Forest Law (Law of the jungle)

softraid on OpenBSD 4.9

2011-01-26T14:28:00.000-08:00

Scenario: 1 Operating system hard drive and 2 hard drives to be configured as a RAID 1 mirror

checking the dmesg and /etc/fstab, wd0 is the boot drive and wd1 + wd2 are supposed to be the mirror drives

Below is slightly modified content of manpage of softraid

            # fdisk -iy wd1
            # fdisk -iy wd2

Now create RAID partitions on all disks:
            # printf "a\n\n\n\nRAID\nw\nq\n\n" | disklabel -E wd1
            # printf "a\n\n\n\nRAID\nw\nq\n\n" | disklabel -E wd2

Assemble the RAID volume:

            # bioctl -c 1 -l /dev/wd1a,/dev/wd2a softraid0

It is good practice to wipe the front of the disk before using it:

            # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rsd0c bs=1m count=1

Initialize the partition table and create a filesystem on the new RAID volume:

           # fdisk -iy sd0
           # printf "a\n\n\n\n4.2BSD\nw\nq\n\n" | disklabel -E sd0
           # newfs /dev/rsd0a
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now the next part is missing from manpage, but its trivial.

           # mkdir /datamirror
           # mount /dev/sd0a /datamirror (OR mount -t ffs /dev/sd0a /datamirror)
   # chown normal_openbsd_user /datamirror

if the mount works, then add the following line to the very end of /etc/fstab to make it work everytime after normal boot.

/dev/sd0a /datamirror ffs rw,softdep,nodev,nosuid 1 2

gmirror on FreeBSD

2010-09-16T18:10:00.000-07:00

gmirror label -v -b split -s 2048 data ad4 ad8

gmirror load

newfs /dev/mirror/data
--------------------------------------------------------------
Insert in /etc/fstab

/dev/mirror/data /data ufs rw 2 2

--------------------------------------
on next boot, go into single user mode and transform /data to use softupdates.

My mirror got disturbed by Windows writing something on one drive.

gmirror remove ad4

gmirror rebuild

after gmirror status says 100%, then reboot for a pristine restore.

Flash on FreeBSD

2010-09-16T18:04:00.000-07:00

Just installed Gnash 0.8.8 on a FreeBSD 8.1 machine.

Configured with options --enable-gui=gtk --enable-media=ffmpeg

copy the .so file into ~/.mozilla/plugins for all users.

This allows you to watch flash content almost anywhere. For youtube, you have to block cookies.

COMPUTING: Extremely low power x86 workstation

2010-07-29T13:55:00.000-07:00

I am searching for a sub-50 Watt machine.

Must haves:

1) 8GB RAM, expandability is desired
2) 3 hard drives (1 boot + a mirror with software RAID 1)
3) Any power sipping x64 CPU (64 bits a must)
4) 256MB-1GB external GPU supporting dual LCDs (ATI preferred)

The CPU + motherboard + hard drives consumption should be less than 50 Watts. I love Atoms but I want more than 4GB memory. Budget is $500-800. Any Core 2 Duo, Core i5/i7, Phenom etc can go down to this level?

This machine has to be coming within 50 Watts period, the lower the better.

ECONOMY: Derivatives gone crazy

2010-07-22T14:03:00.000-07:00

NSE India has released a press circular (warning: PDF link) of disseminating VIX.

Nifty is a derivative of the 50 most capitalized companies in India.
VIX is a derivative of Nifty, volatility as measured by puts/calls ratio on Nifty.

And now you would have Futures & Options on VIX.

Welcome to bizarroland.

Derivatives on derivatives on derivatives.

Somebody should stop this nonsense.

Note that the Nifty components can be changed when companies under-perform to maintain the valuation.

COMPUTING: Server market alignment

2009-05-09T07:56:00.000-07:00

Sun Microsystems has a innovative product called SunRay. It runs remotely at our home over DSL/Cable and has no saved states, all the computing is done on a server. It is now history due to the proliferation of cheap power saving devices like 'nettops', which cost roughly the same and whose functionality is much higher.

The server market will see an attack by nettops at the low end. Intel Atom is leading the way, but ARM is not far behind. I predict the days of 90W CPU's is slowly coming to an end. ARM CPU's will gain cores and speed, but keep the power advantage. If AMD and Intel don't watch out they will be broadsided...

FINANCE: The coming realingment in America

2008-07-22T03:33:00.000-07:00

It has now been acknowledged by all and sundry that the coming financial crisis is huge and may rival the Great Depression of 1929-1932. The current US economy defined as GDP will probably take a hair cut of 50% and the world economy as a result can possibly halve from today till 2020. But this is a time when thrift and real old fashioned puritan American way of life will make a comeback in America and the rest of the world.

Here are my industrial predictions

1) Transportation as in railways and bicycles will benefit, cars are on the way out. Clean Mass transport is in. Oh, I would love to see the city of Pune, India explode with bicycles again.
2) Inner city malls will benefit. If you have a lease or own property in downtowns across the world, you will benefit. If you are outside the suburbs totally dependant on your cars, you are toast.
3) Skilled workers will be in demand. Yes, gardeners, metal workers, furniture workers, high rise specialty construction workers get ready for $15-40 per hour nirvana for a few decades at least.
4) Just in time is going to be proved to be a bunch of crock. Not when commodity supply to assemble it remotely is totally uncertain, and there is real risk of transport continuity.
5) Factories in America are going to enjoy a renaissance. Industrialists, if you are reading this, snap any old factories near ports and rail access points.
6) Speaking of ports, the rails and ports will enjoy a meteoric rise. I feel pity for Mack trucks and International and Volvo and other 18 wheeler manufacturers. Yeah, those rail stocks and port operations are going to rise.
7) Wind sails are going to make a massive comeback. The old time naval knowledge locked in the formerly great naval nations e.g. England, France, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal will be useful. Rig the mainmasts mates.
8) Solar is in, wind mills are in.
9) Best of all, consumerism is out, because you just can't get those metals cheaply anymore. No "new every two" free cellphones with two year contract.
10) I do not see a return to work animals, rather I see bicycle highways and bicycle driven local transport. Hey, you transport companies, do some M&A of the bicycle companies. It won't hurt to have a bicycle manufacturer in your group. Yes, Tata Motors, I am talking about you.

Long term short opportunities
1) Fertilizer companies are dead
2) Genetically modified food companies are toast
3) Plastics derived from oil
4) Pretty much every oil derived industry
5) Hydro-electric power companies (water needed for drinking and agriculture)
6) Meat related companies (meat packing, processing etc). Meat is out, veggie is in.

College graduates with non-marketable degrees, you know who you are, I feel pity for you guys. But no pity for the MBA's, if you guys didn't save any money, you will have to really learn to work.

CLIMATE: response to climate change

2007-03-27T18:34:00.000-07:00

Atanu Dey has posted a few skeptical comments on Nitin Pai's blog about global warming. The choice bits is excerpted here

Almost nothing is known about the great heat engine of the upper atmosphere which sheds heat into space and which is affected by incoming cosmic radiation. All the discussion concentrates on the heat-blanketing effect of the lower atmosphere. Also, while the discussion is centred on the melting of Arctic sea-ice (and some Greenland glaciers), and also the melting sea-ice of the western Antarctic peninsula, the increasing amount of snow and ice of the eastern Antarctic is hardly ever mentioned. Equally ignored is the recent world-wide ocean survey by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory which shows that ocean remperatures have been cooling steeply in the last few years. The oceans contain far more heat than the atmosphere and it can only be a matter of time before the atmosphere starts cooling, too, if the ocean temperatures decline continues as they do now.

Ummm, here is another example of selective quotation.

True, there have been reports of cooling in Antarctica in journals. But this is logical.

