Towers of Hanoi

"Hanoi" - as a close friend of mine calls himself, has started a new effort called "Towers of Hanoi".

The so called one man startup has started getting some cool techie work. After much running around doing some creepy service work and making small money .. some good work has found its way to Hanoi.

Of cource .. you must be thinking why the hell am i spending time writing such stupid blog. Well just to attract those "like-minded" few.

The work includes -
1. Moving the fast growing slibe.com to a OpenSSI Linux compute cluster with 4 nodes, which would be almost 10-15 times powerful than Old' Param 1000. ( work would start in June )

2. working with www.misoconcepts.com to research about HA clusters which can be virtualized just like VirtualFe. One very interesting objective of this work is to see if clusters can be extended/replicated beyond a normal LAN to take care of HA.

3. Working with some aquintance on "Distributed database Filesystem". This would ofcource be user space and would help the person host a online distributed storage solution with cost as low as 1$/GB. (work to start after misoconcepts)

And the best part is that he makes good money working on these. And I get free booze whenever i meet him.

cheers ... hic!!

Paradise Paradox

Me and steve discusses this over booze .. but i guess this one is still worth blogging.

Paradise: any place of complete bliss and delight and peace.

If there is indeed such a place called paradise then everybody in that place would be happy. But the meaning of happiness for me is definitely not that of Multi's or to talk of someone famous say Bill Gates. Then how can both of us be happy living together.

Also if such a way of living which could make every righteous soul happy after death .. why wouldn't they strive to achieve this when alive... why do they have to die for it :-)

So, all we can conclude is that either paradise is a hoax promised to man by God to keep him/her on right track OR its a dream or a feeling of virtual reality which is visualized or realized by each individual soul differently.

Think about it.

A brain in drain

My mind is in a state of utter unrest.

A friend of mine once told me that IIT helped me develop wings and left me on a runway. Now I would be a soab if I couldn't break all fetters and takeoff.

Although veritas has been fair to me in giving me good work. I think i am capable of doing much better work and to me its like pumping diesel into aircraft engine.

Even since i have met bhatia .. the !dea of a startup has struck me like a leach. And now neither can i feed this parasite nor can i take it off.

Plus for this endeavor i would require a year long supply of -
1. Moolah
2. Brains

After some months of struggle I think the first one can be taken care of. But the people that i trust are either too busy or take it as yet another booze talk.


But i have hope, coz i know whenever i have been in such situation i have managed to come out well.

Yaaran da Tushon

I got my well awaited laptop HP dv8000z -

AMD Turion x64 2 Gigz
17" brightview
RAM - 512 MB
Bus 1600 Mgz
V. Ram - 128 MB
Chipset - ATI Xpress 200M
Wifi 802.11 a/b/g
DVD +/- RW
7.8 lb

I am a sony fan and wanted to buy a VAIO but .. it would have costed me almost twice. In case of camera/walkmans this is acceptable .. but for something you just assemble why the hell should you charge double.

Plus no one offered a x64 based PC.

I hate Thinkpads for their poor graphics and looks. Dell is good .. but somewhat not that sturdy.

My wishlist of gadgets include -
1. Sony Dig-SLR (expected to hit market in may '06) - $1000
2. Sony PS3 - $500
3. Samsung X730 phone - $300
4. OpenMosix Cluster ;-)


As kids you love toys ... and when you grow up the toys just become a little expensive.

M$ Interview

I like giving interviews .. simply because they keep me updated of latest techs and to put it bluntly my contemporary cost. But I was at M$ for a different reason .. to know if M$ is really as bad as the open source community claim.

This was an "only IITians" walkin at pune. The first day, I went there wearing a "Got Linux" t-shirt and ppl there didn't seem to mind it. The HRrahulpc@microsoft.com) welcomed me and showed me a room make myself comfortable.

My first interviewer was wearing a pink shirt with "Microsoft" imprinted on the collar. He started of asking my work and then started asking me some stupid questions which he called "puzzles". They included all kind of questions like "what is a link list" and "how can you make it circular". Finally he convinced himself that i wasn't probably as stupid as i look and gave me some more questions. He demanded some "tight code" for -

1. Reverse a link list
2. Sort a given string.

This reminded me of my worst prof ever "Hon. Dr. P. K. Das" of IIT Guwahati. I still respect that man ... coz he did teach me one thing - "There would always be one person, much more stupid than you and yet sitting on your head if not making more money than you."

I asked this interviewer again .. if i was being interviwed for a Q.A job, but he told me that i was being considered for a R&D job for the mobile computing group. For the second question I tried to use "String Tries", but very soon came to know that i am crossing my interviewers intelligence level.

Anyways this interview got over and I met this guy dressed smartly and looking at my t-shirt .. as if some stupid has entered the room. He gave me a lecture about "Enterprise Software Development" and how Linux lacks it.

Rest of the interview was as stupid as the previous one .. write a code, find mistakes in it and write test cases. I tried to suggest that probably .. asking me some analytical questions should be better. But i guess i was taken for a fool.

Next day i decided not to go for an interview .. but the HR gave me a call that I should come as my interviews were going *very good*. And stupid of me that i again went there.

But, this was a good day. I met the manager of "mobile computing group". I tried explainig him that i wasn't been tested me for my skill sets. He gave me a puzzle which was similiar to the Chinese Postman problem. I liked it.

And then asked me a mix of good and stupid questions like -
1. What is the common filesystem on linux.
i said .. ext2
2. which company makes it.
well ... it can be the guy next door also.
3. Whats the max path length in ext2
4096 ( he must be googling ;-)
4. How are acls or xattrs organized on disk in ext2.
There are common blocks on the disk and different inodes point to same.
5. How is OS security integrated with filesystem security.
6. Does filesystem security depend upon support from processor.
yes.

anyways he made me an offer (some 8+ lakh annum).. and i told him frankly that if the work is going to me same as the skillsets i have been tested upon, I would not be happy doing it and he can hire a person half the cost as mine to do the same. I walked out.

Thoughout the interview i could feel that these guys dont know anything ouside M$ and they are anything but IITians.

Then HR requested me to meet one of the directors of technology, this guy was smart. He was ready to listen .. i showed him my blog and told him what veritas tested me for. He gave me to design a scheduler and then tested me on a graph problem.

All went well and he talked to me about a position in the Windows Server group and asked me to Hyd for some more interviews.

And then in next few days ... I faced the might of HR. I got a call from Vijaya (Vijaya Talluri v-vijtal@microsoft.com) from Microsoft asking me to join them in Hyd for an interview. I told them my apprehentions about taking a leave .. but she insisted me to take one. Then finally i decided to take a leave .. and she sent me details of flight and accomodations. I recieved a little under a dozen more ppl for the same.

I planned o fly on a friday at 5:30 and about 10 AM same day i get a call from her saying the position i was looking for i filled so she would .. help me get in touch with another HR person.

This is idiotic new character in the story .. calls me at 3PM asking me to prepare for an interview at 6PM. I told her .. that even if I want to I can't take calls during a flight. And then she quite easily says .. that i should drop the idea about flight and take a leave the following week. This fumed me .. and i blasted off .. and to my utter surprise she simply dropped the phone over me.

Next i get a call from Rahul apologizin for the same and told me that I recieved a 5 star "must hire rating" from that director and thats the reason M$ wants to take me in... Finally that stupid HR again called up acting as if nothing has happened.

This time ... i dropped the phone. Thrice.

And, they never spammed again.