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<Summary> YATB, Yet Another Technology Blog </Summary>

Monday, March 28, 2005

Must Read

I am reading Paul Graham's essays, here are the good ones that I read


If you are a college student : http://www.paulgraham.com/college.html
If you are planning to launch a startup: http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html
More essays : http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

Must read.

Friday, March 18, 2005

Yada-Vada

Read about Protothreads, I have to say that I am indeed very much impressed with what Adam Dunkels has done. Couple of links.

http://www.sics.se/~adam/pt/
http://blogs.bl0rg.net/netzstaub/archives/000493.html


My advice don't try to understand them by following the documentation given. Try to understand _WHY_ it works by following BOTH the code in pt.h, lc.h and lc-switch.h and the documentation. It won't take long.

Anyway, as regards to "The Da Vinci Code" it is still "read-in-progress". I haven't been able to get it issued from Library, so I try to go every alternate day to skim through it. The trouble is that the story has turned out to full of suspense and I just can't resist waiting to read about all the environment that the author is trying to create and I just skip to the action part.

Sunday, March 13, 2005

Reading "The Da Vinci Code"

So, I have finally started to read "The Da Vinci Code", when I picked it up in library I thought it was going to be just me satisfying my curiosity about "Da Vinci". But as I started skimming page after page I realized, that it required a more careful reading. After reading about 100 pages on the first day, when I came back home and started researching on Da Vinci a bit more. I was quite surprised that a lot of what is said in the book is indeed true, though the facts page in the book did mention it, I really did not take it with a bit of seriousness. Partially because I did not know much about this book except for some mention here and there. The book is quite critical of the _current_ practices of the Church, information about "holy grail" and also it is quite an interesting read with all the cryptic codes like "Oh! Draconian Devil". All in all a very interting read.

However, as I was researching on Leonardo, I came across texts written by him, there are about 1600 enteries in it, and it would take a _lot_ of time to go through them. FWIW as I was going through them I came across couple interesting ones.



1330.

WHY DOGS TAKE PLEASURE IN SMELLING AT EACH OTHER.

This animal has a horror of the poor, because they eat poor food,
and it loves the rich, because they have good living and especially
meat. And the excrement of animals always retains some virtue of its
origin as is shown by the faeces ...

Now dogs have so keen a smell, that they can discern by their nose
the virtue remaining in these faeces, and if they find them in the
streets, smell them and if they smell in them the virtue of meat or
of other things, they take them, and if not, they leave them: And to
return to the question, I say that if by means of this smell they
know that dog to be well fed, they respect him, because they judge
that he has a powerful and rich master; and if they discover no such
smell with the virtue of meet, they judge that dog to be of small
account and to have a poor and humble master, and therefore they
bite that dog as they would his master.



1285.

A JEST.

It was asked of a painter why, since he made such beautiful figures,
which were but dead things, his children were so ugly; to which the
painter replied that he made his pictures by day, and his children
by night.


Talk about versatility ;-).

Monday, March 07, 2005

Hurray to Quark

So some of you might have read that Quark has fired 150 of it's employees, I had actually been expecting this for quite while now. Quark is one of the very few IT companies in my city. The other one is Infosys and together it is said that they account for more than 50% of the software exports from Punjab state.


However, Quark is one of those companies which has some of the worst management practices I have come across, I have only come across there HR management so let me point out some fallacies in it.

When about a year back I was looking for my internship and I visited their office, I ask the wise guy sitting at desk and he asks me to call this Ms P, I call her up and the convo goes on like this.


Me: Hi, Ms P I am wondering if you can provide me any information about internships at Quark
MsP: Could you tell me what you are doing?
Me: I am doing my Msc(IT)
MsP: We don't take in any Msc(IT) students
Me: Any
MsP: Yes any.

Convo ends. I came back home felling a bit dejected. Later that night I called up one of my friends and she told me about one of our mates who had got internship at Quark. My O my, was in a surprise when I got to know her name. This girl could not even write "Hello World" in C and she was hired. Later I talked to one of my friends at Quark and she was absolutely clear about how Quark hires,

a) You are taken in from college.
b) You know someone in management at Quark.


Sure knowing some one big anywhere is a big asset, but when you can't write hello world and you are hired thats shity. Anyway what can I say about those who were fired

R.I.P