Just For Kicks

Ubuntu - installing and using lxsplit

2008-09-27T16:39:00.003-04:00

Ever used HJSplit for file-splitting and joining? It supports multiple platforms and all are compatible with each other. While there is no HJSplit yet for Ubuntu, there is "lxsplit" which is the linux equivalent of HJSplit.

Here's how you install lxsplit on your Ubuntu, fairly straightforward.

1. Download and install these two Debian packages (using GDebi Package Manager or deb)

lxsplit deb package (command line)
gtksplit deb package (GUI)

2. Install 2 more libraries, libgtk2.1 and libgtk2.1-common, using Synaptic Package Manager

3. You're ready to use - just type gtklxsplit in the command line and it opens up a easy to use GUI window that allows you to join and split files.

paddu@home:~$ which gtklxsplit
/usr/local/bin/gtklxsplit
paddu@home:~$ gtklxsplit &

Just as HJSplit, lxsplit also uses the .001, .002 , etc. convention for the extenstions after splitting the files. So, files split with HJSplit in Windows can be joined together using lxsplit in Linux, and vice-versa.

You will find these tools very handy especially when downloading/uploading huge files from/to the Internet. The storage websites like Rapidshare, MegaUpload, etc, all have size limitations per file uploaded for Free accounts. Most people use HJSplit (or lxsplit in our world!) to circumvent these restrictions. Enjoy.

MOSS to power Olympics portal

2008-08-17T22:21:00.003-04:00

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server will be powering the search engine on a portal that more than thousands of people will use to access information about the Beijing 2008 Olympics.

Cool. Good win for Microsoft and MOSS.

IBM introduces eDiscovery to expand its Enterprise Content Management Solutions

2008-08-17T21:56:00.003-04:00

Over and beyond FileNET and Content Manager On Demand, IBM just introduced its new enterprise content management software IBM eDiscovery for its clients to meet legal discovery requirements. It is intended to help organizations to proactively take control of electronically stored information across the enterprise and help reduce eDiscovery costs and improve responsiveness to litigation.

It is also expected to integrate with IBM (or FileNET's ?) records management technology.

In industries like healthcare, auto insurance, financial services, which are regulated and are subject to litigations from time to time, eDiscovery and records management are key to success and reduce the costs of litigation. IBM, which is a big player in the ECM sector, with this product, is in line with taking things a step forward in the electronic documents world.

Google maps blooper! Russia invades Georgia - Atlanta ! ???

2008-08-17T21:30:00.003-04:00

Google Maps, when used in an Associated Press Report about the Georgia conflict (that's the Georgia near Russia of course) got mixed up and used the Georgia in the United States. Yeah, right. And this is the image they had in the report

I tried Google Maps for "russians invade georgia" as my search string and this is what I get still.

I think journalists will remember and laugh over this for a while. Google goofies.

Heights of security - using SMS to unlock public toilets in Finland

2008-08-17T21:19:00.004-04:00

That's what it's come down to. In response to an increase in arson and damage to public isolated roadside toilets, the transport authority in Finland has come up with a solution (stupid ? but seems to work) where the user needs to SMS "open" (in Finnish) to a short code to open the door and use the toilet.

The solution is as stupid as breaking into a public toilet and damaging it. Seems to work though, since they installed it in Feb 2008, or at least that's what they claim.

Smart self-service scales on the radar for future grocery stores

2008-08-17T20:53:00.004-04:00

German researchers have developed new self-service scales able to automatically recognize fruit or vegetables placed on them. As says the lead scientist, 'The scales automatically recognize which fruit or vegetables are to be weighed and ask the customer to choose between only those icons that are relevant,' such as various kinds of tomatoes. These scales are equipped with a camera and an image evaluation algorithm which compares the image with other ones stored in its database. These scales are now being tested in about 300 supermarkets across Europe

I think this is cutting edge. Useful ? Certainly, yes. Profitable ? Well, I'm not sure how much grocery stores would be willing to pay for this feature. But again, I'm not a big self-service guy when it comes to grocery-shopping, primarily because most often I cannot get it to work upto satisfaction and ease. I have to call somebody. Plus, I think entire grocery shopping should be done online, although I still end up visiting the store at least every week, because we're not there yet. Also, I don't see big lines in the self service stations which means the idea still hasn't taken off big. I do see value for grocery stores to go self-service or even enforce them for their customers - saves labor, time and money.

So, I guess grocery stores still need to do a better job in selling their self-service lines rather than labored billing lines. Maybe offer a discount for a while? or some free coupons ?. On the flip side, these smart scales that are being researched on are a good idea and may make things easier for the consumers to check out faster and easier. Adoption period ? Not very near, IMO...let's see...The question is - when would you be ready to pick a grocery store over another because it has a smart self-service scale and makes checkout easier ?

Bill Clinton sings about being back in the White House!

2008-03-22T00:40:00.002-04:00

No, just a prize-winning animation of that...;)

Do not miss the cartoon

Gov. Richardson endorses Obama ; Clinton tries her cheapshot!

2008-03-21T22:40:00.004-04:00

Gov. Bill Richardson from New Mexico, tha nation's only hispanic governor, today appeared with Obama at a campaign event in Portland, thereby endorsing him. Richardson dropped out of the Democratic presidential race in January. I think this is a great win for Obama, because this is certainly going to improve his stake with the hispanic population in the country, for whom Clinton has been the favorite so far. And that's probably why Clinton should be sweating it out.

However, what surprises or annoys me the most in this thing is Clinton, who was also equally wooing Richardson's endorsement upto this point, on seeing this new endorsement, instead totally switched gears and has announced that Richardson's endorsement is not quite big a deal. Ha! You know what that sounds to me like? you see the girl you want walk away with another guy and you console yourself saying you wouldn't have dated her anyway! I think that was a total desperate cheapshot from Clinton. But hey, it's politics we're dealing with.

Nevertheless, I think this is a great move for Obama's White House race.

NME Prize Disbursement - $2.1 M dollars!!!

2008-03-09T14:29:00.004-04:00

Got this mail today from National Magazine Exchange (NME) saying that I've won or am eligible for (was not clear) for $2.1M dollars as a sweepstake. It also said that the winner will be paid as 30 annual installments of $70,000.00.

Haha! Looks good? Just another scam. Such scams normally give an -800 number and ask you to call back, don't even think to taking it further and doing it. My letter goes straight to the trash, there is nothing called free money. Be careful.

One way to check on these numbers is to go to http://www.800notes.com and try to see if there is a match for the number you were asked to call, or you received a call from, in one of their forums and confirm that it could be a scam.

Important day for ECM!

2008-02-28T22:07:00.005-05:00

(1) R.H. Donnelley - the company behind Yellow Pages, drops 48% this evening. That means, they lost almost half of their company's market value in one day! That's some heavy selling!
Do you still use Yellow Pages? If you answered yes, you're probably among the last few ones to do so. People are moving more towards managing digital content, indexing and searching, and away from paper.

(2) AbitibiBowater, Inc. (ABH) - the 3rd largest pulp and paper company in North America and 8th largest in the world, also reported a Q407 loss of $250 M, with losses in both newsprint paper and specialty paper segments widening from a year before. Stock down 10%.

With more and more industries going paperless, like the news and magazines industry for example, there is more scope for ECM related products for scanning, e-faxing, ingestion, archival and retrieval of electronic documents, etc. The losses that these two big companies reported for Q407 clearly point in the direction of this trend. The Auto Insurance industry is also starting to make inroads into going paperless, if you've started receiving all your documents via email from your insurance provider.

AIG posts largest quarterly loss ever

2008-02-28T21:14:00.004-05:00

Reuters Uncut

American International Group (AIG) Inc. today posted their largest quarterly loss ever when they reported their Q4 2008 earnings. They hugely, hugely missed the Street's expectations and reported a $5.29 billion or $2.08 a share loss, as compared to a profit of $3.44 billion or $1.44 a share during the year-ago quarter.

While we would attribute it to write-down of derivatives exposed to bad mortgage investments, closer analysis shows that if they exclude capital gains, losses and hedging activities, they still had a Q4 loss of $3.2 billion or $1.25 a share, as compared to analyst expectations of a $0.15 loss a share.

Their overall 2007 Annual Net Income dropped around 56% from $14.0 billion to $6.2 billion. More breakdown details from their Q407 financial reports that they released today, according to their different segments -

A. General Insurance : --2.9% to $2.11 billion (compared to Q406)
a. Domestic Brokerage Group (DBG): +14.1% to $1.66 billion
b. Personal Lines : from +$79 million in Q406 to --$184 million in Q407
- California wild fires
- unfavorable loss reserve development in prior accident years - primarily in agency auto
- increase in current year accident loss ratio
- transaction and integration costs in acquisition of minority interest, 21st Century Group.
c. United Guaranty Corporation (UGC) : From +$27 million operating profit in Q406 to operating loss of --$348 million in Q407
d. Foreign General : +2.2% to $805 million in Q407

B. Life Insurance and Retirement Services : Overall - Increased 9.2% to $2.66 billion
a. Domestic Life Insurance (+)
b. Domestic Retirement Services (-)
c. Foreign Life Insurance and Retirement Services (flat)

C. Financial Services - $10.25 billion operating LOSS (-)
a. Aircraft Leasing (+)
b. Capital Markets (---------------------------)
c. American General Finance, AGF (-)
d. AIG Consumer Finance Group (-)

D. Asset Management : --11.8% to $458 million

E. Other Operations : $400 million loss compared to $414 million loss in Q406

So, anyway - it seemz like the loss was distributed across all their segments, but heavily stemming from their Capital Markets segment. Other segments of interest to me, like Personal Lines, also reported huge losses, although they were positive last year on that. I don't know what they include in "Other Operations", but it looks like they are consistent in their losses in that segment - time to retire? Although it is nice to see that they've got their portfolio diversified with various insurance products (that's how they got to where they are now!) and hence were able to balance their risks/losses, I expect some spin-offs to come up soon, considering that they've been performing poorly in almost all the segments. Maybe they have been stretching it too far. Maybe it's time.

Shares fell 2.9% in the after-market trading, after having lost 4% in regular day trading.

Hillary is like an inverted yield curve with liquidation threat

2008-02-20T21:36:00.007-05:00

...says supply-side economist and television personality Larry Kudlow (CNBC: Kudlow and Company,weekdays 7 pm EST). I thought that was a pretty interesting analogy. Larry says, and I agree completely, Hillary Clinton is finished. She needs to win in both Texas and Ohio in the upcoming caucuses. Although she has a chance in TX because of the strong hispanic population there, she does not stand a chance in OH. Obama has knocked her off. All her campaign investments gone, nevertheless she gave an interesting and tough, I must admit upto now, fight for the Democratic candidate. At the Republican side, McCain seems to be sailing smooth. In the last 10 years, Democrats have won the election only 3 times. Can Obama pull it off this year?

And also goes down hopes of John Mack, Chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley, behind his stupidity in endorsing Clinton, although her campaigns were not pro-business. Mack's organization was hit bad by the credit market sluggishness and now will pay the price for the Clinton factor.

Faxing thro' OpenOffice.org

2008-02-12T20:43:00.000-05:00

Faxing made easy through OpenOffice, without the need for a win-modem. I haven't tried it yet on my Ubuntu, but recently I bought a Brother 4-in-1, and am certainly inspired to try setting that up for fax through my OpenOffice, it's the question of time. Will keep you posted if I succeed.

But here's how to do it anyway - on Linux Journal

Things get worse for Allstate

2008-02-12T17:25:00.001-05:00

On January 30th, Allstate reported their Q4 earnings in which they stated that their profit dropped almost 37% on higher catastrophe losses and increased costs. Net income was $760 million, or $1.36 a share, compared with $1.21 billion, or $1.93 a share, in Q4 2006.

Revenue declined 1 percent to $8.99 billion, from $9.1 billion a year earlier.

So that means their Profitability Ratio (Net Income / Revenue) fell by 58.3% from 0.133 (13.3%) to 0.084 (8.4%). That's certainly not good news for Allstate.

Allstate said unrealized losses from mortgage and asset-backed securities totalled $502 million due to illiquidity in those markets. Write-downs on those investments were $82 million.

