Lots of people have given me well meaning advice on how to make Asthra big. But I think the fundamental question that I always ask myself is what do we “WANT” to do.

Big and large enterprises are funny. I'm not sure I'd want Asthra to be like that - with a focus on scaling, making more money and thus creating the 'ABILITY' to do what they want. My only grouse with such is that once we have the ability, we are still not sure of what we want. What’s the point in having a car, a plane or any other vehicle if we are not sure where we want to go. But if we know where we want to go, we'll probably get there even by foot. Of course a vehicle would take us there faster. (I’ll blog about the so called concept of TIME later) 

I'd like Asthra to be at the helm of innovation. The question that I'd like to ask everyday is 'what have we innovated today'. Innovation is a subtle things. When a kid figures out how to tie his laces without anyone telling him, they are innovating. When we discover a new way of cooking a dish, we innovate - so what if the rest of the world already knows this. Innovation is more a process than a result. The result is either a patent or a product - an IP of someone. But the process of innovation is what really gets me the kicks. So when my son and me figure out a new way to solve the puzzle, we have a grin the whole day long. So how do I gather a set of people around me that innovate and who love it. 

I've realized that a lot of people don’t necessarily like to innovate. People are comfortable when things are defined. One of the reasons that a large company becomes monolithic is that it likes things defined. I'm sure all of us have a comfort zone when we know that our salary is going to be credited every month. We can use that as a base and strike out to other avenues (maybe catch a holiday in Europe once we have saved enough). If the basics itself is un-defined, it makes our thought process very complicated. I read a nice article once that said that a person is only capable of working with 5 variable at a time (some of us work with 1 and some with maybe 10 - but its limited). So we are just looking to make everything else constant and focus on the few variables that we can think of. A person in love has one variable less - a person who cheats on his spouse has one variable more - to think of in life. 

Sports persons are tuned to handle more variables. A gust of wind, a pebble on the ground, a head-butt - any of these can defy a person from making that all important penalty kick for their country. So how do sports persons approach their game - I think that’s the lesson that companies need to learn. Zidane's innovative goal score in the free kick (where he got it to bounce off the top of the post) is a reminder. But doesn't sports have static variables. IT DOES - RULES OF THE GAME. What every sport has - is a rule book. And so given that, we have closed the doors to variables there, we can focus on innovating where we can. What the corporate world does not have is RULES. We can hire from our competitors, we can lower costs, we can produce more, we can badger people, we can scare people who lack our information. In the absence of rules, the corporate world prefers to keep things static, scalable and predictable.

So I think the key to innovation is to introduce rules of the game. I need to think up the rules of the game at Asthra – and this future-proofing would be the key to continuing innovation at Asthra.

OK... Live Spaces seems to have mucked up my blog. My whole page is very unusable. Or is it the setup at this clients' place I'm at that's doing this to me.

My blog (as the rest of my life) is going through a re-boot phase. Aug 15th 2006 is the day I re-boot and re-think my whole life. I didn't plan it this way, it's just happening. A quick look at life so far - and what I want it to be later. 

So far, life has been very kind to me. I think that I have done quite well in the rat race without really feeling the heat too much. I think I've managed to stray down a path that not too many ppl were interested in and so I was pretty much left alone - I was never a threat to anyone and was always an easy going nice guy to hang out with. And when ever the going started getting tough, I got out of the way!

More importantly (to me) Asthra has started off nicely. Some tough moments and some lucky moments later I think that Asthra is in a stage where we want to take on bigger things. I don’t think I'm qualified to do bigger things, but I'd like Asthra to be more than just me. So I want it to take on lofty ambitions and I hope that someone more qualified will come along and make it happen. I'll do what I usually do best - dream and let things get there (mostly with least interference from me) 

Thinking back – the one poem that inspires me is the one by Rudyard kipling. And as I re-boot my life, I’d like to start the fresh one with the verses from that poem.

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

In what I'm hoping is the final change, spaces has moved to spaces.live.com. This looks neat and is in theme with the Windows Live initiative. If only I can figure out how to post to spaces via e-mial to a SPECIFIC category, I think this can become quite comortable.

Ok. for the first time, live.com is as fast as google.com and its neat. Now the search context has to get better. I still search for things on live.com and 50% of the time go back to google to search for things. I am hoping that live.com gives better results for Micosoft articles from MSDN (at least), but that does not seem to be the same.

