Jekyll2024-12-02T00:35:50+00:00https://colon-analogy-notation.personal-website-a13.pages.dev/feed.xmlRam’s Personal WebsiteBuilt by Ram Vasuthevan with ❤️ on the [shoulders of giants](/acknowledgements.html)Colon Analogy Notation2024-11-28T00:00:00+00:002024-11-28T00:00:00+00:00https://colon-analogy-notation.personal-website-a13.pages.dev/bitsbipsbricks/Colon-Analogy-Notation A:B::C:D to represent A is to B as C is to D

I have been trying to find the name for this very common notation for analogies:

A:B::C:D to represent A is to B as C is to D

I have found it helpful to query LLMs (ChatGPT 4o in my case) with questions in the format A:B::C:??

I have tried to find the name for this notation by asking ChatGPT, using Google Search and Google Scholar, but I have not found anything authoritative.

I think the name Colon Analogy Notation is a good Schelling point. Someone familiar with the syntax would intuitively recognize the connection upon hearing the name. Likewise, if someone knows the syntax, this might be the name they would naturally search for.

I would love to know if there is a preexisting name for this notation and the history of its use. But it is hard to search for something when you don’t know its name.

So I have written the article I would like to have found for the next searcher.

This sub-blog is for posts written at a certain point in time. I don’t usually update them, but I’ll update this if I learn more.

If you know more, please email me (my email is in the footer) or reach out on Twitter.

]]>Maximizing, Satisficing and Perfectionism2024-08-10T00:00:00+00:002024-08-10T00:00:00+00:00https://colon-analogy-notation.personal-website-a13.pages.dev/bitsbipsbricks/Maxing Caffe latte on white ceramic cup beside silver and black laptop computer

Me experimenting with my daily bagel

I have always had the temperament of a satisficer. I find something that works for me, and I stick to it forever. It’s simple and easy, once I make a commitment to something, I don’t have to think about that category of thing again. I do this for bagels, pens and IDEs. But I am starting to wonder if I am missing out by not maximizing more.

When thinking about new solutions, whether it be software tools, hot sauces, or notetaking apps, I become a perfectionist. I start thinking of my elaborate theoretical use cases and then become overwhelmed and actually do nothing.

If it’s a cheap, reversible decision, the only real mistake is procrastinating on making a decision

TLDR: JUST DO IT!

]]>Twitter Cards Images are Cached2024-07-16T00:00:00+00:002024-07-16T00:00:00+00:00https://colon-analogy-notation.personal-website-a13.pages.dev/bitsbipsbricks/Twitter-Cards-Cached A Blue Jay generated by [sdxl](https://replicate.com/p/ey7z80d79srgj0cgqhpvf0sw7m)


Recently, I learned in a not-so-enjoyable fashion that Twitter caches summary card images.

While writing Verify Jekyll Minima Sites on Mastodon, I originally had a summary card image which was getting cropped poorly, so I kept the image that was being displayed at the top of the article but changed the summary card image with a wider version which got a better crop. And it showed up correctly in my preferred Twitter Card preview tool: BannerBear Twitter Card Preview Tool.

But when I posted it to Twitter, the old image would show up both when I actually posted it and in the preview when I was composing it.


Image 1 Image 2

After some frustrating troubleshooting, I found this support forum thread that said Twitter caches summary images for about a week, and the preview tool could be used to expire the cache.

And while the preview tool, no longer actually shows you a preview of a tweet, it does bust the cache.

Unfortunately, this type of amateurism is typical of Twitter.

I am not really happy with my investigation into this issue. I wonder if there is a way to accurately preview tweets with the cached images.

]]>Verify Jekyll Minima Sites on Mastodon2024-07-13T00:00:00+00:002024-07-13T00:00:00+00:00https://colon-analogy-notation.personal-website-a13.pages.dev/bitsbipsbricks/Mastodon-Verification Mastodon elephant logo


On Mastodon, one way that you can prove that you are who you say you are is by verifying that you own your personal site.

For example, on my Mastodon account, I have verified that I own ramvasuthevan.ca

You prove that you own a page by having a link from that page to your Mastodon account with a rel="me" attribute.

The two simplest ways to verify your site:

  1. Adding an invisible <link> tag inside the <head> tag at the top page to the account that you’d like to be verified for:

     <link rel="me" href="https://mastodon.social/@RamVasuthevan">

  2. By adding a hyperlink to your Mastodon profile somewhere on the page, like:

     <a rel="me" href="https://mastodon.social/@RamVasuthevan">Mastodon</a>

Unfortunately, if you add your Mastodon profile to your config file like this:

mastodon:
  - username: RamVasuthevan
    instance: mastodon.social

Minima 2.5 does not automatically add the rel=me attribute to the link in the footer of your site. And there is no plans to add automatic verification until Minima 3.

