Remember Argentina a decade back ? Almost bankrupt, they liberalised their economy based on the directions of the World Bank/IMF. Pension funds too were privatised and people were given more choice and freedom. Now they’re reversing the decision. They figured that the private guys were too risky to be entrusted with their life’s savings.

Back here, private pension funds are to start operating from April 1, 2009. What a day! Symbollic ??!! Of course not. It’s the first day of the financial year and they can’t help it Of course it’s not without it’s share of controversies.

Meanwhile in Japan, public officials discover to their chagrin the penalties for mismanaging pension records - vigilante style.

Overheard on the pipes,

Q: Why did the Credit Card agencies start their own Pension Funds in the USA ?

A: They figured out that the people might have learnt a lesson from the market meltdown and start investing their remaining credit worthiness in savings plans like pensions.

Somewhere in the middle of this road, I saw a middle aged man walking briskly in the drizzle. Hearing my vehicle, he suddenly turned and waved his hand. I stopped near him and he asked me if I could drop him. I said I could and asked him where he was headed to. He asked me to drop  him somewhere further in the road from where he could take a bus to the city. It started raining heavily by now and as a car passed us by, I was wondering if I did a right thing by offering him help. He could have hitched a ride in the car and saved himself all the drenching

As we neared a bus stand where a bus just overtook us and stopped, my passenger asked me if I too were going straight towards the city. When I replied in the affirmative, he asked me to drop him somewhere near my place from where he can go further. Though puzzled by his request - he could have chosen to board the bus and travel safe and warm - I consented and continued the journey inspite of getting drenched thoroughly.

After about 30 minutes of driving through the varying rain I almost reached my place. Just before I was to take a turn, he asked me to stop at the nearest bus stop. I stopped and he got down. But he kept his bag on the seat and asked me to wait. I was puzzled. He then started searching through his shirt pocket. I asked him as to what happened. He didn’t reply, but took out all contents from his pocket and started shuffling, sieving and vigorously searching through them. All the while, I was standing there trying not to look like a fool.

Finally with a winner’s look on his face, he took out his visiting card out of the mess and handed me the same. And said, “I’m an insurance advisor with this company. We’ve very good tax saving plans. Please do call me to know more. Please tell your friends also”.

I broke into a wicked smile, thinking I should tell him that I was also one of his breed some time back and that the only client I could manage to snare — was myself and sped.

But ruminating about the whole event, I am amazed by the tenacity these people demonstrate. I know  several people who have managed to achieve considerable businesses even under extreme adverse conditions.

I need to learn a lot from them.

When a company pays for a vendor lock-in, they buy not only into the upgrades/support, they also “buy in” a assured End-Of-Life date for the product. Though it’s natural that any product reaches it’s EOL sooner or later, open source based products usually follow a evolutionary approach to progression and growth.

I’ve seen Sendmail installations that have withstood the march of time and  have been maintained and upgraded regularly without the need for any redeployment, massive reconfiguration or any increase in IT budgets. I’ve seen software systems deployed at a time when the term open source was not at all coined running the show without any complaints.

Open Source based solutions really work wonders on a SME’s infrastructure breadth, stability, budget. The only weak link in such deployments are the availability of skilled people to maintain and enhance the services.

This is where we come in. We do take out a lot of headache for SMEs (and a couple of Large corporates too).

BTW, we have an interesting internship programme for students, freshers who wish to learn more about Linux deployments. If you’re interested do drop me a mail

I needed to figure out how to use zenity, the man pages didn’t tell much. So I went on a hunt for other scripts in the system that might use zenity; I was on Debian Etch system running the usual Gnome Desktop and quite a few applications from the Gnome bunch.


shashi@anacoluthon:~$ for p in `echo $PATH|sed 's/:/ /g'`; do find $p -type f|xargs grep -il zenity; done
/usr/bin/zenity
/usr/bin/gdialog

Eh! Only two programs and that too zenity itself and a wrapper over zenity for backward compliance. It’s not much popular is it ? If it isn’t why don’t I remove it from my system ?

$ su -c 'apt-get remove zenity'
Password:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
gnome-desktop-environment zenity

uh! oh!! gnome-desktop-environment!!!??? WTF ? So, what dependencies does this package have ?

shashi@anacoluthon:~$ apt-cache rdepends zenity
zenity
Reverse Depends:
|ssft
gnuvd-gnome
|peercast-handlers
|eclipse-platform
eclipse-platform
eclipse
gnomemeeting
powersaved
gdm
gnome-desktop-environment

heh! heh!! So much for a core dependency. Should it be such a core dependency in the first place ?? Anyway it has it’s own place in the software trove.

An interesting tidbit about zenity. This was the first program I translated to Kannada way back in 2002-2003. But it never made it to the repository.

BTW, another interesting program: PySchoolClock

Do you realize that we don’t understand globalization? Globalization increases Extremistan. That’s one problem with this Tom Friedman guy—he [the bestselling author of The World Is Flat, which argues the advantages of globalization in the internet age] didn’t seem to understand the very simple dynamics that globalization forces redundancy out of the system. And whenever you don’t have redundancy, you have Extremistan. Things are way too efficient, so the smallest mistake blows up. We depend so much on the internet. Tomorrow, if there’s a problem in Bangalore, we’re toast for a long time, you see?

I’m on a committee at the Pentagon, [the Highland Forum, a study group on risk] and one of the founders of the internet is on it and all these people understand that we need more redundancy in the system to avoid a second crisis that may come from the internet, because we don’t understand it.

And to think of it, the Internet was founded to provide redundancy in case of an emergency.

Life’s awesome

Recently we hired a VPS for hosting some of our services. This time, we wanted to break out of the now monotonous theme and name it differently. Hence, we organised a small contest for suggesting the names and these were the names our guys came up with:

dooradabetta, ಅಗಸ್ತ್ಯ , ನಕ್ಷತ್ರ, Gogglers, Picaroons, Cyclotron, Bumblebee, Ironhide, Barricade, Optimus Prime, Prithvi -, Vismaya -, Amulya - Priceless, Arnav - ocean/ sea, Avinash - indestructible, bushbetta, Bandana, Maya - As in Illusion(Virtual), Rudra, Swastika, Varuna, Ugrana (Storage in Kannada ), Taatvika, sanctimonia (Latin), recondo, commodo, munus, muneris, lorica, officium, servitium, tutus, latrocinium, bisibelebath, kalasa, Abayan, Yuga
Vajra, Sambath, jataayu

That’s a neat variety of suggestions and lots of original thinking too. Finally, after almost a month I’ve decided upon one amongst the above.

bisibelebath

Well, not exactly! in a shortened form - bcube. So the hostname - bcube.informedia.in

Thanks to Kaladisvarane for the name. And to all others too.

But more interesting than that are the mergers happening in the internet media world, which IMHO is a pointer that the industry needs consolidation big time.

CBS bought CNET Networks, Condé Nast bought Ars Technica, Vodafone bought a Social Networking Startup - ZYB.

Particularly interesting is the Condé Nast deal. With the latest one, they have three of the most popular and high-traffic websites of the tech world - Wired, Reddit and Ars Technica.

• Would the merger have been a good thing for Zimbra users ?
• Did Microsoft lose out on it’s only chance of becoming a contributor to Open Source ?
• Would projects like Hadoop, YUI, Zimbra died a premature death under the Microsoft’s management ?

• Seemingly unrelated events influence one’s personal and professional lives in ways that can not be even imagined.

BTW, the video which may miss out is this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE