Reversing of I.T. Outsourcing ??

I reviewed a book earlier titled "My Job Went to India." The premise is basically I.T. jobs in the West are being outsourced to the more cost-effective regions of the world such as India. According to the book, all is not LOST for the Western developers because there are certain inherent core values and competencies that our brothers in the East don't share.

Two weeks later, this BBC news article talked about the reverse phenomenon: "India attracts Western tech talent." A certain I.T. company in Bangalore, India has been hiring hundreds of Americans (& Britons) to work in India.

The article claimed that some Indian companies are now "not afraid to poach the best talent from their international competitors, matching their salaries and perks in India." In addition, "the competition is good for Indian companies and workers. .... Indians will only benefit by interacting with foreign skills."

I wonder what the author of "My Job Went to India" would say in response to this early sign of a reverse "trend". Can we still depend on our inherent core values and competencies in the West to keep our jobs safe?

We should keep an eye out while this all unfolds.

I'm Digging it.

I have been a regular reader of slashdot (http://slashdot.org). Slashdot is arguably the premium web newscast for geeks. It features links to web page articles that are submitted by readers and hand-picked by the slashdot editors. "Being slashdotted" is a term coined to describe the effect of being featured on slashdot, specifically referring to the enormous and sudden web traffic attracted to your site. The extra web traffic can cripple the web server if you are not well prepared for it.

Lately, my interest in reading slashdot is waning. The bottom line is that I don't find that many articles on slashdot which are of interest to me. I now find the articles to be a little bit too "sensational", and not enough "bread-and-better", "hard-core" technology HOW-TOs.

So, I started to look for an alternative news source. I found digg.com

Digg.com has a different editorial policy than slashdot. On slashdot, a "handful" of editors decide which articles go on the web site. Digg is a more democratic system: all articles get on the web site, and the readers vote on how far up it will go (is it "front page" material?) You can digg it (vote for it), or bury it (vote against it).

Granted, hand-picked articles (aka slashdot) will streamline and keep the # of articles down. If you find your interests are similar to the editors, that is perfect. With digg, you have access to more articles, and if you don't want to spend that much time, you can always head to the "most popular" articles list on the front page.

For a more detailed analysis of the dynamics behind digging, click here.

From a publisher perspective (say, as the publisher of this weblog), will digg.com increase my readership?

You bet cha!

As an experiment, I put a Digg It button on my earlier blog entries which I think are still of value today. It increased the number of page impressions on my site about 100 times the first day, and about 30 times the second day. That is the dream of a blogger, isn't it? So, digging is here to stay for me.

And of course, if you like this article or any of my earlier ones, digg it.

Fond of Good-looking Fonts

I'd highly recommend this excellent article on Linux fonts. It is a rather comprehensive treatment on how to use fonts on Linux. Some history, some theory, and some good practical how-to advice on using the Linux fonts. Enjoy!

My Job Went to India, and all I got was this .....

Now that I have your attention ....

Actually, my job did NOT go to India. I am still happily employed by Elastic Path Software. The company and I are both doing quite well, thank you very much.

The title is actually the name of a book I read recently, "My job went to India : and all I got was this lousy book. (52 ways to save your job)"

It is old news that I.T. jobs have been steadily outsourced to off-shore development centers, India being one of the biggest. As North-American developers, what does our future hold? Do we have a future? How can we compete with the lower-cost alternatives from a developing country?

This book offers some excellent observations and practical advice from the perspective of an American geek who spent a year in India to set up and staff a development center there.

This book is organized into 52 chapters, each a vocational tip. The overall theme is that our skills are like a product that we are selling to our employers. As a product, we need to know the market conditions such as the supply and demand for our product, and to constantly look out for signs of change and opportunities. What are our unique selling propositions that our Indian developers could not match?

I was captivated by the insights that the author had on the Indian I.T. industry, and its workers, especially in the early chapters. The later chapters I found to be street-smart common sense that is applicable to any I.T. career whether it is under outsourcing pressure or not.

You won't find in this book the answer to questions such as "Which specific programming language should I be learning?" or "Which operating system should I be mastering?". However, it will offer some general but practical principles. Say, if you have 10 hours of "play time" a week, how do you decide what to learn?

Simply put, this book offers some really good vocational advice for geeks.

I needed a better ftp client .....

For quite some time now, if I ever needed to copy files between 2 machines, I would use ssh. A recent work-related project required that I ftp a directory of finished web pages to a web site. I summarized my experience of choosing and using a ftp client more powerful than the standard ftp command in an article I submitted to linux.com. The ftp client I used was ncftp, and my experience report is here.

You can also glean from the feedback to the article some alternative tools to investigate.

Say GoodBye to those browser Ads

If you hear yourselves swearing at those darn pop-up ads that always cover the part of the browser that you want to read, swear no more. The good news is that you can get rid of that ad once and for all. First, you need to be using Firefox (or Mozilla) as your browser.

Next, download this Firefox extension: AdBlock. It is a criticial part of my arsenal to fight the evil pop-up ads.

In a nutshell, AdBlock lets me specify what ads to filter out in a web page.

When you see an ad on a web page (or Flash plugin, say) that you don't want to ever see again, click the AdBlock tab along the top (or sometimes bottom) of the ad.

The URL for that offensive ad appears in the ensuing dialog box. You can use that as the filter, or replace it with a more general regular expression, e.g., "http://ad.ca.doubleclick.net/*".

Rest assured that Adblock is on your side in the war against unwanted ads !!

Mousing Around Cordlessly

Late last year, I was handed a gift - a Logitech Wireless USB mouse. Not quite sure why I would want to install it - I had a PS2 mouse, and was perfectly happy with that rodent.

Finally, today, I decided I had to do something with it (if nothing else, just to clear some more desk space). I would install the wireless mouse on my Debian Sarge machine. Of course, the box came with a install CD that supports only Windows and Mac OS X.

So, I googled around to see how I should install a cordless mouse under Linux (Debian).

It turned out to be rather easy. Essentially, you need to reconfigure your X-Window to use the new mouse.

1. While the computer is powered down: disconnect the existing PS2 mouse, and connect the cordless mouse receiver to a USB port.
   

   Interesting how it claims to be cordless when I could see a nice long cord hanging from the receiver!!
   

2. Power on your Debian Sarge computer. The X-Window Login screen appears.
   
3. Hit the Cntrl-Alt-F1 to get a command login prompt. It would be a major inconvenience to have to login and operate in X without a mouse.
   
4. Login as root.
   
5. dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86
   

   When prompted, select this USB mouse type: "/dev/input/mice"
   

6. Restart X.
   

   What I did was hit Cntrl-Alt-F7 to go to the existing X login screen. Then, I hit Cntrl-Alt-Backspace to kill the X process and start a new one.
   

7. The X login screen should re-appear.
   
8. Don't forget to press the Connect button on both the receiver and the wireless mouse.
   

"Simple. Less Clutter. More freedom. Eliminate tangled mouse cords." So claimed the Logitech box.

Simple? Maybe.

Less Clutter? Do the math: 1 receiver + 1 mouse = 2. Can someone tell me how it could be less?

More freedom. Sure, but don't forget to replace the AA batteries when they run out.

Eliminate tangled mouse cords. Absolutely. But just don't tangle up the receiver cord which to me is just as long if not longer.

Top 100 News feeds

More time on hand than you can kill?

Look no further.

Here is a list of the top 100 most-subscribed newsfeeds.

Click here

Better Safe Than Sorry

When it comes to protecting data on our hard drives, most of us do some sort of regular back up. What usually gets backed up? Perhaps, the important data on your disks that you can't afford to lose. That is a good starting point, but it is NOT enough. Besides the data itself, do you back up your primary partition table?

The partition table is located in the disk's very first sector, known as the Master Boot Record or MBR. The entries in the partition table specify (among other things) the starting and ending CHS (cylinder, head, sector) of the partition.

The MBR has a total length of 512 bytes. Within the MBR, the partition table consists of 4 entries of 16 bytes each, with a sum of 64 bytes.

Why is the partition table important enough to backup? If your MBR has a damaged partition table, your Windows system may not boot.

Believe me this: partition tables do get clobbered (seemingly more often if you run Windows according to my own experience). When it happens, you can try repairing it or simply restore it from a backup copy if you happen to take heed of my advice here.

To repair the partition table, you need to know its original configuration. If you are caught without a backup of your MBR, you can try using a program called gpart (available on Linux) to "guess" the proper configuration of the partition table.

You wish you had backed it up. I will explain how that is done below.

The Linux command to use is dd which basically makes disk images. If your system runs Windows , you can get a Linux Live CD (ubuntu, Knoppix are good choices) in order to run the exact same commands as below but save it to a floppy drive.

The command to save the MBR (including the partition table) is:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/some/location bs=512 count=1

Note: Substitute /dev/hda with the particular hard drive in your case. Also substitute /some/location to where you want to store the back up. The total size is 512 bytes, so it fits on a floppy disk.

To restore MBR:
dd if=/some/location of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

To restore primary partition table only (without overwriting entire MBR):
dd if=/some/location of=/dev/hda bs=1 count=64 skip=446 seek=446

It happens to all of us ... eventually. So, back it up before the next disaster strikes.