Review of Ektron CMS system and a analogy on the Windows operating system

For the past four weeks I have been working on Ektron CMS400 build 8.0.1.87. This is the copy that is currently available over the internet from the main Ektron site. As with all newly released patches there were a few bugs, some of them were pretty major ones.

Each time I was asked to do a demonstration of the product to prospective clients I was at the back of my mind crossing my fingers. This was especially so when a page started taking more than 30 seconds to load. Thankfully being extremely familiar with such occurrence during my work in the events and entertainment industry, I came prepared with a bagful of magician tricks. Yes, that is right! Direct the attention of the crowd to something else, while I got the w3svc service restarted. While I would leave the demonstration session with the clients quite happy ( and somewhat entertained) with the presentation, I normally have this foul taste in my mouth.

A few days ago, I finally managed to obtain a link to a prior version, the  Ektron CMS 400 8.00 SP1(Build 8.0.0.128) and had it installed. This time it worked like magic. This is truly interesting. In spite of the fact that the version 8.0.1.87 came with all the necessary bug fixes, version 8.0.0.128 without any of the required bug fixes seems to perform better and faster.

Thankfully Build 8.0.0.128 is the build one of our client is using hence I will have no need to worry about the existing bug issues in build 8.0.1.87. Thank God!

There is this chinese saying that seems to apply nicely to this scenario “A ginger that is older is still the spicier one”

Suddenly I occurred to me, inspite the fact the windows operating system has advanced to windows 2008, I am still working on Windows XP. In fact I have little or no inclinations to start working on a latter version unless some new technology I have to work with comes up that requires a latter version of the windows operating system. Even then, instead of messing up my current configuration, I would instead choose to create all the mess in a VPC (virtual pc), where the removal of all these mess is just but a click away.

taking a leap of faith

Johnson my cousin once told me during our drinking session that faith is a very important element in any business venture. You can always go about gathering as much information as you can, do as much research as you want, at the end of the day there will always exist a gap between what you already know and where you want to be.

Within a few days after taking a leap of faith and testing out this new methodology for my operations, the problem I am pondering over now has shifted from “where to look for quality human resource” to “how to more effectively collaborate and communicate with the available human resources“.

Already I am having some semi-concrete notions of how to segregate work and minimize the turn around time for each development project that comes through the pipeline.

The problem of work segregation inevitably lead me to recall one particular module I took during my days in the National University of Singapore. Every week I would attend a lecture pertaining to the subject called Discrete Mathematics and each time after the 2 hour lecture, I would feel totally drained out mentally.

One of the problems posed by the professor during one of these lectures was the issue of countability. There are infinite numbers between 0 to 10, but there are finite number of integers between 0 to 10.

Suppose given a range of problems, and each problem is metaphorically represented by the numbers that exist between 0 to 1, there will then be no end to the amount of solutions required to solve all the problems between 0 to 10.

Suppose metaphorically speaking if we are able to impose units in terms of integers on this range of problems between 0 to 10, we could effectively solve all the problems within this range by supplying in 11 solutions.

Out of the metaphorically realm and back into this real world, suppose we are able to take any programming question and segregate it into discrete units, in this instance we will thus be able to count the number of solutions we will potentially require to solve this programming question.

If the above assumption is true (which actually is if you take each unit to represent a use case scenario) and further assuming there are unlimited human resources available (or some what close to unlimited) then we will theoretically be able to engage each unit of human resource to one use case. Suppose there exist not dependencies between any use cases, this would mean that a programming problem of a 1000 use cases could in actual fact be solved within the period required to solve just one use case.

Theoretically speaking, this seems to be a sound and workable solution, however I am now still keeping my fingers crossed. Who knows what kind of exception might happen in this system which I have thus far envisioned in my mind and am slowly weaving into reality.

time to drop it

This afternoon when I stepped out of the train after 3 long sessions meeting with different clients, I felt somewhat weird. While the train was on its way heading towards Clementi, my subconscious mind spoke to me. It emitted this sense of danger, call it spider sense if you will. I started looking inwards, after a short while I managed to identify the source of this wrongness.

During this recent spate of hectic schedule, I was unconsciously blind siding myself by developing tunnel vision and I knew it could get potentially very dangerous. My brain due to the recent overload of external stimuli had kicked itself  into overdrive mode  (the general direction of my tunnel vision) . This is causing my recent inability to sleep. This inability to sleep further compounded my excessive brain activity. It was a vicious cycle. I was literally walking around like an highly animated zombie during day time in an unnatural state of prolonged hung over.

