Links and Notes - May 1st 2020

It's a new month! As someone on Twitter pointed out, March felt like it was crawling through sludge. April felt like Usain Bolt high on Red Bull.

Coronavirus updates

The Covid-19 pandemic continues. I wouldn't want to say unabated since it is starting to show downward trends. But we are definitely not past the roughest patch yet. I'm currently trying to complete a mini essay on the balance between hard work and self care during this time. As the world ebbs back and forth to a complete economic collapse, it's becoming harder to think of the multiple futures to prepare for. I'm hoping for the best. Preparing for the worst.

Sri Lanka is once again reporting the start of a decline in currently active cases. As we go further, I hope to see larger clusters of people recovering and hopefully marking the end of the peak for us. Technically, the peak might have come much earlier but we seemed to have had very poor handling of military personnel who were doing  a lot of work with Covid suspected patients including those in the drug market. From the outside it seems that military were not provided adequate protection and as a result we saw a spike of over 200 cases. Some of the Navy which saw most of these cases were also granted leave and had traveled back home carrying the virus. We've been under curfew so hopefully this has prevented the creation of new clusters.

But it was a poor slip up and has once again highlighted the need to understand Sri Lanka's somewhat abusive relationship with the tri forces. On one hand they are loved and revered to the point where it's sometimes detrimental as challenges to their relationship with the law is seen as unpatriotic. On the other hand, after years of their participation in infrastructure improvement in the country, it feels like their rights to humane working conditions is seen as secondary. The latter seems linked to the ideas and images we have around military obedience. In my opinion, that view feels abusive. My hope is that we take these incidents to open a conversation about what military work in non war time should look like. It's difficult though when there's so much national pride tied into it. Conversations tend to get toxic very quickly.

Self hosted software

In my post about upgrading the blog, I mentioned that I want to setup servers for testing. One of my hopes for myself for a while now has been to self host a suite of software. I'm thinking:

  • Todo list/project management/time tracking software
    • There's a lot of this. Need to evaluate.
  • Writing (done!)
  • Git!
    • This is mostly for learning. Github provides all I need
    • I'm currently looking at lightweight projects like gittea or gogs
  • Note taking
    • Trillium notes might be a good candidate
  • RSS reader
  • Social media
    • Decentralized things like Mastodon which also happens to be HEAVY!!!

While I'd love to do file/photo storage as well, I don't think I'm ready to trust myself on something that important just yet

Project Euler

I started working on project euler today. One unfortunate thing of Project Euler is that they don't allow discussing solutions to the problem past problem 100. Doing so may result in you even getting banned. Either way. I completed problem number 1 today which was a return to basic mathematical formulas in finding the sum of numbers. I even learnt something new.

I know that the sum of all numbers is n(n+1)/2. What I didn't know was that if you were adding up a sequence of a multiple of numbers, the formula simply multiplies by that number. For example, if were adding up the first 4 multiples of 7, the formula would be 7n(n+1)/2. Neat!

Posted on May 01 2020 by Adnan Issadeen