 

Improving search is a tough job. I guess it involves trying to figure out how the human brain looks to search information. Along with a better search algorithm, I think there are better things from a human expirience that can be done. For example -

Allow users to start a search session. Across the session persist what the person is searching for and allow the search history to be stored for that session. Thus I should be able to start a session and search for "Superman", browse the results, search for "C Reeves", browse around, lok for "Krypton", look for galaxies, look for "Movies",, "Super heros", "Batman", "Batmobile" etc all in the same session. I should have the option to save this session with "Searches" and "Visited links for each Search".

This can be such a powerful way to contextualize search - without which there is no direct relation between Krypton and Batmobile - only the Human mind understand that both are associated with Super heros.

After another hiatius from bloggin, I'm getting back to blogging at MSNSpaces (or LiveSpaces!). With Word 2007, the post to blog is built into the save menu and makes it so much more easier to work off. Look out for more posts both technical and personal at this blog space.

Now that I’ve decided to try to host my own blog, its consuming so much of my time. I am looking around to the various tools that can help me blog – dasBlog seems to be the most popular. Even considering writing my own lite blog engine so that it can get integrated into the Konnect Application and keep me connected at all times from my WorkDesk. So what are the features that I’m looking at :-

1.  I should be able to host the blog with minimalistic hazzles – xcopy with maybe a config file should be good enough – so I need someplace that can have .NET 2.0 (or do I!!)
2.  I must be able to syndicate the blogs (get the rss from spaces.msn.com or blogger.com and show) <in which case maybe I can do with just an XML/XSLT implementation that takes the rss feed and renders a nice looking page. This might not even need .NET if we are using MSXML which is there in most machines anyways.
3.  The blog needs to have <what I call> views. So I should be able to see blogs/members/praveen with categories as technology, photography, music etc or I should also be able to go blogs/topics/technology and see praveen, nahas, etc… so I want the categories to be <for want of a better word> “switchable”. This is something that I have not seen in may blog, but when we want to host a corporate blog, we’d also want to render the output by topic so that it’s more pertinent to the company. At the same time, the content is still owned by the person and so it has be available as categories within his blog. Nice thing about this is that if we have blogs/members/praveen with a category personal, it wont <or will be configured not to> appear on the corporate site – so his personal ramblings need not be linked to the company J. I’m assuming that doing the above, is <just like I envisage everything else in Konnect> a matter of keeping the blog entry separate and linking it to the person, the category etc.. It FITS into the overall Konnect theme.
4.  I’d want to use a proprietary binary store. Why? Well not proprietary exactly, but I’d want to take all the data into datasets and binary serialize them. Keeping it in datasets ensures that a move to SQL is easier. At the same time, It ensures that output to XML is easy and the content is not easily (mistakenly) modified. So what I’m not sure of is – do I want to host the dataset and the program to render this (will this impact the content indexing and searching for this content) or do I want to pre-render it and spew out the HTML. I’m all inclined to go with option 1 and revert to option 2 in case I find any issue…<as is apparent, I’m very new to blog hosting and don’t really understand the implications – I hope I’ll know more at the end of this exercise>
5.  For the editing I’m in love with Lutz Roeder’s Writer.NET http://www.aisto.com/roeder/ . This is JUST AWESOME and I plan to use this (modified into a component) inside of Konnect and also as a editor for blogging. Hope to get the blog editor to work sometime this year itself J 

Last post for some time as I’ll have limited access to e-mails. The posts will remain offline <an incentive NOT to post> but I hope to have some more posts before the end of the year. BTW - I’ve never realized how I can post to spaces.msn.com by email INTO a specific category!! If I get that, I might start posting some technical blogs as well.

This I’m guessing will be my final tour/trip of this year. It has to be as it ends on the 30^th of Dec. What a hectic year it has been and I have the feeling that its going to be as hectic - if not more – next year. So Outlook blogging has finally caught up with me. This is sooo much more comfortable than typing content on web pages. As planned, I shall setup my own blog engine (I always have this feeling that if I blog on a public site, I will loose the data someday… even thou I know people who have been blogging for years and not lost their data).

The trip to Seattle was very nice. Met up with Pradeep Singh – a person I’ll always admire and look up to – and was glad to know that Aditi is doing good. It was nice running my thought through his brain. Caught up with Shobs on chat after a long time. Talked to Anuradha, Dimpy and Bhavin. Next time have to catch up with my college {dreamers} gang.

Of course I also finally managed to get my hands on Office 12. Lots of changes, but what really kicks me is the new file format. It opens up the Office data to so much more. From the little I saw of Office Server, SPS too has a lot of promise. I can think of at least 2-3 scenarios which get solved with just some configuration in about 15 mins as opposed to at least a few days of coding. If live.office.com supports SPSv3 and they provide it for India, I can think of at least one SMB signing on to it – mine.

