Out of IBM

12 yrs, 6 months and 2 days later I move out of IBM. Gr8 place to be in but then India is different, in both kind of work and management style. My aspirations were different from the companies strategy and therefore decided to part ways.
Will miss the culture n ppl with whom I had got used to working with at the big blue.
Last few months were hard. The client needed dumb (one who does not speak) kind of ppl, rather than a partner n it was getting tough to act that way. 

Why should a fish climb a tree?

Just read this interesting article: Personal Blog - Posted by Namratha Jaisimha

Why Should a Fish Climb a Tree? “Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will go its whole life believing it is stupid.” This is so true. Over the years I have received feedback from my managers, parents and mentors. Some of the feedback has been very useful and some has been totally useless. One of the most important roles of a manager is to give the right feedback at the right time. I have seen managers giving feedback only when they are forced due to company policy, say at the annual review. I like to get feedback from a person who is observing me on a daily basis and giving me pointers. Pointing out how to make things better with the right examples and right time would make feedback very useful. I have had my “A-ha” moments with feedback given this way. The feedback has to be meaningful to the employee. The idea of giving feedback is to help your employees improve themselves. Calling names such as “Bully”, “Stupid” does not give any insight to the employee unless good examples are given. Even worse is when the feedback is contradictory. As an employee getting such feedback, you are left wondering what your manager meant. A common mistake that I have seen managers make (I am also guilty of this and I see parents making it also) is to try to make their employee someone they are not – making them fit to a preset mold. This brings me to the starting point of this blog –why do we make the fish climb a tree? Why do we try to turn the fish into a monkey? Even if it tried its whole life, it would not excel. Instead, if we believed that each of our employees is a genius and brings a special value to the team and then make full use of their talents, the team will benefit. I learnt this the hard way when my son was 4 years old. Wanting to make him a math genius, I signed him up for Kumon classes which emphasizes learning math through repetitive activities. I learnt that it is impossible to make my son do repetitive jobs. He is good at math but he cannot learn it the Kumon way. Each person has an inherent personality and talent. I have had to be very creative in recognizing and bringing out his talents. One piece of feedback I have recently received is that my English is bad. At 40+ years of age, it is going to be very difficult to fix this. I agree that my English isn’t the best, but the bigger question is - is it good enough? I seem to be able to connect to hundreds of people with the language I have. One of the best speakers I know mixes languages almost every other sentence but boy, is she a good speaker!! She kept the 400 people crowd engrossed in her speech. One of the authors I like is Chetan Bhagat. He has very vibrant characters in his stories – he mentions that his language is not technically the best and would never win a Bookers award but his books sell. As a manager, as a parent you need to get the best out of people. Focus on enhancing people’s positive points. Reiterating what they are incapable of doing is not going to achieve results. If you notice that the feedback to your employee is the same year after year, probably the feedback is not being meaningful to the employee. Make a fish flip and do a somersault in the water but don’t make it a clumsy tree climber. Don’t make the fish think it is stupid because it is a clumsy tree climber. Make it believe it is a great swimmer and can do even better.

Android sdk n me

Hv been off the sdk for so long. Need to get back.... not sure when. Baby is 4 months now. Maybe after 2 more months :(

My Android App List

I have given some links. Please search market.android.com and find the application using the keyword. Loginto Google with the same account as used on phone and you can install directly

* My phone is rooted so I can run all these apps. Many need root (*). If you don't know what rooted mean skip the entries with * in them !

PIM:

• Business Calendar (Better than stock and has a nice widget)
• CalWidget (With stock calendar. Good widget)
• SMSBackup (Backups all SMS to google with a tag)

Launchers:

• LauncherPro (Too heavy now but had paid :( !)
• Zeam (Really small and works)

Though using the stock launcher now !

