Skill Set?

Tom Kyte on skill sets for the future IT professional:
"
The most important skill set?

o commonsense
o flexibility
o willingness to change
o excitement about learning new things
o not being afraid to say "what I did 5 years ago bears no resemblance to what I
do today and hopefully none to what I do one year from"
o good communication skills
"

Imagine

Imagine there's no heaven,
It's easy if you try,
No hell below us,
Above us only sky,
Imagine all the people
living for today...

Imagine there's no countries,
It isnt hard to do,
Nothing to kill or die for,
No religion too,
Imagine all the people
living life in peace...

Imagine no possesions,
I wonder if you can,
No need for greed or hunger,
A brotherhood of man,
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say Im a dreamer,
but Im not the only one,
I hope some day you'll join us,
And the world will live as one.

Writen by: John Lennon

my oracle dba...

my oracle dba wants me to generate a explain plan for the insert statement of a job that i wanted his help in tuning..Dont know if i should laugh or cry.........

Free Health Education Library

Dr Malpani runs a free-online health education library
Worth a visit for collection at the reading room ..

Stupid Movie Physics

I came across this great site which dissects in detail gimmicks used in movies from a physics point of view.
The articles on Flaming Cars and Cigarettes as Lighters are really great and explain in detail why the stuff shown cannot actually happen .......

Ethics in business intelligence

Richard Hackathorn's recent article on TD magazine on ethics in BI has a interesting perspective on a hypothetical scenario where the person's actions though legal are unethical ,as shown on the quadrant diagram in the article.
I believe in these situations even if the corporations have policies , penalties etc it is the individuals actions that could lead the corporation into messy situations . So in addition to the excellent steps that are mentioned at the end of the article , Employee education should also be made mandatory on these issues.A mandatory training on the lines of Environment and Safety that is essential for employees working in the manufacturing industry a training on Ethics is essential for "Knowledge workers".....

Learn quantum theory from the master

Cornell university has posted 3 lectures by Prof. Hans Bethe on Quantum theory.
It's a great set of audio,video clips a must visit for anyone remotely interested in physics.

US Supreme Court ruling on File sharing

http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?ID=221
The court has ruled that file sharing services are liable for copyright infringement , would be interesting to see how the ruling affects the so called slow-down of CD/DVD sales...

Pitfalls of the Fixed Price Model

A recent post on the Dizwell Blog
directed me to the site of Pythian , where i came across this white paper on the flaws of the FP model by Steve Pickard
I could'nt agree more with the findings detailed in the paper , especially( #3 )the one on Increased Risk , it is the whole "business model" of a FP vendor captured perfectly..

Steve Jobs at Stanford

Rashmi Bansal's recent post on her blog
provided me the link Steve Job's recent speech at Stanford Univ. This is really inspiring stuff.Worth reading.

Blue Notes Radio

I hit the Blue Notes Radio using the Stumbleupon plugin of firefox and now am hooked to the station
Check it out yourself : http://www.bluenote.com/radio.asp

ETL on unstructured data

Informatica is going to bundle Itemfield technologies with their Power Center platform
http://www.dmreview.com/article_sub.cfm?articleId=1030259

Wonder when i will get to test-drive this stuff , support for unstructured data adds a whole new dimension to Power Center platform....

a new blog

Niall Litchfield's recent post directed me to the blog of Sue Harper , Her post on ERD is a gem

ETL framework for marketing by Steve Schultz

Steve Schultz details a ETL framework for a marketing database in a recent article on dmreview
What is missing in the framework is support to downstream applications like Campaign managers...

Oramag article

Jonathan Gennick's article in the current issue of Oracle Magazine
caught my eye in the context of what i mentioned in my previous post about Tibco's business event tool.
As Jonathan Gennick mentions in the summary of the article , the expression filter used in conjunction with oracle streams could very well be suited for a business event montioring and propogating setup ..this stuff is very interesting , i have to dig into some of the 10g manuals to read some more ...

Event Processing

TIBCO has launched a new product called TIBCO BusinessEvents
Which they say "proactively identifies and identifies complex correlated events" wonder how that works.Currently it is available on Windoze and Solaris platforms
Guess they will soon have to bring out something that works on Linux as well !
They have great products but it is difficult to find some good technical literature on how the products work atleast at a high level.
In that aspect i consider the DB Server Concepts Manual from Oracle is a great leader, and the fact that they have made the documentation open on technet is just wonderful.

Alan Alda's interviewing tips

I got directed to this Intelligent Enterprise article from Mark Rittmans blog-post.
It sure makes for some interesting reading, The quick study section summarized by Ralph Kimball, Margy Ross says it all for anyone gathering requirements for a DWH/BI project.

Amazon selects Cognos

Amazon.com has selected Cognos -Report Net for their enterprise-wide reporting requirements, More interesting is the fact that it will be a Linux based setup.
Cognos news

Turning data into action for Customer Insight

In an article on sas com John Gaffney and Larry Dabrow defines customer insight as "Customer insight is where customer value and customer needs intersect. It is where data is transformed into understanding."
They further go on to mention that to get true understanding and retain existing customers enterprises need to get data from two places "The first source is the data from transactions, demographics and attitudes. The second source, which many companies ignore, is data about customer needs and values. It is this fusion, however, that results in the insights that lead to smarter decisions and higher profit."
Another key observation they make : "all available customer data must be deployed fully, because you can bet that the competition will deploy it."
Too often i find that enterprises in their data warehousing integration efforts "Reject" lot of records because of some data quality issues , Gleaning information for action from these "Reject" cases is a challenging task for any data-modeller , Lot of times it is just very easy to error out these records and proceed ahead with the routine , These error cases are supposedly sent back to the business for validation but in my experience business is just not bothered...wonder if we can get some statisitcs of opportunities lost because of this...

Al Green has released a new Album

Came to know about Al Green's new album "Everythings Ok "while watching the Daily show on comedy central with John Stewart.
am a big fan of the reverend's voice but have to wait for atleast 4-6 months before i will be able to get my hands on the CD here in India !!

some of the reviews on amazon dont sound too good but still it is an Al Green album :)

Check out the Radio 2 documentary

An Integration Competency Center

Harriet Fryman group director of integration technologies at Informatica Corp. has an interesting graphic for the 4 integration approaches that he proposes in a recent article in Teradata Magazine.

It is the Shared Services approach which intrigues me because many companies work on a Shared model most of the time and a factor that Harriet Fryman has somehow overlooked is the role of outsourcing partners in this model. An outsourcing partner currently plays a mission critical role in many of these 1 billion dollar companies that the writer mentions; in that the partner with his team of skilled developers monitor,maintain the integration processes and also play an important part in the actual development of these systems by working with subject matter experts.

sony's new phone

I got directed to Sony's phone the W800 from a Sun blog http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/hinkmond/20050301#steve_jobs_better_watch_your

This one is surely going to shake the market , hitting the portable music player + the digital camera companies and at the same time challenging Nokia to match the offerings
http://digital-lifestyles.info/display_page.asp?section=platforms&id=1969

I personally find the Nokia handsets are unbeatable but when it cames to media players a Sony is a Sony ..now if only we could have both at the same time .. Imagine the products that would have become available if there was a partnership between Sony and Nokia instead of Sony-Ericsson....

google maps

Direction finding and map search will never be the same again , with the launch of google maps
check it out the technology is just amazing and navigating the map is also very cool
For people who would like to know the what is happening under the hood a very detailed explanation can be found on jgwebber's blog posting : http://jgwebber.blogspot.com/2005/02/mapping-google.html.

Very cool , Hat's off to Google again.

thank god for the Supreme Court!

The Supreme Court has directed banks and credit-card companies to hang up on sales calls.
"The Supreme Court today issued notices to mobile firms and private banks on a public interest petition alleging that they were providing phone numbers of citizens to commercial groups for promotion of sales."

around the world in < 80 days !!

Ellen MacArthur completed her epic journey by sailing around the world in just about 71 days!
what an achievement.
Ellens Route
New York Times report

cricket-VB series

Australia won another series beating Pakistan 2-0 in a best of 3 finals . The awesome Aussies won the game with a characteristic spirit of never giving up , even after the Pakistani bowlers had done a good job of restricting the total to 240 at the SCG.

My personal opinion is that the Australians should stop playing cricket for the next 2 years atleast and be awarded the World-Cup by default; because there is no team in the world 11 which comes close to their standard of play.
Next month Pakistan tour India , India is going to have a tough time playing their bowlers who are in excellent form especially Razzaq , Naved and if Shoaib is fit by then .....They are going to play a match in Bangalore and i look forward to see Shoaib in action. I just hope Inzy and others resolve their internal differences and select Shoaib for the trip he is a great competitor.

convergence

in the current issue of BI Journal David McGoveran talks of difficulties organizations have had in their integration efforts EAI or ETL. He states further in the article :

"It's becoming increasingly clear that thinking of business integrations in terms of making twor or more software applications interoperate is at best myopic and potentially even disastrous"
and "It is the need for businesses to remove the artificial operational and business barriers that impede and enmesh business objectives while respecting necessary businness constraints"

If only a lot more business recognize this truth , because it is not about Application Integration or technology or IT it is about "Business Integration" where IT is the just one of the enabling agents.