Pasha a few days ago while we were doing some discussions in the west coast park noted this drastic decrease in my recent span of attention and also this tunnel vision of mine.  I have to admit that is the truth. Information is just slipping off my mind before I could even register it to my memory. In fact there have been more than a few occasions, when I experienced serious time lag when attempting to retrieve from my brains facts and information that should have been at my finger tips at any single time (talk about trying to recall what your own name is, haha!). There are increasingly more occasions when I develop this tunnel vision and enter a state of fixation.

Jim while driving my back to his place to discuss about his website pointed out to me, the time lag I had registering “contest” as “contest” instead of “content” during our IMH presentation. Damned! I should have consulted a doctor while I was there at IMH today. 😛

Hmmm, actually the part about me bringing up the fact that they once had their Hawaiian themed annual dinner and dance at the Expo really got them disoriented. I play my little pranks sometimes, I just can’t help myself.

Back to this issue about my insomnia, I think I got Satheesh really annoyed with it today. Opps. sorry my friend.

Hmmmm… I need to find a solution to it soon.

A possibility to this is taking a long break. I mentioned to Jim while I was in the car that I was intending of taking a two months break in some cheap 3rd world countries with no internet or communications facilities and live under 100usd per month after these current projects of mine finished.

While Jim brought up a valid point about the possibility of me losing lots of business in the process. In this case, it is two against one.

Pasha advised that if I go on anymore like this, something irreparable will break.

Dad has been admonishing me with this statement over and over again recently. “Son, make money for yourself and not for the doctors. ”

Now that Alena is out of the picture and is nicely fending for herself, there is really no reason for my continued presence around on this tiny red dot. Ricky was joking just the other day about this.

“It was weird what happened to you while you started hanging around her two years ago. Now that she is out of the picture, I think you will be getting back to your normal self soon enough. It was even amazing you stayed with her for so long, two long years. It was breaking the guineas world record man. The only other girl that I know of that even got close was just 2 months and you didn’t even see that girl more than once a week. Haha ”

I think for my health, I should really start making provisions for this long over due break of mine. I need to get my spiritual center back.

Joomla 1.5 Cloud sourcing continued

My first experience with cloud sourcing proves to be quite positive. Within minutes of uploading my technical specifications of one particular Joomla 1.5 module to the net, I got multiple bids placed on this project. Bids can mainly be placed into a few groups of people.

  1. American!!! (surprisingly)
  2. Indians
  3. Chinese
  4. Eastern Europeans of Slavic origins

One thing I notice across the board within each  group is this

Americans try to hard sell their service attempting to by pass the use of the system in the process. The main thing that worries me is the fact I don’t really feel confident they actually read my technical specifications before they tried hard selling their service. Their rates are generally  higher than group 3 and 4.

Indians try their method of selling their services too. Interestingly their prices are generally the most expensive of the lot. These are mainly Indian companies and not individuals. They mainly talk about how great their companies are. In the process they bombard me with tons of information which I do not find relevant at all to my technical requirements. (why are they talking to me about asp.net, when Joomla is the only thing I am interested in at the moment?) Being somewhat impatient as I am when I cannot find anything pertaining to my technical specifications in their responses, I skipped through the whole lot of them and proceeded to the next bidders in line.

The Chinese are very emotional and enthusiastic, their prices are comparable to group 4. One thing that worried me is how them expressed themselves in English. They didn’t really sound very fluent in them. Nothing was addressed with regards to the details of my technical specifications.

Finally there are the Eastern Europeans. One important thing to note is the fact they don’t hard sell at all. In fact, one of them a Russian jumped the gun, by offering the lowest bid and started working on the problem anywayz. He did a very good job and I am very satisfied with his work.

taking the plunge into cloud sourcing

I have been considering a possibility for the longest time now but neither had the opportunity nor the inclination to test out its feasibility. However due to the recent resource constrains faced coupled with the fast turn around time required, I am thus left in need for alternatives to what is currently available at hand.

Today, just for the sake of testing out the feasibility of this method, I decided to take a simple stand alone use case from amongst one of my clients’ many requirements and throw it to the cloud to see what I get. Surprisingly response I received thus far were extremely positive. I managed to take a look at some of the portfolios made available by my would be suppliers and was pretty impressed by some of their work.

I will leave it to bake for a few more days while I get the design out from Talia (another great graphics designer which I believe I will enjoy working with in the long run) and have it approved by the client. Meanwhile, as I have discussed with Steven the other day, I should really start focusing my efforts on how to get my message across to the other end of the communications channel effectively to facilitate an international outsourcing operation.

