Om Malik of GigaOm fame often says “Silicon Valley is a hot house where everyone smokes the same crappy weed and participates in a constant feedback loop.” Now we know on the internet everyone goes to their favorite hot houses i.e read their favorite bloggers. Indibloggies is a way to bring best of the weed from different spheres. So here are my nominations for my best weed err… nominations for Indibloggies

IndiBlog of the year - http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com

This has to go to the tsunamihelp. It mobilized the various people around the world and provided a single point of information for the Tsunami relief. A great example of power of blog medium.

Best Technology IndiBlog - http://123suds.blogspot.com/

Prof Sadagopan’s weblog is an excellent commentary on various Emerging Technologies, Thoughts, Ideas, Trends and Cyber world. Very well written and shows the thought process from a deep experience. Although Prof he could use a little bigger font on his blog :D

Another technology blog I would like to nominate is Gigaom by Om Malik. He has the uncanny ability to review and analyze various things happening in tech world. When world was singing praises of Gmail he raised the flag of disenchantment.

And the last tech blog which I would like to nominate is TechWhack by Sushubh. Don’t take his younger age for his naiveté in tech areas. If you subscribe to google news you would often find his posts on the front page in TechSection.

Best Humanities(Art, Society, Politicsetc) IndiBlog - http://www.drishtikona.com

Dristikona – a blog from a well experienced person Indra Sharma ji talks about Indian society and the challenges it faces. He never says a thing in vain and always proposes a solution to these hurdles. We all can learn a lot from his lifelong experiences and thoughts based on these which he shares through his blog. Hope more folks like him will join the bloggerdom.

IndiBlog lifetime achiever - http://opinion.paifamily.com

Nitin Pai’s The Acorn – a day is never complete without reading the opinions from his opinionated mind. His writing frequency and insight to the political/foreign policy/financial measures is commendable. He is also proxy-present in Hindi blogger world via his guest posts thru Debashish.

Best Indic (Indian Languages other than English) Blog

I will confine myself to the Hindi language for this as that is what I do. This has to be toughest category for me as every one has become a close friend in the Hindi blogger world. Moreover the bloggers I wanted to nominate have also sponsored prizes so it becomes doubly complex. Without more words I would like to nominate following three Hindi blogs for the best Indic Blog in no particular order

Ravi Ratlami ka Hindi Blog aur Ghazals – One of the most prolific writer in Hindi cyber world. He writes on socially relevant issues and all things technical related to Hindi. An accompanying gazal is his trademark and leaves people wondering how does he do it in such a short time.

Atul Arora ka Rojnamcha – another Hindi blog gem. He is known for his lucid writing style and various techniques he develops like how to measure if you are an NRI etc. He also has a blog-book about his memoirs in US.

Jitendra ka Mera Panna – has to be the 200 mph train of blog world. He started with blogspot and quickly outgrew to his own domain. His writing style is again unique and he uses various characters real or imaginary god knows for his blog. His writings are the talk of the town in this part of blogging world. There are times when only person writing in Hindi is him.

Best New Indic blog –
Fursatiya – Anup Shukla’s blog from Kanpur is another one of its kind new addition to Hindi world. His terse commentary on India’s culture and its unique idiosyncrasies is a must read. He also takes his shots on the hindi bloggers and is a joyful addition to hindi blogger cabal.

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I think I am going to be reading Sadgopan’s blog more and more. He pointed to an article in CIO magazine about an IT project faliure. Now I work as a consultant who implements IT systems to automate business processes. Studying and practicing good project implementation practices is something which I have deep interest in. The article sums it well at the end and every business stake holder should learn it by heart that

There is big leverage between IT and the business processes when you deal with a large supply chain,” he says. “Just looking at contingency planning from an IT point of view would be a big mistake. It has to be looked at from an integrated view of IT processes and the business.

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Sadagopan’s weblog on Emerging Technologies,Thoughts, Ideas,Trends and Cyberworld is a very insightful blog on an amazing gamut of things. Just read his commentry on James Surowiecki’s article about relationship between technological advancement and happiness. Sums up pretty well at the end

My Take: I would think yes in three ways, A. By creating a huge industry, technology is defintely creating new buisness value and by extension helping the stakeholders. B. By making life better fot the society as a whole C. Tech industry is one of the fastest innovators and so is able to roll out newer solutions/products faster - in the process helping society at large happy by providing new variety!!.

