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Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Dave Packard's speech to HP Managers in 1960

The following are few excerpts. ( I am still searching for the full text of the speech on internet).

“I want to discuss why a company exists in the first place….I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply to make money. While this is an improtant result of a company’s existence, we have to go deeper to find our real reason for being….A group of people get together and exist as an institution that we call a company…to do something worthwhile—they make a contribution to society….The real reason for our existence is that we provide something which is unique.”


"At times it seems the most efficient way is to hire a group of people, work them as hard as possible, and when the job is finished, send then home. Well, even if this is the most efficient way, we have never operated in this manner.......................... So we feel it is our responsibility to provide opportunity and job security to the best of our ability. "


" Whenever we discuss overall company objectives, we touch on our responsibility to the community at large..... But none of these can be accomplished unless the company makes a profit. "

"Profit is a measure of our contribution to our customers...... Profit is the measure of how well we work together. "

----
Are you Managers hearing these....?

Why Seena moved from XP to Ubuntu

I was buried deep in work (as usual) and suddenly out of the blue, Seena Called me. He wanted to buy a computer and was looking for some advise from me.

“A Computer?? For you??” I asked.

Seena was working in one of the many industries in Bangalore as a storekeeper. He got fired from there and he worked as an assistant for his former boss. His boss got a job, and closed this business. Not having too many options left, he rented a small shop and started his own business - recharging currencies for the mobile phones. He now wanted to improve his business by offering to copy images/music to the mobile and handhelds of his customers. Luckily for him at this very time a small land deal came through his in-laws and got him the moolah. So the need for a computer and so the call to me.


Being a simpleton, he does not know about the copyrights or copylefts, and if somebody tells him that copying the songs of A R Rehman on to the storage media of his clients mobile phones is a punishable business... he just wonders why and he would never understand the point. Not with so many people doing the same thing.

As usual I tried to escape the responsibility, and I know my suggestion was not very helpful to him. A couple of weeks later he called me and told that he had bought a HCL Computer with so and so configuration for such and such price. It had windows XP installed on it. I congratulated him and wished him good luck.

I was pretty sure that I would be hearing from him soon.

As expected he called one noon and told that he had virus on his computer and it was causing a lot of trouble. He was trying to copy something to a memory card of a customers and suddenly some folders started creating in his computer and even though he keeps deleting them, they KEEP COMING BACK!!!

Now the things get challenging for me. No, its not the virus that are challenging. Its Seena because he does not know what a virus is, how to overcome them, what an anti-virus will do and how to update it. I suggested Linux. More trouble – he does not know difference between XP and Ubuntu. He does not even know what Microsoft is. Heck, the chap doesn’t know what an operating system is.

I tried to explain him what an operating system is, and asked him to install an anti-virus. I even thought of gifting a legal version of some anti-virus to him, so that he could update it regularly. When I told him updating needs Internet connection, he said that an Internet connection would cost him few hundreds every month and his business was not yet profitable and he cannot afford it.

I visited him and after listening to all his problems, and seeing how he was actually managing this “Copying to memory card” business, I told him to more to an open-source operating system. He could still run his business without worrying about virus and without internet for a few more days.

I loaded ubuntu 8.10 on his system and whole thing was done in half an hour. I taught him how to use Ubuntu, how to open his windows partitions and copy the files from there onto the customer storage medias

Unfortunately I had not carried the opt-on CD which have mplayer or codecs for totem. So he could not play his collection of avi, mp3 and mp4 media files.

He was happy about all this. Somehow I knew that a call would be coming to me very soon.

Two weeks later he called me.

"Manjanna, I have got viruses in the version that you loaded also. Please delete everything and reinstall everything newly."

"What...?” I wondered.

"I have got viruses in Ubuntu also. Please reinstall everything again"

I was perplexed. I visited him on that very evening. He showed me a memory card - probably NCP. When loaded and opened there were already some files in it. Autorun.ini and some .exes. His interpretation of those files was that it was some virus. His previous experience with the windows XP and virus looked similar.

I inserted my mobile phones memory card into his system and kept it there for almost half an hour, and nothing new got created. No virus.

Then what are those files? They are the software loaded by the manufacturing companies so that they are readily work with the mobile phones. I am not sure whether he was convinced or not. His business continues and hopefully will flourish someday.



This whole episode has raised a few Questions in my mind. These hardware companies, in trying to make their hardware ready for M$, keep some software on the storage media.

Is it a fair business practice?

As if this was not enough, I came across a Video CD that has a .swf and some .exe files. This VCD can work only with M$ system.

I know this saga will continue when I install mplayer and other codecs to play different kinds of media on Seena’s System.

Somehow I know that this is not the end. In fact, I think “its just the BEGINNING…”

PS : Special thanks to Praveen for editing this write-up.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Shoe lacing styles

I found this blog which describes the lacing styles. If I am right.. some time back I read that break dancers use a separate kind of shoe lacing which will have no knots.. This link does not have it but it is quite interesting link

