Do What Matters

If you are a parent of 2nd grader, you probably also looked around to decide where to take kids this winter break. I decided to say NO to theme parks this time. We had visited a couple of times to local science museum so I was looking for something refreshing and interesting for whole family. Our schools emphasize on Language and Arts until 3rd grade, giving parents more responsibility of introducing math and science to kids through participatory play. I am having hard time motivating my 7 yr old to the innovative and creative sciences so we drove to Lawrence Hall of Science museum at Berkeley last week. I must say that this place is a must go if you like to stimulate your thought and sharpen your science trivia skills. Take a look at these. what could go wrong on a Mars mission? how do you spot a microfossil? how well can you read a face in space? how does food taste in space? how is water recycled from toilet? and many more... you will be able to watch interactive videos tha...

This video shows, how tuning a db2 database system can really lower the power consumption of the server and improve the business productivity. A must watch video for DB2 developers and DBAs:

A DBA (Database Administrator) is a vital resource for any company that needs to setup, manage and operate data efficiently. A DBA ensures that data is backed up and  restored regularly, authorized properly and made available 24x7 to the users. Some DBAs specialize in performance tuning and data security and others grow in their own organization to management positions. So what makes these DBAs most wanted? DBA role requires more than simple database management skills. A DBA needs to have a thorough understanding of the database internals such as indexing, optimization, understanding plan, problem determination and patience. Some of these skills can only be aquired with years of working experiences in multiple projects. A simple job search on simply hired website showed up hundreds of results for DB2 DBA in almost every metro area ranging from no experience to 15 years. Average DB2 DBA Salary is $81,000 and can vary greatly based on location and expertise. This developer works...

The recession and aggressive competition have driven down prices of a lot of things including high-end wines and innovative consumer electronic products. Total sales of wine is going to rise this year by 2.1% (according to market research group), however wines above $25 is getting a big hit. This is not so good news for wineries but it is creating a level playing field for wine loving consumers who otherwise could not afford high-end wines. The price for these fancy wines are going to remain cheap next year. Take a look at some of the innovative consumer products. The top brand 40" LCD TV was selling for $1700 just a couple of years ago. This Thnaksgiving, 40" SONY Bravia 1080P TV was selling for $700 LCD TV, GPS and Flash Camcorder remained HOT this year but prices are much affordable. A 4.3 Garmin Nuvi with tons of features is selling at TigerDirect for $115. Some TomTom models were sold for $70 around Thanksgiving. This is a huge drop for something which is a life s...

What a great introduction to such a complex subject !

Our family enjoyed playing regular monolpoly board game together for years, when I saw this card game on amazon for $5, I had little expectation, but ordered after reading some reviews anyway.  I must say, this game rocks for many reasons: It comes in a small pack, just like a set of playing cards. This game is more fun playing than the traditional board game. This game is designed to keep you engaged throughout, some folks claimed its addictive. A very good family game to have on go, Go get one for your car too... I just saw the target ad for just $4. Wow.. amazon is beaten again. Last week, Wii price was beaten by buy.com. AMAZON - wake up! Don't make us read your review and buy somewhere else !

Holidays season is at its peak, and we sometime miss the opportunity to appreciate those who did the job year around without fail, rain or shine. Our letter carrier (USPS mail man), news paper carrier or your cleaning crew. I always wondered what should be the appropriate tip amount for these folks until I found this Kiplinger article - Holiday Tipping Tip Sheet.   This article links to another one on What you need to know about Holiday Tipping ! Hope this post will help you appreciate their service at this holiday season !

January is celebrated as National Mentoring month . I am writing this blog to remind myself the power of mentoring in my life. I am a big believer of mentoring programs. If you are a working professionals, chances are your company has an official mentoring program, many corporations do. But if your company does not have one, do not be discouraged. You can find one. For those of you who are new to this concept, mentoring is a structured and trusting relationship between two people called mentor and mentee, where mentor offers guide, support and encouragement to develop character and competence of a mentee. If your job is related to innovation and change, mentoring plays a greater role in succeeding at workplace. I recognized the value of mentoring early in my career and based on my experience, here are 3 reasons, you must have a mentor: 1. You need to get out of your comfort zone  We learn and grow and become comfortable with the daily routine and slowly develop our own comfort z...

Social media plays a very important role in connecting with people. Very often, we hear news about how facebook or myspace helped find a lost brother reunite with his family. Linkedin has helped me reconnect with a bunch of my old friends. If you work in technology field, chances are one of your friends / family members works for IBM. IBM operates in 178 countries (no kidding) and employs 398, 455 people If you know last name of your buddy and looking for his/her contact email and phone#, IBM provides a public directory on it's website. Take a look at the IBM Employee Directory. It will not display information if employee has choosen NOT to make information public. Happy searching !

