Configure DLink Wireless Router with BSNL Broadband

Settings :

• DLink Router DHCP Disabled.
• DLink Router allocated a static IP address (192.168.1.10)
• SmartAX MT882 allocated a static IP address (192.168.1.1)
• SmartAX MT882 configured and working. To ensure this is true, connect directly to the MT882 and confirm that you can browse the net.
• DLink Router connected to MT882 from one of the LAN ports. Not WAN port.

Above statement implies that the WAN settings on the DLink router are inapplicable and immaterial. Tested this with multiple setting to ensure that this was the case.

• All clients are DHCP enabled.
• Huwaei SmartAX MT882 configured to be DHCP server, with an address range from 192.168.1.100 to 192.168.1.150.

Note : The above line ensures that there is no conflict with the address of the DLink Router.

The two line items above the ‘NOTE’ are not critical. You could manually allocate IP addresses to the computers you plan to connect. Just ensure that the DLink Router has a unique IP address on the LAN.
I have a problem with lack of flexibility :)

Works like a breeze, after 12 hours to plodding to figure all this out, but thats a limitation on my part, not the hardware :)

Let me know if you get to this piece and it worked for you.
Happy browsing.

Enabling GPRS ( BSNL ) on a Nokia 3500

Took me 3 months (plus) to figure out how to enabling the GPRS on my phone.

Compliments to my perseverance apart, I thought it may help a few other folks who have similar issues.

The two sites which helped me figure things out are :

Writings of a Kerala Geek
and
Hartti Suomela’s Forum Nokia Blog

Now that due credit has been given, I herewith add a brief summary of how to get BSNL GPRS to work.

• Enable GPRS : Send a SMS to 53733 with the text GPRS49 (for limited data throughput) or GPRS199 (for unlimited data throughput).
• Get Settings : Send a SMS to 8355 with the text Nokia 6500 (yup, 6500 – BSNL does not know about the 3500, or so it would seem). You will get a stream of ’setting’ SMS’s. Save these to the phone.
• Getting it working : Go to Menu->Settings->Config Settings. Default configuration settings should be set to : bsnl_internet. Select “Activate Default in all Applications”, as well.
  From here you should be browse the internet.
• Enable packet data : Menu->Settings->Connectivity->Packet data. Packet Data Connection should be set to ‘Always Online’. You can change it later to ‘As Required’ once things are working smoothly, and you need some entertainment.
  “Active Access Point” should be set to BSNL_GPRS . The actual packet data access point is “http://gprssouth.cellone.in”.

Thats it : You should be able to browse the net and use packet-data applications.

BTW, do remember to restart your phone, after making these changes. Sometimes this is the key step to getting things working :)
Hope this helps.

Why working saturday’s is not the answer..

Reflections on an article in the TOI, about getting techie to work extra hours to offset the rise of the rupee :

As the value of the rupee against the dollar drops, there are frantic efforts to squeeze more work out of the employees.
Sqeezeis the right and the wrong word. Right in terms of the approach taken by management, wrong in terms of the end result.

It would be an understatement to say that most of the software organisations are still operating on concepts developed during the industrial revolution. The assembly-line era ideas emphasize the need for physical presence to obtain higher productivity.

We specially the IT organisations have migrated into the ‘think’ mode for productivity. It is only when a person is in a relaxed and reflective mode that great breakthroughs in idea’s and creative thought are achieved. What was Newton doing when he realized the Laws of Gravity. He was sitting under an apple tree. What was Archimedes doing when he screamed ‘Eureka’? Lolling in a bath-tub.

The following three points are essential to achieve higher productivity:

First, we just have to improve the caliber of the front-line managers. Specially in India, most people migrate into management based on their performance as technical contributors. There is a need to train these managers in the basic soft skills essential to front line managers. The technical capability essential to implementing a solution is at a marked contrast to the genteel skill of getting things done.

Secondly, the implement of a metric system. If you do not have some measures – on what basis can you evaluate your teams performance. Start small in terms of the no. of parameters being measured. The biggest problem that software teams face is in the need to show dramatic results. If there is no measure as of date, rest assured, the noise in your project process is going to be large. Just getting to know the noise to signal ratio is itself an achievement.

Third, be aware of the right triggers to motivate the team. A well motivated team can do wonders. The primary requisite for a well motivated team is clear performance measures and unambiguous direction. Most managers fail in this. The annual performance appraisal is the most dreaded event of the year. For the manager as well as the team member. It is necessary to induct the right processes to ensure that this is a collaboration activity which increases synergy.

This would be a good start. If the employee knows what he has to aim for, and how his performance is measured, the rest is just a matter of treating him decent and removing the myriad of obstacles from his way.