I took a deeper look at their Q4 financials. Their Property-Liability combined ratio was 95.9 (vs 85.7 Q4 2006), and if they exclude their catastrophe losses, their combined ratio falls down to 88.6 (vs 84.3 Q4 2006). For Q4 2007, their combined ration consisted of:
- Claims and claims expense ratio - 69.6 (vs 60.6 in Q4 2006)
- Expense ratio - 26.3 (vs 25.1 in Q4 2006 - so not much change here, that is good)

Property-Liability premiums written declined 0.7% from Q4 2006, reflecting :

(a) growth in standard auto (+1.5% WPs and +0.9% in #PIFs) and
(b) decline in homeowners (-1.3% WPs and -3.4% in #PIFs)

Well, (b) was mainly due to catastrophe management actions including the increased cost of the catastrophe reinsurance program. Some more interesting numbers caught my attention, but these could be equally impacting for all players in the auto insurance fight.

(a) Standard auto property damage frequencies increased 2.8%. And, paid severity increased 2.2%
(b) Bodily injury gross claim frequencies decreased 2.8%, compared to Q4 2006. BUT, paid severities increased 9.3%

So, (b) brings out a nice trend that the severity paid per claim for bodily injuries has increased drastically compared to Q4 2006.

Anyway, what does it mean to you? If you're an Allstate customer, there's only one thing you can expect in 2008 as a logical derivation from their current reports. Your premiums could very well go much higher! They have to do the needful to survive and continue to operate. So, if you may, take the cue and do the needful too...

A mad ALLSTATE customer says...

2008-02-12T17:17:00.000-05:00

"...........

I have been a loyal client of the [name removed] (Allstate Representative) in Colorado for over three years. The one time that I actually called her to make changes to my policy, she hangs up on me.

Allstate is more than happy to take your money but when it comes to customer service, they are horrible at it......."

For the full story, visit My3cents here.

It is because of these kind of stories that I think, 15 minutes may save you 15% or more on car insurance and then this is what you expect to pay later!

Breaking news! Another critical ubiquitous Blackberry RIM outage!

2008-02-11T20:15:00.000-05:00

They are not the almighty! They need to fail too, only that everytime their outages hit the headlines, it ends up being majorly critical!

Research In Motion had a critical severity universal outage this afternoon for their Blackberry email. Members from Verizon, Cingular ATT, or T-mobile or be it any - if you're using a Blackberry, you wouldn't be able to get to your email. They have no estimate on the cause, how many people have been affected or when services will be restored. Certainly it's not going to do well on their already sinking stock...

More on The Guardian.

Cultural thing?

2008-02-11T19:36:00.000-05:00

US President George W Bush holds hands w/ Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah while walking past some blue bonnets at his Crawford Ranch, 25th April 2005

Force India launches VJM01..for lack of better names

2008-02-11T19:24:00.001-05:00

I was not sure if I didn't like the team name Force India, but am certain I don't like the car name VJM01 named after the sponsor Vijay Mallya, which is a repainted Spyker , although Ferrari-powered. Can't they think of something else? VJM01 ? blah blah...

However, the latest 2008 car to join the Formula One tracks was launched in Mumbai, India and I look forward to the season start already and see how this car performs, with Fisichella behind its wheels!

Autoblog posted on it too

3 Industry trends to change Web Content Management in 2008

2008-02-10T20:21:00.000-05:00

Sitescore, the leading provider of .NET Web Content Management system, based on their research and customer experience, recently announced that three major trends are driving how enterprises are better leveraging web content management to create more compelling websites and provide better customer interaction.

(1) Integration of Web CMS into the Enterprise
(2) Growth of .NET Framework
(3) Adoption of Mobile computing

White paper summary - What Legal Wants

2008-02-10T19:32:00.000-05:00

I read this white paper sponsored by Contoural, Inc. called, "What Legal Wants...and 7 things IT can do to meet Legal's needs". Here is the summary, in relevance to the Insurance industry and enterprise content management.

Nearly all companies in the course of regular business activities become the target of lawsuits, which vary from simple employee wrongful termination to major litigations such as class-action lawsuits. Litigations, in fact, are a reality of doing business. In the Auto Insurance industry, a huge portion of the lawsuits that the companies face comes from their Claims division, as one may expect. The explosion of electronic documents, along with new regulations, new trends in litigation discovery and how end users handle documents are forcing organizations to re-think their document retention and discovery strategies. According to a recent study from UC Berkeley, more than 96% of all information of an enterprise is in digital format and even 70% of all paper documents are copies of electronic documents.

The different kinds of Electronically Stored Information (ESI) -

I can tell in the Auto Insurance industry, we manage (scan, index, archive and retrieve) all these classes of documents which prevail as a result of the complexity of this data-driven industry.

What is Discovery?

Discovery is the process in which both parties in a lawsuit discover relevant information concerning a case. Ordered by the court during the initial phases of a lawsuit, discovery can be required both of the plaintiff and the defendant. A business that receives a discovery request that calls for the production of electronic and other documents is obligated to make a reasonable effort to search its records for responsive communications.

"Spoliation" - is the term used by courts to describe the improper destruction of evidence, including email and messages. Companies are guilty of spoliation if they destroy evidence like company records relevant to a litigation with the purpose or intent of preventing the other party from using the evidence against them. Spoliation can occur through a "conscious" decision and also unconsciously through inactivity to prevent destruction of email.

Relevant changes to Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP)
The FRCP are a body of rules focussed on governing court procedures for managing civil lawsuits in United States. Here are some of the changes related to discovery that went into effect on December 1, 2006.

As it is obvious from the above summary the importance that IT plays in working with Legal to ensure smooth and reliable discovery like archiving, maintaining proper records retention strategies, and the actual electronic discovery process in the event of a lawsuit. In addition, according to Contoural, here are 7 things that IT can do to meet Legal's needs
(1) Create fast, effective litigation hold processes
(2) Educate Legal on archival capabilities of the IT organization
(3) Find and retrieve documents in native format
(4) Create and update an ESI survey data map
(5) Partner with Legal in creating the document retention policy
(6) Disable PST files and other forms of underground archival
(7) Create process for deleting older email and files that are not under hold or needed for compliance or business processes

By helping Legal with these activities, IT will move from a reactive state to a state of litigation readiness.

Gartner lists Attenex, Aungate, Dataflight, MetaLincs, Summation as some of the key vendors of E-Discovery software. EMC, IBM FileNet, HummingBird, Open Text are some of the top players in the much more complicated Records Management product which enables organizations to create the retention schedules and automate the management of their records retention policies. Since these products are very expensive and mostly have license-based costing, it depends on the companies health and IT investment strategy to go for these!

The ECM Market & major vendors

2008-02-10T14:10:00.000-05:00

According to Gartner, ECM is a $2.9 billion market (wow! that's how big it is) in 2007, merely based on worldwide software revenues. They predict that the market size would grow at a CAGR of 12.9% through 2011. So, there's lots coming in this industry. Some vendors choose to specialize in some specific segments like Records Management or BPM and are successful niche players in those markets. Other big names like IBM (and now Microsoft - through its Sharepoint MOSS 2007 product) are trying to establish themselves as leaders in the ECM market. Below you may find Gartner's Magic Quadrant for ECM

Copyright Gartner

Gartner's hype cycle on ECM

2008-02-10T14:06:00.000-05:00

Copyright Gartner

These are the various technologies that fall under the umbrella of ECM. Different organizations, depending on the industry, their size, their ability to invest in IT, their annual budgets, etc. implement a subset of these components.

Bored enough to do a home experiment?

2008-01-28T18:58:00.000-05:00

Do you know what happens when molten potassium chlorate reacts with sugar? Just try putting in a tiny gummy bear inside a vial containing some of it....

More music..free...and on-demand

2008-01-27T17:48:00.000-05:00

Free and on-demand music on the web is certainly one of the big contemporary crazes, and it seems to be reaching new heights in 2008.

(1) Last.fm - was relaunched last week, and I registered (free) over the weekend. They seem to be having a pretty huge collection of songs and these are mostly full tracks, unlike Lala. The best thing I like about Last.fm is that its player works just fine in Firefox, unlike most of the online radio stations which work only in IE. Their playlist capabilities is not very intuitive - I still haven't been able to figure out how to play songs from my playlist in order, rather than shuffle - and how to create multiple playlists. It looks like if I remove songs from my one and only (so far) playlist, I need to find those songs again if I like to listen to them sometime next week. It doesn't store more than one playlist. That is pretty primitive I think. But their collection is good, I could find almost everything I wanted this weekend, but certain famous bands like Black Sabbath and Floyd, I was surprised to notice, had more previews than full tracks, and that's what I hated about Lala, but nevertheless Last.fm is much better. I believe I could also embedd the playlist into my Blogger, but I haven't tried that yet.

Unique listeners jumped 85% from the previous week on the day of the launch. And they stuck around: The next day, unique visitors were again up 80% over the previous week.

(2) QTrax: This is another name that hit the press this week. QTrax is the long-delayed, much awaited, first legal P2P music sharing service that is expected to launch this week. But there already is a lot of controversy around the launch. QTrax has announced that all four major music labels, including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, EMI, and Sony-BMG are on-board and that it can offer for free close to 5 million songs that Apple iTunes SELLS today on their music store. However, WMG has declined involvement with QTrax, so that could result in a potential lawsuit soon after the launch (midnight today!!). I'll be curious to see how many downloads happen tonight.

(3) Seeqpod: This is a web crawler that allows you to search for playable songs. This is a great search engine, but has several limitations.
(a) As you may think, it depends largely on file names that the web page owners have used for the file that they've uploaded. I tried searching for Black Sabbath and I got tons of files,most of which were called Black_Sabbath.mp3. So until I started listening to the songs there was no way that I could know what song it is. Some were the actual Black Sabbath song, some weren't.
(b) It listed like 20 copies of the same song, doesn't attempt at uniqui'ng them out.
(c) Doesn't list duration - so I can't know if it is a preview or the full track. That's where Last.fm was much better, but I understand the two sites have a different purpose.

Seeqpod is a very useful service, but it has a long way to go, it still is in Beta.I wasn't too happy with the search experience.But already, is is not left out of the controversies. WMG label has just filed a lawsuit against Seeqpod. This is very similar to the Viacom-Youtube case.

The bottomline of this post, is that there's a lot of activity, various kinds, going on in offering free music to the world. Some may succeed, some may crash due to the controversies. At the end, music will certainly be a winner, and so will open sharing.

World's largest sculpture

2008-01-27T17:27:00.000-05:00

Q: Which is the world's largest sculpture?
A: Mt. Rushmore, SD, U.S.A

Mount Rushmore National Memorial, near Keystone, South Dakota, is a monumental granite sculpture that represents the first 150 years of the history of United States with 60 feet sculptures of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

It was a $1M project when it was first constructed in 1941 by sculptor Gutzon Borglum, to pep up the tourism industry in South Dakota. However, the recent renovations which ended in the 90's costed the government $50M. Mt. Rushmore is considered to be in the list of Man-Made Seven Wonders of the world, along with others like the Golden Gate bridge (CA), Hoover dam (CO river), etc., and I don't see why not.....

Can I have a top 15?

2008-01-26T18:23:00.000-05:00

I thought I'll take a stab at my all time favorite (so far) top-15 songs. As you'd imagine, it was much tougher exercise than I thought it would be...but I think I'm pretty accurate.

15. Sex Type Thing - Stone Temple Pilots
14. Man in the Box - Alice in Chains
13. Have a cigar - Pink Floyd
12. Walk on water - Ozzy
11. Stairway to Heaven - Led Zeppelin
10. Free Falling - Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
9. Mr. Crowley - Ozzy
8. Sweetest Goodbye - Maroon 5
7. Coming Undone - Korn
6. Shiver - Maroon 5
5. Evolution - Korn
4. I don't wanna stop - Ozzy
3. N.I.B - Black Sabbath
2. Boulevard of Broken Dreams - Green Day
1. Smells like Teen Spirits - Nirvana

Great pictures and hilarious captions from Macworld '08

2008-01-20T20:42:00.000-05:00

From the Borkware miniblog.

Click here to view the picassaweb album.

This is one conference I want to make it to, in the years to come. Phew!

Save Windows XP? Save yourself first!

