$ cat /writing/index.md
#writing
95 posts since 2008. Long-form essays, technical deep-dives, lab notes, daily logs.
## 2026 · 7 posts
2026-04-28 [ios · ai] DailyVox: Why I Built a Voice Journal That Stays on Your Phone I have been writing a diary for 20 years. When the habit started slipping, I switched to voice notes. That experiment turned into DailyVox. 2026-04-28 [feaws · quant] feaws — the quant lab is public, and so is the math A walkthrough of the feaws.xyz whitepaper in plain English. Five hypotheses, one engine, every trade public. The content IS the product. The trading IS the proof. 2026-04-28 [meta · archive] I like the way I am — what this blog used to be called Going through the old WordPress wp_options table during the archive migration, I found the original name of this blog. It wasn't intrepidkarthi. It was 'I like the way I am' with the tagline 'Earth is a nice place to enjoy our life.' Notes on the slow drift from one identity to another. 2026-04-28 [meta · archive] The Lost Archive — 58 posts that didn't survive the WordPress reinstall When I rebuilt this blog in 2026 from a cPanel SQL dump, 27 posts came back clean. 58 did not. Here is the memorial — the slugs, the years, the topics — for posts I wrote between 2010 and 2013 that exist now only in Google's sitemap and the Wayback Machine. 2026-04-27 [books · reading] Books I Have Read A complete list of books I've read over the years — from fiction to business strategy, self-help to thrillers. 2026-04-14 [diary · writing] I’ve Been Writing a Diary for 20 Years. Then I Couldn’t Anymore. I’ve Been Writing a Diary for 20 Years. Then I Couldn’t Anymore. 2026-02-15 [crypto · bitcoin] Feaws: How I Built a Bitcoin Forecasting Engine from Scratch I started working on Feaws in late 2025, not because I thought I could beat the market, but because the existing tools frustrated me. Here's the technical breakdown of what I built.## 2025 · 4 posts
2025-12-29 [ai · agents] 2026: The Future Belongs to the Builders Since last year, I’ve completely transformed how I work by integrating AI tools into my 2025-06-12 [crypto · stablecoin] 2025: The Year Stablecoins Leave the Crypto Bubble When I first noticed stablecoins back in 2020, they felt like a side 2025-03-28 [crypto · trading] Your Brain vs. the Bull Run: Taming FOMO Before It Ruins Your Trades If you're still letting FOMO control your trades, maybe the problem isn't the market—maybe it' 2025-01-01 [healthywealthy · life] #healthywealthy — two years and counting A daily streak post on x.com — walk, push-ups, plank, a small SIP, a few pages of a book. Two years in. The point is the showing up.## 2023 · 1 post
2023-02-03 [india · regulation] Highlights on India Budget 2023-24 A thread on Indian Budget for the financia## 2022 · 1 post
2022-01-29 [crypto · web3] WAGMI in Web3 Decoupling a few queries about the Web3 eco system as simple as possible based on the attempt of deploying a couple of dApps as a hobby…## 2021 · 1 post
2021-07-11 [life · pandemic] What has been changed since the pandemic? I was having a casual chat with a friend who is a Group Manager at one of the India’s## 2020 · 5 posts
2020-10-06 [blockchain · web3] Blockchain + Brands + Loyalty In the past 2 months, I am helping a startup as a consultant before I pick my next role. In the meantime, I was exploring a f 2020-09-15 [career · books] The Learning Never Ends This month I am completing my 11th year into my professional life. I have worked across MNC, Startups and Mid-size companies. Runni 2020-04-15 [india · life] Will India Change in 2020? Since my childhood, I have heard our late ex president Dr Abdul Kalam’s words “India will become a superpower by 2020”. We are a… 2020-03-13 [leadership · engineering] Building a culture is bigger than building a product It has been 11 months since I joined with Sequoia Consulting Group, a leading provider of Benefits, Payroll processing, 401(k) management… 2020-03-11 [security · engineering] Maintaining secrets and credentials across environments At Sequoia.com, we are building an Enterprise B2B SaaS product for providing health Insurance, HR Benefits & Payroll processing. We are…## 2018 · 2 posts