This has been a COLD trip so far. It snowed in Seattle and its about 0 deg in Shanghai. I am in no mood to venture out of my hotel room for anything. But hunger becons….

I finally took some time off with the family. The hiatus from work was a welcome break. (I’m sure my laptop also appreciated being shutdown for the longest period – 13 days - in its short history of 17 months). We went from Shanghai to Beijing, HongKong and Singapore. Beijing is a very nice place – history, culture and pride are apparent when you interact with the locals. For all the good or bad, Beijing has been the center of the Chinese rule. From the dynastys to the communist party headquarters, it is a continuing saga of the governance of the worlds most populous country. The more I am in touch with history, the more I realize the loss of our generation. The architecture of those times seems so grand, yet practical. Now we just put up tall towers which are pigeon holes for people to work in. Our ‘offices’ do not reflect the work that we do. We are fast moving to a virtual world away from the real world outside.

HongKong was a drastic change from Beijing. While Beijing is steeped in culture and tradition, HK like NY is a vibrant, active, business city. The people are out till late at night. When we landed at about 2:30 AM, there were people in the busses and people waiting to get into the bars and pubs. Nathan road in Kowoloon is bustling at all times. (With English being common and Indian food available, it eased my concerns about my son’s hunger). I liked this city. Its very easy to understand the intention of all around – make money. All suggestions and advice are targeted to making some money out of it. If you ask for a means of transport, you are directed to a taxi charging about 350HKD – inspite of a bus service being available right outside the hotel for about 45HKD.

Ankith and Vasu really enjoyed Disney world. I shall upload some pics of the whole trip. Like some was mentioning, there is not one wrong brick in the whole of Disney world. Its truly a dream world and I can appreciate the large effort behind the scenes to make this dream world so perfect. We followed this up with a trip to Ocean Park in HK where Vasu went on the ride of her life. Now I can be confident that I’m not the scariest thing that happened to her J

Singapore was not as nice as I expected. A very proper city, it seemed to have a sense of artificiality to it. This was the last leg of our journey. Singapore will be a nice place to work, but I don’t think I’ll enjoy living here too long. In a sense, its like the USA. Its clean, spacious, proper, lots of cars but with very few people around. I hope to come back and explore more of this city and also seek some venture to work her for some time.

The best part of the trip was of course the time I got to spend with Vasu and Ankith. We had enough time for ourselves too and enjoyed just being together. Personally to me my family is a strength on which I can launch my campaigns to work. I have been fortunate that now I don’t need to earn to sustain my family. I can take my dreams outside of just myself and my family. But that can only happen on the strength and support of the family.

November 4^th – The final round of Vista introductions

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Walking the team through the labs and doing the labs on the screens made the sessions simpler and more coordinated. But I realize that we need to have a depth focus in each of the foundations. On the positive side – the whole Vista story with the foundations (technically the foundations can be used on XP as well) is a very strong coherent set of technologies that can be used for architecting solutions. The biggest negative side to the story is that current development (using web services, COM+, MSMQ, WinForms etc) might have to be re-architected to utilize these features. A longer learning curve for developers adds to the resistance in moving to these technologies. If an alternate easy, simple and scalable alternative hits the market, it could take away a lot of developers. Is google doing something?

 

October 28^th – Another round of Vista

^{___________________________________________________________}

Whew!! I’m realizing that walking people through WPF, WCF and WWF is more tough than what I expected. What I’m not able to fathom is the time that people take for the labs. I think the key reason is that – as with any new tool – people want to explore all the various properties. I also think we should have spent more time on preparing simpler labs than taking the content from the PDC. I think we need to put a simple story and some recommendations and suggestions that can be leveraged. I plan to start blog-categories for each of the foundations with the intention to enhance my knowledge of these technologies.

 

October 21^th – First round of Vista trainings

^{___________________________________________________________}

Just finished the first week of Vista training. I think the introduction is OK but I found that the teams took a long time to work with Vista (esp WPF). I think it’s a metaphor change for people and so it takes a long time. Also with the absence of drag-drop development, developers are uncomfortable with the environment. Will Microsoft ‘Sparkle’ alleviate the problem? I have not seen Sparkle in action, but I’m guessing that its more like Photoshop and that UI Designers will be more comfortable with it than developers.

 

October 12^th – Gearing up for the Vista trainings

^{___________________________________________________________}

The basic content is in place. It does look like we are covering a lot of content. On the whole it’s a good story – WPF applications using WCF technologies. Creating forms as custom XPS docs and using WWF to manage such XPS documents which are then posted into relational stores to track and search through lists of data.  But the whole architecture is a drastic change from the things that we are used to working with. IMHO – I think its an uphill climb from developers and architects.

