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Blue Swiss Cheese ( 브루 쉬쓰 치즈)
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| I sat down and tried to get comfortable. The seat had more joints than I knew what to do with, and it had a separate button, no two, for each of them. Then it had two macro buttons that scripted the others to do a bunch of high level maneuvers to get to two extremes, and discrete points in between.
I played with it a bit.
There was a bar. They served Dom Peringon among other things. They brought it to me with nuts. That confused me because half my brain suddenly thought that I was at Yacht. I wasn't.
There was a table that slid out from under the television. It was rather large. They came up to me and said, "Sir, may I dress your table?", which always cracks me up. The food was the same old fare, just decorated and served differently.
I watched I am Legend, and Italian Job, and I stretched out and slept. Full length, with a large pillow and comfortable blanket. The seat turned into a bed, with sufficient room for all six feet of me to stretch out. I enjoyed a good couple of hours of undisturbed rest.
The restroom was large. You could stretch out your arms without hitting the walls. Large half length mirrors that covered the side walls created the impression of a larger room.
This was my first time flying international business class. Thanks to my Jet Airways upgrade vouchers, I was able to upgrade from Brussels to Mumbai. I was two vouchers short of an upgrade all the way through.
I could really get used to it, but my company isn't going to pay for my travel, not business class, not economy. I've had to pay for all my trips so far. Which means I should either halve the number of flights I take, or double the amount of money I make.
I still don't know who's going to pay for me to go to Linux Symposium this year. The conference says they won't pay, and Yahoo! doesn't seem to keen on it either, and I'm not about to pay $1500 for the right to speak at a conference. Let the attendees read my blog instead.
Oh yeah, in other news, just had a four day vacation in New York (Manhattan and Cold Spring), and I'll be working from Mumbai for a week. | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment   |
| | Looks like the linuxsymposium conference in Ottawa doesn't cover accommodation and travel costs for speakers. This could be a problem. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| This time I tried to post a comment on the dopplr blog, and I got an error telling me to make sure Javascript and Cookies were enabled on my browser. They both are. Then I did a view source on the blog post page to see what their javascript was doing.
It looks like a standard wordpress set up with WPSpamFree 1.6 for spam handling. The WPSpamFree link is /wp-content/plugins/wp-spamfree/js/wpSpamFreeJS.php. This is a PHP file that's supposed to execute on the server and print out Javascript.
The problem is that this isn't executing on the server. Instead of printing out javascript, the server returns the PHP file itself. The result is that the response of the <script> tag is a file with a php content type, and contains php rather than javascript. The browser cannot execute it, and skips it. The result, is that the wp-comments-post page does not get everything it was expecting from the comment submit form, and throws an error.
The fix would be to either move this script to a location where PHP is executed, or to turn on PHP for the directory where the script is.
I've already notified them of the problem.
IAC, the post I was trying to comment on is this one: Some good Heathrow news.
Update: It's been fixed | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Tags: | dopplr, uid | | Subject: | Updates from dopplr | | Time: | 04:24 pm |
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| The dopplr folks got back to me. Matt Biddulph replied to my last post and they also sent me an email.
Apparently the problem is unique to me, but they're working on a fix. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I get an ical feed from dopplr which I pass through Yahoo! Pipes to filter and convert to JSON. Since I also combine data from tripit and upcoming, I look at the uid on each item to figure out where it came from.
Up until this Thursday, dopplr's feed contained @dopplr.com.
On Thursday night, or maybe on Friday, this changed to @yul.dh.bytemark.co.uk
bytemark.co.uk appear to be the hosting provider that dopplr uses, so my guess is that their boxes are looking at the real hostname rather than the host alias that they use.
Hoping they fix this soon, but in the mean time I've updated my code to look for bytemark.co.uk as well. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | Updates from my other blogs | | Time: | 03:36 am |
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| | Just in case you're interested, there have been a bunch of posts on my other blogs. In particular:on my tech blog, andon my restaurant reviews blog. | | comments: 9 comments or Leave a comment |
| My talk submission for Velocity 2008 was rejected. Looks like I might have some time to travel at towards the end of June.
If you're in the area at the time, you should totally go and watch Stoyan talk. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| So, I'll be at Linux Symposium in Ottawa in July this year. I'll be taking two tutorials. The astute reader will no doubt develop a cheeky grin when they see the topics :P
Also noticed a bunch of familiar names in there. ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) shreyas, Kushal and Botsie are listed, and it would be good to meet the ol' bangalore boys again.
Thanks to achitnis for egging me on to submit something at a time when I was terribly depressed.