Simply speaking, climate systems (a coupled atmosphere-ocean) are arranged in wide cells geographically over the world ('cells' for lack of a better word for laymen). Picture a globe and draw arbitrary cells from Arctic to Antarctic. These cells are irregular, and generally have similar climate. A cell would be an example of the Thar desert in India/Pakistan. Taklamakan in China. Deccan rain forest in India etc...

Whatever happens in one cell pushes out to another cell. So if you get something hotter in Arctic, the global climate system 'tries' to get something else cooler, so the cooling in certain cells. Why not the cooling in immediate cells right now? Adjacent cells will be affected, give it time. My guess is that cells which comprise mostly of countryside (where we grow our crops) will be affected. Why? Less daily temperature variation in rural areas. Also, temperature is not precise, because it is measured in a grid. A sample taken in a 5 km by 5 km grid is interpolated to cover all of it. When we know that a reading of 30C in a city block will change to 33C in a different city block, hardly 100 meters away. If you really want to confirm, ask farmers what changes they have had. Ask two farmers in different 'farmland' cell separated by a city cell. Seasons are changing slightly, either advancing or retarding by a few days/weeks. Best example is of our Monsoon.

Ok, why the cooling so far away in Antarctica? Why in southern hemisphere? Because the southern hemisphere is mostly water. My guess is any 'resultant natural cooling' will be compensated via water, because water can store heat better. Remember the rich get richer, the poor poorer? Western Siberia will accelerate melting, maybe Eastern Siberia will compensate. Adjacent eastern countries (to Vladivostok) like Korea, Japan may get colder. NZ, Tasmania, Southern Australia may get either hotter or cooler because of their proximity to Antarctica...

If compensatory cooling does not occur, we would be in a positive feedback loop, and completely go crazy. I hope this argument is put to rest for you guys.

Regarding NOAA PMEL's ocean cooling paper, actually by Lyman et al (2006)

It is only upper ocean cooling, less than 1000 m depth. The average depth of world's oceans is 3500-3800 m. The major volume is not upper ocean, but deep ocean. Sure the cooling occurs at 400 m and is strong at 750 m. But the deep water takes a while to cool.

There are problems of inadequate sampling intervals and sample grid size. I think that the average upper ocean would probably cool over the globe, because of the additional input of melt water. Snow which doesn't float but is sitting on a continental plate adds additional water, picture a hot cup of tea, add more water, what happens?

But if you read the paper 'Recent Cooling of the Upper Ocean' by Lyman et al. (2006) the globally averaged sea level is still rising. Logically speaking, you will have these regional anomalies.

SOLARIS: ZFS not ready for production yet

2007-03-26T10:04:00.000-07:00

I was evaluating ZFS for possible use, just doing some testing. But I have seen too many posts on opensolaris-discuss which lead me to believe that Sun rushed ZFS far too quickly into production, with Solaris 10. IMO, Sun should have advised customers to refrain from using ZFS in production until Solaris 10 update 5. Right now, ZFS is probably in the final beta stage, as of the 11/06 release. By the middle of 2007, it would be in a RC1 stage, with update 4. I expect that by the end of 2007, with update 5 it should be in a RC3 stage. Middle of 2008 is when it will be prudent to move to production with Solaris 11 or Solaris 10 update 6. I didn't expect such Microsoft like behavior from Sun. (This release timeline reflects my opinion on ZFS only)

It is still good for many purposes, just not i-trust-zfs-with-my-life production. It is horrible to have a customer find out corner case bugs, and find out that their file system is not performing as advertised. This is costing you precious goodwill Sun!

It is especially worse in a NFS scenario (though the worst of it will be fixed in update 4). Just do your own due diligence before anything. Follow these threads for my reasoning, just in the last 2-3 months. There have been many serious bugs, which I have read in the past 3 months.

1) FAULTED ZFS volume even though it is mirrored

2) Why number of NFS threads jumps to the max value?

3) Re: ZFS performance with Oracle

4) Large ZFS-bug...

5) ZFS in a SAN environment

6) ZFS over NFS extra slow?

FOOTBALL: Rose bowl prediction: LSU vs USC

2006-12-02T16:55:00.000-08:00

The Trojans were beaten by UCLA, dashing their national title hopes. I hope LSU goes into the Rose Bowl, to finally settle once and for all, who is the better team.

PHILOSOPHY: Insane wealth generation and philanthropy

2006-06-25T19:49:00.000-07:00

Mary Smaragdis has a post where Sun's CTO Greg Papadopoulus had some positive comments on Bill Gates philanthropy, to the tune of USD $30 billion. Even after reading that Warren Buffett has decided to join in, with another hefty chunk, I still think that Andrew Carnegie with $350 million in 19th and early 20th century was the biggest ever in last two hundred years. Straight from Buffett's mouth

Certainly neither Susie nor I ever thought we should pass huge amounts of money along to our children. Our kids are great. But I would argue that when your kids have all the advantages anyway, in terms of how they grow up and the opportunities they have for education, including what they learn at home - I would say it's neither right nor rational to be flooding them with money.

In effect, they've had a gigantic headstart in a society that aspires to be a meritocracy. Dynastic mega-wealth would further tilt the playing field that we ought to be trying instead to level.

IMO, those who do hoard their wealth for their progeny, are doing them no good. Almost always, by the end of the 5th generation down, it is squandered away.

HARDWARE: Cooling computers with Jet engines

2006-06-24T00:24:00.000-07:00

Reading Ben Rockwood, came across this one.

HP is cooling computers using Jet engines

What a sad day for the hardware industry. In the datacenter at work, my boss faces the same problem, the electricity usage has been proven to be almost 80% due to computers and HVAC. With the cost of electricity, we can probably buy a mid-range Dell/IBM-Lenovo/HP every month. I can confirm what Ben says elsewhere, when you are designing a datacenter, just talk to the person who is designing your HVAC. The techs who design your datacenter's A/C and cooling, all are unanimous that they are getting a lot of business nowadays.

INFRASTRUCTURE: Water reservoirs and Power plants

2006-05-30T17:35:00.000-07:00

Here is my comment which was posted to an Indianeconomy.org post on Democracy and Infrastructure, but it has not shown up yet even after 24 hrs or so.

--------------------------------------

Nitin,

I will try to address your original question. I have been trying to figure out for a while if huge projects like water reservoirs or power plants make economic sense. IMHO, they don't and for lots of reasons.

1) Distribution losses. If you have enormous amounts of losses per km, why not limit your distribution so total losses in the system are kept in check? This applies to power and water. Nuclear, wind, solar, tidal for power and water harvesting in dams or lakes. Water and Power transport from one end of the state to another just doesn’t make sense, yet that is what we have in a power or water grid. In the power lines we have lots of losses, which can be imagined, including theft. In the water lines, the losses are almost the same. I have seen water lines about 2-8 meters diameter, they are almost always being ruptured at their joints.

2) Generation and storage losses. You just have to allocate huge and insane amounts of resources: land, water etc to have a centralized infrastructure, which is not inherently scalable. It is a horrible one-time investment. If you build a 10,000 MW power plant it is almost always obsolete as soon it gets out of planning stage. How will you add another 1,000 MW? How will you efficiently store the energy during night time when there is very less demand? Do you all realize the insane amount of water lost to evaporation in open water lakes?

3) Very less points of failure: self-explanatory… Infrastructure should be resilient.

4) Building/response time. To operate a water/power project you have to plan 10 years ahead. Not economically feasible, what if economic conditions change drastically?

We are in the network age, and why doesn’t anybody think of an analogy to the computer network? Currently nearer nodes are not prioritized, all the nodes on the network are probably equally weighted.

