My Thoughts !

When I got the offer from IBM, I asked whether I can get a Mac as my official laptop. My manager said ThinkPads are the defacto ones and thats what I would get. But after joining IBM, I searched intranet and found a way to get Mac as an official laptop. First my team needs adequate funding and then I've convince my manager with *real* business reasons, and he has to convince his manager, and he in turn has to convince his manager and he inturn ... The chain goes all the way up to the heaven and ultimately He say 'Go on' and the approval comes down. The entire process took months, but then its worth of it.

Now I got a shiny new 2.4 GHz MacBook. I managed to have all my apps running native, so I didn't even install any Virtualization software or use BootCamp. Good bye Windows and Hello Mac - again :-)

I should say the new ones are absolutely gorgeous. Light weight, better battery backup, multi-touch trackpad etc. Few things I noticed is that the apps are not compatible to 10.4. So when I try to connect to my older personal Mac, I can't load the photos here, unless, they are converted to the new format. But converting to the new format means that I can't use them on the older one. So the solution is to upgrade the OS in my older Mac or don't use official laptop to view/edit the photos. I prefer to the second option. Another annoying thing is that the screen is glossy and the reflection is very high. I haven't noticed it in my MacBook or the earlier MacBook Pro. I had to change the direction of my office table to cope up with this. Very minor annoyances and I can definitely live with that for the Mac :-)

Two days back, I got an email from someone called Shakuntala ([email protected]) for the details about their Top 25 Emerging Technology Companies program. The mail said:

Dear Sir.,

Greetings from TheSmarttechie - Silicon India.

Hope your doing good.

The May 2009 edition of The SmartTechie will be on the Top 25 Emerging technology companies. We are looking at what exciting technologies companies are working for and prodigy of leadership team and investors of private companies. A few of these companies will be profiled in the magazine. We are talking to several startups to see who are the Best 25 we can feature in the magazine. A panel of analysts, Venture Capitalists and our editorial team will select the companies.

It will be good idea to be part of this issue along with the 25 Emerging Companies.  We are offering you to advertise in this Special issue and will be part of great branding and visibility among the  95000 readers and subscribers.

Option 1 : Only Advertisement.

Amount : 20,000/-.

   1. One Page Advertisment in the issue of Top 25 Emerging Technology Companies.
   2. Online banner ad on :  www.thesmarttechie.com/magazine

Option 2 : To be listed Among Top 25 StartUps.

Amount : Rs.30,000/-

        1.     Inclusion in the Top 25 Emerging Technology Companies list.
        2.     One page of Company Profile along with the pic of the concern person
        3.     One full page ad in the SmartTechie.
       4.     The company Profile will be displayed on the online magazine page too:  www.thesmarttechie.com/magazine

Please do let me know how we can take this forward. It will be nice to close this loop asap so that we get things rolling.

We can look at a mutual relationship so that your company gets more visibility. Let me know what you think.

If you have anything else on your mind, I shall be open for ideas.

Thanks

Shakuntala
______________________________

Shakuntala
Manager-Marketing
siliconindia
The Smart Techie
Ph: 91.80. 43402004
C: 9916972235

http://www.siliconindia.com
http://www.thesmarttechie.com/
________________________________

siliconindia is a business and technology magazine published from Fremont, California, which covers business, technology and entrepreneurship. Our current circulation exceeds 70,000 and our readership builds from CIOs, CTOs, CEOs and market influencers like fund capitalists, technology  adopters and analysts.

The Smart Techie empowers technology leaders for tomorrow. Its mission is to update its readers on the latest developments in technology and how these developments will impact them. The magazine aims to capture insights from the experiences of senior technology professionals and experts from across the globe. The Smart Techie magazine reaches out to 95000 experienced IT professionals.

________________________________

I was surprised. First I didn't get what they meant by Option 2. Is it that if I pay 30k, my company will be in the Top 25 list? Or is it an entry fees for the program? I sent my questions and the answer was clear:

Its only 25 participants & only 25 rankings not more than that currently we
have 19 clinets confirmed clients till now.

 Ah! Great. But isn't 30k too much for getting awarded as the Top 25 Emerging Technology Companies in the country? I know I also get a full page age, interview, website ad etc, but still, my company is so small you see?

Sure We shall offer you 25k for the same.