2018-09-01 [career · books] From hackathons to publishing — how 18 weekends turned into two ML books I bagged 18 hackathon prizes, gave a TEDx talk, and ended up writing two books on mobile machine learning. The connection between the three is not what I expected. 2018-06-10 [machine-learning · privacy] Insurance fraud detection — a privacy-first ML pipeline Five-stage pipeline: synthesize Indian insurance data, clean it, do EDA, anonymize with k-anonymity and perturbation, then classify with a decision tree. ~99% accuracy on a 91k-row test set.## 2016 · 3 posts
2016-04-20 [hackathon · android] EmpowerWomen — 18 hours at Google Bangalore for rural India An Android survey-collection app for rural India, built in 18 hours at the Google Android Indic Hackathon. ODK on the front end, App Engine on the back. 2016-04-04 [mobile · app] Mobile app statistics :: One week after launch We have launched Teleport Call :: First ever VR Caller application on Android 2016-03-01 [mobile · india] Is India ready to face Virtual Reality? The first decade of 21st century can be categorised for smartphone and handheld devices evolu## 2015 · 4 posts
2015-12-29 [india · regulation] SAY NO TO FREE BASICS India’s poor deserves something better than Facebook and their advertisements. 2015-11-22 [hackathon · career] 3Ps of attending hackathons and events > Chase your dreams and not the money. Money will follow you automatically! It is still in my memory about th 2015-08-22 [hackathon · android] OnTheGo — civic tech in 36 hours at MobileSparks An Android app that lets citizens snap a photo of a civic problem and tag the responsible legislator. Built at MobileSparks 2015 in Bengaluru with two friends and a lot of caffeine. 2015-06-17 [startup · founder] I Have An Idea And I Need An App For That Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience. -Paulo Coelho## 2014 · 4 posts
2014-12-14 [life · career] What did I learn in 25 years? I have downloaded a random app from app store on my mobile in morning. There were a few initial screens with q 2014-09-19 [adserver · madserve] Running my own ad server — mAdserve on shared hosting Spent a weekend standing up mAdserve — an open-source mobile ad server — on a corner of intrepidkarthi.com. The Teleport Call install base is now in the hundreds of thousands and the question of how to monetise without ruining the call experience needs an actual answer. Notes on what mAdserve does, why I'm running my own instead of plugging in AdMob, and what I think the right ad model for VR voice calls actually is. 2014-09-15 [hackathon · healthtech] Medic — building healthtech logistics at Sequoia's 2014 hackathon A hospital → patient → pharmacy ecosystem prototype, built in a weekend at Sequoia Capital's 2014 hackathon in Bangalore. Shipped to the Play Store before we left. 2014-01-19 [security · vodafone] Vodafone is reading SMS/MMS — what I caught in the metadata Noticed something strange in the headers of an MMS that arrived from Vodafone India. Some metadata that does not seem like it should be there. Two screenshots and a few questions that I do not have good answers for.## 2012 · 3 posts
2012-11-06 [security · xss] An XSS cookie stealer, built as a teaching tool Three small PHP files I keep on intrepidkarthi.com/files/xss as a working demonstration of how a cookie-stealing XSS attack actually unfolds — vulnerable page, exfiltration endpoint, log file. For workshop use only. The point is to make the attack physically visible to people who have only seen it in slides. 2012-06-15 [presentation · foss] Presentation: Dive into FOSS and LAMP architecture Slide deck I gave this month on Free & Open Source Software and the L-A-M-P web stack. Built in impress.js, hosted at intrepidkarthi.com/files/presentation/lamp/. The agenda, the highlights, and a why-FOSS-actually-matters note for the engineers in the room. 2012-03-25 [tamil · thamizh] தமிழ் கவிதை — எதிர் வீட்டு ஜன்னல், தனிமை, and a few others I've been writing I've been writing Tamil poetry on the side. Putting up a few that I've illustrated this month — Edhir Veettu Jannal (the window across the road), Thanimai (solitude), and a couple of others. Notes on why I keep coming back to Tamil for the things that matter most.## 2011 · 2 posts
