24. February 2009 by admin.

I think it is now clear or becoming clear that Cloud Computing is the next logical step in the evolution of information communication outsourcing primarily for a Web-enabled world.The entire spectrum of cloud computing covers more traditional models like managed and hosted applications to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to the emerging software-as-a-service (SaaS). Customers should be able to pay and consume infrastructure modules or applications packages as per their day-to-day needs. The major benefits are a) lower capex in this global economic downturn, b) reducing internal IT costs, c) consolidating services and IT functions. Over the next few years it seems Cloud Computing acceptance will be accelerated as a result of the credit crunch. Cloud Computing service providers should have a robust, scalable and highly performant infrastructure to play in this emerging market. I think the Managed Service Providers will move towards Open Transport where Public and Private Internets will play a major role.BT is already offering a MPLS based Private Internet service to large enterprises. Verizon is coming out with one and last I heard Equant is piloting one in Asia Pac.When combined with the public Internet transit backbone, the Private Internet services offers expanded reach of the Internet along with the privacy and security of a private network. Since the service Provider owns and operates both networks worldwide, and can offer multinational organisations a single point of contact to connect their operations anywhere in the world.Private Internet provides connection speeds ranging from 64 Kbps to 1 Gbps (higher in some locations). Customers who need to support IP-based application e-business initiatives such as customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), provide Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes services or who simply require basic data any-to-any communication, will find that Private Internet, coupled with our Managed Firewall Services and Internet Gateway Service deliver a comprehensive service that meets all of their IP network needs. Additionally, Private Internet supports remote-access services, so even dial-in locations can access a company’s secure VPN.

Posted in Misc | Print | 2 Comments »

23. February 2009 by admin.

Most stars in our observable Universe are categorized under one of the seven spectral types: O, B, A, F, G, K and M. Recently three more types have been added - W on the upper end of the temperature spectrum and R and N on the lower end.

These spectral types are further subdivided into 10 subclasses numerical 0 through 9.

Posted in Science | Print | 1 Comment »

23. February 2009 by admin.

Slumdog Millionaire slams the Oscar with eight wins including best picture. As usual my Indian friends are evenly divided in two groups. The first group is elated that an Indian movie (Bollywood production) won eight OSCARs including best movie for the first time. The other group is angry because they think that this movie is still following the trend to sell poverty (Slums) and riots in India to Western audience.

I tend to disagree with both the group. Yes I am happy with the success of Slumdog because it was really a well made movie. The movie is not directed by a Bollywood director. The director, producer and lead actors are British or British of Indian origin. The movie along with the soundtrack was edited overseas and not in India.

But on the other hand the entire movie was shot in Mumbai and most importantly the author is an Indian and the story is about an Indian in India. On a more serious note, the story depicted real facts. Mumbai does house the largest Slum of the world – Dharavi. The riots happen every year or so. Ancient Hindus didn’t wage any holy war because probably they were not religious enough. But the new face of Hindutva is not. They are as bad as any other fundamentalist belief system. There are organized crime groups which force street kids to be beggars. So whatever was depicted in the book and the movie was based on truth.

I am happy that Slumdog won the OSCARs.

Posted in Misc | Print | 1 Comment »

20. February 2009 by admin.

Hinduism, as I understand started as a way of life by the diverse inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent. Some of them were existing tribes from South and some were newer migrants from North. All these happened some 5 to 6 thousand years ago. Anyway Hinduism transformed to a religion and the oldest texts dates back to about 3000 years from today. So far this 3000 year old religion is yet to wage a *holy* war…

This is the only religion in the world as far as I know that consider atheism to be legitimate (as per the Vedic teachings – four of the “holy books”). So let’s delve into the philosophical roots of Atheism in Hinduism.

There are 9 major schools of thought in Hinduism. They falls under either *Astika* or *Nastika* schools. Astika and Nastika loosely means ‘theist’ and ‘atheist’. The six schools which fall under *Astika* schools follow the teaching of Vedas and some of them do not believe in a Creator-God.

*Samkhya* and Karma-Mimasa thinkers belong to the *Astika* group. They believe in the existence of the spirit (Purusha) and the material world (Prakriti), but not in omnipotent God. They don’t have a need of an omnipresence, omnipotent being to enforce the *Karmic* law which states that good deeds are rewarded and bad deeds punished in one’s lifetime.

The three *Nastika* schools are Buddhism, Jainism and Carvaka. These schools reject the doctrine of the Vedas. Buddhism is the only major religion in existence which is agnostic. Jainism again rejects the idea of an omnipotent God. This religion believes in natural laws governing an eternal universe.

Carvaka or *Lokayata* was named after the founder Carvaka. This religion originated around 300 BC and was erased around 1400 AD. All the original works were burnt and the present day knowledge is based upon tomes of criticism of Carvaka philosophy prepared by mainstream Hindu and Buddhist opponents.