I have personally found that it was more difficult to keep engineers out of the office, rather than in it. So there is something fundamentally wrong if there is a need to ask an software engineer to come into work.

The Process of getting back.

On the transition from instant gratification to phased deliveries :)

Estimation

The other day while talking to a new project team, I asked a simple question.
“How many defects (ok, critical defects) do you estimate in this project?”

The blank stares effectively told me that I was coming from another profession. After all we do not quantify such things in the software industry. Reality check, dude! You would be lucky if you got an answer to that question in the past tense.

OK, let’s try the corollary question. In this project, how much time do you expect to spend on resolving defects? Before release and/or after release?
There is a high probability that I get some kind of an answer here. It does not matter, if you are not the paying customer, how accurate this answer is.

So a certain amount of time is estimated for defect fixing; but there is no quantitative justification. Whether you have 20 defects or 2000 they all got to be resolved in the allocated time……or as is most usually the case…the project takes the stake holders for a ride!

There is a lot of talk of how difficult estimation is for a software project. This statement holds whether the organization is doing the 1st project of its kind or the 100th. But then we are a unique industry. We are the only industry (that I know of, and my knowledge of non-software industries is limited) which does appraisals and increments for the individuals without quantifiable data. A salesman is usually rewarded based on meeting specific, quantified, targets….or he is fired. So is a production manager, so is a, never mind…
Only in the software industry are increments given not for quantified deliverables, but for trying or better still perceptions of competence. “Oh, its OK the project was delayed by 3 months. Its not your problem that you only introduced 342 bugs. These things hapoen. So you get a 300% raise. Thank you for staying with us and not looking for another job.

There is only one thing wrong with a project plan which is not adhered it. Just one small thing. It was badly planned. But why do we repeat the same mistakes over and over again? Must be something to do with the fact that we are ‘intellegent workers’.

How many project managers take the effort to track actual time against estimated time? Not many.
But this, I now realize, has to be tracked. You estimate that a particular module will take 1 week = 8 * 5 = 40 man hours to complete. It takes 1 week and 1 day = 40 + 8 man hours. (OK, you are still on ‘schedule’ in terms of time, because the said engineer came in over the weekend to complete the assignment.). Now the reality is that your estimate is already off by (48 X 100) / 40 = 19.2 %; either for a particular resource or for the project as a whole. In 1 week, if you are awake to the reality, you need to raise a red flag regards a change in schedule.
I make the humble assumption here that a deviation of ~20% is worth a mention. Actually, since deviations tend to grow exponentially, the project is more than 20% off schedule.

If I were to ask another question of the said project manager – Of all the activities on the project plan, which activities are such that you may NOT need to do them? By this question, I am sure the above project manager is convinced that I am talking to the wrong person – I should be talking to a shrink!

Assume the assumption is correct that each and every activity will have to be done for the project to be completed. This implies that there is no scope for any deviation in the project schedule. No slack what so ever in the project. But deviations are what ‘Risk Estimation’ is all about. For example, if the third party codec binaries do not work as expected then the additional work to be done is … Does this ever show up in a project plan ?– sorry project estimate. Hardly ever!!

So even though everyone talks of risks and the criticality of monitoring them, it rarely ever percolates down to the mpp level. That being the case, it does not make rational sense to expect the estimate to be adhered to.

Another question: What is the basis for all these task estimates on a project? The answer is usually experience. And how many projects have you handled? And how many of these were successful, by any measure of success? Experience is great, but why can’t we have quantified data to back up this so called experience. Without the data, its just the same 1 project experience repeated 10 times. With data collected on every project executed, the experience really matures and judgment ripens.

For any organization there is nothing better than past performance to guide future execution. This is the basic thumb rule used in most manufacturing organizations. But then these organizations have the fortune to employ blue collar workers. Paucity of retrievable past experience is a forte of the ‘intelligent worker’, software community.

We just have to get over the inertia of not collecting accurate data on projects executed. It is a much better and accurate yardstick for improving estimation than function point analysis!

We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence then is not an act but a habit.
– Aristotle

A First-time Manager’s aids

My friend is a training manager at a textile company. She was narrating a comment made by one of the participants of her program. “Mam, this program is really very good. We should have such programs at least once in 2 to 3 years.”
Further reflection did not make it as amusing as I initially thought the statement to be.

In the textile industry, there is hardly any change. You do not hop jobs every 2/3 years or less. There are hardly any jobs to hop to. The trend is to stick with the bird in hand and hope it does not fly off into the bushes. This is so in contrast to the software industry. The gargantuan appetite for more and more manpower, practically forces a high turnover. Worse still it makes managers out of babes. Just imagine telling a software engineer that he was going to stay a software engineer for the next 6 years, before there was even a chance of him being considered for a promotion?

