Category: Uncategorized

I’m attending IBM’s ExtremeBlue Expo at their Bangalore Centre! :-)

You see, I mentored a couple of teams from IIT Kanpur, Roorkee and
IT-BHU over the summer. This is the culmination of their tenure here –
the ExtremeBlue Expo. I have been invited as a speaker to present one of
my projects.

That apart, this is my first trip to Bangalore! The farthest south I’ve
been! I’ve done a lot of things for the first time over the last 24
hours, beginning with haggling with risckshawallas with large potbellies,
larger handlebar moustaches, and even larger ignorance of Hindi and English!

Photos of the flight on http://www.flickr.com/photos/rahulgaitonde/sets/662615/ .

Till I find some breathing space to write more, tata!

Rediff.com has done a splendid job asking readers to send in their experiences on how they coped with the rain on Torrential Tuesday.

There are some heartwarming, some heartrending tales from the average Mumbaikar, but two things stand out. One: the terrific resilience of the Aam Aadmi. Two, the frustration and palpable anger of the Mumbaikar regarding taxpayers’ money not being channelled back into the city. Indeed. I read an article that mentioned that Mumbai accounts for 16% of income tax collections and 35% of corporate tax collection in the country. People are asking why not even a miniscule fraction of this money is plowed back into the city for the infrastructural development it so badly needs. Any anwers?

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Here are two articles from rediff.com, well over two years apart. Much water has flown under the bridge since April 2003 and July 2005. The world has changed, and so has India – politically, economically. But it’s shocking how these two articles are nearly identical!

“Govt taxes to blame for high petrol prices” – April 22, 2003.
“Minus tax, petrol would cost Rs 18/litre” – July 27, 2005.

http://moon.google.com

Wow. Words fail me. What can’t these guys come up with?

From a poll on Slashdot about the best way to remember multiple passwords:

“Man, why is it that when it comes to passwords people go all closed source! I thought this is slashdot, home of open source supporters! It’s time to open source passwords. I propose that we all post our passwords so that they will be shared and will thus be even easier to remember. Plus if you have a really good password people won’t have to reinvent the wheel and come up with it again. We could even have have a license and call it the General Password License (GPL for short) that requires that anyone using your password share their password back with the community. Besides, without thousands of eyes to make sure you have chosen a good password, how will you ever know?”

Yahoo! News reports a major restructuring at IBM Global Services. The overwhelming message that IBM is sending out over the past quarter (perhaps longer) is that it is no longer “just a products company”. IBM views the service business – over $50 billion last year – as the growth area for the future. Indeed, speaking about IBM’s Q2 earnings report,

The report showed solid growth in services revenue and a surge in new contracts, marking a rebound from a sudden downturn in its services business in the first quarter.

The services business already accounts for over half of IBM’s revenue. And we’re not talking simply technology services, but “professional services” too. For instance, recall the “The Other IBM” ads that made their appearance everywhere earlier this year. Those were for IBM’s Business Consulting Services business. In keeping with this vision,

In a memo to employees, IBM said it plans to reorganize its services business into two arms.
One, called “technology services,” includes information technology services, outsourcing and security, and a second, entitled “business value services,” is made up of consulting, business strategy and asset management services, it said.

The company also acquired PricewaterhouseCoopers for $3.5 billion in three years ago, creating IBM Business Consulting Services.

Transforming the face of IBM:
That’s the way IBM seems to be going over the past few months. And it is serious. There is a concious effort to project a “new face” of IBM; an attempt to get rid of the “big iron” stereotype that still persists. Just a year ago, the company was making grandiose statements about not making products for small and medium-sized businesses, only for the truly large ones. That is probably true even today, but there’re no statements like that any more. In fact, at least in India, there hasn’t been a single IBM product-related advertising campaign for quite a while now. Where have those “Middleware is Everywhere” ads gone? The only ones now are the ones about “On Demand Business – from IBM” and the recent Business Consulting ones. There was even this quip about the acronym “IBM” now expanding to “International Business Models” or “International Business Methods”!

One IBM:
This move also gives you an idea of the sheer scale of this institution – on the one hand, you have IBM Research, probably the only large-scale corporate-run research lab left standing (with only GE Research as a peer). Then you have its vast product line offering – in hardware, storage, collaboration, asset management, systems, and dozens other niche areas. Finally, this new foray into “professional services”. The amazing part about this is that IBM still looks like a cohesive whole. No matter who you are at IBM, there is one direction that the company is following. For sure, we have a wonderful strategy team in place. Contrast this with HP. I wrote an article this April about HP’s future strategy, just after Carly Fiorina’s exit. The common theme throughout the article was that HP has spread itself too wide, and ended up with multiple smaller “HPs”, each pursuing its own agenda. That has never happened to IBM. It’s always been “One IBM”.

Having raved before about Sage, the RSS Feed Aggregator extension for
Firefox, I have now discovered something better – the News and Blogs
account type within Mozilla Thunderbird!

I’ve just begun to use Thunderbird for my Gmail and RahulGaitonde.org
accounts (I needed access to my emails often while disconnected), so I
decided to check this (News and Blogs) feature out too. Well, the
interface is very good indeed. You view each blog/newsfeed as a separate
“folder” within the account. Each blog entry appears as an email.
Depending on the feed itself, viewing the blog post “email” will either
display a plain-Jane HTML version of the post, or will load the web page
itself. I’ve begun using this yesterday, and I’m thrilled already!

This is better than Sage since the email analogy’s better than the
“newspaper” layout display in Sage. Also, the capability of offline
viewing. Finally (related to the first point) , I use Thunderbird often
for “reading” emails. Similarly, I “read” blog posts the exact same way
I’d read emails.