I am writing about this because I am part of this huge event. San Jose State University College of Engineering Graduation ceremony took place at event center today at 9 am. About 600(no official data, heard the announcement) new graduates from all engineering disciplines took walk and collected diploma.  Willem P. Roelandts ex CEO and Chairman of the Board for chip design company Xilinx was the keynote speaker. He delivered a short speech with very strong message to graduates and future tech leaders - Work passionately and earn trust. He emphasized the value of  Trust and credibility for future leaders because lack of trust demoralizes workers which in turn suppresses innovation. Congratulations to all grads !!

It depends on your need ! If you google for NX vs VNC, you will find tons of discussions, and if you are more  confused then you were before, I have a google knol published on this subject. There are some advantages of using  NX over VNC technology: NX uses VFB (Virtual Frame Buffer ) where as VNC uses standard X server. NX  compresses  the X11 data to minimize the amount of data transmitted. This makes NX faster over low bandwidth network. NX uses SSH protocol to send data using public key cryptography for authentication.  However NX has one limitation, your desktop can not be shared with your buddy. Everyone gets a fresh session. Give NX a try, I have documented the minimal set of steps in the knol(link above). For developers like me who work on Unix/Linux platforms, remote desktop is not a "nice to have" but a "must have" productivity tools. Let me know what you prefer to use. Have a great evening !!

Multi-core processors take advantage of advancement in chip manufacturing technology to implement two or more execution cores on a single micro processor. These execution cores essentially are individual processors on a single die. Multi-core processors have evolved from Intel's HT(Hyper threading technology) and according to Intel, multi-core when combined with HT is going to provide powerful optimization and deliver system throughput substantially. The multi-core architecture is very well explained in this Intel Paper . I have been following the trend in CPU architecture for a long time. We have been using multi-core processor desktops and servers for over a year now. My interest is to know how legacy software applications are leveraging this new architecture for performance. Until recently, I did not hear much about enabling software programs for multi-core, why? I asked one of my friend who is an expert in parallel programming. He told me that there are a couple of reason majo...

Got the news this morning of IBM aquiring  Lombardi Software a BPM (Business process management) software company based in Austin Texas. Jim Sinur of Gartner has been writing about the hottest trends in BPM in his blogs. The latest aquisition proves that companies are investing on more formalized model to automate and improve their business process. I do not have good knowledge of BPM software but one thing I understand clearly is that every piece of software is being transformed to support and leverage today's collaborative environment and credit goes to success of social media software. For example, Jim in his blog talked about 5 hot trends in BPM which can be summarized below: Better work experience for knowledge workers Support for collaborative behaviors in the process model continuous improvement in business process through agile business rules Predictive analysis through modelling Time to learn BPM ? I am going to use these resources for now... MIT Open Courseware o...

I couldn't believe my Nikon D40x camera can take night shot like this .. take a look, the picture was taken from the walk over bridge near Excalibur on the Las Vegas strip:

When I looked at the " Optibike " at Academy of Sciences San Francisco Museum last month, I could not believe my eyes; very rugged looking electric bike but for whopping $5000 and more. Five thousand and more for an electric bike??  The first thing came to my mind is that why anything unconventional is so hyped and over priced in this country. I took a couple of photographs to remind myself to do more research later. When I googled it, I found many hardcore fans justifying the cost, not sure if they were justifying their decision to invest $8K (most of the models come around $8K with accessories and extra battery) on a bike. The bike was invented and created by the famous moto racer Jim Turner in his Colorado garage. Company on its website blog explains why it does not make a cheap electric bike. It says " If you want a cheaper electric bike- there are plenty out there.   You will not find them at Optibike,     Someone had to take the lead and build a rea...

I came across this blog while I was looking at SunLight Foundation Labs and it's projects on Open governance . A must read story in my opinion: http://sivers.org/trust

One of my friends asked me this Friday, what Linux flavor he should try to install on his secondary laptop (he never used Linux on his laptop for regular work) and my instant answer was Ubuntu . I have been using Ubuntu for last 4 years and I have persuaded at least 10 folks so far to install and use on their home PC. None of them are unhappy or have any regret that they did. Anyway, most of home usage is limited to internet use and Firefox rules as far as browser is concerned. I am Chrome (google's new browser)  fan and I used this hack to install chrome on my home ubuntu desktop. If you installing Ubuntu on your Laptop for primary use and make your living by developing software programs, You can try out a lot of nice tools and utilities that come with Linux. I wrote a knol a while ago and here is the link, in case you are interested..  Become a more productive software developer Long live Ubuntu !!

