Muthu's Weblog

One of the most crucial parts of talent acquisition process is the initial round - where you decide if it is worth it to evaluate this candidate on the myriad parameters you might have. This post is not for veterans or hiring managers. This is for people in junior roles who are asked to conduct some parts of the interview process. While I am still a bit low on the totem pole in my organisation - I do get to conduct these initial rounds and some more along the process. I have also observed other people (mostly my peers) in the org doing this. And I wanted to collect some thoughts I have regarding this. 1. Remember who is being evaluated and against what When you are in a position to evaluate someone else, it is only natural to mistake that the evaluation must be in some manner against yourself. Resist that temptation - you are looking at a potential team member and measuring them against yourself leads to nothing good. It will make you blind to some really good qualities of the c...

At work, I recently had an interesting challenge - we needed a high throughput site to site VPN between two of our co-located DCs. The existing one was not cutting it with the increasing demand for bandwidth every week. Normally I'd opt for the tried and tested IPsec tunnels using strongswan. One of my mentors had done this in the past -  here  is his own write-up. But I wanted to do something different this time. Enter Wireguard, the newest kid on the VPN block. What follows is a brief write up on the attempts to push decent amount of traffic on WG - enough to meet our needs. Here comes the 'interesting' part of the challenge - One side only has 1G LAN - the final ISP uplink is 10G - but the server is only connected to a 1G switch. We need to push more than 1Gbps over the tunnel.  Here is how it looks: +---------------------+                +----------------+ |                    ...

Introduction: The shortest intro would be these two cURL times - one for a bare metal server, and one for the Openstack VM - both running the same application, for a specific test URL. Problem: dnslookup: 0.109 | connect: 0.359 | appconnect: 0.000 | pretransfer: 0.359 | starttransfer: 0.624 | total: 6.739 | size: 710012 dnslookup: 0.016 | connect: 0.281 | appconnect: 0.000 | pretransfer: 0.281 | starttransfer: 0.531 | total: 6.958 | size: 710277 dnslookup: 0.000 | connect: 0.265 | appconnect: 0.000 | pretransfer: 0.265 | starttransfer: 0.530 | total: 5.351 | size: 709165 No problem: dnslookup: 0.000 | connect: 0.265 | appconnect: 0.000 | pretransfer: 0.265 | starttransfer: 0.546 | total: 2.168 | size: 705631 dnslookup: 0.015 | connect: 0.281 | appconnect: 0.000 | pretransfer: 0.281 | starttransfer: 0.561 | total: 2.402 | size: 705354 dnslookup: 0.000 | connect: 0.265 | appconnect: 0.000 | pretransfer: 0.265 | starttransfer: 0.546 | total: 2.434 | size: 705485 For more details,...

This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay My rating: 5 of 5 stars Thanks for the recommendation @Gokila! This is a brilliant, light heart-ed read. However, most of the entries in this Diary will sound strange to the Indian reader. Surely Doctors are not this humble, are they? And what is this blasphemy - a patient conversing on equal terms with the doctor? But the other side is not so pretty either. Here in India, we have a different kind of Patient - Doctor relationship than the rest of the world. We simultaneously adore them and loathe them. A significant portion of the population wants their off-springs to try their hand at being doctors - but an equally large portion of the population thinks the doctors conspire to put them through painful and expensive procedures to mint money. (Or worse, to "train" at their expense) We all have read about doctors getting attacked by mobs because someone passed away and the crowd thought it was bec...

Without getting into the larger debate of private cloud vs public cloud for the organization as a whole, this document tries to give the numbers that let us make a fair comparison in terms of performance - and performance alone between AWS and Private Cloud through Openstack. The initial benchmarking and preparing these numbers stemmed out of the proposed DC migration to a west coast co-located DC at my current employer. The migration did not happen, but it gave us the opportunity to study the performance impact of having our own cloud. One of the gripes that I've had about our colo infra is that we never seem to have gotten grade-A processors. Almost all of the ones were hand-me-down servers or mid-level Intel Xeons, sometime with absurdly low clock speed. The storage side wasn't very brilliant either. This was solved when we obtained a test bed from Dell with the latest and greatest hardware in their lab that we could setup and run benchmarks on. The machine we got w...

