Windows 8

This week, after a lot of thinking whether to upgrade my desktop from Vista to Widows 7 or 8, I finally decided to go with Windows 8. So far the experience has been good. I ran into the following issues and I found the solutions on the net and I am listing the solution that worked:

When I re-installed Cisco VPN client on Windows 8, it did get installed but when I ran the client, I got the error that the Adapter is not enabled. When I went on the net, I found that many people had this issue and the following solution worked for me:

 Open Registry editor by typingregedit in Run prompt
·    Browse to the Registry Key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Services\\CVirtA
·    Select the DisplayName to modify, and remove the leading characters from the value data upto "%;" i.e.
o    For x86, change the value data from something like "@oem8.inf,%CVirtA_Desc%;Cisco Systems VPN Adapter” to "Cisco Systems VPN Adapter”
o    For x64, change the value data from something like "@oem8.inf,%CVirtA_Desc%;Cisco Systems VPN Adapter for 64-bit Windows” to "Cisco Systems VPN Adapter for 64-bit Windows”
·    Try connecting again

Another issue that I encountered was that my wireless connection was slow. I did the following and I saw a quite a bit of improvement:

- Left click the Internet Access icon in the bottom right corner(Next to sound icon), and then right click the Wireless Network you are connected to and select "View connection properties".

- In the security tab of this window, click the dropdown box for Encryption type, and select 'TKIP'.

- Press okay.

I went to speedtest.net before making the above change and my download speed was 0.56 mbps and the upload speed was 5.6 Mbps. After I made the above change, the download speed increased to 12.24 Mbps and the upload speed to 7.49 Mbps. Overall at this time, my Wireless internet appears to be fast enough. Another option If I face any issue with this is to download the Wireless drivers and reinstalling them again. I hope i don't have to do that. 

Ubuntu 12.10

I was getting bored of Windows Vista and wanted to experience another OS. I heard a lot about Ubuntu and I got the Windows installer of Ubuntu 12.10. When I downloaded the installer (wubi.exe) and double clicked on it to install, it could not because by default it will try to install the 64-bit version of Ubuntu. So I had to run the file by giving a --32bit parameter

http://askubuntu.com/questions/132745/how-to-install-ubuntu-32bit-with-wubi

After that Ubuntu got installed and I ran into another problem. The Wireless connection was not working. I tried a lot of things and none of them worked. Then I hooked up a wired connection and then installed the Broadcom wireless driver for Ubuntu by following the commands from the following link:

http://www.howopensource.com/2012/10/install-broadcom-b43-legacy-wireless-driver-in-ubuntu-12-10-12-04/

Then I went into System Settings > Software Sources > Additional Drivers >
 and selected the Broadcom Wireless Driver and clicked on Apply Changes. It activated the driver and after the system restart, it started recognizing the Wireless connections. It's been heck of a challenge to make it work and now I am enjoying Ubuntu.

The next step was to configure Cisco VPN client and do a remote desktop to my work machine. The first step is to install the client:

http://handytutorial.com/install-cisco-vpn-client-in-ubuntu-12-04/

I actually had a .pcf file from my company. So after I installed the client, I went into the Network Manager > VPN Connections > Configure VPN > click on Import button and import the PCF file. Make the appropriate changes for the username, password etc. and save the VPN connection. 

Then the next step is Remote Desktop client. Ubuntu comes with Remmina Remote Desktop client which is the best for Ubuntu based on my research on the internet. Click on Dash Home on the top left side and type Remmina and you will get the application. Click on it.  It will open the remote desktop connection to your work machine. Adjust the resolution to your choice or match it with the work computer.

I think I have everything in Ubuntu now that I normally do on a windows machine. I will try to use Ubuntu instead of using Windows and see how the experience is.This is the only way to learn something. If we try to find a windows alternative, we will never learn. I plan to upgrade to Windows 8 during christmas holidays. So I will experience Ubuntu until then.

Do you have to be abusive and arrogant to be a successful leader?

Today I was reading an article in the fortune magazine where the authors who wrote books on Sam Walton and Steve Jobs were in conversation. The moderator asked them what are some of the things that are common between their subjects. They answered that both of them were very ambitious, very ruthless in their dealings (nobody wanted to negotiate with them), rejected other's ideas that they did not like very rudely. They had the razor sharp focus on building their company and feared that their successors would ruin the company they started. They never took no for an answer from anyone.

There was another article about Jeff Bezos who is the CEO of Amazon who was declared the 2012 businessman of the year. He shared some of the qualities of Sam and Steve. He is very ambitious, talented, visionary but also very competitive and would not take no for an answer. Outside of this magazine, I had read about Bill Gates and Larry Ellison (CEO of Oracle Corporation) and they also share a lot of things with Steve and Sam. All of them were a little bit rude to others.

