Tuesday October 10, 2006 Blog Moved
My blog moved to my personal site for the last few months. Posted by spurthi ( Oct 10 2006, 05:34:43 PM IST ) Permalink
Tuesday May 16, 2006 Efficiency of Indian Railways Online Ticket System
I have been a regular traveller of Indian Railways for the last few years, but never used their i-ticket system in the past. During last weekend, there is an urgent need to book tickets for family, and resorted to this option because by that time, all the reservation counters are closed for Sunday. I have been a registered user of the online reservation system for quite some time, even though I haven't used it.
Booked my tickets by about 4.00pm on Sunday evening, and surprised to see that the tickets are delivered to my home by 11.00am on Monday morning. This is what I call as operational efficiency. All it costed me is 40.00 INR, which is less than 1.00 USD. I think I should try this i-ticket feature more often.
Also, I want to try the e-ticket feature. Let me see how it works.
Posted by spurthi ( May 16 2006, 07:46:47 AM IST ) Permalink Comments [1]
Thursday April 27, 2006 Sun's offer for indian schools
This article on rediff.com outlines the offer from Sun to schools in India.
Posted by spurthi ( Apr 27 2006, 12:24:17 AM IST ) Permalink
Wednesday April 05, 2006 Netra ACTA Server and Blades
Today Sun announced a ACTA based server and netra blades. The CT900 server offers 14 slots in a 12U rack space. The server comes with two blade choices, the CP3010 UltraSparc (TM) blade and the CP3020 AMD 64 blade. The specs of both these blades look very promising.Posted by spurthi ( Apr 05 2006, 10:31:15 PM IST ) Permalink
Tuesday April 04, 2006 Interesting articles from Slashdot: Apr 04 2006
Here are some interesting articles from Slashdot in the last few days:- A National Archive Moves to ODF: Talks about the National Archives of Australia moving to Open Document Forma (ODF).
- Sun Spearheads Open DRM
- Sun's Open Source DRM
Monday April 03, 2006 Observer Training
Today I attended a day long observer training, which I thought (at some point of time in the past) that I wouldn't need. But this training proved me wrong! I am happy to go thru the aspects of observation versus inference versus judgement, which is very helpful in some of the upcoming activities I am going to do.At the end of the day, when I retrospect on the trainings I am taking at Sun, they fall into 3 major categories.
- Trainings that teach a new concept/technology: These are the trainings that are very easy to get signed up for. But finding such trainings is not an easy task.
- Trainings that give a new perspective on what I think I know: These trainings are very difficult for signing up, but might turn out to be most productive ones.
- Trainings that are a mere waste of time: Thankfully, there are not that many trainins I am attending at Sun that fall into this category.
Going back to my observer training today, it is a variant of the second case, where it helped me to consolidate the unorganized thoughts I had on this topic. Hoping to get some leverage out of this training soon!
Posted by spurthi ( Apr 03 2006, 06:48:09 PM IST ) Permalink
Thursday March 30, 2006 Preso at IEC-Hyderabad
The Sun's IEC-Hyderabad office is migrating from its legacy SeeBeyond form to a Sun division. In a process to assist the engineers migrate faster, I was suggested to give a series of presos on specific topics as needed.Yesterday (Wednesday India time) I had a chance to visit the site and talk to engineering community. The preso is delivered twice, to cover the entire team. Since this is the first preso, all I could do is emphasize on what is critical for an engineer at Sun and expose them to some of the technical forums and tools.
As the members from site get to a stage where they contribute to these forums or use some of the sun-specific tools extensively, I may hold detailed sessions for them.
Sun employees can access the StarOffice version of my preso from my Sun-internal homepage.
