I knew before you!

The Hulu Century Club

I’m delighted to announce that I’m a proud member of the Hulu Century Club. Yep, you heard it right — I was among the first 100 registered users on Hulu! Even I was unaware of this fact until a few days ago, when I received an email from Hulu:

I knew before you

Consider yourself one of the elite: You’re one of the first 100 registered users on Hulu.com. With our one-year anniversary coming on March 12th, we wanted to thank you for supporting us from the very beginning. We need just a few pieces of info in order to send you a little token of our appreciation.

hulu

So there you go, I knew before you!

Aster is hiring!

These days all news you hear is pretty much bad news. Layoffs and cutdowns everywhere.

Aster Data Systems

I’m therefore very happy to note that we are still hiring at Aster! We have a couple of positions open — you can find all the details on our website. So if you are looking for an exciting place to work at in these challenging times, drop us a note. Or if you know someone who is looking for a job, point them our way. Thanks!

Blue balls

Most Americans I talk to feel that I was raised here, because I don’t have the “Indian accent”. I don’t know about that, but what I do know is that cultural differences can show up in the least unexpected places. I’m reminded of an incident that happened in my second year in grad school.

Image courtesy flickr.com

We were working on a paper, and my advisor asked me write a section giving an overview of our implementation. In particular, he wanted me to come up with some good visuals to depict what was going on. So I fired up Inkscape and drew a figure. My figure had a few big prominent markers. Now I’m not too creative when it comes to color schemes. In other words, when I think of “color”, I start from Red, Blue and Green (RGB). Not surprisingly then, I drew my markers in red and blue. Prominent and easily distinguishable.

Now, it so happened that my markers were circular in shape. This was primarily because circles are really easy to draw in Inkscape, and one of the first shapes you see on the toolbar, and also because I didn’t pay too much attention to the shape of the markers. Naturally then, in the corresponding text describing the figure, I had the phrases “red balls” and “blue balls” sprinked all over the place.

I happily sent out the first draft to the faculty on the paper. In our next meeting, everyone came in looking very funny and laughing over something and I had no idea what they were laughing about. I felt so left out, like there was some secret joke that I had missed out on. Well, it turns out that “blue balls” has an entirely different connotation that I had never heard of back in India. Now, imagine a formal academic paper on virtualization talking in terms of red and blue balls. No wonder everyone found it so funny.

Lesson of the story: choose your colors, and your shapes, very very carefully :)

Earth Hour

As you can see from the bar on the top of the site (if you are reading this in your RSS reader, take a break and step out to the real site for a minute), Floating Sun is participating in Earth Hour. What is Earth Hour?:

Earth Hour began in Sydney in 2007, when 2.2 million homes and businesses switched off their lights for one hour. In 2008 the message had grown into a global sustainability movement, with 50 million people switching off their lights. Global landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Rome’s Colosseum, the Sydney Opera House and the Coca Cola billboard in Times Square all stood in darkness.

The funky bar is courtesy the earth hour plugin. Of course, just having a CSS distraction on the website doesn’t do much if it is not followed up by real action. I will be turning off the lights in my apartment at the prescribed time and so should you. I’ll also try to rope in as many of my friends as I can. Remember, this is about making a choice. A single lamp in your house for an hour probably feels trivial, but with millions of people, it adds up. Besides, it is a gesture to show your solidarity and support and committment.

Are you going to take part?

The Aster Flower

DISCLAIMER: These are just my opinions and should not be construed as official in any sense.

A few weeks back I was thinking about the name “Aster” and I realized that I didn’t really know what it meant. So I did some quick Googling and landed up at good old Wikipedia. It turns out that Aster is a genus of flowers.

On some more reading, it was evident that one could draw parallels between some of the characteristics of this genus and the features of Aster’s products. Here are some quotes from the article on Asteraceae:

The most evident characteristic of Asteraceae is perhaps their inflorescence: a specialised capitulum, technically called a calathid or calathidium, but generally referred to as flower head or, alternatively, simply capitulum.[7] The capitulum is a contracted raceme composed of numerous individual sessile flowers, called the florets, all sharing the same receptacle.

In particular, a “pseudanthium (Greek for “false flower”) or flower head is a special type of inflorescence, in which several flowers are grouped together to form a flower-like structure.”

In the same spirit, the Aster nCluster database is composed of many commodity components but exposes itself a single, unified database.