SQL in 10 Minutes a Day, Sams Teach Yourself by Ben Forta

 Its a good SQL book for beginners. I primarily was focusing on query commands. And skipped chapters dealing with mutating tables and advanced topics.

Sample query:
SELECT col1, col2, count(*) FROM table_name WHERE <conditions> GROUP BY <col> HAVING <conditions> ORDER BY <col>;
SELECT col1, col2 FROM table_name_1 t1 JOIN table_name_2 t2 ON t1.eniid = t2.eniid WHERE t1.id=‘ID’;

Chapters include Retrieving data, Sorting Retrieved Data, Filtering Data, Advanced Data Filtering, Using Wildcard Filtering, Creating Calculated Fields, Using Data Manipulation Functions, Summarizing Data, Grouping Data, Working with Subqueries, Joining Tables, Creating Advanced Joins, Combining Queries, more changes which deal with create, update and delete and other advance Topics.

Malgudi Days by R K Narayan

 This is a collection of short stories from the renowned storyteller, R K Narayan. The stories were taken place in Malgudy, an imaginary town set in south India. Each story is beautifully told and the characters include astrologer, postman, doctor, gateman, dog, set in train travel, sculptor, snake man and many more. There are around 30+ stories and it will be a good idea to read one story each night.

Installing Magzter app on Amazon Fire 10

Step 1: Install google play store - refer https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/10/03/install-play-store-amazon-fire-tablet/

Step 2: Install Magzter from play store

You are all set to go!!

TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1 by Kevin Fall and Richard Stevens

 The book covers layer 2 to layer 4 of networking layer. That is IP, IPv6, ICMP, UDP and TCP. Apart from that, the book also covers ARP, DHCP, DNS, NAT and various security protocols. The main highlight of this work is that it illustrates the protocol using a custom udp/tcp socket program, tcpdump, tcptrace and wire shark.

I skimmed through layer 3 and security protocol sections. UDP and TCP sections are very thorough and gives a good insight into the working of this protocol.

There are 6 chapters dealing with TCP - Preliminaries; Connection Management; time-out and retransmission; data flow and window management; congestion control; and keepalive.

Overall I enjoyed reading this book and would recommend to anyone who want to understand the internals of layer 4 networking protocol!

Civil War 1861-1865

Civil war places an important role in American history and its current politics. For a starter, Unionists are from the states in north, also referred as Yankees. Confederates are from the southern states. Confederate states parted from the union and formed a new country. They feared that with the new presidency of Abraham Lincoln in 1861, he would back Abolitionists and put an end to slavery, and hence departed. Abolitionists supported abolishing slavery and were not a main stream movement up until 1861. Eventhough Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the end of slavery and freedom for African American people, but that was not the main reason to go war with Confederates. The war was started on the pretext of secession and to bring back the confederate state back to the fold of union. But slavery was an issue looming large and without addressing that there won’t be any union. Civil war was a bloody war, costing lot of human lives, due to clash of human ideologies, sheer madness, but may be inevitable and unavoidable.

In the last few days, I watched the de facto documentary on this subject, The Civil War by Ken Burns. Backed that with National Geographic’s special edition Atlas of the Civil War. I rented the BlueRay DVD from County library and bought the latter from a news stand. Both documentary and the magazine had 5 main chapters titled, 1861 to 1865. Rather than a mere account of the events, the documentary shows the human side of the war. There are lot of names and events mentioned in it, one may easily get lost. The magazine helped in reiterating some of the key topics.

Anatomy & physiology

Anatomy & physiology for dummies by Maggie Norris and Donna Rae Siegfried is a good read and very enjoyable along with videos from crash course - https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtOAKed_MxxWBNaPno5h3Zs8.

Our body has many parallel systems. It’s amazing to know that how evolution has fine crafted a being like us, or, one may simply amazed by this creation of God, depending on from which school of thought you are from. Never knew that there is a system called lymph network in our body. Memory is not binary storage. Spine can take local decision - remember you pull hand at the prick of a pin. Your smell sense is resulted by chemical bonding. Hormones play a very vital role in keeping things together. Heart is an amazing pump which brings in oxygen depleted blood and pumps out oxygen rich blood. Urinary system is as amazing as blood circulatory system.

The book deals with skeletal system, muscular system, integumentary system, nervous system, endocrine system, circulatory system, respiratory system, digestive system, urinary system, immune system, reproductive system and change and development over the life span. It’s complicated!

Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens

Quite impossible story to happen, but author could take you to the 1950s/60s and life in marsh. It’s waterways, lagoons, beaches, estuaries, egrets, herons, gulls, palmettos, oaks, adjoining meadows and in the these context Kya’s shack. It starts with parallel story of death of Chase Andrews and Kya’s childhood at marsh. Beautifully convenes at solving the mystery, but along with take us through the survival and thriving story of Kya in her adverse conditions.