Some of my friends have recently bought PS3 and others are talking about how fantastic the console is not only for gamers but for any gadget lovers. I know none of my friends are hardcore gamers and if they are buying it for non-gaming use then I must know what they are buying for. Well, some got excuses to replace the DVD player with Blue Ray and since PS3 comes with Blue Ray player, it makes logical sense to buy PS3 instead if price is right. However, price of standalone BDP is following the regular trend of going south, but being able to use PS3 as a very powerful Linux system is what distinguishes it from other gaming console.  As you know, PS3 features CELL processors designed and manufactured jointly by IBM, Sony and Toshiba. CELL processor makes PS3 a computing powerhouse, Read the CELL architecture explained by   Nicholas Blachford.  You can also read the CELL story at IBM Research   Innovation that matters website .  The fact that PS3 uses open plat...

When industry stalwarts like IBM, Microsoft and others talked about Cloud computing a couple years ago, it caught everybody's attention. Then we heard Free software advocates downplaying the whole idea of cloud. I read Richard Stallman  - creator of GNU stating cloud as another trap to lock into proprietary systems in an interview with Guardian in Sept 2008. I am a big fan of GNU tools and I respect his point of views, but I was not convinced with his idea of "keeping information in your own hand". We (individuals and businesses) kept information in our own hands for a long time and later realized that these information provide no values until acted upon, shared and analyzed. In other words, internet really enabled us to use the information and make money from it.  Larry Ellison in Oracle World 2009 spoke about cloud and said " computer industry is more fashion-driven than women's fashion and cloud computing is simply the latest fashion."    It is import...

As soon as I saw this, I said to myself, why it took so long for these companies to come up on such a cool idea. This is a real innovation for consumers in a digital camera in my opinion in last couple of years. We have seen mega pixels increasing lately, but who cares, if you are not a professional photographer and do not print poster of your photos. For regular users like me, I think Nikon did a fantastic job of offering something which is very useful. You can show off your skills immediately to anyone and you don't need a computer. This camera is specially going to be a big hit in countries where majority of population do not have computers at home. Nikon unveiled this 12.1 Mega pixel camera in August of this year and I think it recently started selling here in USA. The model is s1000pj and it comes with remote and an easy to use stand. It projects up to 40 inches in size and at a maximum distance of 2 meters. Amazon has only 8 reviews but they are solid 5 star. This one is d...

Our president received Nobel peace prize at Oslo Norway yesterday, he was greeted by Greenpeace activists with a banner which says.."You won it, now earn it." I thought, it was a very powerful message from people from both side..those who believed that getting elected as US president for him itself was such a world event that shadows everything and those who thought it was too early to award him the most prestigious award without any measurable result for world peace. Politicians are so lucky in this regard. We elect them and award them with title and responsibility and they get time to prove themselves and earn it. Common people are not so lucky. As an employee, we have to work day and night to earn a promotion or reward at work and when we do get it, we have to work even harder to protect it. We have to watch what our president does for peace in the world and how he earns the reward ! Best wishes to him !

DB2 is IBM's flagship database software, DB2 Express C is the free version for application developers to use the industry leading database at no cost. IBM Data Studio is the application development tool which let you develop data driven application in very familiar eclipse environment. I am a long time DB2 developer and have had experience working with latest version of Data Studio recently. We created a enterprise grade web application that accesses huge number of DITA documents stored natively in DB2 pureXML and allowed user to search and navigate using facets and also custom assemble  the topics they are interested in. You will be amazed, how quickly you can connect to your backend database and develop an enterprise ready application using Data Studio and DB2.  Download both DB2 and Data Studio ebook for free: FREE Book- Getting Started with DB2 Express-C and exercises FREE ebook - Getting started with IBM Data Studio for DB2

Living in San Franciso bay area, we have all rights to claim to be some of the most environment friendly citizens on the planet -  Stricter smog tests for cars, most spare the air days, heavy taxes for cleaner gasoline. Is that enough, what are we doing ourself to protect and conserve the natural resources. Are we recycling / reducing / reusing enough? I personally find very difficult to balance it with consumerism here. Look at these and decide for yourself: Post office is delivering tons of junk mails for advertisers. Runs on tax payer's money, earns tons of money from advertisers and again dumps all those garbage to tax payers to clean. No body is there to ask them, why and I have no idea, how to make them stop delivering those unsolicited advertising to my mailbox. They have a point: "We deliver a first class mail for you from coast to coast for 44 cents" Hmm.. we (ultimately planet earth) is paying a heavy price for their ill designed business practices. And I ...

I am amazed, how little I knew about my iPhone - well for me, my iPhone was just a phone until I picked up an Orielly book on iPhone hacks . Here is a couple of things I liked and tried on my iPhone: making a shortcut for your phone# at home screen for quick dial, sounds like no big deal, but saves few finger taps and easy to setup. just point your safari browser to .tel.qlnk.net -> cancel when prompted -> save as a home link Gcast - create your podcast from iPhone; a blog with downloadable mp3 just by making a phone call, see gcast.com you will find out I am going to be trying out few more interesting hacks and post here. enjoy..