Google OS on the way

Google Chrome OS announcement. Part of a grand enterprise Strategy?

Leveraging Virtualization in PLM Data Migration

It has been quite some time ago that I read about how NYT was able to make use of Hadoop in conjunction with EC2 and S3 services from Amazon to convert an approx 11 million articles from TIFF into PDF.  The same analogy could be drawn when doing a datamigration involving millions of objects and the associated(which can be conted in gigabytes) documents. Usually the way forward would be to use one of the vendor provided migration scripts which would be essentially a half baked wrapper around a crude migration solution, in short a piece of trash with little practical sense.

Leveraging the enormous scale that virtualization can provide would be  made feasible by forming a clever data segregation strategy around the inherently inter related nature of PLM data and associated physical files. The idea would be to identify the smallest unit of work(at a part level or even at the BOM level) which can be stateless and then weave the virtualization strategy around that.

I hope this strategy can be feasible in bringing down the execution time by a considerable margin, which can change the way data migration is being done till now.

National Do Not Call(NDC) Registry Rocks!!

Well, i had my apprehensions on how successful this is going to be. But going by my personal experiences, it has been quite a relief. From an average of atleast 10-15 marketing calls a week, the number has come down to almost zero. People are still finding workarounds as i get SMSs with the sender phone number hidden, but that is something that i can live with. A far cry from the earlier situation when you get a call in the middle of some important work and you are in a quadary whether to pick or not.

The process of subscription is also simple, just send “START DND” to 1909, whoever your service provided is going to be. 

BOSS- India’s Contribution to the OSS Community

WOW, the last post was 8 months back..so much for my resolve to be frequently updating this blog!!!!

Quite sometime back there was this news of CDAC spearheading a project to develop a Linux solution tailored specifically to indian needs.  Pretty good initiative indeed, i thought at that time.  The reason for this post is the advt i happened to see in the newspapers last week about the 3.0 release of this distribution. Christened BOSS, an acronym for Bharat Operating System Solutions, this is a debian based distribution, available in Tamil and Hindi, but ultimately to be made available in all the major Indian Languages. Unfortunately, I have been trying to access this page for the last 2 days, but without much luck.

This distribution comes bundled with the BharateeyaOO, which is a project to make available the Open Office Software in Indian Languages.

Good luck CDAC!!!!…

Free Online SmallTalk Books

Came across a collection of free online smalltalk programming books here.

UN declares 2 October, Gandhi’s birthday, as International Day of Non-Violence

United Nations decides to observe October 2 as International Day of Non-Violence in honor of Mahatma Gandhi, the man who inspired a nation with his idea of non-violence. At last, the world has resolved to accept the greatness of our Mahatma and let us hope it doesn’t become a ritual as it is happening here!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks to my wife who pointed out this info to me:-)

IAF turns 75

The Indian Air Force celebrated its Platinum Jubilee on 8th Oct. It was on the same day in 1932, well before we got independence, that IAF was formed, then known as the Royal Air Force with a pretty small fleet of 4 wapiti aircrafts with 6 officers and 19 sepoys. As we stand today, IAF is the 4th largest in the world with over 1.7 lakhs personnel and around 1300 aircrafts.

Limit to the maximum cable rental chargeable

TRAI has come up with a ruling which limits the maximum cable rental that can be charged per month. you can get the news here. Hope this brings some sanity to the whole business wherein rentals used to be fixed on an arbitrary basis.

High Lead content in Paints available in india

A recent study by Toxics Link claims that the lead content of paints available in India is dangerously high. Here is the article which came up in The Hindu.

To quote:-

“The tests show alarming levels of lead in enamel paints (with a gloss finish) and this holds true for most of the paints available in the market. Of the 31 enamel paint sample analysed for lead concentration, 83.87 per cent had more than 600 parts per million (PPM) of lead and only 19.1 per cent had less than 600 PPM presence of the heavy metal.”

However it is not a surprising factor in the sense that there is no regulatory framework to ensure that the lead content doesn’t beyond a prescribed limit. The only factor is that Paint Manufacturers are encouraged to conform to the 1000 PPM(Parts Per Million) limit as suggested by BIS(Bureau Of Indian Standards). It is high time that this is converted to a mandatory, rather than a voluntary regulation.

National Do Not Call Registry

Finally some relief for the Indian telephone subscribers as the DNC(Do-Not-Call) Registry takes off. According to the communication issued by TRAI, the whole framework will be actionized in three phases. In phase 1 the telemarketer will have to register with the system, wherein they will have to fill up an application form TM-I and submit it electronically. Subsequently, they will have to submit the same application form to the service providers. More details can be got here

In the second phase, any subscriber(mobile/Landline) can add their names to the registry through their service provider and this will take a maximum of 45 days to get activated.

In the third and final phase, the telemarketers will have to get their calling list scrubbed by the NDC registry( maintained by National Informatics Centre) and calls will be allowed to those numbers which will be cleared by the registry.

According to the news on Hindu

“As on September 7, about 14,750 telemarketers having around 4.5-lakh telephone lines have already applied with various telecom service providers for getting themselves registered with the DoT.”

The Registry can be accessed here

This initiative is a welcome step in providing a dedicated and centralized repository for all those who do not want to get unsolicited marketing calls. Earlier the NDC used to be maintained by the individual telemarketer. For eg:, ICICI Bank had its own database of people who do not want to get promotional calls. But there was the pain of going to each and every such orgn and registering at their website and to add to it, you would still get calls, flauting the rules set up by RBI on this.

Lets now hope for the best and pray that this initiative will really serve its purpose.