Al-Fathiha

The four Tafsir I am trying to follow.
1. Ibn-kathir, Tafsir ibn Kathir
2. Ibn-Arabi, ഖുർആൻറെറ ഉൾസാര വ്യാഖ്യാനം
3. Maybudi, Kashf al-asrar
4. Seyyed Hossein Nasr(editor), The study Quran

And the Quran
- The Noble Quran, Karya Bestari

KMCA Halaqa 2018-2020

This is the slide which I presented in the first KMCA general body meeting back in 2018.

Why Tarbiya ?
•The word “Tarbiya تربية”  in Arabic can have many different meanings, depending on context. Conventionally, Tarbiya means development and training. Linguistically, it means increase, growth, and loftiness.
•Training helps in rejuvenating the health of organization in long run
•Part of Kerala Muslims’ identity is based on regional and religious aspects. By embracing our identity, liberates one and they can better contribute to the wellness of overall community.
•Tarbiya activity should help in finding a common ground (ethics and law) to work towards the unity of the community.

Activities
•Halaqa is one of the main responsibility of Tharbiya wing.
• Knowledge: Halaqa should help members in achieving knowledge or motivate to seek it.
• Dua: Also take part in Dua and thereby seek mercy and forgiveness from Allah
•Youth Program
•A bimonthly Halaqa for youth volunteered by parents.
•Our stretch goal is to conduct a Tarbiya fest with kids activity, family quiz and a talk from an external speaker.

Calendar
•Monthly Halaqa – 2nd/3rd Saturday of every month.
•First Halaqa on August 18th Saturday at MCA
•Tharbiya Fest – January (tentative)
•A bimonthly Halaqa for youth (boys) volunteered by parents (in planning)

Halaqa rough notes (just for me :) ):

08/18/2018:
Yaseen: 1-9
Br. Anis class.
* "Whoever amongst you sees an evil, he must change it with his hand. If he is not able to do so, then with his tongue. And if he is not able to do so, then with his heart, and that is the weakest form of faith"
* Why someone doing wrong ?
1. Out of Ignorance
2. Out of necessity/Force
3. Before (?)
* (When you see an evil ), Change it by hand, by speech and by heart
* Widely misunderstood Hadith
* Shaithan Thettu cheyyunundu (I don’t remember the rest)

9/29/2018:
Yaseen: 10 - 17 (Explanation pending)
Shanavas Bhai - hajj reflections
* Hajj is a trial
Mayatha mudrakal
* First 2 page. 12
Riyadhu Swaliheen
* Hadhees 1,2
Fath'hul mu'een
* Page 45: Niskarikkal obligatory

10/27/2018:
Yaseen: 18-21
Nasid's class:
* About Dua
* Three aspects about Dua - love, hope and fear
Mayatha mudrakal
* Story 3,4 page. 13
Riyadhu Swaliheen
* Hadhees 3,4
Fath'hul mu'een
* Page 45: Vittu poya namaskaram ( 2 paragraph )

12/15/2018:
Yaseen: 22-30
Shyju's class:
* LEGACY: One's legacy for here.
* For the next generation
* Ibrahim (A)'s prayer to find him as a righteous person.
1. Knowledge about deen
2. Make Dua
3. Start aiming high

Mayatha mudrakal (5,6,7)

2/23/2019:
Yaseen: 30-36
Habeeb's Class:
Importance of Thajweed:
* Pronounce word correctly
* Apply rules
* Understand the difference between Clear mistakes vs Hidden mistakes
*Parenting class* - Br Yasser

Ramadan Halaqa (2019)
5/11 - Janab Shahu (Sr Sumayya’s father) Surah al-Burooj - @ SBIA
5/18 - Br. Shyju - Surah al-Dhuha - @ TBD
5/25 - Br. Rayees. Quran class - @ TBD
6/1 - Br. Sirjad - Surah al-Ghashiyah- @ TBD
Br Shine is planning to cover some basic tips of Arabic language after the Quran class.