Perhaps once the design is out and approved by the client, I will subscribe to this gotomeeting.com service that has been so frequently used by my counter parts in India. I believe whilst it will result in fixed monthly subscription bills, the cost should be marginal compared to the potential cost savings I will received in the long run.

Process innovation will create a strong barrier to entry for businesses in the 21st Century

Recently, I start pondering the chasm that exists between what the sales team promises the clients and what is technically feasible by the operations teams given the resource constrains. This is not a new question, but one that surfaces from time to time during my discussions with countless people working within IT companies.

The first time this question surfaced was more than 8 years ago when I was just in the midst of stepping into the IT service provider arena. The name is Patrick. He was then studying in NUS in the school of computing and had teamed up with a few of his ex-classmates from his polytechnic to start an IT company. One of his two chief sources of headaches then was the problem of the sales man over promising the client in order to clinch the deal and thereby leaving the technical team to deal with the issue of implementation. This issue coupled with the second of headache of excessive scope creeping by the client often lead to projects handled by his company falling from the profitable regions to the regions that are down right unprofitable. He soon closed down his IT Company. The last time I met him, he was working as an employee in one of the government run business entities. Whilst it may not be what he had intended prior to his graduation from NUS, he no longer had to deal with the problems he faced when he was venturing in a start up.

A few months back I managed to sit down with Mathew Noble who is currently working in SQL Star. SQL star is an IT company that specializes in Microsoft Sharepoint projects that are mid ranged in size, with projects normally ranging from $50,000 to $80,000. Interestingly what I managed to glean from Noble during our coffee session together was the fact that SQL Star has a very strict and well defined standard operating procedure set in place for its entire staff to adhere to. This has enabled SQL Star to maintain a project success rate of 95%, impressively higher than the market average success rate of 50% for projects this size.

He did share some of the procedures that his company’s sales staff and technical staff engage in prior to the pre-sales phase of and IT project. There are high levels of interaction between the sales staff and the technical staff during this phase of the project. The sales staff does commit huge amounts of effort in the pre-sales phase to work on potential clients to bring them from the phase of being potential prospects to the phase of closing. Often towards the latter phase of this process conflict occurs between the sales team and the technical staff team. It mainly occurs when the technical team does a feasibility check after having acquired feedback from the sales team the client expectations of the potential project. The sales staff having spent lots of effort to work on this prospect is eager to close the deal, whilst the technical team states clearly what is about to be promised by the sales staff to the potential client is not feasible. Often in this scenario, the sales team differs to the technical team, and the sales staff is thereafter delegated to work on another potential lead. SQL star thus manages to ensure quality and fast turn around time for their projects thereby profitability.

Once during a drinking session with a close friend of mine, he brought up the subject of dropping the use of the off shore development center he has been working closely with for close to the the past 10 years. The main reason was because he finally lost his patience with them. His complaints were mainly the fact that sales staff from this off-shore company attempts to promise everything within the job scope all the time and more often than not above and beyond what was asked for. Had this off-shore company delivered what was promised, this friend of mine would have been an extremely happy man. However such is usually not the case. What often happens thereafter is pro-longed delay to the delivery of the required scope and at times only 20% delivery of what was promised. My friend remains a very unsatisfied person thus.

My brother on occasions when we have the chance to hold discussions does reveal some of the knowledge he acquired while being in the same trade as I did. The main difference between him and me is the fact that he has always been working within a corporate environment where the technical team and the sales team are two different groups of people. One of the main things he sometimes mentioned during our discussions is the need to keep the sales team in check so as to avoid unnecessary and sometimes damaging over promises by the sales team to the clients. Such scenarios often lead to contingencies in the midst of the operating process.

Such a thought was also expressed by the current Chief Marketing Officer of Huelabs, an IT company that specializes in education software. The last time we met, this company was rapidly expanding overseas to Dubai, Australia and parts of Europe under the guidance of this CMO. He always states “a company will not die from starvation, but will definitely die from indigestion.”

This dichotomy in philosophy could not have shown itself better than these two recent projects I had the chance to come into contact with. The first project is one that is worth a few hundred times the salary of an average working adult in Singapore. The essence of what happened in this project could be surmised in this statement by the project manager from the client’s side “just between you and me and off the records, the sales team has been lying to me since day one. What was built does not even conform to what we wanted.”

While it is too harsh to call what the sales man did as lying, I would rather express it as failure by the sales man in the management of client expectations, thus leading to unrealistic expectations by the client.

