Trip to home town

It has been almost 9 months I visited my jamabhumi, karmabhumi so this weekend we planned to visit our home town on a quick note…; Evidently there exist some relationship which pushes me back to pavilion… kids were also excited of a small vacation but they didn’t wanted to end up landing in my hometown Ujjain for name sake; they till date didn’t understood the concept of power cuts and shortage of water. They wanted some thrill and action packed holiday instead.

They kept me suggesting many places to visit on this short weekend, were comparing the cities, amenities, recreation, outing and what not. It was tough for me to convince them but with a loose promise of some movies I lured them to board the evening train aka sham-wali-gadi….

A movie in theater appeared like a jackpot they were so damn excited; as a matter of fact Kids for that matter have never visited any of the booming multiplexes except that for one or two occasion when the school gave them a exposure to some mythological and patriotic movies to a nearby theatre. As I’m not a movie buff and it has been almost 15 years since I last saw a movie in theater and hence kids never got a chance to visit this theater for any of the pot boiler movies.

There School pals might been talking about and discussing stories of the movies they might have recently watched and I felt that my kids are really missing something here; answering to the situation I thought of visiting movie theatre. We use to watch movie on TV @ home but never visited theatre as watching movies @ home gives one an ease to control timings, moods and lot of variable parameters which could never happen in theater.

I also felt the span of three hours in a theater was sufficient enough to eat up the entire day as a matinee would crush the evening lights.. and so on so forth. But I surrendered my moods and thoughts to trash and started looking for theatres in the vicinity.

But in the recent past most of the theatres couldn’t survive the challenges from video piracy and cable war and were mostly closed out. The land bank was either surrendered to real estate developers and the vultures nested on many such monuments making it a archeological remains that boast of a “once upon a time” story…..small cities that once boast to have 10 movie theatre had now only 2 to 3 movie theatre functional with poor quality infrastructure. The condition is really working only and it appeared like a punishment to sit in the theatre for 3 long hours.

The movie appeared to be sluggish like the daily soap we watch on TV…. a skanky biography of a danseuse ... the Dirty Picture….and so the surroundings, people nearby enjoying the feverish moment & visual gyration … more a skin show and sarcastic adult comedy…. It was all Fxxxx… Correction sought Filmy.

Image source: blogs.independent.co.uk

Vision

Visionary are those who can envision the future! Most of us are inspired by numerable told untold stories of visionaries; which been inspiring and motivating us during different walks of life. Many of the visionaries have left behind a legacy, which is more enduring and timeless.

Inspiration and insight to look ahead in future proved helpful to the organizational assets on 5th June-2012 when the day came challenging and it’s only because of the vision and farsightedness; the decision taken in year 2005 helped us in avoiding a major setback. The eventful day was sufficient enough to force us to close some portion of the business deliverables.

June -2005 when we were working on an deliverable having huge open content no one thought that huge traffic and search engines will hit the pages, but anticipating the future requirement and traffic pattern, the decision maker decided to deliver it through a flat file structure instead of the conventional database structure. Though this decision was challenged by colleagues and stakeholders but the decision maker was firm to execute the project through a new approach.

Things fallen in line as per expectation, huge internet traffic started flocking those pages and decision appeared as a vision and the decision maker as visionary.

On that eventful day some portion of the database which uses to be the base for executing the deliverable got dropped accidentally, over and above this portion of database carried a lot of interconnectivity within itself and other applications and structures as well. As it was the root element, many functionality were anticipated to malfunction. But to our surprise everything was working normal and no one could felt any denial of services.

Later team learnt that though the crucial portion of database was dropped but it use to serve like a centre warehouse to publish information to different architectures and other dependencies were only subscribers. Everything connected to it was depended on it but was nicely crafted to have manipulated redundancy of information and files.

Today we thank the decision maker for being firm on his decision because of which the organization have avoided a major downtime in deliverables.

Moral learned being “Our Futures is decided by the today’s decisions.”