2011-07-20 [symantec · norton] Norton Ninja — security suite for your Android Notes on Norton Ninja, the Android security suite I'm working on at Symantec. The threat list is growing fast — premium-rate SMS Trojans, Bluetooth auto-pair attacks, SD-card payloads, contact-list exfiltration. The mantra: whatever the enemy is, we have to win at last. 2011-06-24 [symantec · android] Bandwidth test files — and why mine are filled with Celine Dion I needed two files of known size — 100KB and exactly 1MB — to test mobile-data throughput on Android phones. Filling them with random bytes is boring. Filling them with the Titanic theme song, repeated until the byte count is right, is much more on-brand for what we are actually testing.## 2010 · 4 posts
2010-10-16 [trip · orissa] Orissa trip — Bhubaneswar, Konark, Puri Long weekend in Orissa — Bhubaneswar's temple cluster, Konark's sun temple at the coast, an overnight at Puri. Notes from the trip and twenty-four photos that survived. 2010-10-14 [trip · srisailam] Srisailam trip Long weekend at Srisailam — the Mallikarjuna temple, the Krishna river dam, the ghat road in. Notes and photos from the trip. 2010-02-14 [tamil · thamizh] Three Tamil poems for February — உலக காதலர்களுக்கு, என்னவள் யாரோ, நண்பா நண்பா Three short Tamil pieces from this month. One for the world's lovers, one for whoever my own happens to be, one for a friend. Putting them up together because they came out the same week and they're all asking some version of the same question. 2010-01-15 [tamil · thamizh] எனது முதல் தமிழ் படைப்பு (My first Tamil work) First Tamil-language piece on this blog. Putting it up properly — the writing, the small image I drew for it, and a note on why Tamil is the right language for the things I most want to say.## 2009 · 17 posts
2009-11-26 [college · tce] TOSS and C-Star — what we shipped from the CSE lab this year Two student-team projects that shipped from the Computer Science department at Thiagarajar College of Engineering this year. TOSS — a developer-focused Ubuntu spin, live ISO out yesterday. C-Star — the first fully online intra-college programming contest at TCE, ran in February. 2009-10-15 [tcs · fresher] TCS days starts — orientation tour through Bangalore, Cochin, Ooty, Trivandrum Joined TCS as a fresher last month. The induction took us on an orientation tour — Bangalore, then Cochin, Ooty, and Trivandrum. Photos and notes from the first weeks of the post-college life. 2009-09-15 [autosyngen · nlp] Automatic Synonym Generator — live AutoSynGen is now live at intrepidkarthi.com/autosyngen. Plug in a word, get back a multiple-choice question with one right synonym and four distractors picked using WordNet's synset graph. The MPL trick is doing the work. 2009-05-10 [college · events] Post - after a long busy time It has been a long time since i posted my last post. I have involved with various things. To start with it, treat in aarthy drive inn for conducting FOSSConf'09… 2009-04-15 [college · tce] Final-year projects: CCura+, Give Away, eShelf, AutoSynGen Four BE projects from the final year at TCE. Encryption, peer-to-peer file sharing, semantic search, and a synonym-based question generator that uses WordNet's synset graph. 2009-03-01 [college · events] FOSSConf 09 As a new cap on TCE's feather, this time we have hosted FOSSConf, a national level conference on Free/open Source Software on Feb 27,28 and Mar 1st(today). It w… 2009-02-28 [oltest · osquest5] Deploying osQuest5 — the engine behind the online C test The C++ online test I linked a few months ago points to itworld2.com. The version I'm running on intrepidkarthi.com/oltest is built on osQuest5 — an open-source PHP/XML quiz engine I forked, fixed, and pointed at my own test bank. Notes for anyone trying to do the same. 2009-02-10 [college · events] TOSS inauguration It was my great pleasure to tell about the release of TOSS(TCE Operating System Services), an operating system has a full compatibility and capality to debian a… 2009-02-05 [madurai · travel] Kutladampatti trip!!! Last sunday, me,aswin,mahesh,kannan,naagu,mani went for a bike trip to Kutladampatti nearer to Alankanallur and Paalamedu. It is 35 kms away from my home. We st… 2009-01-26 [events] Successful iCCC We have started TecUthsav by conducting the first contest for it. Yes, we have successfully conducted iCCC(internet C Coding Carnival) regarding TecUthsav comin… 2009-01-23 [tecuthsav · iccc] iCCC — Internet C Coding Carnival, tomorrow We are running an online C programming contest tomorrow as part of TecUthsav 2009. Four hours, gcc-only, no IDEs. Code from anywhere with internet — hostel, home, CCC. Notes on the format and how to enter. 