Interesting numbers will be a section on my blog where I point out statistics that I find are interesting, mildly amusing and provides a new, different perspective. 25% TamilNadu is a key market for Education loans in India, accounting for 25% of all education loans disbursed across the country, amounting to around Rs.20,650 Crores. 1.5Million No. of hectares of forest diverted for non-forest purposes through Forest Conservation Act 1.8Million No. of tribals to be evacuated under a recent supreme court order, under the pretext of preventing protecting forests.

Being a mentor is a not an easy thing. There are a lot of things that a mentor has to do, beyond imparting knowledge. To mentor is to mould and sculpt - to recognize there is a permanence to the teaching for better or worse. One of those things is choosing when to intervene as a mentor, and to fix the mess created by your student. My favorite description of the importance of this intervention is captured in a novel by Arthur Hailey, titled Airport. One of the pages has a story about an air traffic controller training a new recruit - "George Wallace nodded and edged closer to the radarscope. He was in his mid-twenties, had been a trainee for almost two years; before that, he had served an enlistment in the U. S. Air Force. Wallace had already shown himself to have an alert, quick mind, plus the ability not to become rattled under tension. In one more week he would be a qualified controller, though for practical purposes he was fully trained now. Deliberately, Keith allowed the...

Privilege - A special advantage that people enjoy over others. It is this elusive idea , hard to understand for a lot of people. Why is it so? Why do so many people carry on with their lives completely oblivious to the privileges they enjoy by virtue of their very existence? How can so many people miss such an obvious thing as one that pervades all your life? Is it the extraordinary levels of insulation that people can enjoy in this society? Or is it merely an inability to think beyond their little ponds? Can people be pathologically incapable of recognising privileges that they enjoy and the others so cruelly denied? It is not hard to find people like this. People who rant about having to pay taxes, or people who rant about reservation system or people who in general think that the society is unfair to them because they do not always get their way. Don't get me wrong. People are well within their rights to question high taxes or nepotism or inordinate majoritarianism in corne...

Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? by Michael J. Sandel My rating: 5 of 5 stars Ever felt that you are being meted out injustice due to reservations based on Caste? Ever felt that the shopkeepers who sold Milk for 300 Rupees a packet and Water for 200 Rs a Can should be punished? Ever felt strongly for or against same sex marriage? Euthanasia? Cannibalism? If your answer to any of the questions is an yes, then you need to read this book. This book will take that question, rip it apart, then patch them up again, making you understand the various strands that held the question together in the first place. One of those rare, must read books. View all my reviews

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram G. Rajan My rating: 5 of 5 stars TLDR; If you want to understand the '08 crisis without getting bogged down in jargon, this is the book to go. Also, Dr. Rajan makes perceptive observations about India and it's politics, governance, and social security. This book aims to narrate the various factors that contributed to the global economic crisis of '08. he writing is lucid, clear and flows smoothly. Dr. Rajan explains Sub prime mortgage crisis very well, and is clear cut in his reasoning as to why the Government intervening (or not) was bad. He doesn't paint anything to be a panacea, and doesn't bat too much against the bankers, and not for too much regulation either. Her repeatedly makes it clear that there was a lot of things going wrong, and makes very interesting commentary on the social implications of the crisis, and the solutions that tried to corr...