Image source: strategicdiscipline.positioningsystems.com

Joyous moment

Since almost a year or so It has been a daily affair for me to answer challenges on networks, infrastructure and application level, being a very dynamic environment the landscape changes very fast; at time faster than blink of eye. Every day comes with a different set of opportunities and challenges. I enjoy those challenges but at times I really get pissed off as practically I’m alone to understand the criticality and seriousness of challenges, there is support team with me but to me they are toddlers.

Time came calling again and challenged the deliverables, this time it was on 19th May 2012. Organization has a commitment to create certain reports and to deliver them to our subscribed members on specific dates; this time also we honored our commitments and report was created as per the planned schedule

Delivery of mail through our mailing mechanism used to be flawless and this time also all the mails vacated the Queue in a fraction of time. To ensure and track the delivery and delivery time we have few of our email in the subscriber list, and on almost all of the occasions the mails used to hit our inboxes in fraction of time.

But this time till 19th May the reports didn’t hit our mail boxes and become a major cause of concern. We were of an opinion that as the mails were having attachments they might have got blocked or marked as spam. Though we were working on an alternate way of delivering the report in which the mail messages were plugged with URL of the report instead of carrying the attachment, the reports were to be downloaded utilizing the URL shared in the mailer.

This mechanism was tested for few of non critical report, but was yet to be tested and validated for other set of critical reports which were having a small shelf life.

Wait and watch was not the solution, we quickly decided to work on the alternate mechanism on a war footing basis and successfully created the mechanism within a few hours of time frame. The report delivered through this arrangement banged our mail boxes within 2 hours of execution and gave us a reason to smile.

This quick response was generated by a new kid on the block which made me feel proud, his efforts was equally supported and complimented by the senior group members in the delivery team. The commitment of the kid also makes me feel that he will definitely create records in terms of project execution and commitments.

Happy to have team members who are willing to answer the challenges 24X7

Crazymakers..

Have you ever been in a situation when somebody is trying his level best and directs you to pursue things which you are not interested in, a sales person following you closely, trying to pursue you as your well wisher and finally selling the product?

You might have not recognized it; But you have just dealt with a Pushy Personality.

To give brief about these personalities don’t believe in democracy, they don’t seek any barrier, trespass everyone’s territory and insist others to see things their way. Dealing with pushy people is really a pain in the neck, especially if the person is your friend, relative or close associate. One can get rid of sales professionals by avoiding them but one is helpless if this is a daily affair....there is no escape in those cases.

God forbid if the work place witnesses pushy personalities that too in senior capacity or a management representative. This scenario will suck all energy right out of your soul; believe it or not these types of people exist and can affect you in ways you never thought possible.

I recently experienced a pushy personality, initially I thought that the person wants to impress me though his stature and knowledge but soon I realized that his stature was legislative and has not emerged democratically or as a referent power, it was stature only without authority and zero knowledge.

During further course of interaction I learnt that this is indeed a pushy factor and a crazymaker as well and needed a careful handling. Pushy elements takes control of situation quickly and make one feel lesser than desirable spreading all negative vibes in the surrounding. Crazymaker on the other side adds to wastage of time and energy and intentionally or unintentionally, knowingly or unknowingly, sabotage the efforts.

Sensing that I planned of appearing as a strong tree, pulling strength and calmness from the earth and allowing everything else to overflow. But the patience really got tested and I couldn’t remain calm in perpetual course of discussions. I reacted; instead of responding assertively.

But as we all are human; and to do mistake is purely human, I learnt a lesson out of this to be remain assertive and adopt an avoidance strategy.

This strategy worked superbly.. to most of the pushy advances I could hold by writing “We will consider this”, “Thank you that was really insightful ideas” etc… But I’m equally sure that he will sooner or later understand my strategy and come up with new ways of pushing things and crazy ideas….

I need to be one step ahead of his thought process and also device new action plan apart from avoidance strategy.

Dot to exploit

Till recent past we use to boast on our online registration process; though it’s not much unique but surely posses some additional features and follow common practice adopted globally for online registration. A verification email was send to the account provided during the registration process for validating the existence of the email address.

