Happy Holidays and a wonderful New Year

Dear Readers

I will be off for a about 2 weeks. I am enjoying the last week of this year at my home town - away from work. First week of the new year, I will be attending a conference. I shall (hopefully) be back to blogging around the 10th of January. Until then, have a great holidays, and wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year.

mouli

Hard drive rivals unite ...

Seagate buys Maxtor for USD 1.9 billion. Read more here.

$100 laptop

Remember a while back, MIT developed a $100 laptop. This was an experiment. It was decided that, if it could be done, it could be used to make computing available to the masses in developing countries. Well they did it. Looks like, there is now a Taiwanese company which wants to mass market this computer. The coolest thing that I found in this was, the computer actually works using wind-up power ! Wow. Read the $100 laptop page here.

Run linux on your windoze PC

A nice how-to from J_K9 on how to get a linux distro running from inside windoze, using the new free VMWare player. I am going to try this out some time. I have always hated rebooting to run linux - and VMWare was not free at that time. The how-to is pretty detailed. Read the how-to here. (picture courtesy the J_K9 webpage)

Rules do not deter the committed ...

Just read an article by Steve Pavlina titled "Rules are no obstacles for the Committed". Very good read. I should say a little boastful, but inspiring none-the-less. I think he probably has every right to speak highly of his deeds. They are indeed things to be proud of.

A small snippet:

Steve:  I've decided to do X.

Cowardly Lion:  Bock bock bock.  Cluck cluck cluck.  I'm scared.

Steve:  Step aside please.  Coming through.

Cowardly Lion:  Huh?  What?  Um, OK.

Cowardly Lion goes home and ponders what it might be like to live as something other than a cowardly lion for just one day.  Cowardly Lion obeys previous conditioning by flipping on TV to help eliminate such socially disruptive thoughts and feelings.  Cowardly Lion begins feeling "normal" again (ca. 1984) after noticing that friendly TV characters universally agree that people like Steve are broken, anti-social, and wicked and that Cowardly Lion is in fact perfectly normal, average, and socially acceptable.

Read the full article here.

Amazing panoramic view of Paris

Disclaimer: Large file download. But if you have a broadband connection, it is well worth it. Dialup guys might want to rethink. Paris by night

Flickr How-To

Ben Bishop has a wonderful how-to for flickr. A lot of us have seen/used flickr - but for those who are considering moving to it, this how-to is a storehouse of information - written in very simple english. Well written Ben.

Check it out here.

(thanks lifehacker)

PC Inspector

Nope, that is not the local cyber police. This is a software that I just noticed on lifehacker, that is supposed to be an easy-to-use file recovery program. This is freeware. Lifehacker says it in a humorous way, and I have to reproduce it here :)

If you've accidentally erased a few important files that you would kill to have back, put down the gun and try out PC Inspector.

Go the PC Inspector page.

Can this man change M$ ?

NY Times has an article about Ray Ozzie - the new CTO at Microsoft. The article talks about how Microsoft bought Groove Networks, the company that Ray Ozzie had founded, primarily to get Ozzie. Ray Ozzie has been enlisted primarily to get Microsoft to 'rethink' and 'refocus'. Ozzie would be heading Microsoft towards the web services model . Though, they do not really admit it, this is to counter Google and several other small startups who are begenning to show up their web-services - which can potentially hit Microsoft where it hurts - revenue. Lets see what happens.

Read the full article here.

Be sure to peek into the leaked-out memo from Ozzie - a longish read, but a worthwhile glance. So the giant is indeed noticing what is going on.

Yahoo buys del.icio.us

Just read on Wired that Yahoo bought the tagging service del.icio.us . Being a big fan of the del, I hope this does not get sucked up into any slow yahoo app. If it gets integrated into the new Web 2.0 'ajaxy' interface, that yahoo is working on, then I have no problems :) Read the article here.

How Many Bloggers does it take to change a LightBulb

Excellent satire over at Meticulously Underthought. Wonderfully written. Bravo !

I thought of posting some nuggets - but that would spoil the whole thing.

Go and read the full article here.

friday/holiday fun

Not sure if I would ever use this. But it defenitely is worth noting down. Ever been amazed at how beautiful some people's presents are. Neat bow ties on the ribbons etc. Well, Just saw an link on lifehacker, which shows that it is not indeed rocket science, nor does it take too much time. Check out the how to at the simplehuman blog. (pic coutesy : the simplehuman blog)

Personal finance Added

Dear Readers: Planning to add some personal finance articles as well in this blog. The ones that I post would not really be geared to a specific country (US or India). The posts would be more of a generic nature - like saving, budgeting, etc. GCM

America's High-Tech Quandary

A brilliant article in DesignNews, which I found through an ACM news letter on how the US is appearing to lose its technical edge. A very third party-ish neutral article, urging the people of the US to wake up. The article is laden with facts - some of them which surprised even me. I usually do not write about US-bashing, but this article is a genuine plea.

 

Some nuggets:

 

China is headed toward a million engineers a year ... and India isn't far behind

 

"Numbers aren't everything," adds Orsak of SMU. "But it's a lot easier to find a diamond when you're searching through ten times as much material."

Some contend that China's national will in this matter is similar to the one it applied to sports more than two decades ago. Back then, China's desire for a powerhouse basketball program resulted in a "genetic conspiracy" that culminated in the birth of an 11-pound, 23-inch boy named Yao Ming, says a new book titled Operation Yao Ming. Yao, whose father was 6'-10" and whose mother stood 6'-2", was quickly funneled into the Communist sports machine. He grew to the extraordinary height of 7'-5" and became a national icon.

