lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

My dear friends,

I know you love me and wish me well. I know Orkut has this feature where you can mail all your friends in one click, but if you really consider me such a special friend, do take some time out to send me a separate email. Or better still, give me a call. If you cannot be bothered enough to do this much for your friends, please don't flood their mail boxes with generic greetings. No one reads them, and you really should not bother sending such emails. If you feel like you are doing a disservice to your friends by not sending them even generic greetings, trust me, no one really cares.

Thanks for reading till the end,
Your grumpy friend,
raj shekhar

PS: I will still love you even if you don't send me an email greeting.

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

Do you know what a Nutrimatic Machine is and do you want to own one ? Do you know what the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation is ? And do you know of a liquid that tastes "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea". To summarize the summary, if you answered all the questions in a yes, you need The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Tertiary to Quintessential Phases . Share and enjoy, but don't ask me any questions

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

The time right now is Fri Dec 29 00:31:08 IST 2006 and this blog post is brought to you from my emacs and a small php script using the magic of xml-rpc . I have not figured out how to set the blog categories using the mt.setPostCategories call, but I am still trying.

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.

I was just reading a very interesting article from Jeremy Allison of the samba team called The Land of "Nothing for free". A very interesting quote

My panel was rather uncontroversial, Microsoft, Bruce Perens and myself being on our best behavior. The only sparks that flew where when Microsoft made it abundantly clear that they would use their patent portfolio to prevent the spread of GPL software. Section seven of the GPL (the implicit patent grant of the license) now looks like the most prescient writing Richard Stallman has ever done. If you're not familiar with it I'd suggest you read it and understand why using the GPL to protect your Free Software is so important.

The article is old, but do check it out.