mysql's innodb_file_per_table tweak

If you use mysql's innodb table engine, you might find it useful to add the innodb_file_per_table option to your my.cnf file (under the [mysqld] section). This will create each innodb table in its own file/tablespace instead of putting everything in the ibdata file, thus making it easier for you to run optimize table faster. However, this option only affects new tables. Old tables would still live in the shared ibdata file.

Links: mySQL DBA has some further observations about this option and this is the mysql's manual page about this issue.

A.P.J Abdul Kalam on IIT

Atanu Dey has an interesting report about PanIIT 2006, which is the meeting of all IIT alumni. A.P.J Abdul Kalam was one of the speakers there and this is an extract from his speech

His introductory remarks lasted for about 10 minutes in which he panned IITs. He used an interesting device. He said that he called up a bunch of people the previous day and asked what was the first thought that came to their minds when they heard the word "IIT" His respondents included, among others, a General in the army and a former director of an IIT. The responses he received ranged from "very low value addition" to "largely irrelevant" Not exactly the sort of thing that the organizers of PanIIT wanted to hear, I am sure. But then, Kalam had warned that what he was about to say was going to be "mixed"

Link: IIT-Inspire, Involve and Transform

social value and personal value

I was reading Steve Pavlina's blog post about "Making Money Consciously" and I came upon a nice defination of social and personal values.

If you want to earn income as a contributor, you must contribute social value, not personal value. Many would-be contributors get stuck on this concept. Personal value is whatever you say it is — you're free to decide what has value to you personally, and it doesn't matter if no one agrees with you. Social value, however, is assigned by social consensus. If you believe your work has tremendous value, but virtually no one else does, then your work has high personal value but little or no social value. Here's the key point: your income depends on the social value of your work, not the personal value.

This reminded me of an article by Paul Graham called "Mind the Gap". Graham says in that article

In a free market, prices are determined by what buyers want. People like baseball more than poetry, so baseball players make more than poets. To say that a certain kind of work is underpaid is thus identical with saying that people want the wrong things.

This brings me to what I have been thinking about. There are people who say that they are not recognized or rewarded well enough for their work. If we ignore the edge cases, in most of the cases that I have seen, people do get rewarded for adding value to the organization they work for or for adding value to their customers.

Another thing that I have heard quite a few people whine about is how IT-people or the techies (grr — how much I hate both those terms) make so much more money than the other people in different occupations but with the same years of experience. Maybe the techies are adding more value to their customers or the organizations and that is why they are getting paid more.

Link: Making Money Consciously and Mind the Gap

having trouble reddit's rss on bloglines ?

If you use Bloglines and you have not been seeing any updates from Reddit on it then try to get your reddit feed from this rssmix feed. I have no idea why Bloglines is not showing updated feeds from reddit.