weeeblog

Zotfetch: Fetch and Relocate PDFs in Zotero 7

nikhilweee@gmail.com (Nikhil Verma) — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In a previous post, I explained that if your Zotero workflow mainly involves syncing PDF annotations, you can use Zotero on multiple devices without the need for its file sync feature. To make this work, you could use Zotero’s Run Javascript feature and paste a code snippet. If you find yourself doing this frequently, like myself, you might feel the need for a straightforward solution that does this for you at the click of a button. I certainly did, so I took it upon myself to create an addon that lets me fetch and relocate missing PDFs. Allow me to introduce Zotfetch!

You probably don't need Zotero's File Sync feature

nikhilweee@gmail.com (Nikhil Verma) — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have a love-hate relationship with Zotero. It’s not the best reference manager, but it does check a lot of boxes. Most importantly, it’s free, and is fairly popular at least amongst academics.

If you use Zotero on more than one devices, you must be aware of its built-in sync feature. Zotero divides syncing into two parts – file sync and data sync. As of this writing, you get 300MB for file sync, whereas data sync is free and unlimited. Additional plans are available for purchase [1].

Typography

nikhilweee@gmail.com (Nikhil Verma) — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This blog uses the hugo-whiteglass theme. This page showcases commonly used elements.

Headings

Headings have been scaled to preserve their order. The first three levels – H1, H2 and H3 are scaled to 1.5rem, 1.25rem and 1.12rem respectively. All other headings – H4, H5 and H6 are scaled to 1rem. Here is what they look like.

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Heading 6

Styling

Here is some text that is bold. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut mattis fringilla ex eu blandit. Suspendisse potenti. Fusce porttitor egestas posuere. Donec molestie odio ullamcorper mauris consectetur, nec porttitor lectus congue.

Debugging Python C/C++ Extensions

nikhilweee@gmail.com (Nikhil Verma) — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past few weeks I’ve been using OpenSpiel, an RL framework for research on games. Like a lot of popular Python frameworks built for speed, OpenSpiel is also written in C++ with functionality exposed in Python through C++ bindings¹. Although the framework has documentation available, it’s not possible to document everything and besides, nothing beats stepping through the code in a debugger like the built-in pdb or the TUI based pudb (which happens to be my favourite). The fact that the core functionality of OpenSpiel is written in a compiled language makes it difficult to steer through complex code and understand what is happening under the hood. But fear not, I spent quite some time figuring out exactly this and through the little wisdom that I have gained during the process, allow me to share my take on how to navigate this problem.

Cloud Bursting with Slurm

nikhilweee@gmail.com (Nikhil Verma) — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a guide on how to access NYU’s burst cluster for graduate courses. I created this guide for the Fall 2022 edition of the Computer Vision course, but a lot of this should still be applicable for other courses. Please feel free to adapt this to your use case. Further readings can be found towards the end of this post.

Cluster Configuration

Different nodes in the NYU cluster are connected in the following manner. You will access everything through SSH. This schematic should be helpful in understanding the rest of this guide.

My first ML Conference

nikhilweee@gmail.com (Nikhil Verma) — Sat, 23 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’m excited to attend ICML 2022! Unfortunately I’m not presenting this year (hopefully in the future), but since Baltimore is just 3 hours away from New York I thought I’d give it a shot. The student registration fees this year was $400, but I took advantage of the student volunteer programme which reimburses the registration fees if you agree to volunteer during the conference. I think it’s a great deal to save on some costs!

House hunting in New York City

nikhilweee@gmail.com (Nikhil Verma) — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Finding a house in the most populated city in the US is no easy feat. Imagine doing that at a time when property prices are soaring, and it gets even worse. I had the pleasure of searching for a room in New York with an upper limit of $1500 at a time when the market was recovering back from super cheap COVID discounts. This post is a glimpse of what I learnt from my house hunting experience in the Summer of ‘22.