Social:

• Tweetdeck
• Tweetdark (Black themed version of Tweetdeck)
• G+ (As tweetdeck still does not support this)
• If I had space would have used (FB/Twitter/Foursquare)
• Blogger (Haven't yet posting anything using it due to bad keyboard)

News:

• NewsRob with Google Reader Account
• Greader
• Google Reader

Media:

• QuickPic (as the pics come fast though for picasa I have to use the Gallery)
• Color Flashlight (Love the cop light and siren) https://market.android.com/details?id=com.socialnmobile.flashlight
• QQPlayer (Supports a lot of formats)

Books:

• FBReader (support all non DRM books). Lot of free ebooks are there to read
• Google Books (only works in US)

System Utils:

• *App2Sd https://market.android.com/details?id=com.a0soft.gphone.app2sd
• *SetCPU (If you are on xda-dev then you can get it free ;) )
• *Quick Reboot
• *Chainfire3D https://market.android.com/details?id=eu.chainfire.cf3d&feature=order_history
• AndExplorer (Used by the TypeFresh font changer. I use Ubuntu font now) https://market.android.com/details?id=lysesoft.andexplorer&feature=order_history
• SpareParts for faster animation and other settings
• Battery Indicator (As the stock android I have does not show % properly !)
• *Battery Calibration (Charge to full and click this. Will reset the battery. Then proper reading are shown for battery)
• *AdFree (No ads please)

VOIP:

• Google Voice (Got the account somehow and now use it for SMS to US)
• Skype (Works well though really resource hungry)
• Viber (Works pretty well though resource hungry)
• Linphone Video (Works really well with by Spokn account)

My Own:

• FalakCallerID (Shows a popup with the location and operator in India Only.)

Tomcat 7 APR

Tomcat 7 with APR

After a long time (must be 5 years or so) decided to play with Tomcat 7. Have a RHEL6 and so wanted the APR too. Just had to do some more things to get it up and working. Good I have the gcc/make etc already configured on my Linux (for VMware and NVidia native driver).

1. First downloaded Tomcat 7
2. Then followed the steps to set JAVA_HOME and JRE_HOME
3. Startup.sh and it worked. Stopped it
4. Extract the native from bin gz file.
5. Tried compiling, didn't work. Said APR not there
6. Checked a blog, found the APR source, built that one and installed it using 'sudo'
7. Built tomcat native with the APR above, it worked. Installed it too using 'sudo'
8. Start Tomcat and it did not pick up the APR
9. Ah...had forgot to update the LD_LIBRARY_PATH. So updated it and viola it works.
10. 5 years and still I can do it (well just followed instructions)

Next steps: Need to setup as a daemon.

Here the log where it loaded the things.

1 Jul 12, 2011 8:25:40 PM org.apache.catalina.core.AprLifecycleListener init

2 INFO: Loaded APR based Apache Tomcat Native library 1.1.20.

And the admin web page

"ajp-apr-8009"

Max threads: 200 Current thread count: 0 Current thread busy: 0 Keeped alive sockets count: 0
Max processing time: 0 ms Processing time: 0.0 s Request count: 0 Error count: 0 Bytes received: 0.00 MB Bytes sent: 0.00 MB

Stage	Time	B Sent	B Recv	Client	VHost	Request

P: Parse and prepare request S: Service F: Finishing R: Ready K: Keepalive

"http-apr-8080"

Max threads: 200 Current thread count: 5 Current thread busy: 3 Keeped alive sockets count: 0
Max processing time: 1769 ms Processing time: 1.967 s Request count: 2 Error count: 1 Bytes received: 0.00 MB Bytes sent: 0.01 MB

Stage	Time	B Sent	B Recv	Client	VHost	Request
P	?	?	?	?	?	?
S	28 ms	0 KB	0 KB	127.0.0.1	localhost	GET /manager/status HTTP/1.1
P	?	?	?	?	?	?

P: Parse and prepare request S: Service F: Finishing R: Ready K: Keepalive

Live Writer using Unity

Loved live writer so much that had to use VMware unity and XP to use it again. Still have the old machines VM and it works cool.

Virtualization has saved the day again.

Moved to RHEL6 to use the 4G RAM on my T61P

What is innovation?

What is innovation?

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HP Veer Hands-On

HP Veer Hands-On

This is really small and looks good. The specs are also interesting.

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