Dag Hammarskjöld on leadership

"Your position never gives you the right to command. It only imposes on you the duty of so living your life that others can receive your orders without being humiliated."
--Dag Hammarskjöld

unspin the spin

a good article on Regulation, Globalization and the Economics of Information
by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Ph.D., Columbia University

scotch to get cheaper in India

hic hic hurray.
Commerce ministry has proposed a cut in tax on scotch in this budget.
"The high customs duty is giving rise to a 'grey market' and out of the estimated scotch whisky market of over 10 lakh cases in India, 6.5 lakh cases are locally produced counterfeit sold by bootleggers."

Finally we will get the real stuff at a decent price in India .

cheesecake recipe

The best cheesecake i have ever had were during my stay in Stockholm , I especially loved the ones that my manager used to make himself for the friday-"fika" at office.

After spending some time on google and a swedish-english dictionary i found this simple recipe , which i think matches with what Jens had printed out for me a long time back..

I now have to find similar digestive kex here in India , I hear Britannia does make them in India...

another Swedish dessert that i love is called Semlor , which traditionally is a easter treat, but nowadays available throughout the year.
Semlor Recipe 1
Semlor Recipe 2

came across this..

...interesting guide on NASA's site ..neat and concise explanation of some the basic stuff.It's called Beginners Guide to Aeronautics

how nerdy are you

Perseverance

We must not hope to be mowers,
And to gather the ripe gold ears,
Unless we have first been sowers
And watered the furrows with tears.

It is not just as we take it,
This mystical World of ours,
Lifes field will yield as we make it
A harvest of thorns or of flowers.
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , "Perseverance"
Reference : How to drive your Competition Crazy : Guy Kawaski

Friends...

The reason a dog has so many friends is that he wags his tail instead of his tongue. -Anonymous

Oliver Stone's -Alexander

Saw the movie Alexander this weekend , and it was disappointing to say the least !,Oliver Stone has succeeded in portraying the greatest military general as a bisexual , cry baby tormented by his mommy !! The movie is pathetic and also downplays one of the major battles of Alexander's conquest against Porus.

A brilliant strategist , Alexander also had a very diplomatic plan in his expedition in that his treatment of the conquered tribes was far more humane and he managed to make the conquered tribes accept Greek civilization, and himself loved by all. Although towards the end his fellow country-men and soldiers grew tired of his seemingly endless pursuit to conquer the world .
Check out Republic of Macedonias web page on Alexander

Doug Reilly's career guidelines

Who's responsible for your career

Courtship

Courtship lifts a young fellow far and away above his common earthly self and by an impulse natural to those lofty regions he puts on his halo and his heavenly war paint and plays archangel as if he were born to it. He is working a deception, but is not aware of it.
-Mark Twain "Which Was the Dream"

Shrink Wrapping on CD's

Why do CD manufacturers have to make it so hard to open the wrapping. Couple of days back i bought a CD from LandMark and they had shrink-wrapped the CD's twice !!! .
It took me 20 minutes to rip off the f***** wrapping .
A similar incident also happened when i bought myself a bottle of Seagram's-100 pipers, Eager to pour the soothing ;-) drink i twisted the cap to break the outer seal . To find myself another plastic "tamper-proof" contraption . It was a plastic cover under which you have a one-way valve mechanism. The problem started when i twisted the valve thingy to an angle and nothing would pour out of the bottle !!!
Cursing madly , struggling badly i fought a losing battle for quite some time until finally !!! was abe to get valve bit in position using a combination of a swiss-army knife and a needle .....

United Nations ?

Everything will be all right - you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves.
Dag Hammarskjold

Kudos to Jan Egelund..

..For standing up and giving the rich nations a nice dressing down .
Jan Egelund, the UN's Undersecretary General for Humanitarian
Affairs, said "We were more generous when we were less rich, many of the rich countries, and it is beyond me, why are we so stingy, really. ... Even Christmas time should remind many Western countries at least how rich we have become."