A Walkthrough of Isaac Gym

nikhilweee@gmail.com (Nikhil Verma) — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Training a policy using deep reinforcement learning consists of an agent interacting with the environment in a continuous loop. In practise, the agent is often modelled by deep networks that can take advantage of GPU parallelization, but the environment is still modelled by simulators that rely on the CPU. While the poor sample efficiency of RL algorithms remains a huge bottleneck, a significant amount of time is also spent on moving tensors from the CPU to the GPU, not to forget the additional delays caused by the lack of parallelism in CPU based simulation.

Speeding-up Slurm Workflows

nikhilweee@gmail.com (Nikhil Verma) — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Although NYU already a dedicated website with all the documentation to get started with the HPC cluster, here’s a set of tricks that I use to ease up the workflow by a significant amount. Even if you’re not affiliated with NYU, I believe you’d still be able to benefit from this post if your organization uses Slurm.

Getting Started

Here’s something that I recommend doing for any remote server that you’ll access frequently.

A Yucatecan Foodtrip

nikhilweee@gmail.com (Nikhil Verma) — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Disclaimer: All recommendations made in the blog are solely based on personal experiences. There are no affiliate links, and most of them will anyway take you to Google Maps.

Shavak and I had been planning to meet all winter. It was turning out to be difficult because he was working out of Vancouver and I was studying in New York. Neither of us had visas to the other country. A week before the New Year, he calls me up. “Bro, let’s go to Mexico!?” he said.

Adversarial Attacks on RL Agents

nikhilweee@gmail.com (Nikhil Verma) — Sat, 18 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This post a write up for the final project as part of NYU’s graduate course on Deep Reinforcement Learning. The project was the result of a collaboration with Advika Reddy.

Abstract

Prior work has shown that deep RL policies are vulnerable to small adversarial perturbations to their observations, similar to adversarial examples in image classifiers. Such adversarial models assume that the attacker can directly modify the victim’s observation. However, such attacks are not practical in the real world. In contrast, we look at attacks via adversarial policy designed specifically for the two-agent zero-sum environments. The goal of the attacker is to fail a well-trained agent in the game by manipulating the opponent’s behavior. Specifically, we explore the attacks using an adversarial policy in low-dimensional environments.

Building your first RNN

nikhilweee@gmail.com (Nikhil Verma) — Thu, 24 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

If you have some understanding of recurrent networks, want to get your hands dirty, but haven’t really tried to do that on your own, then you are certainly at the right place. This tutorial is a practical guide about getting started with recurrent networks using PyTorch. We’ll solve a simple cipher using PyTorch 0.4.0, which is the latest version at the time of this writing.

You are only expected to have some understanding of recurrent networks. If you don’t, here’s the link to the golden resource - Chris Olah’s post on Understanding LSTMs. We’ll use a single layer LSTM for the task of learning ciphers, which should be a fairly easy exercise.

The Triund Trek

nikhilweee@gmail.com (Nikhil Verma) — Sun, 18 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Prologue

It was early December and for most BITSians this was the compre¹ season. For me though, it is usually at this time of the year when weird ideas surface off. They did, this time too. Me and my friend Sameer were long planning to visit McLeodGanj in search of snow, and this was it. This was the long awaited break.

Dawn from Triund Hill

My previous experiences warned me from planning a trip long before its schedule. No planning until two weeks to liftoff, the bro code said, and I respected the bro. Well, sort of. I couldn’t control the excitement either, so I started planning exactly two weeks before. Later I realised, there actually wasn’t much to plan. Just a brief timeline, a budget and a backpack. That’s it! I was all set!

Shadowsocks

nikhilweee@gmail.com (Nikhil Verma) — Mon, 12 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Shadowsocks! Sounds like the new superhero after Deadpool. Well, in a way it is a superhero! It let’s you bypass censorship, even the GFW! ¹ Okay, so what’s this fuss about? Before going further, I think it needs some introduction.

Shadowsocks is a SOCKS5 compatible proxy server/client suite which excels at being undetectable. It leaves no fingerprint even when you use deep packet inspection. ²

Whoa! Wait, What does that mean? In simple terms, this means that shadowsocks lets you access blocked resources and is hard to detect by even the best firewalls.

