lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

I discover wonderful things through webcomics. Today, I was reading this comic, where I saw a mention of Miyamoto Musashi. I checked out his wikipedia entry, where a I found a link to his book The Book of Five Rings and that is what I am reading now.

One of the thinking tools that I have learned from my manager is the Caf. Caf stands for "consider all factors" and it was invented by De Bono. I have started a wikipedia page on caf . Do add more to it if you know better or if you have any links further exploring this idea.

Nokia ports apache to Symbian , the name of the project is "Raccoon". The phone can serve as a web server. Check out their concept demos. I especially liked their Access to Core Data. They suggest "Mount a read-write view of the /Apache directory using WebDAV and edit your webpages directly.". Nice. Now I have to get my hands on a 6630 asap - just so that I can have a webserver running on it

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.