Manager == boss

It is almost universally accepted that a team manager is invariably the boss of everyone in the team. This is the typical hierarchial system. I was thinking about music bands and their managers. Think of big movie stars and their managers. In these cases, the manager works 'for' the team instead of the other way round!

Can we have managers as team members in a technical team and have him/her work for the team?

Indepedance day!

We celebrated Indian Independance day today at UIC. Professor Venkat hoisted a flag for us and we sang the national anthem. I hope I got all the words exactly right, after all I had been singing it through out my schools days; Prof Venkat asked everyone to contibute to the society around them; its a good reminder. His mother was visiting the campus, so we asked her to speak a few words as well; she head been a teacher in India for around 37 years and she felt very happy speaking to grad students :) well, she asked everyone not to forget their homeland; must see for myself how many will remember her words.

Research team

This is the team that I work with at the lab for advanced computing. From left: Sarah, Susanne, Mike, me, Dave. Dave and I work at UIC and the rest work at the computing institute at University of Chicago. The location of this pic is a restaurant on UofC campus.

The strangest secret!

Whats the strangest secret known to mankind? its this single sentence that can be interpreted in a zillion ways. It says:

"We become what we think about"

Thats the the powerful truth that separates the men from the boys; gods from the humans and humans from the demons and demons from the ... (there is ofcourse no end to the classification of all things that ever existed in the minds of men).

I had been reading James Allen's "As a man thinketh"; found it pretty interesting; its got the same things that today's personality dev gurus chatter about; Infact the book allegedly spun off the whole personality development industry. It is a very short volume (only 27 pages in all) and is available as a free e-book from http://www.asamanthinketh.net/index.html

The book talks about how our thoughts influence our actions and hence create "circumstances" which are the building blocks of life (as in life experience). It therefore follows that our thoughts dictate the quality of our lives; everyone thinks we get to choose what we think about.. well, no quite; do you really have control over what you want (or dont want) to think about? think again.

Google Spreadsheets!

Alrighty, I got an invitation to try out google spreadsheets (you can get it too if you sign up on their page spreadsheet.google.com), and lo and behold! here is an online spread sheet app with a loads of fun! The most striking feature is online-collaboration; ofcourse, an online spreadsheet must dedicate its life to collaboration. I guess thats the best use of this application; I wouldnt use an online-spreadsheet to store my company's financial figures; definitely not; but sure I'd like to collaborate with someone accross the world to get some figures right! and once that is figured out, I can download it as .xls (I wish they supported .sxc the oocalc format too). That wud be the primary use of an online spreadsheet.

Software as service

I read many articles pointing to the new wave of software applications offered as "services" on the web; Instead of buying and installing a piece of software on your machine, you rent a service that does the same thing for you over the internet; Its like using electricity and gas; use as much as you want and then pay up; except that software is not an "exhaustive" resource like gas, and need not be "regenerated" (although it has to "upgraded" regularly);

When I read about companies like salesforce.com it reminds me of the idea behind the "Multics" operating system that was planned by IBM, Bell labs and GE but never took shape (instead, we have today a popular OS called Unix that implemented many ideas planned in Multics). Multics infact extended this whole idea of rent and use to all computing that you will ever need to do; The idea is that users would rent some computing time, do whatever work they need to get done and then logoff; you will be charged for the time you spent doing computation on multics; Infact, the early "Mainframe" computers implemented the same concept;

I thought about the pros and cons of computing as a service...
advantages:
1. You dont have to own a computer; just a sumb terminal would do; hook up to any one of the good services in town and you are suddenly working on a computer; (its like cable TV)
2. No hassles of installing and maintaing your software (including OS). So no need to buy individual copies of your own collection of software; (Again think of how cable TV works; you dont pay for each channel; the cable company pays for each channel and distributes it; overall, it is a win-win situation for the customer and the operator)
3. You will have a choice of platforms; you can prefer to work on a sophisticated when you are doing business and then switch to a less powerfull one when you are just at home watching a movie / browsing the web etc. Everyone can tailor their account to suit their needs;
4. Enormous power - A lot of computing power can be put in your hands without actually paying to buy that kind of a computer (or even leasing out a super computer for a month); Say you just want good power for a week or a month, you can step up your account and get the power you need; later step it down.
5. If you are a corporate company, probabaly you can buy a central computer to which all your users can hook on; (Think of your own power plant to generate power for your enterprise).

Disadvantages:
1. Makes you dependent on what the computing company provides; Taking the cable TV analogy again, if you want to watch a channel thats not provided by your operator. But software can be customized to your needs; still it needs to be verified how much customization can a generic computing services company can provide for you without burning your ass given the range of hardware platforms and things-to-do.

2. Privacy?? what about privacy?! The computing services company can track what you've doing; thats scary to many.

3. The idea of a "Personal computer" brings with it many emotions and feelings that are really strong given human nature of distrustfulness; that is why the PC became an instant hit. Microsoft realized this way back; so they brought out cheap "personal" computing to everybody; and they made good money.

In the old days big fat Mainframe computers provided centralized computing services to everybody in the neighbourhood; Then the PC wave struck; The trend is going back towards centralized services; only now, the platform is the internet; so the grand illusion is that you get to keep your "personal" computing, but then also access computing services via the world wide web. What does that mean? it means you can compose your e-mail online, you can compose your business proposals on an online word processor (and probably store it on the service provider's website so that it would be accessable to you anytime anywhere), and do all your computing by logging on to another computer;
People are talking about the new wave of web-service based software like salesforce.com; while there are big advantages to this model, think about the 3 points in the disadvantages section above? do they still apply?

Ubuntu!

Just installed Ubuntu Linux on my T43; am happy with it. It took a little prodding to properly install the GUI; but all in all, a good desktop system to be with; especially when you are a comp science student; planning to erase windows completely off my laptop soon; as soon as I get linux replacements for all windows software I use :)