The extra mile...

I am still wondering if the service provided by my favorite GSM provider - Airtel was an act of going the extra mile in customer support / satisfaction or going the extra mile in senseless activities.

Call from customer care (CC): Hallo may I speak to M?
M: Yes this is M.
CC: This is regarding your complaint that you have registered at the customer care.
M: (scratching my head), now which complaint was this, tariff change? service activation? DND?...(anyways) YES tell me.
CC: Now is your connection and network coverage issue proper?
M: (I was surprised that they proactively cover everyone's network and in a hurry check my tower signal bar on the phone and see that it is ready to burst out of the phone) Yes it is fine. What was my complaint regarding?
CC: Sir, you have complained about your network coverage in ABC area.
M: uhhhhhhhhh? hmmmm? Are you serious?
CC: Yes sir.
M: Yes the network coverage is long gone, but I want to tell you something, this was a complaint given in the mid of 2007 and you are calling me regarding this a cool 2 years later. (Anyways thanks for remembering)
CC: Sorry for the inconvenience, is there anything else that you would to know from us.
M: No
CC: If you have any query please call 1234455 to get your queries answered, thank you and have a good day sir.
M: Wish you too a good day.
click....

Makes me wonder if they are doing a great job in resolving all issues or are they having some ancient process / systems thats making their good intent to serve people go wrong. Are they losing on money, time, customer good will and above all are they barking on the wrong tree???

Can we apply Business Process Management (BPM) here?
ps: Yes I just finished a training program on BPM.

m.m

Joy of Reading

I was misled in life by my teachers.

Is this a big statement to make with Dr Radhakrishnan’s birthday coming up next month? In my case the entire blame lies with the teachers who made merry by messing up with the usage of the words read and study, this humongous error made me shy away at every instance of the word study or read.

Later in life when I could distinguish between right and write I also knew that the word read was not associated to the social evil – study.

That’s when I started the ’famous’ art of reading with the famous five and was ‘secretly’ reading the secret seven, then had a ‘hard’ time graduating to the hardy boys, didn’t know if mills & boon was a ‘boon or bane’ and now finally into biographies miles away from ‘biology’. The joy of reading increased when I realized that I neither needed to be in Sydney to read works of Sidney Sheldon nor be frost bitten to read works of Robert Frost.

I would be lying if I say that I float in milk colored clouds, surrounded by cute looking angels, and the sound of waterfalls in the background when I read, but the truth is I really get so engrossed by many books that I usually enact many of the characters and scenes in my mind and might end up with an Oscar nomination one moony morning.

To add to a saying of Mahatma Gandhi - Live as if you would die tomorrow learn as if you would live forever and read as if you would carry the wealth of knowledge to your next birth.


m.m

Running a marathon:

Why does Marathon always sound like ‘marra’-thon as in hindi, dead in the queen’s language and the ending pronunciation sound like mara-‘thorn’, a thorn in my sole/soul.

For the ones who have gone through the vice of running marrathorns lap after lap month after month, how do you motivate yourself to train when others drive Bentleys and builds palaces in sand with soft melodious background music of snoring. For the ones falling under the ‘L’ category (lazy, lucky & latter) don’t despair you are better off, bigger assets around the midriff, bigger healthcare bills & of course longer lifespan of your shoe soles.

Amateur marrathorners might have been unlucky to be dragged into the sport by some over passionate runner who covers distances like an auto ferrying passengers. But it is a blessing in disguise once you are hooked, running acts like a drug; it makes you yearn for more and in stronger dosages.

A runner’s best friend is the thump thump footstep sound that accompanies him throughout the grueling distance just that the intensity of the sound is inversely proportional to the distance (longer the distance covered softer the thump). A good runner’s thump is equivalent to a Royal Enfield bikes thump.

A runner’s worst enemy is thoughts of the cozy position on the couch with a coke, fries and a nice action movie on HBO. These thoughts are like mirages that float around the circumference of one’s mind especially when the mind is exhausted and wants to start spreading positive thoughts.

