Beta Thoughts

Cloud Native - Run better, faster

2018-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

DJ Adams</a> started the conversation</a> about cloud native on his recent post. Having seen the journey of SAP Cloud Platform from JPaaS</a> days to present I have certainly been close to the principles and patterns that are now called “Cloud Native” I started commenting on DJ Adams blog and it got so long that I thought of writing it as a post in itself so here we go.

Before delving in to details of “Cloud native” let’s setup some context on why it is important at all for businesses. Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and now highly respected venture capitalist at a16z made a rallying call when he wrote “Why Software is eating the world”</a> One of the main argument he made was that all businesses will become software businesses. You can see manifestations of that all around - more and more things has software in them, larger chunk companies are driving a significant growth in their revenues enabled by software. There are countless examples of impact of software in various industries. One really good thread on this on twitter is by @SuB8u. This entire thread as well as this search</a> is filled with software disruptions

Tech is impacting every industry. The smarter incumbents adapt, the lazier ones fall behind.http://t.co/mWFYQ0FU3P pic.twitter.com/CjltaxQq2L
— Subrahmanyam KVJ (@SuB8u) July 18, 2015 </blockquote>
Stated this way software has become an existential fact for organizations and it would be very important for businesses to be effective at software processes i.e. my title run better, faster. To understand this let us consider a modern development workflow based on DevOps toolchain - 

Plan - code - build - test - release - deploy - observe - maintain
This toolchain is based on the expectations from software in today’s ever connected world where people, things and businesses use software for everything. This could be from ordering lunch, booking a place to stay, checking supplier inventory to performing automated repairs etc. Apart from basic requirements of being always there (availability, graceful fallback) and not break (resiliency) there is also the added expectation of faster response to customer demands (meaning newer functionality and not the latency, though smaller latency is also good). In this context let’s look at two of the most important ideas from where the cloud native principles have emerged

Need for speed and Shorter Feedback Cycles for the win (faster..) If you want to get from idea to market the fastest way you better have very short cycle of delivery baked with continuous feedback cycles. You may have a grand idea but do you want to deliver it in a meaningful incremental way (MVP anyone) or you want to do one big grand delivery with a high chance of not understanding customer requirements or they have changed since you started. The shorter feedback and deployment cycles also help in reducing risk. To do software with shorter delivery and feedback cycles you would need some concepts/patterns like</li> </ol>
On demand and preferably code driven self service for the services and resources (compute, storage, databases etc.) needed for your solution. It won’t be fun if you are still waiting for the PO to be approved or have logistics problems with the delivery of servers or the data center power has not been provisioned correctly. Your software solution inhouse developed or bought has its own code/binaries/artifacts along with a lot of prerequisites/dependencies. It would be really nice if we had a standard way to package all of this in some format that would run everywhere (almost). Containers are here to help and their image definitions provide such a solution. There are a lot of other benefits as well but that’s a topic for another post. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment pipelines that would build, test and feed these artifacts to the applicable runtimes.

Operationally Efficient (run better..) We want to run our solutions the most efficient and economical way. These efficiencies could be from the infrastructure side which is easy to procure/operate/deprecate/upgrade or on the human side i.e. doesn’t require a lot of grooming from humans, has a lot of resiliency or at least graceful degradation built into it so as to avoid 2am calls. There are three concepts we should consider here -</li> </ol>
Evolution of Acitivies - I was first introduced to these by Simon Wardley, concept itself is based on his own research and built on Difffusion of Innovation</a> by Everett Rogers (Crossing the Chasm</a> by Geoffrey Moore is also based on this). Idea is that most of the technology goes thru an evolution curve from relatively unknown genesis to ubiquitous utitlity as shown below

You can see this in from batteries to electricity, Telegraph to hundreds of ways to communicate today and finally computing from Z3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer) to cloud today. Other components needed in software solutions like databases, application servers are also going thru similar evolution and are being offered as services or utility. At any point of time it is best (mostly) to use latest in evolution. For example should I get electricity from utility (Solar is challenging this) or produce my own, should I setup my own datacenter or buy from cloud etc. 
Standardization - As anything moves from left to right on the evolution curve to be more efficient you start seeing standardization of various components. This is the context in which containers fit. You have one standard way to package and deploy software with all the dependencies baked it.
Orchestration - We already covered Building, testing and packaging (CI/CD, containers) the software so that it can be run as efficiently as possible. This task of running efficiently falls under a concept called orchestrator. This orchestrator takes our software packaged as a container and runs it and makes sure that it keeps running. This keep it running is a big part and consists of monitoring, making sure the response time is good, based on the creterions defined by the operators scale up or down the application, provide health checks etc.
There are quite a few other related concepts that I can talk about like microservices, observability, API first etc. but I think we have a covered a lot of ground with talking about need for speed and how to operate in this faster changes + shorter feedback context. Let’s try to tie in all these for a TL:DR version.
All businesses are becoming software businesses while needing to respond faster to customer demands and operate efficiently to grow and compete. This resulted in changes in how to code/build/test/package software (12factor apps, CI/CD, containers) and how best to operate software (orchestration, observability) with the benefits of scalability, resilience and with shorter feedback cycle. Cloud native approach incorporates all of these to plan, build and operate software which is easier to change, resilient and graceful to unexpected situations.
I hope this was useful to you. Please do share your feedback in the comments. I hope to write in more details about some of the concepts individually.
Cross Posted at SAP Community</a>
References
Cloud Native Attitude</a> ebook by Anne Currie 12 Factor Apps - https://12factor.net/</a> Cloud Native Trail Map</a> from cncf.io - This is a really useful map and covers all the important concepts for your cloud native journey
Photo Credits Thor Photoby JD Hancock</a> Evolution Activities</a> curve by Simon Wardley

Jack Kornfield Ajahn Chah

2018-03-05T21:56:01-08:00

It seems there is no running away from Ajahn Chah</a> for me. He must have been a remarkable teacher to have so many great students who themselves are leading life lessons for so many. I have been listening to podcasts by Ajahn Brahm</a> for more than a year. He is a student of Ajahn Chah based in Australia. His podcasts and videos</a> on youtube have been listened/watched by millions. I have learnt a lot from his teachings.
Today when starting for work I looked for my listening diet for the fifty minute commute and settled on Tim Ferris show</a>. From the title it was about meditation, joy in the present the regular mindfulness things. Guest was a guy names Jack Kornfield. I didn’t really had many expectations except to be good talk as Tim chooses the best :-) And what a surprise it turned out to be. Of course Jack is a student of Ajahn Chah. He had amazing stories to tell. I have only listened to an hour of the episode and that is only 1/3 of the episode. Few of the notable things

“My mind is like a bad neighbourhood, I don’t want to go there alone”, Moving story from Kymer Rouge time and Maha Ghosananda in Combodia. Jack’s childhood stories. </blockquote>
Looking forward to listening to the rest. You can find it here</a>. Might update this after listening all.

Steven Sinofsky on organization design

2016-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

[Steven Sinofsky] (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sinofsky) of a16z in an [epic post] (https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/functional-versus-unit-organizations-6b82bfbaa57#.a4reg9rg0) on organization design comparing functional orgs (sales, finance, engineering etc) vs Unit orgs (Product 1 Unit, Product 2 Unit etc) acting as businesses within business. 
{{< tweet 806002642296020996 >}}

Moving to static hosting

2016-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

Having been on wordpress for more that twelve years it was time for this aging techie to try some thing new. The new shiny toy is static hosting on github. This is enable by super cool static site generator Hugo</a> The theme I am using is called Tranquil Peak and can be found on Hugo themes</a>

So the journey for blogging platforms has been Jroller -> Blogger -> MovableType -> Wordpress -> Hugo. Hosting a static site in this way has its own challange and should be played by techies only. For regular folks Wordpress is great. I will cover the tech side in another post (if that happened).

Making of the wordpress empire

2015-11-24T06:36:22+00:00

It is interesting to see the new architecture of wordpress. WordPress.com and self-hosted wordpress is all REST enabled now. There is a new desktop client. You can even manage your self hosted blogs from wordpress.com. They even use the new js flavor of the times – react ( I love react as well). From techie perspective it is quite nice.
What I would hate to see is that now that I am lured into logging into wordpress.com As a self-hosted blog for 10-11 years I have never had the need to login to wordpress.com. So now all self-hosted blogs dial home. This is quite good from commercial perspectives wherein Automattic would get the chance to see and maybe interact in auto-matt-ic way. If that happens I hope it would be quite non-intrusive.
Ok that was a good test post from the new wordpress.com mac client.

SITsv SAP Inside Track Silicon Valley 2015

2015-09-11T06:46:18+00:00

**Join **@rwang0 @finnern @aiazkazi @njasta @moyalynne at SITsv at HanaHaus in Palo Alto. I will be speaking on SAP HANA Cloud Platform. The event is free. Register here</a>. More info and agenda on SCN</a>.

Is it really Bubble 2 dot 0

2015-09-08T06:01:42+00:00

Lately there has been a lot of chatter about bubble in Silicon Valley. This article</a> by Nick Bilton in vanity fair is the latest in that chatter. No doubt there is a preponderance of getting oneself in The Unicorn Club. The burn rates among startups are high. @pmarca raised the cash burn concern </a>an year ago but has been mocking end of world</a> on all the recent dips. Even the fine folks at Hacker News are discussing this</a>.
May be it is. Having lived thru the .com bust my observations in favor and against are
In favor

Have you seen the traffic during commute hours. I used to do Fremont – Mountain View during 99-01 and even with the old 237-880 crossover it wasn’t so bad. Now a days it is a constant zoo from 7am-10am.</li>
Rents are too damn high. Check this new apartment complex</a> close to Apple http://www.nineteen800.com/ 2 bed 2 baths for > $4000 in Cupertino which can only be called a town with High API schools + Apple and nothing else.</li>
Job Market is tight. Try to find good talent.</li> </ul>
Against

Where are the IPOs that were happening left and right. Who remembers VA Linux. Read this CNet story</a> for fun. I understand it is much difficult to take a company public and most take the acquisition exit. But still I don’t see that crazy amount of activity.</li>
It is much cheaper to do startups with this thing called cloud.</li>
My highly unscientific 101-Billboard Index hasn’t started flashing red yet. During the dot com days somewhere after Marsh road exit and all the way to SF, there used to be so many billboards on both sides of 101 that you couldn’t see past them.</li> </ul>
Will be interesting to watch the next few years.

Cloud pricing and pay as you go model

2013-05-25T07:23:50+00:00

Fellow cloudman Matthias Steiner tweeted about pay as you go model and clouds

wonder why so many critics are obsessed by “pay-as-you-go” irt #cloud</a>. I’m pretty sure they all have a #flatrate</a> for their mobiles… #ensw</a> 
— Matthias Steiner (@steinermatt) May 24, 2013</a> </blockquote>

Since I have been doing cloud and pricing for the past few years I had few thoughts on this. Pricing is an art and science combined. To understand let me start with a story from my childhood. If you have even been to India and bought anything from a bazaar you know you never pay the first price the vendor asks for. As a kid I would see my elders haggling over the prices of everything. One fine afternoon my elder brother was buying shoes for me and he got the vendor from Rs 250 to Rs 90 (early 80s good times I know). After getting the shiny shoes for me I asked him how does he came to the figure of Rs 90 and he told me about he thought about

the cost of material, labor and margin </blockquote>
and Rs 90 seemed like a good price. I internalized this concept and lived with it for years. Then I came to US and I noticed all sorts of pricing. Apparel pricing where they would be “fully priced” in spring, some what discounted in summer and deeply discounted by Autumn. Air ticket pricing was black magic. So read a few books^{[1][2]^{and about marginal cost of producing something but then finally settled on the idea of pricing as}}

what someone is ready to pay for </blockquote>
This concept of what someone is ready to pay for is a great one. I mean if for the same necktie one person pays $50 and the other would gladly pay $80, I would like to sell accordingly. But how do I know who would pay how much. This is a really hard problem to solve and is the reason you see a regular cup of coffee for $2.00 while the white caramel macchiato with soy milk costs $4.50 at your favorite coffee joint. You don’t think that extra stuff costs the seller $2.50. It is their way of segmenting the customer and see who would pay more or who derives how much value.
</a>
The above concept works great where perceived value can be shown by adding attributes or services like models of cars, versions of software. But there are markets where doing this segmentation is a little hard. Utility markets for water, electricity and gas are great example of this. One Kwh hour of electricity is indistinguishable from another (though you can still bring in time of the day, how it was produced for some fun). These are the markets that are ripe for pay as you go. You could have tiered pricing over here as well. In cloud computing IaaS and PaaS models (compute units, storage, API calls etc) closely remember this utility model and we see similar pricing models as well.
There is one very important characteristic that dictates the PAYG model for clouds is that of elasticity and efficient use of resources. See in the on-premise model, an organization plans for the peak capacity and buys hardware accordingly (capex). But that peak performance might happen only 10% of the time or even lesser. So these resources are underutilized. But the organization has already bought so not much can be done (though for very large organizations a private cloud can be a choice). Now in the cloud PAYG model most of time you are working under a normal load and paying accordingly. If there is spike in the demand resources are added elastically and you pay for what you use. The same resources that you utilized during the peak time could be repurposed for other organizations during your average load profile.
Another alternative pricing model is of packaging where for commercial reasons or adoption reasons a seller might choose to package the resources in bundles and sell it. For example cell phone plans are great examples of this. These are valid models but fail the elasticity options discussed above as what happens when there is spike in demand. Sometimes you might see unlimited plans (cell phone, ISPs) but then you get into fair use of the resources ( recently a guy was using 50TB of bandwidth on Verizons FIOS plan).
In the end I would say utility like evolving nature of cloud resources and elasticity is what drives the clouds to PAYG models. We can also thank AWS for setting up the precedent.
[1] The Undercover Economist</a> – Tim Hartford (light reading pop science)
[2] Principles of Microeconomics</a> – Greg Mankiw (heavy dry university text)
Coffee Ratecard image by – http://www.flickr.com/photos/nataliejohnson/3017624698/</a>

Bay area at its best Thanks to Bjorn Goerke

2013-04-02T22:09:22+00:00

Bay area at its best. Thanks to Bjorn Goerke for quoting this by Steinbeck which is so apt ( http://bgoerke.wordpress.com/2013/04/02/ive-never-seen-her-more-lovely/</a> )
When I was a child growing up in Salinas we called San Francisco “the City”. Of course it was the only city we knew, but I still think of it as the City, and so does everyone else who has ever associated with it. A strange and exclusive word is “city”. Besides San Francisco, only small sections of London and Rome stay in the mind as the City. New Yorkers say they go to town. Paris has no title but Paris. Mexico City is the Capital.
San Francisco put on a show for me. I saw her across the bay, from the great road that bypasses Sausalito and enters the Golden Gate Bridge. The afternoon sun painted her white and gold rising on her hills like a noble city in a happy dream. A city on hills has it over flatland places. New York makes its own hills with craning buildings, but this gold and white acropolis rising wave on wave against the blue of the Pacific sky was a stunning thing, a painted thing like a picture of a medieval Italian city which can never have existed.
I stopped in a parking place to look at her and the necklace bridge over the entrance from the sea that led to her. Over the green higher hills to the south, the evening fog rolled like herds of sheep coming to cote in the golden city. I’ve never seen her more lovely. When I was a child and we were going to the City, I couldn’t sleep for several nights before, out of bursting excitement. She leaves a mark.
FROM John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley, 1962

Mystery of green circles

2012-05-05T18:00:11+00:00

Often when I am travelling I see these giant green circles on the ground. They look beautiful and is clear are man made. But what is going on. I have seen them all over the US, on the west coast, while flying to east or south you can see them.
</a>
Finally the mystery was solved when I was watching “America Revealed – Food Machine” by PBS</a>. These are agriculture fields or food factories irriagated by something called central pivot irrigation system. Here is a difintion from wikipedia</a>

Central pivot irrigation is a form of overhead (sprinkler</a>) irrigation consisting of several segments of pipe (usually galvanized steel</a> or aluminum</a>) joined together and supported by trusses</a>, mounted on wheeled towers with sprinklers positioned along its length. The machine moves in a circular pattern and is fed with water from the pivot point at the center of the circle. </blockquote>
If you have an hour to spare the PBS documentary is a great watch. You will be amazed at the scale, efficiency, diversity of this giant food producing system. Some of the scenes are quite haunting like all cows getting lined up for getting processed as beef or the host of the show looking in the eyes of a cow and saying is this the same animal or something man made etc. Description of the episode from PBS

Over the past century, an American industrial revolution has given rise to the biggest, most productive food machine the world has ever known.
In this episode, host Yul Kwon explores how this machine feeds nearly 300 million Americans every day. He discovers engineering marvels we’ve created by putting nature to work and takes a look at the costs of our insatiable appetite on our health and environment.
For the first time in human history, less than 2% of the population can feed the other 98%. Yul embarks on a trip that begins with a pizza delivery route in New York City then goes across country to California’s Central Valley, where nearly 50% of America’s fruits, nuts and vegetables are grown and skydives into the heartland for an aerial look of our farmlands.
He meets the men and women who keep us fed 365 days a year—everyone from industrial to urban farmers, crop dusting pilots to long distance bee truckers, modern day cowboys to the pizza deliveryman.
 </blockquote>
Watch Food Machine</a> on PBS. See more from America Revealed.</a> 

Building HTPC 3 Capabilities and big picture

2012-04-08T19:45:25+00:00

(This is the last of this HTPC build series do read the Part 1 – HTPC Research</a> and Part 2 – HTPC Build </a>)
After researching for almost 3 years HTPC was finally built and is the center of my audio video setup. It is truly a one-box-to-rule-the-all solution. I was able to replace the following AV components with this single box

Google TV – online streaming</li>
WDTV Live – local media player</li>
Comcast Cable Settop box</li>
Bluray-DVD player</li>
Digital Video Recorder</li> </ol>
Here is a photo I posted on facebook
</a>
My AV Setup now includes – HTPC, audio receiver, RF based keyboard and remote, Harmony remote. HTPC provides the following capabilities

Live cable TV</li>
DVR</li>
Netflix, Hulu etc</li>
Desi movie watching from bwcinema.com</li>
Online music – pandora, saavn, dhingana</li>
Local media play i.e. digital photos, home videos</li>
Bluray/DVD player</li>
File and backup server</li> </ul>
Let us see how long this setup would last 

Building HTPC 2 Components

2012-04-08T19:45:06+00:00

(This is the second part of this HTPC build series do read the Part 1 – HTPC Research</a> and Part 3 – HTPC Final </a>)
After doing a lot of research I come up with the final list of components. I choose to go for SSD for the OS and programs drive. Really like the choice of Silver Stone GD06 case I made. But that required me to buy a modular power supply and shorter cable set. I was able to repurpose one of my external 1TB USB drives by opening it and using it as a main storage. Keyboard/Remote choice was based on online reviews. iPazzport is a good looking small form factor RF based remote. Performance is average. My best investment was the Ceton infinity card that allows me to take my cable tv wire into the PC and

CPU – i5-2500 (BX80623I52500) 250</li>
Motherboard – GIGABYTE GA-Z68MX-UD2H-B3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68 150</li>
Solid State Hard Drive – Crucial CT128M4SSD2 m4 2.5″ Solid State Drive – 128GB 159.99</li>
Case – SilverStone Grandia Series HTPC Case (GD06) 122</li>
Tuner card – Ceton Infinty 4 PCI-e 199.99</li>
Power Supply – SilverStone Strider Plus ST50F-P 500W ATX 79.99</li>
Hard disk – Western Digital – 1 TB – $60</li>
RAM MEM 4Gx2|GSKILL F3-17000CL9D-8GBXM 74.99</li>
Bluray player – BD Combo Samsung SH-B123L 57.99</li>
CPU COOLER SCYTHE|SCSK-1100 R 34.99</li>
Keyboard/Remote – iPazzport KP-810-18R 38.87</li>
CablesSilverStone PP05 Short Cable for PSU Set 19.99</li>
Wifi AdapRosewill RNX-N180UBE 16.08</li>
Guide – Renethx 4</li> </ol>
Here is a photo of all the components
</a>

Silverstone GD06 case
</a>

Gigabyte Z68 Motherboard
</a>
Assembly in progress
</a>

My buddy Guru Chahal also helped me a lot during this HTPC build. Powersupply in the above picture is upside down from the optimal position as the fan should be down. Ultimately I did put in the optimal way. Had to play with cables a lot for that. Couple of interesting things I learnt during this built. CPU needs it own power. Didn’t knew that and started the PC without that connection. Took some time to figure that out. One should always have a real keyboard handy to configure the PC for 1st time. SATA Blu ray players have separate SATA connectors for data and power. It was hugely satisfying once the HTPC was built and connected with the TV. I ended up spending more than $1000 but it was worth it 