7/20/2019:
Me - Absent

HAJJ :)

11/2/2019:
Yaseen:
* Time of revelation: In the sorrowful years - Death of Abu Talib and Khadheeja (RA), mistreatment from Taif
Sameer's Class:
* Diseases of Heart
* It’s symptoms, cause and care
* Verify an organ is healthy
* Allah looks our heart and deed
- Dua: Ya Mukhallib al-khuloob thabbhith khalbee a'la dheenik

12/4/2019:
Yaseen: 41 - 50
* What is Money ? Individual owned, Government created/backed by economy - no gold standard
* You give charity
* In bible: You cannot serve God and Money - Matthew 6:24, Do not lay up for yourseleves treasures.
* In Quran: Everything belongs to Allah
Faisal Chemban's class:
* Stress and anxiety and it’s Islamic perspective
* loosing life
 -> excessive thought/worry
* Stress, it’s part of being human.
* Prophet's period of sorrow followed by establishment of prayer
* Solution:
1. Breathing exercise
2. Turn to Allah - prayer
3. Be Grateful for all our blessings
4. Doing bad will hurt you / So smile to others.
5. Go to your loved ones - your wife.
Jamsheed's Dua

2/29/2020:
Yaseen:
Rayees N's Class:
* Signs of day of Judgement
* 50 Signs
* Judgement is very close (Hadith)
* Coming of Prophet is a sign of day of judgement.
* Ottomon Empire
* Arabian large buildings
* Obesity
* Coming of Mehdi, ISA(A) and Dajjal
* 10 major Sins
Nasid's Dua: Mentioned Abheesh

4/4/2020:
Yaseen: 59-65
Yasser's class:
* Siyam
* Siyam meaning: Abstention
* From eating and drinking
* Goal of Siyam
 - To gain Taqwa
 - Become righteous person
 * Rukun of Fasting
 Shanavas' Hadith class on Calamity

 Ramadan Halaqa (2020):
 Apr 26th:
o Surah Yousuf: Section 1 by Br. Nsaid and Section 2 Br. Samad
o Hadith Class and Dua by Br. Shajeeb Topic: Superiority of asking forgiveness for parents
May 3rd:
o Surah Yousuf: Section 3 by Br. Shine
o Hadith Class and Dua by Br. Shabeer - Supererogatory Prayers (Nafl Prayers)
May 10th:
o Surah Yousuf: Section 4 by Br. Sirjad
o Hadith Class and Dua by Br. Sabik - (SABR)
May 17th:
o Surah Yousuf: Section 6 by Br. Shyju and Section 6 Br. Samad
o Hadith Class and Dua by Br. Naseer (One Third)

THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME by Mark Haddon

THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME by Mark Haddon

Thanks for this wonderful story. Next time when I see children with special needs, I hope I will see things in a different light. This story could be very well a real one in our community. It depicts the alternative reality perceived by people with special needs. Very good thriller!

Refreshing Basheer !!

Read three short stories from Basheer. Very refreshing!! Made my day.
വിശ്വവിഖ്യാതമായ മൂക്ക്
നീതിന്യായം
പഴയ ഒരു കൊച്ചു പ്രേമകഥ

AWS Certified Solutions Architect

AWS is simply amazing. It makes IT simple and agile to the end customer. Backed up by security aspects ingrained ground up, this is one of the best thing I’ve learnt. This book cover cloud computing in general, Amazon S3, EC2, EBS, VPC, ELB, Amazon CloudWatch, Auto Scaling, IAM, Amazon RDS, Redshift, DynamoDB, SQS, SWF, SNS, DNS and Route 53, Elasticache with memcached and redis, CloudFront, AWS storage gateway, AWS directory service, KMS and CloudHSM,  CloudTrail, Kinesis, Elastic MapReduce, data pipeline, Import/Export, OpsWorks, CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk, Trusted Advisor and AWS Config.

An Introduction to GCC by Brian Gough

This book is a beginner's guide on GCC and covers the topic comprehensively. The topics I like most are Compilation options, optimization and tools section. Its amazing that a high quality tool, like this, developed by open source community. Great book and a great tool!

Recommended option: gcc -ansi -pedantic -Wall -Wextra -Wconversion -Wshadow -Wcast-qual -Wwrite-strings
To core dump: ulimit -c unlimited
GDB command: gdb a.out core
Optimization level: -O0 to -O3
Verbose debugging: gcc -v
Prevent excessive memory usage: ulimit -v limit
Prevent excessive memory usage soft limit : ulimit -S -v limit
GNU archiver to create: ar cr
GNU archiver to list .o: ar t
Profiler gprof: gcc -pg file.c, gprof a.out
Code coverage gcov: gcc -fprofile-arcs -ftest-coverage cov.c, gcov cov.c
Tool-chain:
  Preprocessing: cpp
                           gcc --save-temps
  To assembly:  gcc -S
  Assembly to machine: as file.s -o file.o
  Linker: ld -dynamic-linker

To find details of a.out: file a.out
Examining symbol table: nm a.out
Find dynamically linked libraries: ldd a.out

The witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho

This is the story of a witch and her making. It’s the transcript of her story from people she knew. Through her, the author introduced more loving feminine God. And finally she vanished to obscurity.