Nithin Kamath’s Weblog

Lessons from Project Management: 101 ways to organize your life
http://www.projectmanagementsource.com/
Project Management (and life) Wisdom straight from the mouths of the horses – oops, I mean project managers:
Leadership
Keep your approach friendly: People are not looking to make friends at work, but refraining from an aggressive approach towards your employees is a good idea. The whip - your - team - into - submission approach worked with the “Pyramids of Giza” project – but it is outdated now….

I-schools to be the next big thing
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1914044.cms
I-schools, or information schools, are tipped to be the next big thing in the knowledge economy, after B-schools. The logic behind it is that the country, which is witnessing an industrial revolution of sorts, is in need of information managers.
India has made a quick plunge into the movement and is getting its first I-school — International School of Information Management (ISIM) at the University of Mysore. It will train students in all aspect of information handling — internet technology, data mining and data warehousing, natural language processing, project planning, scheduling and management, information management and security.

Rules Are No Obstacles for Committed People
http://www.stevepavlina.com/
A good reading about the life of the person named Steve, who writes the above blog. He begins the article from the time when he was 7 years old and tells us how he has always been committed to whatever he wanted to do. How this has helped him and brought success.

18 Ways to Stay Focused at Work
http://www.davecheong.com/
Over the years I have worked at many client sites and a variety of office layouts. On one project in particular, we had as many as 80 people in a project team, seated via an open plan arrangement. It was pretty difficult trying to stay focused in an environment like this. These days, the projects I’m on are typically smaller, but there are still a number of distractions which frequently interrupt my working groove. So what are some of the things we can do to minimise such interruptions and distractions?

Software Carpentry Course…
http://www.swc.scipy.org/
Many scientists and engineers spend much of their lives writing, debugging, and maintaining software, but only a handful have ever been taught how to do this effectively: after a couple of introductory courses, they are left to rediscover (or reinvent) the rest of programming on their own. The result? Most spend far too much time wrestling with software, instead of doing research, but have no idea how reliable or efficient their programs are.

This site presents an intensive course on basic software development practices for scientists and engineers. Its aim is not to turn biochemists and mechanical engineers into computer scientists; instead, it introduces them to the 20% of modern software engineering that will satisfy 80% of their needs.

All of the course material is open source: it may be used freely by anyone for educational or commercial purposes, and research groups in academia and industry are actively encouraged to give it a try. The source is available via Subversion from http://swc.scipy.org/svn/swc; if you would like to contribute material, please contact the project lead, Greg Wilson.

Kerala logs Microsoft out
M SARITA VARMA, Financial Times - 26 August.
After the cola ban, it is now the turn of Microsoft to log out of Kerala. Children in 12,500 high schools in the state, India’s most literate, will not be taught Windows. Instead, instructors are lining up Linux for them. This is because Kerala has chalked out a plan for migrating its high school students to free software platforms in three years.

The India Online 2006 report, prepared by Juxt Consult is out and, here are some of interesting points which the report makes:

• Only 60% users have English as their preferred language. Rest prefer Indian language websites. 40% visit Indian language websites.
• Only 50% users come from metros, 22% come from Urban uptowns, 15% from emerging towns and 13% from other towns.
• The proportion of women net users is now has increased from 15% to 26%.
• checking blogs has become second most preferred online activity after e-mailing.
• 51% Indian users come from low-middle class with less than 10k monthly income.

I am mainly surprised by the last two points, that checking blogs is the second most preferred online activity, strange considering not many people whom i know check blogs regularly, but you know it depends on the awareness about technology that matters, obviously people who use internet more find interesting sites and blogs and visit it.

On the other hand the last point mentioned truly shows how the scenario is changing very fast, now almost everyone uses internet. Cost is no longer a barrier, i still remember the days when internet browsing was a real costly affair and was too slow. Now the rates have come down and the speeds have increased leaps and bounds when you consider what providers offer. Things change pretty fast huh! or is it that I am getting old really fast!!! I hope it is not the latter.

Source: thehoot.org