Building HTPC 1 Research

2012-04-08T19:44:43+00:00

(This is the first part of this HTPC build series do read the Part 2 – HTPC Build</a> and Part 3 – HTPC Final </a>)
It was 2008 and I needed to replace my old faithful Sony Vega CRT TV. LCD TVs were becoming quite mainstream at that time and anything above 46 inches were more than 2000 bucks. Spending that much requires some research and I landed on avsforum’s LCD forum.</a> I bought the TV but discovering avsforum was a discovery for gadget loving geek. I will come to that later. Watching TV on 52 inches of LCD was a revelation. Around the same time my little daughter came into the world and there was explosion of cute pictures and HD videos. To watch them on the TV I bought a media player called WDTV </a> which could show me all the media I had on the hard disk attached to it as well as youtube etc.
Since I had discovered avsforum I kept going back to it for reading various things audio video. I found out that due to their thinness LCD TV have poor speakers so one should get external speakers. For watching movies, speakers should really be in at least 5.1 config. Of course to drive these speakers you need a good audio receiver. While I am grokking the intricacies of audio systems and looking at to get a home-theater-in-a-box or separate speaker and receiver I browse to the home theater PC</a> area of avsforum. Being a computer guy it is even more fun. So now it is 2009 and it has been more than a year I have bought the Samsung 52″ LCD TV. And I am totally sucked into the AV world. Thanks to avsforum.
</a>So far I only have the TV and a media player WDTV. But I am also exploring if I should get speakers, audio receiver and may be a HTPC. Reasoning behind HTPC is to have the browsing capability to stream anything you want as WDTV can only stream youtube and couple of other services. While I am in the wait and see mode, there comes a deal at Fry’s a local store for Onkyo home theater in a box for quite cheap. Specs look good with some decent speakers and 4 HDMI ins and I buy that on a whim. Then Google announces Google TV. A friend who works at Logitech is able to get me Revue.
Google TV with Revue is good and it has the Chrome browser where I can browse, stream all I want. It integrates nicely with the Onkyo receiver I have. Netflix, Amazon VOD integration is even nicer. I really like the way search results are overlayed on live TV and the picture in picture is nice. Having used WDTV I am used to the really nice interface to browse local media i.e. pictures and videos. This is where Google TV sucks – while it is great for online media browsing app for local media is not so good. I have to keep WDTV and Google TV while what I want is a single box for every thing. My desire now for HTPC grows even further. So I start doing the final research for building the HTPC and looking for all the components that would go into it. AVSForum’s HTPC forum</a> is the ultimate source for it. Two threads on this forum

renethx</a> ‘s **Guide to Building a HD HTPC **and</li>
assasin </a>‘s Assassin’s Simple/Beginner HTPC Buying and Building Guide</li> </ol>
are my main sources. I learnt a lot from these guys in choosing the components. I ended up buying renethx’s guide to pay my debt 


Why I love design

2012-03-18T15:40:14+00:00

This post is actually about a electronic product, so what does the design has to do with it? Let me start with a bit of history. I am not sure where I got interested in design. But few months of my life where my neurons would have been lit up enough that light was coming thru my ears must be when I came to US. You see I grew up in the India of middle 80s (feeling old :)) where the design must have been stuck in the five year planning commissions. There were the Ambassdor cars, Philips radios, HMT watches and Colgate tooth paste and things would remain the same till may be mid 90s. If a product was supposed to work some way it would for a very long time. Even now if you open some of the Haldiram Namkeen products readily available in US you would see how little attention is paid to usability of the product where design matters a lot.
So 1st few months in US were great from that perspective. I am a very curious person so I would notice the design in everything like how the medicine bottles can only be opened in certain ways, numerous designs of opening the wooden doors meant for gardeners, how the swimming pool chairs have stops for various angle of reclines and dual sided boxee remote etc. That was then, I still notice these design things but the aha moments have sort of reduced. But every now and then something comes up and I go wow.


Any DIYer worth their salt would have dabbled with electronic circuits. Remember when you discovered breadboards for wiring. Those Electronics for You issues for folks who grew up in India. So yesterday I had had to give a b’day present and much to my lovely wife’s discomfort I chose a geek present. It is called Snap Circuits SC100. What they have is similar to a bread board. But what I really LIKED and that’s where the design bit comes – is the way they have solved the problem of joining and creating various circuits. As is clued by the name they used the good old Snap Buttons for making the connection between various components. So a kid of 8-108 ( recommended age group on their box) won’t have to fiddle with cutting the wires, joining and soldering etc. Very nice. 
Essentially you have plastic breadboard with a grid. Instead of typical holes at the intersection of lines you have little plastic projections to which various components and giant plastic wires snap onto by using the buttons. They have a nice book with lots of projects starting from a simple circuit with a switch to on-off a LED to more complicated ones. Here is picture from flickr. Note the shiny buttons at the intersections. Who would have thought the buttons for your shirts will be used to make circuits. That is why design matters</a>. 
 </div>

Bridges of bay area

2012-02-24T02:01:24+00:00

Whenever you are flying over an area just after the takeoff or before landing, most of the time landscape below looks like a organized jumble of </a>residential and commercial buildings with criss-crossing roads and highways. Since our mind is such a great pattern matcher, occasionally you recognize a landmark or building from up above and your mind feels happy.
But this morning in my regular early morning flights to Portland, OR I was in for a treat. Few minutes after takeoff I noticed marshlands and thought we are going over the bay area parallel to 101 side of the bay. Then I noticed the first bridge and thought that must be San Mateo 92 bridge. But then the 2nd bridge became visible and I could make out that 1st one must be Dumbartan bridge and this one is San Mateo bridge. Now it became clear that flight took the path of flying over south bay, east bay parallel to 880 north. So next I could see bay bridge and SF downdown lights and said wow. Now my eyes started looking for Golden Gate and San Rafael bridge and lo and behold you could see them both. Infact you could see San Quentin prison lights at the end of San Rafael bridge.
I thought to my self the only bridge to be seen now is Benecia bridge near Fairfield. I could see two very close small parallel bridges but wasn’t sure if they are the ones I am looking for. Since I cross Benecia bridge every two week I knew the landmarks to look for. When you are driving over the bridge you could see these big parked boats and I spotted them from the air. So it was the one I was looking for. You could also see the orangish brown round structures of the oil refinery so it was double confirmed now.
Overall it was too much fun to see and locate all the bridges of the bay area, seemed I am part of this land. Right now flying over this incredibly beautiful landscape of snow studded mountains with a lake in between. Don’t know where it is.
</a> 
OK even the Flight Attendant pointed at the beauty of this. We are flying over Mt Shasta and Crater Lake should be coming in about 10 minutes. See the pics. . One reason these were closer was because I was flying on this plane which flies at 20000 ft rather than the normal 30000 ft. Will post this when I reach Portland.
</a> 

I have been slowly reading Thinking fast

2012-01-30T06:06:07+00:00

I have been slowly reading ”Thinking fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman. It is full of fun phrases like ” nonregressive assessment of weak evidence” still it is an important book in understanding of human biases and how we decide what we decide. I am sure toread it multiple times. One really good thing is you can pick any chapter and read it a they are independent.

BYO or otherwise Breaking the 10000 server

2011-12-18T02:05:36+00:00

BYO or otherwise – Breaking the 10000 server barrier via Gigaom
It’s in that 5 to 7.5MW area where the company starts having to know about the niceties of chillers and power systems, he said.
“When you break through the 10,000 server barrier — that’s when you start needing 3 to 5MW of power and now you’re getting into major facility costs where you have to have multiple diesel generators, and complex power and cooling systems. And it’s in that 10,000 to 100,000 server zone where costs soar. At that point, there aren’t many companies on the planet that can achieve the scale of an Amazon, a Rackspace, a Google, or a Microsoft. So why not trust your loads to the experts?
Do BYO data centers make sense anymore?</a>
In this era of cheap-and-reliable renta-data centers run by Amazon, Rackspace, and others, does it make sense for a company to build a new data center on it’s own? Unsurprisingly, Amazon’s own James H…

Towards more lighted pixels It has been

2011-12-11T19:43:54+00:00

Towards more lighted pixels
It has been more than three years that I have had a DSLR(T1i) My usage has been mostly family outings with friends and family. But only after these years of use I have come to terms with most of the controls in the camera except for flash. Last night we were at global wonder winterland (http://www.globalwonderland.org/2011/</a>) where I didn’t have to think about setting to change and it came naturally. Still there was one instance where I was in hurry and I used the short cut to Auto 
Another interesting thing that I have been noticing is the trend of everyone moving to DSLRs. At the global wonder winterland one could see more DSLRs and less P&Ses Ofcourse there were our iPhone photographers too.
Global Wonder Winterland | Facebook</a>

Pound the rock and dig out a deep hole

2011-11-30T08:04:57+00:00

While reading the book What I talk about when i talk about running, I came across this para about Talent vs Persistent hard work. This got to be the best lines I read this week

I think this viewpoint applies as well to the job of the novelist. Writers who are blessed with inborn talent can freely write novels no matter what they do—or don’t do. Like water from a natural spring, the sentences just well up, and with little or no effort these writers can complete a work. Occasionally you’ll find someone like that, but, unfortunately, that category wouldn’t include me. I haven’t spotted any springs nearby. I have to pound the rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of creativity. To write a novel I have to drive myself hard physically and use a lot of time and effort. Every time I begin a new novel, I have to dredge out another new, deep hole. But as I’ve sustained this kind of life over many years, I’ve become quite efficient, both technically and physically, at opening a hole in the hard rock and locating a new water vein. So as soon as I notice one water source drying up, I can move on right away to another. If people who rely on a natural spring of talent suddenly find they’ve exhausted their only source, they’re in trouble. </blockquote>

Digitopoly is becoming my favorite blog

2011-11-29T06:36:28+00:00

Digitopoly is becoming my favorite blog as they seem to touch the very topics I am interested in. Future of libraries and books is something I think often. Let us say everytime I visit the local library. Here is there thinking on why reading book should be more like going to cinema rather than owning a physical artifact. You can always argue that there are folks who like to own discs/tapes but that would be minority compared to folks who see the movie.

“Here is the central fact about book publishing: lending is the natural state. Authors produce a book that is improved by others (including editors etc). Then people read the book and that is where it has primary value. Notice that there is no ‘then people buy the book’ stage in the middle or ‘then people place the book on their shelves forever more’ after these. Those are things people did because (a) they had to buy a physical copy and (b) they got used to keeping the physical copy. But for libraries, none of that was relevant.
The issue book publishers face — and so many have said it I really shouldn’t bother, but I will — is that they are wedded to a strategy whereby they sell owned copies rather than reading. That model did translate over to eBooks and, in many respects, eBooks are actually harder to share as owned copies than physical books. Amazon and others have tried to break those constraints but it is safe to say that sharing is hard. Although, when you have a family account things become simpler. But institutionalised lending of eBooks may be very attractive to readers.” </blockquote>
Lending is the right model | Digitopoly</a>
Digitopoly. About; Authors. Erik Brynjolfsson; Joshua Gans; Shane Greenstein. Posts by Author. Erik Brynjolfsson; Joshua Gans; Shane Greenstein. Blog Network. Core Economics; Economics of Information;…

Me Myself and Big Data It seems the future

2011-11-29T06:32:20+00:00

Me Myself and Big Data
It seems the future for self big data is not very far and I think it would be a good thing. Few days ago I read about Up from Jawbone (http://jawbone.com/up</a>) which tracks activity data you in the hope it would nudge you for healthier style. But Larry Smarr from UCSD, chronicles
Quantified Health:
Towards Digitally Enabled Genomic Medicine:A 10-Year Detective Story of Quantifying My Body (Link below)
The amount of data collected as part of this detective work is truly amazing. I am sure it must have required a lot of effort and motivation to do this over 10 years. This required effort to collect self bio markers over long periods would definitely decrease in future with more and more things like Up resulting in insights that were unthinkable earlier.
Strategic News Service – Recent IssuesSTRATEGIC NEWS SERVICE</a>
In This Issue. Feature: Special Letter: Quantified Health: A 10-Year Detective Story. of Digitally Enabled Genomic Medicine. Nutrition, Exercise, and Sleep: The Foundations for a. Healthier Self. Your…

Trouble with bright kids There is very good

2011-11-29T06:17:38+00:00

Trouble with bright kids
There is very good discussion going at Hacker News (http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3284169</a>) on an HBR blogs article. TL;DR version is that bright kids get praised for smartness plus our education system works for the lowest common denominator which means less challenges for the bright ones. These two things work against the bright kids.
The Trouble With Bright Kids – Heidi Grant Halvorson – Harvard Business Review</a>
Business bloggers at Harvard Business Review discuss a variety of business topics including managing people, innovation, leadership, and more.

Photography is an art Dance photography

2011-11-26T16:56:33+00:00

Photography is an art. Dance photography is an extreme form of it due to low light conditions, fast moving objects etc. Peter Norvig, a legendary programmers shares his thoughts on Dance Photography in a really good tutorial form. Read and learn (Most of the indoor parties are simpler examples of dance photography
Dance Photography</a>
Table of Contents 1: Initial Disappointment 2: Basic Photo Editing 3: Basic Equipment 4: Types of Blur 5: Subject Motion Blur 6: Camera Shake 7: Plane of Focus and Depth of Field 8: Noise 9: Exposure …

A colored e reader This is sweet

2011-11-22T05:19:28+00:00

A colored e-reader. This is sweet.


Happened to read a bit of silicon valley

2011-11-21T07:11:05+00:00

Happened to read a bit of silicon valley history from couple of sources recently. One recurring theme is as follows (this bit is from What the Dormouse Said)
“but before long he was bored with building xxxxx that required little of his creativity, and he began looking for something more interesting to work on”

When thinking about giants of computing

2011-11-19T21:57:36+00:00

When thinking about giants of computing one easily forgets that they were young once, this tidbit from What the Dormouse Said about Doug Engelbart is very interesting. His manager is complaining about him to his manager
“Jerry, I know you well enough. I have two things to say, and it will only take sixty seconds point number one is that you have to choose.you either have to risk it on this guy our you have to fire him the second thing I have to say its that this the brightest guy I have ever worked with.”

Very tough story to read It is just terrifying

2011-11-19T02:25:11+00:00

Very tough story to read. It is just terrifying to know that there are millions of girls who are pushed into this every year.
The Face of Modern Slavery</a>
When 6-year-olds are sold to be tortured and raped, it’s time for a 21st-century abolitionist movement to end human trafficking.

Lumia 800 looks good

2011-11-19T01:01:03+00:00

Lumia 800 looks good
There has been a lot of noise about this new phone from Nokia called Lumia 800. Finally got a chance to read up on it. Following the cues of its earlier buddy N9, Lumia 800 looks very good. Let us see how it goes in the world with MS Mango.
Nokia Lumia 800 Phone Review</a>
Nokia’s first Windows Phone has a great design and performs solidly, but the Lumia 800 lacks a few perks its competitors flaunt

Can USPS? part two

2011-11-01T06:20:49+00:00

I recently wrote about if USPS can survive as webvan</a>, on a similar note it was refreshing to see this NYT story</a> about Deutsche Post and how it is thriving and evolving for digital age

The Deutsche Post</a> office across from the train station here offers DVDs, umbrellas, phone cards and toys — with the processing of mail appearing nearly an afterthought. And the facility housing it is not a post office at all. Deutsche Post occupies a corner space in a bank. </blockquote>
What was news to me was how USPS is constrained by law not to evolve or play in limited markets

It’s easy to say that the U.S.P.S. is a bunch of morons, but they live under legislative restrictions on what businesses they can enter and are expressly prevented from entering business unless it’s related to physical mail. </blockquote>
Now thats a bummer. I wonder if these legislative restrictions would be relaxed as things get more digital.

What works in US

2011-11-01T06:04:46+00:00

In a NYT op-ed about Genius of Jobs</a>, Walter Isaacson made a comment about US ingenuity and how it is THE advantage that seperates US from India and China. In my experience I would say 3 things that work well in US
1. Scaling what works best – Ideas that work are scaled rapidly and money flows to them. You would see no-name companies go from small start to national international in matter of years. Venture Capital does wonders over here. Apple, Genentech, Google and Facebook are prime examples. (Sorry for Silicon Valley bias)
2. Law of Land – is enforced and contracts are followed. Enron, Galleon Hedge Fund, Rajat Gupta etc no one is spared. ( Yeah yeah you can say a lot of folks responsible for Financial Crisis didn’t pay for what they let loose but still I think it is net positive than otherwise)
3. University Education – US has most of the world’s best education institutions. This is one advantage that could erode in future as the cost of education is becoming very high plus new models of education would evolve with ubiquitous internet and collaboration tools it enables.

Can USPS survive as webvan

2011-10-04T04:42:00+00:00

USPS has been making losses for many many years and it is not unthinkable that it might not survive with its current structure. Much has been written on various reasons for its demise primarily being email. So when the new blog Digitopoly, by some of my favorite authors wrote on the same topic “Postal mail in the </a>Shadow of Email’ </a> My neurons started firing as it is one of the meme I think about. Other being public libraries in the age ebooks. USPS is unique in its nature and owns the biggest fleet that goes to most of the neighborhoods everyday. It would be a shame if USPS goes under and this network is dismantled. So how it can be saved and be profitable.
One not so radical idea for USPS is to partner with major grocery chains and be their home delivery agent sort of like webvan. So I order from Safeway, Kroger, Walmart’s website and grocery is delivered next day in neat packages by the friendly USPS guy. This does bring images from my childhood in India where the vegetable vendors would put their wares on a push cart and go thru neighborhoods hawking these vegetables. Do you think this idea of Grocery as a Service would work?
(Flickr Photo under CC by sarelkromer</a>)


For the stat lovers in you This is actually pretty good and can be used for a lot

2011-07-07T21:29:31+00:00

For the stat lovers in you. This is actually pretty good and can be used for a lot of other scenarios
slides from my R tutorial on Twitter text mining #rstats « Things …</a>
Tags. 24 altitude autocomplete BlackBerry Bluetooth Boston Cisco cloud computing Dell DNS email ESX Firefox Fox Geocoding ggobi ggplot2 GIS Google Maps hack hardware linux Mac mapping MySQL nightlight…

Hat tip to Nikhil for recommending this

2011-07-07T19:57:56+00:00

Hat tip to Nikhil for recommending this article</a>

So after using Gplus for few days, what are the features you like what do you miss

2011-07-07T02:40:34+00:00

So after using G+ for few days, what are the features you like , what do you miss and what do you hate As per me
– the best feature is ever present notification button and share box on google properties
– unlimited photo storage for picasa or shall we say google photos
– of course selective sharing via circles or just email
– android app ( though it seems sparse at times)
hate or miss
– Sparks – my friend I had high hopes from you, seems like a half baked product
– Limited folks – that is expected, hopefully more people will adopt it
– how to embed google docs in it

This series of photos from Tiber are just amazing Thanks to Amit Gupta for pointer'

2011-07-04T03:20:41+00:00

This series of photos from Tiber are just amazing. Thanks to +Amit Gupta</a> for point to it
Scenes from Tibet « Flickr Blog</a>
Scenes from Tibet. Ganden Gonpa Tibet. Tibet བོདon the Tibetan Plateau བོད་. In his Favorites set reurinkjan has collected some of his favorite images from Tibet and a few other places around the worl…

ClickItch (31 photos)

2011-07-04T03:07:48+00:00

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Stop being a gear whore and start becoming a photographer

2011-07-01T20:42:59+00:00

Stop being a gear whore and start becoming a photographer!
DISCUSSION>> DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY TODAY – Speedhunters</a>

Random photo testing in public

2011-06-30T18:54:13+00:00

Random photo testing in public
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First Sin of Capitalism

2010-10-16T21:34:30+00:00

WaPo’s article on Foreclosure Fraud</a> via Big Picture </a>has this quote from the article

“Law firms competed with one another to file the largest number of foreclosures on behalf of lenders – and were rewarded for their work with bonuses. These and other companies that handled the preparation of documents were paid for volume, so they processed as many as they could en masse, leaving little time to read the paperwork and catch errors.” </blockquote>
I guess this was the flaw Greenspan admitted. I understand incentives matter. So if the incentives are stacked like this – is the only way actors will behave? Is regulation the only way out?

Audrey and iPad

2010-04-26T07:03:21+00:00

It is very difficult to have totally original ideas on the internet. iPad was released around the same time I was changing apartments once more. And during the move I came across my broadband connected tablet like browsing device from the dot com bust era. I am talking about the 3 Com Audrey I bought during 2001 for $99 after a friend from S’Pore called that it is available on tigerdirect. I loved it during those lean times. So the release of iPad brought back all those memories. While these thoughts were circling in my mind, kind folks on the interwebs have already written a post I wanted to write :D. Here is one snippet from that post</a>

Audrey is/was a $500.00 USD “Internet appliance” released by 3Com</a> in 2000 that ran QNX</a> – a popular embedded *nix-like OS. You could surf the web, listen to music and e-mail folks (plus run a few other apps that came with it). It had a touchscreen (tho, you needed a stylus) with a virtual keyboard, but you could also use a wireless keyboard. My setup is a bit worse for the wear, but she still works:
</a>
Uploaded with plasq</a>‘s Skitch</a>! </div>
The device failed because it was too expensive and just a bit ahead of it’s time (you have to remember, the Internet was a different place back then, with the intended, primary means of connecting the Audrey being dial-up). I believe it also failed because there was no good way to develop for it, thus snubbing early adopters who might have been able to get 3Com over the 1st gen hump and provide it a stream of cool apps to make it worth the money for the general public. </blockquote>
On the internet nothing ever dies. There is still the audreyhacking site</a> live. I might just use audrey for few days for the retro feel.

