fromdoon

Everyone with more than 15-20 years of experience in the industry I have interacted with, more or less has the same advice when it comes to having a good work life balance and sustaining the passion for your work for a long time.

They tell me that it is very very helpful if you are able to disconnect yourself from the technical world on a regular basis. This time could be spend doing anything, but it should not be spent fretting about work or thinking about the next exciting technical idea.

They tell me that having a non-technical hobby or spending time with your family/friends/social circle is essential for a rejuvenated mind that can focus back on work.

I agree with OP, lets no be so hard on ourselves and enjoy life. Cheers!!!

This is probably what you are looking for :

Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective By Randal E. Bryant and David R. O'Hallaron

http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/

In India, when you loose a phone, you buy a new one ... often a less costly one. No one ever even thinks of trying to find who stole the phone.

I have always wondered that why we cannot make intangibles like happiness, emotions as a currency. Even though they are more often than not treated as the real wealth a person can have, we have never ever been able to count these intangibles and store them.

Of course this seems to be an absurd idea at first. But, lets try to think about it, doesn't matter how ridiculous or implausible this might sound.

My mind goes back to the movie "In Time", where time was treated as currency, something on which your life depended, literally.

Can't the smartest people on this planet, think of some thing absolutely fascinating, that may let us, mortal people gather our happiness and maybe able to trade it.

Consider for example that someone who helps people out, people who may not have enough money, but who have the intention to bless that person. Can't that person count/take the blessings and become rich in process.

If this is possible, their might a big motivation for everyone to do good, help people out, get their genuine blessings ...

I know this all sounds really crazy!! Just wanted to dish my thoughts out :)

You have to hear him talk ...

http://www.ted.com/talks/arunachalam_muruganantham_how_i_sta...

He is so full of energy and his straight talk will win your heart ... What a person ... cheers ..

I had once had the opportunity to investigate a heisenbug. We could see that the bug disappeared after turning the optimization off, but our clients were not satisfied and wanted a more detailed explanation and exact root cause analysis.

We were using a proprietary C compiler tool chain provided by our vendor and did not get much help from them either.

Finally, We had to sit down, get the assembly from disassembler and went through whole 800 lines of it. And we found the bug, sitting quietly in one of the pipelines.

I am not a compiler guy, but that day I understood the beauty of compiler optimization.

I had read all these, before I got to know about ESR.

I was like, Wow!!, and it never ever came to my mind who wrote this or why. It was just some cool stuff and as a linux newbie I really liked these micro-stories or unix zen fables.

It happens with me as well that when I read something by an author for whom I hold some kind of prejudice, my reading is maligned a bit and I wish I could see what the author had to share from a completely neutral point of view, because then in that case, what I take away from my reading would be closer to what it had meant to be for me.

As someone already said, we should not worry about our planet, for it is going to be here, long long after we are finished. We should be worried about ourselves. We rely on our planet for our existence and the current state of our planet hangs on a fine balance of its constituent elements.

If we were to change the balance, the planet would not die, it would only enter into a new different state. But we would surely die or at least most of us would.

Some of us think that sooner or later, humans would be able to colonize other places in Universe and then our survival would not wholly rely on Earth. That is certainly possible. But how far into the future would that be possible and whether we would be able to survive another hundred years of drastic pollution of Earth is anyone's guess.

I find this very interesting. Most of us who have crossed the 25 year mark, would already have read/seen something like this.

But this is an awesome way to teach some valuable lessons to kids. The analogy of life to a game is something that is clear, simple and pretty intuitive for a growing kid. Since most of the kids these days have played some games or other.

> but it depends on the person

And what makes the person? A Person is an amalgamation of inherited genes and collated personal experiences. Most of the personal experiences are a direct result of your location.

I think it is very important for us to go easy on someone who has gone astray or in our opinion is not living a life the way we think it is ought to be lived.

A Person who is a firm believer in free will would not judge anyone or for that matter force his/her view on anyone else.

Just asking, how can a new CEO change Microsoft's directions.

Or

What suggestions would you give Satya, if you were to meet him today?

Hi, Is there any resource on Web or even any book that documents all the risks. I had once seen a talk given by you .. was good !! Any other such resources out there ??

I had started with using MS Visio at my job. Though I had absolutely no experience in making diagrams, Visio was quite easy to get started and become comfortable in quick time.

The downside of course is that it is not free.

I would also like to know open source alternatives to MS Visio. I can see that Ubuntu 12.04 comes with Libre Draw, but I haven't tried it yet.

I highly recommend Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective

http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspecti...

They are currently over Hongkong/South East Asia, where it is night time.

Too bad, the background with earth lit up would have been awesome ...

Edit: In about 15 minutes, they are expecting orbital sunrise. That would be great !!!

Here in India, we have also witnessed a series of street agitations against a corrupt political system that runs most of the country.

Though, It hasn't crossed the line, yet, and turned into violent protests like Kiev.

There are many things which have happened in the 21st century, but the rise of frequent civilian protests around the world is certainly the one that stands out. I am not a student of history, but this is the first time I am becoming more and more aware of such restlessness in the citizens of the world.

I guess, this is a kind of cycle. Political systems rise, become stable and stay for some time and then slowly the rot begins, which when reaches a certain tipping point, forces the masses to rise to make correction and then the cycles repeats.

The only difference being the timeline of the cycle, which seems to differ from region to region and from country to country.

I am sure there must be some literature/research dedicated to this phenomena.

