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July 2008 - Posts
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For nearly two decades now we haven't seen any innovation in design from makers of
Wintel PCs or laptops. Over the last few years it has been solely Apple that was coming
out with cool designs - whether it was Mac
Mini or Macbook Air.
So I was happy to see finally a PC manufacturer investing on design. I am talking
here about the new Dell Hybrid
desktops. Check them out they don't seem to have compromised on the technical
specifications either which seems to include everything you may want in an average
desktop PC - Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, Vista OS, 320GB HDD, DVD Writer, 5 USB, IEEE
1394, Ethernet, Wi-Fi and more. What is very cool is the availability of a Eco-Friendly
Bamboo casing.
I wish this is just a beginning of design innovation coming from all the competitors
in the Wintel PC world (Dell, Lenovo and HP) and we will see some new form factors
in laptops as well.
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Virtualization (the
ability to run multiple OS simultaneously) is gaining lot of traction nowadays. In
the PC world this started initially with VMWare and Virtual PC (which Microsoft acquired
from Connectix) for development and testing purposes soon gained popularity in the
servers. In servers virtualization is used to consolidate servers and applications
into fewer servers and also used for running legacy OS and applications.
Today the entry barrier is greatly removed for Virtualization software with many of
them available free (as in free beer), following is a partial list of them.
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Microsoft
Virtual PC 2007 for desktops
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Microsoft
Virtual Server 2005 R2 for servers
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VMWare Player for
desktops
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VMWare Server for
servers
Recently few more has joined the list, they are:
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VMWare ESXi - A
hypervisor that allows you to run production applications at near-native performance
is now free
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Sun Microsystems' Virtual Box -
A popular desktop virtualization software that Sun Microsystems recently acquired
from Innotek and turned into an Open Source GPL software
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Microsoft recently released its Server class production ready Hypervisor product called
Hyper-V that is going to be part of Windows Server 2008 for
a nominal fee of $28.
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Two
weeks back on my way back to Chennai in Mumbai Airport I picked up this book - Cold
Steel "Lakshmi Mittal and the Multi-Billion-Dollar Battle for a Global Empire" by
Tim Bouquet and Byron Ousey. The book is about the story of the world’s biggest and
most hard-fought industry takeover of recent years. It is the story of Lakshmi Mittal
taking over (or merging) with European steel giant Arcelor to form ArcelorMittal.
What I liked about the book was that it is told in a thriller fashion on what happened
each day of this six month battle. Each day is being narrated by the authors in a
scene by scene fashion including dialogs spoken. Once you start reading the book you
can't keep it down.
I always admired Mr.Mittal for his humble beginnings to become the "King of Steel"
and for his vision which he followed to grow his company at unprecedented rates. His
growth story is something that is made of numerous acquisitions of assets around the
world which have all been successfully integrated. My admiration keeps growing as
I read more - all his ventures have been outside his home country (India) in all far
off places of the world and he still proudly sports an Indian Passport. This
book goes into detail of all the things (Politics and Racism) that happened behind
closed doors to prevent him from taking over Arcelor. As the book says it - Mr.Mittal
certainly is someone who is "Stoic"
- a term meaning someone who just puts up with whatever is thrown at them. It is a
very apt term to summarize what Mr.Mittal had to put up with during this battle -
right from Racist like comments to protective behaviour of several European governments
and finally the unprecedented stone-walling by Arcelor board for every step of Mr.Mittal.
The takeaway for me as a Corporate head from the book was how the entire team at Mittal
Steel worked together as a single team to triumph over the fragmented Arcelor team.
Consider the fact that Mittal Steel team was not composed of one organization but
it nearly a dozen entities from Investment bankers, lawyers, PR Agencies, to Mr.Aditya
Mittal and Mr.Lakshmi Mittal himself. The whole battle is pure project management
brilliance of how all of them were kept in sync, said the same story, were in the
same page all the time. Add to that the fact they used modern communication tools
(Email and Blackberries) for effective collaboration increased my interest on reading
the book fully.
I highly recommend this book for any one wanting to survive in today's globalized
corporate world.
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If you are following US Business news you would have read about Starbucks
closing over 600 of their stores around USA. I am wondering on what took them
so long to do it.
