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Cost cutting and Employee salary and benefits

When companies are facing financial problem then almost all of them resort to cost cutting by laying off employees, reducing their benefits etc. But is this the right approach? Does this work? In fact when they are in trouble they should focus on quality and service rather than just picking employees pocket. And well motivated employees can certainly improve the quality and service which can take the company out of its financial difficulties.

Intresting read: What Were They Thinking? by Jeffrey Pfeffer.

Merry Christmas

Firefox add

I like this add. It's not direct but delivers the message.

Nobody's Perfect, but a Team Can Be

I find this statement by Siemens CEO Klaus Kleinfeld very interesting because in just one sentence he sums up almost everything that has been written about the advantages of working in a team.

Just For Fun

I recently read Linus Torvalds's Just For Fun. It was a nice read although towards the end it gets a little boring ( as it talks about the politics of open source). Here are few lines I really liked.

Programming the right way:

You can do something the brute force way, the stupid, grind-the-problem-down-until-it's-not-a-problem-anymore way, or you can find the right approach and suddenly the problem just goes away. You look at the problem another way, and you have this epiphany: It was only a problem because you were looking at it the wrong way.

A great mathematician doesn't solve a problem the long and boring way because he sees what a real pattern is behind the question, and applies that pattern to find the answer in a much better way. The same is definitely true in computer science, too. Sure, you can just write a program that calculates the sum. On today's computers that would be snap. But a great programmer would know what the answer is simply by being clever. He would know to write a beautiful program that attacks the problem in a new way that, in the end, is the right way.

It's still hard to explain what can be so fascinating about beating your head against the wall for three days, not knowing how to solve something the better way, the beautiful way. But once you find that way, it's greatest feeling in the world.

Simple is beautiful:

One of the beauties of Unix is realizing that you don't need to have complex interfaces to build up something complex. You can build up any amount of complexity from the interactions of simple things. What you do is create channels of communications (called pipes in Unix) between simple processes to create complex problem-solving.

Unix comes with a small-is-beautiful philosophy. It has a small set of simple basic building blocks that can be combined into something that allows for infinite complexity of expression.

This, by the way, is also how physics works. You try and find the fundamental rules that are supposed to be fairly simple. The complexity comes from the many incredible interactions you get from those simple rules, not from any inherent complexity of the rules themselves.

And you should absolutely not dismiss simplicity for something easy. It takes design and good taste to be simple. You should not confuse the simplicity of Unix with lack of sophistication- quite the reverse.

Scheduling Java program on Windows

Windows scheduler cannot take Java programs and schedule it.
But there is an easy work around.
Make a bat file with the necessary commands to run your java program. And schedule the bat file. Works for me.

Easy but effective way of creating passwords.

Its difficult to come up with good passwords which are hard to crack and at the same time easy to remember.

But Anil Jhon in his msdn blog describes a very easy way of creating such password.
Here is his recommendation:


"Choosing a good password is critical to maintaining the security of this system. To construct a good password, create a simple sentence of 8 to 9 words and choose letters from the words to make up a password. You might take the initial or final letters; you should put some letters in upper case to make the password harder to guess; and at least one number and special character should be inserted as well. An example is the phrase "It's 12 noon and I am hungry" which can be used to create the password "I's12n&Iah". All passwords will be checked to make sure that the following complexity requirements are met:

Must be at least 9 characters
Must contain at least one lower case letter, one upper case letter, one digit and one special character
Valid special characters are - @#'$%^&+= "

Carry your Internet Explorer favorites with you.

Do you have your browser favorites synchronized between your home pc, laptop and office machine. Most probably your answer will be ‘no’. That’s because there is no easy way to keep them synchronized.

It would be fun to have the favorites follow you rather than the other way round.

Recently I came across two tools, which do just that (to some extent). One is A9 from Amazon. And the other is Yahoo toolbar. Both store your favorites in server rather than in client machines. So after you login they are available from any machine. While A9 is 100% web based, Yahoo toolbar needs to be installed on the machine. But it’s easier to access the favorites using yahoo toolbar than using A9.

My Texas A&M web page.

Here is the Link.

Its outdated.
I have plans to update it soon.

Finally decided to start my blog.

It's always good to be in tune with the time. Although it is better to be ahead ( is it so ??) . So I decided it is high time to start my blog.
Recently I posted my comments to a blog. It was moderated. And since the author didn't like my message, it never made it to the blog. This provided me with added impetus to start my own blog. Yes it is mine.