The Mars Trilogy ... it made me come to closer to hard science fiction than ever before ...

This is typical western philosophical bullsh. As life becomes easier in Western world, people have more time to fret about such inconsequential things. Please carry on!

let them push the envelope dude

I had a panic attack recently. Let me tell you, it is worst feeling in the world. The urge to reset your life after such a event is almost natural. It's like, If I don't change right now, I would not be able to live any longer.

I started changing little things. I started sleeping more.

I made it a point to do a 6 Km walk everyday.

I cut down on alcohol.

I stopped seeing people whom I had wanted to avoid for a long time but was not doing so out of social pressures.

I started seeing my parents more often.

I also signed up for an online meditation course.

I started working less ( Looking back, this maybe was the most effective thing)

It takes days to overcome a full fledged panic attack. For days you would dread that you might get another panic attack when you're least expecting it. Like when you're in office or when you are driving or when you're shopping.

I have changed my lifestyle and I can tell you I am quite happy after I did so.

I hope OP also experienced something similar.

Thanks for your comment Kamaal.

I think most of us realize the intangible value that ISRO creates.

Space Tech is here to stay. The cooperation between NASA and ISRO is commendable and shows the weight ISRO carries in the current Space Tech world.

We might have many many problems in India but we have to remember that we are human beings too. We also carry a sense of adventure. We also strive for the unknown.

Space Tech is an art, more so in case of ISRO given there small budget. Here are a bunch of people who want to ride to the frontiers of space from whatever meagre resources they have and they deserve a standing ovation for that. Not only for achieving what they have, but also for trying it.

For every naysayer, there would be hundreds who would stand in awe of every step anyone with a heart filled with dreams takes. For there is a little child in everyone of us who still hasn't given into the negativity of this modern day life and somehow believes in the most daring challenges. For that is what makes us human and our evolutionary history is an indisputable proof of that.

Godspeed ISRO.

Thanks Arjuna.

Thanks for your advice.

Can you point a relevant link with regards to Zed Shaw.

Are you from IT-BHU?

I went there as well. Class of 2008. I can understand what you're saying man. No wonder!!

This seems fascinating. Can you share a more detailed description?

Like, what kind of data compression algo you chose at that time and what were the choices?

How did the techniques you developed at that time helped you later and what significance/standing they have in today's programming world?

How did your spell checker turn out in terms of performance and memory?

Were there better implementations around at that time? Which one was widely accepted as the best one?

Thanks in advance!

>> ... eventually filled up the entire disk and bad things happened

I can only imagine what would have happened. Can you share more details about that.

Also, wonder how the mail servers these days are equipped to handle such attachments. Can someone throw light on that? Is it just plain simple to detect these files?

Hi,

I am also taking the course by Andrew Ng and understand your complaint that the programming assignments aren't as interesting ( from your perspective). Being quite comfortable with linear algebra, I was able to complete the assignments easily.

But when I go through the course forums, I find that for many people taking the course, the intuition behind the use of linear algebra in ML doesn't come as easy as it does for us. I think when Andrew Ng designed this online course, he must have had those people in mind also. I think he mentions it at the start of the course that it's more about understanding the concepts and the implementation details should come later. The programming exercises are designed keeping that in mind, I think.

I tried to make the programming exercises interesting for myself, by first thoroughly understanding the code that they had provided and tweaking it here and there. Once you have done that, you could apply what you've learnt on real world datasets from sources like Kaggle and see how you fare :)

Everyone out there needs some kind of cult, with which they can associate. This happens in every sphere of life. After the information revolution, everyone is exposed to the major success stories in the current times. So it becomes really easy to fall in a cult associated with those success stories. This is not a weakness nor it is bad. It is just how we are.

When you add above phenomena with easy access to development tools and free tutorials that can teach you how to make a simplistic app in a matter of days, then what follows is adaptation/modulation of currently successful ideas on a grand scale. This is what we're a seeing right now. Everyone thinks they can make a social app and make it big, because since the success of Facebook, even when many startups have failed to get going on the social front, there a still a few who've made it big and that is just enough to strengthen the cult. So as long as we don't see a real disruption, kind of a wake up call from the sleep, the prevalent cult of the time would sustain and keep sucking in a fraction of the intellectual talent on Earth at any given time.

But we don't need to worry. As Scott Adams says, the advance of human civilization has always been due to a minority and not because of the majority.

The majority will keep going through the motions of our current times. While a select few would lead us to new directions.

Wired.com: How do you maintain your optimism?

Musk: Do I sound optimistic?

Wired.com: Yeah, you always do.

Musk: Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.

Whatever the odds you face, there is nothing in life you cannot achieve, if you have committed yourself wholeheartedly to the cause.

Old/Young. Experienced/Inexperienced. Adept/Inept. Knowledgeable/Ignoramus. Prodigy/Late Bloomer. Nothing matters in the end.

Cause when we are done and dusted and look back at our time, we will find that it was a journey that couldn't have been any other way. We made it what it was and it lies their for us to cherish.

So don't hold yourself back. Nothing in this world is to be done or not to be done. The conscious/unconscious/subconscious rules that we follow every day were not there to start with and they are neither eternal.

Go out there and change your world. Become the Newton. Become the Napoleon. Become the Buddha. Become the Gandhi.

Remember, there are no rules and there never will be.

Hmm .. it would be really interesting to check out, how many of today's billionaires inherited most or part of their wealth and how many made it big starting from modest backgrounds.

Any pointers folks?