Funny Search Engines

Search Engines are powerful and crazy - they search this world wide web, gazillions of web pages and provide the results. The reason for writing this - someone that I know sent me an email with a link to my blog. I had to read my three old year blogpost. And I had to write this new one.

I am still alive, just too busy to spend any time on writing new blogs. I still work with Cisco as Advanced Services engineer. I do write occasionally some blogs internal to Cisco regarding my work.

I (my profile) also try to write some blog entries at Cisco Community Central for Service Provider Mobility at:
https://www.myciscocommunity.com/community/sp/mobility

Search Engines - keep up the great work.

First job out of college: Large company vs small start-up company

This topic is always a debatable one. Two weeks back, I was with my college friends after we have been in industry for 8 yrs now. And we still were discussing this topic!! Imagine the situation of a fresh out of college student.

When some of my best college friends met during the christmas time, one of the topics that came out was how our choices have affected our career so far. One question that still is debatable is big company vs small company.

The Answer:
I made this observation that probably we have been asking the wrong question. More than size, probably what affects the career more is whether the company you are joining is a great company in terms of finance, culture, team and every other aspect. Is it one of the market leader with great thought leadership?
Size to a large extent dictates aspects of the company culture. And it is more of a personal preference to accomodate to that culture. As long as the company you choose is a market leader, probably the career will help itself.

Most everyone agreed to this thought. We still could not agree if we should have the debatable topic of large company vs small company in our minds.


Closing Thought:
In one other blog for the first job out of college, I felt that the greedy algorithm probably is a good choice for most people (80-20 rule, so for 80% of students). For reference, it is here:
http://ribansal.blogspot.com/2006/04/job-market-greedy-algorithm-works.html
I think to choose the sector, this algorithm still works for most.

Our first "Moniversary"

20th July. That marked our (Aarti and mine) first month of marriage. She went to watch a movie with my parents in India and I went for dinner with my sister here in US. And my phone bill soared around that day!

20th August. She will be joining me here in texas. The brain has already started the countdown, it seems. And it reminded me that July is 31 days long. Okay, 29 days to go..

Success Formula
What works to get you to the top

From Dilbert.Blog
Here was the blog piece from Scott Adams:
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2006/04/success_formula.html

The key point that Scott points out are:

• There are multiple factors involved which combine together to make it happen (Scott points out: Brains, Luck, Looks, Reputation of School)
• If one of the factor is lacking, the other factors have to shine brighter
• Somewhat implicit (though the most important of all in my opinion): You as an individual need to realize whats working and whats not

My Opinion
Another key point that might be implicit (or hidden in "being smart") is: In every situation, it may be different sets of attributes that work! So "being dynamic" and "watchful" is the key!

Overall, though, I would agree with his thinking!

Abraham Lincoln and Apartheid

Learn from history
In continuation of the reservation issue in India, I realized that India is not the first country to go through this phase. USA has gone through the phase when Abraham Lincoln fought against the apartheid

Considering Abraham Lincoln to be one of the greatest leader in the history, we need to learn what he did good that made US a great country and also learn what mistakes he made. Wonder if the indian politicians (or the first mandal commission) ever gave it a thought

Reservation Issues in India:
If nothing more, atleast be a leader!

Reservation or No-Reservation:
I am not going to debat for or against the reservations here
[ Though being fair, my personal opinion is that government has focused on too much on the means rather than the end. So, whats the end? The end goal should have been: "make it a better place to live, for everyone". This end goal can be achieved using thousands of methods, and reservation is hardly a good choice ]


Atleast be a leader!
The interview of the Congress HRD minister, Arjun Singh, done by Karan Thapar is one of the most spoken lately. Its surprising that the person who brought the reservations up being clueless:
http://www.ibnlive.com/news/decision-on-quota-is-final-arjun/11063-4-0.html

Reading it, I felt: If you could do nothing else, be a leader - be vocal and supportive of what you do and believe


Dirty Politics!
I guess thats how politics work.. Arjun Singh through his one simple interview achieved multiple goals:

• He made sure that Manmohan Singh is to be never remembered as the reformer of Indian economics anymore
• He has also made sure that Congress does not win the next round of elections. And guess what - the blame goes to the people whom Karan is taking orders from!

I guess the politics motto: If its not me, then noone else!

Google: Making relevance!

Command Line interface to the world!!

Google on the news:

Google launched "Google Onebox" recently:

http://www.google.com/enterprise/gsa/

Another nice article on the launch:

http://www.informationweek.com/internet/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=186700039&pgno=1&queryText=

Machine replaces human!

For more than a decade, IT consulting companies promised the convergence/integration of the applications that an enterprise had been using. This integration is a huge task which the consulting companies were meant to fail at - nevertheless they made huge bucks!

Google has launched this innovative tool to just achieve this convergence/integration. No more do you need an IT consulting company to create tools that would integrate data from various applications

Hope Google can expand this tool (and still maintain the speed!)

Another Nice Feature

Another feature that I liked is that the data can be represented graphically (though this needs some development work today)

Marketing Innovation

Google pitches this as "command line interface to the world" - which I found to be really cool! This not only shows the big audicious goals that Google has, but also the power that they have to affect the world!

Open Source

Like many great projects have discovered that open source can help scale the project - which otherwise would have grown organically over a loong period of time. I believe, this project is one of those ones that fit with the open source models. And Google is not new to this game - they have done this before

This time, Google just need to expose APIs and sit back and relax. The rest of the applications would be integrated by the open source community!