Paul Graham nails it again!

Paul Graham published a new essay today "Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession?" It is one of those awesome ones. The best part of the essay is this:

... it has gotten much
cheaper to start a startup. There are four main reasons: Moore's
law has made hardware cheap; open source has made software free;
the web has made marketing and distribution free; and more powerful
programming languages mean development teams can be smaller.

All the thoughts on my mind these days, couldn't be summarized better. Check out the full essay, as usual his opinions are radical yet convincing.

By the way, tomorrow

P.S. This is my first post from ScribeFire

A great essay

Today Slashdot had a story on Dijkstra's essay. I started to read it casually during my lunch. After reading 30 pages of handwritten text, I was left awestruck. Some of the points made by Dijkstra in this essay are no short of epiphanies. And the fact that, the prose is 20 years old, feels you with respect for the vision Dijkstra had. If you are anyway related to Software engineering, this essay is a must read.

Here are my favorite snippets:

... As the economics is known as "The Miserable Science", software engineering should be known as "The Doomed Discipline", doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot" ....

... The practice is pervaded by the reassuring illusion that programs are just devices like any others, the only difference admitted being that their manufacturer might require a new type of craftsmen, viz. programmers. From there it is only a small step to measuring "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced per month"....

... Unfathomed misunderstanding is further revealed by the term "software maintenance", as a result of which many people continue to believe that programs - and even programming languages themselves - are subject to wear and tear....

Fedora 10 on MacBook 2,1

I finally got Linux working on my Macbook. Although, I had bought this Macbook in Dec'06, after confirming that Linux can be installed on it; I never felt any need to do so. My desktop was sufficient for the task. But soon I will be getting rid of my desktop, so have to prepare the Macbook as a primary coding machine.

It is pretty easy, to install Linux alongside Mac OS X, provided you are ready to completely format the hard drive. I attempted to salvage my original installation of Mac OS X, by resizing the HFS volume with parted; however that didn't work. I had taken backup of all the necessary data (hopefully!!).

Here is the recipe for converting a 2nd generation MacBook with Intel Core 2 duo, into a dual boot box. Since Bootcamp has expired on Mac OS X Tiger, I couldn't use it; so this one uses rEFIt and OS X's Disk Utility for repartitioning.

1. Download rEFIt and install it.
2. Reboot and see that you can boot into Mac OS X
3. Reboot with Mac OS X install CD. During installation, use the "Disk Utility" to partition your entire hard drive into three volumes. My layout - 30GB Journaled HFS for Mac OS X, 40 GB for linux (type doesn't matter, we will change it later anyway), and 4GB for linux swap.
4. Continue with Mac OS X installation (this takes looooong time)
5. Reboot into newly installed Mac OS X
6. Reboot with Fedora 10 (or other distro's) installer Live CD.
7. Install Fedora 10 as you normally would - I chose the disks with root partition on 40GB volume (mark it to format to ext3) and 4GB swap. Also note that, you should install the bootloader on first sector of the partition (In my case it was /dev/sda3) and NOT the MBR.
8. After installation is complete, reboot.
9. In rEFIt menu you should see the Penguine alongside Mac OS X.

There are several tutorials that tell additional steps; but above steps worked for me.

I was happy to find many things working out of the box: Wifi, sound, Battery meter in tray. (Note that 2nd gen Macbook doesn't have nVidia card, so don't go installing kmod-nvidia packages like mentioned at many places for newer Macs)

There are several things that still need some investigation - right click, scroll gestures on touch pad. I have yet to test suspend and resume.

But overall the system looks good (writing from the same). I am excited to try out KVM virtual machines for the first time - because this is only the first personal machine I have got with hardware support for virtualization.

Thanksgiving at Crater Lake

Here are the results of first experiments with Canon Rebel XSi Digital SLR.

Digital SLR buyer's guide

Between yesterday morning (when I woke up with an epiphany that I need to by a new camera, and that too a digital SLR) and 5 minutes back (when I clicked on the "Place order" button of Amazon's shopping cart), I learnt great deal about digital photography.

I always like Amazon's reviews (no matter which site I am buying from). Also their "X% people bought this item" feature gives some idea about product popularity (although those numbers look pretty skewed when you check out second item on that list). So Canon Rebel XTi (10MP) and XSi (12MP) seemed like decent candidates for my budget (after a long fight with my stingy self of course). From the reviews these models seemed clear winners. XSi was rated 5 stars by 170 out of 213 customers. And 85% bought people bought it. But I still wanted to understand what I was getting before drilling this big a hole in my pocket.

One of the reviewers mentioned this book "Understanding Exposure" by Bryan Peterson. It's a fantastic book. After going through first 40 pages, I got pretty good idea of all the photographic jargon I found on DSLR product page. The aperture, shutter speed, lens, CMOS sensor, significance of MegaPixel, etc. I also found useful articles elsewhere . Although I didn't read it fully, I found the wikipedia article on "depth of field" amazingly detailed. Also this article on the lense that comes by default with XSi, (18-35mm f/3.5-5.6) is also detailed.

edealinfo.com showed a pretty good deal on the XSi model. Although their math showed that it will cost me $607 at Dell Home, I found out that they have conveniently forgotten $50 tax. Especially when I compared this on Amazon, which had the camera for $637 and free shipping and zero tax - my decision was easy (Moreover this earns me 3 times points on Amazon visa).

... the pocket feels lighter. Hopefully it will pay off in long run ...