Author: Prasad Ajinkya

Prasad Ajinkya is the Big Fat Geek and often he spends his time working on the WordPress or Google eco-system. He loves to solve business problems with technology.

IIM Jobs

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No, I am not job hunting. Atleast not yet :)

But I came across this great site. Its iimjobs.com

Its a portal for all job hunters or for those of us who want to know our market value, and feel good with that information. The site has a simple layout with all the recent job openings on top. Plus, if you are particular about one stream only, then you can browse through the job postings by specialty.

And the best part about the site is that you do not have to register to get to the content.

Kudos Tarun!!

Coming back to this post after a decade, and can say so much has changed about IIM Jobs. It has become one of our default sites to post jobs, and also refer to friends and family when they are hunting for opportunities.

In the start-up eco-system, I can see that founders are posting jobs for co-founders.

Valu: The Wild Bull

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valu

Had gone to Mumbai over the weekend, my mother talked me into watching this movie on Saturday night. Since I did not have anything else to do except visit my ophthalmologist, I complied.

It has been over 4-5 years since I have watched a marathi movie in a theater. And I was pleasantly surprised with the new age of marathi movies coming. Valu in marathi means a bull which is unleashed in the wild, it is not to be tamed and not to be tampered with either.

So the movie starts off with a no-nonsense forest officer who is dispatched to capture a rogue wild bull who is disturbing the peaceful proceedings of some nondescript village. The forest officer is miffed at this prospect, that such an important person like him is now relegated to capturing wild bulls instead of leopards and their ilk. Nonetheless he goes there, along with him, comes his younger brother … and his video camera. The entire movie is about different perspectives from different villagers about one problem. A wild bull. If you do understand marathi, then definitely worth a watch.

What is more interesting, is how the movie was made. The producers of this movie are not your regular Sippy’s and Bokadia’s … they are not even millionaires, they are simple middle class people like you and me. The aam aadmi of Maharashtra. How did they come up with the moolah? Well, through their friends, relatives and friend of their friends. Talk about Movie 2.0, huh?

64 = 65?

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I am damn right confused!! What is wrong with this figure … geometrically, an area of 64 sq. units is now converted into 65 sq. units. How!?!

Got any bright ideas on this? I do.

I think it is violating the Basic Proportionality Theorem (BPT). Since it is assuming that 3/8 = 5/13 (the colored triangle being similar to the bigger half of the rectangle). Which is obviously incorrect, so the rectangle cannot be formed like so. Whew! Thank god for the constraints of geometry!!

A precise (and a slightly lengthy) answer is here.

Microsoft to open up?

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Microsoft has started to take the power of the development community seriously. In a press conference yesterday, they have put a very verbose official release regarding increasing the interoperability of all the high volume MS products by releasing and maintaining documentation of their APIs on their site. As quoted from Steve Ballmer,

For the past 33 years, we have shared a lot of information with hundreds of thousands of partners around the world and helped build the industry, but today’s announcement represents a significant expansion toward even greater transparency. Our goal is to promote greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for customers and developers throughout the industry by making our products more open and by sharing even more information about our technologies.

Read the complete release here.

The products whose APIs would be released are Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007, and future versions of all these products.

Can we have someone look into the revenue of these products as well?

Translated, will now have to buy a license and become a registered member of MSDN to understand the APIs for the “high volume products”.

Addendum
RedHat was not so much impressed with this release, read more of it here.

Firefox reaches 500 m :-)

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Its my favorite browser. My only browser for that matter (yes, I sometimes do use Konqueror) and only use the more ubiquitous IE but only to go to Mozilla site and download the latest release of Firefox.

Its great to know that all of us have contributed to the magic number. 500,000,000. There’s hope to this world after all :-)

Read more about the milestone here.

One more example of how the user and customer opinion and feedback was taken into account while developing the product. It sometimes becomes very difficult to choose between the two dictums Customer is always right and To thine own be true. Many a times people have to make those hard choices in order to keep a business running. So what if the product is slightly flawed … the customers wont complain, because they do not have any other obvious choice. Yes I am talking about you-know-who-who-bundles-their-browsers-with-their-operating-systems. Try uninstalling IE from WinXPSP2 and you will know what I am talking about.

Well, now they do. And they know about it!! Power to the people!!

Meetings

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Its 4pm today (read day-before-yesterday), when I have started doodling this blog post. Yes, I am one of those people who sometimes write their blog post on paper before they digitize it. This is being done in the throes or should I say meanders of a meeting. It had started 2 hours ago, and I am getting shudders remembering it. From the start, all of us knew that it was going to be a monster of a meeting.

Still, we managed to touch base upon pollination of flowers, onion and potato rates and how interesting the commodities market is becoming. We had assembled to finalize SAP process flows. We are a retail merchandising firm. I love meetings.

The ideal number of people in a meeting is 3-4, the moment it goes above that, you are asking for trouble. You will have atleast one person (like moi in this case) who will be doodling on a piece of paper.

Focus Prasad!! Focus!!!

Its 8pm now, and we have managed to cover some ground, but it looks pretty glum from my end. I decided to put together a small list that people like me can do when they end up in meetings such as these –

  • Think about the more recent interesting stuff you have read
  • Start a screensaver in your mind, I personally like the Hufo’s Smoke on a linux machine
  • Butt into the meeting with something that borders between sense and incoherence to make your presence felt
  • Try listening for a change and even add “value” to the meeting
  • Try playing your favorite tune in your head
  • Send stratified SMSes to your loved ones
  • Make lists such as these, preferably with a straight face
  • Think about new ways to customize your blog and your website
  • Order for coffee and biscuits
  • Move about the meeting as if people are calling you out for something important or the other
  • Drink enough coffee/water that you have to visit the water closet

Got any more? Do drop me in a line then!!

Cheers.

N3tH@c|<

Prasad Ajinkya3 Comments

The mountain giant picked up a boulder and heaved it towards me. My female orc wizard ducked and narrowly missed the hulk of rock. I decided to take my Wand of striking and kill both the giant and the killer bee buzzing behind him in a single strike. The giant absorbed the magic and moved on to pick up the boulder for another shot. I smote off the killer bee with a couple of blows with my trusted +4 magic staff and turned to face the giant. The goliath had managed to pick up the boulder, now was the time … I took out another wand of magic missile and let go its fury at him. No effect. I would have to kill this one by hand-to-hand. No matter. The staff was up for the challenge and my mithril coat was unharmed. A fast flurry of blows was exchanged the giant lay bested at my feet.

No, this is not a dream. Its one of my favorite games, NetHack!! This is a single player game released in around late 1980’s … the development of this game has been completely on the net … and its a hack and slash game … hence net + hack = nethack :-)

Everytime I play the game, theres something new that happens. The maps are different, the characters are many to play with … and the game decides to behave differently on a full moon day!!

Just one more example of how a product has developed in a decentralized fashion over an open interactive medium (IRC and Usenets) to result in a customer oriented product.