Does online shopping changes the buying behavior

2010-04-24T07:45:28+00:00

</a>
@jeffnolan sent the above tweet</a> about placing more orders than last year on amazon. This prompted me to look at my order history as I was sure I would be in the same boat. Going through the order history confirmed it. Now two consumers from the same geographic region don’t make a trend. But I suspect that this would be the case for a lot more people who are voracious consumer of information on the web i.e. heavy users of blogs, tweets and online news. Increase in spend in itself is not bad if it has merely shifted spending at brick and mortar to online spending for stuff. It would be bad ( at least for my pocket) if this 24/7 connectivity, 1000s of review sites, ease of online ordering has increased our wants and buying behavior.
While buying clothes and food etc is not practical but buying gadgets, books, music, games and software etc is super easy. There is always a new batch of TVs with more features, digital cameras with HD video recording, AV receiver with newer version of HDMI, new notebooks, routers with wifi-n, ipads and iphones. Then there are techmeme, gizmodo, engadget, amazon etc to review it. For more hardcore guys there is dpreview and avsforum. And all of this in your smart phone, connected TV 24/7 at your service. I think all of this creates a never ending anxiety to upgrade stuff. Which is resulting in ever increasing line items in things-I-bought-last-winter list.
Good or bad depends up the age old question about wants and needs. So far I have started going the route of giving useful age in years to various things electronics e.g. TV, notebook at least 5 years, phone 2 years, computer stuff at least 3 years etc. Will be watching my behavior 

China India GDP Gap Last 20 years

2010-01-01T21:35:10+00:00


A picture is worth 1000 words. This is from cool google service based on UN data</a> What happened in the last 20 years. Look at the increasing chasm between China and India GDP. 

Negative side of Social Networking

2009-06-06T14:33:44+00:00

The world of social networking is catching very fast with the real world. Having water cooler talk is pretty normal but hear this now. I was getting ready for a welcome party for a baby and like any self respecting geek I asked Ms Beta Thoughts – hey I like this white shirt what do you think? Umm… didn’t you wear this when we went to Santa Cruz boardwalk, and we uploaded the photos so every one has seen this. Wear a different one.. Oh nooo…

Hindi on G1

2009-05-31T22:04:43+00:00

Am I the only one who care about seeing Hindi on G1 phone? So far the big search company has been very good for Hindi. Alok would attest that. But for whatever reason Hindi, still shows as boxes on Google. I was hoping the cupcake release would have that but not yet.

Nope he will be an engineer

2009-05-26T21:51:23+00:00

Didn’t knew there were Dilbert cartoons. My favorite 
Dilbert – Engineers</a> 

Taking literary snobbism to new a era

2009-04-25T17:29:37+00:00

There is an article</a> on NYTimes about how the age of Kindle or e-bookreaders is going to impact the old-fashioned books and the culture associated with book reading. Much of the article is devoted to the physical nature of books and the signals it sends to people around the person reading the book. For example if I have all my library in Kindle how would others be able to see what I have been reading and infer what sort of a person I am. In another case while traveling seeing another person carry your favorite book makes instant connections.
While I won’t miss these things about books as physical objects. What I would definitely miss is the impact books have when one is growing up with a lot of books around. Some of the earlier books I read were not recommended to me by any one. I happen to read them as they belonged to my elders and were readily available in the house. As a kid when you have spare time you just pick what is around and read it. With ebook readers it is going to be tough. Another thing that concerns me about ebook readers how it is going to impact libraries. I hope I would still be able to borrow books from library the way I do today. May be even better that I won’t have to go to library physically.
As far as the touting the books you are reading in front of your network – it has already been taken care by the “new media”. See my books</a> section. There are applications like livingsocial</a>, weread on facebook. There is even shelfari.com So nothing to complain over there.
Image Courtesy : Flickr Cheneworth</a>

Selecting books to read

2009-04-20T22:31:29+00:00

No question about the fact that book reading is great. After completing college education, only way to grow further is by reading books. But reading a book also means time commitment. Typically a week to few weeks of reading every day. So it becomes necessary to select books with care. Though there is always the option of reading few pages or few chapters but that also results in waste.
Over the years my book selection process has become somewhat refined. Before the advent of blogs or even web the way to find good books was word of mouth, newspapers or magazines. There were best seller lists and books of the year but that meant that one would miss good but obscure books. Also the books from past would be missed too. </a>For example there is no way I was going to find about Thomas Schelling’s “Micromotives and Macro behavior</a>” from best sellers list. With blogs this selection process has become really easy and very effective. Since one only subscribe to authors one likes iis quite likely that the books recommended by them on their blogs would be to your taste. And when one is fond of bibliophiles like Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution it is bonus time</a>. 
Most of the blog authors when talking about books point to its page on big river aka Amazon. Once at Amazon it is easy to find what other’s are talking about the books in customer reviews</a>. This is all good but what I am really excited about is the ability to check if the book is available at one of the branches of local Santa Clara County libraries </a>(SCCL). This is possible by a little greasemonkey script on firefox that was written for Seattle Public Library</a> which I improvised for SCCL</a>. So now I have a blog filtered stream of books whose reviews I can read on Amazon and check their availability in the local libraries. An optimized solution, just what the good engineer ordered.
</a> 

Airtel Call Home Misleading 1 cent campaign

2009-04-13T22:46:13+00:00

First a little background – I have used Airtel Call Home for calling India in the past and generally like their voice quality. They had also ran great introductory offers when they started which gave good run for the money to Reliance India Call – gold standard in India calling. Competition has been good in this market and has pushed the prices down considering it used to be 65-70 cents a minute when I came to US in 1999.
Now to Airtel’s recent claim of 1 cents / minute call</a>. How would you feel if you went to a shop for buying a pair of shoes and saw on display “Shoes for only $100” but later on realize the shoes are infact 66 % more i.e. they are really $166 not $100. This is what Airtel is doing with their 1 cents a minute promotion. Best is the use of phrase like “Rental Value”. If I buy a card for $10, $3.99 is deducted to provide “Rental Value” I wonder what value does the customer drives from this. Why did they choose to rephrase a charge as value. Is customer that dumb. And what was wrong with selling minutes for 1.66 cents per minute? It is still the lowest price I have seen in the Tier 1 India Calling card business and is half the price of what I am paying right now. By trying to mislead customers Airtel is not gonna earn TLC from customers.

Livemints four values of sensex

2008-11-14T03:08:00+00:00

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Livemint </a>has become quite popular during the last year or two of its existence. But sometimes funny things happen on the first page. Example in case is the screenshot above taken on Nov 14th about 12:30pm IST. This image shows 4 different values of the BSE sensex index. Which one should I believe? While I can understand why it would happen, but I think it should be embarassing for the site owners.

Weighing Machine by a Videogame Company

2008-11-07T21:53:14+00:00

</a>
There has been a visible</a> shift</a> towards design on Beta Thoughts in the past few months. If you are one of the 1.5 readers of this blog you might have noticed it. While I have always been interested in the design of things – but only after the google reader’s recommendation engine recommended “core77’s design blog</a>” that this interest has gone into over drive. Besides my work as a NetWeaver professional revolves around thinking from user’s perspective aka user centric design. So what all of this has to do with the title of this post? Read on…
Core77’s recent post</a> pointed to a lengthy but immensely enjoyable article about the design and development of Wii Fit which might have over taken Grand Theft Auto sales</a> by now. Don’t miss reading the complete article</a> for some of the craziest places there ideas come from. Over here I would just point out to how important the user centric design is for them

Miyamoto-san banged the table and said, “That’s wrong!” He told this person that from the consumer’s point-of-view, clarity was important. That people don’t say, “You need to lose 2 BMI points to reach your ideal weight”, they say, “You need to lose 3 pounds to reach your ideal weight”. We wanted people from age 5 to 95 to enjoy using Wii and he pointed out that most of those people wouldn’t know what BMI is. He demanded to know how this person could be so backward-looking when so many employees were working so hard to negotiate with official organizations to allow kilograms to be displayed in the game for the benefit of the consumers. </blockquote>
Image Courtesy – Goodrob13’s photostream</a> at flickr

Dash GPS and Ants

2008-11-06T13:00:16+00:00

When Dash Express, a GPS with internet connectivity and utilizing the collective knowledge about routes from its users was announced, it was quite an innovative concept. But it seems ants might have beaten them to it. Though a bit of rudimentary technology but it works from the Telegraph article (HT Marginal Revolution</a>)

His team set up an “ant motorway” with two routes of different widths from the nest to some sugar syrup. Soon the narrower route soon became congested.
But when an ant returning along the congested route to the nest collided with another ant just starting out, the returning ant pushed the newcomer onto the other path. </blockquote>
It is a pity that Dash is getting out</a> of making their own hardware</a>. I am sure they will survive and hope to use their technology someday in some form.

Congrats to President Obama

2008-11-04T22:12:57+00:00

Wow, so CA closed the deal :D. Many many congrats to Barack Obama. It is a historic moment in the US history. Watching so many people jubilant in Grant Park is fun. A good break from the melancholy financial mess scene.

A Good SOA Analogy

2008-11-03T10:02:39+00:00

Thomas Otter was mulling over</a> how analogies are a great tool in internalizing</a> new concepts like SOA. His analogy of pointing the difference between a laptop/notebook and Desktop is a good one and points to the loosely coupled and tightly coupled systems. There is another analogy I really like and I believe is a good one in explaining SOA to someone. It comes from Bernard Wheeler</a> at Sun. Here it is in its entirety

The traditional relationship between business and IT is like having a personal chef: you (the business) can dictate what you want to eat, or take menu recommendations, but your chef (the IT department) only buys supplies according to the pre-agreed menu. You play no part in how the food is bought, cooked, etc., but you pay the whole cost for the chef, cooking fuel, food and all the waste from each meal. In addition, if you suddenly change your mind about what you want to eat, there’s unlikely to be an alternative meal ready in a short time – apart from re-cooked leftovers.
Using commodity-off-the-shelf (COTS) software is more like eating in a restaurant: there’s typically less flexibility available to you in the actual make-up of the dishes and the more customization you want, the more it’ll cost. But you share the costs of the chef, facilities, etc. among other restaurant-goers – reaping some benefits from the ‘economies of scale’ of the restaurant. Furthermore, if you change your mind about what you want just before ordering (e.g. pizza vs. pasta), there’s probably a reasonable alternative that can be available in an acceptable amount of time. But if you want to include a totally different culture or flavor (e.g. vegetable tempura as a starter), you may have to visit more than one ‘restaurant’ and figure out for yourself the logistics of how the ‘meal’ as a whole is going to be achieved. Also, there’s nothing to stop the restaurant from suddenly hiking up their prices, radically changing their menu, or being bought out by a bigger chain who then ‘trashes’ your preferred meal.
SOA is like eating at a buffet: the chef (either private or shared) prepares a range of dishes from which you build your own meal. The meal you choose does not require the whole ensemble to be put together ‘in the kitchen’: rather, the chef focuses solely on ensuring that there is an appropriate range of dishes provided in the buffet to keep most people happy for most of the time, based on market demand, season (and other prevailing conditions), consumer feedback/requests/suggestions, etc. And if the cost of any item changes dramatically (or there’s an ingredient shortage, “food scare”, or some other reason to change a menu choice), you don’t have to change your whole meal, just that one piece of it (although granted, it may be the centrepiece of the meal). </blockquote>

People want to connect

2008-11-03T02:28:13+00:00

All of us have seen the rise of social software wave in the last few years. If I were to put these software on human life scale – wikis and forums would be the oldies, blogs the middle age folks, FaceBook-Myspace-Orkut-LinkedIn as the young adults and twitter, friendfeed as the teens. The underlying human behavior for the success of everything social on internet is greatly summarized by Clay Shirky in his book “Here Comes Everybody”</a>

Human beings are social creatures – not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our core capabilities, and it shows up in almost every aspect of our lives as both cause and effect. Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups. </blockquote>
Similar views were echoed by Seth Godin in this post</a> where he said

It’s so tempting to believe that we are merely broadcasters, putting together a play list and hurtling it out to the rest of the world. Louder is better. But we’re not. Now we’re leaders.
People want to connect. They want you to do the connecting. </blockquote>

Internalize

2008-11-02T22:05:19+00:00

</a>A quick look up for the meaning of internalize at answers.com tells me it is “to take in and make an integral part of one’s attitudes or beliefs”. Over the years I have realized that it takes quite a long time for ideas to “really” sink in. You might read a book on behavioral economics and really like the ideas and various biases presented in it and say wow that is cool. But unless the idea is internalized you will probably forget it. It would be akin knowing a word and its dictionary meaning but never use it in conversations. It is only after you have read the same idea again and again in various contexts, have discussed about it with your peers, friends etc that the ideas are absorbed. Some of the ideas that have taken time for me our opportunity cost, time value of money and the one pertaining to my profession IT is enabler of business or a tool if you would.
What ideas do you have that took time to sink in?
Image Courtesy – http://openclipart.org/media/files/yves_guillou/6505

Enabling total customer experience

2008-10-29T23:39:46+00:00

I have just started reading “Do you matter?” by Apple design guru Robert Brunner and Stewart Emery. In the very first chapter I came across a paragraph which is just too good to be read alone

The iPod is an iconic product of our time, a glorious example of design and business success. So close your eyes and imagine you’re holding an iPod. Now take away iTunes, take away the ability to buy the song you like for 99¢ without having to pay $15 for a dozen more on a CD you don’t want, lose the ability to create play lists, cut out the packaging, take out the ads, delete the Apple logo, and shutter all the Apple stores. The remaining question is, “Do you still have an iPod?” Yes, the physical product in your hand is exactly the same, but what do you have now? Really, what do you have?
Well, you have a nicely designed object. Is it an iPod still? No, it’s not, because an iPod is a portal to a kaleidoscope of experience. An iPod is not just an object. The object is an icon that is a portal to an experience. </blockquote>
So essentially what is being talked over here is a total customer experience. Think of the product or service you provide and now think about the experience that is being created for your customers. For example for an enterprise software vendor it would be the software itself, how it was sold, how it was implemented, how is the maintenance support provided, how are trainings held for users, user conferences and these days how vibrant is the online community etc.
While all of this is good and very helpful way of making the product and services highly successful. There is one small lurking doubt I have in the corner of my mind. Apple very tightly controls almost all attributes about its offerings. Obviously it has been very successful in the consumer electronics space. But can this be extended everywhere where the producer/provider cannot have such a fine control for various reasons.
Hat Tip: I was introduced to the book by Core 77’s design blog this post</a>.

Another gem from the house of Steve

2008-10-14T21:02:28+00:00

I am sure you have heard the news of new MacBooks. As anything Apple these days you have to admire the industrial design</a> and thought that has gone into building this. The “brick” design or unibody design is quite an innovation for notebooks. Do watch this video </a>detailing the manufacturing and design process and see how every one on the team is so passionate about the product they have made. This should be an inspiration to product teams around the globe.

Dr Krugman wins Noble

2008-10-13T09:11:13+00:00

Over the years I have grown fond of economics. I stumbled across Brad deLong’s blog and started reading some stuff about economics. Then I read “The Great Unraveling”</a> and it was a pleasure to read the ways Dr. Krugman explained some of the concepts using simple models. For the last few months I have been reading his blog</a> at NYTimes and it has been very very informative. So when I read on Marginal Revolution</a> this morning that Dr. Krugman has won this year’s Noble’s prize for economics, I said WOW..
Many many congrats to Dr. Krugman on the much deserved prize.

Tryst with destiny now in tags

2008-06-17T20:57:12+00:00

I came to know about Wordle</a> a service which can turn any text into tags. See how independence day speech </a>by Nehru looks in tags

Bay Area Renting experience needed

2008-06-15T19:40:37+00:00

Only experienced renters please 😉

Amazon down

2008-06-06T12:50:24+00:00

It is 11:50 pm PST. Is it just me or there is a temporary glitch in the matrix. What does it mean for EC2 customers?

Increase Notebook PC Sales Promote HD Camcorders

2008-06-06T12:05:41+00:00

Here is a clue to Intel/AMD – with HD camcorders becoming a commodity a lot more consumers will be mucking around with HD movies at home. Just the playback of HD quality (1080p) movies in AVCHD format is a heart churning exercise for computer processors. I run some pretty heavy enterprise server applications on my computer and my computer has been chugging along faithfully. But today when I tried to playback a AVCHD movie using Oxygen</a> and shooted using the brand new Canon HF 100, my computer showed signs of age. My immediate reaction was to get a computer with more fire under its belly.
So a little nudge from the microprocessor makers would go a long way for consumers to upgrade their computers.
BTW if you are in the market for a HD camcorder and looking for resources to research – Camcorder forum</a> at AVS Forums is a great resource. There is even a blog for the Canon model</a> I bought. Looking for samples of HD video online – vimeo</a> is your friend. It is the videos like this that made me buy the camcorder. When playing the video don’t forget to switch the HD mode on.
Ein Hahn – Again</a> from Martin Koch</a> on Vimeo</a>.

They are humans too

2008-04-28T21:47:54+00:00

One of the twenty or so must read books mentioned in Poor Charlie’s Almanac</a> is “Getting to Yes</a>” – a principled approach to negotiations. It is an excellent and accessible read on getting to mutually agreeable outcome during negotiations ranging from salary to nuclear disarmament talks. For my present gig I commute between South San Francisco and San Jose on a not-so-enjoyable highway 101. Listening to books is a great way to utilize this time. In the book authors point out that one of the mistake parties make during the negotiation is just thinking about one’s own positions. Parties overlook the fact that the folks on the other side of table are humans too. Focusing on the basic human needs of security, appreciation, well being etc. would result in successful results for all parties.
While keeping the human nature in focus during negotiation is definitely fruitful, but I think this principle can be applied in general to a lot more situations. Especially while talking to people in authority. For example students can keep this in mind while talking to professors. Most of the time students would be focused on their own world and think professors are this abstract entities who are after their life giving assignments, asking them to review and re-review their assignments. Same goes for employees towards their managers etc. How many times any one thinks that professors or managers may have a life too. With loving wife and kids may be a dog too. Focusing on the human side of authorities would result in better and cordial relations.

Education pays but no golden ticket

2008-04-20T19:45:31+00:00

In a NY Times article “The Wealth Trajectory”</a> Greg Mankiw, a Harvard Professor and a famous economics blogger</a> explains the differences in earnings for average workers and the super rich. I found the following statistics good on value of education

In 2005, each year of college yielded an additional 12.9 percent. The rate of return from each year of graduate school has risen even more — from 7.3 to 14.2 percent. </blockquote>
Another thing to note for the premium on education is due to the age old supply and demand equation. The demand for educated people in the last few decades outpaced the supply there by raising the earnings of educated class. That also explains the reason for immigrant me being here.
But still education can take you limited distance on the path to super richness. The “real” reason for it seem to be being educated and lucky

Maybe educational levels are like Willie Wonka’s chocolate bars. A few of them come with golden tickets that give you opportunities almost beyond imagination. But even if you aren’t lucky enough to get a golden ticket, you can still enjoy the chocolate, which by itself is well worth the price. </blockquote>

Nextjob a job portal with video

2007-12-03T12:53:25+00:00

YouTube revolutionized the idea of embedding videos into websites. It was a matter of time before before various domain specific websites started embedding videos in their sites. There have been numerous job sites on the internet for job hunting. Now comes Nextjob</a> for landing you the next job. They have a unique feature that the resume poster can embed a short video about himself and his skills. Kind of video resume. If you are in the job market do give them a try. Here is how a video resume looks like

Advice on joining the SAP world

2007-11-18T23:05:45+00:00

Having been in SAP for some years I get asked this question how to get into SAP as a career. I was writing this to a close friend of mine and thought of putting it on the blog. This advice is a rather first step to decide which stream to join in SAP –

Technology Consulting – understanding the architecture of various SAP solutions and advising the IT department of clients on what is best for them and then helping them implement it. Your end customers in this case is always IT department people. This is purely technical job 😀 Folks who work in this area are called technology consultants. On the first day of project you can recognize these guys as someone who is wearing a suit but is uncomfortable in it.</li>
Business consulting – understanding the capabilities of SAP’s solutions and implementing them for the client’s business. For example let us say you manufacture bulbs – you have plants where you make them, you have suppliers who supply you materials, you have distributors who distribute your products and finally you have customers. Also don’t forget the employees. So you implement SAP solutions which take care of all these folks and the processes they are involved in. People who work in these areas are called functional consultants and they love to wear suits 😀</li>
Solution Delivery – both of the above activities could involve multi-month engagement with the end clients with a team of functional as well as technology consultants. This engagement would be called a project. There are folks whose main job is to deliver the on time within budget and scope delivery of these projects. These are your project managers. Usually PMs evolve organically from the above two roles. But you might see folks coming out of B-Schools directly jumping as PMs. This guy is a leader and can be seen very nervous during the first few days of the project 😉</li> </ol>
Once you have decided one of the three above you can focus on a particular SAP product. I wrote this with SAP in mind but I think this would be true for any enterprise software product.

