Who’s the boss

Now that I am settled in India, I finally have time to update the blog. I was surprised by the penetration and popularity of broadband here in just a couple of years. Almost everyone who had dial-up has upgraded to broadband for the same price.  The speeds aren’t very fast but you can get upto 200KB/s consistently. 

The reason I came to India was to work in the family business and get some experience running a company before I go for my MBA. I was involved in the software field (undergrad & work) for 8 years and now I am working in the manufacturing sector. These fields technically are not even remotely related but from running a business view they aren’t very much different. A business is like a sailing ship for ex: the captain steers and the rest of the crew work as a team to get the sails in place. So you don’t need to be a technical wizard and know everything in that field to be able to successfully manage the business. However, you have to know enough so that people can’t fool you.

A person needs to act like a “sponge” when trying to understand the intricacies of business in a different field in a new workplace. I try to follow the “rules” below:
- self-learning
- talking to the employees about their work and learning from them
- listening to work related discussions, even though you can’t contribute much

Finally, do not feel self-entitled to be the “boss” right away. You need to show the employees that you are willing to work just as hard as they are and not just boss them around because your dad owns the business. I have been working for a week and I already feel excited about the work. Sure I don’t have the technical background but running your own business is very rewarding and gets me motivated.

Who killed the Electric car ?

I watched a great documentary on “Who killed the electric car ?” today. It really shows how much power corporate america has over the federal lawmakers. Its amazing how far oil companies and auto makers will go to maintain their control over people’s life and make them slaves to oil. And we as consumers believe what the corporations feed us using their media. Watch it here.

Why Scotiabank place is in Kanata

For Sens fans who have always wondered why Scotiabank Place is in Kanata, read this. Its written by Bruce Firestone who was responsible for bringing back the Senators to Ottawa.

Talk about bad timing

Timing can really make or break your efforts. Consider tennis for example, if you don’t hit the ball at the right time you won’t make a good shot. Buying stocks is another case, where timing is crucial. What you do with your life and more importantly WHEN you do it matters a lot !

This brings me to Formula 1, Honda shocked everyone by pulling out of F1 at the end of last season. I don’t blame them considering how pathetic their performances have been (1 win in almost 8 seasons and never finished in top 3 constructors championship). I belive they were finally going in the right direction in 2008 by hiring Ross Brawn who was the mastermind behind Schumacher’s multiple championships at Benetton and Ferrari. Coupled with the recent economic downturn and lack of success they decided to pull the plug on their F1 team. Ross Brawn had no input whatsoever on the 2008 Honda F1 car but they started work early on their 2009 car because of massive rule changes in 2009. Big sweeping rule changes like these have a side effect of bringing more parity among teams.

If I were Honda I would’ve waited at least another year to see what Brawn could do, but I guess they panicked with car sales dropping and sponsors not willing to spend more. This meant the entire team would be out of a job, but Ross Brawn managed to put together an offer for the team and bought it from Honda and partnered with Mercedes for the engines. He probably did not have a hard time finding sponsors because of his past track record and credibility. The team was called Brawn GP.

They had a mere 2 weeks of testing before the start of the season but they were on the pace from the very first test. And now with qualifying done for the Australian GP, Brawn GP has locked the front row of the grid with Button finishing first and Barrichello second. On top of that they were running heavy on fuel and had a massive 0.6 seconds over third place Vettel.

All those Honda executives who took this decision should be kicking each other in the shin right about now.

Why Wii outsells Xbox360 and PS3 but I still wouldn’t have one

When Nintendo launched the Wii they indirectly used a Blue Ocean Strategy (whether they intended it or not is a different matter) to target a demographic that traditionally didn’t buy consoles like young kids, girls and women. The xbox and ps3 is mostly bought by teenage boys or men but you will be hard pressed to find women buy one.

Gaming consoles are generally regarded as evil promoting laziness, hours of time wasted in front of the television etc. but as people become more health conscious the Wii will stand out as the one console that is health-conscious. The good among evil.

Nintendo with the Wii introduced  a console that appealed to not only men but also women. Playing on a Wii helps you workout (sort of), which makes it more attractive for mom’s who would rather have their kids play games and be active at the same time. The release of Wii Fit just strengthens this argument and now you can do yoga on it and people love that (Yoga is the new buzzword in fitness). People who are afraid of going to the gym or find it boring love the Wii because its fun. But I find it hard to believe that it gives you a workout like the treadmill or weights.

But as far as I am concerned I think the Wii is very gimmicky. Sure it has a novel motion sensor feature but the graphics look like lego blocks, is purely a gaming console and the games on it do not appeal to me. If I need a workout I play sports or hit the gym, but when I play a game on my console I want to feel like its realistic, has cutting edge graphics and looks good. I want my console to serve as a multimedia device, streaming videos from my home server etc.

So the next time someone says “Wii would like to play”, I’d politely decline.

In Place search and replace with Perl on Windows

We had to do a massive restructuring of one of our client’s applications and it required changes to the domain names and URL’s.

The command below will replace occurrences of www.infoexport.gc.ca/ie-en with www.tradecommissioner.gc.ca/eng in html files recursively. The \ is used to escape / in the URL’s.

If you are running this on Windows you HAVE to specify a backup file name using the -i parmeter. This is a limitation of the Windows file system, the side effect being its always good to have backups.

$ find . -type f | xargs perl -p -i’test.bak’ -e ’s/www.infoexport.gc.ca\/ie-en/www.tradecommissioner.gc.ca\/eng/g’ *.html

Fido to “modify” rewards program

Fido used to be David and Rogers Goliath in the fight over GSM supremacy in Ontario, but then Rogers bought Fido and the fight was over. Rogers still insisted that Fido would act as a competitor and operate as an independent organization. But the last couple of years Fido has dropped some of their nice features like unlimited text messaging and etc.

Now then they modified their rewards program so you can not redeem your points for accessories anymore. To top it off, it was not mentioned ANYWHERE except their rewards sub-site that I just stumbled on while looking to get rewarded with a bluetooth headset.

This is what a monopoly does.

Met comrie and campoli at the Brookstreet

I bumped into Mike Comrie and Chris Campoli at the Brookstreet Hotel on Sunday, I was there for brunch. It’s surprising how short Comrie is for a hockey player and is considered  one of the gritty guys.

Picasa for Linux

I had been looking for a good photo manager for uBuntu but couldn’t find that one tool that did it all. I completely overlooked Picasa because I didn’t think Google had a Linux version, but they do which runs on wine and therefore looks just like the windows version. Great tool to manage albums and also upload them on picasaweb.

Google Gears for WordPress

Wow it does make a difference, I am running this on uBuntu 8.04 and Firefox 3.0.6. Websites like wordpress that are js and css intensive really benefit from Gears.