2008-01-20T20:25:00.000-05:00

Around 3 years back, I had a good friend of mine, apparently working on Windows XP team, quit Microsoft Corporation. He made a good choice to pursue something that would be more useful for his career, rather than developing something that no one knew when it was going to launch, or whether it was going to launch at all
! We remember so well the innumerous times when Microsoft had delayed the launch of Windows XP against its promises to the public and computer manufacturers, due to bad planning and unforeseen complexities I would expect.

Within just a few years, Microsoft has now announced that it will stop selling Windows XP by June 30th, 2008. They still have the benefit of dictatorship mainly because of their monopoly in the Operating System market, but nevertheless, this is definitely not going to help the computer manufacturers like Dell and HP, nor enterprise corporations for their huge investments in XP environments. Millions of people, those who use XP, claim no reason to shift to Vista, nor are they happy about Microsoft's sad strategies.

However, there are some useless campaigns like the Info World's Save Windows XP campaign, where they ask for Windows XP users to sign the petition to Microsoft to not force its user base to migrate to Vista. I believe that Info World is just ruining its own reputation by hosting this campaign, although I understand that such petitions are the craze these days and they've just fallen prey to another of those. Individual users and enterprises must at least now start believing in open source and not continue to fall prey to the strategic gimmicks of Microsoft. They are going to do that forever, replace one version with another and then force the users and corporations to migrate, resulting in unnecessary costs for the information technology infrastructures.

People, look beyond Windows. Save yourself, not XP!

Firefox starts to pick up market share...

2008-01-20T20:15:00.000-05:00

Co-Firefox Lovers and Users, here is some good news on the Browser trends over the last couple of years. When there was only one browser in the market, which was IE, people had to use it. That is not the case anymore, with Firefox and Safari slowly starting to eat into the IE market. The scars of Microsoft IE are starting to get exposed, as Microsoft has been losing its anti-trust lawsuits in the EU especially for unfair competition by bundling its IE browser (and its Windows Media Player) along with its Microsoft Windows operating system.

Good moves ahead for Firefox, with close to 20% market share now. Way to go!

More comments on the Wall Street frenzy

2008-01-20T19:26:00.000-05:00

Last week, I posted on the financial sector crisis in the last quarter and in this month, here are more comments on the same from the Silicon Alley Insider -

"In all my years in financial services, I have never seen it this bad," one high-powered securities industry lawyer told The Post. "I have owners of small firms calling me up saying their liabilities now exceed their assets, which means by law they are required to close down."

- The lawyer said he had two 50-something Wall Street guys call him this week, who, he said, "had lost hope, crying on the phone." "It is call after call after call like these," he said.

- A trader at the New York Stock Exchange could not name a Wall Street firm that did not cut staff this week.

- "It is a bloodbath," said the NYSE trader. "Firms are cutting jobs in all the money losing departments, which includes the troubled sub-prime and mortgage areas."

- John Challenger, CEO of outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, predicts more layoffs in the financial services sector in the coming weeks unless Wall Street activity picks up soon.

Yahoo!'s turn to cut jobs?

2008-01-20T18:59:00.000-05:00

Nothin' officially announced yet. But a tipster believes Yahoo! is going to cut around 1500-2000 jobs over the next couple of weeks, and that they already have the list prepared. That's how RIFs work. The "list" is reportedly the product of a Q4 project in which all group heads were asked to look at redundancies and create their own lists of potential cuts. All the group-level lists have now been turned in to corporate.

The decision to go ahead with lay-off is said to be largely dependent on stock price: Yahoo's stock trading in the low $20s has gotten Jerry's and president Sue Decker's attention. Jerry will feel vulnerable if the stock goes into the teens and will try whatever he can to prop it up. He's not ready to give up the CEO job, sell-out, or shop the company around at this point. This is a very interesting comment. Is Yahoo! in a position to be considered for buyout? By who? Google? Amazon?

CEO Jerry Yang is also expected to announce Q4 earnings on the 29th of this month. Is he going to club the 2 announcements?

Yahooo has been doing well, and in fact better than Google, in terms of traffic to online properties, says ComScore. But Google surpasses Yahoo! in converting those traffic to profits, and that's what matters. Microsoft is way behind these two companies in the business of online search and advertising and is desperately trying a few acquisition strategies to catch up.

I have quite a few friends from Netzero who joined Yahoo in the recent times. Hope all is good.

Are you in good hands?

2008-01-16T21:30:00.000-05:00

Not that I want to pick on Allstate again, (There is always Microsoft to pick on perpetually), but are these actually good hands?

Here is a story from the West Virginia records, on Insurance Litigation.

"One night, the water supply line to a commode burst, and water flowed into their home or several hours. Thurman Townsend had to move his wife out to the car and spent hours cleaning the mess.

The next day, he contacted Allstate, his insurer. Charleston attorney Bobby Warner said Townsend contacted the company several times over the next week, but that the first adjuster didn't visit the home for two months.

Then, Warner said, the adjuster spent just 20 minutes looking over the damage.

"It was a rough eyeball inspection," Warner said. "They didn't offer a penny then, and an offer of only $2,000 came about a year later."

On top of that, Warner said Allstate closed the Townsend case without permission.

Townsend finally was rewarded for the headache of that night May 2 when a Marshall County jury awarded him about $1.3 million in compensatory and punitive damages.

Allstate - not ALL State anymore

2008-01-16T20:13:00.000-05:00

#2 AllState has been suspended from writing auto insurance policies in the giant state of Florida, by the FL Insurance Commissioner Kevin McCarthy. This is in response to AllState refusing to comply fully with a subpoena from the state. They failed to turn in the information that the state had requested on hurricane and other property coverage rates.

This just re-emphasizes the complexities in the Auto Insurance industry - which is regulated not even by the Fed, but by each state! The state regulations even range upto and differ from each other in the capitalization of some of the alphabets in the print communication sent to the customers. That's how rigid the industry is. Every auto insurance company is mandated to report their rates and algorithms behind the rates to the state. Failure to comply with this, is like defrauding on earnings reporting. In the latter, you attract accounting scandal-suits or anti-trust lawsuits, while in the former, you're prevented from running new business as in the case of AllState.

Nevertheless, am I thrilled about AllState being in this condition? From the bottom of my heart. FL is a $1.9 Billion annual business for AllState. That's gone (at least until their lobbyists work something out). PLUS, now they have to undergo re-branding efforts and related expenses right? I mean, in an industry that is built on trust and customer satisfaction, who would believe them if they call themselves ALLState now? I would suggest something like "ALMOST ALLState". Oops, but then they got to change their tagline, perhaps to something like, "You're in good hands, USUALLY - except in FL where we got butter fingers now"

Entering the ECM disney world...

2008-01-15T21:43:00.000-05:00

AIIM says: Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists.

Where there is data, there there is ECM. It's as broad as that. If you're working in an industry in which communication to and from the customer is key, and if you serve more than, say 10,000 customers, you're employing some ECM solution or the other without your knowledge. In almost all of the Fortune 500 companies in today's world, there must be at least one ECM vendor that helps to digitize content, store it, manage it and retrieve it.
We're no longer in a world where we can manually index, sort and search documents and photos, etc. Automation is key, and that is what ECM is all about.

ECM is a separate industry by itself, led by players like IBM FileNet, ASG, Microsoft, Adobe, etc. There are at least 20 different segments in the ECM industry, and each player competes in its own segment. Each large organization (mostly in Insurance, Healthcare, and other Financial Services, which are document-driven), employs various pieces of these ECM technologies, as per their need and investment abilities. Remember, IT is a cost-center in these industries.

More to come on the various pieces/segments of the ECM industry. Stay tuned!

Microsoft buys FAST for $1.2 B

2008-01-15T20:42:00.000-05:00

Microsoft buys the financially/legally troubled FAST (FAst Search and Transfer - recursive acronym ?) for their Enterprise Search Platform (ESP). FAST is a Norwegian-based company founded in 1999, and is traded on the Oslo Stock Exchange. ESP includes a software framework for efficient indexing of searchable content, along with a series of search-derivative applications (SDAs) that could be used for online publishing and business intelligence.

It certainly is a good move for Microsoft. At last they realize that they are not good at search and cannot compete with the likes of Yahoo! and Google, and decide to indulge in a buyout strategy. They're paying 42% above the closing price a couple of days back when they placed the bid. The deal is expected to close in Q2 this year.

It's a pity that, they still do not even own the domain http://www.fast.com yet, as when I tried to look it up, it currently redirected to the website of another communications provider called PAETEC.

2008 - not going to be good for 'Jobs'

2008-01-15T20:14:00.000-05:00

Which Jobs? Well, both.

(1) Last week, I just posted on the Jobs in the Financial/Banking sector taking a hit, and Citigroup today again announced another 4200 jobs cut, and they expect reductions in work force all through this year too. They reported a record $9.x Billion Q4 loss.

(2) On the other hand, expectations were high on the other Jobs - Steve Jobs. Undoubtedly, he is one of my most admired CEOs of today's tech world. He inaugurated the Macworld 2008 Conference this week. Same day last year, he stole the show with the launch of the iPhone. This year, he disappointed the audience and analysts too. He reported around 4 M iPhone sales last year! Wow! Isin't that great? Unfortunately no, because we expected 5 M!. Their only new product that he launched this time is their Macbook Air. It sure is so thin, but nothing earth-breaking or mind-blowing. Apple stocks tumbled after the inaugural address at the conference.

Simple hack to increase #posts/page in Blogger

2008-01-14T00:15:00.000-05:00

Q: How to increase the # posts per page in Blogger?

A: Blogger defaults to 20 posts per page. There is a simple hack to increase the #posts. Open your customized Blogger template and wherever the home page or label/tag page is being submitted, add the name=value pair, "max-results=200" as a HTTP GET variable. For example, if Home page is HREF'd to http://lifeisjfk.blogspot.com, add the GET variable to the URL in the anchor tag as, href="http://lifeisjfk.blogspot.com/?max-results=200"

UOL withdraws Classmates IPO

2008-01-13T21:13:00.000-05:00

Slightly old news, but for some of my ex-colleagues while I was at United Online (Netzero) who haven't caught it, they have withdrawn the IPO for wholly-owned subsidiary - Classmates.com - which is European equivalent of America's Facebook.

I'm not sure of the reason, but must talk to some of my friends out there, although I'm sure it must be in the best interests of the shareholders given the current market conditions. The company was expecting to incur around $4.5 M to $5.5 M in Q4 2007, in transaction-related costs.

Intel undermines $100 laptop initiative, but Tata Motors pulls it of with its $2500 car

2008-01-13T16:25:00.000-05:00

Last week, Intel chickened out from its promise of delivering to the world a $100 laptop, mainly targeted at the impoverished masses, in an attempt to bring Information Technology to the rural population and school children in the developing worlds. They sure should be ashamed out themselves. These kind of false promises do catch the media attention, especially if you're talking about non-profit, global causes, etc. It shows that they didn't plan well before they announced, or something screwed up with the plan. If it was a for-profit project, one reason I could see when such projects are terminated pre-maturely is when they decide that it would be a -ve NPV effort to continue the project (that is, they are better off in their losses if they drop their project at this point), and they would consider the investments thus far as sunk costs and drop the project. But in Intel's case, if they categorized it as a non-profit effort, they are worthy enough to be criticized for undermining the distribution and progress of the initiative. Obviously, Professor Nicholas Negroponte, the founder and man behind this initiative, is not too happy with Intel's sudden stance either. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization (owned by both Intel and Prof. Negroponte) is at stake, thanks to Intel.

On the other hand, Tata Motors - one of India's largest automobile manufacturers, has just launched its $2500 (one lakh Indian rupees) car. This "nano" car, as they call it, runs on a 623 cc engine and offers 50 miles per gallon. Can you beat it? To add, it is also much more environment-friendly than most other cars and even motorcycles.
I believe it is 21% bigger inside than a Maruti 800, one of those age-old small Indian cars, but only 80% as long. So, worried about Indian traffic? This is a great leap to save parking space and offers better maneuvering through the Indian traffic. Above all, it is so affordable - the car for the poor!

So, there seems to be a new pattern that is taking shape here. Cheap, inexpensive, but good performing stuff for the people from the developing countries, and those below the poverty line. Some succeed, some try and get out later. Nevertheless, the improvement in technology is a big success!

