Still we are trying to solve social problems with technical solutions

As an engineer I always thought we can implemented this technology here and there and get this done. There were lot of technical solutions available, why can’t we just use it and solve issues ?

Well that’s how an engineer thinks. He thinks life is about problems and solutions. If engineers could solve all problems (and if at all, all were really problems it could be solved) then we wont need any other professions right ?

But then some are basic needs not issues and not problems. Say for example energy. This is a nice article I read. http://www.pluggd.in/power-theft-smart-grid-solution-hameshaon-297/

Just implement this and power theft will stop. Well we also though by moving to private sector we can solve power theft but did we ? The problem is social and not technical.

Yes, we can use IT here to do analytics and predict the amount of power needed and thus router the right amount of power to the right region via intelligent and smart grids.

But can we automatically detect theft and stop it. The answer is no. When the employee from power companies go to check, the hooks are removed (someone tips off the thieves and that someone is an insider) and the hooks come back once the check is complete. If you detect a theft using some form of technical means what can you do

1. Check the place ? Hooks are gone
2. Cut power ? You are penalizing the legal customers too

In developed countries when someone complains (has the guts to complain firstly) he/she knows that action will be taken. Here firstly he/she wont have guts to complain (most power thieves are anti social elements or protected people*. Also whoever can put hooks can easily pull a connection out too). Even if they complain, all the power supply will do is come and remove the connection. To do that they would need police escorts else they might be killed.

India also provides free power (or for $1/month) to poor people and free to farmers so that their kids can read and water pumps can run. These people think its their right and thus waste power. Where a rich, bill paying person makes sure he/she efficiently uses power, the free boarders use it indiscriminately. In Gujarat just for analytical purposes when government wanted to install meters in farmer’s homes they had to involve the local police else employees where beaten up. Now the question is how many of these meters will be allowed to operate correctly.

The problem is enforcement and law and order related. Whether its India’s traffic discipline, energy theft or governance, its all how much rule of law stands and how much they are enforced. An do this, first society has to change and obey the law of land.

My struggle with Corby pro

OK supposedly (acc to Samsung), this is a pro phone or a professional phone i.e.

In all the pain I have gone through it is not. I dropped my E71 and so it became unreliable to use (signal issues, battery not charging et al).

So I though why not touch screen phone. This one said, syncs easy, SNS is there etc etc so I get it. If I never did the following, this phone is good. If I did do this its useless. These were easily done by Nokia E71

1. Sync my
1. Google and Notes calendar as one
2. Notes Address book with photos which show up as caller ID
2. Connect to my laptop using cable or Bluetooth. Somehow Corby supports only cable, no BT. E71 was clever. Come near and it synched auto
3. E71 had smart-connect S/W, so if it found a wifi, it hoped on to it and synched my emails/SNS etc. No data charges. Here i have to manually configure the settings. If wifi is there and accessible still it will use by data plan
4. No call management s/w here like in E71
5. Themes, no fonts, no shortcuts of your own applications. Basically no ways you can customize the pho
6. GPS is way off by a good 2 KM.
7. Multitasking is there but most of the time it will run out of memory and then will auto close some apps as it wishes !
8. Emails are same though I would love to see the status even when its locked. I now only see SMSes
9. No status of upcoming appointments (A mandatory pro feature)
10. Sync with outlook but there are a lot of fields which it says are “not supported” including title. And in my case it reversed first and last names on all my contacts for some strange reason. Also have to sync manually. It doesn't sync auto.

Is it worth the 60% retail of E71. Yes it is , provided the ‘Pro’ is removed. It is never meant to be a professional phone and never can be. Nokia S60 5th edition are always better.

Not happy, suggest avoid the Corby family unless buying for someone who does not bother about the above 10 things. Also don’t buy it for SNS, they are crap. I use Snaptu for Twitter and Facebook anyway.

Hoping Samsung dumps their own OS here and releases a Corby with Android, then it will be appealing. Else its a piece of *** (IMHO).

Have to use it though till my e71 reaches a useable state after repairs. Hopefully the local geeks can do some magic there as Nokia Service center does do cosmetic surgery on phone and the screen/lcd/keypad are cosmetic parts and not covered by warranty !

Good Consultant Vs Best Consultant

All through my career of 10+ years have worked with developers, testers and managers. Then during the days when I become the architect, I have had the opportunities to work with the big shots of any company. They are called as product and industry consultants. They work with the sales people in working with the customer before a deal has been signed. They make sure that we sell the maximum amount of our products and services and we ‘fit’ the sale with customer requirement, thus getting high customer satisfaction later on. I asked what differentiate them from me. Is it just a piece of paper called as MBA degree ? or is it also something else.

As an architect I am trained to think. Well that is why we go through something called as ‘Introduction to Architectural Thinking” as the first course. So I thought and came with this basic differentiators

1. A consultant understand the peculiarities of that business model or that Line of Business, say for example retail  or finance or banking …
2. A consultant is supposed to keep himself/herself aware of any new business processes, models that have come into their domain/space. They should anyway be aware of standard processes
3. He or She should at first listen to the customer to understand the pain the customer wants us to remove. Customer never ever gives requirements, they tell their pains. The difficulty they are having to do their business in the same way they are doing it. It might be a
1. Business process problem
2. Model problem
3. Implementation problem. This can be IT or non IT
4. Anything I cannot think of now
4. A consultant should understand the domain, scope and type of the problem before he can advise on the situation. The advise may not lead to a IT solution being sold at all.
5. A consultant should also gauge the problems he foresees after analyzing the business model or environment, and inform the customer of remedial steps.
6. Bottom line is  that the consultant should never be the sales person who has gone there to sell whatever possible. A customer who is made to buy stuff he does not need and so will never use is a really pissed off customer !