Vedas according to Carvaka was “incoherent rhapsodies of rascals”. Carvaka said:

“The Sacrifices, the three Vedas, the ascetic’s three stave / and smearing oneself with ashes / Brhaspati says these are but means of livelihood / for those whao have no manliness nor sense”

Very strong criticism of the Brahmans and the priests – no wonder they go killedJ

Carvaka was against religious rituals and concept of heaven and he quoted the poet Madhava:

“If a beast slain in the Jyotishtoma rite will itself go to heaven / why then does not the sacrificer, forthwith offer his own father?”

He lashed out against caste systems, well ahead of his time:

“What is this senseless humbug about the castes and the high and low among them when organs like the mouth, etc in human are the same?”

Carvaka was a strong proponent of materialistic and hedonistic philosophy and believed that the only mode of perception is one’s senses and all inferences should be derived from these senses. Carvaka said:

“While life is yours, live joyously;

None can escape Death’s searching eye;

When once this frame of ours they burn,

How shall it ever return?”

No wonder the Nirvana / Reincarnation-believing Buddhists were hostile towards it but I think Gautama Bhuddha was more nearer to Carvaka than any other school of thoughts.

So, I am the last Carvaka standing. Will the 2300 years old Carvaka school of thought end with me… I don’t believe so… I think there are more closet Hindu atheists out there!!!

Moe, Nora, Priest Agnishwara and friends: I think I have somewhat cleared what and who is a Hindu Atheist…

Posted in Atheism | Print | 1 Comment »

19. February 2009 by admin.

We have two Mr IT in our company. One who travels 100% of the time and the other who stays put 100%.

So traveling Mr IT is having some nightmares in what it seems like a shipping dock and the other one is dreaming about Teddy.

Tomorrow R&R will be visiting Twin Peaks to check on the network reachability to Teddy and if the TTL does not expire Mr IT will show up to check on the *port* reachability next… More on that tomorrow..

But while this is developing G of GASS fame is busy developing rather altering web page source codes to create his perfect web site which will be used to launch his movie *Meeting with the President*

Signing out…

Posted in Light Banter | Print | 2 Comments »

19. February 2009 by admin.

I am learning python 2.5 The goal is to be a python mid level programmer by end of this year. While I am learning it I am also working on the back-end provisioning tool for our cloud offering. Today I installed the python IDE (integrated development environment) IDLE named after Eric Idle of Monty Python shows, on my little black Eee PC 4 Gb running xandros.

Used the following scipt for automated installation:

sudo bash

echo “deb http://xnv4.xandros.com/xs2.0/upkg-srv2 etch main contrib non-free” >> /etc/opt/sources.list

apt-get update

apt-get install idle=python2.5

I will post a lesson at a time every week.

Posted in Python 2.5 Lessons | Print | 1 Comment »

17. February 2009 by admin.

Last Thursday I was in AA stadium, watching the Mavs Vs. Celtics game… obviously rooting for Mavs… In the beginning Dallas had complete control of the game. At one point Dallas was 51-40 points ahead. But in the end, Boston won the game by 99-92..

Not that I am a sports pundit, but I am sure the secret of Boston’s success is tenacity, not giving up… During most of the game, Boston was outclassed by Mavericks. But the doggedness of Celtics players paid off…

This is how the present economic recession can be overcome. With persistence and patience we can beat the recession. I think if just continue to do our job (if we have them) we can overcome the recession. I still think it is self inflicted. More and more we scream recession, less and less we release money to the market and all of usgo down the spiral..

So go out and spend and splurge and bring back the golden time of consumerism… buy less expensive homes though…

Posted in Misc | Print | 4 Comments »

17. February 2009 by admin.

The other day I was talking to Khalid about Mr. Crofford’s blog regarding power consumption in our datacenter and he mentioned that we may cut down on cost (power/datacenter space) if we get rid of the redundancy. Later that day while talking to Rusty and Adrian, we came to conclusion that in some of our accounts, how active-active network configuration for load sharing/load balancing has added more complexity.

These made me think – which I rarely do. J I did a quick MTTR (mean time to repair) and MTBF (mean time between failures) calculations for Cisco devices and it seems that we can easily meet an

Now imagine a specific cloud architecture (Infrastructure 3.0 or now being called IAAS – infrastructure as a service) which has less redundant elements which will result in a huge power savings over the year.

We can come up with processes and very tight configuration management (as per ITIL v3) that will allow us to swap out a failed piece of hardware quickly and meeting our SLAs.

Moreover if we have the right procedures, every two months or quarter we can bring up the cold standby and seamlessly failover from the active component thus making sure that the configurations are sync’d and not wearing out the same piece of equipment with overuse.

In this area the ongoing support cost (read human resource) will go up. But this may spur us to do more automation.

If anybody is interested and time permitting we can indulge in a full study. This may be one of the area where we can save some money for us and our clients by going green. We will do good both to our customer and to our future generations – what a thought!!

******Time to create few more Spore creatures to inhabit my Spore Ecoverse.********

Posted in Technology | Print | 1 Comment »

13. February 2009 by admin.

First  of all I like to clarify that I am using the word Taliban more as a popular term for religious bigotry and NOT to identify with Islam where in Arabic or Persian, Taliban means students (so my friend Khalid says… 

A recent incident in India is deeply disturbing. Some Hindu fundamentalist group claiming to be a part of one of the main stream political party warned more than one billion Indians that if they celebrate Valentine’s day in India, the members of this group will literally beat them up.  According to them this is NOT the Hindu way of life.

