India Arriving The IT Story - Article & Book

An interesting article came to my attention that points to a new book released in November by Stanford Professor Rafiq Dossani titled "India Arriving: How This Economic Powerhouse Is Redefining Global Business". The article is an editorial from SandHill.com a website dedicated to the Technology industry - emerging trends and their impact on IT.

The article provides a personal perspective on the changes that India is undergoing as it becomes a service driven economy. While the story of the major IT services firms in India (e.g., Infosys, Wipro, TCS, Satyam and others ...) are fairly well known what the article offers is an interesting glimpse into the changes taking place across India. Professor Dossani relays a story about travelling to one of the Tier 2 cities in India and contrasting the situation to the developments in Bangalore. Beyond his comments about the physical infrastructure and many of the well documented challenges of doing business in India relating to the crumbling infrastructure is the ingenuity being demonstrated by entrepreneurs in rising to meet these challenges as they growth their businesses. His description of seeing an IT outsourcing firm utilizing car batteries tied to an inverter to compensate for the challenges of an unreliable power grid remind me of pictures from this Nokia research presentation relating to cell phone refuelling stations in Africa. What struck me most about the article is the perspective of how technology is beginning to enter all areas of Indian life and the increasing importance of the cell phone and broadband connectivity in transforming the Indian economy and way of life. The editorial is well worth a read and I've put the book on hold at my local library - hopefully they'll get their copies soon so that I can read it and post a review here.

"Fiddlers" by Ed McBain - Book Review

I just finished reading another of the novel's from Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series "Fiddlers" and would give it decent marks for a fairly solid work. McBain's work tends to be a little gritty and a little jumpier than I typically like in my mysteries. In this case the familiar cast of detectives from the 87th are back this time tracking a serial killer who at first is going after an oddly disconnected group of victims. My view is relative to other books in the series this novel starts at a fairly slow pace and it isn't till about half way through the 259 pages in the novel that things really start to heat up. Eventually the killer in the novel builds to six murders across various parts of New York but it really drags. I must say I'm seriously tempted to give the other books in the 87th Precinct series a pass after Fiddlers. Generally, I'm not a big fan of noire novels that involve a fair bit of gore or bloody content (although in fairness this isn't an overly gruesome tale) I'd say I much prefer the mystery element of stories and lean more towards books from Lawrence Block, Janet Evanovich, or Michael Connelly. If you enjoy a decent police procedural Fiddlers is unlike to disappoint but for others its likely worth taking a pass.

Cleaning up a PC before donating it to charity

The main reason I switched to Macintosh was to eliminate the wasted time spent caring for and feeding my Windows PCs at home. I'm in the process of ridding our house of a 3 year old Dell desktop in an effort to organize things and plan to donate the PC to charity. However there are a number of things that I need to do before dropping off the PC to the non-profit that redistributes old computers to charities:

1. Backup and remove any files or data that you want to keep. In this case I believe that I have all the files I need but I burned 3 CDs full of data just to be safe.
2. Time to wipe the hard drive completely - in my case while I have legal software licenses that will effectively disappear with my computer I wanted to take extra precautions by entirely erasing and overwriting the data on my hard drive too ensure that personal data was completed removed from the PC. In this case I went to SourceForge and downloaded a copy of Darik's Boot and Nuke'em (DBAN) there are copies for various operating systems (e.g., Windows, Mac PowerPC) and media formats (e.g., bootable CD, bootable USB and floppy drive).
3. Once you've checked and confirmed that the machine is clean of all data - pack it up and off to charity it goes.