Banking sector crisis in the last quarter

2008-01-11T22:46:00.000-05:00

We all know that the banking (credit services, mortgages, investment banking) industry has gone for a toss in the last few months in the midst of the credit/mortgage crisis in the United States. We've seen a lot happen, in the last quarter especially. Some of the big RIFs that I can remember -

(1) 08/2007 - Lehman Brothers cuts 1200 jobs and shuts down its BNC Mortgage Business at a one-off cost of $52 million
(2) 09/2007 - Countrywide Financial slashes 12,000 jobs. Countrywide is the nation's largest subprime lending mortgage company.
(3) 09/2007 - Key Bank slashes 200 jobs, including call center jobs.
(4) 10/2007 - Bank of America, the largest U.S. bank by market value, cuts 3000 jobs, mostly in the Investment Banking division - 10/2007
(5) 10/2007 - Morgan Stanley cuts 600 mortgage jobs
(6) 12/2007 - Washington Mutual slashes dividend and cuts more than 3000 jobs
(7) 01/2008 - National City cuts 900 jobs and slashes dividend by 49%, and stops offering mortgages thro' brokers - 01/2008
(8) 01/2008 - Merill Lynch announces that it may cut upto 1600 jobs (10%) and unveil writedowns of as much as $10 billion from Q4. Merill was the largest underwriter of 2007.
(9) But the worst of all, came from Citigroup in 04/2007, which their then CEO Charles Prince announced that Citi may cut around 45,000 jobs during the year. Yes, he was made to leave the organization (Cramer had been long telling that Chuck should be fired), and given the market condition, there was no one (from outside and inside) willing to take up the job. Can you beat it? I mean, Citigroup is the world's largest bank and no one wants to lead it! Finally, Vikram Pandit, who was with the organization only for 6 months decides to step in and he gets sworn in as the new Citi CEO. Let's wait and watch if he turns around things. Well at least today, he's got the Saudi billionaire prince Alwaleed to invest in the bank, so that's definitely a good move.

So, where does one go if everyone else around is also cutting jobs?

Among the few that survived, is Goldman Sacchs which turned out to have a great record-breaking 2007 reporting $3.17 billion in Q4 profit. One man's meat - another man's poison?

Now, just today, Bank of America announces one of their stupidest bids ever. They've placed a takeover bid of $4.2 billion for the company that probably was the root cause for this whole credit crisis - Countrywide. I agree, it is a good number for such a huge organization, so from that perspective it may be a good bid. Nevertheless, I think it is gamble in the wrong direction - it's assets and stock prices have been continuously deteriorating.

Where is all this heading? Certainly towards a recession in 2008, with oil prices touching $100 / barrel recently to add to market crisis. Will a change in the government add any value to the current situation? The Democrats, Clinton and Obama are looking towards the economy in their campaigns and caucus speeches, but would they just be speeches? What can the government do? What is the Fed doing? Is Bernanke a failure successor to Greenspan? Or can he do anything?

2 more sections to this blog

2008-01-11T22:31:00.000-05:00

Hello Friends,

I'm adding 2 more sections to the blog, which I hope to be continuously updating. They would be
(1) Enterprise Content Management and (2) Auto Insurance. These are certainly two of my chief areas of interest now, as I currently manage the Progressive Content Management group. As I expand my knowledge in these areas, I hope to share them, though on a more generic basis as the section-titles indicate. Continue to read, and hope you enjoy them. Thanks,

Encoding movies in Ubuntu - How?

2007-12-16T19:00:00.000-05:00

Alright, so now I want to convert RM and WMV into AVI. Here's what I did that worked (of course after quite a few experiments)

1. Enable multiverse repository

All the package installations work from repositories. There are a few kinds of repositories depending on the level of security and authority. If you want to follow the GUI approach, open System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager. Go to Settings->Repositories. I think the 'main' and'universe' repositories are enabled by default, but for mencoder we need the multiverse repository. So, enable it and ensure you're connected to the Internet and click on Reload to sync the packages with the repositories.

2. Install mencoder

This can be done easily from the terminal using apt-get, since we've enabled the multiverse repository. So get to the bash and,

$paddu>sudo apt-get install mencoder

This should be done w/o any problems.

3. Add the Medibuntu repository (Multimedia, Entertainment and Distractions in Ubuntu) to the list of APT repositories.

Again, the Medibuntu repository is not included with the default Ubuntu distribution due to copyright, patent, licenses and other issues. We're adding this repository to get two main packages - w32codecs and libdvdcss2 - which are needed my mencoder to perform to conversion.

The repository can be added by the following steps
(a) Get the list using HTTP GET and add it to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/

$paddu> sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/gutsy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

(b) Then, add the GPG key

$paddu> wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update

Now, the codecs would have been installed at /usr/lib/win32 or /usr/lib/codecs

4. Run mencoder with parameters

This is the easy part, but may take a few minutes depending on the size of the file and the input and output audio and video types.

I'm just going to give an example of RM to AVI here -

$paddu> mencoder source.rm -ovc lavc -ffourcc DX50 -oac pcm -o target.avi

ovc - output video codec
oac - output audio codec
ffourcc DX50 - This option is used because although the video is produced in MPEG4 AVI, the default header is FMP4 which is not widely recognized. My IOmega player did not recognize the format (said - Codec not supported) when I first tried the conversion without that option. A header with DX50 claims that the video is DivX 5 (hence MPEG4) compatible and should therefore play on any media player that can play MPEG4 video.

That's it and you're good to go!

Steps 1-3 are just required the first time to set things up. Then on onwards just running step-4 would be sufficient. Even that can me minimized by adding the parameters to the mencoder config file at ~/.mplayer/mencoder.conf

More tutorials on the mencoder options and various other format conversions can be found at Gentoo Wiki

Encoding movies in Ubuntu - Why?

2007-12-16T18:36:00.000-05:00

So much to my heart's content, since it's been quite some time that I've been out of school and don't need that crappy OS on my system (you know what I'm talking about) I upgraded myself from a dual boot of Windows XP and Fedora Core 3, to a single boot Ubuntu. After a lot of self-debating and reading from forums on whether to migrate to Core 8 or Ubuntu, I went with the Gutsy Gibbon 7.x flavor of Ubuntu. The installation was like eating a piece of cheesecake. Almost a single click installation. Even if Microsoft were to reverse its name, they can't beat this. And remember, although I installed it, one can run the OS directly from the CD. Isin't that cool?

I'll write about some of the cool things of Ubuntu later, now I want to talk about how to encode movies in Ubuntu, since I just went through the process. I had bought an Iomega 500 gig Screenplay which is a hard-drive with multimedia playback capability. I bought that so that I can use it as a hard-drive and at the same time connect it via RCA or S-video to my TV and play directly.Reviews on that product to follow later.

Now this player has some limitations, it plays only AVI, MPEG-4 (with Divx 3.x, 4.x, 5.x encoding), and of course, MP3, JPEG and all that. AVIs just played perfect. Now, I wanted to play some .RM and .WMV movies, that my Iomega player wouldn't normally play. That's where MPlayer and MEncoder came to my rescue. MPlayer is the world's best and most-equipped multimedia player, hands down! Just imagine, if I were to switch to Windows, just to substitute the capabilities of MPlayer, I would need at least 10 different players or softwares. All supported here by just one Mplayer with the appropriate codecs. That's the power of open-source. That's the power of Linux. MEncoder is the encoding engine that comes with the MPlayer and separate.

What do you need to do to convert these RM and WMV files into AVI or MPEG, that my player understands? Read on, the how's on the follow up post...

Force India?

2007-11-06T20:17:00.000-05:00

Break through news! Indian business tycoon Vijay Mallya and his Amsterdam partners complete the successful acquisition of Spyker-Ferrari Formula One racing team. This further demonstrates the soaring interest in F1 racing in India, especially the youth, after Narain Karthikeyan drove the Jordan out in 2005.

They've been permitted to change the team name to Force India frm next season. Wow, the Indian sponsors and corporates must be celebrating that. For all Formula One fans, the 2007 season climax was a feast, with Raikonnen claiming the clown in the last couple of seconds in the season, phew! that was some excitement! To add to that, now we hear about Force India. A small step for Mallya, a giant leap for Indian sports...

My terrible horrible iPhone activating experience.....

2007-09-01T11:50:00.001-04:00

While I'm typing this, I'm sitting here listening to some really stupid song on the phone while being on hold with AT&T to activate my iPhone. And I'm frustrated because, I had a simple problem while activating my iPhone (my home address could not be located, for some reason mysterious to me) and I got an email asking me to call an ATT number. I called them, and they said they don't assist iPhone activations!! So they asked me to call 1-800-MYIPHONE. Patience still prevailed. I called them. They said this is an ATT problem and they are going to route me to ATT. But, that's where I came from!!!!

I now understand that these are the problems that you face when two such big companies come together to offer a product or service. Who takes ownership? Who takes responsibility? Hahaha! Simple activation issue. No one knows who's supposed to fix it or find a solution to.

.....waiting......

Alright, so here I am now talking to an ATT customer service agent now...First question after introduction, "So, sir, are you activating your iPhone? " No, my Motorola Razr and I thought I'll call you instead because I like talking to ATT customer service...

Anyway, at least this guy is trying to check what went wrong and is interested in helping me out. Let's see how it goes.

In the meanwhile, I wasn't very satisfied with the iTunes activation process either for my phone. Very simple things that they could have done better or tested better -
- The social security text field had no length limit
- It mandates that I enter a home phone number! For God sake, I'm not breaking the law if I don't have a landline, do I? So I put in my work phone number instead.
- I tried to go back a few screens during the activation process, to refer to some information that I had entered, and I couldn't go forward again. I had to cancel the activation process and repeat the whole process again. Could it get better?

Ok, back to the customer service rep. I'm stil on the phone, and he's not able to help me. He's trying to figure out who he should redirect me to and is probably going to redirect me to the original number I started from.

Hahaha! as I expected, he's asking me to call the 877-800-3701 ATT number that I started from, and he's not able to transfer me there because they have high call volumes at the moment.

Me: "So, that's where I started right, and they asked me to call 1-800-MYIPHONE and they transfered me to you and you're asking me to call the first number I called again!"
ATT agent: {doesn't know what to say...silence for a few seconds and then repeats what he just said} Yes sir, that's the number you have to call, and right now they have high call volumes so you may want to try after some time
Me:{I give up...} 'orite thanks...
ATT: Thank you for calling ATT customer service sir, you have a good day
Me: Thanks, I'm already having a smashing one!

After a few minutes, here I am, calling the ATT 877 number again, and they hang up saying that they have a high call volume and ask me to call later.

So i got through. The welcome message (I didn't probably observe this before) says happily, "Welcome to the iPhone activation system" and the first agent I speak to says again that she cannot assist me and transfered me to another ATT department and the automated IVR asks me to enter my wireless cellular number. Dude, I don't have one yet as I'm trying to activate it, wasn't I clear?? But it doesn't let me go through, so I hang up, give up.

So I don't know what to do, and am sure one out of 50 or 100 might have had this kind of an activation experience, but the fact is I did and I don't like this process. So, I'm going golfing now.

VMware goes public!

2007-08-16T22:15:00.000-04:00

I don't believe I missed this. If you did too, catch their IPO action on Economist.com

VMWare dominates the virtualization programs industry and I just read that investors drove their shares high by 76% on the opening day. I know that technology firms are again adored by investors and venture capitalists, but does this mark the restart of the tech IPO booms? Read more on the Economist.

Simply GDP

2007-08-16T21:59:00.000-04:00

Someone asked me about this today, so I thought will post on it too...

Q: What is GDP and how is a country's GDP estimated?

A: A country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is nothing but a way of measuring the size of its economy. It can be considered as the market value of all goods and services produced within the country in a given time frame.

The famous GDP equation is as follows -

GDP = C + I + G + (X-M)

C -> total Consumption in the country (e.g., food)
I -> total Investment in the country (e.g., construction of a new oil field)
G -> total Government spending in the country (e.g., salaries of civil servants)
X -> total eXports
M -> total iMports

And where to get the numbers to plug into this equation? Wish it were that simple, that is a big course by itself, on what to include and what not to include.

