The Shifting Goalpost

After 20 years, he gives an interview through email and answers 6 questions. What a recluse?!

Slashdot discussion and
The interview on Cleveland.com

Calvin and Hobbes - one of my favourite comics characters.

If you find the following funny, then you should buy The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.

—
Calvin: “Dad, are you vicariously living through me in the hope that my accomplishments will validate your mediocre life and in some way compensate for all of the opportunities you botched?”
Father: “If I were, you can bet I’d be re-evaluating my strategy.”
Calvin, later to his mother: “Mom, Dad keeps insulting me.”
—
This one’s tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen …
—
Ms. Wormwood: Calvin! Pay attention! We’re studying GEOGRAPHY! Now what state do you live in?
Calvin: Denial.
Ms. Wormwood: [sighs] Well, I don’t suppose I can argue with that…
—

I came across this Wired article Ubiquity Alternatives Offer Power Users Command-Line Tools for the Web. The bookmarklet Quix is a wonderful tool - command line for the browser - it is similar to Quicksilver for Mac. I have dragged the bookmarklet to Safari’s Bookmarks Bar in the first position and hence I can invoke Quix command line by just pressing ⌘-1. There are loads of useful commands - I liked the ‘tt’ command which is useful for tweeting the current URL through Tweetie.

Finally, the shipment from UK arrived in Mumbai after 10 weeks and glad to have most of the things in one piece. I had to visit the customs office at the Mumbai Docks to get a clearance and pay for any duties. And I have to say the customs officers have been very co-operative, very helpful and very courteous. There was no underhand dealings or demands. Apart from the initial wait (and that was a long one), I was very delighted. In fact, the agents were the ones who were problematic.

I was excited like a kid finding a new toy when I read an article about the upcoming graphic novels based on Ratnakar Matkari’s Marathi stories (the comics are in English) in today’s Loksatta. Now, I consider Ratnakar Matkari as the Marathi Stephen King. And being an ardent fan of S.King and Graphic Novels, I am not able to contain my excitement.

Is this the beginning of getting something similar to 100 Bullets, V for Vendetta, Sin City and Sandman from India? Wow.

Please visit The Feast and other visions of malevolence to get a glimpse of these comics. Ashish Padlekar and Saumin Patel are the people behind this. Congratulations and Best of Luck to them!

Here are some rough notes about my experiences in Mumbai so far…

Mobile connection
Airtel - Initially, I went to Airtel Chembur office for getting a mobile connection as I also wanted to check out an iPhone (I was under the impression that Airtel was the exclusive supplier in India). We had a major trouble finding it since it had just opened and nobody knew where it was. And the Airtel hoardings all over were making the search more complicated. Anyway, eventually found it but the staff were totally clueless about the iPhone’s availability, price, and the data plan (they said it was just Rs.200 per month - I am still not sure whether that is the case). Unimpressed, I decided to seek other options.

Vodafone - My friend, who is a long term Vodafone customer, took me to their office in Chembur. I wanted to get two SIM cards - for me and my wife. The staff was courteous and after asking a few questions about the expected usage (voice and data) explained me the various post-paid options and sold me two connections - smooth ride. They told me that it will take not more than 48 hours for the SIM cards to get activated. What they did not tell me was it was 48 hours after I give them the address proof - house agreement copy. Now my friend who is a very diligent person actually had carried my house agreement copy in the car (she was taking care of all affairs related to my house while I was overseas). So I gave the staff the copy for photocopying and he took the necessary papers. I had to sign all the photocopies - self-attestation - fantastic ritual as compared to the earlier days of finding a Special Executive Magistrate for attesting your photocopies. Vodafone staff was also appeared uninterested in my iPhone query.

Now, I was patiently waiting for my mobile connection to start - switching the phone on and off now and again with no luck. The stipulated 48 hours passed and still no result. I tried the Vodafone customer care 111 a number of times and every time they said, the connection will start after 4 hours. Finally, I went to their office and it seems the staff already knew what was wrong - they had failed to take a copy of a certain page from the documents I provided. But did not bother to contact me to tell that. And when asked that I had called 111 a number of times but they did not tell me that this was an issue, the response was they don’t have this record with them. So all the time when they said the problem will be solved after 4 hours, it was a total bluff.

The ordeal doesn’t end here. After making sure that all the documents were with them and getting another assurance that the phone will be activated within 48 hours(!), I started for my journey to go out of Mumbai for 5 days. I knew I was carrying the risk of the connection not activating and it did materialise but the most surprising aspect was that out of my two connections, the one for my wife started within a day and the other one did not start for the next 5 days (but wife’s phone was disconnected twice after that for address verification and started after a call to 111) - both connections bought at the same time, same documents submitted and still this unexplainable phenomenon.

