http://xkcd.com/609/

It has been a while that I have posted a real entry on the blog feeds.

Past two months have been a blur, mostly because of dealing with the various things going wrong around me. Checked with a few friends and it seems that has been the case around the general circle of contacts.

Just so that I can get it out of my system, here are a few -

Europe Trip Extension
I was supposed to be in Europe for two weeks and in India for 3 days. Thanks to various vendors being vendors, language issues, customs problems, shipping delays and what now, I had to extend that to 4 weeks. That trip taught me a lot about dealing with international vendors and the issues around them but it affected my health enough for me to notice it.

While I was gone
We had moved into the new house just a week before I had to leave on the work trip. The water heater at home had water leakage issues and Pooja was trying to deal with them. After the initial few fixes, I asked her to just let it be as I was going to be back in just two weeks and will take care of it then.

Double HDD failures on a RAID 5
Just after I got back, one fine wednesday morning, got the news that our SAN volume back in the east which had 12+ production virtual servers had just crashed with a double HDD failure. Not a big deal when you have backups but restoring from a backup when your main storage has failed is not a task for the faint hearted.

It took me three days, hours and hours on the phone with Dell storage support and a lot of swearing at myself to get things back in shape. I had to fly down to New York to finally get things done. While moving the machines to local storage on individual vmware esx servers, we realized that even those servers had hardware issues and spent another two days trying to move things over.

The Dell engineers were surprised at the double HDD failure and I decided NEVER to touch Dell storage products, ever again. In the end, it turned out to be a bad controller. Well, that too we don’t know yet because we had to isolate it and use other storage mediums for the time being.

Falling parts at home
So a few days back, we walked back home after a shopping spree and heard a loud noise in the kitchen. Walked in to discover that a piece of the microwave oven had fallen down with a cracked screw hole. Took me a while to figure out how to put it back safely.

Car Dent
Last week, Pooja and mom were out for a shopping trip to the mall. On the way back, she was taking a left turn out from the lot and did not see a random piece of metal pole lying around. No one could have seen that in that position. The car hit from the right side and put a big dent into it. Pooja was not very happy about it. I was just glad she was OK.

News from Friends
Just heard about this colleague at work. His father had just had by-pass surgery. He was ready to come back when he heard of his cousin brother + pregnant wife + young kid being killed in a car accident. A few days later, his wife lost a cousin to the same fate.

WTH is going on?

http://www.bombaylives.com/index.php/qualcomm-ventures-qprize-competition.html

http://www.bombaylives.com/?p=1641

More than $500,000 in Early Stage Financing for Companies and Entrepreneurs

Qualcomm Ventures Launches QPrize Business Plan Competition Supporting Global Entrepreneurship

QPrize is an initiative to identify and strengthen novel business ideas while in the concept stage.

Business Sectors

QPrize competition is open to international entrants whose business plans accelerate wireless technology development in the following business sectors:

• Consumer/enterprise applications and services

• Communication devices

• Semiconductor and component technologies

• Mobile platforms

• Digital media and content

• Healthcare technologies and services

• CleanTech

Additional details on candidate eligibility and submission guidelines are available at www.qprize2009.com

Timelines

May 7th, 2009                   Public Launch
July 31st, 2009                 Deadline for submitting completed business plans
August 28th, 2009               Notifications will be sent to all  semi-finalists
September  2009                 India Regional event to pick India Region Winner
October 16th, 2009              Deadline for submitting revised business plans for the final competition
November, 2009                  Finals at San Diego, CA

For more information, please visit www.qualcomm.com/ventures

The Qualcomm Ventures QPrize™ competition is open to entrepreneurs in India, North America, Europe and China and will provide US$550,000 in total seed funding to help entrepreneurs transform their innovative business plans into reality. India Regional winner will receive US$100,000 of convertible note funding. The India Regional Winner will also have the opportunity to compete with other Regional winners for a Grand Prize of an additional US$150,000 of convertible note funding.

Also, one last question. When she wrote back to me in French she put "tu veut".  I always thought it was tu veux?! Lol it's such a simple question but I googled it and it said "tu veux" but she's French so surely it must be acceptable to write tu veut too? Thank you!

http://www.bombaylives.com/index.php/are-we-waiting-for-a-disaster.html

http://www.bombaylives.com/?p=1638

http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report_king-long-bus-catches-fire-no-casualties_1273253

This is the second time that King Long BEST bus got completely burnt and luckily no one was injured or killed,  I wonder if the BEST guys are waiting for some deaths or casualty to happen before they decide to ban these buses.

Am not surprised that these buses are Made in China.

Pic courtesy : Platform7

fog 0033f, originally uploaded by Kaja.Malouf.

I suppose it's time I got out and took more photos but I have so many interesting shots of the fog that I might just keep posting them. It's a beautiful day in Canberra today. I really wish we would get more rain though.

http://arnab.org/blog/microsoft-researchs-data-related-launches

Microsoft Research has been making a bunch of cool data analysis-related launches at the upcoming Faculty Summit.

