Monday, August 15, 2016

Live sensor data on web page with MQTT, Mosquitto and WebSocket

We will be using a standalone MQTT broker with Websocket support.

For the installation step of Mosquitto with WebSocket support in Ubuntu, refer this post
http://www.berzek.com/2015/11/03/installing-mosquitto-1-4-4-with-websockets-on-ubuntu-trusty-14-04-lts/

to edit the mosquitto.conf file, easy way would be using editor.

gksudo gedit

Also the actual file link to the libwebsocket can be found at

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Product, Process and Tools

If is often considered following a process is an overhead by many people.  It will be true of you do not understand the intent of the process or following a wrong process to do something. Let us look into the broad meaning of what exactly a process or product mean?
  • Product: Is the end delivery or outcome of the work
  • Process: The way to achieve the result, probably in a very systematic way.
In very simple terms, the intent of the process is to give clarity on How to start and proceed with your work to accomplish the product.

For individual
We may not be calling them in process or product terminology. But if we do so, it is obvious that we deal with them every day.
Example 1:
I want to make a cup of Coffee to drink.  Here Coffee is the product. To make coffee I might have used a kettle to boil the water then adds Coffee powder and sugar to make a drink. These steps I followed are the process to accomplish my product. Here the process may be very familiar that we may not even think that as a process.

Make sense? Have a look into another example.
Example 2:
This time we need to make a particular food dish that I’m complete unaware how to make it. I got a recipe book in my hand as I’m unfamiliar with the dish.  I just need to follow the instruction to make the dish. Even though it is a new dish, we could make that dish (product) by following the instruction/method (process) documented in the recipe book.

For Organization: 
The need of a standard process is much important for Organization. They usually consist of multiple people. They have to make sure their products are not varying according to one person to other who does that job. So they often go for standardizing the process. So for organization to perform it mission well it has to consider three factors.
  1. People
  2. Process
  3. Product



Monday, February 2, 2015

The Learning Framework

The Coursera’s MOOC – Learning How to Learn by Barbara Oakley was an amazing course that would take you to unfamiliar insights of Human Brain capabilities and how to tweak them to best suite for our practical life and learning. The course changed my perspective towards learning by teaching how to make my learning effective with some practical tips. Interview with Benny Lewis, a polyglot- a guy who mastered multiple languages was remarkably inspiring. His statement regarding the learning strategy is quite impressive. “If you failed in learning or understanding something, then it is not a problem with your abilities or skills. It is the problem with the process or approach you opted for learning. You have to change your process to learn effectively”. The whole course gave me bits and pieces of several information that I can use to formulate my own learning process or framework.

There are two fundamental modes of thinking- Focused and Diffused modes.  In short, Diffused is a big picture look on a problem while Focused is a very detailed level walk through of the same. Crux of the process is to make use of both focused and diffused mode of thinking. They are like two sides of a coin and have to be used back and forth to deliver extraordinary results. Focused mode thinking will get preference when the problem in plate is familiar to you. The brain will look for the similar thought patterns already exists. This can sometime causes a problem called “Einstellung”, it hinders new thoughts. Since similar thought pattern exist in brain it will not try to look for or learn new patterns. It is quite tricky in such case that you have to unlearn what you have learnt and start with fresh thoughts.  The tricks practiced by the famous Italian painter Salvador Dali and legendary scientist Thomas Edison to make use of these two modes of thinking is pretty interesting. They used nap (short sleep) to achieve transition from focused mode to diffused mode of thinking in order to solve difficult problems.

As like computer programs the human brain also has working memory and long term memory (Analogy with the computer is made to easily visualize the things. I'm a computer expert, huh? familiar with RAM and Hard Disk). Working memory is very less in size compared to the other one. Unlike computer, both working and long term memories are constantly undergoing physical changes every second in human brain. There are some Neuro modulators that influence your learning process. Acetylcholine -helps in learning and attention, Dopamine – helps in motivation and mental rewards; Serotonin- decides social life and risk taking. Physical exercise plays a vital role in controlling them to result in efficient work of the brain. Body release chemicals when it is under stress. How do you interpret body’s reaction to those chemicals makes the major difference. This is alternatively stated as the confidence factor. Instead of approaching a problem with scared mind, assumption and faith that you can do in best improves the performance and result.

There are several techniques you can use to master your learning skills. Metaphor and Analogy are few powerful tools. Another important thing is to make use of the visual memory area of your brain. It has huge capacity; it can remember enormous visuals, smells, taste, sound etc. You might have practically experienced this. Situations like meeting an old class mate of school, you would be familiar with face but you could not recollect the name as it he/she was not in contact in recent past. So making solutions to diagrams/visuals and memorizing them with your visual memory is a cool way of learning. Practice and repetition over a period of time again and again is required to place it in the long term memory of our brain. Recalling, like going through the notes again after some period of time is a way to harden your memory. Overlearning or spending more time continuously on a thing is a waste of time. Instead we have to practice interleaving and repetition. “LITTLE WORK, EVERYDAY” is the key trick. Another important aspect of learning is simplifying any bigger problem into smaller chunks. Chunk is nothing but a group of similar information. Once you started doing chunking any information, it can leverage results beyond our expectation.  Chunk can be treated as a clearly defined small framework of a solution. Once you start practicing this, you will be able to find similarities with other chunks (a generic problem and its solution) of different topic and you can learn things faster.


Procrastination is a major enemy of learning. You need to make a plan to tackle them. A proposed solution is the use of POMODORO technique. It is a short and focused learning time. Usually it will be a 25 minute uninterrupted learning time.  Also watch out constantly for cues that prompt you to deviate from it. Make your own learning process (Flow of actions and habits with respect to time) to get your product (outcome or result). Having a weekly and daily TO-DO plan is a supporting factor for learning. Like starting time, it is equally important to plan the exit (finishing) time as well. Planning can be made by mixing different task to make use of diffused mode of thinking. The Law Of Serendipity says –“The lady luck favors the one who tries”. As per the law, planning well or preparing well is a part of attempt.


Brain can be considered as a sophisticated device which comes without an instruction manual. It is our task to create an instruction manual for it. Throw away the imposter syndrome (negative thoughts like I’m not capable, and I achieved things just by luck) and come up with strategic instruction manual or framework for your brain to learn and conquer things.

This is what I picturized/summarized the entire course. I tried to create a flow diagram that start with a problem to solve in brain, goes though various stages and finally getting into our memory or grasping (in other word it is Learning). I felt rewarded when my class mates likes  to add this picture to the Hall of Fame of the course (http://howthebrainlearnsiii.blogspot.it/p/arunkumar-anand.html)


Barbara Oakley @ TEDx


Final Notes:
The entire course was a wonderful experience for me. I got to know the power of MOOC, the way people collaborate, the way people grasp and share knowledge. It is amazing and I have no doubts that MOOCs would be the future of education. I really appreciate the effort people put to share their knowledge. Even I want to contribute my share. That's how my blog originated.

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