Abdul Bijur V

I have dreamed a dream, and now that dream has gone from me.

Will have to keep myself extremely busy now and have to distract myself into something else. I have spent too much time trying to make myself heard. I was always heard, but seldom understood. Posted on another blog a couple of days about the wokaylah dream coming to an end.. yet there is another dream here thats coming to a bitter end.

Really looking forward to school now. I cant wait , but I have to begin life again at square one. Keeping myself extremely busy. I will soon start some blog for jotting down the step by step ordeals of the entire process.

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time has gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say

The Lenovo T61 comes preinstalled with Vista and a whole lot of shareware software and tons of spyware. My new laptop used to take about 3 minutes to boot and become completely usable.

It has tons of registry fixes and you will not able to upgrade any of your video driver or anything at all . It comes preinstalled with Office 2007, win DVD, Diskeeper, Tom Dick and all the other harry’s. Of course none of them the full software. Vista has really bad handling of wireless networks and long long boot up time and hogs your system resources and .. and .. and .. i could go on and on. Then I saw this on CNET as they rated Vista as the worst technological product of 2007

Windows Vista
Any operating system that provokes a campaign for its predecessor’s reintroduction deserves to be classed as terrible technology. Any operating system that quietly has a downgrade-to- previous-edition option introduced for PC makers deserves to be classed as terrible technology. Any operating system that takes six years of development but is instantly hated by hordes of PC professionals and enthusiasts deserves to be classed as terrible technology.

Windows Vista conforms to all of the above. Its incompatibility with hardware, its obsessive requirement of human interaction to clear security dialogue box warnings and its abusive use of hated DRM, not to mention its general pointlessness as an upgrade, are just some examples of why this expensive operating system earns the final place in our terrible tech list.

So I decided to get this trash out of my sexy laptop and install one of the best things that MS has ever come out with. MS XP. Here is how you can go about it.

First things first:

Take a backup
Take a backupof allimportant data on the laptop.

Make product recovery discs
You could make product recovery discs by going to thinkvantage -> create product recovery disks.
This would take 1 CD and then 8 other CD’s for the complete product recovery disc creations. Or if u have a dvd writer, it would take 1 CD and 2 DVDs.

Understanding the Lenovo partitions
The Lenovo hard disk is usually partitioned into a single visible partition. But there is another hidden partitin with the product information on it. Its a 6 GB partition. If you have created the 9 Recovery discs then we can and need to knock off this partition when we install xp. You can either create a single partition or as you please when you install xp.

Once the recovery discs are done, install XP from the product discs. Once the base xp is installed. You should install the following.

The Drivers page of Lenovo has drivers for chipset, video, audio, power-managment and the hard disk utility and hotkeys driver from that page and you are golden.

Vista had real poor sleep-wake times and it used to take an aweful lot of time to resume once i had closed my laptop lid. Now things are much faster. I get really short boot up times and to be honest, I dont reboot at all now because my laptop goes to sleep and wakes in no time at all making it all the more easier for me to manage.

Tags: lenovo, t61, vista, xp

Major erp migration happening at work. We are switching from one ERP (Oracle) to another ERP ( MFG Pro) over the weekend. The two ERP’s are very different and the decision to change has come across after the erstwhile Gemplus (running Oracle) “merged” with Axalto (running MFG Pro) to be called Gemalto.

Now the merger took place in Aug 2006 which means that ever since then , there are a zillion processes going on within the organization to iron out the differences between the two companies and get the single organization a single operating Unit. I’d faced similiar situation when Oracle had merged with Peoplesoft which had quite a bit of effect on Oracle and more catastrophically for Peoplesoft.

One of the major aspects of merging two companies is the process of merging the processes of the two organizations. I am not really sure how much analysis had gone on before the merger about the similiarity of processes between the two companies. Even though both Gemplus and Axalto sell almost similiar products, they are miles apart when it comes to processes are concerned and that is where an ERP system comes into play.

An ERP system is chosen by an organization to bind all of the companies processes together. The more an organization has rules about process compliance and compliance to various other guidelines like SOX etc. the more tightly compliant ERP they’d need.

Why do they need to be all this compliant? Well its simple, lets take the case of a customer for these companies like MasterCard or Visa. These customers would have benchmarks and regulations which govern their criteria of selecting their vendors for Card manufacturing. Any company would rather prefer a partner who is more governed under compliant processes than a supplier who doesnt. These compliancy and guidelines are sort of benchmarks for their customers showing them how credible they are, how reliable they are, and how strong a set of processes they have. This would in turn directly affect their turnaround time and how dependable the turnaround dates provided by that particular organization are.

When two organizations are merged, there is a dire need to merge processes and hence depending on the management pick on “median” processes, they have to finally decide on which ERP system to choose.

Oracle is a very tightly bound system. It is high on the compliance benchmarks and tries to make sure that SOX compliances etc are very well adhered to. MFG Pro on the other end is basically a system for medium scale industries. It hence is a lot more loosely bound and hence is easier to modify manually. This means that compliance levels are low. A company has to evaluate its available processes and if they decide to move from a tightly bound ERP system to a loosely bound ERP system they would be cutting down most of their processes which would affect their credibility with their customers. Hence the choice of which ERP to follow would be a key decision for any merger/acquisition to succeed.