Posted by spurthi ( Mar 30 2006, 10:59:34 PM IST ) Permalink
Thursday March 23, 2006 Completely migrated to StarOffice 8
Finally, I spent some time this week to migrate completely to StarOffice 8 on all the systems I currently use, including my laptop and home system. This was due for quite some time. Both on my SunRay and my laptop, I feel StarOffice8 is reasonably faster to come up.Posted by spurthi ( Mar 23 2006, 08:43:10 PM IST ) Permalink
Tuesday March 21, 2006 Solaris 10 x86 install
Just a quick log of certain things I have done previous weekend- Helped installation of Solaris 10 at my engineering college (S.R.K.R.)
- Delivered a short lecture on DTrace and Zones. Students seem to be very interested in the real life usages of these features.
- Some quick facts about the OpenSolaris initiative and how it helps students.
- Tell me the performance hit on the system when I partition it into multiple zones.
- How can I use the DTrace feature on multiple, yet related processes.
- How long does it take to boot a zone.
Eyes must widen when I talk about the performance numbers of the DTrace and Zones. It is always a good feeling answering such questions with pride!
Posted by spurthi ( Mar 21 2006, 09:21:34 PM IST ) Permalink
Tuesday March 07, 2006 Emergency Readiness Team in Sun India
After a considerable gap, I signed up for Emergency Response Team at Sun and attended a Fire Emergency Response Training today. The training went on for about 4 hours, and I feel that it is time very well spent. Just refreshed my past learnings about the types of extinguishers, when to use each type, types of fires, several techniques to help disabled persons during evacuation etc.Also, I liked the new & improved floor plans that are displayed in each floor.
Posted by spurthi ( Mar 07 2006, 09:18:23 PM IST ) Permalink
Saturday February 11, 2006 Sportstar gets a new look
Right from when I was a kid, India's popular sports magazine Sportstar featured the same look. It always presented the best quality sports news in print, along with breathtaking pictures of sportspersons in action. Its posters are the only posters I might have ever wanted to keep on a wall.Last night, I have seen this magazine feature a new tabloid style, away from its classic magazine style. This is a very interesting move. In this style, the magazine can feature better (read bigger) sports photos. People who are travelling may find this new style very handy.
Posted by spurthi ( Feb 11 2006, 07:09:23 AM IST ) Permalink
Tuesday February 07, 2006 Iris scan
Recently, Government of Andhra Pradesh started issuing multi-purpose (ration, identity, proof of residence etc.) cards to its residents. I haven't had such cards for more than a decade for several reasons, so thought of getting one. Yesterday my wife and myself went to get one and got a pleasant surprise too.The application forms are distributed well in advance to my home, so had no difficulty in figuring out what documentation is needed to get the card. The form is simple, boxed and ready for data entry in the sense that you need to fill in codes for occupation, relationship, nativity etc. The codes are well documented on the back of the form.
The facility (a community hall less than a km from my place) is a temp setup to issue these cards, so it is free from the typical government office ambience. They started with a help desk and have setup about 6 counters for various things like scrutiny, fee payment, photo shoot, iris scan, data entry and data validation. We flowed thru these counters very smoothly, always thanking the cooperative counter clerks.
The photo shoot and iris scan are the best part of the whole episode. It is a very simple, no-nonsense setup that made me feel happy and proud to be part of such a system. This is the first time I got my iris scanned. A government office doing that is very impressive.
I was asked to validate the complete data before they printed out the card. This is a very good provision they made. I was handed out a laminated card with details of all our family members and photos of myself and wife (kids excused to attend the school.)
The entire process took just a little more than 30 minutes. This is less than the time I had to wait at a movie ticket counter over the last weekend.
Definitely, governments are improving!
Posted by spurthi ( Feb 07 2006, 09:46:51 AM IST ) Permalink
Friday February 03, 2006 Breakfast at what time?
