Why Meg Whitman failed

There is some media coverage Why Meg Whitman failed. When i read d article, I wondered: did anyone in her team have any strong incentive to tell her about her mistakes during her campaign? I expect there must be some incentive to help her win, but perhaps there was a stronger incentive to just take her money (big money at $140MM) and not care about the result.

How can leaders avoid this situation?

Why would shaadi.com wish people a happy rakhi

It is funny that shaadi.com (Indian dating site) is wishing its users a happy Rakhi (Indian celebrations for brothers and sisters). I hope they don't want the girls on the site to tie a rakhi to all the boys on the site : )

Buying at Zappos

I had heard about this company a few times in the last couple of years, finally made my first purchase with them - two pairs of jeans. Great experience, free shipping both ways, hasslefree. Highly recommended.

http://www.zappos.com/

about having kids

seen at another blog, somewhat my view:

"I will most likely never have kids. I think out of all the other factors edumundo mentioned, kids by far are the largest limiter of options. You can't divorce a kid (at least not without being a terrible person), you can't pay off a kid, and finally, unlike in previous points in history, kids are a depreciating asset.

There is a reason that as a society develops the birthrate drops. When you are a poor farmer in India, having multiple kids is liking getting cheap labor. As they get older they work in the fields and eventually they will feed you in retirement. Compare that to developed societies where kids consume more and more resources as they grow up. And there is no longer any society enforced family commitment (individuality and freedom are encouraged) so the kid(s) could move across the world and no longer be there to help you survive retirement. Basically all the economic incentives are gone and only costs remain."

Joomla Tutorial: creating a copy of a Joomla site

A web development company developed a site for me using Joomla and set it up at the hosting service. I wanted to make a copy of that site on my local machine. I had to go through some troubleshooting, I am recording it here for my and others' benefit.

You need to have administrator access to the Joomla site.

Remote machine
archive site using akeeba
download the zip file
backs at my SQL database and download

Local machine
MySQL
creative user name and password exactly as you have on remote site for Joomla
create database and assign access rights to the newly created user to the database with the correct hostname

Local Apache
enable mod_rewrite (used for seo URLs): ap2enmod rewrite
restart Apache
set " allowoverride all " in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default (at all the places in the file, if you are smart enough and you know what you are doing, do it only where required)
create virtual host for a new site, this is required so that the rewrite rules for URLs will work properly. Initially I put the Joomla site under a folder but that doesn't work properly that the rewrite rules.

Local - machine from where you will access the site on browser
make the correct entry in /etc/hosts to match the virtual host setting an Apache so that your browser goes to your local Joomla installation.

Argument against the average

On a podcast a gentleman talked about the relation between money and happiness. It seems the relationship is logarithmic, people's happiness doubles when their wealth increases by 10 times.

What should I make of this for myself? Is this what I should expect to happen to me?

How many children on average do US families have? I believe it is something like 1.3. Do you know any family that has 1.3 children? Your parents had exactly as many children as they had. It is a fact and it is before you. You don't have to rely on National statistics to find out how things are around you.

I am not the average person from that study. I am what I am. I believe I will be happy when I reach my financial goal and have no need for any more, happiness or money.

We should be careful about how much attention we give to the aggregated metrics. Sometimes we may have hard numbers close by and no need to rely on aggregate numbers.

Google has abandoned desktop search

Went looking for desktop search for Ubuntu, top result is Google Desktop Search for Linux. Pleasant surprise that Google supports Linux. I click on search result and just out of curiosity go to the product blog. And what do I see there? Their blog has not been updated for more than one year! Looks like they have abandoned desktop search. I guess there is no competition.

Link to most recent blog post as of today below:
http://googledesktop.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-desktop-now-supports-64-bit.html

my spirit

this is my spirit:

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat. - Theodore Roosevelt

Piwik: Open source alternative to Google analytics

I have been using Google Analytics for a while but I don't like it because:
- I prefer not to give my website data to Google
- it does not provide real-time analytics
- it does not able to monitor clicks on PDF, and other similar types of files.

The log file analysis tools usually provided with hosting services are not very good. I have meant to set up my own system on my home machine but haven't gotten to it yet.

I have finally found an open source solution which looks promising. I am about to install it on my website and will report back on how it goes. check it out at: Piwik

RF media remote recommendation for your computer

I have had a Logitech wireless keyboard, mouse and media remote combo for about four years and have been extremely happy with it. I use the media report the most, love the fact that it works through walls and I don't have to have line of sight with my computer to control itunes. Unfortunately they stopped making this gadget.

I have been looking for a similar gadget for my Ubuntu LINUX computer for a while but I didn't find anything that I liked. I looked again a few days ago and found this on Amazon:


Been using for about a month and am very happy with it. In addition to being a remote, it has a Novel mouse feature that at first I thought would be a gimmick. But it's actually pretty cool.

Is my way the right way?

I often disagree with a friend of mine about project management. How can I show him that I'm right? It's very tempting to say that between the two of us the one who completes the project successfully had the right idea.

But, I feel that the relationship between action and result is not such a close one. Then, how can I show my friend my way of managing a project is the right one? Would it help to take an average of the result of 10 projects?

I think the real question that I am asking is, if we break apart the relationship between action and result, as recommended by the Gita to some extent, what is the basis for choosing between one action and the other.

What leads to misunderstanding in relationships?

Very often you see in Hindi movies that either the girl or the boy hesitates to tell the other about how they feel, leading to a sad song and a sharp twist in the story. The goal of the rest of the movie is usually to resolve this misunderstanding.

For a long time I thought that misunderstandings were often a communication issue. As long as everyone is clear about their intent, I thought people could generally avoid surprises about each other in the future (avoid "I never knew you felt this way" moments).

Some time ago, I can't remember the exact event clearly, my opinion changed. I now feel, communication is not the only issue. Even if we asked people clearly to state intent we may still end up with misunderstandings. People may not be able to answer clearly because they either don't know, or are afraid to tell.

For example, if I asked someone whether or not they are committed to a camping trip, it is quite possible that even though they intend to answer clearly, they may not know how they feel at that time the question is asked, they may not know that they don't know.

Windows web service doesnt know about 'tsv' files

How long have people been using TSV files for data? 30 years? My XP computer graciously offered to use an 'online service' to locate the right application to open a '.tsv' file I have. And then showed me this:

Simple website link checker

Simple website link checker

check status of a list of links you have in a text file:

GIGRIB is useragent for pingdom.com

for i in `cat urls`; do echo -n $i ' '; wget -B --spider $i -S -U GIGRIB -O - 2>&1 | awk '/HTTP request sent, awaiting response/{getline;print}'; done

i will update with more info.

easy, free website monitor

I just signed up with pingdom.com to monitor one of my websites for uptime.

Easy signup. Seems to be from a reputable company/founder.

They have a free account that will monitor one site for you.