Instead a 100-500-1000 MW power plant delivering dedicated electricity to a certain area, with regional electricity transfer possible only to the physically connected grids.

1) You cut down on corruption. Mega projects have lots of opportunities for easy money.
2) Fast response times, can be done inside 6 months to a year from planning to operation.
3) Hopefully more accountable, not much stealing i.e. distribution losses
4) Cheaper to build because very less displacement unlike Narmada Valley project etc.

We have a classic problem of Monolithic vs. microkernel operating systems. Most of the operating systems are now hybrid, but right now most of the power plants and water reservoirs are monolithic. There are efforts in the West and China to go to micropower and micro-water, we should look to them.

SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION: Splunk

2006-05-16T11:00:00.000-07:00

Ben Rockwood has a series of posts on splunking your logfiles. They include all sorts of logs, please go and read Ben's posts. Splunk is to logs, what Google is to search.

Post 1 is on Splunk itself

To put it simply, Splunk sucks up every type of log you care to feed it, indexes them, and then makes them easily searchable via a nifty AJAX-enabled web interface. The most common usage would be to aggregate a centralized syslog server, but you can feed it all sorts of logs including Apache, Microsoft IIS, JBoss, Windows Event Logs, Sendmail/Postfix/Qmail, OpenLDAP, Active Directory, etc, etc, etc

(Ben's quote with minor spelling corrections)

Post 2 is on centralizing your sys logs. I have heard many people say that syslog ng is better than plain vanilla syslog. YMMV.

His summary post has nice pictures on what is possible with Splunk, and brief install instructions.

From his last link to Joe Reeves website, here is some information on how to centralize your Windows boxen logging...

Basically, you use freeware SNARE Agents to send yourApplication, Security, Systems, and IIS logs to a remote syslog serverwhich is on a Linux/BSD/Solaris box. And Splunk can grab and analyze data on your Windows boxes.

Joe Reeves Splunk FAQ

SNARE: Agent for Windows
SNARE Apache
SNARE IIS

and finally, don't forget to visit and download your copy of Splunk

ENVIRONMENT: Folding bikes Part 3

2006-04-29T17:31:00.000-07:00

More bikes to add to my list of good bikes.

Xootr Swift - Fold is not as smooth but some people on bikeforums.net have done a few mods to make it their dream bike. The frame design is clean.

Mercbike (a Brompton clone) - 16" wheels with upgraded components from the original Brompton. The current bike is a 3 speed Sturmey-Archer internal hub. More gears coming in their next model. For decent pictures look at this bikeforums.net thread. This type of bike is ideal for multi-modal commuting i.e train, bus, and bike.

Burro - Extremely tough bike, literally can go anywhere a bike can go.

WAR: Bunker buster bombs

2006-04-16T19:51:00.000-07:00

I came across a Bob Harris post which mentions how foolish the myth is of working bunker buster bombs. Afterwards, came across this link in his post, which points to a Union Of Concerned Scientists cartoon.

All of Pakistan, and parts of northern India will be affected by the nuclear fallout.

To those who have been sleeping inside a cave. Seymour Hersh has something to say about a imminent Iran attack and the US preparations.

The Parsi community in India is descended from a bygone era of the old day Iran i.e Persia. The Parsis have contributed greatly to India's growth. The House of Tatas, numerous merchant families, numerous scientific people Homi Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai...Why the current people in power in India, the Gandhi family, are somewhat Parsi! Rahul Gandhi's paternal grandfather was a Parsi.

Sy Hersh is stating that nobody is listening to the military guys, who counsel diplomacy. Iran is a Shia nation, and I think they look even more fierce than the Sunnis, especially doing Matam! Shias are no stranger to martyrdom and suffering.

Finally, Masood Mortazavi mentions that rarely do we break a self-imposed taboo on politics...

PHILOSOPHY: Women choosing last names

2006-04-11T17:48:00.000-07:00

The taking on of the father's or husband's name, exists to trace your lineage in a patriarchal society. It would be the other way around in a matriarchal society where matrilineality dominates. I have read that in earlier times where the origin of pregnancy was a mystery, matrilineality tends to dominate. Also, another factor is that the mother is known but the father unknown, so the kids inherit everything from her family.

I don't really think that the majority of the world is going to get to that stage i.e. matriarchal society. Unfortunately, the women of today are destined to suffer unless they figure out how to usurp the current status quo.

In the beginning remember we (the human race) had no names, forget surnames.

[An interesting story I have read is the pain and anguish American slaves went through when they were forced to take on some kind of surname, and their subsequent conversion to Christianity from their native religions. As an aside, it is not for nothing that the greatest music in modern year’s aka jazz, reggae, and maybe blues, has come from the American South, due to its African rhythmic origins.]

In the ensuring compact between the sexes, women were 'confined' to the house, while men fought outside. This has led to the fostering of stereotypes, deep brainwashing to hammer into a young girl’s mind, that, you can play with Barbie dolls but not ‘boyz stuff’. And the reverse is usually true for boys. This cultural stereotype is thousands of years old, and to get rid of it is a daunting challenge. I have written in a comment at Tim Worstall’s blog that the juggernaut of change lags behind by a lot. Somebody has to distribute the idea of the change for it to have any effect.

[Again, this compact has led to lots of other problems like mothers favoring sons over daughters, women being treated as sex objects but not men etc...]

Women are not confined to the house now, but I observe the stereotypes are still being followed. If not by their parents, by their peers at school.

ENVIRONMENT: Folding bikes Part 2

2006-03-19T08:25:00.000-08:00

I finally purchased a 2005 Downtube VIII FS Orange bike, it is a 20" folder with derailleur gears and a full suspension. No racks and no fenders/mudguards as yet. This is what it looks like..

Hub geared bikes are much cleaner to operate than derailleur, but I heard on www.bikeforums.net that when the inevitable puncture occurs, it is a chore to service. Nowadays, the tires come with some sort of puncture protection. Look at the Schwalbe Marathon and Schwalbe Big Apple series. They enhance either comfort or speed, depends on your choice. A recommended choice of many on www.bikeforums.net and Dahon's support forums, is the Cane Creek Thudbuster suspension seatpost. The Thudbuster looks very expensive, but a tire upgrade is very cheap compared to it, tires cost $30-35...

I looked at the following companies:

1) Dahon - The king of folding bicycles! Good products, for a comparable price the specs on Dahon's bikes are loaded with accessories. I particularly like Vitesse D5 or D7 with the internal hub gears. They suffer from extremely poor shipping dates, some dealers told me that they would have a bike in 2-3-4 months, never immediately!

2) Bike Friday - Good reputation but too expensive for many people, starts at $700. If you know your stuff at customizing your bike, you will probably go with them.

3) Brompton - Folding size is smallest, comes with 16" wheels, but very expensive $800-900 for a halfway decent model. This is what I would like to get, smallest folding size of 44" with the maximum airline legal size being 62" (L x W x H), this fits in very easily. People say, that the factory version is not spec'd right, have to upgrade soon as you get the bike.

4) KHS - I looked at their 2005 models, their 2006 lineup has a 'Mocha', which looks like a good bang for the buck at $330.

5) Breezer - Looks like they have cross-licensed Dahon's design.

6) Alex Moulton - Alex Moulton bikes are the fastest bikes in the world. Anybody doing any search on the Internet would come across this fact somewhere. This is what I dream of owning if I ever go on a serious tour of Europe or cross country biking. It consists of a separable frame, which is NOT folding. Can be dismantled and put in a suitcase, and assembled when you reach your destination. Feel free to browse around to find out why a Moulton is the best if you have no hangups about money. They start at £ 1500 or so, some at £ 2100. With the USD being 1.8 times the UK pound currently, that means a lot of money.