Also, I am getting strange phone calls for verification of address with somebody asking for date of birth, work details, and so on. And when confronted, they apologise and inform that a Vodafone representative had gone to my home address and since there was nobody then, we can take the details on the phone. I told them to ask the guys to come back again after taking an appointment. But till date, nobody has called me again.

In the meanwhile, I am always dreading that the connection(s) could go dead anytime (for lack of address verification!).

I had received a couple of phone calls explaining me the plans that I had subscribed to. These were very nice, polite and informative conversations. But I already had this information from my first visit to the Vodafone office.

Mobile Unlocking - This has been a horrible nightmare. I have already lost Rs.1200.00 (Rs.700 for unlocking and Rs.500 for solving an issue after that) but the phone again had a problem and is currently unusable.

Internet
Broadband - This has to be the best experience as yet. I had received a leaflet at home for Airtel phone and broadband. Called the person, set up an appointment and he promptly came to explain the various options (including what the competitor offers), fill the forms, and take the payment. The wiring was done the next evening at 8pm. And another person set up the broadband the next day. And it has been a smooth ride since then. Apart from the one occasion, when the line went dead - it seems there was another set up going on in the building and the wiring might have been affected during that time. But it was solved within half an hour, so no major grief. Apart from my anxiety whether this has something to do with address verification .

Other
Milk, newspaper, vegetables, medicines, grocery, and taxi can be ordered over the phone and are delivered without any extra charges. Businesses will send a person to collect cheques and forms to remove the delay it could take for you to go and buy from their premises and to eliminate the risk of you going to a competitor. This is super convenience and comparable to the online services in the western world with an edge over the flexibility in delivery times - my shoe-rack was delivered at 10pm. One should appreciate why e-commerce has to be approached from a different angle in India. Phone and human resource availability is the major competition for Internet in India. Even for bill payments, India has drop box facilities which I think are easier than online payments (for the majority who are still not comfortable with the computers and internet).

Travel
Meru - Call 022-44224422 and you can get a taxi at your doorstep. The service is very good. I wanted a taxi at 11.30pm at Airoli (in Navi Mumbai) and they arranged it within 15 minutes of my call.
BEST - Apart from some dangerous drivers, I am pretty impressed with BEST. It is superb value for money. I have used a combination of the two sites http://www.bestundertaking.com/transport/index.htm and http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/navigator1/index.html to plan the journey and though both the sites are rudimentary, they are quite useful. BEST has introduced a suburban and city day pass for Rs.20/Rs.25 which is fantastic. Nowhere in the world can you get so much for so little. If you get a window seat, it comes with the added advantage of going through some amusing placards, slogans, information boards along the way e.g. today I saw an ad for ‘Car Fiancee’.

More to follow…

It took one week for my mobile connection to get activated (I will be writing a critical review of Vodafone later) and left with no internet connection anywhere for me.

But slowly things are getting sorted out and we had a good week - including a fantastic trip to my native place (I drove my father’s Indica cursing the drivers all along). Surprisingly for everybody Advaita has adjusted quite well and is enjoying all this. He has so many small kiddy uncle and aunts, and big number of grandparents and quite a few great grandparents - amazing!

Will write later - I am sweating in a shady cybercafe.

… but still micro-blogging on Twitter @sandeepmeher and Facebook.

Driving down IT Operations Costs

Introduction

Even before the economic downturn started, organisations were always exploring ideas for bringing down the IT Operations costs of running live systems. The economic downturn has just brought more rigour or pressure in exercises aiming to reduce costs. IT service providers are exasperated as they are reaching a point where they can only maintain a skeletal support team and have to start absorbing risks associated with it and are vary of any more cuts demanded of them.

This document aims to address how organisations can prepare for any further cost reductions in the IT Operations costs by opting for an Incident Based Price Model in place of the traditional Fixed Price or Time & Material Price models.

Current Models: Challenges and Limitations

Where does the supplier get half a person? Fixed Price and T&M Price Models have been effective for both buyers and suppliers of IT Services in Production Support and Operations till the number of FTE (full time equivalent) were at least 2 for a certain application group. But for organisations having a complex IT landscape (number of small disparate systems complex enough to warrant multiple technical skills), the number of personnel required to service the volume of actual incidents or problems may not be justifiable.