http://ritemail-amazing.blogspot.com/2008/09/shoe-lacing-style.html

Monday, September 29, 2008

BCube -- BisiBeleBath

ಬಿಸಿಬೇಳೆ ಬಾತ್
ಒಂದು ಅಳತೆ ಅಕ್ಕಿಗೆ ಒಂದು ಅಳತೆ ಬೇಳೆ , ಒಂದು ಅಳತೆ ತರಕಾರಿ ಐದು ಅಳತೆ ನೀರು. ( ಈರುಳ್ಳಿ ಮತ್ತು ಟೊಮೇಟೊ ಇರಬೇಕು)
ಮೊದಲಿಗೆ ಬೇಳೆ , ತರಕಾರಿಗಳನ್ನು ನೀರಿನೊಡನೆ ಒಂದು ಚಮಚ ಎಣ್ಣೆ ಮತ್ತು ಒಂದು ಚಿಟಿಕೆ ಅರಿಷಿನ ಪುಡಿಯೊಂದಿಗೆ ಬೇಯಿಸಿಕೊಳ್ಳಬೇಕು. (ಸುಮಾರು ಒಂದು ಬಾರಿ ಕುಕರ್ ಕೂಗುವವರೆಗೆ)
ಅಕ್ಕಿ ತೊಳೆದು, ಒಣಕೊಬ್ಬರಿ ತುರಿ ಮತ್ತು ಬಿಸಿಬೇಳೆಬಾತ್ ಪುಡಿಯೊಂದಿಗೆ ಬೆರೆಸಿ ಮೇಲಿನ ಮಿಶ್ರಣದೊಂದಿಗೆ ಸೇರಿಸಿ ಮತ್ತೆ ಬೇಯಿಸಬೇಕು. ಜೊತೆಗೆ ರುಚಿಗೆ ತಕ್ಕಕ್ಷ್ಹ್ಟು ಉಪ್ಪು ಸೇರಿಸಬೇಕು. (ಇನ್ನೊಂದು ಬಾರಿ ಕುಕ್ಕರ್ ಕೂಗುವವರೆಗೆ)

ಪ್ರೆಷರ್ ಇಳಿದನಂತರ ಒಂದು ಬಾಂಡಲೆಯಲ್ಲಿ, ಒಣಮೆಣಸಿನಕಾಯಿ, ಕರಿಬೇವು, ಗೋಡಂಬಿ, ಬೇಕಿದ್ದರೆ ಕಡಲೇಬೀಜ ಸೇರಿಸಿ ಒಗ್ಗರಣೆ ಹಾಕಿಕೊಳ್ಳುವುದು. ಎಲ್ಲವನ್ನೂ ಒಟ್ಟಾಗಿ ಸೇರಿಸಿದರೆ ಬಿಸಿಬೇಳೆಬಾತ್ ರೆಡಿ.

ನಮ್ಮಾಕೆ ವೀಣಾ ಹೇಳಿದ ಹಾಗೆ

Bisibelebaath

for one measure of rice, equal measure of toordal and equal measure of mix of vegetables and five measures of water. (onions and tomato are part of vegetables)

first boil toor daal and mix of chopped vegetables in a cooker adding a spoon of oil and a spoon of turmeric powder till it gives single whistle.
then add the rice cocunut scrapes, and bisibelebaath powder along with salt. continue boiling for another whistle.


Fry dry chillies, coriander leaves, cashewnuts, groundnuts in oil add it to the above cooked dish. and surve hot Bcube.

As told by my wife veena,

Monday, August 25, 2008

Friday, August 08, 2008

ಒಂದು ಅಪರೂಪದ ಚಿತ್ರ


ನನ್ನ ಅತಿ ಪ್ರಿಯವಾದ ಚಿತ್ರ ಇದು .. ;)

ಮಂಜು

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Compiling kernel for second time

When I first compiled kernel for an application to work was an early time and supervised by a guru Anand Avati and supported by Shantharam. ( I miss both of them sometime)

it was then simple

#make menuconfig

select all the things you need ( Ah.. you should know what are all hardware you have and what functionalities you required)

#make

copy the image to /usr/src

make the changes in /etc/lilo and run lilo and reboot.

It was almost 3-4 years back and I almost forget about it by now.

Even though my lenova think center Desktop was working fine with 1 GB utilized RAM by the kernel without high memory support, there was a bug pricking me inside telling that I am wasting some inventory. And I have decided to do the kernel compiling again.

Well now things got changed. Earlier the linux flavour was slackware and now it is debian ( I shifted to debian because of the "apt-get" .. ;) ) When I asked Shashi how to do kernel compiling in Debian he sent me a link ( http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/system/kernel-pkg.html ) which has the details. As usual I was lazy enough not to go through it.

And one day as their was a police firing in Haavery and I donot have really business critical thing to do in my office. thought I can give try to do the kc without waiting for anybody.

Steps followed were simpler. Some mistakes for sure.. But finally kernel compiled and I am able to see this finally.

manjax# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2067516 810884 1256632 0 105608 393188
-/+ buffers/cache: 312088 1755428
Swap: 2731040 0 2731040

Steps are very simple as follows

Download the required applications and kernel source

manjax# apt-get install gcc kernel-package kernel-source-(uname -r) libc6-dev tk8.3 libncurses5-dev fakeroot

To use the exiting config for the new kernel compilation

manjax# cp /boot/config-(uname-r) .config
manjax# make oldconfig

Actual build of the Kernel (You have to wait till you burn couple of cigerettes with safety gap between them)

manjax# make-kpkg --initrd --append-to-version=-highmem kernel_image

To Install the build to perform

manjax# dpkg -i kernel_image-highmem

To make it active

manjax# reboot

viola, If everything is fine the new customized kernel will start working. Otherwise please repeat the steps as above. :P

PS : Donot looooooose heart.. I got the thing working only in 6th reboot.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

sun support sites

Sun Solve - http://sunsolve.sun.com
Big Admin - http://bigadmin.sun.com
Software Download Center - http://www.sun.com/download
Sun Microsystems Documentation - http://docs.sun.com
Links from Sun homepage - http://www.sun.com
Sun's homepage Products link - http://www.sun.com/products


Sun Installation Assistant for Windows and Linux
http://www.sun.com/systemmanagement/sia.jsp
N1 System Manager
http://www.sun.com/software/products/system_manager/
Sun Management Center
http://www.sun.com/software/products/sunmanagementcenter/index.xml
xVM Ops Center
http://www.sun.com/software/products/xvmopscenter/index.jsp