Change!

Many of you already know about this... but now directly from the donkey's mouth...

Feb 28th will be my last in Persistent as an employee. I will continue to work with the same teams @ Persistent as an independent consultant. I will be very much in Pune and continue to sit at the same place. So nothing much changes for the most part for most people, especially for Rakesh's teams. Just that i wont get to the do the bossgiri which i am so used to.

I had one heck of a stay in Persistent. Persistent gave me a chance do to whatever i wanted to do and most importantly do it my way. I worked with some great people and great clients, and i owe a lot to Persistent!

Ten years is a long time, and this has been a hard decision to make. Though I should say i have never bothered to "think through" my decisions. You always get to know whether a decision is right or wrong only in retrospect. So what the heck!

Jai Ho!

Slumdog - whats so great?

I dont get whats so great about this movie! No wonder, Slumdog didnt do well in India.  

So, either we in Indian dint like the so called "truth", or its a hit in the west because they liked its poverty porn. I just didnt feel "entertained" enough. Rest I dont care. Though Rahman's mucis, as always, is great.

There also seems to be a trend now with movies getting great reviews but movies turning out to be not so great. E.g. devd, gajani. I wont be surprised if the number of stars a movie gets is directly propotional to how much ads the paper gets from that movie! :)

Post Oscar: Should admit that it felt very good to see SM winnig those awards...

~Sri

Why I hate unnecessary Word docs!

Do you get emails like this?

Agenda for tomorrow's meeting attached.

Agenda.doc contains

Call in details: XXXX

Agenda:

 1.

 2.

 3.

It beats me why do we need a Word doc for this? Its a pain for the sender & pain for the reader. Why dont you just write it in the email itself?

Better still, write it in a Wiki and send the Wiki link (now dont attach the doc in Wiki, more about it later). That way Wiki contains all the Agendas, MOMs, status reports in one easily accessible way.

Someone might say, "I can create tables easily in Word doc" or "Wiki is hard to use", etc. Most of these apprehensions come from the fact that many people have not used Wiki and more importantly most of these artifacts (Agendas, MOMs, status reports) dont need any fancy formatting. Just simple text is *the* best way to use it.

Now coming to attaching a Word doc in Wiki. This is equally bad as per  my opinion.  Then you need a CVS/SVN, not a Wiki.

So keep it simple. Use Word for req specs, design docs etc. 

Top Ten Web Design Mistakes

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designmistakes.html

The famous Bill Gates letter from 1976 about MS piracy.

memcached

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=39391378919&id=9445547199&index=0

If you've read anything about scaling large websites, you've probably heard about memcached. memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system. Here at Facebook, we're likely the world's largest user of memcached. We use memcached to alleviate database load. memcached is already fast, but we need it to be faster and more efficient than most installations. We use more than 800 servers supplying over 28 terabytes of memory to our users. Over the past year as Facebook's popularity has skyrocketed, we've run into a number of scaling issues. This ever increasing demand has required us to make modifications to both our operating system and memcached to achieve the performance that provides the best possible experience for our users.