An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India by Shashi Tharoor My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is a well researched book that covers all the aspects of the argument against British Raj. There are not only nationalistic arguments, but points against social, cultural, moral, technological, political and utilitarian theories that seek to support the British rule. Shashi tharoor makes no bones about calling out the people who say that British provided us with democracy, and those who say that they were better rulers because of their liberalism. There are some great data and writing that sum up how British imperialism maimed India badly. The pages about famine and War efforts make for some really grim reading and out to shut anyone up who plays the utilitarian card. This might very well be Shashi tharoor's first classic. View all my reviews

A world without Fidel Maruthan Fidel won't be able to read the thousands of tributes and eulogies that are being written from all over the world. But he has read many eulogies written for him. He has amused himself over the failure of numerous attempts on his life by the world's prime super power, smiling over a cigar on that tiny island. We do not know if he ever saw the viral video 'Castro's last Journey?!' that was released in 2011. But he smiled saying that he has seen news about his own death on the TV and read about it on Twitter. From Eisenhower who broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba to Barack Obama who tried to renew the relations, Castro has seen 11 US presidents, and opposed them consistently. Just as he looms into our view as one of the greatest personalities of this century, Fidel Castro also remains the most abused and hated "dictator" for many. His death on 25th of November, 2016 has created a vacuum not only for those who admired him,...

Half - Lion: How P.V. Narasimha Rao Transformed India by Vinay Sitapati My rating: 0 of 5 stars Take half a Lion, add a mouse and fox to make a whole, and dress it with a garland of Ambition, you have made yourself the Prime minister of India from 1991-1996, Pamulaparti Venkata Narasimha Rao. P.V. Narasimha rao is mostly known to us as the Prime minister who led the '91 reforms, ended the License quota raj, failed to prevent the destruction of Babri Masjid, led over the biggest stock market scam, and one who opened up Telecom and Satellite TV to private sector. He is also seen as someone who was done a great injustice by the Nehru - Indira Gandhi clan, and denied his rightful position in the history. Someone, who people like to think of as a underdog. PVNR, Landed Brahmin from Andhra who was a staunch socialist, began his political career with a loss to a Communist Candidate. He would go on to win eight elections after that, and holding every sig...

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson My rating: 5 of 5 stars This was a brilliant read. The narrative weaves drama and science seamlessly, in a way that I would have not thought was possible. This might even clash with Leviathan Wakes for my most loved SF novel, for its lucidity and the way the characters were shaped. There was a disconnect at times, but it could be pardoned, for this was the single best novel I read in this year, especially in the SF genre. Highly recommended. View all my reviews

Faster than Lightning: My Autobiography by Usain Bolt My rating: 4 of 5 stars There is a certain audacity in the way Bolt asserts himself in this biography. I have met some people in my life that are at/near the absolute top of their fields and in a way, they are too humble. When we start to embark on a journey to attain that skill level, we sometimes miss out on the humility. Then there is this rushing towards an excess of it, as our extraordinary lump of tissue sitting atop our neck decides that some failures along the way are due to our lack of humility. While humility or the lack of it can substantially alter our progress in the learning, all other things being equal, humility as is practiced in the post modern world might be disposable. Or that's what Bolt will convince you of. There is a certainty with which he asserts his dominance. He is unapologetic about the fact that he has special talent. He is not overtly humble. He just sails throug...

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane My rating: 5 of 5 stars This was an exhilarating read. The plot is extraordinary and makes you feel invested in a way that very things can do. You want to travel along, you want to read just one more page and see what Teddy is up to. Every time there is a twist in the novel, you'll think, "Ha! I know this trick!". And you'll be woefully wrong. Dennis Lehane carves a wonderful thriller and my only regret was that I didn't read it in a single stretch. Rekindled my interest in thrillers. :D View all my reviews

Windows 10 users, download this registry entry, double click and add, and restart your system. Don't shutdown, restart. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-QbWCkLjW6qTkg2ZWdFU2ZJdDg/view?usp=sharing Ubuntu users, download this file, and from the directory where you have downloaded the file, execute the following commands one by one in a terminal. You will have to connect temporarily to a mobile hotspot to install missing dependencies. So, connect to hotspot, run these commands. sudo dpkg -i wpasupplicant_2.3-2.3_amd64.deb sudo apt-get -f install