Shantaram 1

2007-10-15T18:43:49+00:00

After many many years I have started reading a novel based on the true story of author – Shantaram. I am on the 11th page and I love it. Here is a blurb about Bombay

A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind the discreet shelter of a satellite dish. An electric forklift truck was being used to unload goods from an ancient wooden cart with wooden wheels. The impression was of a ploding, indefatigable, and distant past that had crashed intact through barriers of time, into its own future. </blockquote>
A little be dramatic but about right for any large city in India.

Back from SAP TechED 2007

2007-10-06T12:14:28+00:00

</a> Last night I landed back in San Jose on US Airways 162 which should have been dubbed rather TechED flight. I am sure more than 50% folks were returning from Mandalay Bay. It was easily the biggest TechED so far with 6000 folks from all over the US, quite a few from outside US too. Attending the sessions you like and managing the schedule can be a lot of work – see right.
eSOA was the biggest theme this year and it was quite fun to participate in the Product Strategy workshops with Product Management folks. There were also quite a few sessions on Composition Environment. In fact Vishal Sikka’s keynote demoed some parts of the CE. Some of the other interesting things
</a> ADoW – ADoW or Application Delivery over WAN was announced last year</a> and it was good to hear that SAP is using it internally for their portal. It is a software appliance to speed up the delivery of NetWeaver Applications over the long haul WANs like between continents and long distances. It is achieved by caching and bandwidth shaping etc.
“New” Identity Management – is based on SAP’s new acquisition Maxware. This will be very useful and powerful tool in SAP’s portfolio. I can see this tool filling a lot of gaps I have seen on NetWeaver implementations. Virtual Directory Server (VDS) concept inside this tool is quite powerful. VDS can put a facade around most of the user stores like LDAP, DB, ABAP user stores. Right now this exists as a separate tool from NetWeaver. Hopefully SAP would be integrating this with NW pretty soon. 
Virtualization – is a recurrent theme which has been very hot in the last few years. VMWare and Intel were seen promoting this heavily and I attended a session on virtualization and Linux
SDN Clubhouse – Not a technical thing but IMO clubhouse was the most fun place to be between the sessions. Cappuccinos and Mochas were excellent. Met a lot of interesting folks over here. Good to see Craig Cmehil</a>, Mario Herger</a>, Irfan Khan and Kartik Iyengar. There were a lot of activities going on like SAP demos on the pods, community theater, 5 partner stalls with lots of ipod touches to give :), check your basis skills in the back etc.
Overall a fun and tiring TechEd. You can see a large collection of photos on Flickr</a>. On Monday the first day I picked a lot of ribbons I associate with. Sticking them together and hanging under the badge would have made a nice necktie. But I chose to wear just the badge. Anyway here are the ribbons stuck together
</a>
Technorati tags: sapteched</a>, sap</a>, esoa</a> </div>

Future of Enterprise Software

2007-09-20T00:46:26+00:00

Few days back I was at Project Management training and our excellent instructor asked what is the problem executives are trying to solve by going for ERP implementation. What he said rhymed with some thing Jeff Nolan wrote today on Future of Enterprise Software</a>

CEOs are concerned about growing their businesses in an era of increasing uncertainty and efficiency demands; business managers need real-time visibility for intra- and inter-company events, as well as the ability to reconfigure processes with increasing frequency; the CFO, meanwhile, has to ensure regulatory compliance and business integrity.
For the CIO, these challenges come at time when maintenance costs are rising and the number of trusted partners are shrinking â€” systems remain undiminished, yet there are fewer vendors capable of supporting large-enterprise customers. We are down to less than 200 publicly traded tech providers from over 400 in 2001. </blockquote>
Thanks to Jeff for penning these thoughts and Om Malik</a> for bringing all the folks writing thoughts on future</a> of software.

Business of Software Services

2007-09-19T00:33:10+00:00

</a> I am reading “The Business of Software” these days. What a delightful book to read about business of software as a product and services. After starting as a developer I have been in the services for the past few years. Michael Cusumano, the author distills the business of software in few succinct words


The Software services business … is about getting enough profitable accounts to keep your consultants and developers busy close to 100 percent of the time…..
It is usually important to mix senior people with junior to maximize profits for any given client project……
economies of scope are the holy grail….. they can come from structuring knowledge such as how to do requirements, manage projects, customize applications, conduct user acceptance testing, or reuse design frameworks and even pieces of code across different projects and customers. </blockquote>
Do read this book if you are starting a career in software in whatever side of the business – product or services.

Understanding the Carrots

2007-09-09T14:56:35+00:00

In his 1995 speech â€œThe Psychology of Human Misjudgmentâ€</a> given at Harvard Law School, Charlie Munger</a> said

â€œWell I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.â€ </blockquote>
Coming from Mr. Munger, incentives as the very first cause or bias in Human Misjudgment, learning about incentives is quite important. And now Tyler Cowen, an economist and author of very famous blog Marginal Revolution</a> has written a complete book on incentives called â€œ Discover your inner economist</a>â€
</a> This 250 page book</a> is quite an easy read and very accessible as Tyler has used the â€œMe factorâ€ to fullest extent. For me the most interesting part was about the signaling concept. As an analytical mind it is very difficult to rationalize stuff like why spend extra money flowers on valentineâ€™s or on diamonds. But when you consider signaling concept and what might be going in your partnerâ€™s mind it all makes sense 😀 thereby increasing your marital bliss.
If you live in a large metropolitan area like San Francisco bay area, Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Singapore or Delhi you would resonate a lot with the chapter on finding good restaurants. Next time you are looking for good food look for low rent areas and donâ€™t order what you can make at home.
There are other parts in the book about visiting museums, going to movies, dating and even saving the world. I finished the book over a regular weekend and was quite happy to read it. Gives a lot of talking points to talk with oneâ€™s peers to make one look smart (again me factor). Before ending the review a tip for the author. In the book Tyler wonders if sending a Christmas Card to his dentist who happens to be a Hindu an effective incentive. I would say send it on the Diwali</a> (It is on Nov 9th this year) and it might work better.

Safari for Windows and WWDC07

2007-06-11T12:48:13+00:00

As speculated on</a> Firefox wiki Safari, the web browser from Apple has been released for Windows. It is a very interesting development as this would take away some market share from IE and Firefox. It is also important for me as my work involves accessing enterprise apps using a browser. So far most of the time folks would access these apps using a browser that is IE or Firefox. But now that Apple has unleashed its Safari on windows users it would be interesting to see if how this pans out for us.
Anyway I was following WWDC07 over the internet and it was quite close to being there, here is screenshot of the Safari Announcement
</a>
Steve jobs is a master salesman. Few things to note from his keynote are how successfully he uses “the hook” technique for presenting ideas or telling a story. Just like films or serials/sitcoms have punch lines to pique the interest notice he has “One more thing…” in the above picture. Also to note is how the core ideas or takeaways from the keynote were reinforced at the end with the following – sweet, simple and easy to remember line

“So, we’ve seen this morning Leopard, Safari for Windows, and an awesome way to write apps for the iPhone.” </blockquote>

Redesign O Seven

2007-05-20T04:19:38+00:00

Finished another redesign of Beta Thoughts. It is hard to understand why I redesign. This redesign is probably the best I have seen on this semi-active blog. Here is how I did it

I have used the BloggingPro Widgets Ready</a> theme from Blogging Pro. </li>

Choice of colors comes from the latest book by Geoffery Moore – Dealing with Darwin</a>. I am quite pleased with how it has turned up. </li>

Beta Thoughts logo at the top is created by using the excellent font Delicious found here.</a> </li>

Changed the image on About page. Now it shows a photograph clicked while on our way back from Santa Barbara going towards Solvang. </li>

Used the SDN</a> profile image on the front page profile and also provided the link to my profile</a> on LinkedIn. </li>

Switched the tag line from “My tech life – Enjoying every moment of IT” to “Intense Activity – in the midst of eternal calmness”. This one comes originally from Bhagwad Gita but was reiterated beautifully by Swami Vivekanand in his lecture series Practical Vedanta</a>. </li>

Few things are still left to be done like comment form colors, round edges etc. </li>

Apart from this I used Notepad, FileZilla, Powerpoint, Paint.Net and MS Paint. </li> </ol>
If you happen to notice this change, do let me know how you like it.

Product to Money

2007-02-27T01:11:25+00:00

</a>

Most widely used SOA enabled application

2006-05-28T21:12:24+00:00

What is the most widely used SOA enabled application? If you work with enterprise software, like I do, names of large German software vendor or the one here locally from Redwood City or up in the North of bay area may start popping in your head. But I would say think a little bit more. Consider this, the application being talked about is used by millions of users, across operating systems, hardware platforms with so much ease that even the metaphorical grandmas can use it. The application is blogging engines like WordPress, MovableType or Blogger. All these engines have evolved in a service oriented framework without consciously keeping the SOA approach in mind. A typical engine offers the following services 
RSS – RSS was the first service offered by blogging engines and was also picked up later by websites. It was a really simple idea whose time had come. It allowed content of one site to be used in other sites. All one has to do was to publish small xml file with some excerpts of the new content and links to it. These xml files or RSS feeds as they are called are later picked by various RSS readers or clients FeedDemon, NewsGator, Bloglines etc. One can also include RSS feeds of other blogs in other sites.
XMLRPC – While RSS allows the reading interface of a blog XMLRPC is publishing interface of a blog. Using this service you publish posts to a blog in particular category. There are various innovative blogging clients available that allow publishing from desktop (w:blogger, ecto) or browsers. I even hear that those lovely unix folks have developed a plugin for emacs so that they can publish from their favorite editor. Latest news is the Word 2007 supports this natively i.e. now anybody in the organization with Microsoft Office can publish to a blog directly.
Trackback and PING – These are the alert services offered by these engine. If one author has written about writings of another author they can alert the author’s blog about it. One can also ping publicly available service that something new has been published. Again this gave rise to Technorati, Pingomatic etc.
Publish by Email – While XMLRPC is the most widely used interface to publish content for blogs. There is another interface which allows to publish by sending the email. Now one can blog by sending email from crackberries. Don’t you love it.

Good investment advice from Bogle

2006-05-24T00:05:06+00:00

But one of the ideas behind the 401(k) was, “you can do it!” You own it; you run it. And you’ve got millions of people out there saying, “I can beat the averages.” What do you say to that? 
I say, don’t kid yourself, pal. Look, it’s so simple. We’re not like the kids out in Lake Wobegon. As investors, we are all average, and as investors, we all share the stock market’s return. It’s going to turn out to be 8 percent return, we’re all going to share 8 percent return, but only before costs are deducted. We all share the market’s return less the cost of the financial system. All those management fees and brokerage commissions and sales loads and God knows what else is thrown in there — the advertising that you see. 

The evidence is profound that mutual fund investors make terrible errors in terms of timing. They want to pour money into the stock market when it’s high, and they want to pull it out when the market is low. They make terrible errors on fund selection. They want to buy funds that have done the best, and then when they do the worst they want to switch out of them and get into something else that is then doing the best. All that shuffling around is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing but losses for the investor. 
… Then another place we have really gone awry is we now offer people basically a nice little shotgun by which they can commit suicide: We have given them brokerage accounts, and you can run a brokerage account in your 401(k) plan. So you can then buy individual stocks and go back and forth and do all the insane things that so many investors do all the time. 
So we have taken a system that should be simple — own the stock market and hold it forever; if you like bonds a little more as you get older, have more in bonds, and hold it forever — [and] now it’s pick and choose and select and move money back and forth, even to the point of where you can pick individual stocks and pick your company’s stock, which is a big part of the 401(k) problem, and issue; you can do that, too. It’s a system that really needs to be fixed, and badly. 
This is from an interview over here</a> Bogle also has a blog over here</a>. (Hat tip Jonathan)</a>

SGI files bankruptcy

2006-05-08T15:25:25+00:00

SGI Indigo</a> was the first computer I fell in love with. Playing Flight Simulator on it was plain ecstatic. Looking at the Einstein juggling balls in Indy</a> was fun. When I surfed for the first time on internet, the first site I went to was sgi.com. And today SGI filed for bankruptcy. Commoditization huh.. Would it be another Digital or Wang?? More on this here</a>, here </a>and here</a>.

Using Mediawiki as personal wiki

2006-03-30T09:39:34+00:00

I have been trying to maintain a personal wiki for taking notes for a long time. I have tried almost everything available under the sun. There were few basic but absolutely necessary requirements that I wanted from this wiki

I am the only one i.e. only I would be able to read it and no one else.</li>
Someone else can not start writing to it unless I authorize</li>
Ability to change look and feel</li> </ol>
In search of this kind of wiki I started to look around. The first stop was the software that runs the largest wiki (wikipedia) i.e. mediawiki. I liked it what I saw in version 1.3.x but it didn’t meet my requirements for a personal wiki and was more geared towards the traditional wiki at that time. Bit I liked it and ended up creating a public wiki called sarvagya for Hindi on web. After this I flirted around with BaseCamp, Jot, PmWiki, Microwiki based around wordpress, tiddlywiki, WakkaWiki etc. etc.
None seemed to fit the bill besides I was spoiled by Mediawiki’s other features and a great and active developer community. One of the things that one has to consider while using open source software is that it will be around for a while ( I will confess it is same for the enterprise software which brings bread for me) But I digress. So recently during one of the conversations with a friend he pointed that Mediawiki’s users right management has been improved a lot and now it supports all the features that you want. I checked and found this page called preventing access</a>, here are the few lines of settings in LocalSettings.php that allowed what I wanted
$wgWhitelistRead = array( "Main Page", "Special:Userlogin" ); $wgGroupPermissions['*' ]['createaccount'] = false; $wgGroupPermissions['*' ]['read'] = false; $wgGroupPermissions['*' ]['edit'] = false;</pre>
Third requirement of chaging the look and feel of the wiki is possible but still still a little more involved process and I don’t want to spend more time on this. I would have loved if it would have been similar to creating [I have been trying to maintain a personal wiki for taking notes for a long time. I have tried almost everything available under the sun. There were few basic but absolutely necessary requirements that I wanted from this wiki

I am the only one i.e. only I would be able to read it and no one else.</li>
Someone else can not start writing to it unless I authorize</li>
Ability to change look and feel</li> </ol>
In search of this kind of wiki I started to look around. The first stop was the software that runs the largest wiki (wikipedia) i.e. mediawiki. I liked it what I saw in version 1.3.x but it didn’t meet my requirements for a personal wiki and was more geared towards the traditional wiki at that time. Bit I liked it and ended up creating a public wiki called sarvagya for Hindi on web. After this I flirted around with BaseCamp, Jot, PmWiki, Microwiki based around wordpress, tiddlywiki, WakkaWiki etc. etc.
None seemed to fit the bill besides I was spoiled by Mediawiki’s other features and a great and active developer community. One of the things that one has to consider while using open source software is that it will be around for a while ( I will confess it is same for the enterprise software which brings bread for me) But I digress. So recently during one of the conversations with a friend he pointed that Mediawiki’s users right management has been improved a lot and now it supports all the features that you want. I checked and found this page called preventing access</a>, here are the few lines of settings in LocalSettings.php that allowed what I wanted
$wgWhitelistRead = array( "Main Page", "Special:Userlogin" ); $wgGroupPermissions['*' ]['createaccount'] = false; $wgGroupPermissions['*' ]['read'] = false; $wgGroupPermissions['*' ]['edit'] = false;</pre>
Third requirement of chaging the look and feel of the wiki is possible but still still a little more involved process and I don’t want to spend more time on this. I would have loved if it would have been similar to creating](http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development)
Overall I am just happy to be able to create a small personal wiki using Mediawiki

Answering the wake up call

2006-01-27T09:18:16+00:00

So far I didn’t have a formal resolution for this year. But here I make a formal resolution to writing more about SAP’s technologies, focusing more the Netweaver and ESA side. This wake up call is sponsered by this post</a> from Vinnie Mirchandani and my first post using Performancing </a>blog writer plugin.

The Great Distractor

2006-01-21T12:35:17+00:00

The great distractor that is internet</a> is the subject of this post from Dey Da. He also equates it with the intellectual equivalent of Kubla Khanâ€™s â€œmiracle of rare device, a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice.â€

It is cold in MKE

2005-12-05T22:37:56+00:00

This is the first time I am in this cold a weather. Check the photo I took of the compass in the rental 9 degrees fahrenheit. Last time I was in this cold would have been in Louisville about 14 degrees.

What is FON

2005-11-30T00:01:41+00:00

While driving around riding my new Firefox 1.5, I stumbled across something called FON</a>. Initial words “FON is is wifi revolution” caught my attention I started reading more about it. It is a pretty interesting concept analogous to File-sharing networks. Here instead of sharing your files you are actually sharing your internet bandwidth so that FON members can utilize your bandwidth and surf the net while they are near you and you get the same benefits if you happen to be near a FONer. From there website
FON</a> is an integration of those wanting to contribute to free universal communication and solidarity. We are a usernet growing larger every time we exchange part of our bandwidth for the ability to connect to the bandwidth of other FON members, in every moment from every location in the world.
Pretty interesting. I am sure telecom companies won’t like it. They might even introduce a clause in the service 😀 But if an idea catches up with the masses there is nothing there to prevent it from spreading like virus. So far this is only in Europe let us see when it becomes common in US specially the silicon valley

Conversation at its best

2005-11-14T00:59:27+00:00

Finally internet is opening new avenues to express oneself in true human nature. Read IT in Punjab</a> (Hat Tip – Desipundit</a>)

Engineers run China

2005-11-09T13:00:53+00:00

Came across The 9 Men who run China</a> via Tim Iacono</a>. Amazing, never knew Chinese policies are decided by engineers at the top in Politburo Standing Committee.

Time to do a little Squible

2005-11-08T12:05:15+00:00

I have wanted to move away from Kubrick look which was showing of age. I liked Squible</a> for its different look. It also matches closely with the design I have had in mind.

Grabline aggregator for India news

2005-11-05T14:21:13+00:00

Recently a close friend started an aggregator for India related news with the name Grabline</a>. Well wishes to him. Take a look if you are interesed in reading India related news at one site.

What if Mass Media disappeared one day

2005-11-05T13:47:28+00:00

These days there is lot of talk about mass media and its future in the coming age. There are those in the blog world that pronounce that mass media will be marginalized more and more as we move further along. Then there are those in the mass media like Forbes who dedicate a full issue for attacking the bloggers</a>.
My personal belief is that a lot of stories in the blog world start by referring to something seen/read/heard from the mass media and then the author’s take on it. I am not saying that there is nothing original written in the blog world but rather there is good amount of let’s say filtering from Mass Media that happens. Posts about good stories get published a lot and get a lot of comments. While if the mass media committed a folly, it would be pointed out loud. Most of the blog writers do something else for a living while journalists or professional writers do it for a living so naturally they have more time to research and are generally better articulate in putting their thoughts on paper. Coming back to what is mass media disappeared one day – it would be a very dull day for bloggers. So much that we might even see a drop in internet bandwidth usage that day 😀

Golden rules of consulting

2005-11-04T20:53:50+00:00

When I started Beta Thoughts</a> one of the very first categories I had created was consulting</a>. Idea was to share some of the thoughts, best practices etc. that I have gained over the years. During the last few years I have been to many places</a>, got to be part of exciting teams, different work environments etc. One thing that has remained constant is two golden rules that were told to me by Michael Chio, an excellent consultant on my very first consulting gig in Bay Area</a>. I have lost touch with him over the years but I still remember his golden advice. Here they are
Never Say No – Never say a out right no to what is asked from you. Besides isnâ€™t it true that given enough time and effort most of things can be done. Even in cases where you know that this task cannot be done, ask more questions to about the task, get more clarifications of the variables of the problem being asked. It may be the case that you haven’t understood the problem. If still you think the answer is no give enough simple and clear reasons why the task can not be done.
Do not panic – this might be written on the front page of Hitch Hiker’s guide to galaxy but it is also true in consulting world. You might have blown away the last week’s effort but do not I repeat do not panic. Your panic situation will send an exponentially higher signal to the client. There is nothing worse than a consultant panicking in front of a client. Analyze the reasons it happened and what you need to do to resolve this.
I have added a third rule to this
Communicate – Humans like to talk. It is very important that you are talking about your progress with your client. You might be doing a yeoman’s job but without communication it might not be as worthful. It doesn’t help to just sit there and do your job one needs to talk to peers and higher ups.

Yahoo releases Flash based maps

2005-11-03T18:11:53+00:00

Long time readers of Beta Thoughts would know my love for Maps. May be this comes from the time I spent in creating GIS for Chandigarh while still at college</a>. I was so happy when Google released its map offering with cool AJAX features. I even did a little screencast</a> using Wink</a>.
Today Yahoo released the Beta version of its maps application based on flash and I love it. Yahoo maps API is so easy that it takes less than few minutes to comeup with your stuff. Based up on their Javascript API I created a flash based map of the center of desi land i.e. Lawrence and El Camino cross section with a overlay of “Indian Food” You can see my favorite grocery shop in the map along with 10 other points.
So far it is only US based (I can see smoke coming out of Niks</a> ears) Hopefully they will cover the rest of world along with a little island somewhere in Asia-Pacific.