But you can copy the _includes/social.html file and add it to your _includes file. And then add a rel="me" attribute to the a href tag for Mastodon.

Or you can just copy my version.

After adding the link to your page, go to https://mastodon.social/settings/profile and add the page you want to verify as one of the extra fields.


Mastodon elephant logo


Your profile must be updated after adding the rel-me link to your web page. If you have added the link to your profile before, try removing the link from your profile, saving, re-adding the link, and then saving again. (See documentation).

]]>Search for All Dependabot Created PRs on Your Repos2024-06-29T00:00:00+00:002024-06-29T00:00:00+00:00https://colon-analogy-notation.personal-website-a13.pages.dev/bitsbipsbricks/github-dependabot-prs Caffe latte on white ceramic cup beside silver and black laptop computer

Photo by Nolan Issac from Unsplash

In the spirit of early patio11, I’m going to write more about what I worked on, what I learned, and the problems I solved on any given day.

In that spirit, I have a bunch of repos with Dependabot enabled. It’s a pain in the ass to manually go to all of the repos and see if a Dependabot PR has been created.

Search query: is:pr author:app/dependabot is:open archived:false user:@me

GitHub Search for Dependabot PRs

]]>Create Jekyll Sub Blogs using only Liquid2024-05-14T00:00:00+00:002024-05-14T00:00:00+00:00https://colon-analogy-notation.personal-website-a13.pages.dev/bitsbipsbricks/Jekyll-Sub-Blogs :not(pre) > code { background-color: #f4f4f4; /* Light grey background */ color: #333; /* Darker text for better readability */ padding: 2px 4px; border-radius: 4px; }
Stock photo of a laptop, coffee, pen, notepad and phone

Photo by Andrew Neel from Unsplash

I started writing this blog in the spirit of Visa’s do 100’s things. The best way to become a better writer is to write. Writing and writing energy is not scarce. It’s not like you have a finite number of things you can write in your life. The more you write, the more you can write. If you write an article about an idea, it doesn’t need to be perfect. You can always write more about it later.

I started writing on Ghost because it was easy to set up and maintain. At first, I didn’t mention my name anywhere. Eventually, I decided to merge it with my personal site after I became more confident with my writing and so that I could gain more control over how the site looked. As an engineer, I love being able to take advantage of Git for version control, setting up my writing environment using VS Code and knowing that I can easily maintain and migrate it from Jekyll if necessary.

Jekyll by default puts all blog posts into one feed, but sometimes, I want to write something small, a snippet, a note mostly for myself, that doesn’t really fit in Bits, Bips and Bricks.

By taking advantage of Jekyll categories and tags you can easily have multiple sub blogs each with their own Atom feed using only Liquid.

A category can be defined using the front matter keys category or categories (a space separated list of categories) or putting a directory above the post’s _post directory with the name of the category.

A tag can be defined using can be defined using the front matter keys tag or tags (a space separated list of tags)

This snippet is built to match the style of Minma, but similar logic can be used for other themes.

Copy the following code and paste it in _includes/blog.html:

<div class="blog">
    <h2 class="post-list-heading">{{ page.list_title | default: "Posts" }}</h2>
    <ul class="post-list">
      {%- for post in site.posts -%}
      {%- if post.categories contains include.category or post.tags contains include.tag -%}
      <li>
        {%- assign date_format = site.minima.date_format | default: "%b %-d, %Y" -%}
        <span class="post-meta">{{ post.date | date: date_format }}</span>
        <h3>
          <a class="post-link" href="{{ post.url | relative_url }}">
            {{ post.title | escape }}
          </a>
        </h3>
        {%- if site.show_excerpts -%}
          {{ post.excerpt }}
        {%- endif -%}
      </li>
      {%-endif -%}
      {%- endfor -%}

    </ul>

    {%- if include.category and site.feed.categories contains include.category -%}
      {% unless include.tag %}
      {% assign feed_location = site.feed.categories[include.category].path | default: '/feed/' | append: include.category | append: '.xml' | relative_url %}
        <p class="rss-subscribe">subscribe <a href="{{ '/feed/' | append: include.category | append: '.xml' | relative_url }}">via RSS</a></p>
        {% endunless %}
    {%- endif -%}

    {%- if include.tag and site.feed.tags contains include.tag -%}
    {% unless include.category %}
      <p class="rss-subscribe">subscribe <a href="{{ '/feed/' | append: include.tag | append: '.xml' | relative_url }}">via RSS</a></p>
    {% endunless %}
    {%- endif -%}

</div>

The above code is available under the MIT license and contains code from minima/_layouts/home.html

On the page that you want a sub blog with only posts from a certain category:

{% include blog.html category="category_name" %}

On the page that you want a sub blog with only posts with a certain tag:

{% include blog.html tag="tag_name" %}

If you don’t add a category or tag parameter, then all posts will be in the sub blog.