No stopping Ozzy....!

2007-08-12T22:13:00.000-04:00

Hey fella Ozzy and metal fans, I'm sure you've all been indulging in as much head-banging as I've been over the last couple of weeks, when this man, the legendary 59-year old Ozzy Osbourne released his new album after 6 years, Black Rain (Buy it on Amazon here ).
The first two songs, Not Going Away and I Don't Wanna Stop are just out of the world IMO, and pretty much among the best headbangs you can ever get. And as you may see from these two track titles and lyrics, the message is clear. There's no stopping Ozzy, and he wants to stretch it as far as he can!

All my life I've been over the top
I don't know what I'm doing,
All I know is
I Don't Wanna Stop!

Phew! Don't miss it!

Also, catch the Rolling Stone review on Black Rain - where Ozzy says, "I can't believe I'm still here, I should be dead" Yeah, the old guy can't even actually talk, and then suddenly he comes up with such a blowing album. Man, I'm so glad he's still here. There've been times I've wished he was still with Sabbath, but thinking about it, he's given a lot more smashing hits after he left Sabbath in 1979 too, and has sold 50 million individual albums worldwide. WOW, that's something! Mr. Crowley, Walk on Water, Suicide Solution (and the list continues) have always been among my top favorites for a while. However, it is sad to hear him announce his retirement from performing live at the Ozzfest (held together by his son Jack Osbourne) after this year. I missed the opportunity of my lifetime last week when Ozzfest was at Columbus, OH, which is just a couple of hours from where I live. Sadly, I couldn't make it as the stupid thing was on a weekday and I had stuff to take care of at office. I've never see him live! hmmm.......

On the funny side, I was talking to my friend Sheila about it today, and she seems to have got it all against the old guy, hahaha, and particularly disturbed about his biting the head of a live dove intentionally a few years back at the meeting with one of his records executives...So yeah, he's crazy, but also rockin' crazy! Sorry, Sheila, I've tried to and like to keep the dove away from his music..:)

Thanks for reading, that's my tribute to this legend.....

Free People Search with ZabaSearch

2007-08-09T22:24:00.000-04:00

Ever wanted to lookup people in the United States ? Look beyond Yahoo Directory or people.yahoo.com and think Zaba! This engine ZabaSearch.com offers much better and accurate results on people search. It even returns the birth date of the person you're looking up. Plus, it's got a pretty clean interface. Check it out at ZABASEARCH.COM

Thanks to Shankar for pointing me to this. It did help!

Free Running - the sport of tomorrow??

2007-08-08T00:57:00.000-04:00

I met this guy Craig today at the Buddhist temple, who just casually mentioned about Free Running and it intrigued me that I got back home and checked it out. Man, these guys just rule Jackie Chan and the lot out of the race. Crouching Tiger is no match. They just fly like birds. Few more years, and I wouldn't be surprised if this Free Running becomes a professional sport and we see an industry behind it. I'm not sure if they're wearing any special shoes, but they just don't get hurt when they jump from roof to roof.

Here's a sample video on Free Running - watch it and enjoy the action!

And in case it interests you further, these two brothers performing Free Running are a delight to watch....they don't seem to leave any surface untouched..

America's infrastructure gone for a toss, with the Minnesota breakdown

2007-08-02T19:06:00.000-04:00

Here's the update....

Minnesota Interstate 35W bridge breaks down (experts say, due to corrosion), costs 6 lives (counting...)
Minnesota ranked #3 in the country for infrastructure
Ranked #11 by CNBC for business in the Transportation industry
Victims trapped in submerged cars
Not able to use cellphones, as these stupid devices, like Tendulkar, don't serve in emergency situations. They couldn't handle the traffic when everyone reached their cellphones immediately and simply crashed! - Speaks of America's infrastructure again!
Federal government orders all the states to inspect all their bridges IMMEDIATELY

Click here for a slideshow of images of the breakdown from CNBC.com

Victim driver says, "I don't believe I'm alive..." - Check out CNN.com for more coverage on that.

Some more stats that may be eye-openers for the Congressmen, who probably feel it's not a sex appeal to talk about transportation and infrastructure during their campaigns, nor are willing to sufficient spend money on it.

70,000+ (13%) U.S. bridges are structurally deficient
3,871 of these are over 100 years old
$188B - $0.5 Trillion to bring them upto what they should be, and it will take a lifetime
Bridge repair backlog is around $55 B
Fed spends nearly $40B a year on highways and bridges

Alright, if the Minnesota bridges are ranked among the nation's best and this is what happens, I guess everytime now I go on a bridge or a highway, I can't stop my thoughts wander......

Cokexplosion!

2007-07-31T18:03:00.000-04:00

Can you make Coke explode? Watch this, it's too funny. I'm waiting to try this on someone....while I don't want to mess my house up. Maybe the parking lot? :)

Drama at NASA

2007-07-30T22:56:00.000-04:00

NASA has always been among my most admired and respected agencies of the Federal Government, known for its reputation and highly-skilled scientists. The movie Apollo 13, starring Tom Hanks if you haven't seen it, is a true IMAX experience, but in addition, captures the astronomical abilities and leadership skills of these NASA folks both on the shuttle and back down at their Houston center. While I was in TX, I made it a point to visit Houston just to be inside the Johnson Space Center, just for kicks....

However, it is a pity to observe the recent happenings at this great insitution that hosts some of the best mathematical brains in the world.

(1) On at least 2 occasions, NASA astronauts were permitted to fly after drinking heavily, according to a report that was released last Friday by an independent investigation panel. Are you kidding me? While heavily is a relative term and the reports don't quantify it, dude c'mon, what are they flying here...? space shuttles for God sake...although the report also does not mention whether they were flying the space shuttle or were on the training planes. In either case, I don't think anyone would consider it acceptable or pardon the misdeed jeopardizing the flight safety.

(2) To add to their miseries, the space agency is also currently investigating the sabotage of a computer scheduled for delivery to the International Space Station (ISS) during a space shuttle mission next month. Reports say that a worker at a subcontractor deliberately cut the wires on the computer.

I wonder what is happening to the agency and what the government is planning to do to fix these issues, and restore its slowly tarnishing reputation...

The new ultra deep sea driller

2007-07-23T08:05:00.000-04:00

Q: How many people operate the new independent hub by Anadarko Petroleum in Houston, TX?

A: 16 people

That's right! Just 16 people! This is the deepest hub or sea driller ever built, it goes 8000 feet deep. And, it is a $2 billion project - yes, this is a very capital intensive industry, says Anadarko CEO, James Hackett.

CNBC Top U.S State for Business

2007-07-13T12:15:00.000-04:00

Q: Which has been named as America's Top State for Business, by CNBC?

A: Virginia

More information on why...

- Internet capital of the country
- Largest office building in the world
- Largest shipyard in the world
- Unemployment rate - 2.9%
- State's largest industry - Agriculture

Two weaknesses that were noticed for Virginia during the study are Transportation and Cost of Living. But the government is believed to have started addressing the Transportation issue with their intiatives.

And the Top-5 list extends to....

#2 Texas (Go Texas!!!)
#3 Utah
#4 Georgia
#5 North Carolina

My new Wimbledon favorite!

2007-07-07T02:00:00.000-04:00

Alright, you've seen me talk stories about the Champion, Federer, here. This Wimbledon 2007, esp. after the stunning Quarterfinal match between Roddick and this 21 year old 12th seed, Richard Gasquet, this French guy becomes my new favorite. As proclaimed, his backhand is just amazing, and I believe if there's one guy who can beat Federer on grass, it has to be this guy - perfect technique and absolute elegance.

He came back from 2 sets down to beat 3rd seed Andy Roddick 8-6 on the final set, with 93 winners, majority of those coming from his flawless single-handed backhand. The only other player I've seen in recent times play such fluent, effortless single-handed backhand is obviosuly Roger Federer.

I'm all excited to see the semi-final clash at noon on Saturday between Federer and Gasquet, where for the first time I'm going to be supporting someone against Federer. Hmmmm......

Carl Icahn's theory on Management

2007-06-28T10:32:00.000-04:00

Billionaire Carl Icahn was interviewed after the Deal and Deal Makers Conference at the NYSE and here's what he says -

“There are few companies I can’t go in to today and save 30%. A lot of companies are very wasteful.” (Call it the Seinfeld theory of management, after the sit-com famous for being about nothing.)

He is not a big fan of the U.S CEOs, it is quite obvious. However he still had a few good things to say about Motorola where he was denied the right to get on the board after many futile attempts earlier this year. Against many voices that we've heard off late on the PE market, he still predicts that private equity and LBO has peaked.

Watch his interview here -

Mossberg on the iPhone

2007-06-28T10:21:00.000-04:00

Here's the Mossberg Solution on the iPhone -a thorough and comprehensive testing andd review, Walter Mossberg at his best as always...

WSJ Premium content

or catch it on his blog at:
The Mossberg Column archive

I love the way he's simulated the 7 hour phone call on the iPhone, check it out!

Would you fall for this Jam Auction scam?

2007-06-21T11:56:00.000-04:00

Hustlers steal money off gullible people by selling them worthless goods at first. Watch this video and reflect on whether you would be happy or not...:)

And, I think these people can't even go to jail because their customers are giving their money to them out of will. So, there's nothing illegal involved in this scam?

Borsa Italiana to merge with LSE

2007-06-21T01:40:00.001-04:00

Heard something interesting today. We've all been long aware of the fact that Nasdaq has pursued the buy the London Stock Exchange (LSE) at least twice in the recent years. While the bids were being turned down by LSE, now they come up with talks with Borsa Italiana for a smashing merger. This combination would have listed on it, companies valued more than $5.1 trillion!

This is a clear indication of globalisation and consolidation of international financial markets. Exchanges worldwide have never been under such pressure before as they are now , from their shareholders, to merge in order to cut costs and offer a broader range of products at the same time.

We have to wait and see how Nasdaq responds to this. But I think they should still pursue the larger LSE even if this deal with Borsa Italiana works out. The European tinge could add more flavor to Nasdaq.

Microsoft succumbs to Google on antitrust allegation

2007-06-21T01:13:00.000-04:00

In response to complaints from Google, Inc., Microsoft agreed to change its Windows Vista software in advance of a court hearing that will review its compliance with a 2002 antitrust settlement. Haha! Looks like they are getting to be proactive these days on the antitrust front. So, if they knew they were wrong, I'm curious if they are committing these antitrust crimes hoping that competitors don't file them? Well, maybe you have to do such things when you get big.

Google alleges Microsoft that Vista makes it hard for consumers to use rival desktop-search applications provided by Google and others. Microsoft, which denied the claims, however said the company was willing to alter Vista if required. It looks like they've seen and experienced enough of this anttrust stuff - primarily from the Windows Media Player antitrust lawsuit in the EU and now it is desktop search! You might think - is this illegal? No, it is not illegal, but it is unfair competition and does not stand a chance under the antitrust regulations both in the EU and in the US.

As usual, these changes to Vista software are expected to go out with their Service Pack-1 release awaited later this year, which would also include fixes to other security problems and bugs......amidst, of course, other new bugs.....

Prometeus - the Media Revolution

2007-06-19T12:58:00.000-04:00

Fascinating video on the media revolution. It is a futuristic vision of the media industry all the way upto 2050, with some interseting predictions like Google buying Microsoft and Amazon buying out Yahoo! by 2020-2030, which is little over a decade from now. It also talks about Second Life and points out that virtual life is the way of the future.

Hope you like the video

Tax Boost for PE firms going public

2007-06-15T23:58:00.000-04:00

Federal lawmakers on the Senate Finance committee launched a bipartisan bill against the blooming Private Equity market on the eve of the much awaited IPO of Blackstone Group. Historically, when hedge funds and buyout firms which are structured as private partnerships, become publicly traded, they enjoy the benefits of behaving like a corporation but pay taxes at the lower rates of partnerships. This bill introduced in the Senate, changes this agreement by raising the tax rates for private equity firms going public.

"It's unfair to allow a publicly traded company to act like a corporation but not pay corporate tax, contrary to the intent of the tax code."