Based on the above I once looked at a extract of data from a customer and had a talk with the consultant. This doesn’t look right. Even though the system will work with this data but the model of the data is not complete. There are some entries missing. These entries are used for product management and will really help in supply chain analysis, merchandising and business intelligence later on if they would have been present. I do recommend we tell it to the customer.

He said, huh, they will never change their model, they have been using for the last 20 years ! There is no point.

Two Things came to my mind. First is this consultant is pessimistic, bad bad bad.Second, he assumes that if someone used it long then its right. This is first thing a consultant is supposed to not believe in.

I checked some more. I did my job by telling them that but why they were not doing theirs. Arrrggh !

• A consultant is not sales person. Here the consultant is acting as one and thinks he might loose business if he says anything. He is not confident of the reason because of which the client has chosen our company. He has no clue about this
• He just did his MBA and become a consultant. Was a programmer or some IT person before that. Which means he has no experience in this field. Experience adds knowledge, teaches tact and thus brings in confidence. Once you have that then you know what you are thinking is right, you have an idea of how to implement it and thus using proper communication you will somehow pass that message along

Thus, a consultant whether he is from business or IT plays a very important role. They are the outsiders, the third trained eye, who sees the problem as a whole, sees the building facade from outside and the structure/beams/floor/basement from inside and then can say where the problems are, the steps we can take to fix them and the plan which we can execute to take those steps in the most economical and non-destructive manner.

Industry experience, positive attitude, the eye that sees things as one, a mind that always thinks and a mouth that is not shy to point out the wrongs makes a damn good consultant.

Business mobility from IBM

 

Shows what IBM is up to

Business mobility from IBM

Virtualization for development

 

When I joined this industry in 1999, we always had issue with developing on Windows and testing/deploying on Unix. We still have the same issues now but from the verification and validation side of things we are better off now due to virtualization and also due to maturity of Linux. The maturity of Linux has made it the platform of choice at least for its Enterprise flavors from Redhat and Suse. Also testing has become so easy using VMware images of the two OSes. Create a virtual test environment and test your product on Linux or even Solaris. Though for commercial UX you will still need their physical box but I guess you can get it free if you tell them its either their OS/box or Linux on their competitors !

Virtualization has made life simple for developers too. Earlier, lot of time was wasted when developers had to first install the tools, configure them, load data into the DB, which were time wasters. Now you can create a whole image of the developer desktop, deploy it on the cloud and developers can use it on demand. At night, the developer desktop will go to sleep, the same server now starts the build/test environment and starts running the build or the test scripts. OS Patches also effect the product and that also can be factored in now by keeping versions and snapshots of the images.

We though need to be careful about licenses. Remember a windows image still need a license, so if you company has 50 licenses it means physical + virtual. Better have a good deal with MS on the licenses front. MS does bundle them. Like you can run 4 Win2k3 on the server which is running Win2k3/VMware Server. Win2k8 natively supports virtualization.

Lastly, for a Linux enthusiast like me, I can get a Linux environment on my Windows XP using VMWare player and do not need the Xserver or a telnet client. I can just switch over to the Linux desktop and work the way I like to work on remote Unix/Linux boxes as if I am on the console. I can learn Linux or just do development on Linux.

Career Options in India

 

List is not complete. There are still other options available. Click on it to be forwarded to the M-Power page.

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Must read: Consultants, know how the IRS determines employee status

 

Chip Camden offers independent consultants tips on how to be savvy when it comes to the IRS’s 20 factors for determining whether a worker is an employee under common law rules.

How IRS determines a Employee-Employer relationship

Is determined as employee the tax liability comes in which can cause penalties too so better be aware of what criteria are used by IRS to determine this. Important for freelance and independent software consultants working in USA.

Performance testing with no $$

 

Yes I know there are enough tools that can do automated testing but they do cost a lot of $ + you need a person who charges a lot of $ to use them. Before spending $ on that and them check this out once and see if your project requirement can be met using JMeter, a free performance testing tool. You do need some background on performance testing though and out friends at MS have given this paper for that. Read it first, then understand it, then decide what you want to do and the try executing in in JMeter. If it fits the requirement you are good, at least you would know what to use if it doesn’t.

MS Link

Performance Testing for web applications

Google Tech talk about OS tools for performance testing

Eclipse for Java Beginnings

 

Yes I know that you think you know Eclipse IDE but please go through this once so that next time when some senior person talks something like why don’t we create a breakpoint and watch the RS object to see the cursor position and RS object you don’t have a blank on your face !

Go to you-tube and make an effort to see the videos, helps a lot even for someone who has worked a lot on eclipse.

UML – The Visual language

 

The required language to know to interact with Clients, Engineers and managers !

Architects in Software

Its difficult to get why they are needed + the numerous kinds also add to confusion. Luckily people are understanding the need now. here is one more for the cause.

Enterprise Architect, Solution Architect and Infrastructure Architect.