lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

Alternative expansions for IRC (as seen in the #phpc@irc.freenode.net)

Tetraboy :  Internet Relax Chat
lig           : Instant Resource chat 

Dina points to "email is dead" in reference to teens by Danah Boyd

"Now, let's talk about youth. They have email accounts. They get homework assignments sent there. Xanga tells them that their friends have updated their pages. Attachments (a.k.a. digital Netflix/Amazon packages) get sent there. Companies try to spam them there (a.k.a. junk mail). Sifting through the crap, they might get a neat penpal letter or a friend might have sent them something to read but, by and large, there's not a lot of emotional investment over email.

That said, take away their AIM or MySpace or SMS or whatever their primary form of asynchronous messaging with their friends is and they will start twitching and moan about how you've ruined their life. And you have. Because you've taken away their access to their friends, their access to the thing that matters most to them. It's like me taking away your access to blogs and email and being forced to stay at the office just because you showed up late for work.

There is a difference that I see in the way IM and emails work. On an IM, you get messages from a set of accepted people - who talk about stuff that (mostly) matters to you. On the other hand, your email account is a dropbox for a bunch of uninteresting stuff - mostly spam. However, if you think about it, email has its advantage too - it can be archived, encrypted, signed, personalized, sent across networks (i.e. your gmail.com account can send an email to yahoo.com email id, but you cannot chat with your yahoo! messenger friends from gtalk.

Maybe something equivalent to your IM-buddy list can be done for emails too. You have an email account and that accepts emails only from a whitelisted set of email-ids. Whenever you get an email from a new id, you can either add him to the buddy list or you can report the message as a spam and block the email id. Next step would be to integrate the notifications of new messages into you own desktop and an online presence indicator.

Just some food for thought .

When I moved to Bangalore, my brother and sister came here with me. However, sometime back both of them got admitted into MBA colleges in Pune and Mumbai respectively and I have been living alone. This has lead to a sort of tv-addiction. I come back from work and switch on the tv and bham! two hours have gone past just like that. Or on a weekend I take my lunch and sit in front of the tv and bham! it is soon dinner time.

To get out of this groove, I unplugged the cable that brings me cable television from the TV. Then I went one step further. I took a bit of string and the cable to one of the window rods. Now when I want to watch the tv, I will have to get up, untie the knot and plug the cable into the tv. Since this is too much work, I will not do it . However, there are some serials (like Simpsons) for which I would do that much work. This will reduce my casual tv surfing to null.

It has been two days now and this experiment has been successful till now.

I have been playing with s9y's cml-rpc interface for a few days now. Here is a small article on how you can post to your s9y blog using the command line.

If you have not yet read the book iWoz, you have to go out and get this book and read it cover to cover. It is an amazing book and I could not put this book down once I started reading it. It is an amazing book and I could not put this book down once I started reading it. Woz is an excellent storyteller and his tone of writing is conversational. Every engineer should read this book. It tells the stories of sleepless nights and how much they are worth. It talks about persistence and passion and how they really make a difference. One of the profound statements that Woz makes is " I chose to be happy ". The book ends with Woz's thoughts on being a great engineer:

• Don’t waver.
• See things in gray-scale.
• Work alone.
• Trust your instincts.

One surprising thing in the book is the absence of any mention of the EFF, of which Woz was one of the founders.

Ramki explaing some subtle points. However, just think of it as a demo of b**b-catching and laugh

There has been a thread going on in the india-gii list about hiring and retaining talented coders in india. Here is the email that the original poster had posted

Over the past few weeks I've met with several people who are all
having the same headaches

1. Hiring talented coders
2. Retaining talented coders

The first is usually down to lack of talent (coders directly out of
college just don't have the "new " skills (for example) in things like
ajax, ruby, but have core knowledge of things like C, and what I call
"old" languages), and also salaries wanted, especially if you are
trying to sell abroad and compete with pricing abroad, i.e brazil,
russia, ukraine offer lower prices these days.  

My thoughts about this

When hiring freshers, I don't think you should look for what languages
they know. Instead you should
- try to gauge how much of the fundamentals they know
- if they (freshers) are self-learners

Point 1 can be checked by asking them about sorting/searching
algorithms or networking or process management (basically the topics
which are covered in their operating system course or their data
structures course).

Point 2 can be checked by seeing if they have contributed to any free
software project and actually asking them to show their code (it is
after all free software and there is no NDA).  If a fresher has worked
on an open source project, it usually means
- he knows about version control
- he knows about mailing lists
- he can work without much supervision
- he can work with a distributed team
- and most importantly, he can work with a team

In the email, the original poster had also mentioned this point

the big guns (tcs, infosys etc) hire like 10K users in a go, and its
seems that the prospects of getting a good wife/husband are directly
linked to the name of the company on the CV (again this maybe biased,
but am seeing it more and more).

WTF!! ROTFL!!