Excellent. So looks like the entire event is just a bullshit. Last year there were hoardings all over Bangalore about this. I thought it was a genuine program and the companies were "awarded" through the program and not "bought" that. Now I know the truth. So if you see the list of companies this year, you should be knowing that they are not really the Top 25 emerging companies, but the 25 companies that opted to pay 30k (minus whatever discount they got) Considering it would be the average monthly salary of a developer, its a good thing for a company to pay for it. And these guys get more than 6 Lakhs. So its a win-win situation for both the companies and the magazine. Only we think its all genuine and get fooled :-)

Back at Fiorano, I started as the lead of the IDE team. The IDE was on Netbeans platform and my task was to design and develop an Eclipse based IDE. Months after, I got assigned with additional responsibility of leading the Server team as well. Managing both the team had one advantage. If I want anything to be done for the IDE, it was much easier :-) In that way, I've pushed in new features (with fancy names like EPLCM) coupled with a nice interface. Features like Dynamic Message Injection from an IDE to a server running in production is not something that you can achieve with other ESBs.  If that is not enough, I threw away the old webconsole and revamped it using ExtGWT. The result was a totally new looking product - a new Eclipse based IDE, Ajax Console and feature rich server. Now after months of beta, the product is released to the public. Kudos to my guys there for their really hard work. Hope the customers like it :-)

Its been in the news all over. While the primary motive might be in the server space, I'm thinking of what it means to Eclipse and Java as a whole. Thinking of the possibilities:

• Netbeans platform to be deprecated (read: gone)
• Eclipse is bundled with JDK
• JDK uses Eclipse Compiler. Only downside I see is that the Eclipse Compiler is a pure Java application and needs a JRE, but hey a JDK ships with the JRE right?
• Every JRE ships with a latest version of SWT
• No more worries for interoperability of JSR 277 with OSGi - as OSGi will be pushed into Java Platform as a standard

Wow! The possibilities are promising. Let me see how many of these come true

It all looks like a dream. A month back, it was a well respected company and people were happy on the returns. Now the shares are in the dust bin. From 250 bucks to 30 bucks. Looks like Satyam will go out of business within the next few months - or weeks! So what happens now?

Satyam has over 50,000 employees. In the troubled economy, I don't think all of them will get jobs soon. This essentially means 50,000 people with less or no salary. Almost all of them would have got one or more house loans. As most of these people are based in Hyderabad, the real estate there is going to get a hit. More houses will come for sale - which will cause prices to come down. A definite hit to real estate and the banks who have given loans.

The next short term hit would be the Indian IT companies. With all the global meltdown and Obama's non-so friendly views on outsouring, this will simply add worries to the other service companies like Infosys & TCS. They might gain some projects which were with Satyam, so in the long run, when everyone forgets that a company called Satyam exists, they will have a bigger share in the pie.

As usual corporate policies and goverment practices will be questioned and more new regulations will be imposed. This is not just in India, Satyam is listed in US as well and still gets to go away with this fraud for years together.

The auditors will be more scrutinized. Satyam was audited by the famous Price Waterhouse Coopers. When Satyam claimed to have 5,000 Crore Rupees in banks, they didn't even check the bank balance? hmmm bad. I guess these guys should get punished a lot.

After all the Maytas deal & troubles, some employees of Satyam started a website for supporting their honest CEO and God father (http://www.ramalingaraju.com/) They blame that media is bad and they are not seeing his work on making Satyam as India's pride. I wish they realize that Satyam is now India's shame :-(

Wow! so all these years they have inflated the profit and cooked the books. In the statement released to SEBI, stock exchanges and to the board, he says that none of the board members knew this situation till now (neither the promotor's family members knew it). Here is the letter:

To the Board of Directors
Satyam Computer Services Ltd. Dear Board Members, It is with deep regret, at tremendous burden that I am carrying on my conscience, that I would like to bring the following facts to your notice:

1. The Balance Sheet carries as of September 30, 2008
   • Inflated (non-existent) cash and bank balances of Rs.5,040 crore (as against Rs. 5361 crore reflected in the books)
   • An accrued interest of Rs. 376 crore which is non-existent
   • An understated liability of Rs. 1,230 crore on account of funds arranged by me
   • An over stated debtors position of Rs. 490 crore (as against Rs. 2651 [cr.] reflected in the books)
2. For the September quarter (02) we reported a revenue of Rs.2,700 crore and an operating margin of Rs. 649 crore (24% Of revenues) as against the actual revenues of Rs. 2,112 crore and an actual operating margin of Rs. 61 Crore ( 3% of revenues). This has resulted in artificial, cash and bank balances going up by Rs. 588 crore in Q2 alone.

