Moved to GNOME 3 ...

I was experimenting with GNOME 3 over the weekend on my OpenSuSE 11.4 Desktop.  First I tried the One-Click install which actually screwed up my desktop completely.   After analyzing little more and studying various forums on the internet, I opted the 'zypper'  approach which worked great for me.

I used the GNOME 3:Stable repository thru zypper to install GNOME 3 on my OpenSuSE desktop and this is what I got.   It looks beautiful and appealing.   My first experience has been pretty smooth.   In minutes I was able to get my applications configured against the new scintillating desktop.    My first view ... "GNOME 3 is a completely new approach to desktop users"  - far better than Windows 7 and its predecessors.   GNOME 3 is going to be default with next OpenSuSE community edition (after 11.4) - but I am taking an early look at it and is planning to file some defects to improve the desktop computing exprience.

If you are a serious desktop user, I urge you try this.....I am sure you would love it.

Kudos to the GNOME community !     

Art of Parenting - Gene, Generate, Generation

I was pondering over the word "Generation" and I could kinda extract a few meaningful words from it to justify my title here.
Gene,  Generate, Ration  are contained inside Generation

Gene -   is a unit of heredity in a living organism.
Ration - supply of essential needs

So, putting it all together, as a parent, your duty is to bestow essential needs in form of knowledge, creativity, socialization and culture in your children.   Once that is rationed, there would be a constant supply of these virtues to them.   As your children grow, it gets internalized inside their genes.    Thus, I do firmly believe that this virtue is passed down to generations below as a heredity.

As a responsible parent, by doing this, you ensure that you not only serve your children but a generation there after.

Fun with English

Heard this in a program presided by Suki Sivam in Hosur.   

English is a very funny but beautiful language.   Humans are habituated animals.   They tend to do the same thing again and again as they gain the know how  and become comfortable in doing it.    It becomes their HABIT.   

Let us decipher this special word  H-A-B-I-T.

So
        Removing 'H'  -     'A BIT" is left for you to live upto to your legacy.

        Removing 'A'  -     You still have the "BIT" with your wisdom in you.

        Removing 'B'  -     "IT" is still there with you and IT will remain in you.

Habits are etched hard into your soul which is hard to erase.

Secret behind successful ventures!

I was reading a literature a few days back on successful ventures and was pondering around this topic for few days.    I do feel that the following are critical elements for any venture to be successful

a. Timing  
              The need of the hour
b. Quick turn around time
              How fast the first deliverable is made
c.  Quality of the first outcome
               In terms of performance and reliability 
d.  Right cost 
              People are ready to pay as long as there is quality in it)
e.  Confidentiality
             Do not talk about it till you have finalized your goal and ready      

Let me give you two great examples from the Indian context

Maruti Car   :   In early 80s when only Premier Padminis and Ambassador cars were seen, people were fed up and wanted to change.   Maruti Suzuki took timely advantage of this situation and delivered its first car (the small car "The red Maruti 800") which had the modern looks, superb pick for those days and the ability to easily maneuver.    And after that there is no looking back for Maruti Udyog.

Volvo Bus :     Volvo was quick to realize that there was a need for fast and technically advanced buses and trucks which Tata and Ashok Leyland were unable to produce.   They quickly introduced the Volvo buses.   This was quickly accepted by numerous travel operators which made travel so comfortable and fast.
Ofcourse, there are many other examples too, but these two are the flashy ones that came to my immediately.  

So, it is critical to consider the above 5 mantras before you start your venture and have a detailed plan in place.

World Chess Championship comes to India (Chennai)

It is heartening to learn that the World chess championship is going to be held in Chennai in 2011.    This is simply nothing but a visbile accredition to our country as a critical chess playing nation.   I also read that out of 20 International Grandmasters from India, 10 are from Tamilnadu.    What a remarkable achievement from this South Indian state.

This shows the intellectual capability of the nation and most of the credit goes to the prevailing education system and the unity and diversity of the country.   

I am extremly proud to be an Indian.

What is the next big thin(g)k from Microsoft ?

A few weeks back someone told me that Microsoft is working on Windows 8 which is slated to be released sometime in 2012. I am given to understand that there are several users who are yet to make a switch to Windows 7 from XP; especially the enterprise desktop users. I wonder if there is really a need for Windows 8 at all? I don't want to see Microsoft repeating the same mistake which it did with Windows VISTA which brought down its reputation. I think enough research and public opinion needs to be sought before investing in developing the next desktop OS. We are pretty satisfied with the stability of Windows 7 and we would like to see it serving us for next few years like Windows XP did. Microsoft did a great job in the mid 80s making the end-user computing for the common man easy through DOS and it lived for many years till Microsoft made the great shift to the Windows world. It might want to adopt a similar strategy for smartphone market. But, it has to be smarter this time as it is not alone today.  I am particularly keen in the Nokia smartphone with Windows in it and the following demonstration sounds promising https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6oidCTUw4s&feature=player_embedded

Google Story - Motivational Teachers...