First, there’s The academic release of Dryad and DryadLINQ

Dryad is a high-performance, general-purpose, distributed-computing engine that simplifies the task of implementing distributed applications on clusters of computers running a Windows® operating system. DryadLINQ enables developers to implement Dryad applications in managed code by using an extended version of the LINQ programming model and API. The academic release of Dryad and DryadLINQ provides the software necessary to develop DryadLINQ applications and to run them on a Windows HPC Server 2008 cluster. The academic release includes documentation and code samples.

They also launched Project Trident , a workflow workbench, which is available for download:

Project Trident: A Scientific Workflow Workbench is a set of tools—based on the Windows Workflow Foundation—for creating and running data analysis workflows. It addresses scientists’ need for a flexible and powerful way to analyze large and diverse datasets, and share their results. Trident Management Studio provides graphical tools for running, managing, and sharing workflows. It manages the Trident Registry, schedules workflow jobs, and monitors local or remote workflow execution. For large data sets, Trident can run multiple workflows in parallel on a Windows HPC Server 2008 cluster. Trident provides a framework to add runtime services and comes with services such as provenance and workflow monitoring. The Trident security model supports users and roles that allows scientists to control access rights to their workflows.

Then there’s Graywolf :

GrayWulf builds on the work of Jim Gray, a Microsoft Research scientist and pioneer in database and transaction processing research. It also pays homage to Beowulf, the original computer cluster developed at NASA using “off-the-shelf” computer hardware.

English, 70 mins
PW: Kuo Pao Kun
Dir: Jaimini Pathak

Watched it yesterday. The audience was given a small strip of pink color paper at the beginning of the play and the actors showed everyone how to roll it and make a rose out of it. Everyones was asked to write their names on it . Being an adaptation of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint , the director has made an attempt to some of the interesting instances in the book. A girl who wanted to become an artist was discouraged by the grown-ups who never understand anything beyond numbers. She was bored. One day she walked and walked which was when she met her Prince. He had a problem. There was 1 rose in his planet and he wanted to save it from the goat. He didn’t want to tie the goat because then the goat won’t be able to move around freely. He didn’t even want to fence the rose, because the rose would feel lonely. So the girl made a deal with the Prince that if she solved his problem, he would have to take her to some other planet. Both of them agreed to it and set off to find a solution to the rose problem. They just had 35 mins in hand after which the prince had to go back to his planet. They met a lot of people including a Geographer with a long beard. They asked him if he could find a solution to his rose problem. The Geographer said that he just knows the number of lakes and monuments in the world. So the girl asked him for the number of lakes in Bangalore city. The Geographers loosens his arms and a map rolls out. He is unable to find any. The girl is irritated. She asked him how was it possible for a Geographer to not know the number of lakes in his own city . The Geographer replied saying that it was not his job but the job of the explorers to report it and his job was to only collect the data. The Geographer asked the Prince about his planet. The Prince said that he had 3 volcanoes in his planet of which one is unusable and one is used to boil water. Prince and the girl set off again to find a solution. They finally land up a gardener’s rose farm. The old gardener whom they came looking for had died but there was a man looking after the farm who was watering the garden. The Prince asked how he could save his special rose. The gardener said that every rose was special.

So now the audience was asked to raise their hands and show their roses. That was the rose garden. Everyone of them is special. He said the Prince should water the rose and the roses were capable of protecting themselves from the goat. The Prince was confused, his rose had told him that she was the most special rose and here he found that every rose was special. The kids in the audience came out with answers on how the rose could be saved.Kill the goat, Take the goat away were some of the funny answers from the kids. But one of them said , The rose has a thorn. It can protect itself. The prince had found his answer. The Prince had to go back now and the girl realised that her planet is special and she didn’t want to go anywhere.

Three actors including one in multiple roles of a Drawing Teacher, Gardener, Geographer were fantastic. Their costumes were good too. I really liked the costume of the Drawing Teacher and Geographer. The Gardener used an long circular box which made the sound of water when moved upside down. The Prince did a few magic acts too which entertained the kids a lot.

Authentication for Yahoo protocol version 16 is finally up and running in the netv2 branch of ayttm. I committed the last part of the login sequence, the address book download from the new location (address.yahoo.com).

Things look quite promising for the netv2 branch with a lot of changes like:

• Revamped networking code to have connection negotiations happen in parallel. As a result of this change ayttm is multi-threaded now. It no longer hangs if the DNS servers or proxies are unavailable. We need people testing for proxies to make sure it works well.
• SSL is now integrated into the networking code. So any protocol can have easy access to an SSL connection with just the flip of a switch. This has simplified a lot of the protocol code as well
• Changes to individual protocols to work with the new networking code. Currently Yahoo, Jabber and IRC are done. I am working on MSN