The flip side of the coin is that we have people who have hardly grasped the technical aspects of their trade suddenly thrust with the additional responsibilities of managing equally naive resources. And they are expected to deliver. What amazes me is not that software projects are late, but that they are ever delivered at all.

The myth that most managers in the IT industry have is that they are working with leading edge technology. The moment you take on the mantel (or have it thrust upon you) of a manager, you are no more working with technology. You work with people. Period. Sadly, this is rarely if ever pointed out to the incumbent. He still continues to believe that this performance is measured by his technical competence.

Here are some points I would impart to new managers, in the fond hope……
After all, a bad immediate manager is the primary cause of almost all attrition.

 Keep your hands off the bacon : You are only as effective as your team. Your core function is to delegate work and help your team members do it. If you make the fatal mistake of delegating technical work to yourself, you are done for. You tend to loose perspective. You start developing tunnel vision. Good to have as an developer / designer. Never good as a manager.

 Managing people : Don’t gripe about a person having a bad attitude. It won’t hold up in court (so to speak). What you can deal with is behavior. The earlier you learn to categorize people, appreciate their temperaments and moods the better off you will be. Don’t allocate work by rote. Take the effort to understand what are the strengths and weaknesses of your team. Who is a good debugger ? Who is a meticulous? Who cannot handle stress too well? Who on your team has time constraints? You need to know this upfront. Because your work allocation is based on this.

 Review Work Allocation : Its not about work allocation, its about follow-up. You are expected to know better! So when a developer does not deliver, there is no point finger pointing. Delegation is only the first step, the critical second step is review. Multiple reviews. Reviews are checkpoints at which you check to see that the person doing the work has understood your expectations correctly and is on track to deliver by the committed date. If you are surprised on delivery day, its nobody’s fault but yours.

 Meetings : Learn to conduct meetings well. Attend courses, if you have to. But there are different meetings, and each has to be handled differently. The technical brainstorming is not the same as the product prioritization. Status presentations are in a league by themselves.

 Managing Conflict : It is a skill, not a modus operandi. Learn it and it will show you multiple for any given situation.

 Roles and Responsibilities : Above all else, do not miss out on this one. You need to have clearly documented roles and responsibilities for each of your team members. Read documented. This, coupled with actual work done on the projects is going to be the basis of your appraisal and feedback loop. It does not pay to slack off on this one, trust me, I have learned this the hard way,

Jai Hind?

As is obvious enough the internet makes communication and correspondence just a mouse click away. I do believe the old adage of ‘think twice before you speak’ would work equally well in the new world – ‘think twice before you click’.

Yesterday I got a mail forwarded with patriotic fervor. It showed a picture of an Indian lady with the India flag near her feet. The mail urged me to forward the attached pictures as an expression of my strong patriotic objections to such a blatant disregard for my country’s icon.

On reflection, the following points come to mind

§ It says very little of a person’s maturity and character IF they were to belittle the flag of any nation. That being the case, why give such a person free publicity by forwarding these pictures to all the unsuspecting folks on your mailing list.

§ I believe that these ‘put down’ mails just serve one purpose. They make the sender feel superior. Without any effort it helps massage our ego. Sadly it also raises passions against an individual / group – and at times it is such small acts which hold the germs of violence and unrest. Communal or otherwise.

§ So what if some one stamps on my national flag. First and foremost we proclaim to be the biggest democracy in the world. Democracy is not easy. It gives everyone the right to freedom of expression and freedom of action. I have the right to live and love my country (and the national flag as a representation of it). Equally, someone has the right to use it as a foot-mat. Democracy really needs maturity and the ability to ignore the non-essential; to focus on the highest good.

§ Why do we feel the need to express our patriotic passion by bringing to the fore instances where someone does not show adequate respect for our country? Being patriotic is a much bigger responsibility than just condemning the anti-national act of some individual. Does are being patriotic really make us behave as better citizens? Take simple day to day activities, such as obeying traffic rules. Standing in line for a taxi/auto at the railway station as an expression of belief in the system. Not subverting the system by paying a non-complying auto-driver extra just to satiate our immediate needs. Does being patriotic stop us from dropping garbage and refuse out of a moving car /bus/train? Just because our feelings are so strong that we cannot bear to see this land we love be unclean. Sadly, hardly ever does our patriotism extend that far. Then the question ‘Is our patriotism even worthy of the name’?

Maybe I over react, but what does it take to shift to a more positive mode of communication. Why can’t we have narrations which bespeak ideals of nationalistic pride and of the human race? Is it that difficult?

What is the true mark of patriotism? I believe it’s the everyday acts which help make this country a better place than it was yesterday. I believe it’s expressed in a focus on self improvement. In always comparing ourselves to someone whose behavior is better than mine, rather than one I can ridicule.