The gap in the Balance Sheet has arisen purely on account of inflated profits over a period of last several years (limited only to Satyam standalone, books of subsidiaries reflecting true performance). What started as a marginal gap between actual operating profit and the one reflected in the books of accounts continued to grow over the years. It has attained unmanageable proportions as the size of company operations grew significantly (annualized revenue run rate of Rs. 11,276 crore in the September quarter, 2008 and official reserves of Rs. 8,392 crore). The differential in the real profits and the one reflected in the books was further accentuated by the fact that the company had to carry additional resources and assets to justify higher level of operations — thereby significantly increasing the costs.

Every attempt made to eliminate the gap failed. As the promoters held a small percentage of equity, the concern was that poor performance would result in a take-over; thereby exposing the gap. It was like riding a tiger, not knowing how to get off without being eaten.

The aborted Maytas acquisition deal was the last attempt to fill the fictitious assets with real ones. Maytas’ investors were convinced that this is a good divestment opportunity and a strategic fit. Once Satyam’s problem was solved, it was hoped that Maytas’ payments can be delayed. But that was not to be. What followed in the last several days is common knowledge.

I would like the Board to know:

1. That neither myself, nor the Managing Director (including our spouses) sold any shares in the last eight years — excepting for a small proportion declared and sold for philanthropic purposes.

2. That in the last two years a net amount of Rs. 1,230 crore was arranged to Satyam (not reflected in the books of Satyam) to keep the operations going by resorting to pledging all the promoter shares and raising funds from known sources by giving all kinds of assurances (Statement enclosed, only to the members of the board). Significant dividend payments, acquisitions, capital expenditure to provide for growth did not help matters. Every attempt was made to keep the wheel moving and to ensure prompt payment of salaries to the associates. The last straw was the selling of most of the pledged share[s] by the lenders on account of margin triggers.

3. That neither me, nor the Managing Director took even one rupee/dollar from the company and have not benefitted in financial terms on account of the inflated results.

4. None of the board members, past or present, had any knowledge of the situation in which the company is placed. Even business leaders and senior executives in the company, such as, Ram Mynampati, Subu D, T.R. Anand, Keshab Panda, Virender Agarwal, A.S. Murthy, Han T, SV Krishnan, Vijay Prasad, Manish Mehta, Murali V. Sriram Papani, Kavale, Joe Lagioia, Ravindra Penumetsa, Jayaraman and Prabhakar Gupta are unaware of the real situation as against the books of accounts. None of my or Managing Director’s immediate or extended family members has any idea about these issues.

Having put these facts before you, I leave it to the wisdom of the board to take the matters forward. However, I am also taking the liberty to recommend the following steps:

1. A Task Force has been formed in the last few days to address the situation arising but of the failed Maytas acquisition attempt. This consists of some of the most accomplished leaders of Satyam; Subu D, T.R. Anand, Keshab Panda and Virender Agarwal , representing business functions; and A.S. Murthy, Han T and Murali V representing support functions. I suggest that Ram Mynampàti be made the Chairman of this Task Force to immediately address some of the operational matters on hand. Ram can also act as an interim CEO reporting to the board.

2. Merrill Lynch can be entrusted with the task of quickly exploring some Merger opportunities.

3. You may have a testatement of accounts’ prepared by the auditors in light of the facts that.I have placed before you.

I have promoted and have been associated with Satyam for well over twenty years now I have seen it grow from few people to 53,000 people, with 185 Fortune 500 companies as customers and operations in 66 countries. Satyam has established an excellent leadership and competency base at all levels. I sincerely apologize to all Satyamites and stakeholders, who have made Satyam a special organization, for the current situation. I am confident they will stand by the company in this hour of crisis.

In light of the above, I fervently appeal to the board to hold together to take some important steps Mr T R Prasad is well placed to mobilize support from the government at this crucial time. With the hope that members of the Task Force arid the financial advisor, Merrill Lynch (now Bank of America) will stand by the company at this crucial hour, I am marking copies of this statement to them as well.

Under the circumstances, I am tendering my resignation as the chairman of Satyam and shall continue in this position only till such time the current board is expanded. My continuance is just to ensure enhancement of the board over the next several days or as early as possible.

I am now prepared to subject myself tothe laws of theland and lace consequences thereof.

(B. Ramalinga Raju)
Copies marked to:
1. Chairman SEBI
2. Stock Exchanges

 

In one of my previous companies (which is small and privately held), I happened to meet few of the board members and had chance to interact with them. I was surprised that how little they were knowledged about the core product and the business it brings to the company. In my opinion they all had lot of other stuff to do and for just sitting in the board they get a good Honorarium. So they don't want to spoil that by talking/questioning. Thats exactly what had happened in case of the "independent" board members of Satyam as well. hmmm corporates!

