lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

Do you want to come work for Yahoo! Bangalore ? Our team is looking for one more team member. A major benefit for coming to work with us will be that you get to hang out with me and people who are 10 times cooler than me . Besides that, we know all the good bars and restaurants in Bangalore.

In addition to the stuff listed in Desired Skills , it will be great if you have the following qualifications

• Know all the pubs in Bangalore
• You are a good table tennis or foosball or pool player
• You can willingly participate in flamewars about emacs/vi, php/perl, Delhi/Mumbai/Bangalore

Send your resumes here

Technical Lead for Media Ops

Introduction:

Media Systems Engineering (Media Ops) is the engineering and operations team in Media. Team does varied tasks, which includes architecture review, performance analysis, troubleshooting. Each member is will be doing varied tasks from on-call to performance analyst, systems engineering to capacity planning, architect to tool development. A tech lead is expected to drive individual projects which may involve members from within and outside the team.

Qualification:

B.Tech/MCA or equivalent with good experience in UNIX

Required Skills:

• Good experience in UNIX Systems, performance tuning and troubleshooting.
• Good understanding of IP Networking and ability to analyze network performance and behavior with standard tools.
• Understanding of high-volume production systems monitoring and management. Good scripting skills in any of shell, Perl, PHP etc.

Desired skills:

• Experience in Mysql/Oracle
• Programming in c/c++

Role and responsibilities:

• Self motivated in leading projects which requires interaction with various teams
• Willingness to work on operational projects which requires massive cleaning, overhaul, survey and detail oriented Thoroughly responsible in closing/deploying projects.
• Take up periodic on-call

Something interesting I read on Steve Woz's site
As yet another engineer working in Silicon Valley, it seems that with all the Internet startups and dot-com millionaires, no-one is out to create exciting, innovative products and technologies here anymore. Instead of "How can I change the world?", it's "How can I go IPO ASAP and get rich quick?" I see PhD's leaving high-tech to work on yet another search engine. I see folks reading The Wall Street Journal who used to read Byte. Do you see this trend worsening? Can hi-tech get out of this dot-com mind-set and back to innovation? Will there ever be anything close to a technical revolution again?
Woz:
I do see this trend increasing. A lot of the problem is that small guys with something attractive have a much more difficult time getting recognized. This is largely due to the spending of large companies, ensuring that their territory is not easily eaten into. You have a good point. Where are the engineers and scientists these days? All we hear about are CEO's. Typically they attended business schools and weren't inspired by science fiction.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

One ring

The one ring is available cheap now

I have come to a realization. Any project, no matter how small or big, should have a way to measure how sucessful it is. We should be able to define the metrics which would make a project sucessful and ways to measure those parameters. There should be a objective way to measure these metrics defined before we start the project. I am using the term project in a generic term - it may be something as mundane as learning chess (in which case the metric can be - I should be able to defeat the chess program at level 4) or something as challenging as losing weight.

RFC 1984 is Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) Statement on Cryptographic Technology and the Internet.

The below is not my writing. I picked it from the comments left at " The Importance of Having Friends Who Disagree".

Somethings I have observed,which are indirectly related to topic (well more to the topic of ideas really) are:

• Now a days, more than ever, even if you implement an idea/prototype which you do not yourself believe in much or consider low-impact; people may find it interesting and find out a new way of using than what you could not even think. Somethings become popular just like that:(. (This is not to suggest that popularity is necessarily a measure of cool ideas)
• It is difficult generally in practice for people to reject an "new" idea which is implemented (tangible) and available to play with; than an idea presented in theory/verbally. I mean both can get rejected, but it relatively takes greater time to reject the former than latter unless someone has implemented very badly(in which case even a good idea can get rejected quickly).
• A good measure of finding a person which you mention, quickly, is how fast and right that person understands the concept of "po". After explaining "po", from the other persons reaction, you can make out how close he is to the perfect guy. I have seen that some guys do not bothered to listen; then there are those who nod their head and say they understood ; but the closest are those who just start building upon an idea from where you left or branch out from it or start another path. Basically, if idea has any inspiration/possibility they seek before giving it up immediately. It means they give due consideration before judging it black or white. Most of the times I have seen that both people involved come out with something slightly or completely different than the original.
• Some people develop "disagreement" as a coolness trait, assuming it to be a characteristic of an "independent thinker". They generally are successful in drawing a lot of attention. It is in my opinion, important to cross-check them, by looking at their cool ideas/reasons/explanations carefully and having your own opinion about it. It is sometimes easy to fall in the trap of pseudo-disagreement friends too:)

Did Shakespeare inspire Douglas Adams for the answer 42?

Take thou this vial, being then in bed,
And this distilled liquor drink thou off;
When presently through all thy veins shall run
A cold and drowsy humour, for no pulse
Shall keep his native progress, but surcease:
No warmth, no breath, shall testify thou livest;
The roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fade
To paly ashes, thy eyes' windows fall,
Like death, when he shuts up the day of life;
Each part, deprived of supple government,
Shall, stiff and stark and cold, appear like death:
And in this borrow'd likeness of shrunk death
Thou shalt continue
two and forty hours,
And then awake as from a pleasant sleep.
— Shakespeare, Act 4, Scene 1.
          FRIAR LAURENCE gives Juliet the vial