2009-01-22 [college · movies] Project status before second review Till now we have completed simple search and also we have integrated wordnet api into our app. We have implemented simple search through every documents in our … 2009-01-17 [college · events] Gonna be busy From tomorrow onwards I am going to be busy, for project and tecuthsav works. I am always doing multiplay. This gonna be continue. Tomorrow morning I am going t… 2009-01-16 [movies] Movie Review - padikkadhavan Yesterday afternoon, I went to ganesh Adlabs with my school buddies, rajesh, Suresh,Selvaprabhu, Rafi,Vinoth to the film Padikkadhavan, starring Dhanush, Thaman… 2009-01-16 [personal] VHN Reunion On Jan 14th, the day on Thamizhar Thirunaal, all my school buddies were gathered together at Eco park, Mdu. We were around 35 people there. Our friend Senthil m… 2009-01-05 [college] project status I am on the way of finding a way of progressing to generate rules (owl files) for the raw data. As for now I have completed getting the files as input and index… 2009-01-01 [college · events] Bye bye 2008!!! Welcome 2009!!! Some important events on 2008 - My last birthday in college in December - Placement in TCS in May - Went to tirupathi on Deepavali - Started building our new ho…## 2008 · 19 posts
2008-12-24 [college · events] TecUthsav 2009 I am really glad to work with the TECUTHSAV team in my college. Oh, first let me tell about tecuthsav. Tecuthsav, a national wide technical extravaganza organiz… 2008-12-24 [personal · college] Wrote in mood out A short personal entry — a long evening fixing the TecUthsav registration form, an irritation, a headache, sleep. Saving it because the day was real even if the entry never got published. 2008-12-22 [college] Text Annotator - first module in project Text Annotator will be my first module regarding SSTS(Secure solution tracking system). Here with this module, i am going to get a file as input and parse throu… 2008-12-20 [college · events] Tecuthsav I am currently working on developing the website for tecuthsav09 with my juniors, second year guys. We are using LAMP stack where we have used Xhtml, css, java … 2008-12-19 [journal] Our new home We have started to build a new home for us in Old kuyavar paayam road, nearer to my school. It is exactly opposite to the mariyamman temple there in the main ro… 2008-12-18 [college] Project work starts From today onwards i am start doing my project coding parts. We have analyzed a lot for our project. Finally i have come to a conclusion to derive a rule genera… 2008-12-15 [college · personal] My Birthday Successfully I have crossed 2 decades of my life path, this is completion of 21 st birthday(12/12/08). First of all i thank god for giving me such nice friends … 2008-11-28 [college · tech] Final year project At last we have started working on our project. The name of our work is 'Solution Tracking System'.Our project mainly concentrates on providing eSupport for the… 2008-11-25 [college] Project confirmed atlast!!! At last our project title was confirmed today. It is 'Solution Tracking System', a project deals with rule based semantic search. The main aim of our project wi… 2008-11-22 [tech] C++ Online Test… Test ur Knowledge of C++ Online Test…… Free online test of C++ www.itworld2.com try it……… its nice 2008-11-22 [college · madurai] Madurai Madurai is a 2600 years old historical city surrounded by elegant natural plantations, technical institutes and textile mills situated in Tamilnadu, India. The … 2008-11-21 [blogging · college] SEO working!!! Our project title is still under consideration. May be it will be confirmed within monday. But i dont know whether it will be a research oriented or application… 2008-11-19 [college] Written in a confused state hi, today its wednesday. From the morning itself i am feeling somewhat uneasy. I dont know what happened. Feeling really very bored too. I am in a confused stat… 2008-11-18 [college · personal] Last semester starts From yesterday onwards, last semester of my college life started. Still we have a very few days to go to complete our college life. Now we are in the state to s… 2008-11-18 [blogging · travel] Our papanasam trip Hi friends, on friday night