After having used Windows at work for a while, and trying it out at home, I’ve discovered that Windows XP is a LOT better than the last Windows I used regularly, Windows 98. Things work as easily as they do in Linux. Well, at least most of the time. A few things are better implemented in Linux. For instance, I cannot believe how dumb the command line is in Windows. I don’t require something as cool as BASH or as powerful as zsh, but at least tab completion, better listing, piping, command-line scripting, the *basics*! Then, GNOME has so many more applets than the Windows taskbar. Of course,I could go on and on, but let me come to the point of the whole post.

Windows XP is Good, but there are some applications that need to be installed to make it operate better. Here is my current list of top applications for Windows XP, heavily biased from the point of view of an everyday Linux user. Feel free to send in your suggestions. Note that all applications must be freeware. I have spent a bomb for my copy of Windows XP when I bought my ThinkPad; I don’t have any more to spend.

• PuTTY – the best ssh/telnet/rsh client for Windows there ever was.
• Cygwin + Cygwin/X – I use this primarily to run an X-Server for Windows, but you can get a complete UNIX environment with Cygwin,
• Firefox – Duh.
• Thunderbird – Outlook Express? Yech!
• Winamp Lite – Windows Media Player may be good for videos, but who can beat Winamp for audio playback? Of course, I use it only because XMMS is so much like it.
• Trillian Instant Messenger – GAIM replacement. Log in to Yahoo and MSN at the same time.
• Vim for Windows – HOW can you use Notepad all the time?
• MPlayer for Windows – Windows Media Player may be good for videos, but better then MPlayer? No, sir!
• IrfanView – View any picture file. Quick.
• OpenOffice.org – for the plethora of OO.org files that clutter my “My Documents” folder.
• PowerPro Virtual Desktop – There isn’t a thing that this can’t do. I have barely scratched the surface of the functionality of PowerPro. Currently, it gives me four virtual desktops, numerous keyboard shortcuts like the all-time favourites Alt-F9 minimise and Alt-F10 maximise. Power users of this software rave about it all the time. Must be fantastic.
• Explore2FS – Access my Linux partitions. It needs to be better integrated with Windows Explorer, for sure.

At IBM, we use Lotus Notes/Domino as our central application for collaboration. Of course we do; Notes is our baby. Not just email, but for all sorts of stuff – common databases, team rooms, instant messaging, scheduling, information management, and a dozen other things I can’t think up of right now. As is human nature, we keep cribbing about Notes all the time! Like I (used to) say – If I had a rupee for every feature that sucked in Notes, I’d be a crorepati today! (%s/rupee/dollar/g and %s/crorepati/billionaire/g for all you Westerners).

A few evenings ago, I made a concious effort to get to know Notes better. After all, 118 million users couldn’t all be complaining at the same time. I have discovered that Notes truly is a wonderful, wonderful application with stupendously well-thought-out features. If there is one thing that is responsible for all of the criticism that Notes gets, it’s the fact that its UI isn’t as intuitive as it could be. That’s primarily because Notes tries to be everything to everyone – and very nearly succeeds. There’s SO much to display, and only so much space to do it in. I am sure that power users of Notes, those who’ve been using it everyday for years, have customised this application so much as to become few of the most productive people on earth. It’s that good. I am a Convert to the Church of Notes!

I will be posting tips that I have learnt to manage your information in Notes better, in the weeks and months to come. If you’re in an organisation that’s deployed Notes/Domino, I hope you’ll find these posts useful. For now, here are a few popular sites about Lotus Notes, just for starters. lotus.com is the IBM Lotus home page, btw. Duh.

Alan Lepofsky’s Lotus Notes/Domino Hints and tips blog – http://www.alanlepofsky.net/alepofsky/alanblog.nsf/
Ed Brill’s Blog – http://www.edbrill.com . Ed Brill is Business Unit Executive, Sales, IBM Lotus.
Richard Schwartz, “Technology Consultant” – http://smokey.rhs.com/web/blog/poweroftheschwartz.nsf

My Favourite Firefox Extensions:

All in One Mouse Gestures – Mouse Gesture Mappings for Back, Forward, Reload, Home, New Tab, New Window, Close Tab, Maximise, Minimise. Invaluable.

GMail Notifier – Small button in your status bar which displays number of new messages in your inbox.

Paste and Go – Copy a URL, right-click in the address bar and select “Paste and Go”. Alternatively, select “Paste and Search” in the search bar. Saves the trouble of clicking on the “Go” button, or hitting Enter.

Extra Search Engines – Mycroft’s top 30 search engines. Select from drop-down list in the search bar.

Sage – Sage is a lightweight RSS/Atom feed manager and reader. Stores RSS links in a folder in Firefox’s bookmarks. Displays content from feeds in Newspaper-style 2-column format.

Scrapbook – Store entire web pages or selections locally while preserving them as HTML. Contrast this with saving as text, which removes the images and formatting, or as web pages, which means saving all the content on the page. Manage your scraps in folders, perform title searches or even full-text searches on them.

Nuke Anything – Right-click any element or selection on a web page and select “Remove this Object”, or “Remove this Selection” to get rid of pesky ads and flash animations, or sidebars and text that doesn’t relate to the content you’re reading. Nuke Anything and Scrapbook form an excellent combination.

Reload Every – Reload a page every “N” seconds. Choose from predefined values of “N” or enter your own.

SessionSaver – Restore Firefox to exactly the state it was when you shut it. Windows, Tabs, their states. Customizable too. Opera’s had this feature for a while, now Firefox does too.

Do suggest ones that you use regularly, and I’ll post an update to this post. I’m sure these aren’t the only good extensions around, considering that MozillaUpdate has over 500 extensions to Firefox! Of course, when you nominate your favourite extension, do remember that they’ve got to be generally useful – that is, if they satisfy a very specific need, then they’re not exactly “useful” enough to be included.