Looking at all the case studies above, one could conclude that in order to be as successful as all of the above, one would have to be arrogant, ruthless and abusive. I don't think so. But I am yet to come across some who is as successful as the ones above and who is not arrogant and abusive. After the death of Steve Jobs, lot of people read his biography and analyzed him deeply so that they can emulate him. I hope people take away his passion, ambition, relentless pursuit for excellence and not his arrogance and abusive behavior.

Worst Case in life

During one of my introspective sessions, I thought of something that I feel I need to share with everyone because I feel it is a powerful idea. Most of the times when we have to make a decision whether to do something or not, our heart says something but we do want to think logically and evaluate the pros and cons of doing something or not doing something. Then based on the analysis, we choose the one that we think is the best decision considering the risk involved.

During these decision making sessions, we always ask ourselves: "what is the worse that will happen if we do this or don't do this?". And we make a list of all the things that can go wrong if we choose to take this path. If we see a lot of things in this list, we refrain from doing so even though our heart wants to do it. The mind does not let us do it because it is risky. In my opinion, there is only one worse thing that can happen to us in this life and that is death. As long as you are alive, you can always do something else and achieve the same success a little late or achieve a different kind of success that we never thought of. So my friends, as long as the list does not include death, there is no worse case. Follow your heart and do what you really want to do. I am not asking you to suspend logic and thinking but when you really want to do something and by doing it if you won't die, there is no reason for you to not do it. 

Catching up with myself

It has been a long time I have taken time to write down something. Life has been very busy. I have been running around not having time for anything. My son is already 15 months old. He is a real joy to be with. It still feels so surreal that I was partly responsible in creating a human being. As normal as it may sound  to others, I feel very surreal about it. If I have to think of the most proud thing that I did in this life, it has to be the birth of my son. I don't think anything else compares to this feat. I hope I get to see every inch of him growing up. I will do my best to expose him to everthing possible so that he grows up to be a balanced and broad-minded person.

Apart from my son, my MBA studies have been keeping me busy. So far it has been a great experience. My favorite course is organizational behavior. There is so much psychology in this course that I am enjoying learning every bit of it. This course has explained certain behaviors and helped me confirm some of my understandings of why people behave in a certain way. Now I am very careful in stereotyping people and forming perceptions about people.

Work has been the same. Luckily with the new manager and the new setup, I have a lot of freedom to do what I want and so far I have been successful in getting the work done on time with high quality. There are two more releases this year and if I can deliver with high quality and also deliver some nagging performance and production issues, I can be very proud of myself. Next year is going to be a challenge as we need to make the reform platform ready. I am looking forward to this challenge.

Of late, I have watched some videos on you tube called "Classic Legends with Javed Akhtar". I learned about some of my favorite artists: Raj Kapoor, RD Burman, Majrooh Sultanpuri and I also learned about Sahir Ludhianvi who I did not know much about but he turns out to be one of the greatest poet in our film industry. All these stories are so inspiring. They have achieved so much in their life which reminds me that life is short and I should not waste time in worrying about things that don't matter much  and do what I want to do. Before I know it, I will be standing at the end of the road for this life. I really want to take a pledge to follow my heart and not worry about anything and anyone.

Agneepath (2012)

The original Agneepath has been one of my favorite films. Amitabh's performance in that movie was phenomenal. Even his son Abhishek calls this his most favorite movie of his father. When I originally heard of the remake, I was skeptical and outrightly dismissive of this project. Given the notorious reputation of Bollywood with originality, I thought they would ripoff the old story and put it in a new bottle.

When I saw the remake, I was very impressed. This is the best remake made by Bollywood till date. They took the essence of the original movie and created a completely new movie with new characters. It was impossible to picture Hrithik playing those original scenes like Mr. Bachchan did. They created a normal man in Vijay's character and not THE Vijay Dinanath Chauhan who was larger than life. That made the character believable. Then they removed some silly characters from the original like the Mithun Chakravarthy's character, Tinnu Anand's character and those three silly villians. They kept the contest only between Vijay and Kancha. In the process, they created the new character of Rauf Lala which is brilliantly played by Rishi Kapoor. I thought that Rishi Kapoor was a good actor, but this role really pushes him to display all his acting prowess. The new character of Priyanka is also well written and well played by her.

I am surprised with the choice of Ajay-Atul as the music directors. They delivered so well just like Singham. I am surprised that Karen opted for these new music directors. In the end, I would like to give kudos to the writers of this movie for thinking out of the box and being brave enough to reject the unnecessary characters from the original and having the courage that these changes will still not disappoint the original Agneepath audience. Like how Krissh and Lage Raho Munna Bhai started the trend of sequels, I think Agneepath will surely continue making good remakes of the classics (the trend of remakes was started by Don). We don't mind seeing the remakes of the classics if you are able to think our of the box and take just the essence of the original.

Having talked so much about this movie, let me give you my stars: I give 4 ****/5 for this effort.