For instance every time I visit Seattle (their headquarters) I am puzzled on how come
Starbucks have nearly half-a-dozen stores in the downtown area around WA State convention
Center. Aand all of them in walking distance to one another. In one of the streets
for every block they have a Starbucks store. Naturally each of their store will eat
into their other stores - if it is carpet bombing strategy against competition, I
don't find it impressive.
Here is the full
list of stores that they are closing.
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While returning from the USA in my flight I saw this movie "The
Bank Job". The
Bank Job is supposed to be a true life story of a bank robbery that took place
in London in 1971. The robbery was allegedly plotted by UK's secret police to cover
up a prominent member of British Royal Family. It involved thieves digging a tunnel
below a shop into a near-by bank, get into its vault and rob it. After finding millions
of pounds in the vault they also discover lot of dirty secrets - and realize why the
secret police plotted them into this. They use the mud uncovered to negotiate for
getting their safe passage. In the true life it is claimed none of the robbers were
arrested due to their safe passage given by the government.
A good movie that is enjoyable and also well taken. A must see if you like this "Genre"
of movies.
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 After
spending few hours in San Jose Tech Museum I took the local
VTA bus 180 to travel to the Great way mall. I was not sure on the direction of
the bus to take, their call centre was unhelpful answering my query, then I asked
one of the bus driver who guided me to take the bus going in the"Fremont BART"
direction. After Seattle Bay Area seems to have a decent public transport system,
which made me like this US city a bit. There is nothing exceptional about the mall
other than it is big and you get all designer stuffs here.
To kill time I went to Century Cinemas there to watch "Hellboy
II" - why Hellboy, because there was no other movie I would have liked. The
movie's story is completely fictitious and unbelievable, but the graphics and effects
are superb.
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I was in San Jose area and had the whole day to spend before my return flight (Jet
Airways from SFO to BOM) in the evening. So I started the day with my friend dropping
me in San Jose Tech Museum.
First I went to see the IMAX movie "The
Alps" which had breath taking views and an emotional story - an expert climber
had been wanting to climb the "Eiger" mountain in the Alps which had killed
his father
40 years back.
Then I went to see the exhibits, which included a Silicon IC (Chip) manufacturing,
Gene therapy, inventions, solar energy and many more. It is a must see museum for
today's students. I wish we had something like this in India - may be in Bangalore
Indian IT giants can take a clue from their Silicon Valley counterparts to fund one.
What impressed me was the web page creation kit they have - in every exhibit you can
insert your bar coded ticket to get a photograph of yourself and at the end you can
post all of them into your own custom
web page, cool!
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This time while travelling within the USA, I selected to fly with Southwest Airlines.
Most other airlines especially in the USA are using the Oil price rise as a good excuse
to cut all the "services" they are offering to customers and deteriorating
in every aspect. Southwest seems to be using this great risk as a clear opportunity
to differentiate itself as a provider of great service. You might ask what great service,
I could list the following:
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On time arrival and departure
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Courteous Staffs
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Accommodating change request whether it is to prepone a flight at the gates or with
no fees postpone your ticket online even for the lowest fare
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Wide choice of beverages on board - Starbucks Coffee, Tea, Soft Drinks & Juices
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Quick arrival of bags
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Affordable fares and no charge for two check-in bags (In one sector Alaska charged
me $25 for the second bag)
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Finally, few tables in every gate with 110V Power sockets to charge your laptops/accessories
and USB Power sockets to charge your iPods and phones.
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I had written earlier about Microsoft
Surface, but today I got a chance to play with it in person for sometime. I am
in Redmond, WA this week and was visiting one of the Microsoft offices where they
had kept a Surface computer for demo. Surface is one cool technology that you got
to use for getting a good feel. It definitely has great potential of changing the
way we interact with computers.
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Even if you have a hard disk with hundreds of GBs, you will run out of space soon.
At that time you want to see what is taking most of the space. Using Windows Explorer
and going to each folder is a time consuming job. Several years back I got introduced
to a tool called "Tree
Size" that displays chart like bars against each folder so that you can easily
see the usage. Today I found a free tool to do the same thing better - WinDirStat.
Apart from bars, it displays a beautiful squarisish picture of the usage based on
file types. Check it out.
