Came across this New York Times article which shares about the Edison's list of questions for job candidates in his plant.

Of-course the list has a few questions which would have been relevant in those particular years (around 1921), but it can be great if we can modernise this list.

Just in case the original link does not work, here is the pdf.

“A failure often does not have to be a failure at all. However, you have to be ready for it. Will you admit when things go wrong? Will you take steps to set them right? Because the difference between triumph and defeat, you’ll find, isn’t about willingness to take risks. It’s about mastery of rescue.” – Atul Gawande, 2012 Williams College Commencement Address

Bill Gates hits the bulls-eye in this open letter dated February 3, 1976. The line that strikes me the most is that "most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share." Something that is abnormally common in India.

The complete letter (via LettersOfNote:

I now realise the perils of piracy in India. Being addicted to piracy, and getting mp3s and movies for free, we now assume the net to be free. Software is the last thing we like to pay for. And probably this is the reason why we neither have "good softwares being written" nor a Facebook or Google marked ‘made in India’.

Update:

Bill Gate's response to Windows Piracy in China, in 1998:

Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though, and as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.

That is actually what is happening now as all the laptops are preloaded with genuine Windows. The lesson can be summarized as:

Step 1: If you want to make a great software, and keep it alive, then make it paid.
Step 2: Don't lose the market. Those who can't pay, give them free and make them addicted.

I tried various guides on installing Microsoft Office 2010 on Ubuntu using Wine (1.5.22) but none worked. In each case the installer failed the midway. However, since the official Wine page gives it a rating of Platinum, I finally read through the page and it worked.

Bookmarking the relevant extracts for future.

Make sure all dependencies of Wine are installed on your system, including winbind.

1. Installed the latest Wine version (1.5.22) using Synaptic. It auto installed wine-mono mentioned in the original article.

2. Installed ttf-mscorefonts (i.e. the windows fonts).

   Install Office 2010 to a clean wineprefix--no winetricks or other tweaks, and no other applications installed. Do not change the Windows version in winecfg; it should remain at the default setting of XP.

3. Reset WineTricks changes: WineTricks >> Select the default wineprefix >> Delete all data and applications. Start WineTricks again to recreate default prefix.

   After installing, set riched20 to native, builtin in winecfg to enable Powerpoint to start and selection boxes to display correctly. Do not use winetricks; Office installs its own riched20 to a private directory, and the one installed by winetricks is insufficient.

4. Run winecfg >> Libraries >> add riched20 >> edit to select native.

Have been using the the above for quite some time now. It is very stable and looks even more beautiful than on Windows :).

Official Wine Page

This is an powerful guide to Zero-Inbox technique using Gmail shortcuts.

e: archive
#: delete
se: star & archive
gi: goto inbox
gs: goto stared mails (do more often than gi)
j: next mail
k: previous mail

While reading the [discussion][] about it, also came across some useful Gmail tips:

1. Use followup.cc.
2. Enable auto-advance in labs.
3. Enable undo sent if you already haven't.

Have been playing around with D3 recently. This was the most easy to understand guide/tutorial to understand scales, domains and ranges in D3. It is powerful and I am loving it!

The values in any data set are unlikely to correspond exactly to pixel measurements for use in your visualization. Scales provide a convenient way to map those data values to new values useful for visualization purposes.

Listed to this song and loved the lyrics by Varun Grover. Interestingly, he is the same guy who also penned the lyrics of Ishq Wala Love.

Frustiyaao nahin moora,
Narbhasaao nahin moora,
Anytime moodwa ko,
Upsettaao nahin moora…

Jo bhi wrongwa hai usey,
Set right-wa karo ji,
Naahin loojiye ji hope,
Thoda fightwa karo ji..
Moora..

Complete lyrics