 

October 6^th – Vista – my first look

^{___________________________________________________________}

Starting my first look at Vista. We will be looking at the security enhancements and then the core 3 pillars of Vista – WPF, WCF and WWF. The VPC is up and running. I had forgotten to activate the version of Vista. So far its looks ok. Explorer seems very unstable. I have taken to using the dos prompt to move across directories (esp for copying data from my main machine into the VPC through shared folders)

As I could not post from Outlook for sometime, I have been blogging offline. Now I post the blog as is with the series of sub-blogs.

 

September 26^th – Singapore Airport

^{___________________________________________________________}

It was very nice of Jason to come over and get me most of the content on Saturday just before I left Redmond. Now I have a fully bootable Virtual setup of Vista with VS2005(Beta2) and WinFX and WWF. Hopefully all the PDC demos will work off this. Tried a few and they seemed to work. Now its all a LOT of work of putting up the story and stitching all the pieces together.

 

September 22^th – Change of Plans

^{___________________________________________________________}

Though I tried to change my tickets to later, there was not flight available. So took the tough call to work the rest remotely. There is still a bunch of stuff to be done and a lot of content to be burnt and sent over by Jason before I can be comfortable with starting off the Vista content.

 

September 20^th – Microsoft and a dinner

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Walked into the Microsoft Campus on the 19^th. Met up with Jason, Lynn and Marco. Had a very nice dinner with Marco and we talked of all odds and ends. On one side we talked a bit of business, but it was also a lot of talk about each other, our thoughts, about India and China, about what we want to do and stuff.

 

September 18^th – Crossing the border

^{___________________________________________________________}

Spent a very nice, relaxed weekend at Santhosh’s place. Drove them out of their bed – but it was worth itJ. Visited LA and the offices of Google and Oracle. Santhosh and Jyothi seem to be made for each other. It was very heartening to see them so obviously in sync with each other. May they be blessed with joy and may they always have time for each other.

 

September 15^th – Vista Explored

^{___________________________________________________________}

Hmm… Vista. I have the agenda to attend the Vista sessions. Even though I was dying to attend the LINQ sessions, I stuck to the Vista sessions. While the pieces seem nice, it’s made me all confused about the message of Vista. The key takeaways about Vista – as I see it so far is

A modular OS base

Better execution contexts (session 0 separation)

WPF for high end graphics - we will still continue with WinForms and WebForms with the idea being that WPF will ‘eventually’ replace WinForms.

WCF for all communications – it’s very tempting for Microsoft and other to go overboard with this and use this across all the tiers. I think the plumbing is nice, but it should be used judiciously.

WWF for workflow - this is a revelation. Its so nice to have this available in the OS out of the box. Though its typically thought to be server side, it can be effectively used in multiple scenarios. Nice to have this available out of the box in the OS itself.

RSS in the OS - not sure what this is all about. Need to explore further. I have not yet understood why this is needed.

 

September 14^th – LA Convention Center

^{___________________________________________________________}

Reached the PDC. The setup is nice… with the biggest attraction being the HOL area where we can play with the technology. Met up with Dani, Dilip, Govind and Venkat. Still not got a hang of the technology sessions.

 

September 13^th – Off to the PDC - Finally

^{___________________________________________________________}

The consulate was very kind to me. I got a 10 yr multiple entry business visa to the US. I don’t have to go through this harrowing experience again if I want to travel to the US. So finally I’m off to the PDC – though late by a day and a half.

The terrible tragedy at New Orleans reminds us of the balancing power of nature. A hurricane is after all a balancing of the winds from a cold wave to a heat wave. The difference in temperatures causes nature to swirl in the cooler winds with such force that it wrecks all in its path. Even with the large resources at the disposal of the USA, the country has nearly lost a city. Filled with water that flowed over the leeves, it lies inundated. A prayer to all the ones affected (for it will affect a lot more people than just the ones who were staying there). May we all have the perseverance and the patience to rebuild a part of our lives that we have lost.

Against the background of such disasters like this and the tsunami last year, we should also remember that its not fair to blame nature – it just took back what we had claimed for our own from it. This should teach us the humility to respect it. As humans move into cities and create a concrete jungle, we are marring nature. We desperately need a move away from this back into something that is in tune with nature and learn to live in harmony.

 

Tiago Monteiro has managed to finish all the races this year. He might go on to become the rookie with the most no of completed races.  But is this good? Every other driver with > 1 race under their belt have had a retd. Does that mean that Tiago does not push his machine to the limit and is always on the right side of the limit?