I guess the whole problem with Satyam was that the promoters had a very little share of 8% (unlike 51%) and they don't want someone/some other company to take over Satyam. So they started to cook the books. Now that its overcooked, they had no other choice.

What could happen next? Forget the great CEO Ramalinga Raju. As the politicians say, the law will take its own course. We will see in few years. Coming to Satyam, either the leaders within will for a strong management team and come out from the crisis or it will be taken over by HCL/Reliance/some one else or it will simply get out of business within 2 years. The last might happen because an IT company's biggest asset is its engineers. They will start quitting the company owing to the fears of their house loans and credit card bills; the projects will get more delayed; and more companies will let go of the contracts; more employees leave/fired - you see its a spiral all the way down to zero.

Satyam was a wonderful example of Indian IT dream. Started small with less money & people and made all the way into Top 5 IT companies with billions of dollars of revenue. I wish it stayed there rather crashing down this far, this soon, just because the promoter wanted to hold control.

A lesson learnt in the hard way for Indian IT :-(

I've got few TinEye invites available. In case you are interested in trying out this Image Search Engine, let me know, I'll send you an invitation.

Yup, it doesn't cost you anything. Its absolutely free :-)

Got an invitation for private beta for TinEye - an image search engine. When I say image search its not by entering some keywords and searching for images, rather giving an image as reference and finding out similar images. I've worked on a similar product for my final year project (identifying traffic signs), I know its not an easy task. The algorithm that I've used, needs proper training to identify the images. But for a search like this, you don't have a training input. You get only one chance to identify the images. Sounds pretty complex to me!

I tried this search:



And the result:



As you can see the results are accurate even thou they are cropped, added few elements etc. Sounds like a perfect target for Google to acquire :-)

Last night we went live with BaZaa beta. Download it here.

You can list items and find items, and BaZaa provides you the matches. Best of all this is that none of your queries/listings are saved in the server and that makes it very scalable. The speed and efficiency will good when there are more users and items listed. I'm not going to explain the technlogy (BTW, its patented) but just the UI, which I wrote. Here are some screenshots (Click to enlarge):

Seen all the screen shots? Now you get a picture of how to list/find right? Now close your eyes and think how many places you have the labels like "Query: [text box]", "Price: [text box]" ? Can't think of any? Well, there are only few places where we have labels. The UI was designed from the ground up in a way that the users will not have the web-based-form-filling feeling. When one of the demos a partner prospect from Zurich said, "for the first time I'm seeing a UI that I can use immediately without asking anyone how to use". Oh! yeah, if you were wondering, we are neither shipping any documentation for how to use it nor having a web page for that. Keep experimenting the UI and try out yourself :-)

Believe it or not, all the UI components are OS native components, but coded in Java! 2 months back, when I was given a demo of this for the first time, the UI was in Swing and looked pathetic. I was asked whether it can be improved. That night in the hotel I wrote the mock up as an RCP application and when I showed it to my CEO the next day, he was impressed. It was obvious that SWT & RCP is the best choice for BaZaa over Swing. Ever since that day, I worked on few hours every day for building and testing the UI and finally we are live!

As of now, we are running the servers only in US. We have purchased servers & bandwidths in other countries, soon you should see local version. Try it now and send your comments/suggestions either to me or click the feedback link in the BaZaa website.

If you are running Weblogic on Mac or some unsupported version of Linux, you might get OutOfMemoryError quite often (esp. if you are using the web console). To get rid of this, open the <domain root>/bin/setDomainEnv.sh file and add this line:

USER_MEM_ARGS=”-Xms512m -Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m”

Its should be fine for the weblogic. If you have only 1GB RAM, your other apps will beg for more memory. So if you requently use weblogic and other apps simultaneously, better upgrade to 2 GB RAM.

Related:

Installing Weblogic on Mac

Meanwhile, Microsoft has said that an internal build of IE 8 now passes the Acid Test. Wow! Thats an achievement. I think its the second browser after Opera to pass the test. While IE 8 is expected to be released in an year or so, Firefox 3 is close to release. Its already in Beta 2 and it rocks!

Its based on Gecko 1.9, pages now loads really fast, UI is cool, Proto theme blends well with Mac and so on. If you ask for my favourite feature, it is the auto complete feature in the location bar. No longer you have to type from the beginning. Type any character in the URL/page name you want, Firefox shows all the results. See the screen shot:



In another related news, Mozilla Prism isn't exciting as I thought earlier. Its just creates a short cut and nothing else. I thought some nice integration such as Application Menus are on the way, but nothing of that sort. If all I want is a short cut on the desktop, I don't need an application, all I need is the upcoming version of Google Gears!