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I was in our US office today and at the end of the day I had few hours to kill and
a few Mbps of Internet pipe. So I made the best use - watch some videos in Hulu.com.
For those of you who are outside USA, Hulu is promoted by NBC and News Corp media
houses, that has only legal videos and tons of it - including popular TV shows like
"The Simpsons" & "The Office". These are supported by naturally
advertisements.
While browsing I came across this movie "Casino
Royale (1967)" which was said to be a spoof on the original James Bond movie.
I didn't know this was a real movie, I assumed it to be a short fun clip but it turned
out to be a 2 hour full movie. This is an all-star 1967 spoof of Ian Fleming's 007.
David Niven comes as the aging Sir James Bond, called out of retirement to take on
the organized threat of SMERSH. After watching the movie which was fun I
learned about its creation - which involved 5 Directors, 6 James Bonds and
one of the James Bonds' Peter Sellers leaving in between.
Note: Hulu I guess is accessible only in North America due to geographical limits
of its copyright reach.
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The other day in a dinner conversation the topic was on how India has a nation has
grown in spite of everything - Corruption, Inefficient bureaucracy and all the differences.
That's when this book came up "In
Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce". I bought
the book immediately and I finished reading it during my travel now.
The book is an excellent work done by Mr.Edward Luce, who is a journalist with Financial
Times. During his various assignments he had worked in London, New Delhi and now in
Washington. Mr.Luce is best suited to do this book because of his long stay
in India, his wife being an Indian and finally he being a Britisher (lot of things
in India are still colonial hangovers). Without these background he couldn't have
done such a wonderful job.
Mr.Luce finely balances a westerner viewpoint and Indian insight in a lucid manner
- you don't see contradictions anywhere. Many things about India is puzzling to understand
even for Indians, and many times you have to go back to long gone history to truly
understand. For doing this Mr.Luce start with detail of larger than life figure of
3 modern day Indians - Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and BR Ambedkar. People who
know India know that North India is very different from South India and so on., so
Mr.Luce seems to have done extensive travel to report both sides.
I was happy to read about the good things he talks about the work of my state (Tamilnadu)
government. I learned many things from the book about India that I didn't know before
or haven't seen it that way. One observation I really liked is Mr.Luce's case on how
several welfare programs in India like anti-poor program, literacy programs, free
power, labour laws which are all created with good intentions are not effective because
of the very bureaucracy that is created to run it. Mr.Luce talks with ease of
both India's strength and weakness.
If you are an Indian or someone interested about India, this is a must read book.
Thank you Mr.Luce.
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Few weeks back I had a strange problem, my Vista installation kept saying it is going
to expire in 11 days. If you see the above image of the Control Panel-Systems says Windows
is Activated. So I was puzzled, how can something that is activated can expire.
Strangely the same error kept coming in few other machines in our office.
After several hours with Microsoft PSS on phone, they diagnosed the issue in my machine
to be a time-bombed SP1. Since I was in the beta program of SP1, I had downloaded
the RTM of SP1 from Connect which was time-bombed. The safe way is to get SP1 through
Windows Update or Microsoft Downloads.
I uninstalled this SP1, installed a fresh one from download.microsoft.com; now my
machine is fine. I had trouble with installing Windows
Search 4.0, which also got resolved after the fresh SP1 install.
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The next movie I watched on flight was Vikram's
Bheema. This movie got delayed for over 3 years & in the period Vikram didn't
act in any other movie. The story was usual and very ordinary. It is about a gangster
and gang wars - we have seen enough of this in Tamil movies. The only difference is
that everyone gets killed in the climax - Hero, Heroine, both the Gang Leaders (Prakash
Raj, Raghuvaran) and Thailavasal Vijay. If you can please skip watching this movie,
a low-point in Vikram and Director N.
Linguswamy's careers.
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On my Jet Airways flight from Mumbai to SFO I saw this movie 10,000
BC. It is a fictitious story of how a Hero from a small tribe fights against a
large civilization (resembling Egypt Pyramid days). After a sustained chase he wins
over them, get his people and his love released.
 
The settings, costume, fighting's have been taken well. At times in the movie you
feel a little bored and the story is overall unbelievable.
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