Early indication of a problem on the horizon is when the buyer starts asking for a fraction of FTE or when the supplier starts offering that. This is when compromises start happening and risks being taken for parameters such as backup plans of staff e.g. replacement in case of illness or holidays.

The New Approach

Incident based pricing is not new - product vendors have been following this model indirectly for ages. It may be new to the support involved for customised and bespoke applications.

The key is of course to put a price tag on an individual incident. The most obvious step seems to be on the basis of Severity. But there are other parameters to be considered e.g. a sev 1 incident might be due to a server powered down by mistake for which the resolution is as simple as switching it on and taking care that the OS and applications start in a controlled fashion. On the other hand, a sev 4 incident could be about bank address of a particular customer changed but not picked up by a payment process in time for automatic debit. This could be more difficult to investigate and resolve than the sev 1 mentioned earlier.

Of course, including too many parameters would lead to a additional overhead in finalising a contract as well as billing. Though a daunting task, overhauling the contract and billing systems to include as many relevant parameters as possible, may make it possible to have a finer control. But till then, it is important to strike a balance and design a matrix that could be in the following format-

		Complexity
Severity	Low		Medium		High
Sev 1		£250		£500		£1000
Sev 2		£100		£250		£500
Sev 3		£30		£50		£75
Sev 4		£20		£30		£40
Sev 5		£10		£20		£30

One of the parameters defining the complexity could be the number of applications or support groups impacted.

Regular maintenance activities and critical activities can be charged at a special rate or allowed to fall in one of the above cells.

Controls will have to be put in place for incidents travelling from one support group to another and back.

Treatment to be decided for unresolved incidents. ‘No payments till resolution’ could be considered as an automatic penalty and would result in avoiding efforts for a separate penalty system under the other price models. But this would introduce the new risk and additional overhead of the incident resolution sign-off process in some cases.

Since the billing is directly linked to incident resolution, there is an incentive for the supplier to resolve the incidents as quickly as possible. And there will be no need for a rigourous SLA, at least for low severity incidents. This would also save on the related overheads of tracking and following up supplier on the SLAs.

This is a work in progress and the Google Doc here will be updated with any future changes.

A few days back, we had been to Banham Zoo in Norfolk - first zoo visit for my son, Advaita. It was a good day out. I think this was one of my best shots that day.

I was looking for a book that looks at the life of top executives in corporate and wanted to avoid business biographies. Luckily, I came across the “The Secrets of CEOs: 150 Global Chief Executives Lift The Lid On Business, Life And Leadership by Steve Tappin and Andrew Cave” which claims to have interviewed 150 CEOs and present the result of their research. Impressively, it has a foreword by Sir Richard Branson.

The book is divided in three parts - the first explains the current problems or challenges faced by CEOs (not exhaustive and a Chapter dedicated to each problem), the second categorises CEOs in five groups (a Chapter dedicated to each category) and provides a profile of one CEO falling in each of these group. This is the inspirational part and can help you in understanding what category you fall in as a leader. The third is supposed to be a compilation of CEOs’ secrets and guidance. But is actually a lot of management/leadership gyaan peppered with CEOs’ quotes.

I think one of the best part would have been “The Fellowship” section in Chapter 12, but that is very brief and just touches on an idea and this is an area where the CEOs’ might not have actually shared their secrets. Chapter 13 “Preparing to Lead” and Chapter 14 “Heeding the CEO Health Warning” provides career guidance and counselling - now the question is do aspiring CEOs really require this or not - I mean actual worthy candidates will find their way anyway.

One profile has definitely made a lasting impression - Terry Leahy - Tesco CEO since 1997 - who started as casual worker at the age of 23 becoming a director at the age of 30 and CEO at the age of 40.

Ben Verwaayen - BT CEO from 2001 to 2008 was the other inspiring personality in the book. And one of the striking quotes from Verwaayen was - “The biggest disease at companies is that it is more important to please your boss than to please yourself. It is very hard to get rid of because it is in people’s DNA. People want to please their boss so if he wants nonsense, they will serve it hot or cold or however he wants it.”

Overall, a book which does not require your 100% attention but can be added to the reading list for slightly more than a quick glance through.

Interestingly, both US CTO and CIO appointed in Obama’s administration are of Indian origin - Vivek Kundra and Aneesh Chopra. And there is a debate going on in the tech circle whether these appointments are right or not - not just debate - it is mudslinging now. Today this has reached new levels with John C. Dvorak asking whether Vivek is a phony. On the other hand, Tim O’Reilly had showered glowing praise - Why Aneesh Chopra is a Great Choice for Federal CTO and continues to support both the appointments.