7) Pashley-Moulton - The TSR8 and other variants is a cheaper cousin of the same basic Moulton design. Costs start at about $2000-2500 USD.

For servicing I looked at Gaerlan and Sheldon Brown's website for tips.

Happy biking!

(Disclaimer: The prices are current as of mid-March 2006, they may change. Don't blame me, do your own due diligence [DD] before putting in money!)

POLITICS: Composition of Security Council

2006-03-17T15:30:00.000-08:00

In today's current geopolitical situation, two countries do not deserve to be there in the Security Council. They have a shell of a military (the SAS and the Foreign Legion amongst others are world class), their economic potential is so-so, and their population is less than what other and more deserving countries have. They will never be great again, umm... at least not in the forthcoming 50 years. Before anybody adds any new countries to the Security Council, which is ineffective anyway, those two countries should be kicked out. Old men should not do some things which are detrimental to their health.

No prizes for guessing who they are.

Also, Japan's population is getting too old for it to be considered in the Council. What is the use of being a permanent member? Except maybe for pride and one-upmanship against China. I hear they don't like immigrants preferring robots to do their work, and encouraging their women to marry and have lots of kids.

I am guessing a lot of it boils down to population demographics.

POLITICS: Observations for India

2006-03-17T15:12:00.000-08:00

Iraq and recently Iran are finding out that they cannot depend on Russia (or France or ...). India should do well to heed the same, in their relations with Iran, Russia, China, or the US.

Russia has a lot of other assets which are going to be useful to the world in the years to come. The Boreal forest will start mushrooming due to warming, more minerals to be found etc. As an aside, Brazil is hell-bent on stripping their Amazonian resources.

Reiterating Mike Schilling's comment in that link: it would pay for any country to mind Russia's lesson: when England, US, and Germany together screwed the Russians. There are no friends in geopolitics, just temporary alignment of interests.

DIPLOMACY: Why the US is courting India?

2006-03-03T21:47:00.000-08:00

This post is a comment to Daniel Drezner's post that the nuclear deal is right. Leaving aside the underlying desire for world peace, I personally feel that the deal is probably good for both countries. A point which is not raised directly, the boots on the ground for future 'natural disasters' would be coming from countries like India. Being a mercenary used (uh, it still is, right?) to be a honorable profession, after all the people who got rich when they went to 'the wars'.

Some food for thought for you all...

Why the US Promotes India's Great-Power Ambitions

To summarize just the title of the sections

1) Context: US strategic perspective worldwide
2) New US 'global defence posture'
3) Need for Indian bases, training facilities
4) Indian armed forces to do the "low-end" tasks
5) Proliferation Security Initiative: violation of international law
6) Missile 'defence': an offensive alliance with grave consequences
7) India as the linchpin of a proposed 'Asian NATO'

FINANCE: Banks and Credit Card companies

2006-02-23T19:45:00.000-08:00

A teller dispensing cash costs a US bank $15 per hr (a minimum figure, typically its more) in wages, benefits, and insurance. If a teller is supposed to work for regular/fixed hours, then it is probably a 9hr day. Ignoring the possibility of a bank, which has a popular location, we will assume a single teller suffices for all cash dispensing transactions. So, a teller costs a typical bank about $135 per day per location. Assuming 250 working days in a year, a teller costs a bank $30,000 and counting per location per year.

An ATM machine has one-time costs of $3000-5000 (Google for ATM machine cost); throw in an annual maintenance contract (AMC) of $1000 (around 20% is the industrial norm), to get a figure of $4000-6000 for first year. After the first year, it costs just $1000 or so for a ATM machine per location per year.

So an ATM is theoretically profitable for the bank somewhere after a couple of months, but still the banks charge $2.50 per transaction, if your account is with another bank. Come on, the banking network is the same for all banks, they need to communicate anyway to verify your account information. I read somewhere that when ATM's first came out banks didn’t charge anything, but now the ATM’s are pure cash cows, pulling in enormous amounts of profit. The banks shouldn't charge me to save them a lot of money. When will the banks capitulate on that one?

Similarly, each credit card transaction carries a 2-5% surcharge, which has to be paid by the merchants. This drives up cost for every consumer, regardless of who pays with a credit card or cash.

Where does this extra profit go?

And why do consumers tolerate this behavior from the banks and credit card companies?

Response to thoughts on Freedom of Expression

2006-02-22T17:53:00.000-08:00

Atanu blogged about Freedom of Expression, relevant thoughts. I tried to comment on his blog, but I am not sure what happened. I am reproducing the comment here...

--------------------------------

While I agree with the majority of your post, I beg to differ with sweeping statements like these…

India’s development is dependent on absolute freedom of expression.

Not so, nobody I repeat nobody can give absolute freedom of expression and survive as a society. Society equates to some form of constraints.

In India, the freedom of expression is severely curtailed.

So it is everywhere. Not just India. Can you prove that it is completely (and practically speaking) open in any country in the world?

Thus there should not be any limits placed on the freedom of expression for the very practical reason that that freedom has an instrumental role in promoting the development of an economy.

Again, you are confusing freedom of expression with wide exposure of your ideas. You can get wide exposure of your ideas, if the timing is right. You can substitute India with any other country and it won’t sound out of place.

GENERAL: Cognition skills in the modern world

2006-02-14T10:18:00.000-08:00

Why is it that some people are turning to the Internet to understand basic reasoning skills and pass websites links to each other, displaying a herd mentality, and then collectively perform exclamations of aha/Eureka etc., as if it is a great revelation? Is this behaviour restricted to geeks who lack certain social skills? Or are we as a society just dumbing down due to the influence of varied forms of entertainment? I would imagine cognitive skills come with general and varied intensive reading. I would also think that intensive reading is not really required for some types of cognition, it would also come with good debate, or deep thinking.

Herd mentality is also called the Slashdot effect when your website is linked from popular technology focussed websites like /., digg, reddit etc...

An example is Bruce Schneier's column in Wired called 'Fighting Fat-Wallet Syndrome'. It should be obvious to many, why you have multiple credit cards.

Or Christopher Diggins mentioning that HR Dept is your IT Company's biggest enemy in his
'Your IT Company's Biggest Enemy'. People will have strong opinions on this issue, but it should be obvious that you need to be balanced, as is displayed in the comments section in the blog.

Another example is Fred Gratzon blogging about 'The Lazy Way to Success'. This should be obvious to somebody doing a MBA or involved in people management.

What I don't like in such kind of columns is the extra simplified alternatives #1, #2, #3, #4 etc. Is the audience they are trying to target so dumb that they think anybody can reduce complex decisions or scenarios to simple alternatives by their formulas?

PHILOSOPHY: Lower prices and Wal-Mart

2006-02-10T13:09:00.000-08:00

I went to prajatantra through DesiPundit and left a comment on lower prices and Wal-Mart. I am pasting the relevant portion of that comment here just in case that blog disappears.

Lok-adhikar,
Regarding "The consumer will benefit from lower prices" and chains like Wal-Mart. I beg to disagree with this benefit.

The consumer actually never benefits, ***IF*** they save some money on some products, and splurge it on others, due to a insane variety of choice goods. Wal-Mart benefits, because they have made more sales and more profits. Good for Wal-Mart, bad for 'dumb' consumers, and ugly for the rest (due to resultant environmental destruction), because it encourages frivolous spending.

It also encourages dumping, deterioration of quality, monoculture, overproduction, and extremely efficient destruction of jobs.

Modern businesses have forgetten the lessons learned from the Great Depression. Too much efficiency leads to overproduction which leads to deflation... Couple this with no income or jobs for the majority of the population, and you have a unfortunate recipe for social unrest.

TECHNOLOGY: Why DRM and locking is a big lie

2006-01-24T14:34:00.000-08:00

Charlie Demerjian at the tech site The Inquirer has given the low-down on why the big media labels want to lock down your audio, video feeds in their own proprietary formats.