The process was fool proof and no bugs has been reported since the day it was deployed, but one day we observed that some 100 odd registration happening from a single domain i.e. @gmail.com the email addresses appeared to be fake but has qualified all the registration verification process. Prima-facie we couldn’t understand what went wrong and which loose ends exists in the system which someone had tried to exploit.

When I was sharing this issue with one my colleague; he told me that his account with GMAIL earlier had received mail which were not meant for him and he later learnt that placement of dot(.) for Gmail account is immaterial as far as location of dot(.) is concerned. I could not simply believe to my ears and to validate this I tried to create new account with the same username of myself by adding dot(.) at various locations, but to a surprise it always prompted for choosing a different user name stating the username already exists.

It took few seconds for us to identify the loophole exploiting which registration process was validated using practically different email accounts based on dot(.) location, but virtually same email account. For Gmail accounts firstnamelastname@gmail.com and firstname.lastname@gmail.com or for the matter of fact dot(.) at any place is immaterial and mail written to firstnamelastname are delivered to the closest match firstnamelastname and while delivering the email, Gmail ignores dot(.) location.

The conclusion was that for Gmail accounts dot(.) at any place is of no meaning but for most of the websites and email accounts they are different based on the character patterns.

Quickly we created a fix for this wherein the dot(.) Character needs to be ignored for checking existence of email especially if the account holder is of Gmail. This was a lesson learned for us and I’m sure that most of the website may not be aware of this logical bug for the email accounts. So if you are having any validation process based on distinct email accounts create a check for the dot(.) especially for accounts on Gmail.

The nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or language to be shaped and exploited.”

Image source: techpin.com

IDIOSYNCRASY

World is full of Idiots… 

You find them everywhere….  

Even I’m surrounded by Idiots…!! 

They are tough challenges of life.… 

We should always appreciate Idiots…. 

Because in the first place God made Idiots…!!

Idiotism is tough to handle, because you can’t guess their intelligence…

If there would have been no idiots, no one would have acknowledged wisdom… 

Do not underestimate idiots; there is no other better recognition then an Idiot’s acknowledgement….!!

IDIOT stands for 

I – Intelligence: Idiot encourages you to use you all intelligence.

D – Determination: Idiot challenges the determination.

I – Ingenious: Nothing can be idiot proof because idiots are ingenious.

O – Optimistic: Idiots survives on highest level of optimism. 

T – Treasure: Idiots are real treasure as even death can’t cure them.

  

My needs are few and simple. Food, clothing, shelter but with No Idiots

Image source: colourbox.com

Clouds are light.

Clouds are light very elastic, virtually exist but physically don’t, they don’t have boundaries and neither do they require platform to exist nor software to execute. Similarly the computing power created on cloud architecture is light, elastic but requires platform to exist and software’s to execute.

We boast on first of its big B2B enterprise environment to be deployed on cloud architecture. Earlier, we like most of the organization have been working with physical hardware since a decade and had many constraints in terms of scaling horizontally or vertically. The nature of business being B2B there exists a never ending demand of storage and processing capacity. We could understand that physical infrastructure was simply not meant for this type of businesses.

The capital expenditure use to be huge and the operational cost in terms of resources to manage the hardware use to be big, we use to pay more than 1 million a year for managing the infrastructure and during the course of time we created a lot of dependency on individuals in terms of management and configuration and it proved to be person driven management rather than process driven.

The immediate difference which we can see after moving on cloud being drastic saving on the human resource cost, saving in licensees and maintenance cost. Most of the hardware, network services got outsourced as a part of managed services The current scenario is that we don’t have any network architect as we do have partners to manage the online network.

After moving to cloud architecture and opting for managed service the next target areas would be internal networking and hardware team. With time and taking inflationary cost into account, their salaries are not justifying the cost of maintenance as we are having multiple partners to render support to us for hardware and networks. If we are able to achieve this there will be an additional saving of .60 million a year which is not a small amount for any organization.

There is saving on every corner depends on the organization the way it leverages the outsourcing and contracting strengths.