If you're going to be there, sign up on upcoming.
 | | comments: 16 comments or Leave a comment |
| Went down to St. Cyprian's for the Easter Vigil service. It's about five and a half blocks away, so I walk there. Was amused on the way back to see someone drive back home — two blocks away and I crossed him before he pulled into his driveway.
Four youngsters — three of them looked like teenagers, and the fourth may have been older — were baptised today, and another two (six in all) (both teenagers) were confirmed. The priest completely drenched the baptised kids with holy water and then they went backstage to change into white clothing. I've never seen anything like it before, and from the looks of it, neither had anyone else in the congregation.
Also noticed that the church provides candles for everyone at the service. I didn't know that in advance, so spent a little while searching for a simple candle at Lucky. The only ones I could find were the kind you use for a romantic candlelight dinner - at least that's what the label said, and it was priced accordingly. Luckily the checkout machine knew nothing about romantic candles from the stationery section, so the helper out there charged me a dollar for it.
Anyway, Happy Easter everyone. It feels like four years ago again, when I spent my first Easter away from home. Back then I had Easter dinner with jessyleen. Let's see what I do this year. | | comments: 10 comments or Leave a comment |
| So we got in to Myrtle Beach in one piece, all checked in into the Grande Shores resort in a not so grande room. Our flights weren't the best of all, but they got us there. I had a window seat towards the back of my US Airways flight from San Francisco to Charlotte, and there was a family with three babies sharing the row with me. The two older girls took turns wailing, while the younger boy thought they were talking to him and tried to respond by mimicking their wails.
I ended up staying awake for the most part, but that meant that I got to see the most amazing blood red crescent moonrise. It was about a quarter in, and red at the rise turning orange, yellow and white as it got higher. Awesome. I fell asleep after that, and woke up when we reached Charlotte.
There was no food served on the flight, but I'd had dinner at home before leaving for the airport, so was okay.
We got in to Charlotte at about 7:00am, which was 4am on the west coast. I ran off to the other end of the airport for my next flight to Myrtle Beach. This flight was short and fairly uneventful. As we landed, I got a view of the Medieval Times Dinner and Tournament building.
Met bluesmuse at the airport. She'd landed a few minutes earlier.
Once out, we checked our options. Our hotel check in time was at 4pm, which means we had a day to kill, and no way to get around. We thought about renting scooters or mopeds, but the bags would have been a problem, so we ended up renting a car. Also got about 4 maps from various tourist information centres at the airport, and all of them were useless.
Thanks to Yahoo! Trip Planner, we'd more or less listed out all the places that we wanted to go to. Just hadn't figured out how yet. Woodhaven pancake house was on the list for breakfast because it was close to the airport, so we decided to head there. Unfortunately, none of the maps had anything other than the King's Highway on them. Didn't realise that there was free wifi at the airport otherwise I'd have checked things online.
Drove around for a long while until we hit the right King's Highway (there are two), and took a guess about which direction to go in. Got lucky, and found Woodhaven on our left. The pancake house has a webcam mounted on its roof giving you a feed of things around. It's called the wafflecam. I stood in front of it and called up nvivek for his birthday. He couldn't see me though.
They also had free wifi at the restaurant, so we checked up our options, and decided to head to Murrel's Inlet. Headed south till we found signs for Murrel's Inlet, and followed them. The area is full of pubs and seafood places, and every now and then, an opening to get down to the water's edge. We stopped at one of these and took in the view and the fresh air.
Sat there for a while, feeling the sun, which was good after chilly California and freezing Boston. It was very calming, and I'd have caught up on my sleep there if I wasn't getting sunburnt.
After Murrel's inlet, we headed back up north, and stopped at a place to do some souvenir shopping. Nice to get that out of the way up front so that the rest of the vacation is open for fun stuff :) Got a couple of T-Shirts, and I got a hat for myself to add to my collection.
Headed further north after that, but decided to drive down to Ocean Blvd instead. Stopped at Surfside beach, and sat on the pier for a while looking out at the beach and the sea. You'd never believe that the Atlantic ocean could be so calm and azure. We left once we started burning up, and decided to check out Broadway at the beach.
By the time we pulled in to the parking lot though, I felt as though I'd fall asleep right there, so we decided to skip that plan and head off to the hotel to try our luck.
The Grande Shores resort is in North Myrtle beach, but it was a short drive on the highway. We got there, and checked in without a problem. Our room was on the ground floor (that's the first floor for all ye Americans out there), facing the sea. It was so cool, you could just open the French window and walk out onto the beach. It would have been even better if they weren't renovating the pool section that was between our room and the beach. All the same, sitting in the room with the window open brought in some lovely sea breeze and the soothing sound of waves on the beach.