PHILOSOPHY: Choice of words, education, and literacy

2005-12-16T23:31:00.000-08:00

For the past six months I have been following a lot of blogs, and I have started noticing a growing trend. A few of the posters, either by choice (or by habit, though I doubt it) use complicated sounding words which force me to look it up in a dictionary. I can follow almost everything what they are trying to say when I read the whole sentence, but sometimes I wonder why they do not favor using simple words. I understand you can use one word instead of ten or maybe more. But I personally favor giving up that ability to reach more number of people, so they can understand me when I try to get my point across. This ability I think would be very useful for effective communication.

English language is evolving too fast, and we are adding a lot of words to the language every year. The trend should be towards simplification of things, and not cluttering it with using complex words. We are getting hit (inundated eh?) with a lot of new information coming out of new scientific fields, which was not present before. I suspect the rate at which population has grown from the early 1900's to 2000, is not as much as the rate at which we have added new terms and words in the English language :)

This raises the bar of everyday literacy level for those who come in later and want to learn. A lot of people would probably get excluded because we are all specializing in our little fields, whatever they maybe. We will never have a person who knows everything. There will never be a institution which is the fountain of all knowledge. The only possible way to collect and make sense of our knowledge today is to have a knowledge commons of group collaboration, like the team blog 'Innovation Commons', that I belong to, but haven't yet posted anything yet. Maybe, this will be my first cross post to my personal blog, and that one.

Now English is not the first language I learnt. Same thing with a lot of people from all over the world. But I am sad to say, I know it way better than the other two languages I am fluent in. I am beginning to realize as the day is drawing nearer for my much anticipated visit to India, that I am slowly losing touch with my cultural roots. I have difficulty choosing the right words to express complex thoughts in one word, like I used to do before, in those two languages. Actually, I was not that great in the other two languages compared to some friends and family, and each day that passes that knowledgeable skill is lost. The constant mental struggle to remember and fit in new words, things, and ideas is pushing out the old. A child learns quite fast when they are in their formative years, are we supposed to be in this child like state forever just to stay on top? Some people will choose to refuse to learn new things and just give up the never ending struggle. Some people would choose to take a middle ground: ignoring to learn in certain fields, trying to keep current in something which is dear to them...

We are creating a society of elites. A completely different group. A group which is not in touch with the majority of people. I think scientists have started to unconsciously realize this, and the trend towards 'inter-disciplinary' cooperation in science fields is a positive thing. In programming languages the trend is towards simplification of whatever software they produce, but I see that the words they use to express certain old ideas are getting more complicated and take more effort to digest and understand. Can something which is basically complex be made simple and used by most everybody? Aren't those people (me included) who use complicated sounding words guilty of being a little arrogant? Do we do it to show off our knowledge of words or ideas? What can be the possible causes which makes us do it?

NB: I have deliberately tried to use simple sounding words in this blog post, and will try to follow being simple (when I remember!).

PHILOSOPHY: On our possible future as human beings

2005-12-15T23:41:00.000-08:00

Amit Varma on Indianeconomy.org was asking questions about Wal-mart (without doing any background research!) at a post called Tilling fields. And I along with some other people have tried to show the other point of view. I posted a rather long comment. Please read the whole thread if you are interested. My long post I am reproducing here for posterity.

----------------------------begin post----------------------------

Amit V,

Another reader of this site (and one other person) has told me privately that I am wasting my time talking about this on such an openly 'privatization' or 'make everything private' blog. I am realizing that I am expending a lot of energy, you all are set in your opinions, and nobody except you yourselves can change it. From now on I will try my hardest not to appear to be a spoilsport, but skim through the posts here to get a feel of what others are thinking. This is possibly my last effort here on this blog, I will respond to comments on this post though, till it dies a natural death. I will post elsewhere where my current way of thinking is more compatible with like-minded people (Birds of a feather and all that). I was drawn to this blog due to two people whose opinions I really respect (Nitin Pai and Atanu Dey) and thought they would be really posting about the Indian economy as they probably care about India. People care, but, differently, most of you posters care short term, i.e. 1-2 decades. Unfortunately, Nitin doesn't post here much, I will just visit his blog for his thoughts.

And I am starting to think Atanu is too overzealous. He does make excellent points, as do some of the others. For eg. The other day Ravikiran observation about 'product liberalization' and not privatization. But Atanu is not being real when he is posting 'stop wasting money on arms'. Comparing US and Pakistan as being similar. Stating we should de-criminalize politics etc. Get real; it is never going to happen, it has always been like that throughout most of recorded history. I may not like it but I can understand why the leaders think as they think. If India did not have any serious arms capability, I wouldn't blame a strong country if it attacks India. A rich merchant is powerless against a robber, being rich doesn’t help if your poorer and more martial neighbor is in need. Remembering, the US is fighting a war for diminishing resources, and further remembering that more such wars are going to be fought for water, for land, for clean air. Iraq also has one of the largest fresh water resources in the Middle East, after Libya I think. I perfectly understand the rationalization of why the leaders of the US are in Iraq, and why they want to go into Iran, and why they have stationed their military forces around the world. The resource wars of the future will lead to tremendous cataclysms. The climate is screwed. We have screwed the earth with our fertilizers, which is evident with increasing desertification. We have screwed the oceans with oil and plastic, the US alone dumps 6 billion tons of plastic year after year after year. And you guys talk about fancy market theories and taxation of plastic bags? We have screwed the air with our cars and need for electricity. Forget Carbon dioxide, can you honestly get a deep breathe of air in our cities without inhaling a lot of harmful suspended particulate matter? Nature is now starting the process of healing, melting the ice caps, and naturally trying to grow forests, to compensate, to inject fresh air, and clean the air. In our greed we would overlook that, I see us getting into the Arctic, Siberia and exploiting those resource rich regions. We are already screwing the Amazonian rainforest in South America. What the rich don’t get is that by walling themselves off in private properties, in expensive condos, with armed guards, their turn to suffer will come. Because our whole Earth is getting screwed before our very eyes, and we are not doing anything about it.

You all are not being real when you think that cheap cell phone prices in India are going to be sustained (Cheapest in the world!). When this Indian market saturates, they will start mergers, be monopolies, and start jacking prices. I have already posted my thoughts in a previous entry, and I don’t want to repeat it here.

Ok, back to your question:

You seem to be missing the point: the workers are working at Wal-Mart because they have no choice! When Wal-Mart comes to a rural place, they kill the competition, and where would those people who are displaced go for feeding themselves with a job but at the biggest employer around? I am not sure if you know, but Wal-Mart started in the South, in the rural places first. They still have their HQ in Bentonville, Arkansas. When you are in debt, have two kids, a nice house, a certain lifestyle to maintain, you want to survive, you swallow your thoughts, your prejudices, and go to work for anyone for anything they say to feed your family.

Does an addict need drugs or a drug needs an addict? India can do without somebody like Wal-Mart and get by with our undeveloped state, looking enviously at ‘developed’ economies, and wishing we joined them. If Wal-Mart same-store sales are almost constant and grow anemically, their stock price is hammered. Companies in the US keep their shareholders (i.e. the guys who pull the strings like the big investment banks, hedge funds) happy by growing constantly quarter after quarter after every quarter. If not, your stock price is hammered. That is the reason for the pressure to open new stores, sell more, earn more revenue, and get more profit. They face a lot of pressure to perform; hence they HAVE to have new markets. Or as in most of Silicon Valley they buy companies with promising products, to increase revenue. Microsoft is on the way out. So is Google. 99% people will think that I am crazy. But the day you have to depend on acquiring new companies to get new revenue, in my book, that company is on the way down. This happens because in our current culture we are not satisfied with whatever we have. What is the real use of throwing perfectly usable cell phones, computers, etc? And getting new toys, and throwing, and getting, and piling on debt so that at the end of the day you can say that I have a 4 bedroom house in the country with a 3 car garage, and I have this diamond necklace and I have more than that guy down the corner etc. It is a philosophical issue, which most cultures would understand, and to which we all would eventually be forced to return. The roots of Christianity and Islam are in Judaism, and Judaism is philosophical. The roots of other major religions in the Asian continent are also philosophical. The roots of pagan religions of the native people in N & S America are the same. I figure with the coming cataclysms, the world would discover more religion. I would hopefully be alive to witness that fact.

