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Entries from Raj Shekhar

  • January, 2006

  • Reflections on 2005

    Thanks to Sachac for pointing out this list of questions to review your year.

    What did I learn this year?

    Let me see. On the technical side I learnt quite a lot.

    • a bit of Perl
    • quite a lot of MySQL
    • new things in PHP, especially related to web services and graphs
    • lots of new stuff related to high availability and failover
    • lots of new stuff in troubleshooting

    On the non technical side, I did not learn much

    • I finally read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
    • I started taking steps to manage my time well. I am following the Getting Things Done forums and mailing lists, picking up great tips from them but have yet to read THE BOOK. It was this year that I learnt about emacs-planner for managing tasks
    • I read a few management type books, they are not that bad

    The lessons of life that I learnt this year

    • I am much better than I think I am :-D
    • Family support and good friends are the most important assets that someone can have
    • Don't try to get stereotyped
    • An idea does not have to be big, it has to change the world
    • It is a good idea to write and publish about every new thing that I learn.

    What did I accomplish this year?

    Quite a lot, if I can say that myself :-)

    • Got selected to be a part of Yahoo! Bangalore
    • Moved from Delhi to Bangalore and established a household here :-)
    • One of the interns I mentored got selected to become a regular employee
    • Got published in webzines
    • Kickstarted the PHPC Gazette, which is still in its infancy but I am sure something good will come out of it
    • Wrote articles on my website that proved useful to a bunch of people
    • Spoke on Y! webservice at Freedel
    • Got a good year end appraisal :-)
    • Discovered Terry Pratchett

    Which accomplishments am I proudest of?

    • Getting selected to be a part of Yahoo! bangalore
    • Kickstarting the PHPC Gazette

    Knowing what I know now, what would I have done differently in the past year?

    Let me see.

    • Written more articles
    • Written more code for my favourite free software
    • Read more Terry Pratchett

    What will be my greatest lasting memories of this year?

    • Getting selected into Yahoo!. Absolutely something that I will always remember.
    • Moving to Bangalore from Delhi

    In what ways did I contribute?

    Not in as many ways as I would have liked to, just in small ways

    • Helped my previous colleague in taking over from where I left off
    • Started the PHPC Gazette
    • Submitted one patch for AMO. I should have done more :-(
    • Answered a bunch of questions on php-general, linux-delhi and some other mailing lists and IRC channels.
    • Supported my brother and sister for this year

    What were my biggest challenges or obstacles?

    • Not enough time management
    • I am not punctual
    • I am not caring about my health, even though I am aware that it might give me trouble later in life

    What obstacles did I overcome?

    • Reduced the time I spend in the office from 16 hours to 9 hours, though this change took place only in December
    • Established a household in a new city

    How am I different now than I was at the start of the year?

    • I am more confident than I was when the year started
    • I am more willing to voice my disagreements, both in person and over email
    • I have stopped saying RTFM to questions now
    • I am fatter :-)
    • I know how to better manage my time now (but this is still a ongoing struggle )

    What am I most grateful for?

    • The support of my family
    • My job

    What else do I want to reflect on?

    I should have contributed more to Free Software projects than I do now, and by contributing I mean more in terms of code. I need to figure out a way to fit exercise in my schedule and lose weight.

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  • December, 2005

  • Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

    Funny quote

    Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is Star Wars for girls.
    Seen here
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  • ImageMagick magic

    I am experimenting a bit with ImageMagick. Here is a neat trick that I found. Suppose that you have an image (79.gif) and you want to make an ecard out of it, i.e a montage where 79.gif should appear on the left and your message to the recipient on the right. Here is how you can do it E:\>convert -font arial -pointsize 30 label:"The answer as always is\n42" miff:- | montage -tile 2x1 79.gif - myecard.png

    The convert part creates a text label (with your message) and sends the output to the STDOUT , which is piped to the montage command. Montage takes care of stitching the message and the image together. Currently, the 79.gif loses its original resolution and gets resized to the label size. I will update this post further if I find out how to make it retain the original size. This is a good place to start if you are interested

    Update : convert -font arial -pointsize 30 label:"The answer as always is\n42" miff:- | montage -geometry +2+1 79.jpg - myecard.png preserves the size of the original image and adds the message to the right of the image as well

    Update : convert -size 1200x1600 xc:white -font arial -pointsize 40 -gravity Center -annotate +30+90 "Wishing you a very\nProsperous and a happy 2006\n \n From\n-- Lunatech" -trim +repage miff:- | montage -geometry +2+1 79.jpg - -quality 95 myecard.png does the job. I have added the quality 95 to bring down the file size of the myecard.png

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  • Interesting quotes from "You and Your Research" talk by Richard Hamming

    • Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.
    • Well I now come down to the topic, ``Is the effort to be a great scientist worth it?'' To answer this, you must ask people. When you get beyond their modesty, most people will say, ``Yes, doing really first-class work, and knowing it, is as good as wine, women and song put together,'' or if it's a woman she says, ``It is as good as wine, men and song put together.'' And if you look at the bosses, they tend to come back or ask for reports, trying to participate in those moments of discovery. They're always in the way. So evidently those who have done it, want to do it again. But it is a limited survey. I have never dared to go out and ask those who didn't do great work how they felt about the matter. It's a biased sample, but I still think it is worth the struggle. I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself. The success and fame are sort of dividends, in my opinion.

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  • making glossy, dark button

    Since del.icio.us is down, this a note to self. How to make glossy buttons with rounded edges - I tested it out and it really works :-) .
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  • The joy of programming

    Today, after a long time, I again felt the "joy of programming" - I was working on something absolutely trivial, but the difference this time was that I was not programming for someone else, but just for the heck of it (or simply, because I could).
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  • Trying out MySQL5

    I have written a small article on how you can install MySQL5 alongside with MySQL4. MySQL5 has a bunch of new features and I am trying to spend some time in learining them. Read the article titled Trying out MySQL5 without clobbering your MySQL4 installation and let me know of your comments.

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