“Run as if your life depended on it, in fact it does so do run” - MM

Link: http://runnersforlife.com/

Disclaimer: I am neither an ultra marathon runner nor a health freak; all I am is a bad writer trying my luck for fame or rather a few nice comments.

m.m

Flower Enthusiast or Macro Photographer

Does it matter if you are a flower enthusiast or a macro maniac sorry I meant macro photographer??? The place to be is The Lalbagh Botanical Garden, Bangalore.

The flower show revolving around the Independence day celebrations in India has started. It is really worth a visit, but remember people travel from far to see this show so there will be a crowd. Try being there at around 8:30 and get into the glass house at 9;00 when it opens. If you go early you will be lucky to see all the butterflies having their morning snack - nectar and flowers in full bloom and not many to disturb your angles and your macro's.

PS: Will post my 2009 pictures soon.

Lalbagh-2009

My Lalbagh Set - 2007
My Photostream

For more history, address and details on Lalbagh,
http://www.horticulture.kar.nic.in/lalbagh.htm

News Articles
TOI
http://www.sindhtoday.net/news/1/37928.htm
DH

m.m

Job Schedulers - UNIX

We might have worked on various Job Scheduling Frameworks, one of the famous one that comes to our mind is Quartz. Yes quartz is a cool frameworks which has advanced error handling, job scheduling and various other great feature. Recently while trying to create a scheduling task for a task in UNIX I decided to check out the inbuilt job scheduling component - crontab, instead of setting up a java application and scheduling it using quartz. There is also a command like a timer at which a script can be run - at , but this feature doesn't enable scheduling and is good for a run once command.

What?
In the UNIX / Linux environment, it is possible to asynchronously execute tasks at any desired time of the day.

How?
It spawn's a new shell at the scheduled time and runs the job. cron starts itself at boot time and never stops until the machine is shutdown. This is maintained by the cron clock daemon.
cron is slaved to the system clock and awakens at one minute intervals to start scheduled jobs / jobs.

Process?
cron reads text files called cron tables. cron table maintenance is accomplished with the crontab command. A cron table file is ordinary ASCII text and consists of one or more lines specifying what is to be executed and when.

Commands?
crontab -e and crontab -l are most often used, the former to create or edit a cron table and the latter to display it. On most systems, crontab -e will automatically start the vi text editor and if a cron table already exists, load it into vi. Upon saving and exiting from vi, the new or revised file will be submitted to cron, overwriting the existing cron table.

Syntax?

min hour day mon dow command #comment

Permitted Values
min 0-59
hour 0-23
day 1-31
mon 1-12
dow 0-6 (Sunday = 0)

Values are cumulative, cron understands an asterisk (*) to mean all legal values for the field where it is used, and also understands numeric ranges.

Example
crontab -l

30 * * * * /export/home/user/example/DeleteOldTmpFiles.sh
This means this sh file will run every 30th minute of a hour every day, every month of the year.

Credit: http://aplawrence.com/Basics/bbcronbasics.html
Summary and few pointers have been taken from the above site and the above site is a very good tutorial site.

Issues
1) If vi doesn’t start check if the .profile file of the user contains the following
export VISUAL=vi
export EDITOR=v
2) If the cron job doesn’t start check if your username is in the cron deny file – check this link for more details - http://www.tech-faq.com/create-cron-job.shtml
3) If everything seems right and still your cron job doesn't run check if your script file has executable rights
ls -altr filename
if it is not there you will have to add this in your .profile of your user or create a new .profile file
chmod u+x /export/home/user/example/DeleteOldTmpFiles.sh

Useful Links
http://www.adminschoice.com/docs/crontab.htm

m.m

SVN vs CVS

Why is every one adopting SVN / Subversion over CVS?

Is SVN / Subversion winning over CVS?

Find out more at the following links.

Detailed Notes
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn.forcvs.html

Comparison Details
http://www.pushok.com/soft_svn_vscvs.php
http://momentarypause.blogspot.com/2007/01/subversion-vs-cvs.html
http://versioncontrolblog.com/comparison/CVS/Subversion/index.html

m.m