Peace

GENERAL: Jakob Nielsen's blog usability guidelines

2005-12-07T22:40:00.000-08:00

I have tried to follow Dr. Jakob Nielsen's recommendations on this blog.

1) A short author biography - tick
2) author photo -tick
3) relevant post title - tick (improving...)
4) links warning - tick (improving...)
5) classic hits are buried - ? (don't have one yet)
6) categorical postings - tick
7) Irregular post frequency - half hearted tick - hmm. working on a weekly schedule
8) specialized blogs - not yet, soon
9) forgetting about privacy - tick (I think I know)
10) Hosted blogs is bad - not now

On #10, the actual costs of owning your own blog are not the $8-15 for the domain name per year. It is also the hosting costs of $5-15 per month.

PHILOSOPHY: My response to 'It is ownership, not competition'

2005-11-28T18:27:00.000-08:00

I read Ravikiran's post on 'Indian Economy Blog' here and felt compelled to respond especially since my previous post on a similar topic on Tim Worstall's blog here, was posted only yesterday! Here is my response to him.

---------------------------

I will go out on a limb here and argue against the blind way people think that COMPLETE privatization is good in India. People nowadays point to cellular phone penetration vs. landline telephone penetration figures…

I agree upfront with what you say in your post, that, the way the government runs the Public Sector Unit's (PSU) is bad. But what Ramnath in his post was trying to highlight the fact that first and foremost we owe something to those in unfortunate circumstances than us. I have posted some thoughts on Tim Worstall's blog here (opens in new window, please scroll to the end)...

A mix of private and public is the answer.

Many people have posted on what is wrong in PSU type system in India and elsewhere (especially the former Soviet Union and its bloc, though I think the real reason the Soviet Union collapsed was not their sick PSU's). Private systems focus on survival yes, and now quoting you here:

"Do you ever think that a government will ever put profits above the interest of its employees?

Most private companies in the United States now focus on short-term profits to the exclusion of long-term growth or vision. Witness the sinking of a once reputable company in Silicon Valley who are now primarily sustaining their business (majority of profit is obtained) on selling printers. It is not purely the company interest only or employee interest only; it should be a synergy of the two. Private companies are driven to this extreme by some of their shareholders who want them to show a profit every financial quarter. It is impossible to be profitable quarter after quarter after quarter. Suppose Company X holds 100% of the market for processors, (there is no competition from anyone) they sell to 1 billion people on Earth, and they reduce prices to sell to the other 5 billion. They wait for the upgrade market to pick up newer PC’s; they wait for processors to be installed in your cars/stereos/whatever. A time will come when there is slackening demand, not because of their fault but because they have exhausted all their potential avenues by selling to all their potential customers on Earth. Company X will then have to pray that there is life outside Earth so they can sell more processors to ET and his lovable friends.

Think, if this doesn’t apply to every (or maybe just unnecessary) product sold under our system of modern capitalism as practiced in the US, and maybe Europe, and maybe elsewhere. I don’t know about other places, people who have been there would know more.

What then happens to the employees of Company X?

The company got enormous profits, and it gave a relatively measly amount to the people who helped the company. Now that it is impossible to grow, it is time for the axe.

Many people talk about corruption in PSU’s, what about the paychecks of CEO’s running these private companies? Even when the growth is anemic or non-existent (as in massive loss), under the current system they should be accountable, but they are not. But I argue that if and given if: what they are trying to accomplish succeeds, they deserve their six/seven/eight whatever figure salaries and stock options. But the major rub is that they cut XXXX amount of jobs, and the amount goes for increased compensation into the hands of a select few, and NOT to the shareholders.

The situation is the same, from my deck chair, for both the majority of PSU’s and private companies.

Okay, returning back to the topic of private cellular phone companies in India and their high/wonderful penetration and their low low rates, which are the cheapest in the world. The next step will be mergers and acquisitions, because the low rates maybe unsustainable or they want more moolah (Remember the famous Pepsi Hindi slogan ‘Yeh dil mange more’). Now then, because competition is reduced they will jack up the rates, typical monopoly behavior. Economics 101. That is the strategy, which will be followed: low prices, and then price hikes. What we are witnessing in India is the first act; maybe the second act has started, I don’t know if they are doing merging/acquisitions because I don’t follow the market.

What Ratan Tata and maybe others are getting into is this particular aspect of the whole picture. As an aside, I have the greatest respect for ‘Sifu’ Lee Kuan Yew. And I think that the current system of capitalism would change to take this into account. Now the question whether the change is ever so slowly and gently transitioned or is abrupt nobody knows. But I would prefer to live in a place, which has a visionary leader, who understands the big picture.

ENVIRONMENT: Folding bikes

2005-11-26T11:28:00.000-08:00

While I was browsing Treehugger.com, I came across Plan B: New Orleans Community Bike Project.

And then later on through more browsing I came across, Dahon's range of folding bikes. Isn't it a cool concept? No question of a bike being stolen, rusting, locking it securely etc.

It would be good to go on short trips with a folder, to your local gym, to do short errands. Also a cool idea is a European trip on a folder through bike friendly Austria or the former Soviet bloc East European Countries. A really cheap and fun vacation! A description of a trip on the Danube is here. Any takers? :)

What would be the best choice for a city, a Boardwalk D7 priced at $299 or a conventional Espresso priced at $360?

FINANCE: The derivatives bubble

2005-11-26T11:15:00.000-08:00

This post is a response to Madan Manoharan, to more clearly explain my position against the insane leverage exerted by derivatives in the financial markets..

I will try to keep it simple, so here goes...

How much is the worth of the total world economy? With the US around $10-12 trillion supposed to be one-fourth, we can roughly approximate the entire world GDP as around $50 trillion per year. GDP is actually what we spend, it is a measure of 'economic activity'. It is not a measure of how much we save in the bank. How much is the total debt of the US economy? We can refer to Messrs. Brad Setser and Nouriel Roubini for this answer, as they closely follow this topic on their excellent website RGE Monitor. From this link, they estimate a $3.7 trillion current account deficit at the end of 2005 (or 30% of US economy deficit).

How much is the total outstanding debt of Over The Counter (OTC) derivatives? Conservatively it is in excess of $270 trillion (i.e more than 5 times entire world's economic yearly output). JP Morgan alone has a debt of $46 trillion from their shorting of gold in the early 1990's! Don't believe me? Read it for yourself here (warning:pdf link). How can that be possible? JP Morgan is a huge bank, but its financial obligations are higher than the entire US economy? Now if some event happens that forces any of the esteemed institutions to immediately payback its debt obligations, what would happen? Anybody remember LTCM? Google for 'Long Term Capital Management' + 1998.

Madan, what is the use or value of derivatives in this case? To shift responsibility and the consequents risk away to unknown third persons? When the entire economic system cannot ever support the honoring of such kinds of contracts and agreements which are totally make believe?

