DeeKaying @ Nettle

From: Sue Gardner <...@ wikimedia.org > Date: Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 1:41 PM Subject: Thank you from the Wikimedia Foundation Dear Divye, Thank you for your gift of USD 100 to the Wikimedia Foundation, received on December 8, 2010. I'm very grateful for your support. Your donation celebrates everything Wikipedia and its sister sites stand for: the power of information to help people live better lives, and the importance of sharing, freedom, learning and discovery. Thank you so much for helping to keep these projects freely available for their more than 400 million monthly readers around the world. Your money supports technology and people. The Wikimedia Foundation develops and improves the technology behind Wikipedia and nine other projects, and sustains the infrastructure that keeps them up and running. The Foundation has a staff of about fifty, which provides technical, administrative, legal and outreach support for the global community of volunteers who write and ed...

I just made a donation of $100 to Wikipedia in recognition of the shared treasure of knowledge it maintains on such a huge wealth of topics. Thank you so much Wikipedia for all that you've done for me. I am indebted to you.

Hi Guys,    I know I'm not really writing a letter, but I really felt that I should jot down my impression of the Google Campus Placement process of 2010 before I forgot most of it. As a lot of my Facebook friends know by now, I've been given a campus placement offer by Google. Naturally, I'm really excited about it. Here's the story of how it all happened - a blow by blow account. (Tip: The interview questions are well marked out in the narrative and you can skip to them if you're not really interested in the campus process narrative).    Google's hiring process is known to be pretty tough and their engineers are counted among the best in the world. The first whiff of that came through when a couple of young techies and an HR landed on campus sometime in November to carry out their written test. 50 eligible candidates for the test and 50 copies of the question paper: +3 -1 was the scoring scheme - so no guessing! (or atleast very calculative guessing). Most o...

Update: Rohan Rathore and his tragic story is a hoax for sure. This is confirmed. I've talked to my friends at IIT Guwahati and there is no record of such a person ever existing on campus. Nobody at IIT-G knew him and if a person dies in tragic circumstances, nearly everyone in the IIT knows it. The story about Rohan Rathore was created in order to gain views for a video on Youtube. So let us all put the "fake" Rohan Rathore to rest permanently as a person who never existed. Therefore, we can be very sure that the original singer of the song is Gajendra Verma. I'm leaving the original post below for archival purposes. ------ Original Post follows ---- I was introduced to this song by Sanat nearly a month ago and today, after listening to it again on Youtube,  I really felt that I needed to transcribe its lyrics. It's such a soulful song that you can't help feeling sentimental after hearing it - especially since the IITian (Rohan Rathod) who wrote a...

I read this on the LinkedIn groups' Microsoft current and ex-employees forum and it really touched my heart. I've worked (more accurately, interned) at Microsoft and I can understand the pain that he has felt. Read the mail below and form your own opinions about MSFT. LinkedIn Groups Group: Microsoft - Current and Former Employees Discussion: I think MS is dying because of losing capability of innovation, losing capability to keep those talent people to work for her, and the fatal reseason of MS dying is Value of Closing" and "Isolated" Here's my personal experience of trying to innovate at Microsoft. I spent 14.5 years at there. I'm one of the co-inventors of ClearType, I have some 20-odd granted US Patents, so I think I have some credibility... Approximately 2.5 of my Microsoft years were the best years of my (long) working life. About 12 of ...

This was the question that I received from France via Aardvark. Here's my response: "Faster" when applied to software implies a number of things - including the quality of implementation (which can sometimes play a very significant role). Firstly, it is unfair to compare NoSQL and Relational databases because many NoSQL implementations do away with many of the hard guarantees of the relational world. So even though you might get a speed boost because of that, you're compromising on durability or consistency in some cases. Secondly, space usage is definitely a concern. Not everyone can afford the humongous disks that NoSQL implementations will invariably require (denormalization eats up space because of repetition - but this does not apply in all scenarios and can be mitigated with careful thought - YMMV). Thirdly, nothing can beat RAM - so pure memcached implementations will beat a database anyday at the cost of durability of data. In short, treat "fast...

Over the past few days (months?? year?) I've become just too busy to blog about anything of interest to anyone. That has left me with a number of tricks, tips, ideas and unfinished blog posts. It is high time that I officially post on my blog my inability to service it with content. For those of you looking to find me or to take my advice, please mail me at my email id that is there somewhere on the sidebar of this page. FB and LinkedIn are good ways to connect. That's it for now. Ciao!

Hey guys and girls,    I have the screencast nearly ready, but it is hugely boring and very very long. Not only that, it's very impossible to download because of the large file size. So, if you're interested, what is the max file size that you can download? Ping in the comments, I'll try and make it smaller. Divye

Pasta in White Sauce Okay, here goes the super duper ultra not-so-secret recipe to awesome indianized pasta created by the resident geek who writes on these hallowed pages. Part 1: Preparing the pasta 1. Take a huge kadhai and fill it with sufficient water (sufficient = enough to cover all the pasta you will put into it later completely). 2. Add enough salt to make the water quite salty. Exact quantity doesn't matter too much here.. 3. Start heating the water, put in the pasta (penne version preferably as it doesn't break easily) and bring to boil. The water will start frothing. 4. Keep the pasta boiling in the water till it grows in size and changes colour from hard, deep yellow to a lighter, softer, larger size (closer to off-white)     Acid test for this step: you are able to break the pasta easily with a tablespoon's edge. 5. Remove from boil and drain away all the water with a sieve. (you can taste the pasta to judge its saltiness if you like, it won't b...

I never liked using gedit for programming because it needed extensive customization before it even came close to becoming a programming editor. However, those that are just starting out with linux will feel most at home in gedit. So here is how to enable "Compile and Run" functionality in gedit. 1. Enable the External Tools plugin by going to Edit -> Preferences -> Plugins as shown in the screenshot below 2. Go to Tools -> Manage External Tools and create a new Tool by clicking on the "new" icon near the Help button. 3. Name the new tool "Compile and Run" and press enter 4. In the coding area, paste the following script: #!/bin/sh cd $GEDIT_CURRENT_DOCUMENT_DIR g++ -Wall -g $GEDIT_CURRENT_DOCUMENT_NAME && xterm -e "sh -c './a.out; echo Press enter to quit... && read KEY'" 5. Put in a shortcut key (eg. Ctrl + F5 ) in the shortcut key area 6. Set the save setting to Current Document 7. In the applicab...

If the file is named file.cpp or file.c, in the vim command mode just type in: :!make abc :!./abc The first command compiles file abc.cpp to the executable file abc in the current directory. You can then execute it using the second command. Alternatively, you could use something like :!g++ -g -Wall file.cpp -o file if you want to specify your own compilation options. (Anything more complex and you should be using a Makefile anyway).

This post should probably belong to the Zigndog site, but seeing that I have no time to update it, let me just post it here. I trust that most of you who are interested will be mailing me soon (common self-interest reasons) :) To get your rewritten certificates, you need to perform the following tasks: 1. Get in touch with me on my Zigndog id (divye kapoor (at the rate of) zigndog (dot) com 2. Send in a scanned copy of your old certificate along with your correct spelling and the address to which you want the certificates dispatched. 3. I'll acknowledge the receipt of your email and dispatch the revised certificate soon. 4. On receipt of the revised certificate, please mail back the original certificate via speed post. That's all folks! Looking forward to your mails...