The premise of this post is that there are enough engineers out there who answer this right.

You are a prolific midnight coder and dislike anyone who wakes you up before noon. Between these two, what would you chose?

a. An evening date (and a lot more) with Angelina Jolie and Megan Fox (yes, *together*), or

b. Breakfast with Linus Benedict Torvalds. At 7:00 am.

We are hiring. If you got that right, please mail us at {careers at altheasystems dot com}. (Hint: if you are feeling torn between the two choices, there's probably something terribly wrong with you. We may probably not want to read your mail.)

Interested in knowing more? Here's an SEO keyword burst:

We are a young tech startup. Very well funded. ShuffleFeed, our social video discovery platform, is the backbone for all Shufflr multi-screen apps (Desktop, Mobile, Web, Lean back). To scale this platform to the next level, we are looking to hire extremely strong computer science + Unix engineers who have worked on consumer 'web scale' backend applications. Typical workplace fun for our platform developers involves:

• Core application features - implementation, deployment & scaling to 'web-scale' (e.g., how do you ensure sub-second responses for per-user social graph requests?)
• Large scale database design, replication, performance analysis and finetuning
• Designing and implementing in-memory and persistent caches
• Distributed programming and concurrency aware designs in the core application
• Web video indexing/crawling
• Mining external networks for extracting video activity from our users' social graphs
• Integrating personalisation algorithms for recommendations, search and related videos
• Strong unit testing and continuous integration before deployment
• Multi-stage code integration (one or more staging zones that protect production systems from unreliable commits)
• AWS cloud deployment including push button deployment, scaling, load balancing, automated health monitoring, fault recovery

Oh yes, we just chomped away 5 varieties of pizzas while coding at work tonight :)

I saw this gem of a live political satire(?!) as I was goofing off in my office, well past midnight into the early hours today. Worth a re-watch even if you've already seen it. A classic that went viral overnight and continues to be immensely popular (over 2million views on this youtube video alone; there are more).

The stage is White House Press Corps Dinner, 2006. Stephen T. Colbert walks armed to the teeth(!) into enemy territory, into the beastly lair - the White House, properly wrecks Fox & Bush & Cheney & Rumsfeld & ... the whole Washington, D.C and walks out untouched. Unbelievable. 'Seething with anger' is a loosely paraded phrase; it is to be employed solely for describing Bush's reactions to Colbert.

Note: This post will make little sense to non-ruby/rails programmers.

I use RVM to manage multiple rubies and gemsets. Weird things happen if one uses a wrong ruby+gemset. Zsh users have a way to display the current ruby+gemset selection via RPS1. But I use bash (which has no RPS1 equivalent). So, here's my ~/.bashrc hack to do the same. Oh yes, is xterm resize-safe too :)

# this goes to the end of ~/.bashrc, after the line that loads RVM into the shell session

# a hack based on http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prompt-HOWTO/clockt.html

function rvmised_prompt {
    n_cols=$(tput cols)
    rvm_prompt="$(rvm-prompt)"
    let rvm_ppos=$n_cols-${#rvm_prompt}

    tput sc # save cursor
    tput cuf $rvm_ppos; tput setaf 1 # right justified and in red
    echo -n $rvm_prompt
    tput sgr0 # may not always work as expected
    tput rc # restore cursor
}

PROMPT_COMMAND=rvmised_prompt

The other day, Fred Wilson did a prophetic (okay, prescient) post on storm clouds gathering over web-entrepreneurship & VC. An excerpt:

And anything that is unsustainable will eventually stop happening. And when it stops happening, there will be a dislocation event that will cause people to change their behavior.

... you don't know when that event will happen and you have to operate your business until then. So we will see this behavior and other troubling things continue to happen for some time to come. When will it stop? Who knows? But be prepared for it to end. And when it does, things will be different. And we should all be prepared for that time.

These thoughts are seconded by seasoned web investors like Brad Feld and Mark Suster too. It is almost as if every one knows the outcome but are glibly playing along, as no one knows the D-day exactly anyway.

BTW, did you watch The 11th Hour? You must. It has a more chilling (and hopefully convincing) effect than Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. The climate-change storm clouds are getting darker and hovering all over our mother-ship. Our collective inaction is incomprehensible.

Well, sometimes things just take time. The wraps are off and it is time to introduce our series A investor - Intel Capital :^)

HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Intel Capital, Intel Corporation’s global investment organization, reaffirmed its dedication to foster worldwide innovation with the announcement of 18 new investments. The new deals total approximately $77 million and were announced today at the 11th annual Intel Capital CEO Summit, Intel Capital’s gathering of portfolio company CEOs, corporate technology decision makers from Global 1000 companies and thought leaders from around the world. The new Intel Capital investments span 11 countries including Brazil, China, Germany, India, Israel, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Russia, Taiwan, Ukraine and the United States.

...

The new investments include Adaptivity, Althea Systems, Anobit, boo-box, De Novo, IPTEGO, Layar, Lilliputian Systems, Inc, Ortiva Wireless, Rock Flow Dynamics, Select-TV, SilkRoad, Taifatech, Videon Central, Verismo Networks, Winchannel, YuMe and Yummly.com.

Now that the revelation is public, it is time for me to come out of the cave and speak freely again.

Of late, we've been spending a good bit of time with lawyers at our startup - Althea Systems. Quite exhausting, even if for perfectly good reasons like closing our Series A, putting our ESOP policy into a legal framework and verifying the property deeds of a new office rental space.

A few minutes back, I open a new terminal and see fortune (/usr/games/fortune) answer the question that has been bothering all of us non-lawyers since long:

Q: How many lawyers does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Whereas the party of the first part, also known as "Lawyer", and the party of the second part, also known as "Light Bulb", do hereby and forthwith agree to a transaction wherein the party of the second part shall be removed from the current position as a result of failure to perform previously agreed upon duties, i.e., the lighting, elucidation, and otherwise illumination of the area ranging from the front (north) door, through the entryway, terminating at an area just inside the primary living area, demarcated by the beginning of the carpet, any spillover illumination being at the option of the party of the second part and not required by the aforementioned agreement between the parties.

The aforementioned removal transaction shall include, but not be limited to, the following.  The party of the first part shall, with or without elevation at his option, by means of a chair, stepstool, ladder or any other means of elevation, grasp the party of the second part and rotate the party of the second part in a counter-clockwise direction, this point being tendered non-negotiable.  Upon reaching a point where the party of the second part becomes fully detached from the receptacle, the party of the first part shall have the option of disposing of the party of the second part in a manner consistent with all relevant and applicable local, state and federal statutes.

Once separation and disposal have been achieved, the party of the first part shall have the option of beginning installation.  Aforesaid installation shall occur in a manner consistent with the reverse of the procedures described in step one of this self-same document, being careful to note that the rotation should occur in a clockwise direction, this point also being non-negotiable.

The above described steps may be performed, at the option of the party of the first part, by any or all agents authorized by him, the objective being to produce the most possible revenue for the Partnership.

Heard this? Shufflr's users have begun connecting to Twitter.

In the true spirit of exploring new frontiers, the first-contact message would say something like:

Shufflr to Houston. All systems fine. Over & out.

Or as a tribute to one of the greatest starships in outerspace ever:

Enterprise, this is Shufflr. All systems fine. Over & out.

There are sporadic reports of Kirk & crew roger'ing those messages from the mothership.

--

Mission - Explore & Discover.