Makes for an interesting thought. In any facet of life, should we push the limits or should we be conservative? I believe that one should push the limits even if it means loosing a bit. After all its only when we loose that we learn what it takes to win. But if we can push and stop at the border just before loosing, its perfection. (On a personal front, I have not been impressed of Narain either – though he does push, he seems to make silly errors too. Of the two, I have been relatively impressed with Tiago). I hope the Constructor’s is decided only in the last race.

 

Well – the devil is in the detail.  My visa looks as if its going to get delayed and I might end up missing some part of the PDC L.

On a separate note, as I was coming up by the lift today, I noticed the scheduling that lifts use. Some of them are setup to service only certain floor during certain (peak) periods. So in the mornings, some of the lifts will only service floors 13-26. But isn’t it better to check the usage pattern of the lift. For example, I’d rather be in a lift with all people in the 5^th and 25^th floors (takes 2 stops to get to my floor – 25^th) than one that stops in the 5, 11, 14,16,18, 20, 25 and 26^th. So how can we go about getting an algorithm that’s based on current requirement rather than using a generic algorithm?

The first requirement for this would be that we can capture the requirement to travel to a floor up-front and not after the person enters the lift. So a (WiFi/Bluetooth?) device can act as a entry system where users key in a requirement and are issued a token (optional – just a tracking mechanism for cancellation. This can be avoided if the screen is visible to all, thus ensuring that people only work with their IDs).

Now that we know how many users want to travel to each floor, we first group people by floor and then distribute the people across the lifts. A sample of 25 people with 10 to floor 5, 2 to floor 11, 5 to floor 14, 2 to floor 16, 1 to floor 18, 2 to floor 20,1 to floor 25 and 2 to floor 26.

Now that we have the grouped list, we start distributing the people (note:if we had not done the grouping, its possible that ppl of the 5^th floor get distributed into all the lifts and all the lifts stop at that floor). If each lift can take 7 people (we are ignoring weight here) and there are 4 lifts, let’s consider both the options. (For statistics, let’s assume that the lift takes 0.5 min to travel to each floor and uses 2 mins for each stop.

Option A : 2 lifts service floors 1-13 and 2 service floors 14-26. (I have added 2 mins to the last stop for the lift to ‘finish’ its work)

Best Case (Option A) :

7 people use lift 1 and it stop only at floor 5. Total time = 4.5mins.

5 ppl use lift 2 and 3 get off at floor 5 and 2 at floor 11. Total time = 9.5 mins.

7 people use lift 3 and 5 get off at floor 14 and 2 at floor 16. Total time = 12 mins.

6 people use lift 4 and 1 gets off at floor 18, 2 get off at 20, 1 at 25 and 2 at 26. Total time = 21 mins.

Max Lift usage time = 21 mins

User experience à [5-4.5][11-9.5][14-9][16-12][18-11][20-14][25-18.5][26-21]

Worst Case (Option A) :

6 people use lift 1 and it stop at floor 5 and floor 11. Total time = 9.5mins.

6 ppl use lift 2 it stop at floor 5 and floor 11. Total time = 9.5 mins.

7 people use lift 3 and it stops at 14,16,18,20,26. Total time = 23 mins.

6 people use lift 4 and it stops at 14,16,20,25,26. Total time = 23 mins.

Max Lift usage time = 23 mins

User experience à [5-4.5][11-9.5][14-9][16-12][18-15][20-18][25-20.5][26-23]

Option B : We use the scheduling algorithms and group the people

7 people use lift 1 and it stop only at floor 5. Total time = 4.5mins.

7 ppl use lift 2 it stops at 5,11 and 26. Total time = 19 mins.

7 people use lift 3 and it stops at 14 and 16. Total time = 12 mins.

4 people use lift 4 and it stops at 18,20,25. Total time = 18.5 mins.

Max Lift usage time = 19mins

User experience à [5-4.5][11-9.5][14-9][16-12][18-11][20-14][25-16.5][26-19]

The best possible use experience is User experience à [5-4.5][11-7.5][14-9][16-10][18-11][20-12][25-14.5][26-15] if each person gets a lift to directly travel to their floor with out stopping anywhere. Only 4 groups can get this experience as there are only 4 lifts.

I’m sure there are a lot more options to consider but the basic assumption that lifts take more time stopped than traveling is valid and so the effort should be to minimize the stops for the lift and to provide a better user experience. This is also based on the assumption that we can capture the current user requirement (which we do by ticketing in airplanes but don’t in lifts and busses). If expanded this can be used for scheduling busses, airplanes, software jobs and a lot more. Hmm… do they accept patent filing for incomplete theories?