List of Books I have read(August 2013 - December 2015)

I read 0.59 book per month down from 0.83 book per month of previous post http://kisorbiswal.blogspot.in/2013/07/the-list-of-non-fiction-books-i-have.html

From now I'll write review/summary on every book I read. Every December I'll publish the list of books I read during that year.

During this time(August 2013 -  December 2015) the focus was on learning how to learn and being lean. I don't know if learning efficiency increased yet, need a better tool to measure. I'll publish the summary of learning techniques and theories I have learned in a following post. Body weight is easily measurable gone down from approximately 74kg to now 67kg. Though I missed my target of 59kg by now, not given up, making slow progress.

1. The Body Ecology Diet: Recovering Your Health and Rebuilding.. by Donna Gates
2. Mini Habits: Smaller Habits, Bigger Results by Stephen Guise
3. Meditations - Enhanced Edition (Illustrated. Newly revised.. by Marcus Aurelius
4. Manual for Living Epictetus
5. The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone
6. Eat Stop Eat by Brad Pilon
7. Brain Maker by David Perlmutter, Kristin Loberg
8. Keto Clarity by Eric C. Westman, Jimmy Moore
9. So Good They Can't Ignore You, Cal Newport
10. The Five Elements of Effective Thinking by Edward B. Burger, Michael Starbird
11. The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence by Josh Waitzkin
12. The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding by Al Ries
13. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink
14. Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means.., Christopher Ryan
15. Seed India: How To Navigate The Seed Capital Gap In India.. by Sramana Mitra
16. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do, and How to Change by Charles Duhigg

Priorities: Because everything has a minimum effective dose and a course duration

When, for what duration and at what frequency, these are specific to each task. Some tasks are important, some are urgent, something can be postponed without any damage, some tasks can be outsourced, some things need to be done by you and only by you, some tasks can be skipped, somethings have danger consequences of missing it. Quality of life depends on how effectively the tasks are done. Probably that decides who you really are, irrespective of what you think of yourself.

For example at 12.47 am I'm writing this, I have already missed my priorities. I can not go gym tomorrow. If I go to gym, I can not go to work on time, if I do those two I can not get 8 hours of sleep which is even more important. Why am I not sleeping now? Just cant sleep, overwhelming number of open tasks probably disturbing me. Why am I not working if that is the case? I don't have enough energy now. The real problem here is I need to sleep 8 hours everyday not 56 hours a week.

I want to get out of this loop. Here is what I'm going to do for that.

1. List all the tasks including sleeping, work, entertainment, hobby projects, paying bills and any chore.
2. Assign those with priority, due date/time, minimum effective dose, frequency, do I need to do or can be outsourced, can be postponed/cancelled as required.
3. Automate whatever is possible.
4. Outsource whatever is possible.
5. Batch similar tasks.
6. Never miss anything that has consequence on health e.g sleeping, working out.
7. Reserve time for social activities.
8. Time for reading/entertainment.
9. Remove tasks from list that does not get time in the schedule, preserving priorities.
10. Build/find a system to measure effectiveness and manage all the tasks.

I don't know if this will work. At least I wrote something instead of completely wasting the time :)

Learned from mistakes

This is republication of an old post. Lessons learned from my mistakes.

1. Never have uncommitted code, when switching context.
2. Never ignore a peice of untrusted code because it works.
3. Before providing the access specifiers make sure that its appropriate.
4. Minimize hard coded paths and Sql queries, put them in configuration files.
5. Never ignore/suppress errors/warnings if it can be fixed or improved.
6. Pay attention to Naming convention of Classes, Methods, Variables and the packages.
7. Always have the Implementation Class named after the interface.
8. Sort members according to visibility and dependency.
9. Try to minimize the number of lines of code and make it more readable.
10. While making loops make sure that most appropriate condition is being checked.

Is reading books useful?

Answer is yes, books are always useful. The believe system we have now is a combined result of everything we know yet. Though we don't realize the result immediately after reading a book. Books give a lot of information, experience of other people's life, lessons from success and failure of others. This gives experience of many lives, which I could have never afford to live on my own. This gives reasons to look myself from a different perspective, challenge my old beliefs.

A book is completely different from a tutorial. Unlike tutorials books can not be followed step by step. Books talk more on raw principles which should be personalized to be used. And to personalize, it needs to be understood thoroughly.

As I read, I understand, I change, I change everyday. I'm often asked, are you being mislead by books? No, I'm not mislead. I don't believe anything blindly and don't use any principle that I do not understand completely. Because of curiosity I start way more things than I can handle, this should not be confused with being mislead.

Starting all over again

I have grown bulky in all possible ways; body, cost of living etc, but I always wanted to be nimble. Health is not in it's best condition. Gone off road from what I wanted to be, some part of it is intentional, most of it is unwanted consequence of my deeds. Life values are diluted, again some changes are intentional and most are changed because, I was afraid to be rejected(not liked) by people. Other major reason is my laziness.

I'm not expecting to be a superman overnight, however want to put things in right direction, right from now. I'll still do mistakes, but it should be only because of my inability, not because I'm afraid.

Following things should be achieved in 200days, i.e by Friday, March 7, 2014

1. Good Health condition, No Sick Leave.
2. Reduced cost of living, Credit Card Free life.
3. Math, Probability & Statistics refreshed.

List of Books I have read(June 2011-July 2013)

The list of Non-Fiction books I have read since June 2011(2 years). The ones I like, the title is followed by (Recommended).  A few books omitted as the title did not pass through censor board ;) Average is 0.83 Book/Month. Target is to increase the average to 2 Books/Month in next 2 years.

1. You Are a Brand!: How Smart People Brand Themselves for Business Success
2. Choose Yourself!(Recommended)
3. The 4-Hour Body: An uncommon guide to rapid fat-loss, incredible sex and becoming superhuman
4. As a Man Thinketh (Illustrated)(Recommended)
5. Walden (Good to read classical book)
6. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
7. Goals By Brian Tracy
8. Eat That Frog
9. It Starts With Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways(Recommended)
10. Making a Living Without a Job: Winning Ways For Creating Work That You Love
11. How Will You Measure Your Life?(Recommended)
12. The Elements of Investing
13. How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
14. Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life: Train Your Brain to Get More Done in Less Time
15. "Speed Reading" Increase Your Comprehension and Reading Speed
16. Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science(Recommended)
17. Kiss Theory Good Bye
18. The Leader Who Had No Title
19. Stay Hungry Stay Foolish
20. Think And Grow Rich(Recommended)

JVM Memory management: Garbage Collection

Most of the questions related to memory would have been answered by the image above. There are two and only two major partitions in JVM memory, Heap and Non-Heap. All the other type of memory space or pools we have heard belong to either of these two. Java specification does not enforce any specific implementation of memory, it depends on JVM implementation. The JVM of Oracle is named HotSpot.


Young Generation:
Here garbage collection is frequent and less expensive.
Eden Space: Initially all objects created here.
Survivor space: Contains objects that survived garbage collection in Eden Space

Old Generation:
Here garbage collection is less frequent and expensive.
Tenured Space: The objects survived the garbage collection get moved here.
PermGen: Contains meta data of the virtual machine, class and method objects.

Garbage Collector:
It is a low priority daemon thread. It frees memory of any object that is not reachable from a live thread. We can suggest JVM to do garbage collection by calling Runtime.getRuntime().gc() or System.gc() which internally calls Runtime.getRuntime().gc(). Runtime is singleton. We can configure type of garbage collector to be used by passing command line arguments to JVM. For more details on garbage collection http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/gc-tuning-5-138395.html 

To configure stack memory  -Xss1m
To configure heap memory  -Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m