Today, China is said to be applying a similar form of national will to engineering. And, as it did 20 years ago, its desire for success is trickling down from the top. Heads of state are applying their engineering knowledge to a desire for the country's biggest companies to "get more than mere pennies on the dollar" for the products created there. By developing intellectual property, instead of merely specializing in knock-offs of existing designs, Chinese officials hope to grab a bigger share of every economic pie, much as Microsoft does in the U.S.

 Interest in engineering among American students is dwindling, particularly at the Ph.D. level, where 51 percent of the students are now foreign-born. Moreover, applications to U.S. engineering schools are down 60 percent from China and 40 percent from India during the last two years, suggesting that our foreign spigot may be running dry.

For many, the most frustrating part of the entire phenomenon is engineering's lack of appeal among American-born students. A combination of factors—salaries and public image, as well as offshoring of jobs to Asia—has made engineering appear undesirable to high school kids who might otherwise choose it as a career path. Add to that the fact that it's generally recognized as the toughest undergraduate curriculum in American education, and that many of its students increasingly see their college experience as an extraordinary grind, and the result is that worst of all cultural images: uncoolness.

 

Read the full article here

More on teaching your kids money-matters

As a followup to a post on Dec 4 about spilling the money guts, I read today in pfadvise which said it all. The author was wanting to write an article on why we should teach our kids about finances - and since he did not have kids, he goes to a friends place who has a teen, who was an expert in finances at home.

Read the full article to see how the author was pleasantly surprised.

As I was thanking my friend for his help and about to leave, we heard a voice from the other room. "Don't forget to turn off the lights when you're done in there," his son reminded. My friend rolled his eyes and I laughed. It was the only time I've ever heard a kid reminding their parents to turn off the lights and I guess that in itself says it all.

Five Deadly Sins of Business

WSJ (free feature) has an article from the Late Peter Drucker on the five deadly sins of Business. Wow. Amazing. Read it to believe it. That guy was a genius. This article is a reprint of his article from 1993.

The five sins are:

• worship of high profit margins and of "premium pricing"
• mispricing a new product by charging "what the market will bear.
• cost-driven pricing.
• slaughtering tomorrow's opportunity on the altar of yesterday.
• feeding problems and starving opportunities.

Read the full article here.

Shrug effect

Ramit Sethi in his blog I will teach you to be rich, writes an excellent piece on Sucess and the Shrug effect. He talks about how, when we compare ourselves with a famous person - lets say a CEO, we tend to put ourselves behind and compare, find excuses to prove why we are not there as the CEO and then shrug it off. Very well written.

Some snippets from the article:

CEOs don't just magically flip a switch and start wearing a fancy suit one day, directing their staff to do this and that. Getting to the top isn't about knowing how to execute a leveraged buyout, or negotiating anti-dilution provisions, or whatever. (This is true for both CEOs and other successful people in other domains!)

It starts earlier. For that CEO, it probably started when he took a paper route in junior high, or started a Web site in high school, or designed an interesting product in college. It started by knowing how to get in touch with the right people and learning--through lots of experience and failure--that senior executives are just people. They're regular people who started their path to being extraordinary by taking small steps.

He defines the shrug effect as : 

          Pointing at someone successful, attributing it to external factors, and shrugging because you don't have identical qualities. 

  

Read the full article here.

Golden Quadrilateral Project features in a NY Times article

A nicely written by rather lengthy article (read 7 pages) in NY Times details how India is building its roads slowly. The British concentrated on building the Rail network in India (which I must admit, they did very well - seeing the extremely vast system that is present today - read the wiki page). The last time, roads were buit in such a grand scale was ages ago - when Sher Shah Suri built the Grand Trunk Road (GT Road). The previous goverment in India, led by Vajpayee of the BJP party had kick started this project of building a vast highway network. This project was to connect the 4 large metro cities of Delhi, Mumbai (Bombay), Chennai (Madras), and Kolkata (Calcutta) by 4-lane and 6-lane super highways. Governments have changed, but thankfully, most of the projects are still going on. This was mainly because Vajpayee had established an autonomous body to oversee this project. I personally have been some stretches of this road network - and I should say, it is a pleasure to drive on these roads.

I do not totally agree to some of the points made in the article, but then it is written by an observer/reporter who spent one month in India and wrote the article. I would excuse and forgive him, for the reason, that, he only wrote what he observed.

Read the full article here.

'Talk about the money'

Motley Fool, at biz.yahoo.com, writes an excellent piece titled 'Spill your Money Guts'. He talks about how we should talk about our financial matters more openly. The one really cool thing that struck me in the article was, to start talking about the financial guts of the family to kids, when they reach a certain age. I totally agree. Talk about saving, talk about budgeting, talk about 'what it takes for papa to provide food and shelter for the family'. I think it is very important for junior to know all these at a young age.

Read the full article here.

On The Road to a 6-figure blogger

No, I am not talking about me. I write for the pleasure of it, and for archiving these nuggets that I find on the web. I am talking about Steve Pavlina and his personal development blog. He claims that it is not (at the moment) his primary source of income ; but maybe next year it will be. November alone brought about $4700 through earnings on his website. He says that it is a 33x increase than his January 2005 earnings. At this rate, extrapolating, he claims that 'maybe' his 2006 earnings through the website would be about $100,000.

Read about this and some more of his ideas (disclaimer: some of them wacky) at his blog post today.