lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

Today completes my one year at Yahoo! Bangalore. This is the first time in my life when I am not thinking of quitting a job after six months. A big thanks to spoOnman aka Pankaj Kaushal for referring me here. Looking forward to another fun filled year here.

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:)

I joined the gym today. Yahoo! provides free gym memberships to all its employees and after a year of making excuses, I joined up today. Some observations

• I joined the gym together with my manager. Hopefully, whenever one of us tries to run away, the other will motivate him to keep going
• This is the first time that I joined a gym which gave people fitness trainers. I can attest from my personal experience that this is very important. This is the first time I left a gym with only minimal amount of pain in my muscles, thanks to proper warmup and cool down sessions
• During my warm up session, I had a spell of dizziness. I am not sure why this happened, but I had to slow down after that. My guess is that it was caused by my high-sugar, low-nutrition diet. I should take time to research some low fat and nutritious food which are easy to make or buy

Some picks from 101 Zen stories. Arranged from best to good (in my opinion)

A Cup of Tea

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.

Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"

"Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"

If You Love, Love Openly

Twenty monks and one nun, who was named Eshun, were practicing meditation with a certain Zen master.

Eshun was very pretty even though her head was shaved and her dress plain. Several monks secretly fell in love with her. One of them wrote her a love letter, insisting upon a private meeting.

Eshun did not reply. The following day the master gave a lecture to the group, and when it was over, Eshun arose. Addressing the one who had written her, she said: "If you really love me so much, come and embrace me now."

The Moon Cannot Be Stolen

Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut only to discover there was nothing in it to steal.

Ryokan returned and caught him. "You may have come a long way to visit me," he told the prowler, "and you shoud not return emptyhanded. Please take my clothes as a gift."

The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away.

Ryokan sat naked, watching the moon. "Poor fellow, " he mused, "I wish I could give him this beautiful moon."

The First Principle

When one goes to Obaku temple in Kyoto he sees carved over the gate the words "The First Principle." The letters are unusually large, and those who appreciate calligraphy always admire them as being a masterpiece. They were drawn by Kosen two hundred years ago.

When the master drew them he did so on paper, from which workmen made the larger carving in wood. As Kosen sketched the letters a bold pupil was with him who had made several gallons of ink for the calligraphy and who never failed to criticize his master's work.

"That is not good," he told Kosen after the first effort.

"How is that one?"

"Poor. Worse than before," pronounced the pupil.

Kosen patiently wrote one sheet after another until eighty-four First Principles had been accumulated, still without the approval of the pupil.

Then, when the young man stepped outside for a few moments, Kosen thought: "Now is my chance to escape his keen eye," and he wrote hurridly, with a mind free from disctraction. "The First Principle."

"A masterpiece," pronounced the pupil.

The Voice of Happiness

After Bankei had passed away, a blind man who lived near the master's temple told a friend: "Since I am blind, I cannot watch a person's face, so I must judge his character by the sound of his voice. Ordinarily when I hear someone congratulate another upon his happiness or success, I also hear a secret tone of envy. When condolence is expressed for the misfortune of another, I hear pleasure and satisfaction, as if the one condoling was really glad there was something left to gain in his own world.

"In all my experience, however, Bankei's voice was always sincere. Whenever he expressed happiness, I heard nothing but happiness, and whenever he expressed sorrow, sorrow was all I heard."

Everything is Best

When Banzan was walking through a market he overheard a conversation between a butcher and his customer.

"Give me the best piece of meat you have," said the customer.

"Everything in my shop is the best," replied the butcher. "You cannot find here any piece of meat that is not the best."

At these words Banzan became enlightened.

I did quite a bit of thoughtful writing tonight. I created a Personal Manifesto and cleaned up my list of Recommended Books

Last week, I had gone to GNUnify, a conference organized by Symbiosis(SICSR), Pune. I had spoken on webservices together with Gopalv and Premshree.

An interesting event we organized was a Birds of a Feather (BoF) meeting on "Why you should be a FOSS programmer" that we had with the students there. My first observation during the BoF was that most of the students had no idea what FOSS is. One of them actually thought that FOSS was a programming language. Most of them had been absolutely brain washed by MS propaganda or maybe they had been brainwashed by their teachers. Not may of them had used any of the P languages (Perl, PHP, Python). I asked them this question - "will you like to work for Yahoo!, Google or Amazon or will you like to work for another IT sweat shop? If you want to work with the big names, then you have to know the P languages". Gopalv, Premshree, Pankaj and Philip spoke about their respective projects, how they had gotten into free software and how it had helped them in getting jobs. Gopalv pointed out how our education system is flawed when it comes to exams and assignments. In a class, you have to beat the others to be called a achiever. In the real world, you have to work with others to come up with something good. Working with FOSS allows you to collaborate with others and have a taste of how things work in the real world.

Our main aim in organizing this BoF was to get even 2 students interested in FOSS. Sadly, I am sure we failed to do that . However, we told the students about the mailing lists and irc channels that they could use to find help. I hope some of them eventually turn up there.

Danese was one of the speakers in this conference and she gave a good presentation on how to get into open source. Answering the audience questions on how to make money with Open Source, she said that Open Source allows you to make money by offering services, and India understands the service model well. This rankled me quite a bit. There aer ways to make money by selling FOSS products too - MySQL and SugarCRM being the prime examples. However, in India, you don't have any companies which make products. Lots of companies outsource their development work here, but except Tally (a closed source accounting software), I don;t know of any Indian companies making products. I am not sure why this is the way things are - one reason might be that product development is inherently a risky business. On the other hand, the payoff from a product is quite high.

I also met a bunch of people whom I knew only in the online world. We went to this amazing restaurant called "Horn OK Please". Even though we had to wait a bit to get the tables, it was really worth it. If you are in Pune, try out that restaurant.

All in all, I will say that this experience was really good. The students did excellent work in organizing the event, though I would have been happier if they participated in the event instead of just being a volunteer in it.

orthogonal - statistically independent, if things are orthogonal, then one thing can change without affecting others

Political freedoms and laissez fair capitalism are largely orthogonal, except in extreme cases on both left and right, where it tends to diminish democracy.

-- seen on some mailing list