lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

Hugh McGuire is the founder of LibriVox.org. LibriVox is a volunteer project to make great books available to everyone as free audiobooks.

A few weeks back, I listened to an interview of Hugh McGuire (the interviewer was Jon Udell) and it is quite interesting to see how a part time project grows into a major project involving so many people. Hugh mentioned that most of the work for LibriVox is done using forums.

I am downloading books from libriVox and listening them on the weekend on my ipod.

Links:

• Jon Udell's interview with Hugh McGuire
• LibriVox
• Euthyphro by Plato - the book that I heard

Have you checked out the new my yahoo! ?

link: Announcement

I was reading the Top Five Scale-Out Pitfalls to Avoid article. I knew about 4 of the 5 techniques that they mentioned, however, this one was new to me

1. Avoid Mixing Hot and Cold Data

   Similar to #3 is mixing hot (frequently-changed) and cold (more static) data, especially when it comes to write activity. Since database writes are more difficult and expensive to scale, it is advisable to keep this type of data away from data that does not change that often. Again, separating the data onto different databases and/or servers can significantly enhance your application's performance.

# Title:

I am at the Delhi airport and the secne here is chaotic. I am travelling by Spicejet airways and it looks like the whole world is planning to fly in the same aeroplane. The queue managmnet for Spicejet is t3h suck - I don't think I will travel with Spicejet again unless I am in a major financial crunch. A good thing about the airport though is that there are enough electrical points - if you are willing to sit on the floor. The seats next to electric plug points are occupied by fat, sleeping middle aged women .

Before leaving for this Delhi trip I had setup a very nifty mail setup on my laptop which allows me to read my mail even offline. It involves dovecot and offlineimap.

Delhi weather is really crappy right now - too damn hot. The people here are as ill-behaved as ever. I hardly see anyone standing in the queue or waiting politely for their turn to come.

That is all the update that I have from the Delhi airport.

I have lived in Bangalore for the past two years. Before Bangalore, I was in Delhi for ten years. I was born in Bihar, and I lived there for around sixteen years. When someone asks me, "Which place do you belong to?", I usually answer "Bihar". But it is hard for me to consider Bihar a home now. I have not been there for around ten years now. I think I will call Bangalore my home hence forth. I think it is one city which has rewarded me the most. It is one city that has not discriminated against me for being a Bihari (all North Indians are treated equally badly here ).

Added another article to my website. The article shows a nifty (I hope) way to make the logic part of your web forms cleaner.

Link: Creating complex queries in your web form

I was born in Bhagalpur, a small town in Bihar. If you have ever been to Delhi, you might have noticed that calling someone (or something) Bihari (i.e. someone from Bihar) is a popular form of dismissing him or her as mostly illiterate or gaudy or irrelevant. Atanu Dey has a blog entry that sums up pretty much why Bihar has been left out and why I have not been to my home for around 10 years now.

Sitting on in the de-briefing meetings, a picture of gradual and steady decline began forming in my mind. The signs were apparent. The power failed intermittently. Bihar produces no electrical power of its own. Somnath informed me that Bihar gets about 1000 MW of power from outside the state, 700 MW of which is unaccounted for. Patna consumes 300 MW, a good bit of which appears to have been used by the Rabri Devi household. It is reported that when she vacated her official Chief Minister's residence, they had to remove 53 air conditioners.

Heh. I remember the days when we used to go without power for at least a week (stealing power cables and selling the copper used to be good source of income for some people). Enough reminiscing - those days are behind me now.

Link

Update: Changed the blog title