lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

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!!

Firefox 2

I am Living on the edge. What about you ? .

Dear Manager,
I thank you from the bottom of my heart for approvimg my request to move my work desktop to a RedHat system. FreeBSD4 sucks donkey balls (as Eric Cartman would say). Linux is so super-sweet (even if it is RHEL)
Now to move my home directory.
Your sincere slave
Raj Shekhar

Almost 2 months back, I got myself an ipod shuffle. After using it for some time, I am totally in love with it. I can now understand why the Macheads sell out their souls to Apple - the bargain is well worth it .

I was thinking about why portable devices like ipod and mobile phones are so close to their owners and I came up with this list.

• They are truly personal. You can customize them (think mobile wallpapers, ringtones, playlists) quite a lot.
• The are small and portable (duh!)
• They can serve multiple purposes. A mobile phone can also serve as a watch, address book, radio, m3 player, camera. A ipod can also be used as a memory stick, FM transmitter and it can also fit in your car's music system.
• These devices become useful as soon as you buy them. You can start using a mobile phone as soon as you insert your sim card into it and you can start using your ipod as soon as you transfer music into it. Instant karma!
• They have long battery life.

This list is just something to keep in mind when I am designing my Killer App (TM).

If you have not heard about emacs registers, you are missing a very powerful tool in your arsenal. Think of registers as "clipboard" on steroids. I had been using registers to store text -i.e. C-x r s a to copy region into register "a" and C-x r i a to insert text from register "a".

Today, while reading the gnu.emacs.help newsgroup, I came to know that you could save your current (emacs)frames layout to the register and then restore it back again.

• `C-x r w R' Save the state of the selected frame's windows in register R (`window-configuration-to-register').
• `C-x r j R' restore a window or frame configuration stored in register R.

Here is the email where I saw this.

Re: how to keep/restore my view and mode?

• From: David Hansen
• Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
• Subject: Re: how to keep/restore my view and mode?
• Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2006 10:13:58 +0200
• References: <1158816234.643256.254090@e3g2000cwe.googlegroups.com>
• To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
• Mail-Followup-To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
• List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs.gnu.org>

On 20 Sep 2006 22:23:54 -0700 Leo Hou wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I am not sure if I am using the right term of "view" and "mode". My
> problem is as follows:
>
> I am using C-x 3 and "follow-mode" to view my source code. Every time I
> compile, the other column becomes the result of make. I need to use a
> lot of keys to switch it back to normal: C-x o; C-x k; C-x o; M-x
> follow-mode
> Is there a better way?

C-x r w <some letter or number> to store a window layout and
C-x r j <the same number or letter> to restore it. And there
is no need to kill the compilation buffer.  It gets reused
anyway.

David