Hummer and American Economy

2005-11-03T16:28:18+00:00

Tim talks about the growing inventory of Hummers</a> at the local dealer in sunny and beautiful San Diego(the epicenter of Housing Bubble). He even clicked few photographs from the so called undisclosed location
What I liked about the post was that it shows the power of blogging or an excellent piece of citizen journalism</a> as Dan Gilmore of BayOSphere</a> calls it. Tim ends the post with a thoughtful metaphor

The reason that the story of rapidly rising Hummer inventory is so interesting and so amusing, is that America’s most ostentatious Sport Utility Vehicle, ** the Hummer SUV, is a metaphor for America** in the world today – overweight, overpriced, inefficient, and unloved. </blockquote>

Gmail Conversations love them

2005-11-01T13:50:55+00:00

One of the prime reasons I moved from yahoo mail to gmail was the conversations feature provided by Gmail. You can see this feature in all glory in the following image. What it shows is the response to my Happy Diwali email I sent to few of my friends
In the non-conversation world I might have ended with that many emails and it would have been so not-cool to manage them. Here on Gmail I have them tied in a nice bundle.
Technorati Tags: gmail</a>, diwali</a>

from darkness to light Happy Diwali 2005

2005-11-01T00:31:09+00:00

Â 
May the festival of lights bring light of joy and prosperity to every day of your life…
Â 
Â to every one.

Ownership in Indian Economy

2005-10-30T10:09:35+00:00

Atanu Dey, the same guy who wrote “Stuff Matters</a>” has another excellent post</a> on the importance of accountability or ownership for a prospering economy. Excerpt from the post –

The market is slowly coming into being in India. The law is flawed. We need to get the â€œfâ€ and the â€œedâ€ out of â€œflawedâ€ to get some good law. What that means is we need to get the courts to move. Many trades donâ€™t occur because contracts cannot be enforced by a court system which has a reported backlog of about 300-odd years. Finally, we need to make people owners so that they can properly care for their charge and this they will do only if they have an incentive to perform their duty, which they will do if credible commitments can be made about public flogging. </blockquote>
I was amused when he recommended public flogging as the way to mend public officials. I am sure it was not his intent but a by-product of the sense of humor I am sure he picked from the sunny-sunny California.Â 

Akismet

2005-10-25T21:27:58+00:00

So finally we know what Matt has been up to</a>. Just installed Akismet</a> on Beta Thoughts. I have deactivated Spam Karma for now. Let us see how effective Akismet is. One thing I fail to understand is the distribution mechanism of API keys. Does that mean that every one should have a weblog on wordpress.com as well as one’s personal weblog?? Hopefully the doubt will be clear in few days.
The name Akismet is interesting as kismet is urdu/persian word for fate. Â 

Pricing

2005-10-22T23:53:39+00:00

One of the blogs I often read is Brad deLong’s Semi Daily journal. You can always find good discussions on various economic trends and news from Brad’s prespective on this site. In one of the stories</a> he linked</a>, it had the following line from original author

The Holy Grail in economics is that price should equal marginal cost </blockquote>
I ended up spending more time in thinking about this line than I should have. Obviously my first attempt was to think about software pricing where this would fail miserably. The cost of producing next unit of software is practically nil. Infact this is true for any thing which can be made digital. This is the reason MPAA and RIAA are fretting over this so much for the music and movie copying.
Pricing is a very interesting topic. First instance of this would have been during the bartering system in the early stages of civilization. Initial pricing techniques must have been very simple. Some thing on the lines it costed me this much in producing 100 kilogram of onions. With this much as markup I should price this item this amount. Ofcourse the compitition should be kept in mind over here.
This simple concept must have taken drastic turn with the introduction of branding. I am not sure when the pricing technique of how much the customer would be willing to pay for this product/service would have come into practice. I guess it has been there since early ages Here are few pricing scenarios

Stock valuation – the most crazy and weird thing in the world to price. Is Google really worth what it is now upwards of $300?</li>
Software Licenses – This is again a art.</li>
Price difference between the similar quality branded and non-branded stuff. For example a simple white shirt stiched by a taylor in Bangladesh with GAP logo and without the logo</li>
Health Care costs in US</li> </ol>

Flock is out

2005-10-21T09:05:55+00:00

For the past few weeks/month Silicon Valley has been abuzz with the talks about Flock – a browser based on Firefox with lot of stuff added to make life easier. Before going further I would like to remind the readers a phrase</a> coined by Om of GigaOm</a>
“Silicon Valley is a hot house where everyone smokes the same crappy weed and participates in a constant feedback loop.”
So with that grain of salt let me say that I was happy when read </a>it on Matt’s wordpress.com</a> site that Flock it out. First thing I did after downloading was to post to my Hindi weblog as this is something I have been looking for. None of the free blogging clients offer a good support for unicoded Devnagari. I was a happy puppy when flock recognized the name of my weblog correctly. Â You can see my shiny little hindi post from weblog at Haanbhai</a> Incidently this might be the first unicoded post from flock. Needless to say this post is also from flock. I like the ability to put technorati tags from interface itself. Will keep using Flock and let us see how it helps making my online life easier. Kudos to Flock team.
Update: This is from WP interface. I had some formatting challenges from the Flock interface so making the changes from WP interface. Plus how do one posts to a particular category from Flock.Â 
Technorati Tags: flock</a>, hindi</a>

Culture of participation

2005-10-18T19:11:36+00:00

Om Malik reflecting</a> on Nicholas Carr’s Amorality of Web 2.0</a> writes about the culture of participation which is the center of so called web 2.0 – Â 
Â 

if this culture of participation was seemingly help build businesses on our collective backs. So if we tag, bookmark or share, and help del.icio.us or Technorati or Yahoo become better commercial entities, arenâ€™t we seemingly commoditizing our most valuable asset – time. We become the outsourced workforce, the collective, though it is still unclear what is the pay-off. While we may (or may not) gain something from the collective efforts, the odds are whatever â€œthe collective effortsâ€ are, they are going to boost the economic value of those entities. Will they share in their upside? Not likely! </blockquote>
Coming to Om’s point of being the outsourced workforce – there has to be something for this to work. So far del.icio.us, technorati have been hugely successful. Any successful transaction involves give and take. If I create a link pointing to AJAX, there are thousands other links created by the community in the same area for me to see. Naturally I got the benefit of that collective work. So yes 1 Person vs. del.icio.us is definitely in favor of the site but n Persons vs. del.icio.us definitely tilts the scale towards an individual.
Â 
I have often wondered about this in regards to Akshargram</a> – the online hindi bloggers community website I have the honor to host. It is sort of a virtual meeting place where hindi blogger’s ruminate on various things like geeks talk about technology on Slashdot, Culture of participation thouhts of Om are true about akshargram too. Without the community akshargram would have died a silent death. So if participants spend time inÂ writing posts to Akshargram, do they lose or gain any thing. In my opinion I think it works both ways.

Reason I still love living in Bayarea

2005-10-15T15:11:24+00:00

One of the reason for moving from Louisville KY to bayarea was the startup activity that happens in the valley. It is too much fun being surrounded by geeks 😀 Andreeson whose Netscape started the IPO fever is telling on the same lines</a>

There’s a critical mass of investors — way more than anywhere else, which does matter. [There are] sales people, executives, accountants, lawyers, bankers, and you’re in the flow of what’s actually going on. [Being in tech and not being in Silicon Valley] is like trying to be in the movie business not in LA or trying to be in national politics and not be in D.C. You just don’t know what’s going on half the time. You get outside the valley and you’re not aware of next six startups that just got funded. That actually matters. </blockquote>
Ofcourse now that I am here there are other reasons like great food choices for Indian Cuisine, lots of buddies from PEC</a> – the school I went to in Chandigarh</a>, Naz8</a> and so on.
</blockquote>

Very cool title for a blog

2005-10-11T21:21:47+00:00

Impedance mismatch over HTTP</a>
Coming from EE background and working with web-apps this title holds a special place for me.Â 

I finally get what is Beta

2005-10-10T22:01:21+00:00

Nope the Beta I am talking about is not the Beta from Beta Thoughts but the Beta of financial markets. Few years or may be months back, see in the first few years of marriage time doesn’t matter 😀 but I am digressing. So few months back a longtime friend</a> started discussing in his inimitable style yaar</a>, what is this beta my collegues keep talking about.Â I didn’t knew a iota about this beta.
Then I started reading A Random Walk down Wall Street</a> in July when I quoted the author about Madness of the Crowds</a>. Books like Random Walk take its own sweet time to get digested. I was only able to finish five chapters in the first go. I picked it again in this month of Oktoberfest while flying for work. I finally saw the light and now I know what is Beta. From the book

Beta is the numerical description of systematic risk. Despite the mathematical manipulations involved, the basic idea behind the beta measurement is one of putting some precise numbers on the subjective feelings money managers have had for years
…
The calculation begin by assigning a beta of 1 to a broad market index, such as NYSE index or the S&P 500. If a stock has a beta of 2, then on average it swings twice as far as the market. If the market rises by 10 percent, the stock rises by 20 percent. If a stock has a beta of 0.5, it tends to be more stable than the market (it will go up or down 5 percent when the market rises or declines by 10 percent). </blockquote>
Isn’t it easy.
Â 

The coming of composites

2005-10-10T20:36:44+00:00

Enterprise software has been of great interest to me since the college days. Sadgopan</a> who heads eBusiness and Consulting for Satyam</a> has written an excellent article on evolution of enterprise software and the direction it is going to take in future. He is musing

With globalization and a flat world increasingly beginning to force enterprises to become more competitive the business climate began to slowly change – the new rule of the game demanded agility as the key driver for success in general – the game changed and began to favor the fast moving against the slower one and big size did not necessarily confer advantages on business entities by default. </blockquote>
Do read it over here at sandhill.com</a>. He concludes that the enterprise software is moving towards composite applications made from mash-up of existing apps. My own take on the software evolution can be summarized in very few words –

First there were custom apps,
Then came COTS^{[1]

Now is the age of the composite applications
</blockquote>}
What is more motivating in the story is validation of SAP’s Netweaver Intiative. Being a Netweaver professional it makes me smile. Quoting Sadgopan

SAP is said to be devoting as much as a third of its overall R&D efforts towards building composites & its roadmap promises to provide its customers with the ability to create new business processes on the fly & avoid any rebuilds </blockquote>
[1] Commercial Off The Shelf

See the big picture at News dot com

2005-10-04T21:09:54+00:00

Read over at Silicon Beat</a> about the new Big Picture feature of New.com. It tells you about the related stories, companies and concepts related to the present story. Immediately went and checked this story</a>. See what the big picture is.

Isn’t it interesting how SAP has Micorsoft, Oracle in its vicinity.