People involved in the Blackstone IPO said that this bill could hit Blackstone's $40 billion valuation by as much as 20% !! Boy, that is huge and this also means that they may not be able to proceed with the IPO as planned and may have to defer the offering. This bill is definitely a blow to these hot buyout firms like Blackstone and KKR.

Blackstone has been amongst the most prominent PE firm with their audacious deals that range from their $39 billion takeover of the nation's largest ownwr of office buildings namely Equity Office Properties to Freescale Semiconductor. As one would expect, they are already indulging in some extensive lobbying to get a headstart against their rival firms intending to go public.

I think this is a good move and the bill should get passed both in the House and the Senate. It is a totally unfair rainbow that the PE firms are currently enjoying when they go public, unfair against the corporations and other startups going public.....All should be treated on par and taxed at the corporate rates. But will Blackstone going public escape this? Or has the bill been introduced at the right moment to stop it from going public?

NDTV catches Rajnikanth for a quick interview

2007-06-14T12:44:00.000-04:00

After watching the preview of Shivaji with TDP leader Chandrababu Naidu, Rajni was stopped to be interviewed for just a couple of minutes on NDTV. In a nutshell, Rajni says, "If I'm just a king in movies, Amitabh is an emperor, incorrect to compare the two.."

Watch the interview here

LeBron on Etch A Sketch

2007-06-13T00:52:00.000-04:00

With the Spurs leading the Cavs 3-0 in the NBA finals, LeBron still manages to be in the spotlight. This time on Etch A Sketch. If you're not aware of this etching business, take a look at what Wikipedia has to say.
Here is a video of some guy who's gonna be on the Guiness books for doing this. This is simply amazing. Watch him etch the Cavs superstar LeBron James. I wish I had the talent to do something like that in a hundred years, however, at least I'm good at finding videos on YouTube!

A few cool quotes on friendship and love

2007-06-08T03:01:00.000-04:00

I found these nice - hope you like 'em.

"Never explain--your friends do not need it, and your enemies will not believe you anyway." - Elbert Hubbard

"With true friends...even water drunk together is sweet enough." - Chinese proverb

"There is no remedy for love but to love more." - Henry David Thoreau

"Love makes the time pass. Time makes love pass." - Euripides

"It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you." - Mark Twain

"If you judge people, you have no time to love them." - Mother Teresa

"A friend is one who believes in you when you have ceased to believe in yourself." - Anonymous

"He was a true friend, he stabbed me in the front." - Anonymous

"Better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all." - Alfred Lord Tennyson

"He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals." - Benjamin Franklin

Don't Walk Alone in Paris

2007-06-07T02:29:00.000-04:00

Says who? The answer is, none other than Sony!

Sony has launched a pretty creative yet unintuitive (at least the online version at DontWalkAlone.com seems rather unintuitive to me, but let me accept I'm not a big marketing guy) marketing campaign on the streets of Paris. They've started taking over the walls of the French city, so that you'll never have to walk alone again.

Projection Sony
Uploaded by buzzismedia

More videos are uploaded for some vague purpose on their campaign website - DontWalkAlone.com

In fact, until I read what is happening on Buzz Is Media, I had no clue that even Sony was involved with this - that's how clever (or unclever?) this whole campaign is.

I'm trying to think what are they trying to do? Are they marketing their wall projector, or are they going to project on the streets of Paris, their ads for their own diversified products?
If it is the latter, I might start getting inclined to think that it is a pretty cool idea, or at least an untraditional attempt. Let's see where they head from here. But nevertheless, you never have to walk alone in Paris again, yeah, you're going to be crowded around with stick figures and ghosts...beware!

Robert F. Kennedy's speech on MLK's assasination

2007-06-07T02:07:00.001-04:00

I hit upon this video of Sen. Bobby addressing his gathering (predominantly black) while campaigning to become the Democratic candidate for the then Presidential elections of United States. He had to throw away his campaign speech and go almost extempore on this sudden news.
Great speech! Great man!

The speech ends at 3:45 minutes

And while I heard this speech, I don't know why, I was reminded of one of the all time best speeches I've ever heard, by President Whitmore (Bill Pullman) in ID4. Here you go!

Lala launches on-demand free streaming music service

2007-06-05T03:03:00.000-04:00

LaLa is now offering users the ability to listen to an unlimited amount of on-demand streaming music, for free, marking the first time this has been available legally. Their tag line is “Play albums on demand, buy the ones you love.”

This Lala is clearly aimed at iTunes, users can listen to complete songs as often as they like, while maintaining their playlists online as well. I just tried them out, the player is embedded and pretty neat. Their website also now looks pretty intuitive with Web 2.0 capabilities. Songs can be directly downloaded directly to the iPod too, at a price of $0.99 per song.

So, this helps us in two ways -
(1) I don't need to maintain songs on my computer, which I currently do
(2) Unlike Napster which was doomed to be illegal, Lala is legal and hence prevents the need for P2P sharing

You must try this out, I have a feeling I'm going to be addicted to this.

Boycott Novell - already?

2007-06-05T01:50:00.000-04:00

While the Novell-Microsoft deal can be among the worst things that has ever happened or could potentially happen to open source software development, there are already many many calls to start boycotting Novell's products as well. Novell has already posted a loss for the most recent quarter...

For those who missed, here is a reiteration of the main points of focus of the agreement, that took place in Nov 2006 -

Virtualization. Virtualization is one of the most important trends in the industry. Customers tell Microsoft that virtualization is one way they can consolidate and more easily manage rapidly growing server workloads and their large set of server applications. Microsoft and Novell will jointly develop a compelling virtualization offering for Linux and Windows.
Web services for managing physical and virtual servers. Web services and service-oriented architectures continue to be one of the defining ways software companies can deliver greater value to customers. Microsoft and Novell will undertake work to make it easier for customers to manage mixed Windows and SUSE Linux Enterprise environments and to make it easier for customers to federate Microsoft Active Directory® with Novell eDirectory.
Document format compatibility. Microsoft and Novell have been focusing on ways to improve interoperability between office productivity applications. The two companies will now work together on ways for OpenOffice and Microsoft Office system users to best share documents, and both will take steps to make translators available to improve interoperability between Open XML and OpenDocument formats.

Sounds neat? Or is it actually part of Microsoft's strategy to beat its only real threat in the OS market, Red Hat? Because, we all know Balmer would go anywhere to do anything to sell Windows, Windows and Windows....Open source developers must not fall a prey to believe that Microsoft has started to love Linux...but these are signs that they've begun to feel the heat in Linux.

Anyway, that's all old news. Visit BoycottNovell.com to explore the reality behing the Microsoft-Novell deal and its subtle implications - it is a pretty interesting blog that I came across and wanted to share, which tears apart the Xandros deal among other things.

Shivaji trailers...

2007-06-05T00:33:00.001-04:00

While the movie is to launch on the 15th of June worldwide, catch the trailers online.

or catch it on my friend's website BehindWoods.com (site dedicated to Tamil movies)- I've been closely following this guy's website for Shivaji HD images and other launch news and reviews - pretty comprehensive coverage on the movie.

Same Trailer from Behind Woods

Don't miss the last shot!

2006 U.S. Crime Statistics - mixed data

2007-06-04T16:00:00.000-04:00

The Federal Bureau of Investigation released crime statistics data this week, for the previous year. This report was compiled with data from around 11,700 law enforcement agencies nationwide. Click here to view the entire report, but here are the highlights -

Overall, a slight 1.3% increase in violent crimes in 2006. But this is 2nd straight annual increase
Number of homicides in major metropolitan areas (those with more than 1M residents) increased by 6.7%
Smaller cities saw their murders decrease by a collective 11.9%
Violent crimes saw their numbers increase in every region except NorthEast, with the Western states seeing the largest jump, by 2.8%
Property crimes decreased by 2.9% from 2005
Burglaries, however, rose by a slight 3.3%, particularly in midsize cities
The spike in robberies marked the highest increase in any category of crime surveyed in the FBI report

Overall, I think the figures are not really threatening or should raise any alerts for the nation. The numbers are as bad as the previous year, but at least not worse in most categories. So the respective departments and offices are doing a fair job in maintaining these numbers.

iPhone fever to begin on June 29th!

2007-06-04T15:34:00.000-04:00

Apple has confirmed to launch the much awaited iPhone on the 29th of June this year. It will retail for $499 or $599 depending on the configuration and will be offered exclusively AT&T's Cingular wireless service.

Apple's shares rose 7% last week and has nearly doubled over the last year to around $120 today.

The iPhone is the most awaited gadget expected to launch this year and it has been hyped up ever since Jobs announced its release in the Mac World conference earlier this year. I think this would have already been incorporated into its stock price rise and we may not observe any other hikes in this month or two during the iPhone launch - which would once again show us that the markets are effecient.

However, if the product does not do as well as expected, we might see AAPL's value drop as this is one of their biggest and revolutionizing products after the iPod. It would be interesting to keep track.

My movie picks

2007-05-26T11:46:00.000-04:00

Just had some time to reflect on my all time favorite movie picks. Not that I've watched all the movies on earth but among the ones I've seen, these are the ones that I've cherished the most....mostly in order, but as you know, some are difficult to sort...

Gangsta movies
1. Godfather-1
2. Scarface
3. Untouchables
4. The Departed
5. Godfather-2
6. Billa (Indian)
7. Nayakan (Indian)
8. Company (Indian)

Other Drama
1. The Shawshank Redemption
2. Life is Beautiful
3. I am Sam
4. Scent of a Woman
5. 21 grams
6. Philadelphia
7. The Man Without a Face
8. Dead Man Walking

Thriller
1. Saw-1
2. The Usual Suspects
3. Fight Club
4. North By Northwest
5. Red Dragon
6. Primal Fear

Animation
1. Monster's Inc.
2. Shrek-1
3. Antz
4. Finding Nemo
5. The Incredibles

Romance
1. Notting Hill
2. Top Gun
3. Forrest Gump
4. Before Sunset
5. A Walk in the Clouds
6. The Notebook

Classics
1. My Fair Lady
2. Casablanca
3. Singing in the Rain
4. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Action
1. The Good Bad and Ugly
2. Mission: Impossible-1
3. The Great Escape
4. The Terminator-2 Judgement Day
5. Braveheart
6. Die Hard
7. Spiderman-1
8. House of Flying Daggers

War
1. Casablanca
2. Behind Enemy Lines
3. Enemy at the Gates
4. Troy
5. Bridge on the River Quai

Comedy
1. Pancha Tantram (Indian)
2. Meet the Parents
3. Munnabhai M.B.B.S (Indian)
4. Chupke Chupke (Indian)
5. There's Something About Mary
6. Mickey Blue Eyes

Geeks are sexy...and so are detergents...

2007-05-23T17:19:00.000-04:00

Hey pals, sorry for not keeping this space active for a while. I've been busy with my finals and then guess what...my graduation! Yes, managed that! Will post a few photos soon.
I was going to resume blogging actively in a week or two, but couldn't resist this one! Don't ask me where I came across this.

There is a detergent powder that sells in Switzerland by the name 'Linux' and is owned by a company called Rosch. There you go, look at this - 10Kg of Linux! hahaha!

So, the first thing that came to my mind is, shouldn't Linux be trademarked to either Linus or IBM or Novell or anyone but a detergent company? So, is it a violation of trademark rights for some washing powder company to use that name?
I did a trademark search on the USPTO website for the term Linux and got 26 matches with two of them matching the whole word Linux.

Look at Trademarks -

(1) 74560867 -
G & S: computer operating system software to facilitate computer use and operation. FIRST USE: 19940802. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 19940802

Last listed owner - Linus Torvalds

(2) 75735641
G & S: laundry detergents and laundry bleaches for home use[; all purpose cleaning preparations for home use; general purpose scouring powders; skin soap for personal use; perfume; essential oils for personal use; preparations for personal hygiene and cosmetic purposes, namely, hair shampoo, skin toners, shower gel, skin lotions; hair tonic and toothpaste]

Owner
(REGISTRANT) Rosch (Swiss) AG CORPORATION SWITZERLAND Axensteinstrasse 4 CH-9000 St. Gallen SWITZERLAND

So, there are two trademarks, totally different, associated with the brand 'Linux'. This, I realized, is because trademarks are treated different than patents in that the mark is registered only with a specific type or range of products, and we obviously see that detergents have at least one dissimilarity with operating systems...fair enough? Well, I would agree, as long as the PTO officers are clear on how thick the line is between the various products and services that are being thrown into this earth everyday.......

