the famous Andrew NG  himself. 'AI for Everyone' gives a very good introduction to AI and you don't have to be a techie to understand this course. It is useful regardless of your background or your current job role. This is a course even CEOs and business leaders can take to get a quick insight of what AI can and can't do. It will provide pointers on how you can get your company and/or your career ready to ride the coming wave of AI. AI is already here and Andrew keeps repeating it is the next Electricity for us. The course provides practical steps and checklists to get you started with your first AI project. I enjoyed the learning.

MATLAB Onramp course

I recently registered for the Machine Learning, Stanford University online course at Coursera - conducted by the famous Andrew Ng himself. An amazing experience I must say. He puts across the concepts so well that even your lack of advanced Math knowledge is not a barrier and you soon pick up the concepts quite well. The quizzes and assignments are real good. As part of this course you have to submit your ML algorithms in either Octave or Matlab and I chose the latter. Did a quick online self paced course on Matlab at Mathworks, which was quite interesting and lo and behold the completion certificate is seen below 😊

Sapiens, Homo Deus & 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Posting after a long long time and this is not a post on development. Just finished listening to these 3 mind blowing audio books @ Audible by Yuval Noah Harari  https://www.ynharari.com/ Sapiens Homo Deus 21 Lessons for the 21st Century Amazing the way he describes -- how we became the number one species on this planet and the unknown future that we are heading into. Some very interesting topics that I personally liked: 1. How tech (AI, ML etc) are going to change and affect everything and everyone 2. A world run by algorithms 3. Humans now trying to evolve into "Gods" - Immortal, Omnipresent and Omniscient 4. Billions of years of Organic evolution vs Human invented Inorganic rapid evolution Do read these books and they will seed many new ideas and thoughts in you. Next onto Elon Musk's biography...

Winners of the jQuery Mobile Cookbook giveaway

I had earlier announced that I would be giving away 2 copies of my book, jQuery Mobile Cookbook here . I wish to thank all the participants who sent in their entries from across the world. Thrilled by your response.  Due to unavoidable circumstances, there was a delay in me procuring the books and so I was not able to announce the winners sooner. But now here they are: Congratulations !!! Winner of the hard copy from India:  Vasudevan P Winner of the e-book from Spain:  Miguel Angel The two winners were randomly chosen by me without any bias and have been informed by direct email. They will be receiving their copies soon. The decision is final and not subject to review or contest. Thanks again to all those who participated! Link to the book:  http://www.packtpub.com/jquery-mobile-cookbook/book Extract from the publisher website: Overview: Create applications that use custom animations and use various techniques to improve application perfo...

Giving away 2 free copies of jQuery Mobile Cookbook

I wish to thank all my friends, readers and well wishers. Your constant encouragement and support helped me complete my very first published book. I'm now very glad to announce that my book jQuery Mobile Cookbook just got published by Packt Publishers. The link is here:  http://www.packtpub.com/jquery-mobile-cookbook/book Extract from the publisher website: Overview: Create applications that use custom animations and use various techniques to improve application performance Use and customize the various controls such as toolbars, buttons, and lists with custom icons, icon sprites, styles, and themes Write simple but powerful scripts to manipulate the various configurations and work with the events, methods, and utilities which are provided by the framework What you will learn from this book: Create single-page and multi-page applications that use custom CSS and JavaScript transitions; improve performance using Prefetch, DOM-Cache, and Application Cache Use fi...

Node.js: Notes on Install and Upgrade on Ubuntu

To install Node.js, first install the below prerequisite and add the node.js repository. # sudo apt-get install python-software-properties # sudo apt-add-repository ppa:chris-lea/node.js  Now install Node.js and npm (the Node Packet Manager). # sudo apt-get update # sudo apt-get install nodejs npm Thats it. Your Node.js is ready. Test by running the below command. # node -v v0.6.18 Node.js stable releases are done quite frequently. To upgrade run, # sudo apt-get update # sudo apt-get upgrade nodejs npm   You could also use the Ubuntu Update Manager to do the update. If you are the kind who prefers to directly build from the sources then, # cd <directory> # sudo wget http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.6.18/node-v0.6.18.tar.gz # sudo tar -zxf node-v0.6.18.tar.gz # cd node-v0.6.18 # sudo ./configure # sudo make # sudo make install # node -v v0.6.18 The latest version was v0.6.18 at the time of writing this post. For other platforms, installation is...