indiOne hotels by Tata Group

2005-09-20T23:24:41+00:00

A nice hotel is a must for any business traveller. A good night at a decent hotel can do good for the business. As a SAP professional constantly on the road, I can associate with this. Just read over at Rajesh Jain’s Emergic </a>about the new hotels from Tata group called indiOne</a>. Rajesh has good things to say about this hotel. From the looks they look pretty decent. Have a dekho yourself
<img width="162" height="157" src="http://www.indione.com/images/new_IO_SSR2.jpg" /><img width="162" height="157" src="http://www.indione.com/images/new_IO_SSR3.jpg" /> </code></pre> Nice fact about the hotel is that first the price of the rooms was fixed and then the infrastructure was built backwards from there or as Rajesh puts it “bottom-up innovation”. For 1000 bucks a night this is great deal.Considering SAP India is in the walking distance from there I might just land up there some day. If you are going to SAP TechEd ’05 Bangalore</a>, this might be the place to spend your nights.
Placeopedia the fun never ends 2005-09-19T15:11:00+00:00 Â Just got to know about Placeopedia</a>, a simple site to connect Wikipedia articles about places like Ambala</a>, Chandigarh </a>to their geographical position on google maps. No points for guessing which places I have pin pointed 😀 Ambala </a> Chandigarh</a> Punjab Engineering College</a> Please switch to Hybrid view once you are there. While in Ambala – try to find the air force strip, and in Chandigarh you can see the lovely Sukhna Lake. Too many fond memories associated with it. Here is a pic for your eyes Â Create you places. Let us tag this round planet 😀 5 Things 2005-09-15T12:18:17+00:00 In a personal email thread on Gmail the geeks from CELPEC</a> decided to mull over 5 things </blockquote> What 5 things in the last ten years have really made you jump out of your proverbial bath tub and run through the streets all excited?</li> Corollary to (1), What 5 things have really been very useful for you in the last ten years? </li> What 5 things you see as absolutely neurotic, or useless in the last ten years which have come about and are just not dying out!</li> What 2-3 ( or more if your heart so desires ) things or innovations would really make a difference to your life?</li> </ol> Being a online community guy I decided to give it a shot on Beta Thoughts :D. So here it goes Jump out of proverbial bath tub Wifi – from the day I started using this, I am in love with this. Now a days I even stream video from my desktop to TV with a notebook on wifi connecting to desktop</li> P2P – This is just amazing. Have you ever looked at the Detailed view in Azureus</li> Google Earth – While it did make me jump when Guru demoed it to me while it was still keyhole. I used it a lot for doing my apartment search</a>. But now that the novelty has worn off. I am back to Google Maps</a>, if only they would implement A9’s proximity images in it</li> DVD Backup – How easy it is these days to do it and once the DVD is in on the harddisk opportunities to modify the content are endless.</li> Modern Telecom – just the fact that I can talk, video conference, voip with any one with relatively ease still makes me jump from that damn tub. I talk over cell phone, AD conversion, communication with cell tower, base station, may be sattelite, may be fiber under see, voice reaches India, Ambala exchange, my home. All this in before I can count to 10 I mean wow.</li> </ul> Really Useful All the above except Google Earth which is useful sometimes.</li> Cell phone is mighty useful</li> Gmail Conversations.</li> </ol> Neurotic and Useless Didn’t knew about 5 blade Gillette. But would be absolutely useless</li> Telemarketing on Cell phones. God save me from them</li> Healthcare as a bottomline caring business</li> Apple’s stubborn persistence on single button mouse. But it has changed with Might Mouse</a></li> </ul> What would make difference to my life Netflix or someone going true video on demand</li> Fiber to my home with at least 1 GBps</li> Cheaper Hybrid SUVs with 50 miles/gallon efficiency. Toyota Highlander is a step in that direction</li> Better cheaper dental floss devices</li> 4GHz Dual CPU 8GB RAM 1 Terrabit HDD System under $500 I will use the home 62″ plasma for the display so don’t care about the monitor 😀</li> </ul> Et Tu Plumtree and end of pure play portal vendors 2005-09-05T21:56:39+00:00 In the rosy days of late nineties there were three pure portal play companies. Plumtree, Epicentric and Toptier. Then sometime in late 2000 SAP decided to complement there technology platform with a portal offering. They acquired Toptier</a> for whopping $400 millions and married it with their existing portal product called workplace. This was a great buy for SAP as the acquired product has now morphed in the very mature people layer of SAP’s Netweaver</a> platform. Then somewhere in 2002 came Epicentric’s turn and it got acquired by Vignette for $32 millions</a>. Vignette complemented their content development platform with the content delivery platform via Epicentric. Today I read the news of Plumtree’s acquisition by BEA</a> via Phil Wainewright’s excellent Loosely Coupled blog</a>. It is sad in the sense that there is no major Pure Play Portal vendor left in the field But does that mean being pure portal vendor is not viable in today’s economic scenarios. You got to be an applications vendor and club portal as delivery platform. SAP has a whole slew of applications to be delivered via portal i.e. CRM, BW, HCM, SCM, and SRM etc. Vignette has while not a business application vendor has the content management system up its sleeve. </blockquote> This gives rise to the question what application does BEA has? But again BEA has been a pure technology platform vendor. What perplexed me as rightly pointed by Phil in LCBlog was the decision to keep BEA’s existing portal separate from Plumtree stack. “We now have leadership in both transactional and collaboration portals” Chuang said. Both Chuang and Carges stressed that BEA will maintain separate portal offerings. “We will have two separate portal product lines for as long as we can see,” Carges said. Keeping both the products separate would mean more pain for the customers in maintaining and operating two separate stacks. It would be interesting to see how long both of the stacks remain separate from each and how they evolve. Last a disclaimer I have been a SAP Portals consultant for the last four years and naturally I have a strond bias towards SAP Portal which I consider the best positioned platform sitting at the top in SAP’s Netweaver Platform’s People layer. Also it would have been more interesting if Oracle had bought Plumtree 😀 Good old treeware books vs Audio Books 2005-09-05T21:28:25+00:00 I have always wondered about the idea of Audio Books. I mean one grows up hearing the old adage the books are once best friends and such things. I never had a chance to try any audio book until now. See when you have to do an hour long commute on Highway 101 between San Jose and San Francisco you tend to find better use of that time. Besides many in the valley term the folks doing this kind of thing as having suicidal tendencies 😀 Any way to better utilize the time I got myself this very famous book “Good to Great”</a>. There is no question that the book is great (a review will follow some time later) After listening to 2 out of 5 CDs I have made few theories about the audio books I miss the capability to easily read and re-read the passages I like.</li> How do I highlight the stuff I really like.</li> How about doing a very quick revision of what I have read so far</li> The impact of written word is totally missing. This may have to do with the our mind showing more love for the visual input.</li> </ol> Based on the above facts I think if you are a bibliophile AudioCDs are great for story telling books i.e. stories, novels etc but for the serious non fiction work good ol’ treeware books still rule. Do you have similar experiences? It will be interesting to know.. Â The States I have been to in United States 2005-08-02T14:05:55+00:00 Create Your Own</a> The Corporation 2005-08-01T21:03:41+00:00 I am watching a documentary â€œThe Corporation</a>” talking about obviously modern day companies. The chief idea being, how corporations are treated legally as a person and how it is a bad idea. First it was interesting to know that the 14th amendment to the US Constitution</a> which made to ensure equal protection to all persons of life regardless of race is used by corporations to protect their rights as legally they are also person. Quoting Chomsky “These are special kind of persons which are designed by law to be concerned only for their stock holders and not, say what are stake holders like the community or the workforce” </blockquote> Also of interest was what would be in ideal corporation and one of the definitions given was The Eagle, soaring clear eyed competitive prepared to strike but not vulture, noble, visionary, majestic that people can believe in and be inspired by that creates a lift that it soars. </blockquote> Ambala thru The Great Eye 2005-07-10T16:44:16+00:00 What a joy it is to see one’s home town as a satellite image. I am sure every blogger worth his salt knows about the Google Earth</a>. Initially it was cool to see Bay Area and see all the locations etc. It also helped me in finding my next apartment. One can see the neighbor hood etc using this. Then Ashish wrote in an email that he was able to get the long/lats for his home in Delhi using it. That got me interested that Ambala not as large as Delhi still be visible. And here is the shot of Ambala. I can find out GT Road, Ambala Chandigarh Highway, Indian Air Force Station and the air strips inside it etc. My immediate reaction was to kind of draw on top of this image with the names of different roads etc. Too bad that functionality is only available in Google Earth Plus. This functionality would allow easy creation of online maps. I had discussed this with Vishal some time back. It would very cool to have “detailed” street lever online maps of India. May be this will become reality in near future. The Madness of CROWDS 2005-07-03T14:33:18+00:00 I have started reading “A Random Walk Down Wall Street”</a> over this July 4 long weekend after reading about it on Joel On Software</a> book reviews. Very enjoyable read. My personal experience has been with the dot-gone bubble of late 90s and may be the present bubble or froth as quoted by Alan Greenspan in the real estate markets. Some of the excerpts from the chapter “Madness of Crowds” are so relevant that I am surprised we never seem to learn from old mistakes. Consider this when Burton G. Malkiel talks about the tulip craze and the call-options which happened in Holland in 1630s “Part of the genius of financial markets is that when there is a real demand for a method to enhance speculative opportunities, the market will surely provide it” </blockquote> Isn’t what markets did when every mom-and-pop dot.com company went IPO in the 90s or the interest only loans and adjustable ARMs of today. I am equally amazed at reading the story British South Sea Company and the South Sea Bubble. Can’t imagine its share between 1717-1722 went from 100 pounds to 1000 pounds and then back to nothing. Or how about the RCA shares back in America rose from $94.25 to $505 from March 3, 1928 to September 3, 1929; a cool 434.5% growth in 18 months. I think this beats the growth of modern day darling Google. That too when we are in correction mode after the 90s. This last paragraph of the chapter is what is most intriguing to me. I have read something to the same effect in quite a few articles. But it still beats me how this can be so simple. The business of making more money from existing money or investing It is not hard, really, to make money in the market. As we shall see later, investors who select a portfolio of stock listings in the Wall Street Journal can make fairly handsome long-run returns. What is hard to avoid is the alluring temptation to throw your money away on short, get-rich-quick speculative binges. </blockquote> Notice the “really”. Do you think so. Make No Little Plans 2005-06-26T23:03:39+00:00 Rajesh Jain of Emergic</a> has been writing very thoughtful letters to his newly born and sharing his values in life. This post</a> quite touched somewhere. Here is an excerpt This quote (via Atanu) by Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect, sums up what I think should be your philosophy for life. â€œMake no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.” When you are ready to make your mark in the world, keep these words in mind. Too often, we are happy with the mundane, the ordinary. All around, we see mediocrity. People are happy being good. Good is the enemy of Great. We get into a groove, a comfort zone, and stay there. Donâ€™t. We live only once. Dream big. We are where we are today only because a few in our past dared to think different and envision a world that could be. </blockquote> Nirantar WordPress Special 2005-06-01T19:30:16+00:00 As I said in my earlier post</a> the WordPress special issue of our Hindi blogzine Nirantar </a>is online. Thanks to everyone who contributed. Besides the hardwork of its editors this issue also highlights the spirit of WordPress community. Thanks to Matt</a>, Khaled</a>, Carthik</a> and Mark </a>for their contributions. So if you can read Hindi head over to Nirantar</a>. Here are links to their contributions Matt’s interview </a> Khaled’s article on development of Manji</a> Conversation between Carthik and Mark fictitiously at Las Vegas</a> Nirantar June Issue WordPress special 2005-05-20T14:11:37+00:00 I am part of the team that manages an online monthly Hindi Blogzine called Nirantar</a>. The team is quite geographically dispersed through out the globe joined by the common thread of love for Hindi. Every one has their personal weblogs in Hindi and also contributes to various other initiatives</a>. We launched the magazine in March 2005. For the past two months everyone has been working very hard on the June issue which is going to be WordPress special. Stay tuned to read some great articles on WordPress. Finding an apartment and looking for opinions 2005-05-15T20:27:05+00:00 I have been living in the bay area</a> for the past five years. I must have moved into quite a few apartments. Every time I start hunting for a new apartment I use different websites for finding an apartment. One of the website I often use to find ratings of an apartment community is aptratings.com</a>. Finding an objective review from reviewers is a very tough task. Most of the time you would find that people don’t like any things. Management sucks at each and every community. Then there is the problem of management folks at these apartment communities posing as reviewers and writing positive reviews. Still there are few things one can keep in mind to gather some intelligence about the future home Look for reviewers talking about noise problems from nearby highways. Then try to avoid those units. </li> Parking problems. Guest parking etc. </li> Cable/DSL/TV issues </li> </ol> Time Division Multiplexing Gals 2005-04-04T00:01:54+00:00 The last thing you want to say about the girl you have been thinking seriously- Man, she is doing time-divison-multiplexing with me </blockquote> Funny narrative of something that happens at global level to male species. Go read Amit’s ” Neha Network Systems”.</a> India Development Atanu Dey of Deeshaa 2005-03-27T12:20:51+00:00 Atanu’s post over at Deeshaa about India Development are always very pertinent. In his latest post on _leapfrogging_India into a developed nation and his related posts elsewhere on Deeshaa he brings up excellent points. Gist of it is that you don’t go from an agricultural econmoy to services economy, you have to go thru the industrial/manufacturing stage. And for a large economies like India most of the stuff/products should be consumed domestically. It is the last point that got me interested in these posts by Atanu. I was still in college so it must be at least 7-8 years old news. A couple of professors from Berkeley or Stanford were visiting Banglore and they echoed the same things that for Banglore to be the Real Silicon Valley most of the services generated by it should be consumed in the domestic market. Any way here are the links to Atanu’s posts *Sequencing — Part 2</a> or leapfrogging </blockquote> *The Development Path of Economies</a> </blockquote> *Agriculture and Development</a> </blockquote> Bubble has it been Five year already 2005-03-10T08:00:08+00:00 Busting of bubble</a> is the theme of blog-a-than being run by Om Malik. This post is related to that. Here I would share my thoughts with blurbs from already published articles of this series. Make sure to read all the articles published in this series over here</a>. Has it already been five years? Doesnâ€™t feel like it. Seriously. In retrospective when I think, my first hint of the bubble should have been when I had put my resume as a Java Developer on dice.com (it might still be there) I was living a serene life in Louisville KY, and then being a geek, I felt the pull of Silicon Valley during those days. I should have posted my resume around mid-night EST. I got few replies immediately. But craziness happened the next day. My cell phone wonâ€™t stop ringing. My home answering machine was full with messages. There were folks who would send the job offer papers right away in the reply mail. I was amazed. So many people wanted to hire me. Here is another funny bit, my analysis of prospective employers was based on guess what, companyâ€™s press releases and reading analysts. I didnâ€™t knew Paul Kedroskyâ€™s views</a> then While it was nowhere near as bad as it would eventually get in the late days of the tech boom, it was already obvious that technology equity analysts were becoming overpaid PR flacks. Our job was to dress up press releases in ornate prose chock-full of financial ratios and jargon and then parade them around. The ugly truth, however, was that we were pimps for investment banking business: Declining commissions and rapidly-rising technology stocks had conspired to turn us all into technology sluts. </blockquote> I finally arrived in Silicon Valley, all dreamy eyed. I was immediately hooked to CNet Radio. What a gem it was. You would get all the news while stuck in traffic jam on I-880. Both sides of 101 were totally crammed with billboards of all these companies. I would often think of them as, man I could have started that. Andy Kesslerâ€™s reasoning</a> for so many billboards is quite right The only thing slowing the growth of Momo funds was the lack of names. You could only put away so much Dell or Cisco until you owned the whole damn company â€“ so Momos turned to Wall Street and begged for new names. Wall Street didnâ€™t have to be asked twice â€“ and took public via IPO anything that wasnâ€™t nailed down â€“ and nothing having to do with the Internet was nailed down, no matter how stupid. </blockquote> I was part of the generation who got swanky jobs even in their early twenties. What was there to hate about it. But then shit happened. Luckily for me it just meant switching few employers. The money I lost is not even worth whispering. Now after five years I have these stories of wild parties, kids buying luxury cars and a bubble I was part of. Before concluding a lesson to learn, mastered first by Om Malik the biggest lesson which I learnt was that when VC firms hire a journalist to help them with investments, its a sure and perhaps the final sign of a market top, a bubble that is about to pop. </blockquote> An open letter to Lord PEC of pecobians dot com 2005-02-25T20:18:53+00:00 Recently few good folks from PEC</a>, my college started an online forum at pecobians.com.</a> I wanted to provide some feedback on this. When I started to write the feedback, I was thinking of sending it as a personal email to Lord PEC the admin of pecobians.com</a>, but then I thought it would be a good idea to just put it over here and see what every one says. And maybe someone unrelated to PEC might find it useful. So here it is ———– Dear Lord PEC I have been meaning to write this email for a while. Now that it is weekend over here I can write it. First of all kudos for the great work done on pecobians.com. It is a noble effort and I have a lot of appreciation for the folks involved in this project. You might have noticed some noise over here http://www.pnarula.com/archives/2005/02/12/some-news-about-the-alma/</a> You will be surprised to know how I came to know about pecobians.com. I have been toying with the idea of online community for PEC folks for a while. So I tossed an idea to Rahul Jindal aka Zombielabs </a>and in reply he told me about pecobians.com. Here is some text from that email ==START EMAIL SNIP== Now to the PEC project. What I am thinking is to club togather a bunch of folks from PEC who have net access and ask them to blog about Day-to-day-PEC. Idea came to me when I saw UCSD’s independent student’s blog at http://youcsd.com</a> Check this blog and you would know what I am talking about. The only trouble is that they are in constant tussle with authorities, But then that is the fun. So what I ask from you is, that since you are my only contact in CHD, even you are leaving now can we do something like this. Since CONTENT will be created by students only so their involvement is must. For a start it can be started by from $free$ blogspot. If a some good content is being produced by students and good hits are there. I can move it to its own domain and web space. What say trooper.. == END EMAIL SNIP== Having started with the online forums is a great start. This is like we have gathered a lot of people in a room and they are chatting with each other. I call forums the community piece of online web presence puzzle. Read here for more on this http://www.pnarula.com/archives/2004/05/10/ccc/</a> Having established a vibrant community I think this would be good time to add another piece to it, some formal content in weblog manner. I guess on the same lines as I mentioned in the email for youcsd.com site. I have been doing similar things for a different community, you can see some of the work I have been involved at Sarvagya</a> – A wiki to capture knowledge about Hindi weblogs. Uses MediaWiki</a> Nirantar </a>– Soon to be launched online magazine focused on Hindi blogging world. Uses CivicSpace</a> Akshargram</a> – A group weblog for Hindi bloggers – Uses WordPress</a> IMHO, take a look at CivicSpace. It has great features and is based on Drupal CMS. I chose it for one of my projects(Nirantar) after quite some research. And I see a lot of uses of its features in the Pecobians.com online community. You can see what is possible using this at the following URLs Better Donkey</a> There is no Crisis</a> Flat Earth Award</a> Spread Firefox</a> Better Donkey is my personal favorite. Let me know if you need any help or ideas related to this. — Pankaj Narula http://pnarula.com http://hindi.pnarula.com/haanbhai Something to watch for SAP and Linux 2005-02-15T01:14:39+00:00 I was smitten by Linux very early in my tech life. I still remember how long it took to configure X Windows on a CEL</a> machine in the summer of 95. SAP also has a special initiative for linux</a> It pleased me to read about German Railways migration to linux over here</a>. What got me more interested was this snippet The company has already shifted its vital train timetabling system from HP Non-Stop to Linux. Next, it will move various SAP systems, including sales support, from Unix to Linux. And by the end of the year, all remaining critical systems such as databases, application servers, Web servers, mail servers and network infrastructure will be running on Linux, the company said. </blockquote> Definitely some thing to watch for. Someday I want to do a detailed ROI analysis of SAP on Linux. Some news about the alma 2005-02-12T01:50:22+00:00 Rahul</a> told me about this new hangout place for Pecobians</a> at pecobians.com. I have always wanted some place like this and it was a great find. Immediately registered and posted the first post. While surfing on this site, I also came across this video file</a> showing a news item related to PEC on Star News. It was fun to watch and see old professors, present students on the screen. The news was quite special to me as I was also the part of placement cell as a representative of my class. Read Hindi Version Here</a> . Google Maps 2005-02-08T21:18:31+00:00 In one of my lives, while I was still in college</a>, I did a lot of work on GIS (ArcGIS</a> and MapInfo</a>) or geographical information systems. As a group we digitized the Chandigarh and applied a lot of GIS techniques for Income Tax department, one of the local elections etc. When I came to US in 1999 it amazed me to see the Yahoo Maps</a> and Mapquest</a> etc. But these maps were essentially static. Today I saw the newest kid in the maps and directions world – Google</a>. My initial reaction was GOOD! Using the stateless HTTP they have made interactive maps. I was impressed to the point that I created a little flash movie of Google Maps testing. Here is what I tried on it Find an address near San Jose Airport </li> Zoom out to see more of silicon valley. </li> Pan to move around in the valley. </li> Finally go back to the point where I started. </li> </ol> [FLASH] http://pnarula.com/media/video/google-maps.swf ,464, 358 [/FLASH] Feed computers were all outside the body 2005-01-22T14:24:40+00:00 I first read about “Feed by MT Anderson”</a> at FutureSalon</a>. I found it interesting and brought the book home. I didn’t read it for quite some time. But yesterday while at work in an elevator it came to my mind that it would be quite possible to get rid of keyboard and monitor. I mean come to think of it these are just one of the input and output mediums we use to interact with our intelligent machines 😀 The idea is not novel at all. Since I knew it is also the theme of Feed. This renewed interest in this idea led me to reading this little fiction for young adults. Feed is about the few teens in future. They have some sort of chip implanted in their brains which keeps feeding them all this information about where ever they look. It was marketed as a great tool for the kids as they will have access to all information via the feed. I haven’t read the complete book. I liked it so much that I recorded one of the paragraphs where Titus, one of the teens after having lost feed in a hacking incident, is thinking about the past when people didn’t didn’t had feeds. Listen to it Feed from the Feed</a> </blockquote> Slaves of numbers 2005-01-17T17:25:22+00:00 Nilesh</a>, our resident bekaar bheja aka idle mind was on a trip to Silicon Valley as a part of his MBA at Johnson</a>. They call it networking :D. I took him to the Santa Clara City Library</a> and he suggested “Against the Gods</a>” as a good reading. I am glad he did that. It is a lucid tale of Risk. I will write about it detail in another post. The following paragraph intrigued me so I am posting it over here. Our lives teem with numbers, but we sometimes forget that numbers are only tools. They have no soul; they may indeed become fetishes. Many of our most critical decisions are made by computers, contraptions that devour like voracious monsters and insist on being nourished with ever-greater quantities of digits to crunch, digest and spew back. </blockquote> SAP on Slashdot 2005-01-03T20:37:48+00:00 If something makes a news on Slashdot it has to belong to the kingdom of day-to-day geeks. Typically SAP professionals start getting the news about cool technologies brewing inside the tech giant thru various niche magazines and lately SDN</a>. I was excited to read Dagfinn Parnas</a>‘s article SAP Virtual Machine Container (as seen on TechEd)</a>. But this article</a> on slashdot just makes my day… Writing an article about “A Java Server That Never Goes Down</a>” is pure hubris, but a German developer who says he’s been “eating, sleeping, and drinking Java” for 8 years doesn’t seem to care and his article brings to light the aspects of VM we rarely think of as he introduces “user isolation” and tells about some interesting work SAP in Germany is doing in that area, merging the Java and the ABAP worlds.” </blockquote> Indibloggies 2004 2004-12-30T21:49:37+00:00 Om Malik of GigaOm</a> fame often says</a> “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</a> 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/</a> Prof</strike> Sadagopanâ€™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 </strike> he could use a little bigger font on his blog 😀 Another technology blog I would like to nominate is Gigaom</a> 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</a> by Sushubh</a>. Donâ€™t take his younger age for his naivetÃ© 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</a> Dristikona â€“ 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</a> Nitin Paiâ€™s The Acorn â€“ 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</a> â€“ 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. [ Om Malik of GigaOm</a> fame often says</a> “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</a> 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/</a> Prof</strike> Sadagopanâ€™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 </strike> he could use a little bigger font on his blog 😀 Another technology blog I would like to nominate is Gigaom</a> 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</a> by Sushubh</a>. Donâ€™t take his younger age for his naivetÃ© 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</a> Dristikona â€“ 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</a> Nitin Paiâ€™s The Acorn â€“ 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</a> â€“ 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. ](http://rojnamcha.blogspot.com) â€“ 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 </a>â€“ 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 â€“ Fursatiya </a>â€“ Anup Shuklaâ€™s blog from Kanpur is another one of its kind new addition to Hindi world. His terse commentary on Indiaâ€™s culture</a> and its unique idiosyncrasies</a> is a must read. He also takes his shots</a> on the hindi bloggers and is a joyful addition to hindi blogger cabal. LAST CALL for nominations to Indibloggies 2004 2004-12-28T22:40:30+00:00 Alright just 2 days left to send in your nominations for this Indibloggies 2004. </a> I will be submitting my nominations for the following categories. # IndiBlog of the year # Best Technology IndiBlog # Best Indic Blog # Best Humanities(Art, Society, Politicsetc) IndiBlog # Best Indic (Indian Languages other than Engilish) Blog Send yours at pankajnarula at gmail dot com Tsunami Blog and easiest way to help 2004-12-27T20:29:41+00:00 Various sources (Acorn</a>, Brij </a>et al) point to the Tsunami blog</a> set up by few folks to aggregate the information about Tsunami relief efforts. This link</a> points to the list of important telephone numbers on the Tsunami blog. Also contribute to the relief efforts in whatever way you can. Ram Dhan</a> has made it very easy by setting up a site to contribute by Paypal. Click the link below to find more Contribute via Paypal on Ram Dhan’s Site</a> When Bad Things Happen to Good Projects 2004-12-26T02:05:10+00:00 I think I am going to be reading Sadgopan’s</a> blog more and more. He pointed to an article</a> 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. </blockquote> Everybody loves Documentation 2004-12-25T16:14:03+00:00 Being a consultant you are constantly, though rightfully, asked by the clients to document everything before you leave. Now updating my personal blog I am my own client so why be partial towards oneself. Here is what I did to update Beta Thoughts to version 3.0. Download Latest Nightly</a> </li> Adapt Ryan’s Kubrick Theme</a> </li> </ol> a. style.css for width and color changes b. header.php for header image width c. Create pages for Links template and Archives template Introduce Navigation based on Listamatic’s Simple Horizontal List</a></li> </ol> a. style.css for navlist b. create a navigation.php and include it in header.php to show on every page Plugins</li> </ol> a. Brian’s Latest Comment</a> for Activity in the sidebar – b. Nick Momriks Recent Posts </a>for Other Recent Posts in the sidebar c. Alex’s Related Posts</a> on the Single Post page d. Kitten’s Spam Words</a> e. Matt’s Spam Stopgap</a> Announce on WordPress Support Forum</a></li> </ol> Happiness and fun 2004-12-25T09:42:00+00:00 Sadagopan’s weblog</a> 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</a>. 