Minima assumes that if there are no posts, the feed will not be shown. I disagree, you can have a blog without blog posts.

Make sure to update your _config.yml according to the instructions for jekyll-feed to make sure that the feeds for your category or tag are generated.

]]>U of T Law School Courses Related to Real Estate2024-03-20T00:00:00+00:002024-03-20T00:00:00+00:00https://colon-analogy-notation.personal-website-a13.pages.dev/snippets/UofT-Real-Estate Flavelle House at the Faculty of Law

Photo of Flavelle House at the Faculty of Law by Chensiyuan/Wikipedia

On the 2023-2024 U of T Law School Course List, there seems to be 3 course related to real esate:

]]>Large Collections of Free (as in Speech) Images2024-03-19T00:00:00+00:002024-03-19T00:00:00+00:00https://colon-analogy-notation.personal-website-a13.pages.dev/snippets/Free-Images-Collections Three locomotives in the station at [Old Union Station](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Union_Station_(1873))

Taken in 1907 by freelance photographer William James (City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 99)

Here are large collections of free (as in speech) images:

  • The City of Toronto Archives has 275k images, a large number of which are free
  • The Art Institute of Chicago API has public domain images. See Data Dump
  • Metropolitan Museum of Art has 375k photos under CC0 (Via CC0)
  • The Art Institute of Chicago API follows the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), other places that might also have freely available images

Editor’s Note: I initially intended Snippets for posts which were never updated. I don’t know if I’ll update this post if I find another large free image repository.

A public digital garden will be the correct spot for a post like this. Maybe Snippets can be a spot for pages to be initially planted and then if they are repeatedly updated and grow, they can he transplanted somewhere else.

]]>Interchange (de Kooning) no longer on loan to the Art Institute of Chicago2024-02-12T00:00:00+00:002024-02-12T00:00:00+00:00https://colon-analogy-notation.personal-website-a13.pages.dev/snippets/Interchange-No%20Longer-on-Loan Photo of Interchange by Willem de Kooning taken by Andrew Cho

Photo of Interchange by Willem de Kooning taken by Andrew Cho/Wikipedia

As of 2024-02-08, the Wikipedia page for Interchange (de Kooning) stated:

Private collection of Kenneth C. Griffin. Currently loaned to and displayed at the Art Institute of Chicago

But, the Art Institute of Chicago’s website does not contain Interchange.

I emailed the AIC asking if Interchange was still on loan to the Art Institute of Chicago; on 2024-02-09, they replied that it was not.

Screenshot of an email thread stating that Interchange is no longer on loan to the AIC

Screenshot of an email thread stating that Interchange is no longer on loan to the AIC

After doing all of this, I realized Interchange no longer being on display at the AIC, was mentioned in Vanity Fair

]]>A Bit of a Sabbatical: Time for More Focus2023-11-25T00:00:00+00:002023-11-25T00:00:00+00:00https://colon-analogy-notation.personal-website-a13.pages.dev/bitsbipsbricks/A%20Bit-of-a-Sabbatical-Time-for-More-Focus Toronto Buildings In Fog

Photo by Patrick Tomasso from Unsplash

Editor’s Note: This was written in early November and my views have changed a bit, but I’ve decided to post this now for posterity

The last 12 weeks have been great. It helped me figure out what to do with my life:

I am a software engineer on sabbatical. I am working on applying technology to real estate in Toronto.

But my sabbatical is constrained by money and and thus constrained by time. It’s now time for focus.

Projects which will be focusing on:

  1. Lobbying in Toronto
  2. TRREB MLS Search Engine
    • Build a Virtual Office Website for TRREB’s MLS to make it easier for Realtor and their clients to search for properties in Toronto
  3. Open Map of Toronto
  4. Bits, Bips and Bricks
    • Write more regularly and about more topics
    • The vibe that I am going for:

I will also work on side projects, especially if they align with my goal of applying technology to real estate but it is now time to impose a discipline on myself.

]]>