Persistent Mounts

nikhilweee@gmail.com (Nikhil Verma) — Thu, 11 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

After installing your linux distro, though you’ll be able to access your Windows/NTFS partitions easily, things can get annoying sometimes with you having to mount the partition manually everytime. Here I describe how to get away with this mess by automatically mounting partitions on boot.

You could also do the same from Unity using the Disks utility, but here I describe the so called hard way. The way we do it is by editing the /etc/fstab file. This file gets executed everytime you boot up your system. We just instruct this file to also mount our desired partitions apart from what it normally does.

Shout IRC!

nikhilweee@gmail.com (Nikhil Verma) — Thu, 28 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re reading this, there are high chances that you are under internet surveillance and your IT admin has blocked access to IRC. God! Why do they do this? IRC isn’t bad at all, you may argue. But unfortunately there’s no one to listen. Hush. You’ll have to find a way out, and here’s exactly how you can do it!

I’ll be using one of the many benefits of having your own server in the cloud. Sure it costs you, but $5 a month won’t hurt your pockets! Added to this, the open source community is just awesome! It has tools for almost all your needs. Yes, it can help you get over IRC, and this blog is one of their many freebies. Thank you Open Source!

Set up a Ghost blog

nikhilweee@gmail.com (Nikhil Verma) — Fri, 08 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This is not an in-depth tutorial for a total newbie. That would call for a really long post. Though I’ve given one-liners explaining each command, It would be better if you had some experience working with the linux terminal and a basic understanding of how web content is served.

Things you’ll need

Just the two of them will do.

A Server : This is where your site contents will be stored. It’s just an internet connected computer that’ll stay awake 24x7 for your blog and will serve users with your blog as and when asked to so.

Sticky Notes

nikhilweee@gmail.com (Nikhil Verma) — Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This page hosts little ideas, solutions to problems I’ve faced in the past or mistakes that I don’t want to repeat again - stored here as a reference in case they bother me again. Read on, maybe even you might find something relevant!

Some useful aliases

Timesync!

$ alias timesync='sudo /etc/cron.daily/timesync'

# /etc/cron.daily/timesync
sudo date -s "$(wget -qSO- --max-redirect=0 google.com \
 2>&1 | grep Date: | cut -d' ' -f5-8)Z"

Short for activating virtual environments

$ alias sv='source venv/bin/activate; export PS1="(${PWD##*/}-venv)$_OLD_VIRTUAL_PS1"'

I use these all the time

$ alias log='tail -f /var/log/syslog'
$ alias nmr='sudo service network-manager restart; sudo service networking restart; log'

Show folder sizes in descending order

$ alias duinfo='sudo du --all --block-size=MB --max-depth=1 | sort -n'

I always forget the color scheme of my terminal. It’s base16_isotope. Oh! base16!

Docker and DC++

Docker and DC++ don’t go hand in hand. Docker creates iptables routes for private ip addresses like 172.17.x.x and DC++ uses the same. You may keep on getting No route to host when you try to connect to a hub, which is really annoying! @kamermans has a gist here that helped me out.

Calendar

nikhilweee@gmail.com (Nikhil Verma) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Calendar

In case you want to talk, feel free to email me with your preferred time and I’ll get back to you.

Projects

nikhilweee@gmail.com (Nikhil Verma) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Current Projects

New York University Incremental Skill Discovery for RL Agents
I’m working in the CILVR Lab with Prof. Lerrel Pinto on expanding ’s incremental skill discovery framework to manipulation environments like AllegroHand.

New York University Speech Recognition for Mandarin Conversations
I’m working with Prof. Michael Picheny on DARPA’s CCU Program to improve speech recognition systems for conversational Mandarin, primarily on the AISHELL4 dataset .

Resume

nikhilweee@gmail.com (Nikhil Verma) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Resume

Here’s my resume. You can expand it for better readability, or download it as a PDF if you please.

It appears you don't have a PDF plugin for this browser. No biggie... you can click here to download the PDF file.