They say its easy to sign a merger or acquire an organization, its difficult to get them both working together as one. Even though the choice of ERP might not be the most important of those decisions, it certainly is up there on the list.

Tags: ERP, MfgPro, Oracle, Strategy, Technology consulting

Intel has already released their santa rosa platform with centrino 2.0. They already have the 45nm “Quad Core” processor which is infact a patched up two core 2 duo’s packaged into a single cpu. The advantage they have is that laptops/Desktops are already out with this configuration and the marketing team of intel (which i believe is their best men on the deck) are doing a great job heralding it as the next best thing. So much so that an ardent fan of amd like myself have got one of these babies (more cos lenovo doesnt have an amd port).

AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) on the other hand had an awful delay in their quad core processors. Why? Because they wanted to come out with a real quad core processors with 4 cores in a single die and they are planning to release two packaged quad cores (like the quad core intel) into a single cpu and release a single 8 core cpu. In the meanwhile, they also acquired ATI and now have a fantastic chipset technology.

They also up-ed their hypertransport to version 3.0 which supports bus speeds of upto 3600 Mhz compared to the fsb of 800 Mhz of Intel’s santa rosa. Their new Cool n Quiet 2.0 has given individual cores the ability to shut each other out and have considerable savings on power.

ATI tie up is bearing fruits in the form of the new platform, Spider. Spider is a platform which can accommodate upto 4 graphics cards in a crossfire X formation providing upto 3 times the performance achieved from a single card.

And all this AMD intends to unleash to medium segment market at a very affordable price. If these plans go well, Intel could well be in for a tough time. Intel processors have always be expensive and the integrated graphics always of bad quality. With ATI AMD can have good quality graphics cards and motherboard and the processor made by a single company which would make sure that the compatibilities and stability of the system is high while keeping costs down.

The market strategy of AMD seems good, but can that form a dent in the extremely strong marketing strategies of Intel, that is yet to be seen. AMD sure does seem to be hitting all the right buttons by pointing their stress towards the medium and lower medium markets. The entire platform + graphics + Processor(quad core) range is being touted to be highly affordable.

The gaming community already have AMD as their favourite, but the lack of any significant product releases by AMD in the last 1 year has significantly hurt AMD’s image and has led Intel to significantly raise the prices of their processors.

Bear in mind that AMD already has a significantly larger market share in the servers segment than Intel and even now Intel server segment processors of Xeon are finding life difficult competing with Opteron.

AMD finally seems to have settled down after the whole merger and now have started getting their act right. The next few months would show us, how effective their new brainchild is.

How many dreams have we crushed, just so that we could slot in better into the mold?

Found this on xkcd (”a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language”).

Ten ways the world could end very suddenly.

This talk is by the Chief Editor of Discover Magazine talking about ten different ways in which the world could come to an end. And this list doesn’t include Global Warming.

If you do not want the listen to this talk, you can continue reading, though I highly recommend , you should read it.

10. We lose our will to survive: He talks about mental depression and diseases of the mind.
Suggestions for remedy include insurance cover for mental diseases and advanced psycho active drugs
9. Aliens invade earth.
8. Eco system collapsing.
Suggestions: Create eco system reserves and study eco systems much further ahead of collapse
7. One particle acceleration experiment could go haywire and end the earth.
6. Biotech disasters
5. Reversal of the earths magnetic field which results in earth losing the magnetic field for about 100 years.
Solution: Replenish Ozone layer.
4. Giant Solar Flares.
Suggestion: Start looking for a earth like planets or start terraforming Mars.
3. A new global epidemic
2. We meet a rogue black hole. Even if a black hole gets as close as a billion miles away from us we could be have a three month ice age a year.
1. Asteroid collision.

I searched for my name on the internet, and a host of links came flooding on the screen, mostly from my blog, some from other people’s blog that I had commented on, and then a totally different set from community portals like facebook, linkedIn etc. Information, that is sometimes personal, some sentimental story that I had posted about three years ago, or some twisted ideology, influenced out of movies/debris of books etc. I went along till about 5 - 6 pages of this, till i thought to myself, this is such a good venue to share ideas, why not share better ideas.

Why not do something that we all can benefit from. Fortunately I have a readership who are all people who can contribute something to this world. At some point of time in their lives, I believe these people are going to become people who would have a chance to make a difference and I should use this exposure that I have to put ideas into their minds.

At some point of time in my life, I intend to do an MBA. I have always wanted to do it and I hope I would  be able to soon. In the current world, when you mention MBA, the fields of finance, consulting etc. comes rushing to your mind. Money has been associated with an MBA for a long long time. Is that what an MBA should all be about. Most MBA schools in India, seems to have their focus centered around “Placements”. The criterion for students to join them is how good their placements are and how high the outgoing salaries are.

A graduate school should be much more than that. A graduate school, especially MBA, is building a set of leaders into this world. These are people who should be brought up to be in a position where they would be able to have a say in the lives of many people. The schools have to be able to prepare the students on more than just how to succeed in the cut throat market. They’ve got to build better leaders, they have got to build leaders who can think and act sensibly for the common good rather than just sheer profit.

I intend to pursue this web log in such a way that I can bring out ideas that I have or I grasped can be shown to my readers. I have been blessed with a lot of readers whom I believe would have a chance to make a difference at some particular point of time in their lives.

Tags: Introduction