we have planned to go for a trip to papanasam to enjoy our holidays. It is nearer to tirunelveli. We reached there on saturday morni… 2008-11-14 [blogging · personal] Ikon begins!!! this is just about my first blog post 2008-11-14 [college · madurai] This is about me I havent yet told anything about me. First let me introduce nyself. Myself Karthikeyan NG, doing my final year BE(2008-09) in Thiagarajar college of Engg, Madur… 2008-01-08 [movies · tamil] Yo yo.. RoBo.. On d track… It is officially confirmed that Superstar Rajinikanth will feature in Shankar’s Robot! It might be recalled that Shankar had this project in mind a few years back with Kamal Hassan… 2008-01-02 [events · personal] New Year….. The World is three days: As for yesterday, it has vanished, along with all that was in it. As for tomorrow, you may never see it. As for today, it is yours, so work in it.## 2007 · 18 posts
2007-12-31 [events · personal] Let us walk on 2008!!!!! A New Year 2008 image-only post — the original Photobucket-hosted GIF is no longer reachable. 2007-12-30 [madurai · tamil] About MyCity –>மதுைர Madurai is a 2600 years old historical city surrounded by elegant natural plantations, technical institutes and textile mills situated in Tamilnadu, India. 2007-12-30 [news · tech] Factory waste produces enough energy for 750 homes…. Nice one…. This comes from an old story but it is more relevant today than ever! The photo is a typical rotary furnace sold today so you can get an idea of how it works. 2007-12-30 [tech] mig33 Get mig33 and you’ll be connected to people around the world. IM, visit chat rooms, send email, share photos, SMS and, of course, make cheap calls all through your mobile phone and… 2007-12-28 [programming] C++ Online Test… Test ur Knowledge of C++ Online Test…… Free online test of C++ www.itworld2.com try it……….. 2007-12-28 [college · personal] EULA Vs GPL Some features about software covered by the EULA (End User License Agreement) for Microsoft Windows XP: copying was prohibited could be used only on one computer with a maximum of… 2007-12-28 [tech] Google’s New Service Great new service from Google – GOOG-411.Make the call, tell them what city and business, get a list of business. 2007-12-28 [tamil] Kaadhal… 2007-12-28 [college · events] Kalloori……. Yesterday it was boring to me… I just downloaded this movie… Since i got Jaundice for the past fifteen days i couldnt able to go anywhere outside my home… thats why i keep on sitti… 2007-12-28 [news · personal] News today I am just in shock over hearing about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. I was away from my computer for several hours, and saw it shortly after sitting down. 2007-12-28 [movies · tamil] Polladhavan… Hey its boring for me… So i watched the movie Polladhavan, starring Dhanush, sorry dunno heroine name exactly… Film full of fights for a bike(pulsar 200cc;-) )… Can see only once… 2007-12-28 [blogging · movies] Saw IV Hey, Dont get angry on me. I have no work to do. Thats why am keep on watching movies and blogging. 2007-12-28 [programming] Simple Triangle.. But 4 diff approach…. A program to draw like this…. first: include<stdio.h int main() { int i, j, base = 10; clrscr(); for(i = 0; i < base / 2; i++) { for(j = 0; j < base / 2 – i; j++) printf(” “); prin… 2007-12-27 [tech] MyBook Yeah.That is MyBook. A kutty software created for storing the details of our friends.It was boring for me for the past two days.So i have created this in VB.Net using visualStudio2… 2007-12-27 [tamil · personal] Natpu…. An image-only post about friendship — the original linked artwork is no longer reachable. 2007-12-27 [personal · philosophy] To my GOD On the white summit of eternity A single Soul of bare infinities, Guarded he keeps by a fire-screen of peace His mystic loneliness of nude ecstasy. 2007-12-27 [programming · tech] What is Memory Leak??? When memory is allocated using malloc() in any function ,it returns a pointer to the start of the data………and again we free the memory using free() wit the help of pointer.but it sh… 2007-12-17 [blogging · personal] Hello World — My First Post Am getting bored in my home… So here after I thought of writing a little about me here…Today 2007/12/17 3:47 pm I have started writing my first blog… I hope it will continue…Don’t… $ you scrolled all the way down? respect.