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!!. </blockquote> And here is my take on it 😀 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. Collective IQ 2004-12-24T01:19:52+00:00 Few weeks back I attended Future Salon</a> for the first time. It was by none other than Doug Engelbart</a> and the topic was Collective IQ. I have to admit my mind has a bent for the collective word. Having been a past fan of Ayn Rand, collective word ring some negative bells in my mind. Essentially that every thing great comes from works of few genius beings. So I was more than anxious to hear great mindâ€™s thoughts. Without surprise someone asked the same question during the talk. Discussion among the audience led to the idea â€“ yes great ideas come from great minds but they always stand on the shoulders of giants. Ah.. simple thought but epiphany for me 😀 Dougâ€™s talk was different from my biases on more oriented towards information mining. He talked about we have so much information on the internet â€“ thousands of conversations going on, threaded discussions, hundreds of meeting documents among organizations, documents containing arguments and counter arguments etc. considering this can there be a system which can draw inference on some thing out of this information. In a simple scenario if 10 participants to a essay writing submitted their essays to this system can this system draw a conclusion out of these essays. Now scale this to hundreds of thousands of documents. Who am I 2004-12-13T22:14:10+00:00 I came across this introduction about one self on Neeraj’s weblog</a>. Very nicely written and can be substituted for most of us Who am I? I’m an alien and I’m not kidding. That’s how I was referred to by the paper handed over to me by the smiling immigration lady at the airport. The emails I receive at work refer to me as a contractor to emphasize that only employees are invited to certain special parties. I am referred to as a developer in my boss’s project plan. My fellow countrymen (&women) call me a desi. </blockquote> Story of my Audrey 2004-12-08T14:38:28+00:00 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 😀 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</a> 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</a> 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. Audrey visits India Then afterwards I joined my next employer and got into the cruel 😉 consulting world. So now this audrey was sitting idle at home. I shipped it to India for my nephew. There he struck a snafu as there was still no broadband in Chandigarh, India circa 2002. Modem option which I was sure would work didn’t work as Chandigarh at that time had 6 digit phone numbers and Audrey was expecting 7 digit phone number. So poor Audrey sat there gathering dust. Homecoming This year I asked another one of my buddies whose parents live in Chandigarh to get that Audrey back from India on his trip back home. So finally sometime this year Audrey came back. A lot of developments have happened in the Audrey Geekdom</a> I was so happy to get it back, though my nephew thinks otherwise as his place has 7 digit phone numbers as well as broadband. My last month was spent first upgrading the Audrey’s OS using spoofed DNS so that I can get a shell. Then archiving the CF images and finally replacing it with images from one of the sites</a>. So many ways It is amazing how people are using this little internet appliance. Hook it to a phone line and capture the Caller IDs, play MP3s (good case for listening to podcasts), act as a home automation device etc. Right now I want it to work with as USB wi-fi card so that I can put it in my kitchen and we can use it look for recipes, store the postit notes we put on the refrigerator. I don’t want to run a Ethernet cable from my router to this baby. I know I can always buy another wi-fi router and then bridge two routers and get a connection from second router. But that won’t be clean, right.. My wordpress install process 2004-12-05T19:39:54+00:00 In the past year I have installed wordpress so many times that installation of it has become a very trivial process for me. Of course wordpress developers </a>have worked to make it this simple. Here is the process I follow Create the database for WP from cpanel.</li> Create the user for this DB or use an existing user. Assign ALL_PRIVILEGES to this user for the newly created database.</li> Download the latest WP nightly from wordpress site and extract it in a separate directory. This will create a wordpress directory.</li> Change to this directory and copy wp-config-sample.php file as wp-config.php.</li> </ol> Edit wp-config.php file to reflect the settings for database, db user, and db password created above. </code></pre> Create a directory called languages in wp-include. Copy the hi.mo or language machine object file to the languages directory. This step is necessary if you want to have the wordpress in any other language than English.</li> Rename the wordpress directory the name you want for example â€˜blogâ€™.</li> Move this blog directory underneath your web document root.</li> Visit this page if the install.php links shows click on it.</li> This will be step 1 â€“ give a name to your blog. Go to step 2.</li> Jot down the admin password from step 2. Your wordpress is installed now.</li> Login into wordpress using the admin/password. Change the password to your own password you can remember.</li> At this point you can download plugins, themes etc and activate them. You can configure WordPress to your liking like changing the links, date format, permalinks etc. </></ol></li> </ol> A photo blog is different from a gallery 2004-12-04T21:48:20+00:00 It finally dawned upon me today that a photoblog is not the same as photo gallery. I have been confused between these two. For example I wanted something which would have the capabilites of both. A photoblog is where a photographer displays his best pics with commentry along each photograph. Nilesh’s Shutterbug</a> and Prashant’s Photoblog</a> is along the same line. While a gallery is what lazy people like me who are not photographers but still click any way and haul them at a place on the web. Galleries is also a nice way to share photographs among kith and kin. Execution the dicipline of getting things done 2004-12-04T21:28:29+00:00 To me one of the most beautiful sight to watch is some one doing their job efficiently. It could be a carpenter working on wood or a coder tapping on the keyboard. Browsing thru the excellant</a> Santa Clara City Library</a> I came across this book – Execution-the dicipline of getting things done</a>. The word execution immediately struck a chord in me and brought the same feeling I wrote earlier. When I checked out the book from library, I was thinking of execution at a personal level. But it turned out focus of the book is much larger and it is execution at the organization level. In other words it is a good book for CEOs. But then somewhere in everyone there is this feeling to be one someday. So it was a good education to me on what CEOs face in day to day life. How organizations work and what does is the best way to run them. Authors have broadly divided the organizations into People, Strategy, and Operations. Of course People are the most important part of an organization, they are the ones who make strategies which are then turned into operational plans. Strategy is a much abused word in consulting business I work. The booked helped me align my thoughts on what really is a strategy what a CEO talks about. Strategy is what turns an idea like “we need to have product for this” to reality. Finally Operations is step by step action plan to walk down the path given by strategy. It was not an easy book to read for me. At various points I would stop and think about what the author’s are trying to say and how would a real life situation like that would be. Again I have never thought as an executive. My work plan is limited to get this solution implemented as decided during the blue print phase while managing the client expectations. So this book for me was also a peep into he CEO’s mind. I guess I need to widen my perspective. A good Diwali greeting 2004-11-13T17:26:48+00:00 I got a nice Diwali greeting from someone at SAP. I love it. I too have been sending HTML greetings over the years. What I liked about this one was the right header, content and footer. Pankaj Happy Diwali 2004-11-11T16:14:16+00:00 Happy Diwali to every one. It is an Indian festival to celebrate the victory of light over darkness or good over evil. More details can be found here</a>. May this Diwali bring more prosperity, happiness and joy to your life. Doug Engelbart at Nov 19 Future Salon 2004-11-09T21:50:36+00:00 Finally the stars have aligned, I have got a local project, Future Salon is happening on a favorable day. Now I will be able to attend one of the Future Salon</a>s organized by Mark Finnern. What better way to start then attending the one by Doug Engelbart. The event is on Nov 19 in Palo Alto. More details here</a>. I am quite excited to attend this. I have read so much about Doug Engelbart. First I time I read about him was in a book name virtual communities or something like that or may be it was the graphics book in first year CS. Will be fun to attend. HACMP what is that 2004-11-05T12:22:07+00:00 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</a>, which is nice collection of resources about HACMP. I love their FAQs section</a>. 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: Ask your manager if the application is business critical.</li> </ol> 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. 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.</li> </ol> 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. </blockquote> Installing Debian Sarge 2004-10-30T13:20:19+00:00 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</a> 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 😀 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. Celebrating opening of Nileshs Blog 2004-10-30T11:27:34+00:00 Nilesh has been a good friend of mine over the years. He has a lot of rants, thoughts and blurbs to say. Till now he had been honoring us with his thoughts via the email. After much persuasion he has started a blog of his own – Bekar Bheje Ki Upaj</a> or Products of an Idle Mind. Way to go buddy 😀 Dont you love OM 2004-10-27T05:58:35+00:00 There is a line in the comic book series Asterix and Obelix</a> 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</a> here comes OM busting the hype</a> around it. Today’s victim of Om’s love</a> 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. </blockquote> 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. Real Time A tribute to Hasso Plattner 2004-10-23T20:02:07+00:00 Got the book</a> in the mail today courtesy Jeff Nolan</a> of SAP Ventures. Some one, I think Vivekanand</a>, said once to the effect that if you need advice on something, see what the great men of the world did in the same situation. It would be intersting to read how Hasso made a company with “128 quarters of financial results and only 1 of them in the red</a>“. Thanks again to Jeff for the book giveaway</a>. Finished reading The Great Unraveling by Paul Krugman 2004-10-15T10:23:02+00:00 I have been reading Brad De Long’s writings for some time and he is a fan</a> of Paul Krugman’s writings. While reading my daily dose of blogs I noticed Brij</a> has mentioned Paul Krugman’s “The Great Unraveling” as a book to read. On my next trip to Santa Clara City Library</a> I picked this book and am I glad to read this book. The book is about corporate scandals and how for short term political benefits political parties can ransom the future. Authors approach of telling economic facts and theories is marvelous. Back in engineering school</a> my good friend Arun Sharma used to say if you know a concept very well then you would be able to describe it by making common analogies. That’s what the professor does. I liked how in A Retirement Fable author writes “There once was a land where people lived only two years. In the first year they worked; in the second year they lived off their personal savings. There came a time when the government decided to help out the elderly. So it instituted a system called Social Security” </blockquote> to talk about the impending social security crisis. Or how bulls and bears are described in The Ice Age Cometh. I smiled reading Two Thousand Acres when author concludes that According to my calculations, my work space occupies only a few square inches of office floor. You may find this implausible, but I’m using a well-accepted methodology. Well accepted, that is, among supporters of oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. </blockquote> It was fascinating to read the real cause of California Electricity Crisis or Asian Currency trouble was just plain greed. Overall a great read. Check it at out at Amazon</a>. Google comes to your PC 2004-10-15T06:41:56+00:00 So finally Google for desktop search is here</a>. First impressions – easy to install, takes about 9 MB of your RAM, solid search functionality. Especially love the interface where you can click on the file types in the search results i.e. if you want to see search results for emails you can. Some of the suggestions/rants I have Can someone connect from remote computer to the google search on my computer. </li> An option to password protect the search would be nice. </li> Stop words – don’t let any one search on my computer on the word “account” or “password” </li> It is nice to see the google search icon in the system tray but there should be a way to make it invisible and just be running there. Connect to it using the URL or from Start menu etc. </li> </ol> For an interesting discussion check this link</a> at manageability. Update: Read Om’s post</a> for more coverage on this. While I agree with Om that there are better alternatives available but IMHO google’s reach would make their tool much more popular than any other tool. Let’s see how this goes 😀 Story of a watch and a cell phone 2004-10-10T21:05:55+00:00 Somewhere over the Atlantic, while enroute to US for the first time, my Titan wristwatch gifted by my elder brother on my matriculation started misbehaving. I didn’t buy a new one after seeing time being displayed anywhere and everywhere. From TV settop box, oven, banks to computers. It was as if I was surrounded by clocks. But then my consultant life started and I found myself traveling coast to coast very often. Still my primary way of looking at time was the cell phone. Nice thing about this that cell phone would auto adjust the time based on Time zone. But there was one problem, you canâ€™t switch your phone in an aircraft and on flights of more than two hours watch is one of the ways of passing time. So finally I bought a decent Citizen Eco-Drive</a>. Now I was happy in plane but another problem popped up I have to adjust watch time while traveling. Today I decided to leave the watch at hotel when I am outside of California and still use the Cell phone as time device and wear the watch only while on planes. Seems like I bought watch for the planes 😉 MS in Services coming near to you 2004-10-10T07:44:48+00:00 There are times when I think about going back to school get masters. Often I have thought if I go back what would I be specializing in? Now being a geek at heart I can’t imagine myself getting into a totally tangential field. Being a consultant I have always been involved with high pressure projects and you have to deliver at the right time with the right cost. If you don’t you are out of the game quickly. Wise men of the consulting would agree with me that even with the best intentions sometimes the things don’t go the way you never wanted them to go. So I thought it would nice to go to a school where you go thru these kind of scenarios in a rapid manner. So instead of learning by experience which is a great thing but takes longer time you will have some idea what you are getting into and what to expect. It seems world thinks the same. Atleast researchers at the IBM Alamden Research Center. Infoworld is carrying a story</a> starting a curricullum on services sciences. Quote from the article The idea behind services science is to develop a curriculum focused on the study of the services industry, much in the same way that computer science gradually evolved as an independent field of study during the mid-20th century. </div> </blockquote> This had to happen. I am glad it is happening. On a separate note a somewhat related book on this topic is “Aligning the Stars”</a>. An enjoyable read with pragmatic advice. The new road to riches 2004-10-09T09:54:04+00:00 Just read “The new road to riches” by Om Malik by following the plug from his blog post</a>. Thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Fires up the thought engine which asks me “Dude what you been doing..” The next OddPost might be around the corner 😀 On a separate note, the photograph that accompanies the story is quite suitable and reminds me of “Dil Chahata Hai” the hindi movie 😀 Gimme the power let it be wireless this time 2004-10-06T14:15:26+00:00 Back in college</a> as a student of electrical engineering Wireless Power used to be the holy grail for us. And now as a consultant with my notebook with me every where I go, there can be nothing better than this. This concern is shared by so many. Came across this great article</a> by Paul Hartzog on wireless power via A VC</a>. Do read it, nice history and where we are with wireless power. Interesting VC blogs 2004-09-26T16:27:52+00:00 Om Malik pointed to these VC blogs in his post</a> – Jeff Nolan</a> of SAP Ventures Ed Sim’s Beyond VC</a> A VC</a> at NYC Bill Burnham’s Burnham Beat</a> Venture Blog</a> a group blog Web Applications and Business Server Pages 2004-08-31T12:42:42+00:00 You can use the SAP Web Application Server to develop Web applications that are based on the Internet Communication Framework and the HTTP request handler IF_HTTP_EXT_BSP. These Web applications are also known as BSP applications (Business Server Page applications). [Link</a>] Quid pro quo 2004-08-14T13:34:13+00:00 Finally the unthinkable has happen. I never thought I would actually quote TOI. Came across this news </a>about a Portland web developer in Bangalore on TOI via Sulekha. Excerpts from some of the posts on her blog</a> On traffic and street names</a> ” his is not a very easy city to remember street names. In fact, there really aren’t street names on the streets – its just not intuitive to find. In order to find out what street you are on, you need to look at the business signs because some of them have the whole address printed on the sign. It really makes locating businesses/homes a little difficult. I read that Bangalore was built piece by piece. Each locality back then was built by a different ruler. So that’s why the city layout is so complex. ” BTW most of the city landscapes are that way. Reading the addresses off the shop business signs is how I used to know which city I am while travelling by bus or train. I so miss the ease of going to doctors back home. On doctor visit</a> “I called the reception to call a doctor. The doctor came and did a check up. The doctors here actually do house visits. That was great! Because I did not want to have to ride the bumpy roads just to get to one. The cost was $11 for the house visit (for the BEST doctor) and $3.33 for the medicine she prescribed. Wow! I was really impressed…I was feeling extremely sick and a couple of hours after I took the medicine I was feeling almost 80%. I was able to get up, my headache went away, and my swollen throat eased up. I was so amazed. This is the fastest recovery to any sickness I’ve ever encountered.” Life moves on</a> “But now that I have moved into my own apartment, furnished it, found tofu, garlic powder, diet coke at a market just two minutes away, enjoying my 5 minute commute to work; I feel like I am now finally starting to feel and flow with the rhythm of life here. That is a beautiful feeling.” Finally a reader sums all my feelings in comments for one of the posts</a> “I am from India and currently live in San Francisco..everytime I get sick I miss the Indian docs so much….U never have to hassle much for an appointment plus recovery is super fast..The medical and insurance infrastructure is very well established in US however it has its own drawbacks…Sometimes you have to wait for weeks to get an appointment with a specialist…. Anyways, I like your blog..Its kinda reverse psychology and interesting for me to read…Hope you travel and enjoy better experiences in India..” Tomatoes and Berkeley economists 2004-08-13T10:53:01+00:00 One of the economy guy whose RSS I subscribe had to buy tomatoes at a real sweet price and is wondering</a> “Today, for the first time in my life, I spent $20 on tomatoes: 7 pounds of heirloom tomatoes from Andronicos at $3 a pound. ” This post started a long list of comments among his readers which is quite interesting to read. Last I knew only homely ladies used to complain. Economists are feeling the pain too LOL… What a nation means 2004-08-05T15:11:32+00:00 A thoughtful definition of a nation [via The Pioneer</a>] Former RSS spokesman MG Vaidya, while defining nationalism, wrote: One, nation means people, or the society with memories of their history; two, Nation means people who share a common heritage, a common value system, that is, common culture; three, in order to constitute and sustain a nation, the people must have a desire to live together and the will to improve upon the past inheritance; and, four, nation has little to do with material benefits; it lives in sentiments.” Mr Vaidya further wrote, “There is a tendency to blissfully forget our identity and to engage in vociferous condemnation of our identity so much so that even the name Hindustan is an anathema for some. If state is a legal association, nation is a patriotic association. No constitution can make people patriotic, or make people sacrifice for the nation’s good. It is national pride that alone can prompt people to sacrifice; feeling of nationality can only make people feel they are one, which alone can inspire them to rise to great heights…” </div></blockquote> PCWorld busting the biggest PC Myths 2004-07-14T06:49:46+00:00 A nice tip from PCWorld.com – Busting the Biggest PC Myths</a> If you’re using Windows XP, right-click the desktop, choose New, Shortcut, type shutdown -s -t 00, click Next, give the shortcut a name (for example, Shutdown), and click Finish. Next time you need to shut down, click the shortcut icon. </blockquote> A whole new way Reliance India Call 2004-07-12T19:12:20+00:00 Having folks back in India warrants a lot of overseas call. For the reasons best known to VSNL </a>or other such outfits international calling to and from India has been quite expensive. Its still better than when I came over here. At that time it used to be 37 cents per minute thru MCI or AT&T. Then I discovered the world of calling cards. Rediff Valucom was just god sent gift at 20-25 cents a minute with no pin to call. After a while Valucom also became expensive and I moved on to ReliableCom, SDICard and 9278.com etc at the rate of 14-18 cents a minute. Now when I got back from I got to know of Reliance India Call</a> which is giving India calling at the introductory price of 11.9 cents per minute. I am totally liking their service. Now since this is an introductory price let us see what happens in the future. It would also be interesting to see how they cope up when every one starts using them. Empty Refrigerator 2004-07-09T10:08:46+00:00 Sylvia Lehnen writes in Connecting the Dots</a> at SDN about portal content. I really like the refrigerator analogy Market studies have shown that up to 50% of portal project fail not because of technical issues, but because the portals couldn’t attract users or get them to come back. It’s like an empty refrigerator, it doesn’t matter how great the refrigerator is when there are only a few stale items inside. </div></blockquote> Coke or Pepsi Your drink is powered by SAP 2004-06-09T09:16:49+00:00 Cnet Reports today SAP siphons Pepsi away from Oracle | CNET News.com</a> SAP said it will be responsible for installing the full range of the flagship MySAP product line at Pepsi, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management tools. SAP said the effort is aimed at unifying all the legacy software systems used in Pepsi’s many divisions, including Frito-Lay, Quaker Oats and the Pepsi Bottling Group. </div></blockquote> The Giant is opening up 2004-06-06T20:04:35+00:00 How do you let the world know all the cool technologies and solutions you are brewing up. By opening up more. That is what has been happening in the SAP world for the last couple of years. There was a time when the only public way to access information about SAP was through their website. There were few enthusiast websites but limited in content. This is changing now. First of all there is SAP Community</a> site. So many interesting discussions happen in the forums</a>. Then there are executive blogs</a> where you can read about vision and what is in the executive’s minds. They always have some cool freebie for the members as a part of their rewards program. For the more technically inclined geek heads their is SAP Developer Network</a>(SDN). You will find content areas for the complete technology stack. Netweaver, Enterprise Portals, Business Intelligence, and WebDynpro all are their. For consultants like me discussion forums is a great thing. Then there are weblogs where mavens</a>(Thanks Mark </a>for making me aware of this term) can write to their hearts desire. While over there don’t forget to check DevToday based on the ViewPoint technology. It is contextual mining of content on steroids 😀 Before I forget you do need the free registration to access these sites. You might be a Ã¼ber geek but you still need quick access to documentation. Help portal</a> just does the thing and with the help of trex search engine any help page is few click away. To top this all there are Best Practice guides also available on this help portal. These guides are the best qualitative knowledge you would find for implementing any solution from SAP. Let us get Rolling 2004-06-05T11:27:49+00:00 As I said earlier </a> for the corporate world Roller type java blogs make a lot more sense. Sun’s decision </a> to use Roller also cemented these thoughts. Finally I installed Roller 0.9.8 at my present client and boy that was a breeze of an install. While it can not be compared to the 5-minute install</a> of WordPress but for a multi-user blogging application deployed on a solid J2EE based scalable architecture it is great. It took me about 40-55 minutes to install excluding the download time for various components. Install was in a Windows environment. The only place where I stopped to think was Search Engine index</a> settings. I had to make Tomcat service run as a named user account instead of the default LocalSystem Account.Overall I am quite happy. Five days left and I still havent bought the tickets 