The status of this project has since fell from the profitable range into the reds for the vendor IT Company.

The second project was a pretty challenging one as the client company had more financial muscles than the vendor IT Company. The truly fortunate situation that occurred is the fact the project manager had the strong support of the company director and that the both of them stepped in prior to the sales closing of the project. Attempts had been made by these two individuals to ensure expectations of both parties were realistic prior to project commencement. The project manager was deeply involved with communications with the end users of the client company. In the process, he managed to identify potential pitfalls and steered the project clear of them, thus far keeping the project within the profitable region.

Based on so many examples I have had the chance to come across it seems that while the end products remain almost similar in nature what truly ensures the successful completion of a project has really a lot to do with the process that runs within the existing company.

Thinking back now to the statement made by one of the consultants who conducted one of the courses I took back in NUS, it is very true indeed. Product innovations and process innovations both take place within an organization. Knowledge about a product can be easily diffused out of a company and quickly copied by a rival company who there after produces a rival product. Knowledge about a process remains large tacit and has difficulty in terms of adoption by rival companies. In that sense, in the 21st century arena where information flow is so rapid, the true edge that a business can create over its competitors is not in terms of product innovation but in terms of process innovation. This is in line with the factors that result in the dominance of UPS and Wal-mart in their own markets.

A reality check and the discovery of one huge gap

After hitting the recent brick wall repeatedly over and over again, I have this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I am doing something seriously wrong in the business processes I am handling at the moment (or to such an extent of being absolutely ignorant to the existance of them). The fact I have no idea where I did wrong was extremely frustrating. It is to such an extent I have been lying in bed staring at the ceiling brooding over this matter for countless nights. I will not allow for the possibilities of defeat in this mission of mine.

I came back home from my day outside feeling utterly drained from my committments at work. I unrolled my tatami and laid down attempting to catch a few winks. It was for a lost cause. I tossed & turned and finally gave up on sleeping altogether let the sleep debt accumulate, I will pay my debts at a later date.

I was once again unable to catch hold of Amba to discuss an upcoming project happening on Steven’s side. From the absence of a quotation from their side thus far, I deduced the method in which I choose to draft the requirements did not provide them the level of clarify they needed. I needed to find out the truth for myself.

Pasha arrived at my place. Since his laptop was out for repairs we had to postpone official matters to the day after. We left for dinner shortly and headed over to the beach for a talk. Pasha proved insightful and gave good advice in some matters pertaining to future expansion. In a sense I could always dig his mind for insights pertaining into such matters. I wonder if this quality of his was due to his PHD training or was it due to this quality of his that resulted in him finally finishing his PHD training.

He tried to provide encouragement to boost my morale. I give him thanks for his effort, however what I really needed was not a morale booster, I had no problems in that department. What I seriously needed was honest straight in your face criticism. I needed some waking up, I needed terribly to see the light. In that department though I found no answer, we parted shortly after and I continued brooding on this subject on my way back home.

If there was any consolation from this day, I had at least ensured that matters pertaining to Company A has been delegated to one capable of handling the part of the process it is currently in. All human resources required from now to the end of the entire process has been accounted for.

Company B is one of my worries. Prior to the initiation of the project, I had some reservations about the human resouce allocated to the task. 2 weeks into the commencement of the developement, it was proven beyond a doubt, my initial suspicions were not unfound. Alas, it is now imperative we arrange for another human resource to fulfill the requirements of that role.

Company C is experiencing complications that arose due to miscommunications isses. I am currently pondering on the methodology that will need to be put in place to ensure against such miscommunications in the future. It will be a painful process for all involved. In a sense, buidling a business model is like building a lego block, the integrity of each block must be ensured for the stability of the eventual architecture.

Company D, E and F are in already in the pipeline. I envision the need to enforce the same methodology used in Company C on these three as well to ensure the proper operations.

I arrived home at 2am in the morning, apparently brother was still awake. This night is one of those rare occasions when we talked about work. And then it happened. God is most kind indeed, it offers blessings to those ready for it. I finally got the harsh and yet honest criticism I have been searching high and low for over the past two weeks. From my brother. This is one of those good thing (or bad depending on the situation) about having a sibling who always extremely practical about work and skeptical when it comes to opportunities. You can always trust him to systemtically identify all potential pits falls that will likely exist in an idea, but never ever harbour even the most remote hope of him acting on an idea he comes across however even remotely plausible.