And then I was asleep. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| I moved to the US on the 29th December, and hadn't done much travelling since then. There were a few trips to San Francisco and San Jose, but they qualify as local now. Napa Valley was the only far off place that I'd been to. Most of my time was spent searching for houses and getting settled in. Jan passed, and it was only in Feb that I moved into my own place. I had nothing though, and my shipment from India wasn't due to arrive until late Feb, which meant that I had to stay put until then.
In the mean time, I had to give up the rental car, which also cut off all my local travel options. I was basically stuck in Sunnyvale with no option to get out.
My stuff finally arrived on the 23rd, and I had the house completely set up on the 24th. I could finally look at leaving town.
On the 29th, I packed my brand new backpack and headed off to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina for a couple of days. Good fun, and I shall write about it soon. I then flew to New York and got onto a flight to Mumbai. Spent a couple of days in Mumbai and then yesterday I flew to Delhi where code_martial and nadircruise met me at the airport and we drove to Chandigarh for bhavanar's wedding. Had a look around Chandigarh today and now I'm back in Mumbai. More about that later.
Will be heading to Bangalore tomorrow for a bunch of work, and then I'll be back on my way to SFO via Newark on Wednesday.
It's been short, but good. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Jet airways appears to be panicking. After flying with them every two to three weeks for the past three years, I suddenly haven't taken a flight in two months, but I've sent in many many bug reports with their website. They'll give me 1000 bonus miles on my next flight. Well, I might just take them up on the offer. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | Severance agreements | | Time: | 11:38 pm |
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| I haven't been laid off, which means I haven't really signed a severance agreement, but from what I've heard, it basically boils down to, "You lose your job, and you keep your mouth shut, and we give you some amount of money.". There are probably other terms too.
Now, one also has to sign a contract when joining a company, which also has a bunch of terms in it. One difference is that the people who get you to sign both these agreements are generally okay with you taking a little bit of time to think about and sign a joining agreement, but they try to get the severance agreement signed and sealed as quickly as possible.
I'm guessing that people with experience on one side of this matter aren't allowed to comment on it, whereas people on the other side would be betraying their tribe if they did, so we're unlikely to get any real insights here (unless you feel like commenting anonymously).
With that in mind, I throw open the comments to all sorts of speculation and hearsay. Go. | | comments: 17 comments or Leave a comment |
| I'd complained earlier about Firefox on Ubuntu crashing on Yahoo! Maps and a bunch of other sites. Today I finally got fed up of it, and decided to just get firefox from getfirefox.com.
It's been running smoothly so far. Yahoo! Maps works without issue, as do all the other places I've tried today. I can't list the sites that would fail, because I'm not sure what caused the failures. Sometimes just clicking on a link was enough to freeze firefox, sometimes hitting Ctrl+L to go to the URL bar would freeze it, and once, just starting firefox was enough to cause a crash.
There's also the flickr uploadr, which I'm gonna try after I'm done with this post.
Update: Firefox still crashes when trying to upload photos to flickr. Most likely a flash plugin issue. Again, this happens _only_ on Ubuntu. RHEL5 works without issue. | | comments: 8 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Tags: | yahoo | | Subject: | Once I was two | | Time: | 01:50 am |
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| Once I was two and soon I'll be four.
A little further down, the conversation went like this:
tahirbond: what're you supposed to do at yahoo? I mean, the job profile
philiptellis: yes, i remember nitesh. he win the lottery?
philiptellis: i'm doing code reviews and performance testng right now
philiptellis: well, everyone has to do code reviews
philiptellis: it's part of the devel process
So, ask me again today, and I'll give you the same answer.
But we went on...
philiptellis: oh, we review across teams
philiptellis: so i'll review code from another team
tahirbond: okay. perl or what?
philiptellis: C++ and PHP
philiptellis: but i'm looking at C++
tahirbond: C++! that would be anything but boring
philiptellis: you want to join?
philiptellis: i know you're good, send me your resume
tahirbond: seriously
philiptellis: ya
philiptellis: we're hiring
tahirbond: I've applied for MTech in IIT. If I don't get in, I quit.
tahirbond: I can join from July 1
philiptellis: well, interviews here generally take 1 days
philiptellis: so send me your resume sometime in june then
tahirbond: will do
philiptellis: although we're looking to hire 70 people within 3 months
philiptellis: in the mean time, brush up on your linux kernel knowledge
tahirbond: 2.4? 2.6?