Toyota becomes world's No.1

2007-04-24T03:08:00.000-04:00

Forbes Uncut

Toyota Motor became world's No.1 auto seller when it overtook General Motors finally by selling 2.348M vehicles worldwide in the last quarter from Jan to Mar, as against 2.26M vehicles by GM.

This is a big milestone for Toyota, as it continues its innovation and fight for gaining the world's No. 1 spot. Will 2007 be the year? It looks favorable...

Being Proactive

2007-03-22T01:10:00.000-04:00

My 200th post!

Being proactive means that instead of merely reacting to events as they happen, you consciously engineer your own events.

This post has been abridged from one of Steve Palina's blog posts

- “Be Proactive” is habit #1 from Steve Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Being proactive means taking conscious control over your life, setting goals and working to achieve them. Instead of reacting to events and waiting for opportunities, you go out and create your own events and opportunities.
- Steve Covey points out that there’s a gap between stimulus and response, and within that gap lies the potential for us to choose our response. Four special human endowments give us this power:

Self-awareness - the understanding that you do have a choice between stimulus and response. If someone insults you, you can choose not to become angry. If you are offered a donut, you can choose not to eat it.
Conscience - the ability to consult your inner compass to decide what is right for you. You can make decisions based on unchanging principles, regardless of what is socially favored at the moment.
Creative Imagination - the ability to visualize alternative responses. By using your imagination, you can mentally generate and evaluate different options.
Independent Will - You have the freedom to choose your own unique response. You aren’t forced to conform to what others expect from you.

- It can be argued that on some level, we’re always reacting to events, either external or internal. The difference between proactivity and reactivity can then be viewed in terms of what degree of “mental processing” occurs during the gap between stimulus and response. A proactive person will apply the four human endowments to choose a response (or to choose no response at all). But even more than that, a proactive person will invest the time to make conscious life choices and follow through on them.

- Proactive people are aware of their core values. They consciously make key decisions based on those values. They create their own opportunities and direct the flow of their own lives. Proactive people will take actions that often seem mysterious to reactive people. They may suddenly quit their job to start a new business, even though everything seemed to be going well for them. They’ll often start new projects or activities “out of the blue” when it seems like there’s no externally motivated reason to do so. A proactive person will still pay attention to external events, but they’ll pilot themselves to their desired destination regardless of those events.

- If a reactive person were to captain a ship, the ship would flow with the currents. This person would be preoccupied with studying the currents, trying to predict where the ship will end up as a function of the currents. If the currents are good, this person is happy. If the currents are poor, this person feels stressed. On occasion this person might attempt to set a destination, and if the currents are good, the ship will arrive. But if the currents are poor, this person will bemoan them and give up the destination for an easier one.

If a proactive person were to captain a ship, however, the ship would go wherever the captain wanted it to go. This captain would still note the currents, but they’d merely be used for navigational purposes. Sometimes the ship would flow with the currents; other times it would steam against them. It matters little whether the currents are good or not; this captain will reach the intended destination regardless of the currents. The currents can only control the time of arrival and the exact path from starting point to final destination. But the currents have no power to dictate the final destination; that is entirely the captain’s choice.

Some examples of reactive [proactive] language:

Where is the industry going? [Where shall I go next, and how will I get there?]
I don’t have time to exercise. [How shall I make time to exercise?]
How much money can I expect to make if I do X? [How much money do I want to make, and what will I do to earn it?]
I’ll try it and see what happens. [I’ll do it.]
I’m too tired. [What can I do to increase my energy?]
I’ve never been very good at math. [How can I improve my math skills and enjoy the process?]
Nothing really inspires me. [What would I tackle if I knew I couldn’t fail?]
What is the meaning of life? [What is the meaning I wish to give to my life?]

- winners make it happen vs. losers let it happen.
- What matters is making the decision to start consciously directing your own life instead of being pushed along by external currents.

A quote from Lou Gerstner

2007-03-01T00:38:00.000-05:00

"This competitive focus has to be visceral, not cerebral. It's got to be in our guts, not out heads. They're coming into our homes and taking our children's college money"

- Quoted Lou Gerstner, when he took over IBM. He showed photos of the CEOs of IBM's top competitors belittling IBM and gloating over their fall. He thus showed his anger visibly, and thereby got the his employees angry too, to build the competitive spirit from within them.

Lou Gerstner is one of the all-time best CEOs, who transformed IBM (1993-2002) into a completely entrepreneurial and innovative environment almost single-handedly to what it is today. He was also the former CEO of RJR Nabisco and American Express.

Double whammy for Vista

2007-02-27T23:22:00.000-05:00

In addition to the world wide stock market crash today, where Dow fell 4% by 416 points, biggest fall since 2001, (I thought I'll post about that, then decided against it as it is all over the place today anyway, visit CNBC.com for expert economist opinions, or the special WSJ premium report), there were two news releases that caught my attention today

(a) What we've been waiting for has arrived, sooner than we expected. Microsoft discloses an antipiracy bug in Windows Vista, where users are prompted / forced to reactivate their Vista, even on PCs where reactivation is not required, after installing certain system drivers and utilities.
Microsoft acknowledges, "This is not a problem with any of the drivers and utilities. This is a Vista problem"

Worth the wait? Well, even worth the 'no-Vista'

(b) Worldwide PC maker, Dell to start selling Linux PCs - Wow! Isn't that awesome? After collecting some 1800 new products and service ideas from IT users and customers through an online suggestion box (in CEO Michael Dell's serious attempts to survive the phase Dell,Inc. is going through), Dell has annouced that it is going to sell a new line of certified ready-to-use Linux-loaded desktop and laptop computers. Way to go!

It's payback time for Martin Scorsese!!!!!!!

2007-02-26T02:14:00.000-05:00

And it is twice the fortune! Martin Scorsese's mob epic stole the Oscars today for both the 'Best Picture' and 'Best Director'. I was certain that this was Mardy's year, after being nominated 5 times for Best Directing Oscar in the past. 'The Departed' was such a movie, and his first one based on a plot, and what a plot it was!! Scorsese, 64, is undoubtedly one of America's finest directors, having the likes of Aviator, Gangs of New York, Taxi Driver, Good Fellas, etc.
But the Best Movie Oscar came as a pleasant surprise. I thought Little Miss Sunshine had a better chance, as I believe the Oscar Selection Committee normally feels against what I feel. 'Departed' bagged a total of 4 oscars. I'm more delighted about the Best Director Oscar though, how many years have we all waited for this moment!!! ?

The team (Martin Scorsese, Leonordo DiCaprio) has already announced their next - The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (2008)

One thing that kept us wondering was, there was no Matt Damon in the audi, and neither was a mention to his credit by the producer or the director. Or did I miss it?

The wonders of education in Africa

2007-02-25T01:10:00.000-05:00

An interesting statistic published by UNESCO in the Global Monitoring Report, 2005

Microsoft needs an ethics officer

2007-02-23T02:01:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure if they have one. But, even if they do, I'm sure he's not doing a good job. Time and again, we see this company entering anti-trust lawsuits (I can list so many cases where they were penalized by the EU). This time, it is in the U.S., for patent infringement.

As a company, they must learn to compete ethically and produce innovative products with their own creativity. Alcatel-Lucent had accused the world's largest software maker for infringing on its patents related to standards used for playing MP3 digital music files. A U.S federal court found Microsoft guilty today and ordered the firm to pay Alcatel-Lucent $1.52 billion in damages. This is a large sum to settle a suit, even for Microsoft, which is used to paying in the order of hundreds of millions for the anti-trust lawsuits that it faces frequently.

I'm not very surprised at this, this time. I adjust my thoughts to believe that this is what happens when a company grows to this size. It loses its controls on ethics. Today, it could be Microsoft, tomorrow it could be anyone else! Microsoft, of late, have been more of a follower in terms of products -

Playstation ==> XBox
Apple iPod ==> Zune MP3
Mac OS X ==> Vista (3d graphics, etc.)
Google Docs ==> MS Office Live
Google Earth ==> MS Virtual Earth

All these put together suggest a pattern to me - dearth of creativity at the giant!

Costco ruins Apple's image, reputation and creativity

2007-02-23T01:32:00.000-05:00

Picked this up from Greg Miller's UnixJunkie blog. This is so sad for Apple!

Apple would rather give it away for free. Time to sue Costco for its stupidity and negligence.

Apple's win over Cisco's iPhone

2007-02-22T23:42:00.000-05:00

BBC Uncut

Last month Steve Jobs announced the forthcoming release of Apple's entry into the cellular phone market via the iPhone, but Cisco had registered the brand name in 2000 for its Linksys subsidiary.

So, Cisco had sued Apple on a trademark violation, but now the two firms have mutually agreed to use the term iPhone on their products worldwide. So, we are going to have two iPhones!! We still do not have the details on how they worked the deal out yet, but under the deal they will also work together on security, consumer and business communication.

This is a win for Apple, isin't it? It also stresses the value they associate with their brand name, and that they are not willing to settle for anything other than 'iPhone'. I still think Apple may go a step forward and prevent Cisco now from using the iPhone brand in the future sometime, as this starts leading to customer confusion. Just imagine, there would be two somewhat similar products called iPhone floating in the market. Consumers who want to buy one may get shown the other at the store and may stick with it. Search results for 'iPhone' would not return only Apple's product. Eventually, this might turn to be a disadvantage for Apple and so I believe since they possess an image for the i* products, they would even try to pay Cisco out of the way soon. Cisco shouldn't worry too much about that.

@ Austin City Limits (ACL) 2006

2007-02-20T01:13:00.000-05:00

If there's one thing for which I would say 'Been there, Done that' about Austin, that is ACL most definitely. I've never had the opportunity in my life so far to see 130 bands play at 7 different stages for 3 consecutive days! I've seen a lot of live music in the likes of Bryan Adams, etc. back in India, but those were all one band-one stage-one evening type of concerts. My experience at ACL last year went far beyond description.
Click to enlarge any of these photos for a closer view...

Some of my favorites at ACL 2006 (not in order of preference)

Haan..here's rest of the gang too...

DAY-1

Cloudy huh? Not a soul moved even when it rained....

1. John Mayer (man, he was so amazing)

2. Van Morrison (although he was performing in parallel with John Mayer at a different stage, I must admit both the stages were filled with its own followers)

3. Los Lonely Boys (Always wish I could hear more of them)

DAY-2

That's Amy and me...guess that's the start of the second day...

1. Nada Surf
2. The Secret Machines (these were the ones that started my day there)
3. String Cheese Incident
4. The Raconteurs
5. Massive Attack (and what a way to end the day! Phew!)

DAY-3 (favorite day for me, and for most I would guess)

1. Matt Costa (I thought he was pleasant)
2. The New Pornographers (How many rock bands have a female lead? I don't know the answer but this one does, and they were awesome together! Metal mania!)
3. Damian Marley (missed some reggae?)
4. Matisyahu (This guy has his own charm when it comes to live performances)
5. Jack Ingram
6. Ween (I missed these guys, as they were in parallel with Matisyahu, but Charles said they were pretty cool that day)

Yeah, Dustin and I are kind of getting tired, but Charles looks all excited still, as we wait for the last two bands of the festival!! And they are.....

7. The Flaming Lips (The BEST on-stage performance I've ever seen, at ACL 2006 and ever - They know live performance, and got the crowd involved so much. Everyone just loved 'em.)

Click to enlarge - when you see a colorful stage as this, you don't have to go too far to guess who that is, it has to be the Flaming Lips!

8. Tom Petty (you bet! - What a conclusion he gave to the whole festival on a rainy Sunday! - He played all my favorites including Mary Jane, Refugee and Life is a Highway ofcourse... And he goes down as my favorite at ACL 2006. He didn't have to try too many things as the Flaming Lips, it's just his vocal chord and guitar, that's enuf!) - Here's the big guy himself -

Exciting, right? Don't miss it if you're here at Austin during September, 2007.

How to get a doctorate in Physics?

2007-02-19T00:10:00.000-05:00

Ask the Physics maestro - Chiranjeevi :) For those not aware, Chiranjeevi is the killer actor in the Telugu Film Industry in India. Sometime back I posted about how he defied gravity with an awe-inspiring video, but this time it gets even better - he defies friction.