Apparently he has began formal training in that specific branch of knowledge which I have use for at the moment. Even better, I suddenly had the whole framework I so badly needed delivered to me on a sliver platter. Haha. god is kind to he who seeks! (ask and you shall recieve)

Once again, I shall do what I do best , jump right into the deepest end of the swimming pool and start learning how to swim or drown trying. Immersion course, boot camp, crash course whatever you call it.

One gold mine leads to another

After being somewhat annoyed at the low pay per click rates I was getting for my adsense affiliate advertising, I sat down and started seriously analyzing the advertisements being served there. Most of them were really cheapo advertising about stuff nobody in the right mind will be interested. Thus I held a spring cleaning session. Interestingly, my earning made a jump and became 3 times what it used to be. Wow! This is really cool stuff. Now I can really concentrate on creating more quality and relevant content and not worry about junk served by advertisers via Google Adsense.

My goal for this year is to be able to generate passive income via online methods that will be able to cover up to at least 50% of my daily expenses. Once I have achieved this, I will attempt to scale up my operations to cover up to 100% of my daily expenses, all these at 0% increase in the percentage of time I spend per day to maintain my business model.

Fingers crossed, if all goes well, I should not need to worry about cashflow for the next years, but really start looking at places where I can park my funds to get some really serious capital gains. Ironically, I am enthusiastically waiting for the next serious worldwide economic depression to come around the corner.

Suddenly I remembered the time I was surfing off the Australian Gold Coast. Constantly I would pass the time away chatting with the folks on the surf board right next to me while waiting for the right wave to come. Seems like this is like surfing all over again. Haha

hilarious nonsense and the failure to be classified

It was just past midnight and I was sitting outside club Attica drinking from my bottle of Heineken.

Suddenly, from where abouts I have no idea of, I  popped this question to those two sitting right beside me “have you ever made a green shooting star? ”

They looked at me totally puzzled.

“Green shooting star?”

“Oh Yes! green shooting star” I insisted. Laughing away maniacly at myself.

“What the hell is that?”

“Alrite I am gonna show you later” I replied in my drunken stupor.

Nash soon walked off with looking for chics. His was quite a profitable venture too, he soon brought back two of them. I was by then on the verge of finishing my bottle of heineken.

I finished the last sip from my bottle of heineken, I once again popped the question but this time to the two new comers.

“Have you ever saw a green shooting stars? ”

“What?” they responded puzzled once again.

“Alrite let me show you”

I stood up then and flung the green empty bottle of heinken across to the far side of the river.

“Now you see green shooting stars. Hahahaha!” I burst out laughing incapable of controlling my mirth.

While Nash and this other dude with a cool looking goatie laughed along. Those two new comers looked at me in the weirdest way possible then and walked off.

“Sigh. Some jokes are just too hard to get” I exclaimed and kept laughed away oblivious to everything around me.

Interestingly, this is not the first time. We have this inherent urge within us to classify everything. In a sense, such an act provides us with a false sense of comfort and security in this otherwise anarchical reality of ours. The same thing goes too with our dealings with other individuals whom we see for the first time.

It is generally true for us to harbour prejudices towards a stranger whom we met for the first time. And this prejudice is often based on something external and superficial such as looks, hair style, height, built, race, clothing accessories. It is just amazing how fast we form this prejudice. Our synapses just forms it within the wink of an eye and it suddenly becomes our overriding reality without any concious decision making on our part. This just goes on to show how suggestible we truly are as humans.

On the other side of the coin, take an instance whereby your prejudiced is immediatlely shattered by a strongly contradictory evidence that shortly presents this prejudice is formed. That really leaves you with two options. The first is to simply ignore the new evidences available and go about the current reality that you have already created for yourself. The second is throw what you think you knew of the world out of the window and relearn everything from scratch.

The defining difference between people who choose the second option over the first option, is their level of openness to change. In some literature, this is one defined as one of the main characteristics of a person live a happy and carefree life despite the fact that 2012 and the end of the world might be coming to theaters near you. Haha!

Drunken rambling

In this drunken state of mind where logic fails, I hereby state this unqualified statement that “there comes a point in time in the life of man when the thrill of acquiring wealth, fame and power far surpasses the thrill which comes with the successful pursuit of women.”

Should a man upon having reached this stage in life have found a woman for himself which he could deem as a soul mate, he can indeed be considered a fortunate man.

A man otherwise is a man who have to eventually accept the fact of his aloneness. Try as he might, there will always exist this inconquerable gap between him and his mate to be. As such mate will never be deemed to be a soul mate but rather a mate of convenience.