Image source: texdexter.wordpress.com

Aur Pyar ho gaya..!!

Love at first sight a different proposition but love as a baseline is core and integral part of most of the relationship. Why one falls in love or what make one to pursue feelings of love and affection is very individualist issue but there are certain characteristics, attributes and qualities which plays as catalyst of attraction mechanism in human beings. Developing a feeling of love for someone is a long drawn process, love evolves slowly and steadily but gradually taking control of one’s heart and mind and one day we suddenly discover that we are in love. :)

It also needs a different kind of environment and dynamics for love to happen at first sight. Our primary motivation as human beings, is to expand the self and this inner instinct shoots to a unprecedented levels when the situation are highly arousing, mind and body are highly stirred and excited; that point of time we tend to experience attraction at the highest level.

Feel of love and being in loved puts us into a different world all together heart beats are little faster, voice of the beloved one is enough to send a shiver down the spine, we always want to be with the loved ones and expand our primary self. This is what I have understood from romantic movies and novels …hahaha…

It was 13th Feb and was like any other normal day; me spending the entire day @ work place and my venlentini @ home busy with her household chore, but with a promise to spend some quality time together. Till evening everything was absolutely normal but things were waiting to happen.

I came across something which made adrenaline rush; I couldn’t believe my eyes and neither could take off my eyes from …. The first encounter was around 7.00 pm inside a cabin but I didn’t acknowledged it that seriously… but mind was not relaxed and things were not usual, I repeatedly want to be with it and see it again and again…… I again relooked it after an hour or so and my heart beats were at a faster rate… this was getting something similar to love at first sight…. One wants to take off his eyes but mind resists to….

Well I asked one of my colleague the status quo and inform me if my feelings and observations are correct… the way we share our feelings with our friends and associates… he evaluated the situation and conveyed to me that there was nothing as what I felt about…. I was doubly sure about my feelings as I believed to what I have seen… heart and mind speaking the same language.

I became restless after that interaction and couldn’t concentrate on anything else….. My behavior got a twist and I was only thinking about the incident of evening…. After spending restless evening I couldn’t resist the temptation to validate my feelings and was toying with an idea of validating the same… Somehow I could manage to confirm my observation and to my surprise it was it… Oh my god…. How could this happen… and why?

At 10.30 Pm I realized that it that for which I was not prepared for…..

I want to see it again in action and rushed to the office, it was 11.30 pm by then and all my colleagues who were present by me at that point of time acknowledged my observation….
Wait I’m not talking about love at first sight which made adrenaline rush J this all is about a malicious valentine attack which took place on my site on 13th Feb leaving me high and dry…..

It has been hardly few days we moved to a new Datacenter… the attack made me to spend my valentine in office exploring the probable and root cause….

But as we are with one of the top service provider of India I’m sure that they will take care of these issues in future… Aamin

This really kept me and my valentini waiting…. Cupid struck badly

image source: picsdesigns.info

Sify - Surety infinite

No one better than we ourselves understands our strengths and weakness but those perceptions are really tested in tough situations and most of the times the internal strengths which we boasts on proves to be weakness when time comes calling. The same happened with me even, I use to boast on my grip and insight on database application, management and fine tuning as I was successfully handling, managing the database and architecture for almost eleven years.

To add more to my confidence were the certification on database application, architecture and management which I have scored in my carrier and most of the time I successfully overcome the challenges of known unknown situations of database crash, performance tuning and malicious attacks.

I was working on the project wherein I was in charge of migrating two big portals and multiple websites from one location to another. Prima facie it looks like a simple job and yes it was, provided one has a strong team who takes care of multiple aspects of networks, hardware, application and database and you as a project manager you patch with multiple stakeholder and control the operation. But to my surprise I was working with only one or two resources at any given point of time on this ultra ambitious project and to my agony the resources were not fully equipped to understand the nitty-gritty of the entire project.