[Cross post from my Eclipse blog]

Eclipse Demo Camp is coming to Bangalore on 10th Dec. Looking at other Demo Camps, Bangalore might be the one with highest number of registration (around 50) - and its still growing. In case you wish to attend, do register here.

Yup, I'm working on a presentation on GEF. Meet you all there.

It looks promising. Offline web apps are becoming more and more popular and Firefox is making a right move towards it. I'll be writing a complete review soon, but for now, you can click here.

Yup. Sonoa, my previous employer, is finally out of stealth mode :-)

The website now lists two products - Info 2.0 and ServiceNet. Yesterday they have announced that they are working with IBM for Info 2.0, which is an appliance for creating Mashups within an Enterprise.  News is already out and spread well. That sounds really nice, except for the two points:

• It is based on IBM's not-even-beta IBM Mashup Starter Kit


• Is there a real market for Mashups within Enterprise?

Since they have just started working, the Mashup Starter Kit should have graduated out of alphaworks, but what about the market? I'm really curious to know about the case studies and customers for that product. Lets wait and see.

James Gosling has posted a video of Project Green - the one that gave birth to Java. Considering the technology was developed one and half decades back, its really amazing to see what the little hand held device can accomplish. Full touch screen, speakers (yeah, but ugly sound theme), infrared and yes smooth scrolling in the touch screen interface. Is this where iPhone copied it from?


Watch the video and decide yourself. I think if Sun had patented it, it could have sued Apple!

You have too many credit cards. One card gets you reward points for a dress purchase; other will give you cash back for swipes in restaurant, and so on. Too many cards, too many offers. Its best to carry all your cards while shopping. You wallet becomes heavy and if you loose it you are in a real mess.

Is there a solution? Yes, iCache is a wonderful nice solution to this. Its actually a rewritable credit card with a device to write in it. The device is so small so that you can carry it along. If someone steals it, you are safe, because it has fingerprint scanner. And no, although the name hints, its not by Apple :-)

BEA is one of the biggest Java vendors; Macs run Java & many Java developers use Mac. But still Weblogic is not supported on Mac. So I have to follow the unofficial informations to install it. Here are the steps:

BEA's download site lists the officially supported OS. Mac won't be there in the list. If you select IBM AIX/ HP Itanium, you will see that the downloaded file is server<version>_generic.jar. These jars can be used to install Weblogic on any machine with a JRE.

The generic installer is "intelligent" enough to find that you don't have any space in your disk to install and will give you this error dialog:

To avoid this you have to tell the installer that you are running on a Unix machine: java -Dos.name=unix -jar server100_generic.jar

The installation will go smoothly without any troubles. When you are done with the installation, the wizard you show you an option to run the QuickStart uncheck and press Finish. (If you are happy with the Example Server and want to start it, you may want to show the Quick Start)

Run the <bea home>/wlserver_10.0/common/bin/config.sh to create your own domain and go to the domain directory and run startWeblogic.sh. Its all the usual stuff. Nothing specific to Mac.

The only trouble is you will get the login screen for console and the login will take for ever with more than 90% CPU usage :-( Don't worry, I'll give a solution soon :-)

Related Posts:

Weblogic on Ubuntu

The Securities and Exchange Commission of US has done a brave move, which is to be welcomed by every e-mail user. Confused? Read this. It takes lot of guts to take this decision. These kind of decisions will definitely reduce spam mails. What next? Ban the sites that sell the software at "unimaginable cost"? Ban the pharmacies which sells the viagara and "increase my length"? Ban the banks which "approved loans"?

For me above all, I'm willing to donate my

• 3yr old PC loaded with Ubuntu


• my Adidas T Shirt that I bought with 50% flat discount


• my Project Manager

all to Google, if they can freeze the email ids of persons who forwarded me the great "Vijaya T. Rajender & Mumtaj in Veerasamy" photo.

Now that I own a Mac, I've to kick M$ and M$ products and praise Apple's product. At least thats I've seen with every switcher. On the contrary, I'm now praising a M$ product - Photosynth. Its really cool and nice one. It analyzes a set of photos and presents you a 3D view of it. Its really wonderful idea and an amazing implementation as well. More over its not a desktop product like Picasa, rather its on the net. Check this out for yourself: http://labs.live.com/photosynth