In 1996, when Microsoft had already made its name in the PC Industry as a software gaint, many college students dreamt to be the next Bill Gates.  But, they did not know how to achieve the glory, what should be done?   Many of them wanted to join the company to be part of the booming wave and also make lots of money.    This is probably true with Standford students too.

The internet started to show its face.    Search engines such as Altavista, Infoseek and Yahoo emerged inside the Netscape Browser, but were either slow or could not fetch useful needed information at will.


When Brin and Page were studying at Stanford, they just not only had inspiring friends, but also inspiring teachers.  I think one of them wanted to download the world wide web and study it intensely to see how to meaningfully rank order the links to get meaning results of search queries.    I am sure the idea would have emerged by means of some useful and intense brainstorming with geeks and professors.   It is not just the motivation that made the two lads perceive their research but also the support the university gave them with lot of faith in their project which finally gave GOOGLE to us.

It would be nice to introspect this aspect and extract some best practices that could be followed in grooming and shaping the student-teacher relationship right from high school to graduate school.   I will try to talk about this to more and more teachers I meet henceforth.  

I will try to blog more about this aspect and my findings moving forward.

THE ERA OF PERSONAL COMPUTING

Most of today's PC Users do not know or not care about the history of PC     computing.    While there are several books and online materials which  cover exhaustively in different ways, I took a simple approach of writing this short blog.    These are not taken from any book or any online material,  but, they are the ones I experienced in my software career.    I apologize  in advance, if something is mis-represented.   Please feel free to comment  on my blog and I swear to correct this and enhance.   This is for sheer pleasure of reading.

1982      IBM PC with two 5 1/4"  Floppy Drive to hold 512 KB Floppies
            Spec :  8088 with 64 KB RAM  (No Hard Drive)
            Operating System :  MS DOS 3.1

            Applications :   BASICA,  FORTRAN IV,  COBOL,

                                      WORDSTAR

                                      DBASE III
                                      LOTUS 1-2-3

            Games        :     PacMan,  Prince, Digger, Paratroopers
            
1986    The advent of Hard Disk
                IBM PC XT (Extended Technology) with 10-20 MB Hard Disk

1989    Faster Processors
                IBM PC AT 
                Spec :      80286  (PC AT-286)
                                80386  (PC AT-386) with 80387 Math co-processor)

                Applications :    GW-BASIC, FORTRAN 77
                                FOXBASE
                                CLIPPER (To produce .EXE from dbase/foxbase code)
                                TURBO-C   (For 'C' Programming)
                                TURBO-PASCAL  (for 'Pascal' Programming)
               
                Connectivity (LAN)    :   Novell NetWare 3.12 ( 'F' Drive)
       
1991    IBM PC AT Unleashed!              
                Spec:    80486 (PC AT-486) with in-built co-processor)
                           Better capacity hard disks with more than 80 MB are available
               
                The advent of 3 1/2"  floppy Disks with 1.2 MB Capacity.                   

                The bane :   Advent of Viruses and vaccines
                                      "Your PC is Stoned!"
                                       "Marijuana"
(More and more people in India started buying PCs and we started feeding  Bill Gates with more cash!)

We started bidding adieu to manual type writters (Godrejs, Remingtons became history)

1993    'C' Compiler reaches PC-Programmers 


Also the era of desktop publishing with Ventura and Pagemaker from XEROX Corporation.   Banks and educational insitutions adopted more Novell NetWare 4.1.     More and more students started learning C-Programming but they struggled with the concept  of pointers in C.    Recruiters took advantage of this asking more and more twisted questions in pointers and used them as key criteria for recruitment.     
Real computer science knowledge was brushed aside.

Yashwant Kanitkar - a young man from Nagpur took advantage of this situation and released books such as "Pointers in C",  "Let us C"   which sold like hot cakes.
The exciting world of Windows came into existence with WINDOWS 3.1.    Clever move from Microsoft.
            The following were revolutionized
                a.    People learnt to click, drag, copy and paste
                b.    The need of mouse arose and sold like hot cakes.  
                c.    True multi-tasking with the capability to run multiple programs simultneously.

Several applications were developed using Windows SDK on Windows 3.1
But the adoption was not rapid.    People still continued to use MS DOS 3.3.
Windows 3.1 needed MS DOS 3.3 and hence people were confused to whether to adopt Windows 3.1or stay with MS DOS.
This challenged Microsoft to completely move to GUI-based OS...........so they started working on it more  vigorously.   They hardly had 12-18 months of time to break this ambiguity.