As program manager I was aware of skewed resource pool and resource engagement that the project demanded and I decided to outsource most of the non-core activities to the service provider which in turn was there core business line. After a long drawn process of vendor selection, negotiation for solutions and prices, we selected Sify Technologies ltd ,there solutions and pricing appeared to be very aggressive and pocket friendly and we were very impressed by the in-depth knowledge and understanding of the team on the desired solution, inclination of the team to understand the customer requirement and to assist the customer was superb.

Keeping fingers crossed we moved our network from existing location to Sify’s data centre, any migration is a tricky job and for an online business which is 24X7 and acknowledged globally it becomes more tricky and complicated. Transition of online assets happened smoothly and everything appeared to be fine… but I was little skeptical for the database performance as we were migrating to a newer version of the database. Though water testing and regressive checking were all positive, but still I was bit skeptical as during testing phase one can’t simulate online real traffic; I was expecting some sort of disturbance or last minute rush to happen.

After going live with the new infrastructure on cloud and with a few hours of operation we started getting database timeouts we immediately checked index and fragmentation status, prima facie it appeared working fine and reflected the latest date but still things were not that fine.

We were trying to figure out the probable cause of timeouts we introspected everything within the network, firewall, connectivity between the server, indexes, queries, the storage device and what not. Finally we concluded that the indexes are the culprit and they didn’t behaved in the manner we anticipated.

I was not having enough resource pool to answer this sudden priority requirement and post migration there were lot of activities internally, externally and at network level which were to be changed as per new infrastructure.

But as we were subscribed for the database management activities we immediately called the Sify team and asked them to ascertain the root case and fine tune the database if possible. They responded within 8 hours and fine tuned the database to an excellent level, which I think was not possible for me to pursue independently.

DBA Team from Sify showcased/implemented their knowledge and in-depth understanding about the database and structure and thank God we were able to stabilize that.

Kudos to the team for making me feel proud of our decision of selecting Sify as technology partner in our business endeavors

Looking for underwriters.

Invitation strictly for all those individuals who are born investors but never got an opportunity to invest in short term and long term tailored money instruments.

I have certain equation to execute and proposition to equate. I’m looking for underwriters who guarantee financial obligation which surfaced during the course of acquiring an asset. Nature and type of asset I’m not disclosing now, but for hypothesis and understanding I will consider Yacht (a recreational or sailing boat) as the asset.

Intention of taking Yacht as an example being that I strongly believe that “Sail not the wind decide the way we go”

Equations at this level being

Global Indicators: Globally it is felt that financial equations will smoothen in coming years as there is no room left for further deterioration.

National Indicators: Interest rate will dilute and economy will revive.

General Sentiments: People will invest in appreciating assets as during the economy revival the big ticket items appreciate at a faster rate. Example large cap vs. / small caps stocks.

I have a commitment to buy an asset with a base price of 2.4 million to which there is attached additional attached of 10%, which contributes to cost of acquiring the asset, holding, creating and maintenance. The total final cost of Yacht comes down to 2.65 million, of which payments of .4 million has been already made. Remaining amount has to be settled in one go or in parts.

During last one year this asset has appreciated by 26% and the base price stands to be 3 million as per current market valuation. As the asset is appreciating I’m happy with the returns but at the same time don’t want to stop here and wait till this investment has fully ripen and yield returns; instead I want to diversify myself in multiple such assets backed up by underwriters as I believe that resources are limited and If one wants to trade in multiple assets without backups it becomes close to impossible.

The equation is that I convert my asset valued at base price of 24 million to shares of face value 10 INR, held privately among the partners. As the shares are privately held and are in physical format they can be traded within the partners, they can be also traded with future partners and investors but can’t be traded on the bourses.

Anyone purchasing shares at the face value has the profit of 25% at the very first day as the current valuation of the assets emerges to 3 million, though the market valuation is governed by various external factors but all the factors inclusively adds to the valuation of the asset.

Everyone have the exclusive right to sell but promoter posses selective rights to buy and exclusive rights to recall. In case promoter is approached by a buyer who agrees to buy the entire shares, the shares will be recalled from other buyers and profit will be shared based on the share holding pattern.