It’s not easy, and we have a very long way to go. Of only one thing I am certain, we need to start today.

Jai Hind.

Ethics of Protest

The Principal of a School decides that it is necessary for the teachers to be dressed in formal clothes, as a way of setting an example to the students.

Gentlemen will be expected to wear a tie.

Given the hot tropical climate of Bangalore, this does not really go down too well with the teachers. At least one of them decides to lodge a protest. To rebel.

The modus operandi is to wear a tie with the top shirt button undone, a half sleeve shirt and sandals. It looks rather absurd and completely defeats the purpose.

I too am to blame. Some time ago, as a senior employee of an organization, I too felt that it was OK to bend the rules, not conform to norms or otherwise make my non-acceptance of absurd rules known. Today, after some reflection, I do not believe that it is appropriate to do so. Not with this modus operandi.

Most probably the teacher did not concur with the Principals decision on formal attire. Granted he has the right to differ. Where the line has to be drawn, is in how the protest was logged. In my view, by making a protest in the way he did, the teacher did a lot more harm and hardly any good.

When we sign on to work in a particular organization, especially at senior or influential levels (and which level is not senior or influential enough?), there are certain implicit expectations which should not be violated or ignored. It is necessary to understand that we are ethically and morally bound to comply with the rules of the organization. The only assumption I make here that the individual has not been coerced into working for the organization.

Back to our example. Foremost, the teacher communicated the message that it was OK to flaunt the rules of the school. Heck, if it’s acceptable for a teacher to flaunt the regulations or worse still ridicule them, then why cant the students. This message which a child picks up in his early years has an impact through the rest of the child’s life. Today it may be OK to flaunt the school rules. Tomorrow those of a college and day after those of society.

I don’t think I am exaggerating the point. I sincerely believe that teachers are one of the first role models that a student has. A teacher capable of teaching his subject well has an added responsibility. This ability gives the teacher a higher than average standing with the students. So every act, every deed and every nuance is monitored and picked up and a guideline for future behavior.

It is so much harder to protest without rebellion. It requires much more discipline to keep within the bounds of regulations and then try to change the regulations. That is no easy task. Using this as a guideline I was wondering what possible form that the protest could take.

First the regulations would have to be complied with. The proper attire would have to be worn. Something that would most certainly be uncomfortable on a warm tropical day. Then what?

I guess initially it would consist of appealing to the principle, citing the daily temperature as a valid reason for doing away with the rule. Maybe even suggesting that the rule be modified to semi-formal. Or office casual.

It would be even more helpful if he was able to persuade other teachers to join in the protest (but then, maybe they do not think so strongly about the matter).

If the principal does not relent then the next option would be to go above the principal and write to the school board, questioning the validity of the principal’s demands.

Now here is where things become interesting. Is the issue under consideration worth it? Worth taking on the wrath of someone who has more authority than you do? Is it worth staking your future? These are question’s the concerned individual has to answer.

From what I can perceive today, it takes a lot many mature characteristics to protest while adhering to the ethical and explicit guidelines of the system. It requires good presentation and negotiating skills to strongly justify your argument. It takes a very level head to decide which battles are worth fighting and otherwise. It takes perseverance to follow through, if the skirmish turns into a long drawn out war. In other words it takes a strong character to make a stand and feel strongly enough about it to push it through.

Wait a sec, throwing in the towel is a definite option at all times.

I guess all in all, its so much easier to rebel against the system without bothering too much about the ethics and impact of your protest, as long as it makes you a hero for a day.

That said, why condemn the stone-throwing, bandh-calling minions of society. After all they have not even had the luxury of going to school. So why ask them to fret over the ethics of working with in the system.

When is it appropriate to break the Law ?

The advert  shows a cop chasing a defaulter at breakneck speed. And finally letting off the defaulter as he was breaking the law for a humanitarian cause. To donate blood to a needy child. Since its been playing practically continuously for the last few days it’s been playing on my mind more than a bit.

 

I am trying to figure out the key message that the add is trying to push?

I guess, it leaves a good feeling with anybody who views it, after all that’s what its commercial objective is. But my concern is with – What message does it convey to the masses, towards whom (I assume) its directed?

 

The bottom line appears to be, IT IS OK to break the law for an appropriate cause. Yeah, right. Let’s change the advertisement a bit. This phantom rider is zipping towards the cop; the cop sees him jump a RED light and smash into a kindergarten child and his grandfather walking across the road on a zebra crossing. The child is crippled for life and the grandfather is killed on the spot.

 

Now the rest of the add plays itself out as on TV. And pauses at the point where the urgent request for blood donation is made.

 

This is followed by the question : Now what is the course of action the cop is suppose to take ?