So as usual like any fundamentalist organization, this group does not believe in Indian constitution which had declared the Republic of India as Secular (meaning every group, religious or otherwise, has same rights and the democratically elected government will treat every group equally).

They are trying to dictate to the citizens of India how to lead their daily lives. Soon probably they will ask to revert our constitution back to Manu Sanhita – the Brahminical text from sixth century (around that time – may be fifth – who cares?) which actually transformed Hinduism into more uptight and ritualistic religion and during Islamic invasion these beliefs gained ground to counter forceful conversion.

We all know during troubled times logic and reasoning goes out of the window – India is still under attack which started from Greek invasion to Islamic invaders to British (and other European) colonization and now from these Hindu Fundamentalists from within.. Of course we gained so much from knowledge and absorbed cultural traits from the Greek, Islamic and European civilizations.  But this time it’s just pure garbage.

Of course this Hindu fundamentalist group does not even understand the true meaning of being a Hindu – which not necessarily a religion but a belief system, a way of life which preaches malice towards none and love to all.

Typically Valentine day, to me, is more commercial.  But this is the day to show one’s love and appreciation for the loved ones…… so what is wrong with this…. When is expressing one’s love,  in whatever way Western or Eastern, become a crime? In which Hindu religious text is this banned.. Oh I forgot these people are probably illiterate and the guys behind the screen instigating are in for some political benefit.

If the group is so concerned with Hindu culture, go and address the evils of caste systems still lingering on… do something about discrimination against female children… address the issues of child labor… open all the Hindu temples to everybody.. and foremost stop killing and maiming people in the name of Hindu religion.

Fundamentalists are by definition narrow and cannot broaden their view. Their bodies are in twenty-first century but their heads and souls are in medieval ages. They cannot stand change but want to use all the benefits of that change.

It is very unfortunate, that we are seeing more and more fundamentalism these days – there are religious fundamentalist as well as other kinds ranging from socio-political group to scientific groups. 

Anyway I think I will change my web site’s name to SanjayRants.com

Posted in Religion | Print | 1 Comment »

11. February 2009 by admin.

Information Technology (IT), as I came to realize over all these years, is a major support function for the business. With the on going economic recession, IT organizations are cash strapped and are not going to invest in newer technology.

But this can be changed if IT organizations can tie newer technologies directly to business needs which use technology to assist the business to increase revenue and reduce the over all cost of doing business. Money will come.

How can we, in IS/IT, help our business to increase revenue and help decrease cost at the same time?

Our answer will be to invest in a flexible and agile infrastructure, which will negate the current state of economy and its impact on business, by enabling the most valuable assets of any business in an inexpensive way. And we all know the most valuable asset of any business is its people and customers.

In short we need to transform from a self-defeating network to a self-defending network (as Cisco proclaims…)

Here are some business trends and corresponding new technologies to transform the way we do business today:

• At home workers
• Reduce leased square footage at corporate
• Move products/services to the Web (Internet)
• Simple contact center
• Support mobile work force and customer collaboration

The technologies we will see in action are:

• Collaboration Technology
  • WebEx Connect Clients
    • PC
    • MAC
    • IPhone
    • Blackberry

•  
  • WebEx Connect Space
    • Document Share
    • XMPP application (multi IM client connectivity with Video)

• Mobility solutions for the collaborative workforce
  • Single number reach
  • Presence – native in Call Manager
  • Context aware mobility
  • Secure Unified Communication and mobile access
  • Cloud Application like Email and Calendar services

All of these will give rise to the Unified Workspace…

So we are seeing a paradigm shift from IT support perspective and *Remote people are no longer half people*

In today’s blog we will start looking at Cisco’s WebEx collaboration platform architecture.

Cisco has recently announced that it is going to follow the “software-as-a-service” model for its WebEx Connect Collaboration Services. It will be hosted in Cisco’s cloud computing environment across their “global delivery network” spanning 4 continents…

No to mention that the WebEx Media Tone Network is a Service Provider grade network… The intelligent network element will be comprised of voice/video/QoS enabled network components.

The Cisco application element is comprised of WebEx Collaboration Solutions. The solution suite contains the following:

§         WebEx Connect

o       Jabber XMPP client federated with six or seven IM clients like GoogleTalk, MSN, Yahoo messengers, etc….

o       Native Call Manager integration for *Presence*

o       Shared Space (like SharePoint but based on open platform)

§         Business Specific Meeting Solutions

o       Event Calendar

o       Sales Calendar

o      

o      

o      

Any other custom applications like an billing application which will keep track of all cell phone/ email/desk phone and WebEx meetings for a lawyer with her specific client and then sending a report to another application which will send an invoice to the client.

WebEx clients are now available for PC, Linux and MAC platforms and for IPhone and blackberry handsets.

More to follow….

Posted in Technology | Print | 1 Comment »