philiptellis: both
tahirbond: okay
philiptellis: know the changelog by heart
philiptellis: know threading implementations well (we don't use it, but we need you to know it)
philiptellis: know process scheduling
philiptellis: know IPC
philiptellis: all types
tahirbond: woow! i've never looked at the kernel before
tahirbond: I know IPC
philiptellis: and know IPC!
philiptellis: all types
philiptellis: specially shared memory and message queues
philiptellis: know how apache works
philiptellis: get some idea about PHP
tahirbond: yeah, I know the IPC syscalls. did pipes and fifos, message Qs, shared memory was a bit shaky
philiptellis: semaphores and mutexes
tahirbond: dude, I've to grok Corba 3 and Web Services in the next 4 weeks. AAD starts on 18th April
tahirbond: IPC is no problemo
philiptellis: you need to know all this of the top of your head to get through the interview
philiptellis: then you need to know C++ to do the actual works
tahirbond: "you need to know all this of the top of your head to get through the interview" -- means I need to be thorough with it?
tahirbond: ok, got till June to figure out apache and the kernel.
philiptellis: well, you either be thorough with it, or prove that you can derive the knowledge on teh spotting
tahirbond: okay...
tahirbond: any use for corba kind of stuff there?
tahirbond: and web services
philiptellis: nope
tahirbond: hmm...
philiptellis: you'll like our way better
tahirbond: didn't mean it that way...
tahirbond: I guess it'll still help to have an insight into distributed/grid computing technology
philiptellis: yeah, the more you know the better
Now this last part is interesting, because it kinda suggests that it's really hard to get into Yahoo! as a C++ programmer. I've had similar convos with Premshree as well, but he's a little different from normal kids :P
Two years later I was screening front end enginners. PHP, HTML, Javascript, CSS. Screens generally went like this:
me: What's the difference between GET and POST
candidate: POST is more secure
...
me: What's the difference between padding and margin
candidate: What's that?
...
me: On a scale of 1-10, what do you rate yourself in Javascript?
candidate: 7
me: How do you do prototypal inheritance in Javascript?
candidate: huh?
So looks like we (or I at least) really drill people, and most people probably get rejected.
Then again, we're 1500 strong... or 1439 or something in that range, so don't let me scare you away from applying. It isn't that hard to get in.
But then I was two, and we had a hack day, only most people don't get it.
But then I was almost two, and I could still make public posts about work. But we stay, because good people find each other.
But then I was old, and soon I'll be four.
But will it matter any more? | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Just completed a week in my new house. I moved here last Sunday evening. While I've been here, I bought a bicycle and some basic gear (lights, pump, tools, etc.).
Today I headed out to find the new church that I'll be going to. I used google maps to search for it. No, not Yahoo! maps, because that causes Firefox on Ubuntu to crash... but then, it looks like pretty much anything will cause firefox on ubuntu to crash these days.
Anyway, so I cycled down El Camino Real, and found my way to St. Joseph's Catholic church in Mountain View... between Castro and Hope... which is good, because Castro street on a sunny Sunday afternoon is great.
So, a little more about this church. They have a Tamil mass on the second Saturday of every month. They have a Gaelic, Italian and Lithuanian mass once a year, they have a Spanish mass every Sunday, and English masses every day of the week. The church itself is large, but not huge.
After mass, I headed off to Castro to find some food. Ended up at a place called Baklava - a Mediterranean (Greek/Turkish) place. They had their tables out on the side walk, so I sat outside to get some people watching done while I ate my Dolmas and Mousaka - both vegetarian.
The food itself was good, but I'll write about that later.
After lunch, walked around the down town area a bit, and then cycled off down Dana Street till I got home. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| One thing that windows and mac users have had over linux users for a really long time is voice and video chat. While Skype has offered voice chat capabilities to linux users for a long time, their video offering only works with Windows and the Mac. Ayttm has, on the other hand, had video chat capabilities for several years, but for various non-technical reasons, we've been unable to add voice capabilities to the mix.
As I type this post, I've just gotten off a voice-video chat with my dad in Mumbai. The solution was pretty simple.
We got voice through Skype, and video through Ayttm, and ran the two in parallel. There weren't any discernible syncing issues.
Research has shown (though I can't find a link to the specific paper at the moment) that users will forgive bad video if audio quality is high enough. That's basically what you get with this arrangement. Yahoo! Messenger's video chat actually sends single frames spaced a few seconds apart rather than a video stream (Note, this information is publicly available via the libyahoo2 sources, courtesy Michaël Kamp), which means that you don't really see continuous lip movements, but you get the gist of facial expressions. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
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Blue Swiss Cheese ( 브루 쉬쓰 치즈)
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