And here is my take on it :D I have often wondered about the happiness. During the surveys that James Surowiecki articles talks about when people were asked about happiness were they thinking about fun or happiness. It is quite too often that one would confuse between the too. To me real happiness is like looking at one’s kids, getting the love of one’s life etc. Having fun would be visiting Disney world, taking the roller coaster ride etc. It is this fun that looses its novelty just too easy. After being on a ride on 30 feet roller coaster you want to have a bigger thrill, so you go for 50 feet and so on.

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Dot-com crash and between jobs
The other day I was talking to one of my pals about Audrey, the internet appliance now discontinued by 3Com. I bought it because of the dot-com crash :D I was between jobs and company notebook was rightfully taken back by my earlier employer. I needed something to browse the internet and buying a notebook didn’t look like a good idea in those times. Then I get this call from my uber-geek friend Nikhil Goel who has chosen Singapore as his workplace, about one website offering Audrey’s at $99. I immediately ordered one. It was a god sent gift at that time. I loved it. I was only able to access net thru modem in its initial form. So I started visiting these websites for more info on how to attach a network card with it which turned out pretty easy. I had to buy a Netgear USB NIC and then spoof it’s MAC address or something to make it behave like 3Com gear :D. (more…)

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My past experience with High Availabilty has been Microsoft Clustering Services. Quite often I would find links and references to HA solutions in the Unix world but never had a chance to delve deeply. Recently I came across the HA solution from IBM for their Unix Flavor - AIX. This got me hooked to it. It looks like a great solution. Google pointed me to Matilda Teams’s HACMP resources, which is nice collection of resources about HACMP. I love their FAQs section. Consider this golden nugget

Do I need a highly available cluster for my application?

The short answer is (probably): if you aren’t sure if you need HACMP then you don’t need HACMP.

The medium answer is: If you don’t know if you need a highly available cluster for your application then you almost certainly don’t (or you really don’t understand your application’s requirements in which case, you’re not ready to put your application into a highly available cluster).

The long answer (known as Jose’s Law in honour of the person who came up with it) is:

1. Ask your manager if the application is business critical.

1a. If your manager says yes, investigate the tolerable downtime and economic loss of unavailability (you need to justify the cost of setting up an HA cluster).

1b. If the answer is no, ask his permission to investigate deeper.

2. In either case, investigate further by first powering down the server. Wait for the calls. Say you are fixing it. Count the calls. Ask if it’s critical. Ask how critical it is.

2a. If nobody who matters complains then format the disks and install an MP3 & Quake server.

2b. If the house is on fire then go back to your manager. You need HACMP and you now have the business case to support the need.

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After a very long time I have again decided to use Linux. I used to be a RH user but this time I am going with Debian, as Nikhil says Real Users use Debian. Being a SAP professional it would have made more sense to install RH but since I am planning to use this for a private wiki serving as an accessory to my brain :D Debian should be fine. Besides I am being real cheap on this install. I have an old box PII 400 MHz 128 MB RAM and 4GB HDD which I bought for $100.

I am doing this using this net-install CD so it is taking a bit longer. It has been a about an hour since I started this install. I am using kernel.org which I guess is hosted in Santa Clara and is giving me download speed of ~160 kB/s. Let us see how this goes. 8m30s to go.

Update
As it happens with so many projects - it failed due to lack of disk space debian instllaler allocated and I approved to install the binaries. Will try again in the evening.

Update2
Ended up installing Fedora Core 2.

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There is a line in the comic book series Asterix and Obelix where Asterix says about Obelix “The boy never fails to surprise me” So can be said about Om Malik. When all the world was singing praises of Google Desktop Search here comes OM busting the hype around it. Today’s victim of Om’s love is the launch of Treo 650. He is at his best when he says

I have often said that Silicon Valley is a hot house where everyone smokes the same crappy weed and participates in a constant feedback loop.

Always remember these golden words when buying any Silicon Valley Stock, implementing a hot shot solution from a startup and ofcourse buying a new device.

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