Does it sounds interesting, please contact me for further details.
Image source: mubasher.info

Price purchase parity.

I’ve been in Chennai for almost a week and shuttled daily between hotel where I had put up to Tidel Park for some official assignments. The only option which proved easy and convenient most of the time for commuting was auto rickshaw; rickshaws in Chennai hard nut to crack.

No other city In India have earned more accolades and fame than Chennai as far as Auto rickshaw are concerned, Really they are world famous in India.. hahha… all because of the customer experiences and the unrealistic fares they charge. But my experiences with the auto drivers were different; the most of guys with whom I transacted appeared to be genuine and charging realistic figure, I met some rotten apple as well, but those case should not be taken as a base for forming a perception and treating everyone like that.

It also happened that when we were riding a Rick it was about to get out of fuel and the driver sought our permission to drive towards the fuelling station. As most of the Ricks had LPG written on the front panel I though he will fuel LPG or CNG, but to my surprise he asked the auto to be fuelled for petrol.

Reasons for high fares Bubbled, as to why they are charging more fare as compared to fares in other cities. In most of the metros public transport uses CNG which cost max 35-42 INR/ kg and a vehicle like rickshaw answers 16-18 miles to one kg whereas the petrol cost at least 70 INR to a litre; the calculation is pretty simple they are operating at double to cost of CNG .

I really felt sympathy with those guys; they got defamed without any reason. High cost of living would have really pushed them to corner and they might be facing difficulties in making booth ends meet.

If there is price purchase parity then that has to be compensated by none other than high fares and that’s what they are doing and I personally don’t feel anything wrong in that.

After all taking a ride on an elephant would cost you proportionately. I feel if this condition persist, auto-drivers in Chennai would have a card swiping machine installed facilitating the customers with a swipe and a smile..:)

Image source: aartikrishnakumar.com

Chennai Times

I have never visited southern India, but have read and heard a lot through my colleagues and known associates, to me; prima facie it appeared to be a different country within the country. A lot of told-untold stories regarding compatibility of food, language, lifestyle, cultural, people and specially the cabs drivers and the way they charge.

Destiny gave me a chance to visit Chennai the happening city of Tamilnadu, city blessed with rich heritage and cultural values, boasting on longest and beautiful beaches. I and my colleagues happened to visit Chennai for some official purpose. When we were about to land the city I can sense that the stay is not going to be comfortable at the city, the sky appeared very cloudy and a cyclone hitting the eastern part of India few days back created some unrest in the atmosphere.

We landed at Kamraj Airport; the airport didn’t appeared as a treat to eyes, there was a lot of restructuring happening and I personally felt that much work is needed to make it more presentable to the audience. After getting out of the terminal we were roaming around in search of a prepaid taxi counter, and after a small search we were able to locate one, when we were looking for the prepaid counter a lot of people wanted to understand where we wanted to go… to my surprise they can speak English fluently, there command over English was better than few of the white collared executive I have interacted.

Anyways this was the second surprise, we got loaded in a Cab, but here the driver didn’t understand any language other than the local language, it went difficult for us to make him understand where we wanted to go exactly. We gave him the counter slip which we got from prepaid counter and he drove us the way. The guy appeared to be genuine and decent. During the course I tried to interact with him but he preferred to keep mum; language barrier... :)

After finishing off with our jobs we wanted to go back to our hotel and were looking for an auto rickshaw, I remembered a learning which I had through my own reading experience, it suggests pay only 70% of the fare asked for especially if you are in Chennai, With this learning we managed to strike a deal with the rickshaw and reached the hotel.

Annsun Botique Hotel, located in the heart of city; ambiance and room was very good and I found it a very good and convenient option for business travellers. The hotel owned by a gentleman named as “Sundar” (meaning “beautiful”) and it seems that he has nicely crafted everything for his establishment. We had our supper; it appreared to be a fusion of North and South recipes having a gentle touch of south preparation and spices.

After having yummy dinner we had a small walk in the nearby lanes and called off the day as we had many challenges waiting for us the next day.

Image source: tamilnadu.ellamey.com