Start Right

This weekend I decided to spend 30 minutes watching 3 TED videos I had bookmarked a while ago.

I thought I should summarize the points into this blog in a flow which makes sense to the time-pressed retards we are fast becoming!

In Short, for folks with just 5 minutes – start-right with this 3 page ppt. Courtesy TED.

Video 1 spoke about Success through 8 points

Crisp and to the point – It would be hard to find anomalies to the above 8 points if you look at successful people in history.

Video 2 – To me success is about conveying the right ideas well so that people will listen. To speak and for others to stop, sit and take notice is a both a prerequisite and an after effect of success. The video below speaks about a few important things to be aware of while putting forth your thoughts in the open. Again crisp and clear.

Video 3 was all about Motivating people to work or achieve in the 21st century tasks which are not so mundane and far from the one goal, one approach traditional tasks. People are often required to innovate even in the day to day jobs they take care. Old and a bit 2 buckets when it comes to motivating people yet it is a gold to bookmark and revisit.

Hope you would find some words of wisdom in these 3 short videos.

~Trilok R ~

The right pitch!

Having won a few high stake competitions in my company and elsewhere, I was planning to do an article on how I created most of those 10-15 mins pitches, with a ‘believable’ story telling to convey my ideas.

But before I could pen my thoughts, Scott Dadich, Editor in Chief of Wired, articulated it better than what I could have. He wrote in his editorial of Jun 2015, how he chose the cover story on Artificial Intelligence from a number of other pitches.

To rephrase what he said in 7 points regarding selling of an incredible idea in a time when ideas are plenty and execution debatable.

Firstly, imagine you are writing a one page pitch, under 500 words, for your cover story to an editor in chief. You are selling your story and he has that tough task of selecting the best one among a deluge of good material from people like you. Now, how would you go about it?
Establish quickly why you are a Subject Matter Expert and why you know your story well inside out.
What is unique in the story as compared to similar ones read or heard earlier – USP!
Is this the future? Case in point where we are seeing some adoption points.
Like a short story – A conflict between the current popular narrative and thought process and the story in hand – This is where the idea has to be elaborated and told how it works out.
If this clicks, what is the impact that we are looking at.
Applies only if you are selling your idea to someone else for a spot in the final story telling – How will you present it and what more could be in store – time and condition permits?

Now the above points have been made extremely (field) agnostic, from a technology parlance, so that it can be applied to a cover story you are writing, a technology business pitch you are selling to an audience judging you (something like shark tank 😉 ) or you are part of the deal team selling a multi year outsourcing project to a company with many competitors in the bidding process.

Ultimately, in my opinion, story telling is vital to every single individual irrespective of the field of practice we are in.

Would love to hear whether this helps you out to make your next brilliant pitch!

~ Trilok R. ~

Error 451

Stumbled across http error response 451 one of these days. How many of you know this? I didn’t. Have you used it or handled it?

For all my years working with technology, internet and the umpteen years of sending and receiving http request and response, I mostly cared about the 200, 404 and stuff. It never even crossed my mind to cross check whether there is a new one, until the other day when I came across an article on blocked websites, censorship and the internet freedom debate.

Well, we used to use 403 forbidden to check denied access to website. But with governments blocking websites or access due to legal issues and other lawsuits, there arose a need to have a specific error to handle this.

“403 Forbidden message appears when a court has ordered a website to be blocked. 403 Forbidden is supposed to appear when a website wants to refuse access to somebody.

403 Forbidden shouldn’t be shown when a site is blocked for legal reasons. That’s not what it’s meant for.

People should know that 403 Forbidden only means that the site wants to deny them access.

Error 451 would let people know that a court ordered the site to be blocked. This might be because it contains restricted political content or carries copyright material.”

So from the above, we realize that there is a need to classify forbidden due to what reason?

Error 451 – is http status code for use when resource access is denied as a consequence of legal demands. It is used when a server operator has received a legal demand to deny access to a resource or to a set of resources that includes the requested resource. This status code can be used to provide transparency in circumstances where issues of law or public policy affect server operations. This transparency may be beneficial both to these operators and to end users.

With that mind, we expect a message as below when 451 is thrown by ISPs or end sites.

   HTTP/1.1 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons
   Link: <https://spqr.example.org/legislatione>; rel="blocked-by"
   Content-Type: text/html

   <html>
    <head><title>Unavailable For Legal Reasons</title></head>
    <body>
<h1>Unavailable For Legal Reasons</h1>
This request may not be serviced in the Roman Province
     of Judea due to the Lex Julia Majestatis, which disallows
     access to resources hosted on servers deemed to be
     operated by the People's Front of Judea.

    </body>
   </html>

“Responses using this status code SHOULD include an explanation, in the response body, of the details of the legal demand: the party making it, the applicable legislation or regulation, and what classes of person and resource it applies to.”

‘When an entity blocks access to a resource and returns status 451, it SHOULD include a “Link” HTTP header field [RFC5988] whose value is a URI reference [RFC3986] identifying itself. When used for this purpose, the “Link” header field MUST have a “rel” parameter whose value is “blocked-by”. ‘

Trivia – Understanding the origin

With the technicalities discussed, you may wonder why 451 and not any other number, say 432 the next possible number in the series.

It is inspired by Ray Bradbury’s fiction, Fahrenheit 451, which looks at a dystopian future, which tells of a world where books are banned and burned and fireman don’t put fires out but start them. In the Internet world, though checks and balances are needed, an overarching sense of nervousness and fear is needed before a censorship is imposed on a site. In many cases, law may not be transparent or inducing fear in the rest of the open internet populace. Hence, it is important to remind everyone of the importance of openness and transparency in the Internet world. With all this mind, Tim Bray, a fan of Bradbury’s writing, recommended to the Internet Engineering Task Force, which governs such choices, that when access to a website is denied for legal reasons the user is given the status code 451.

References quoted above come from below links:

“What’s in a name?

“What’s in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.”

Why this question now? Of late my friends have been asking me to explain the funda regarding my strange ID – LogRCubed. It is being used in my blog name, domain ids, my GitHub Id, my tags etc. So what exactly is this? But before all that what is a literature post doing here. I am sheepishly trying to justify the keywords in my blog name – LogRCubed, a whole brain, Cipher and my domain name – 3logR.com!

I stumbled upon this idea during my school days while learning logarithms. People have been calling me Threelok, ThreeLog, Trilock, Trylock etc. All kinds of variations. One of these misspelled representation or mispronunciation gave me this idea to think of my name as a mathematical expression, logarithmic expression to be precise, the derivation of which is given below.

LogRCubed = Log [R]³
= 3 Log R
= 3 Lok R
= Three-Lok R
= Trilok R

Hence the Name and the Strange ID! Phew… There starts my love for name mangling, ciphers and being whole brain. Someone who loves both art and code to the same extent.

So again, what is in a name? Many a things, most importantly “being you”…!