I entirely disagree with the concept of 'the real risk is the gross fair value' and to ignore notional amounts. I can buy a contract worth $50,000 to trade S&P 500 with just $4,000 when S&P 500 is at 1000.25 (it moves in increments of 0.25 if I recall correctly), sell it when S&P 500 is at 1000.75 and make a profit... But what if the S&P drops suddenly to 900.75, am I not liable to pay everything due? i.e buying price - selling price = -100 points! A 1 point move is worth $50 so I am out by $5000! And I do not have $50,000 to buy the contract in the first place, what if the dealer calls me to deliver the contract?

I want to discuss my other pet peeve: Junk bonds next.

Updated on November 28, 2005: When I get the time or inclination :)

ENVIRONMENT: Tom Philpott's rant against Industrial Agriculture and its effect on our health

2005-10-14T10:51:00.000-07:00

Tom Philpott rants against our food being industrialised on his excellent blog here. I tend to agree with him on his genetically modified seeds posts and its connection with our industrialised system of agriculture here, here, and here.

Tom mentions in the last link that

"When Roundup ready soybeans first sprang to life in US fields in 1996, ADM and Cargill solved the Europe problem by diverting US soybeans away from the European food market (though they kept GM soy flowing into the animal-feed market), and sent the Europeans Brazilian soy. At that time, Brazil had banned GM seeds."

It is extremely sad to see that short term greed of a certain minority section of our society is forcing GM food indirectly or directly into the whole ecosystem. GM foods have not evolved over many years, and they would lack certain things which help to contain future unforeseen effects. In simple words, if you don't like mosquitoes and wipe them off the face of the earth, you would wipe out an entire ecosystem which depend on mosquitoes. It is not possible for anybody to gauge the inter-dependence of introducing certain traits into food. It is much much better to try and alter food by natural means, and not in the lab. But a certain side-effect is the distress the alien species may cause to native species.

On another note, all these processed foods (partially hydrogenated oils, fats, corn syrup in sweet substances) may disturb our body which hasn't evolved to handle these things. I surely would wish to try out a raw food diet once in a while but eating it raw maybe a problem due to unknown amount of pesticides. We are slowly losing the idea of growing our food in the backyard, and also our connection with nature. I once read about a narrative where a couple who was living in the Dakotas were driving 75+ miles to the local Wal-mart for fresh produce!

Tom observes here (via Treehugger)

Historically, people of limited means have tended to scrape by on what's locally available, while the wealthy have used their resources to draw in fancy food from far away. Now, that situation has turned upside down. Economies of scale brought on by increasing consolidation, vast subsidies, and wholesale, unchecked exploitation of immigrant labor have created a system of cheap, plentiful, and dreadful food.

Tom's article on Gristmill is thought provoking and I urge people to take a look. I am adding his blog (Bitter Greens Gazette) to my links section for my weekly read.

Much more detailed explanation is written up by Richard Manning here, found via Tom Philpott's column on Gristmill here.

PROGRAMMING: Java advice for Sun to woo programmers

2005-09-28T10:21:00.000-07:00

1) Make Java syntax easier (autoboxing, unboxing etc), not everybody likes to use an IDE like Eclipse or NetBeans. Learn from Ruby on Rails to give importance to developer productivity. Shift as much work as possible to the compiler.

2) Implement a lint4j, jlint, findbugs like free program(s) which catches those thread deadlocks/synch problems reliably. If you are going to deliver CMT with the upcoming Niagara line of CPU's and help us debug the next gen threaded applications give us command line tools which help. Talk to Tim Bray about any ideas he may have. Look at this post of his here. Search for "Testing and Debugging" paragraph.

Isn't it possible to spot a lot of problems like memory leaks, performance problems (lint4j does it now) etc in the compile stage itself? It seems to me javac is used just for correct compilation.

There are not any viable compilers out there, I maybe completely wrong but that is the impression I have.

3) Invest in some outside developers in Jikes to make it Mustang (JDK 1.6) compliant. You cannot rely on just one compiler, which maybe prone to making mistakes. Java sucks because there is no alternative compiler out there. I fondly remember Jikes as a lightning fast compiler which could compile 5000 classes from scratch in a minute or two, while javac would take forever.

4) Have a java command line option "heuristic" which when used will spit out its advice to the developer... "Use this -X option, use that funky option". It is confusing that there are so many options which we never use. There maybe 5 different ways of doing Garbage collection supported by the JVM, I do not want to spend days/weeks on deciding what is best for my application. Lessen my burden, and take out the guesswork. What I would like to see the JVM do is tell the developer, I have analyzed your app, based on my analysis, this is what you should use, and explain to the developer why the JVM is recommending its use. This analysis should be like DTrace, very lightweight, and not imposing too much performance penalty.

PROGRAMMING: Threads, processes, and future performance

2005-09-24T10:38:00.000-07:00

Some unnamed people (who I respect professionally and personally, after all they are family, and I may have to lie to keep them happy!) who work for a software company are looking around for a programming language to develop their next gen applications. Their choice has narrowed down to Ruby on Rails (RoR) and Java. I am asked to give unbiased feedback (feedback is always biased eh?). This post is for them to consider and make their own decision.

Tim Bray discusses the issues (here and here) that I think are going to be very important in the future of computing for the next 5 years.

1) Performance gains are going to be extracted through threads, NOT processes.

2) RoR has taken the approach of single process, single thread model using a pool of FastCGI processes. Jon Tiersen has more on this page. I have asked a question which was uppermost in my mind over on that page. I am curious on how RoR will solve that kind of problem.

3) Current processor speeds from Intel, which was the company which hyped Pentium performance, are stuck around 4 GHz. They have belatedly realized that cooling those big puppies is one big hassle. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry is going to be using some sort of CMT. AMD realized this way back in 2002 when it stopped publishing raw CPU speeds, instead pushing its Athlon/Duron equivalent performance numbers. Sun also realized it around 2002 when it bought Afara.

4) Tim says that "Debugging it is a complete mindf**k, and I’m spending too much time debugging it because I have no idea how to write the unit tests." I have done some debugging for MT applications, and believe me it is no fun. You get nightmares, insomnia, loss of weight, and ultimately loss of concentration. Sun errs in this area in not providing a free enterprise profiler like Yourkit, or something like on DTrace on any platform, not just Solaris. Why they leave it to the likes of OptimizeIt, Yourkit, JProbe etc is beyond me. This is almost like Microsoft's incompetency in having a Windows which allows viruses, trojans, and the like. I find it disgusting that Microsoft is selling its Anti-spyware product when it cannot do their software right in the first place.

5) Java has a head start on all the major (and commercially sucessful) programming languages today due to Doug Lea's concurrency work being folded into the core language in JDK 1.5 aka Java 5. Of course, these features maybe present in Smalltalk or other languages for a long time. Herb Sutter says, "The C++ language has long been used to write heavy-duty multithreaded systems well, but it has no standardized support for concurrency at all (the ISO C++ standard doesn’t even mention threads, and does so intentionally)".

6) The most compelling reason to switch to RoR would be less lines of code (LoC) and consequently more developer productivity. Geert Bevin kills that assumption with his post on the RIFE framework. Read it all carefully and see if it suits your needs.

My intuitive conclusion: RoR is being developed right now, and I feel it is at the place where Java was in 2000 i.e still immature. I wouldn't risk spending big money on RoR at this time, maybe you can revisit and evaluate at the end of 2006. Look to frameworks like Spring, Hibernate, Tangosol etc for performance, scalability.. Java will be here for the next five to fifteen years. At this time, Java is mature, and it is poised for takeoff with the introduction of CMT. For an aside read Cameron Purdy's post on Java and Trading systems here.

My advice: Deploy on Solaris and take advantage of DTrace using AMD's dual core 2/4 way Opterons. Make it OS and database independent. Pay $99 for 1 year subscription of Solaris Express and change the OS every 3 months or 6 months as the Software RTU is 6 months. Use Solaris Zones/Containers to simulate multiple developer machines.