Also, I don’t understand how the Indian media miss out on all this masala. Generally they go over the top about the achievements or infamy of Indians (or people of Indian origin) abroad.

The reason might be the attitude of so called entrepreneurs - blaming the bigger organisations i.e. blaming others for their failures. Please read this rant Why Wipro, Infosys and TCS are “Axis of Evil” for Indian startups!.

As a comics fan - maybe not as much as those who attend the Comic-Con, I was very interested in the two unconventional super-hero movies, Hancock and Unbreakable. Both the movies are very different but both portray super-heroes facing problems similar to ordinary human beings. The very conventional Peter Parker/Spider-man faces human problems but he faces those as Peter Parker not as Spider-man. Hancock faces a drinking problem. And David Dunn (Unbreakable) doesn’t even know that he has extraordinary powers (the whole movie is based on how he is made aware of that). Both have relationship issues.
Shyamalan’s every movie is compared with The Sixth Sense and then criticised how it fails to reach that level. I think that is very unfair. But compared to Signs and The Village, Unbreakable might be (or have been as I am watching it after 9 years of its release ) more likeable to The Sixth Sense fans. It has a very similar beginning and tries to have a similar shocking ending. But if you are a comics fan and a Shyamalan fan, Unbreakable is a fantastic treat.

BBC2 is broadcasting a fantastic series on cricket - Empire of Cricket. Any cricket fan worth his salt should not miss this. More information here - BBC Two Programmes - Empire of Cricket.

India out of T20 World Cup

I had thought about writing this for quite some time. Ab Tak Chhappan is one of the best movies to understand and implement effective Team Management - I am not joking. Having read this, if you go and watch this movie, it will be impossible not to get the point I am making. Your opinion may differ on whether it is the best lesson or not (I sure do consider it one), but you surely will agree 100% with me that it indeed is a management lesson.

I have seen this umpteen times now. Latest run on last Friday with a dear friend who completely agreed with me - he confessed that he had seen the movie but never thought about the management angle but now feels that every shot gives an insight.

My photography experiment after a long time…

HDTV connected to a Mac running Plex controlled by Apple Remote. Plex is a great replacement for Front Row because of the control, configuration and expandability options it provides and it is as slick as Apple software.

Finally, I gave up my reluctance against HTPC, shared media around house, NAS in a home etc. and decided to do get started on a project to take a leap in that direction. Problem: 2 external hard disks, 1 old eMac desktop computer, 1 Macbook Pro (MBP) and an old TV. I want to use the MBP to play my HD movies stored on the external hard disks on the old TV.

eMac is wired to the wireless router. External hard disks are connected to the eMac. So sharing the hard disks makes it (and the movies) available on the wireless network that serves the MBP. But this requires the eMac to be on all the time which is a waste of electricity. Actually it should be ON for the MBP to access the files. And then it can be turned OFF. But physically turning it ON/OFF is painful. I was aware of the wake on lan feature and decided to give it a try. A utility WakeOnLan is available from ReadPixel which allows a similar thing - instead of ON/OFF one can Wake/Sleep a computer on the network. And getting this done was a small source of joy.

The last part is not going to be that simple. For playing a movie on the old TV using the MBP is going to be a challenge (£15 + a few couple more) as I could only find Apple makes the DVI to S-video/RGB cable. There are loads of DVI to HDMI options but no S-video/RGB and hence connecting to “old” TV is a problem. Now, the challenge is spend £15 for the DVI to S-video or £600+ for a new TV and the connector. The later option looks so tempting!!! I am not going for the S-video cable right now.

I used to cringe whenever I heard/read comics being referred as Graphic Novels (I thought that term was redundant). But then I came across the fantastic Sandman and I can say that comics and Graphic Novels are two different entities. There is no superhero by the name Sandman (at least not in the two volumes I read in last couple of weeks). It is a “a comic book for intellectuals.” See the Wikipedia entry for more details.

Will start updating regularly from this week. At least one friend cares and hence this update.

Another year, another move, and one of the reasons why my blog includes the word ’shifting’. Will be on the blogging track regularly - I don’t think anybody missed anyway

No words to describe what I am feeling after watching the news.

I was a huge fan of Indrajal comics during my school days (and Phantom was the favourite). And if you were too, this article will bring back some old memories.

