Viewing profile — jrmenon

Fully agree with you here. Wanted to also add that even the 'parsing' of text is easy by using standard tools like awk, sed etc.. rather than writing custom code to debug binary pr…

Disclaimer: I come from C++ and PHP world, but in the last few years, have been working in Java after a long gap. So here are the pros and cons of Java I see (not comprehensive but…

Actually the abundance of water was detected in some young sun-like stars: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-06/herschel-sp...

Some of the best programmers I have seen have a non-CS background, and were self-taught. Based on how I interview (and also on various interviews I have attended), here are some su…

> Software engineering in life-critical applications is serious business. Probably one of the most tragic cases of a SW bug: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

Was wondering if the headline was misleading in mentioning 'uranium free'... Incidentally India's 3-stage plan is meant to use its vast Thorium deposits in the 3rd stage: http://en…

Big fan of kqueue() mentioned in the article. IIRC with sockets, it not only tells you if the socket fd is ready (say for non-blocking read), but even informs the number of bytes a…

Thanks for the pointer here. Will explore it more closely.

How does this compare with Kohana? http://kohanaframework.org/index Note: I tend to use frameworks largely to enforce safe db queries. IIRC, Kohana does all the needed escaping tra…

Nothing unusual about the lock-in strategy. I would argue Apple does the same with iTunes/App Store walled-garden, same for Facebook, and Google - their Android playstore, GMail/GD…

Interesting debate.....when I see the comments here, I am reminded of this most-probably a misunderstood book by Francis Fukuyama: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_a…

More on braces, I am squarely in the Allman camp for the reasons described here: http://www.experimentgarden.com/2009/07/facts-behind-code-in... It is amazing the old-style K&R sti…

Conversion tracking is definitely the norm in the app-install world. However what the OP did is sort of life-time-value (LTV) analysis which in the long run might give a better ind…

FWIW, our start-up began on AWS during early days, but finally due to cost constraints, migrated most of our servers to our own h/w setup. We had substantial number of servers of v…

From the article: "The shift from procedural to OO brings with it a shift from thinking about problems and solutions to thinking about architecture" Couldn't agree more... I have b…

JPL seems to have had quite a few founders. I recall reading about Jack Parsons who was also into occult matters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Whiteside_Parsons Happen to run …

Not just the Nordic model, but even the achievements of some European countries (notably Germany) and Japan, would have been possible without US security guarantees? Essentially th…

I have done a lot of scripts/tools to mostly automate or simplify it for non-techs to take over, but probably the one that I am most proud of was a 'mailbox reaper' task that was f…

Not sure if it explains everything though. The comparison may not be fair, but the tax rates in US ~ the 50s and 60s were fairly high too, and yet it led to post-WW2 boom: Dwight D…

Many good answers here. I also moved from many years ago, and noticed the same trends. Just to add additional points: 1) I think the lack of low-level corruption not just in US, bu…

While not directly related to h/w, one of my favorite reads has been "Unix Haters Handbook": http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf Note I am a Unix//Linux fan myself, but it was …

Shouldn't be hard to setup a few instances (based on your traffic profile) to host the static files esp. in conjunction with a CDN like Cloudfront. If you are using apache, you can…

Assuming you are looking for a Unix/Linux person: 1) Good understanding of the user-land + kernel layers - filesystems, inter-process commn (pipes, shared memory etc..), process vs…

Almost all the ones you listed have had a large role of the Government in play (ARPANET, DOD etc.. not to mention indirectly via research grants to universities). To claim that is …

While not a complete history, the following book, 'Design and Evolution of C++', does go into some history of other languages that influenced C++: http://www.amazon.com/The-Design-…