Also, hire just a grand total of 5-7 developers who know Java or can learn anything in that area. I know one person who has this ability, and you both know who I am talking about. I cannot end without asking you (one of the decision makers) to read Paul Graham's article here.

ENVIRONMENT: Lawns, agriculture, seed balls, and monoculture

2005-09-21T21:45:00.000-07:00

Everytime I see a well tended lawn I get sad of the wastes implied in the process.

I fail to understand why people plant grass, feed some fertilizer (oil based), and cut the grass every 3-5 days using a lawn mower (again wasting oil). Is it just because it looks good or because it is green and is soothing to the eyes of the person in charge of making that decision?

What of a typical farmer who plants a single crop, say wheat/coffee etc?

It is unnatural for monocultures to exist in nature. Instead of planting grass I personally would like to see somebody literally grow a wild forest in their backyard. Just use the idea of seed balls from Masanobu Fukuoka-san. Gather a bunch of seeds from plants which co-exist with each other, roll it in mud, to prevent their destruction until the time is right for them to sprout, and spread it out! Go read the website and google for "seed balls" "Masanobu Fukuoka" to learn more. I wish we redid agriculture by planting several 'crops' simultaneously, instead the focus is on selling them for money, and getting useless things like TV, expensive clothes, lifestyle relevant garbage. I recall Louis L'Amour quoting in many of his books "The Native American was doomed the moment he discovered the virtue of a horse, a rifle, a knife, a sewing needle etc". Technology is useful but this subversion of natural things for short term greed will have to stop one fine day. (I will rant more on technology stuff later this month)

Another thing to remember is that monoculture in agriculture will slowly eradicate traditional knowledge of concurrent agriculture. That is, crop X can be planted with crop Y, and crop Z in a such-and-such pattern. Crop X needs XXX chemicals (nitrogen, phosphorus etc.) produced by Y, which in turn is dependant on Z which produces YYY. The three crops allow communities of bacteria A, B, C, D, and E in the rhizosphere of the crops. Over time this knowledge which lurks in the religious texts and formal books will be lost.

Monoculture is slowly destroying the natural order of things, and will result in crops highly susceptible to attack from wildly changing bacteria/virii. Natural genetic change is brought on when speciation occurs, or when wildly different species mate or manage to live together. This info I got from reading this book here. Why do you think we haven't yet figured out a foolproof way to eradicate common cold? Because the virii involved change their signatures and their genetic code so rapidly that they manage to fool our immune systems. Malaria, TB, and other tropical diseases are making a comeback due to the inability to recognise their continuosly varying signatures.

It's all karma neh? (stolen straight from James Clavell's main character Yoshi Toranaga in 'Shogun')

TIGERS: more reduction in fuel consumption

2005-09-21T21:29:00.000-07:00

Green Car Congress has a excellent post on a simple system which can eventually be used to enable camless, zero belts, no alternator operation in a typical vehicle.

Grr, a power steering/drive train/alternator/AC belt system is so prone to breaking. The things need to be changed every 5 yrs/60,000 miles. Finally, this will enable a reduction in vehicle weight by about 50-100 lbs (30+ for cams, 10+ for belts, 30+ for alternator)

Update on October 1, 2005 This will probably remove the timing belt, which is a huge expense done every 5 years or 60-100,000 miles.

This follows the principle of BSD Unix. Cut the stuff so there are less points of failures.

PHILOSOPHY: Being a vegetarian

2005-09-19T20:57:00.000-07:00

Background: I was born into a vegetarian family, and didn't have a taste of meat till I was in my early 20's, and that too by accident! On the few occasions I have eaten meat it was because of cultural misconception on my part. Although on one occasion, I didn’t have anything else to eat for a long time, so I had to make an exception. For survival’s sake I will eat anything but I abhor meat.

Belief: I believe that if we have to survive to a long age without a useless disease plaguing us we should eat the healthiest food. There is more chance of getting sick by eating improperly cooked meat. It has been clinically proven you can get gout by eating too much rich meat or get mad cow disease in infected meat. Modern ‘farming’ of animals is also dangerous for our health, because it can give an opportunity to new virii species for jumping into humans e.g the avian flu or SARS. I also think vegetables are also easier to digest. If you are used to it, you can eat raw meat or raw vegetables, but either is an acquired taste. But if you can raise healthy meat, and eat it in moderation it is good.

Clarification for violent animal lovers: I do not believe that you should refrain from eating meat just because you should be compassionate to animals. We need food to survive, either meat or vegetables. We cannot prevent violence against living beings, we need to kill plants or animals to survive, as it is an unfortunate fact that we never evolved to manufacture our own food like plants. Cruelty towards animals affects us differently than cruelty towards plants. We can feel it better because they shed blood just like us. And there is an innate bond because we shared a closer ancestor than we may have done with plants.
September 24, 2005 update: There is a big difference between wanton cruelty and necessary cruelty. Many of the Native American tribes thanked their Gods before partaking of meat which they had to kill. In almost all religions, the prayer you recite while partaking a meal is mindful of this fact.

Pets: I would like to keep a pet or two, but we need to realize we do this for our own selfish reasons. Wolves were kept around for helping humans with hunting and guarding. We have bred the original wolves into something else that we fancied. Cats were also kept for the rats!
September 24, 2005 update: Pets prove that you do not need language to communicate. You can communicate just as well with gestures and body language, though I feel most pets take on their 'owners' characteristics.

What about protein?: It seems that I am asked this question by almost all meat lovers. In fact, having too much protein is bad for health. Swami Vivekananda said "Anything in excess is poison". Vegans and Vegetarians can get protein or anything else they need from plants. Whatever meat meat-lovers eat is first fortified by plant feed. I have also read accounts stating that animals which are not evolved to handle meat are sometimes fed meat in some factories for an improved boost of protein.

SOLARIS: Solaris 10, Solaris Express, and OpenSolaris

2005-09-17T22:40:00.000-07:00

I just thought that I would create a entry to remind myself of the difference between the three distributions of Solaris.

Solaris 10 = S10, Solaris Express = SE

Solaris 10 was the official BIG product launched in January 2005. Just like Windows XP was launched in 2001.

Solaris Express is released monthly, and is a snapshot of the progress made till date on the Solaris 10 codebase. It is basically preparing us folks of the next big release after S10, internally called Nevada by the Sun team. (Will it be called S11?) This is usually lagging the bleeding edge by about 1-3 months.

OpenSolaris is the open source version of Solaris Express. You need to download and install a recent SE build and then upgrade to OpenSolaris. Source code commit synchronization between OpenSolaris & Solaris are made on a bi-weekly basis right now, sometime end of this year or early next year, the commits will be the same for the Nevada build, and the OpenSolaris codebase.

The latest and greatest Nevada builds are released into OpenSolaris first, and then after some testing (just regression or is it more?) are released as SE builds. Dan Price maintains a nice blog reflecting changes for each build of SE.

Updated: September 21, 2005

Increasing Fuel economy of IC Engines

2005-09-16T22:41:00.000-07:00

1) Switch to Diesel, which typically gives an 20-30 % boost in economy. It eliminates spark plugs, spark plug wires, distributor/distributorless ignition components. This is a major tune up in modern post-1996 engines.

For more, read
Jon Fry's excellent Automotive based site

These below suggestions are for the Auto manufacturers...

2) Use of camless engines: Valeo, Sturman

3) Use of dual clutch / CVT to deliver efficiency in transmission

4) OEM use of K&N type air filters

5) OEM use of high performance synthetics like Amsoil

6) More sensors used to continuosly diagnose what's happening in the car. Remove all guesswork, a sensor should report what's going wrong.