A few hours ago, I attended a cousin's marriage. Everything seemed perfectly usual for an early morning marriage: Dinner by 8.00pm that night, most of the attendees leave by 9.30pm after wishing the bride and groom, the muhurat for marriage at 01.54am that night etc. However, when I am about to leave the venue at about 2.00am with my family, got a very good surprise: Breakfast!There are about 400 people still at the venue at 2.00am and the host requested us to have breakfast before we leave. A couple of my cousins said loud enough: "You must be kidding!" The host persisted and we had a very nice breakfast at that hour: Idli, Masala Dosa, Moong Dosa with Upma etc. Freshly made and served hot. With the usual coffee and tea at the end! May last in memory for quite some time.
Having enjoyed such a great breakfast at an odd hour, need to :-) say more about the bride, groom and off course, the rest of the marriage. The groom is Kishore, my wife's cousin. The bride is Harita. The venue, Silpa Kala Vedika at Shilparamam, is very suitable for the 2000 odd estimated attendance. The attendees included the home minister of AP, Film actors Chiranjeevi, Nagababu, Murali Mohan, Ravindra etc., Former Union Minister U. Krishnam Raju, MLA A. Krishnam Raju, few more sitting MLAs, few more former MLAs and Ministers, Film Director Raghavendra Rao, and the list goes on. Typical security checks for such a gathering may cause a little inconvenience, but rest of the marriage went on very fine. The dinner is extravagant, the dessert/fruit stall itself serving more than 30 varieties of foods/fruits.
Had to take a short break after dinner till 1.00am, baby sitting kids at home. Kids enjoyed the fruits after dinner, especially the good quality strawberries.
Amidst all this, the unusual breakfast at 2.00am is really unforgettable.
Posted by spurthi ( Feb 03 2006, 07:12:33 AM IST ) Permalink
Wednesday January 25, 2006 Cleared pending email
Well, as of weekend, I had more than 1000 pending emails from last trip etc. Managed to clear all of them. One of those very rare days where I can clear pending emails during week days.Posted by spurthi ( Jan 25 2006, 10:32:40 AM IST ) Permalink
Friday January 20, 2006 Niagara Launch in Bangalore
I got an invitation from Marketing to join the Niagara Launch in Bangalore. First I debated whether to spend 3 hours in an event that launches a product that I know a lot of details about already. However, wanted to see how the event is run, rather than for the content of it. Surprisingly, a good amount of content of the lauch is very impressive and informative. So it is worth spending those 3 hours there.The launch is done at Hotel Grand Ashok in Bangalore. It is attended by at least 500 people (I am bad at counting crowds, but the number is my worst case estimate.) The session is hosted by Sun's Brand Ambassador in India, Perizaad Zorabian. She did an impressive job of running the show smoothly.
Rajesh Rege gave a very good overview of Sun's current positioning in the open, standards based offering front. He discussed why and how Sun offers choices to customers: choice of hardware, choice of OS/OE, choice of middleware etc. This presentation is very well received.
Jeff O'Neal of SSG tookover from there and did an excellent presentation covering the advantages of Ultrasparc T1 Processor, the concept and advantages of Multi-Core processors in this range, coolthreads technology and how it is used to build the T1000 and T2000 servers. He gave various comparisions of the SPEC benchmarks of these servers against that of other players in the market. Jeff's articulation of details in a simple manner seemed to impress the gathering very well.
Arnab Roy gave a very good demo of calculating the SWaP metrics and calculating the cost of ownership using SIM datacenter tool. This demo has a strong impact on the audience because they could see the advantages of the T1000/T2000 servers over the products of our competitors. He used the SIM datacenter tool to calculate the Space, Power and Airconditioning requirements for achieving 150,000 SAPs worth of throughput.
Suresh Kolthay, GM Oracle Direct, articulated details of the extended Sun-Oracle relationship.
The videos shown during the launch are very well shot. They convey the message precisely, yet in a comic way.
During the dinner, I could see people discussing the salient features of these new products. I am sure the launches in other parts of India and world also have resulted in similar positive response from customers.
Posted by spurthi ( Jan 20 2006, 11:47:10 PM IST ) Permalink Comments [1]