1995    Windows 95 was born!           
The news spread like wild fire with people pre-booking their copies.    Windows 95 replaced Windows 3.1 in a jiffy.    It not only replaced it on the machine but also inside people's minds.  With that, there came a whole big revolution in the software industry for the common man.
            Most noticeable ones were
                    -> Microsoft Office
                    -> Visual C++
                    -> Media Player or MPlayer
                    -> Paint Brush or MSPaint   
                    ->Notepad and Wordpad       
            However, the 'START BUTTON', "WINDOWS TASK BAR' and 'EXPLORER'  became the integral part of  Operating System.    The word 'Directory' got renamed to 'Folder' and slowly the DOS command prompt began to disaappear although Microsoft preferred to ship it with all its versions till Windows 7.   That's something that I would like to ask the experts.

However, the concept of PC-Networking was still alien to Microsoft although I believe the company was secretly working on internal networking project Like Microsoft File Sharing and the NetBIOS Protocol.    Novell continued to dominate the PC-Networking world.  The most admiring thing that caught everybody's attention were the screen savers and wall papers.  For the first time in the history of personal computing, one could customize the desktop with flashy  wall papers.    I believe this is a truely a revolutionary concept which made Windows and PC inseparable.

1996 thru 1998    Windows 95 to Windows 98
Millions of home users and enterprise desktops adopted Windows 95.   When I joined Novell in 1997,  they gave me a Windows 95 desktop which I saw for the first time in my life.   With Windows 95 filling every desktop space,  there was no looking back for Micosoft.    It became the highly acclaimed company with enormous trust with its share holders giving them deep pockets.     
Microsoft was unstoppable.    Bill Gates's reputation shot leaps and bounds and he probably became a virtual  member of a few American families.  

 I think the concept of Multimedia  became prevalent during this generation with Windows Media Player (MPalyer) playing wav and VCD files.   MPEGs  were probably unheard in those days.

 The advent of ithe Internet with Netscape Navigator became ubiqutous and took the PC to the next level.  With limited network bandwidth, for the first time in the history of computing, the internet (till them only accessible to NASA, Military and Scientific research) became accessible to the common man.   The PC User  was able to access the World Wide Web and enter into the information super highway.     I would say, this is  probably  the greatest revolution in the history of mankind. 

The Art Of Parenting - 1

ART OF PARENTING - by Solvendar Mr. Sukisivam
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0F0iQdGk_4&feature=related
Tried to translate as much as possible in English


I would like to share an opinion with you. There is no guarantee that our children would accept us as good parents. Many of us as parents are not willing to accept this important truth. We must modulate our mind to accept this. There is no point in striving to enact as good parents before our children. Our objective is not to get a conduct certificate from our child. That's not why we brought them to this world and that is not why we are growing them. If we expect our children to appreciate us for everything that we do to them, then we are inviting trouble. You would probably be branded as "Bad Parents" by our children. Instead, you may want to 'suggest' and explain the advantages if your child follows your suggestion. Do not get upset if your suggestion is not taken.

The first problem most of us do as parents is 'dictate'. Dictators are hated by people which we know by real examples. There are several cases in world history in the past and present where dictators have disappeared and people have forgotten them. Are we dictators? My humble request to all parents is to not dictate to their children. The more you dictate, the more you distance yourself from your child. The child wouldn't feel empowered and they grow as dependant individuals. They stop thinking on their own and thus their creativity is crippled.

Today's education system in India is mostly marks-oriented. Children are subjected to excess mental stress and torture to score high marks in their 12th grade school examination. The rat race is geared towards seeking admission in a top-notch engineering or medical college. Their knowledge is bookish and limited. Hardly any attempt is made to enhance their IQ and intellectuality. As able and committed parents, do you want to take part in this rat race or do you want your child to get holistic knowledge of the society? Let me give the basics of art of learning. Children want to learn by themselves, but they do not want to be taught. Essentially this means, they want to learn through experiencing things. As parents, we have to find out the likes and dislikes of the child and get them experienced into what they like more.

Let me give you an incident that took place many years ago in the west. There was a child by name 'Tommy'. He was partially deaf. His teacher lost hope with him and found him no good at studies. She called his mother and told her that he is too stupid to learn and thus asked her not to send him to school henceforth. Although his mother was deeply saddened by this incident, she never lost hope. She worked day and night and self-taught Tommy. He later became an eminent scientist. He is none other than the great Thomas Alva Edison.

The art of good parenting is to unleash the true potential of your child and guide him/her to adopt the right direction helping them march towards the glory without major expectations.