2004-06-04T18:12:31+00:00 My present thoughts about I, Me, Myself are “I am out of my mind” I am planning to fly the coming weekend to India. But I am still working on tickets with one of the agent over here in LA. Let’s hope I get it other wise it is a long flight thru the redlands for $1430. I guess fight till the last moment. The world is really noticing us or it is good PR 2004-06-04T00:25:16+00:00 Stories like A Giant So Big It’s a Proxy for India’s Economy</a> always make me prowd, but then somewhere in the back a thought lurks is it a result of good PR. But anyway this story reminds me of an advice CNET radio anchor for a investment talk show use to give – “Tech stocks are not the real index of economy, shares like Home Depot, Wal-Mart really tell you where the economy is going” Quote from the article on Reliance at NY Times In the tumult of putting a new government in place in India, the stock of Reliance Industries was a good gauge of expectations about the prospects for continued economic liberalization. </blockquote> Another question that comes to mind is while it is good but just like in cricket we need more good players besides Sachin. Over population, castes and Bollywood 2004-06-03T16:08:31+00:00 Few days ago Atanu was musing over </a>the problem of over population in India and its effects. In this post he did a thought experiment starting with two families a blue family and green family. Blue is a small family and is able to provide education to the children of the family and green is bigger family and is only able to provide the basic food and clothing. Quoting him Let’s fast forward a few generations now. Given the rate of growth of populations — exponential — the Greens number in the thousands and the Blues are in hundreds. The Blues have steadily improved their lot since they keep getting richer doing more productive and creative work which is highly valued and the Greens work for the Blues in factories, houses, etc., at less productive (albeit necessary) positions. </div> </blockquote> Today I read a guest post by Nitin on the NewCaste Sytems</a> on Jivha. What Nitin says is exactly the results of that little thought experiment done by Atanu. Given her parentage, Karishma Kapoor was able to make the transition from Prem Qaidi to Fiza. The question is whether she would have been given the start, the support and the number of chances to succeed if it were not for Daddy and Granddaddy and Greatgranddaddy. Abhishek Bachchan too will be a good actor one day. </div> </blockquote> Wow, amazing how on blogland you can see two people saying the same thing in different context. Let us all go to India this summer 2004-06-03T12:19:41+00:00 Seems like this is the time to go to India. I had no plans to visit India 3 weeks earlier and now I am busy shopping tickets for it. Looks like people</a> and people</a> have beaten me to it. I am getting tickets in excess of $1450. Steep price boo hoo hoo May be someone will tell me the phone number of an angel travel agent who can procure tickets for the good ol’ price of $1200. Link SAP Operating System Monitor 2004-06-02T09:29:09+00:00 SAP Library – Operating System Monitor</a> The operating system collector SAPOSCOL is a stand-alone program that runs in the operating system background. It runs independently of SAP instances exactly once per monitored host. SAPOSCOL collects data about operating system resources, including: Â· Usage of virtual and physical memory Â· CPU utilization Â· Utilization of physical disks and file systems Â· Resource usage of running processes Beta Thoughts Slightly loaded 2004-05-31T21:13:01+00:00 Finally I did some work on the remaining todo items for Beta Thoughts Branding I am pleased with my work on the logo. It is a picture of digit nine in binary i.e. 1001. It is said that 9 is the most powerful digit . Will do some more research on it later. If someone has some link on it please leave a comment. </div> Also notice the same logo in address bar. I need to work on the header image as jpeg is totally messed after being subjected to many saves. Install with a different directory Pretty simple just had to follow the guide over here</a>. SAP Category and its separate page Being a SAP Netweaver consultant I wanted to write about it but didn’t wanted to put it on the main page. Just had to follow this message</a> on forums. Now the SAP categories has its own sideblog at http://pnarula.com/sap</a> TODO: Still thinking about should I go with Matt’s asides</a> or RebelPixel’s Recent-Links</a>. Any suggestions? And all he wanted was to write 2004-05-29T18:39:24+00:00 Finally Om, has made the switch</a>. It has been a long battle. I wish software world was easy enough that systems behaved the way we wanted them not the way we told them. I would say it is a great win for WP community considering Om’s path to switch Disstatisfied with MT’s performance decides to move on to Expression Engine</li> EE doesn’t fit the bill moves on to WP 1.0.2</li> Due to tech snafus with hosting provider moves to typepad</li> Also tries Blogger</li> Due to limited features on Blogger moves back to MT but this time upgrades to MT 3.0</li> Again hits the same issues as earlier MT version</li> Moves back to WP on 1.2</li> </ol> I am hoping this time the move is for good. Considering the frequency at which he writes it should be a good testcase for WP’s preformance. Now it better be good as his readership is huge. Consulting I love it I hate it 2004-05-25T23:19:35+00:00 I have been a consultant for many years now. It has taken me to many new places, to many clients almost across complete US. While on the road experiences are bound to happen. Some good and some not so good. I always wanted to write them but never had the put them somewhere in a structured manner. Now with the medium of weblogs, I have got just what I was looking for. Here I would try to put my unstructured train of thoughts on consulting. Here is the first post in the consulting category. What a blog is how and why its better than email a la yahoogroups 2004-05-24T18:08:24+00:00 Recently I started another group weblog called CELPEC. CELPEC is group of individuals who worked in one particular lab at Punjab Engineering College. One of the friends asked what is weblog and why should we start using it instead of our good ol’ mailing list at yahoo. What follows is my reply to him. Here is link to good introduction to weblogs, donâ€™t forget to also read part 2 http://www.dynamicobjects.com/d2r/archives/002399.html</a> There are links to very good articles on blogging just in the beginning of part 1. I will also try to explain it in the context of CELPEC. What do we do on CELPEC: Talk about any thing and every thing, more on technology and related stuff. Idea is to have some form of conversation where one starts by saying â€œHey dude did you hear about this, or you know what happenedâ€ But this thing happens in the virtual world. With weblogs in picture, idea will still remain the same. But we are opening our conversation to the whole wide web. So be sure that you donâ€™t want to put some thing like my company sucks. As it would be viewable to everyone, would be indexed by google, tracked and pinged by you donâ€™t know whom. But consider putting something like hey I have this neat theory about how Indiaâ€™s population can be reduced 😉 Or I read this book. You get the idea. How do we do it: With the CELPEC mailing list, it is a real simple interface, you send an email to a particular address, mailing list host accepts this email from certain predefined addresses, which were put there when we subscribed to it. With CELPEC weblog, the most simple interface would be to visit the site http://blogger.com or whatever. Login to make a new entry and post to your heartâ€™s desire. This is the basic one. Now onto more exotic ones, almost all blogging systems provide something like â€œBlog Thisâ€. Idea is to have a link to your browser toolbar. You would see this orange symbol on google toolbar. This is really neat. You might be reading a website and you feel the urge to blog. You select some text of your interest on the webpage and click the â€œBlog Thisâ€ link on your tool bar. This would popup a window with the selected test and the link to it. Now you can enter your comments on this and publish this. It would be posted to your weblog. Third and most widely used by regular writers is to have clients like w:blogger (http://wbloggar.com) etc. These are your regular applications you give your server address and your credentials in the beginning. Then write stuff inside this client and once done press publish. Just like the above â€œBlog Thisâ€ interface your post is published and ready to pleasure worldâ€™s eyes. Interaction: On the mailing list we simply reply if someone feels like and everybody gets the reply. Idea is limited to our selected group. But with weblogs your post is opened to the whole world and anybody can comment on it. Another nice and powerful feature is trackback. Let us say you read a post somewhere and you want to write about it, or you mentioned it in your blog. By using the trackback feature you can let the author of that post know that you have published an entry that references his post. How do we get it or syndication: With mailing list we get in our inbox. With blog, you can goto the site regularly to check if there is something new. But there is no fun in it. For this almost every weblog publishes a feed. For example celpec feed is at http://celpec.blogspot.com/atom.xml So there are weblog feed aggregators like SharpReader(http://sharpreader.net) where you can specify which weblogs you are interested in reading and just like your email client check this regularly to see if anyone has something new to say. There are online aggregators like http://www.bloglines.com/ also. Hope this helps. I am posting this on my blog at http://pnarula.com/blog</a> as well as celpec blog</a>. WordPress Linkblogging at atmaspheric 2004-05-19T22:31:52+00:00 “WordPress linkblogs are getting easier to deal with for the interested… I’ve been debating how to best do it myself since I sometimes post very short “of interest” bits rather than actual written by me bits. Here are two ways you might consider “- Link</a> To Java or PHP is the question 2004-05-18T22:28:14+00:00 I have been a Java dude since its first version came in PC Quest</a>‘s CD. PCQ didn’t even had a website then. I had to go on my bicycle to Sector 16 in Chandigarh</a> to get that PCQ with a CD. I instantly fell in love watching those sorting applets showing the power of threads. Even in professional life I have used Java the most be it for making custom apps or apps based on SAP’s Solutions</a>. Also my first blog was on JRoller. But when it came to creating my own blog in my own domain. I settled first for MovableType and then moved on to WordPress. Both based on scripting languages. There were quite a few reasons that I chose to go this route. I will list few of them over here Economy The biggest one was as usual the money. It is cheaper to host a php/perl based solution which is based on how much resources an ISP has to put to support a solution. For scripting based apps the CPU usage is only momentary when the site is accessed (Do I hear people saying dude what about scalability) while for Java based first of all JVM is running all the time. Secondly you really want your own JVM. Last thing you want is someone else’s application has hung crashed the JVM and no one can access your site. </li> Maintenance Again IMO there are more pieces in the Java side of the puzzle then are there on the scripting side. More the pieces more the complexity more single point of failures. For a single person hosting an app with few users it is too much to maintain 😉 </li> </ol> All said and done I would say that if I had go for a blogging solution for one of our corporate clients I would be first one to jump on suggestiing Roller Weblogger</a> or Pebble(though I don’t have personal experience with this). First Corporations won’t be as cheap as me so reason number one is blown secondly they have the neccessary resources to maintain these application. Moreover companies would already have people experienced with server side java app management. Viral Effects of blogging 2004-05-18T18:17:04+00:00 Once in a while, I go through the access and referrer log files for my domain i.e. pnarula.com. For the past few weeks I have been seeing a particular entry </a>about her playing with WordPress. What is interesting is that she said Another impressive bit about WordPress is that the developers are focusing on localization and internationalization</a> features within the software, which I think is one aspect, along with easy install and a very usable interface, that will help WordPress find its own glory among today’s diverse weblogging solutions. </div> </blockquote> Localization link in Molly’s quote points to a test blog I have setup for hindi and I announced</a> it on WP forums. I might have taken this site down without even knowing people might be coming to this. So I guess from now onwards I gotta be careful in creating these URLs. Another Gmail Post 2004-05-17T23:20:54+00:00 Looks like I am getting addicted to Gmail as the days pass. Conversations concept is pretty nice, wish it was in Thunderbird or Outlook. No one can beat the search ability. I am at a point where I am redirecting more email at the google acct than pnarula dot com for which I pay. What world we are living in. I like a free service better than the one I pay for 😀 There is one feature which I would like to see in email clients, ability to attach an annotation with an email so that instead of instead of subject this annotation shows. I saw this mentioned with something from IBM or somebody. This would be a killer as it would allow me to attach more meta info with an email. Are learned ones less likely to vote 2004-05-17T21:59:56+00:00 While at work a colleague pointed that young folks who are working away from their hometowns are less likely to vote and this has more to do with the voter lists. Considering me being away over here that is impossible. But what would stop a single guy from lets say Ambala to vote in Bangalore? If it is true isn’t it ironical… WP 12 Plugins 2004-05-17T21:35:30+00:00 Note to myself – Good WP 1.2 Plugin Eric Meyer’s creations – here</a> From MtDewVirus factory – here</a> Alex King’s Plugins – here</a> Rebel Pixel’s Recent Links – here</a> Spread the Love Slugs 2004-05-16T20:48:51+00:00 Never knew about this feature. Apparently greater gods have been using this for a while. There is this neat feature in WP that allows you to make your URIs even nicer. Consider what is better http://www.pnarula.com/2004/05/15/this-is-my-first-post</code> or this http://www.pnarula.com/2004/05/15/firstpost/</code> In the first example WP is creating the post-slug automatically by using the title, I never bothered to edit it. Now after reading at LibaryPlanet </a> I have seen the light and URIs are much nicer. Do yourself a favor and start editing those post-slugs. End Note: This is only available in WP 1.2. MT Licensing and all that talk 2004-05-16T18:54:15+00:00 MoveableType has moved</a> and after the Beta-Tease</a> phase have come up with new licensing terms to generate more revenues. Well nothing wrong with that. No body should be stopped from eating</a> the fruits of one’s labour. And no doubt I have enjoyed the ease with which I was able to extend MT for my hindi blogs – Haan Bhai and Akshargram. But then it is this user’s ability to contribute and extend that has made MT what it is. Anyway we can go on talking about this. MT did what they thought is best in their interests. People would do, what they think is best for them. IT to India look who is watching 2004-05-11T22:37:42+00:00 I have been reading Brad DeLong</a>‘s writings for quite sometime. I first came across him for one his book “Slouching towards Utopia”</a>. This book made me feel good as it described the life of a worker during Victorian ages and present workers. Brad is a Professor of Economic at UCB and it is good to see how closely he is following IT to India phenomenon. Today on his blog he pointed</a> to a story on Hindu about “Google opening office in India”. Homogeneous vs Heterogeneous IT environment 2004-05-11T19:34:01+00:00 Recently I got introduced to LooslelyCoupled</a> blog via a post on Brij@147</a>. LooselyCoupled is all about how IT landscapes should be loosely coupled, with best of breed applications from different vendors and all systems talking to each other via standard and open services. I would call it a heterogenous environment. Having being trained as an engineer my mind makes me beleive this is the ideal concept. I agree it is beautiful concept. There is so much freedom to replace and put a new system. Vendor lock in is totally avoided. But then we live in a real world and as human beings we are rather lazy. Last few years I have spent in the consulting world, working with different clients all across the US, one thing I have found is that companies want to standardize their systems. For example for notebooks we are going to purchase Thinkpads, we will only use Oracle databases, or even all our consultants would come from this company. I can understand the reason for all this having fewer parties to talk reduces the process load on company employees. Similarly large enterprises tend to choose one or two vendors for their business applications. Besides dealing with the same company added benefit is easier integration across the products from same vendor. This is what I call a homogenous enterprise. While what I said above might not be true for all the companies but IMHO this happens at a lot of companies. It is the best way or not is debatable. Content Community and Collaboration and success of blogs 2004-05-10T19:06:00+00:00 During the go-go nineties I read an article for making a highly successful and effective web site. I have forgotten the authorss name but his ideas are still valid and proving mighty right every day with the success of weblogs. Authorâ€™s views were that three Cs are necessary for a highly successful site. Content, Community, and Collaboration. Author backed this by giving the example of MSN. Before Microsoft acquired hotmail, MSN was just another site. But when Microsoft added the hotmail community its popularity skyrocketed. Bloggingâ€™s popularity is reaching the levels of obsession. In my opinion this popularity is again due to these three tenets of CCC. Newer blogging softwares like MoveableType</a>, Blogger</a>, TypePad</a>, WordPress</a> has made any body and every body a web publisher. Comments complement the collaboration piece of puzzle. With the reach of RSS, ATOM and trackback capabilities of blogs newer and newer communities are being formed dynamically. This is going to continue for a while. Let us see where it takes us. For reading this in Hindi click here</a>. Digital Camera manual controls 2004-05-09T23:06:47+00:00 When I was buying my digital camera one of the feature I had in mind was manual controls. I did not wanted a simple pointand shoot type camera. Being the geek I am, I wanted to tweak the settings a bit to suit my needs. So I settled for Canon S45 </a>first which was stolen and then I bought S50. Both of these cameras have manual controls but only available thru menu. Now after heavy use of these cameras I have come to the conclusion that these controls are not of much value. If you indulge in setting these using the menus – scene being photographed would change. Therefore a S400 would have also fitted the bill. Conclusion: If you really want to play with manual controls on a camera go for analog controls, the good ol’s rotating dials. Beta Testing or beta-teasing 2004-05-09T14:30:31+00:00 While the importance of Beta Testing phase cannot be denied, but it seems to me these days this phase is also serving as another marketing tool. To be successful in the competitive space most of the software companies make their roadmaps public. Whenever a new product is ready, a beta period has to precede it. This beta is highly advertised. Cases in point â€“ Googleâ€™s Gmail, and Microsoftâ€™s Longhorn</a>, SAPâ€™s Netweaver, and MoveableTypeâ€™s 3.0</a>. By making the product available to select few a group of haves and have-nots is created. There by creating an anxiety in the tech community. This serves the software vendors very well as an effective brand awareness and marketing tool. Om Malik also pointed about this in relation to Steve Jobs</a>. Keeping all this in mind I believe this beta testing phase could very well be called beta-teasing. So next time someone tells you their product is in beta, think they might be pulling a beta-tease on you 😀 On a separate note I might be the first one to use this term – beta-teasing. Beta Thoughts Version 10 GA aka my first post 2004-05-09T03:25:38+00:00 Hello World! It’s been quite some time that I have been playing with WordPress</a>. Finally I am satisfied with the design and layout of my weblog. I have named this theme as LaJolla</a> because of the header image. This image is a part of an image I took at LaJolla beach. Let me know what you guys think of this blog. Good Portal Consulting Offering at Bearing Point 2004-02-25T16:32:27+00:00 While going thru iviewstudio found this great site about the portal offerings from Bearing Point http://www.bearingpoint.de/content/library/PortalQuickScan/data/indexm.htm This is an archived entry from Jroller. The first blogging tool I ever used.</a> Reading mySAP CRM Solution for Success 2004-02-08T16:30:52+00:00 I am reading this introductory book from SAP Press on SAP CRM. After reading just first few pages the thought that struck me was how well big companies position their software in an enterprise. And how from there point of view, it makes sense to use software from the same enterprise software vendor. Although this might be good from customer’s prespective if they wanted to deal with the same vendor and lessen their integration woes. As one would expect offerings from same vendor to be tightly integrated. For example lets say you decide to use mySAP CRM, then if you have mySAP ERP inhouse, CRM would be able to integrate with the sales and finance module. And if you had SCM offering from SAP very cool now you can integrate your supply chain vendors. And now if you feel to do some annlytics work, what better solution than SAP BW. And of course while you are at it all this and you want a people centric user interface so that every one can access it so Enterprise Portals would make a lot of sense. I want my original paper 2003-12-28T16:25:37+00:00 Seems like this is the age of aggregators. Be it news aggregator sites like Sulekha.com for the average Indian dude, or Slashdot for run of the mill IT guy. To top them all we have RSS feeds for everything so Feeddemons are busy collecting news for folks. Though I shouldn’t be complaining as these sites and software programs do save a lot of time with all that information bloating in every nook and corner. Still somewhere I have the vague longing for my innocent looking Times of India or New York Times when I would see them in entirety. And not read the headlines. This is an archived entry from Jroller. The first blogging tool I ever used.</a> Perpetual Khurki 2003-12-02T16:24:09+00:00 Just coined the term “Perpetual Khurki”. Khurak in Hindi means scratching. In other words it would mean the one who has been scratching his itch forever. I guess it applies to a lot of people in Open Source Software field. Linus, RMS, Perens would fit in nicely. This is an archived entry from Jroller. The first blogging tool I ever used.</a> So much for security in modern OSes 2003-11-30T16:21:15+00:00 During one of my business trips I had to stay in one of the leading chain hotels. They had a 24×7 business services section for the guests to surf internet and use M$ office. For security reasons when you clicked on the Start button of their M$ XP it showed only Shutdown and Logoff options. There were links for office and IE on the desktop. So a user was stuck with only these options. I had to print few pdfs which I emailed myself to my Hotmail acct and went to the Business Service section to print them by visiting hotmail. Some how whatever I was sending to the printer was getting queued in the printer queue and never printing. There was no way to debug this thing. Out of shear desperation I was trying different key combinations and I hit F1 accidently. Help Center opened up and I could search for command prompt for there which gave me a link to the open up command prompt. So much for security. I guess someone can say that security was not setup correctly on those computers but if it is difficult to set up the security then it is of no use. This is an archived entry from Jroller. The first blogging tool I ever used.</a> Whats going on 2003-10-30T16:18:18+00:00 I have been working in the Enterprise Portals space for more than 2 years. Quite a few portal companies have also been able to survive the ongoing recession in Tech sector. But for the first time in these years I have worked in portals I am seeing some frentic activity. People are getting offers at dot-com era salaries. So life has become suddenly charming. Apart from all this I am still learning web-dynpro and related techonologies in NetWeaver Developer Studio in whatever free time I am getting. This is an archived entry from Jroller. The first blogging tool I ever used.</a> A little thought and Happy Diwali 2003-10-25T16:15:58+00:00 Happy Diwali… Today is the festival of lights for Indians. It also brings back the thought that has always plagued me on every Diwali -I have been in US. Quite a fews times people ask me what do you miss the most working US; while having been brought up in India. My answer has always been – festivals. Come to think of it why do we have festivals. IMO besides their own respective importance festivals break the monotony of life. They remind us that there is more to life than work 😀 So I do try to do – as I would have done in India. But then that is no match at all. Even if I was able to fire crackers, buy a whole lot sweets, do all the praying to Goddess Lakshmi and God Ganesha as I have seen in my parents home; from where would I bring the aura that is there in every indian city and town around Diwali. But then it is my choice to be here so friends whereever you are “Shubh Dipawali” This is an archived entry from Jroller. The first blogging tool I ever used.</a> Uncharted Waters SAP Enterprise Portal PDK 2003-10-08T16:22:56+00:00 As an enterprise portal consultant many a times I have to write custom code to develop java iviews (portlets in SAP lingo). For the present gig I have to write a small java iview for name search or people finder. Since the people information is in a database I planned to use database pools for accessing them. Now PDK (portal development kit) available at iviewstudio is available for Tomcat. While enterprise portal as such runs on SAP J2EE engine. This presented a little problem coz first I had to figure out jndi data sources on tomcat and then do the same thing on SAP J2EE. Being the lazy I am I wanted to avoid this double work. The obvious solution to this was to have PDK running on SAP J2EE. I had read somewhere in some forum that few people have done it and inside SAP a lot of developers do that. So I decided to do that. Finally after few hours of tinkering around reading online forums, going thru SAP Notes I tasted success. So plan to start writing code on Monday. Eclipse plugin for PDK would be a great help in that regard. On a seaperate note just read a blog by good ol’ Himanshu at SDN on the upcoming GUI Machine. I have been waiting for this for some time. Should download the alpha and give it a spin. This is an archived entry from Jroller. The first blogging tool I ever used.</a> Web Dynpro WAS and Software Fashion 2003-10-06T16:12:39+00:00 A couple of weeks ago I downloaded WebAS 6.4 Beta from SDN</a> and have been making crude stabs at writng MDA web apps with it. It touts a new web app tool called WebDynPro which seems a decent tool for wrting business apps. Now coming to Software Fashion</a> context. I read at software reality how there are fashions in the software industry. It made me think that is this (webdynpro) also a fashion or is this in for the long run? I hope it is in for a long term. This is an archived entry from Jroller. The first blogging tool I ever used.</a> Business of Life 2003-01-18T16:28:44+00:00 I have been reading the “How I became a Hindu” by Sri Sita Ram Goel for the past few hours. I came across this paragraph which tells a lot about so many of us “The business of life can go on very well without an ideological frame of reference. One eats and mates and sleeps and makes a living. One reads books and papers and gossips and goes about passing conventional judgments on current events, One has a family, a profession, a circle of friends, and some hobby to keep one occupied in leisure time. One grows old, collects one’s own share of diseases, and looks back with anguish towards earlier days when one was young and active. For most of us ordinary mortals, this is the whole of human life. We take very seriously our successes and failures and our loves and hates, without spending a thought on what it is all about.” Though on a higher frame of reference i.e. about life it is true. An interesting observation was a side effect which I am sure the auther had not thought is “gossips and goes about passing conventional judgments on current events”, isn’t that tells a lot about blogging. 😀 And am I doing the same thing. This is an archived entry from Jroller. The first blogging tool I ever used.</a> Welcome to your Roller weblog! 2002-03-22T16:08:13+00:00 Go to the Edit-Weblog page, delete this weblog entry, and make your own first post. This is an archived entry from Jroller. The first blogging tool I ever used.</a>