What more could have Sachin Tendulkar done to be unequivocally accepted as the all time great of the cricketing world? My answer is ‘nothing’. I am not ashamed of saying that he is the one.

I cannot understand why he is always placed after Bradman and why he is always compared with Lara and now ridiculously with Ponting? If scoring more than 28,000 runs cannot make you the greatest, then nothing ever can and I think that is very unfair. How many who place him after Bradman have actually seen Bradman play? Sachin has definitely played more cricket than Bradman, has faced more variety of bowlers, who arguably could be better bowlers than those from the Bradman era. And Lara has scored 6,000 runs less at a lower average in both forms of the cricket.

After the dotcom bubble burst, internet evolved in Web2.0. And I think after the current financial crisis, we will get Web3.0 and maybe it will be easier to define and deliver Web3.0 (I think it will be development resulting from the crisis) than it was for Web2.0.

In the midst of all the turmoil in the financial markets across the world, Indian markets ended on the higher side (+2%). I don’t believe anybody expected that to happen and that there is any explanation as to why that happened.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

I think the current shakeout was necessary and will eventually help everybody in the long run. For investors in Indian stock markets, this is another opportunity to build up a portfolio over the next few years. But I shudder at the thought of what will happen to Sensex and Nifty tomorrow (tomorrow as in Tuesday, 30/Sep/08).

Workflow is an interesting term and I guess it is very common in the Design/Photography/Video industry (I can only guess as I am not in that industry - in IT we use the term Process more often than anything else - of course one of the applications I am closely associated with - Siebel - has workflows, but then that is for the application usage - yea yea by users and developers both, but not for the application development process(!)). It is so easy to digress from a topic and you have seen an example now.

Anyway, I always had this skepticism about this workflow concept till now. At work (I don’t blog about work but this cannot be avoided) we decided to record the cross-group trainings we have every week and make the material available for distribution to the wider audience. And here comes my challenge to set up a workflow to download (errm no… capture footage), encode, and then deliver/ store (errm no… publish) the material. Does not sound too complicated. But then, I tied this up with putting my old eMac to thorough use instead of keeping my MacBook Pro busy and unusable for other tasks (eh eh… surfing). I didn’t want to use iMovie (as I want to spend much time on post processing and since the clean install of Leopard, I actually don’t have iLife on the eMac). I decided to put Quicktime for this task. But I can’t believe how complicated this has now become?

I use Canon HV20 for movies. I had already bought Quicktime Pro from Apple to enable Quicktime’s recording and export features. But one of the problems I initially faced was that Quicktime would not recognise the HD mode of the camera - that was no good for my HD blockbusters (no not the Training videos). After a few sleepless nights, found this pointer towards a developer utility called DVHSCAP that comes with the Apple’s Firewire SDK. And it was such a delight to find out that DVHSCAP captures HD video from the camcorder and stores it as a M2T file (MPEG-2 Transport) and that’s it. I had received pointers towards using MPEG Streamclip to convert the captured video to destination format (that search to decide what the destination format should be is still going on). But no life is not so easy, MPEG Streamclip requires a Quicktime MPEG-2 codec for converting M2T files and this is sold at an extra cost from Apple. Now I don’t want to pay more cash having already bought Quicktime Pro - that would be just a tenner or couple less than the price for iLife suite. But I already had ffmpegx on my eMac and gave it a try and it was successful in the conversion but then the quality was not that great - jerky in some places - possibly due to interlacing/deinterlacing or lack of either or due to some setting for frame rates (PAL - 25fps, NTSC - 29.97fps). Being an eternal optimist, I took this as a learning oppurtunity and increase my knowledge of this complicated medium. And everyday is a new surprise, e.g. today I came to know that there are square pixels (computer displays) and rectangular pixels (TV). That 4:3, 16:9 might end up displayed differently on computers and TV that many of the pixel sizes actually i.e. mathematically not in the ratios 4:3 and 16:9.

I had decided to go for SD recording instead of HD for the training videos. And Quicktime Pro can capture SD through its “New Movie Rcording” option in the menu after starting the playback on the camcorder connected through Firewire. But it severely limits the compression options available for the new recordings depending on the machine being used and rightly so (right now, a 3 minute clip is taking more than 40 minutes for conversion to Web Delivery format - something is bloody wrong somewhere). Quicktime Pro allows the capture with the fantastic ‘Device Native’ option in the video’s full resolution which I have selected. This creates a 12GB file for every hour. But then this is just halfway to the holy grail.

I am too sleepy to include links to the various utilities mentioned above - a quick Google search should do the trick.