Enjoy this hilarious 15 sec video!

I think, in that shot, if there was anyone that felt a little embrassed shooting this scene, it must have been that poor horse.

Downloading YouTube videos

2007-02-17T14:02:00.001-05:00

They maintain everything on the server, that is their strength. But if you ever need to download YouTube videos to your desktop, you can try this simple tool.

http://www.downloadyoutubevideos.com/

You would need Flash Player (You can get it free here) since you would have to save the file as .flv

Note: This blog does not guarantee that it is legal or illegal.

Plan-B to save Darfur

2007-02-16T00:54:00.000-05:00

President Bashir and the Sudanese Govt have foiled all opportunities to cooperate with international efforts to end the violence at Darfur. If you are in the dark, about what is happening at Darfur, please click here to read what I posted sometime back for more details on what is happening there. More than 400,000 people have been ruthlessly killed.

I take this opportunity to urge you to sign this petition (from Save Darfur)to President Bush, who apparently keeps delaying the launch of this plan. If you do not believe in the effectiveness of activist groups (especially since the first petition didn't have a great impact), remember it could do no harm or cost you anything, but there is a slight chance that the President hears us. This is probably the least we can do to prevent further loss and displacement of innocent lives.

Click here to sign the petition - shouldn't take more than a minute.

Thank you very much.

LA Countries using USD as currency

2007-02-13T21:42:00.000-05:00

Q: Could you name at least one Latin American country that uses the US Dollar as its official currency?

A: Panama - since 1904, joined by Ecuador in 2000

Economists term this process dollarization
Click here to read a September 2000 article, on how Ecuador transformed from sucre to USD

Onyx hits biotech jackpot

2007-02-12T20:38:00.000-05:00

Shares of Onyx Pharmaceuticals doubled today after Onyx and partner Bayer AG reported increased survival rates in a drug trial on patients with liver cancer. This drug, Nexavar, is currently approved for kidney cancer in 50 countries, but liver cancer poses a more serious problem, for which currently there is no treatment in the U.S.
Would this be it?

Watch Onyx CEO, Hollings Renton, interview with CNBC.

DUI in the airline industry?

2007-02-11T05:36:00.000-05:00

WSJ Premium Uncut

Well, not really. Thankfully pilots don't indulge in drunken driving, but the week before, U.S Airways CEO Doug Parker was arrested under DUI charges, just hours after their $9.8 billion bid for Delta Air Lines was rejected. Mr. Parker, 45, was pulled over at 11:30 pm. Jan 31st. Results showed his blood-alcohol level to be 0.096, when the legal limit in Arizona is 0.08.

The CEO wrote 2 letters to his employees regarding the incident -

"You need to know how embarrassed and sorry I am about this," Mr. Parker wrote in the first letter Thursday. "I have let down all of you and also my family, and that is something I will have to live with irrespective of the outcome."

The second one after the results -

"I will accept the consequences of my actions and I will ensure that it doesn't happen again," he wrote. "Again, I apologize to you and appreciate the hundreds of notes of encouragement that I have received from you already. We have a great airline with great employees and I'm committed to not letting you down in the future."

Well, I'm not sure if these would help. I agree he is human too, but he is a leader and has his responsibilities. Once the apple rots, it is hard to bring it back to its original freshness, right? I think someone should write a book on CEOs and Criminals. I wonder who the cause is and who the consequence is...

Cisco IBSG Global Offsite Conference, 2007

2007-02-10T03:22:00.000-05:00

Hello everybody, sorry there've been no updates for a few days. I was busy at Cisco's IBSG (Internet Business Solutions Group) -Global Offsite 2007 Conference at San Jose from Feb 6-9. And I'm just on my way back.

It was a very exciting experience where I got to meet a lot of exceptionally qualified people from all over the world, including the emerging markets like Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Korea. It was a 3 day event at the Seascape Resort at Aptos, CA (around an hour's drive from San Jose).Our CEO, John Chambers addressed the gathering today. I must admit he is an amazing speaker and personality. He enlightened us on Cisco's vision and strategy for the future. The one speaker who left the audience discussing the topic at dinner tables throughout the conference, was Cory Ondrejka - CTO Linden Labs. (I've long wanted to post about that - Linden Labs and Second Life, I'll do it sometime this weekend or next - If you don't know about Second Life yet, hold on for the surprise)

Overall, an inspiring week!

Can flowers stink?

2007-02-06T02:36:00.000-05:00

Q: Which is the world's stinkiest flower?

A: Titan Arum (Amorphophallus Titanum) also known as the Corpse Flower

Curator Don Murray says, "It is a cross between rotten cheese, dog poo and something dead". Yukkeeeee......revolting stink!

The warmth of 2006 and mild winter to date have encouraged the Corpse Flower into a phenomenal growth spurt and into flower -- an event that usually happens only once every six to nine years.

Vista hits retail shelves..., only shelves...

2007-02-05T02:32:00.000-05:00

Last week, Microsoft's long-delayed Vista hit the retail shelves to let consumers get their hands on their coolest operating system in their history...., but not many did. Stores saw only a trickle of early adopters on Tuesday. Retailers around the world held special midnight events Monday or opened early Tuesday when Microsoft released its Vista and Office 2007 products in 70 countries.
However, for example, at a CompUSA store at Raleigh, NC, only a dozen customers braved the late night to stake their claim on a copy of Vista.

Do not misunderstand, this is not the trend. Just the week before, the video game World of Warcraft - The Burning Crusade hit the shelves and sold a smashing record of 2.4M copies in just 24 hours worldwide. I don't have the numbers on Vista's opening day sales yet, but no where close!
Simply because

It is a Microsoft product, let's wait for them to fix the bugs
What is the 'killer' application in Vista? Why should I upgrade?

Nevertheless, new PCs shipped from the manufacturers like Dell and HP will go with Vista henceforth. That should be something to cheer about for Windows lovers. But, is this the best that the world's richest and largest software company can do? C'mon....they've spent half a decade in developing the product and planning this release...

Peyton Manning and Colts claim the Super Bowl victory!

2007-02-05T01:08:00.000-05:00

Peyton proved that he is a tremendous player and a great leader, when he guided the Indianapolis Colts to their Super Bowl victory against the Chicago Bears, and also claimed the Super Bowl MVP of the year.

It was a wet and wild game, but the Colts were not sloppy and proved they can win the biggest game. It was a great start for the Bears with a kickoff touchdown, but they didn't quite capitalize on that. I was waiting for them to turn things around, but except Urlacher and Tillman's few desperate efforts, nothing major happened. The Colts dominated the entire game with elegance and classic interceptions. The Colts won 29-17 to take home the Vince Lombardi Trophy.

But nevertheless, loyal to the fact of the Super Bowl Sunday being the day with the 2nd largest food consumption in the country (after ThanksGiving ofcourse) , I had lots of it, and enjoyed the game.

Photos from our Republic Day celebrations

2007-02-04T02:57:00.000-05:00

We had our Jan 26th Repubic Day celebrations, as part of the Indian Graduate Business Association (IGBA) here at McCombs, UT. I have a few photos to share.

That's Jaison, Ravin, Wes and me, from your R to L.
Don't miss the flag behind! That was the purpose...Miss the plates in front, that wasn't...

Olamide (alias Lamy) discusses camera defects, ...little aware that Jaison knows only banking.

Btw, Jaison's our representative IB guy. And watch, Vivek contributes from the kitchen.

What's a Republic Day without a cake! Well, actually, don't know the significance of a cake here, but I'd go anywhere for one!

That's Priyanka, our incoming IGBA President (batch of '08) doing the honors, and Vivek our outgoing President (batch of '07 as I am) acknowledging. Damn, the Presidents ate it all too..! Sheila tries to get a pic, oh, and she's not smiling eeeeeeeeee for once...Colgate's goin' to sue her...wonder what went wrong with her camera now...just kidding...take it easy...

There are 2 kinds of people in this world. Those who know they're in the photo, those who don't....hard to differentiate though...:)

And finally, everybody realizes it's Republic Day and we got to be together - with Mukund negotiating the center stage...as usual...

Change in tone. Here are a few more pictures from Republic Day celebrations from India, Hyderabad, at a school for the under-privileged children. 'SAVE India', as you might already know, is fighting for the rights of poor children in the weaker sections of the society, and educating them to take them to the next mile in their life.

Deepak, who co-founded SAVE along with me and my friends Mukesh and Partha, and who is among the best people I've ever met until today, did the honors as the chief guest at the school. I got the privilege once a couple of years back and trust me, it was once in a lifetime experience... Click here to know more about SAVE.

A space elevator? A 21st century achievement?

2007-02-04T02:24:00.000-05:00

Yes. LiftPort corporation says within the next 15 years they believe they can take people to space through a space elevator that they are building. They think it would take around a week to get to space through this robot, in other words, the trip itself is a vacation! :)

NASA recently hosted a competition for this, and that's when LiftPort came to the limelight. They've staked their corporation on this concept which they themselves don't see going live before the next 15 years. So, they see something in it. They are dedicated to building a mass transportation system to open up access to the inner solar system.

Well, I'd definitely do it if it happens on my watch. Enjoy their interview.

Google = Internet

2007-02-03T15:49:00.000-05:00

Google wants to go beyond just becoming a verb. They want to become our Internet. They've been acquiring huge volumes of fibre assets, not just for search you would imagine. They are building a LOT of data centers with close proximity to power, like they recently bought 520 acres in Goose Creek industrial park which is probably 100 times as much land as any conceivable data center would require. Why all this? The reason is simple and logical. As we all begin embracing Internet video (50% Internet bandwidth is over Bit-Torrent), it becomes a huge backbone burden on the ISPs and cable companies whose current network infrastructure cannot support anywhere close. Google is the first to see this, and has just started its building program. There will be a day when all the ISPs will HAVE to team up with Google to use their local data centers, as an alternative to bankruptcy.

"We won't know if we're using Google or if we're using Internet and for all practical purposes it won't matter. Google will become our phone company, our cable company, our stereo system and our digital video recorder", says Mr. Cringley

Tutorial on trading futures

2007-02-03T01:30:00.000-05:00

This is a small tutorial on how to make arbitrage profits from trading futures.

What are futures?
The futures contract calls for delivery of a commodity at a specified delivery or maturity date, for an agreed-upon price called the futures price, to be paid at contract maturity.

How to get the price information?
Let us take Gold for example. We can get the spot price (current trading price of the commodity) and the futures price from various sources. We also need the risk-free rate or Treasury Bill rate. Let us use Wall Street Journal market place.

Here is the information after th bell today, 2/2/2007.

Gold spot price - $647.45 (So)
6-month T-bill rate - 5.152% (Rf)

You will also find the list of all Gold futures prices here.
(From there, I got
Gold August-07 price (6 months from now) - $663.9 (Fo)
We will not need this information now, it is for comparison)

How to make arbitrage profits by trading Gold futures?
If the markets were efficient, the Spot-Future parity must hold good.
Fo = So (1 + Rf)^T

where T in our case = 0.5 years, as I'm estimating the 6-month futures price of Gold.
Plugging in the data we got from WSJ,

Fo = 647.45 * (1+.05152)^0.5
= $663.91

Now if we check what the 6-month Gold future contracts are trading in the market at, we see that it is $663.9 too ! If it were selling for less than $663.9, people could make arbitrage profits. Since the market is efficient, in that case, there will be buying and selling of such contracts till the market corrects itself to sell 6-month futures at $663.9, and that is what has happened here.

Now for argument sake, let us suppose, Gold is trading at $663.0 instead of $663.91. I'll show you how to make profits

1. Today
(a) Long the Gold futures. So there is no cash flow now. You have just entered an agreement to buy at a future date for $663.0
(b) Go short on Gold. ie. sell Gold at its current spot price. You get $647.45.
(c) Invest this money in T-bills maturing at the end of 6 months from today

2. After 6 months
(a) You will get 647.45(1.05152)^0.5=$663.91 from the T-bills
(b) Use $663.0 out of that to pay for the futures contract and get the Gold
(c) Use this Gold to cover your short position
(c) $0.91 is your profit left on the table! Enjoy!