Strength lies not in Defence but in Attack

Blink - The power of thinking without thinking

2010-08-05T03:00:00.000-07:00

We make decisions in every single moment we live. Some decisions are trivial and others are serious enough that we need to spend considerable time and effort for information accumulation and reasoning. However, Malcolm Gladwell in his bestselling book “Blink”, suggests that despite the complexity and the consequences of decisions they can be made rapidly and automatically from little information and reasoning.

Blink is about making decisions in blink of an eye. First Malcolm convinces the reader that decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately. Then he advices on when should we trust our instincts and when should we be wary of them. Then he suggests that our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled.

The main technique brain uses in making very quick judgments is as Malcolm defined is “thin slicing”. It refers to the ability of our unconsciousness to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience. The part of the brain that leaps to quick conclusions is called the adaptive unconscious.

What are rapid judgments?

Rapid judgments are taking only two seconds to be made. They are different from intuition which are based on emotions and do not seem entirely rational. Rapid or snap judgments are entirely rational but they can be made in very short time. As we are not aware that we are reasoning when we make such judgments Malcolm calls this “thinking without thinking”. Thus the Blink is a book which teaches us the power of thinking without thinking.

While reading Blink I always remember a snap judgment I made few years back. I was driving faster on a rainy day and the road was little slippery. I almost forgot the gap which I need to maintain with the vehicle in front. The passenger bus running in front was stopped suddenly and I immediately push the break paddle. However, within a second I realized that there is a high chance that my car is not going to stop before collapsing into the bus. Clearly there were two choices, pushing the break paddle furthest and hope that the car will manage to stop without clashing or turn the car away from the bus. If I turn left the car will clash into the pavement and can manage the situation with minor damages to the car. It was a two lane road and if I turn right car will go into the opposite lane and if any vehicle comes in the opposite direction the outcome can be very serious. However, I turned right and there were no vehicles on the other lane. I was not clear whether I have look at the other lane and checked whether there are no vehicles. It is quite clear that certain level of reasoning happened but rapid nature of the decision do not qualify for a post analysis of the situation. Malcolm says “If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments.”. This mysterious nature of snap judgments can be understood by considering several examples of snap judgments.

Malcolm describes several good examples for snap judgments. The story of Getty Kouros is about a statue brought to a museum in California. The museum brought the statue after analyzing it for months and very confident that the statue is an original. However, several experts in Greek sculpture later examined the status and most of them within few seconds were able to conclude that the statue is a fake. However, they couldn’t able to provide any good reasoning for their judgments.

In another example, a group of firefighters entered into a building with fire. They suspected that the fire is in the kitchen and open their hoses. In a moment one person realized that there is something unusual and call the team to get out of the house. Few moments after them came out the floor was collapsed. The fire was in the basement. The person who realized that something unusual is there did not have any explanation to why he ordered others to exit the place.

Thin slicing

Thin slicing is a technique where the brain divides an event or experience into very small pieces and identifies patterns in those small pieces of experience. A good example is selecting a book to read from a library. When selecting a book, most of us do not need to read more than couple of sentences to judge what sort of book it is. Just by considering the size of the book, the cover, the length of the sentences, and the language use we can decide whether it is a type of book that we read. This sort of a short series of quick reasoning is what thing slicing is about.

Malcolm shares a very interesting story about university lecturers. In a study carried out by a university a group of students were selected for evaluate their teachers before they started a semester. Even before they see the teachers they were shown a five second video clip of each teacher and asked to evaluate their teaching ability. Then they were asked to do the same evaluation at the end of the semester where they had enough exposure to the teachers. The study found that the accuracy of the initial evaluation is very high. Thus Malcolm suggests that thin slicing is what we do in making snap judgments and argue that there is nothing wrong in utilizing snap judgment as a main tool in our decision making.

In real life situations we can use thin slicing to a greater extend. Malcolm suggests “Next time you meet a doctor, and you sit down in his office and he starts to talk, if you have the sense that he isn't listening to you, that he's talking down to you, and that he isn't treating you with respect, listen to that feeling. You have thin-sliced him and found him wanting.”.

A similar technique has been used by a researcher in predicting divorces. He has developed the skills in thin slicing where he can predict the probability of a couple to be still married after 15 years just by listening to an ordinary conversation between the partners. The accuracy of his judgments was as high as 95%. Another example which is very similar to this is tracking German Morse code operators in World War II. By identifying the patterns of communication the Allies intelligence officers were able to track the position of the armies by tracking the Morse code operators. Even though they couldn’t recognize the messages been transmitted, they were able to detect which operator is sending the messages. Thus the can track the operators and by that they track the army units. Blink says “If you can measure contempt, then all of a sudden you don't need to know every detail of the couple’s relationship… Predicting divorce, like tracking Morse code operators, is pattern recognition.”).

How can we go wrong

Although the snap judgment is a very versatile technique in decision making, they are not always correct. Because of various reasons the rapid judgments can go wrong. However, in most of such cases rapid judgments are taken because the decisions are to be taken rapidly. Thus deliberate thinking exercise is not an alternative for snap judgment.

Stereotyping is one of the main hurdles for making snap judgments. Once of the good examples from the book is about car sellers. The initial offerings made by them for the customers are very different from the race and the gender of the customer. White women told a slightly high price than white men and black men told very high prices compared to white men. A success of a particular salesman was solely due to the fact that he never bias to race and gender. He was able to sell very high number of vehicles than an average salesman. The book further emphasizes “Treat every customer exactly the same because he's aware of just how dangerous snap judgments are when it comes to race and sex and appearance.”.

Another barrier for successful snap judgment is information overload. This has explained using a story about diagnosing heat attacks in a hospital in Chicago. Doctors believe it is better to collect as much as information possible in decision making. However, a researcher named Goldman developed an algorithm for triage chest pain patients. Doctors were advised to gather less information on their patients and ignore the details. This allowed the hospital to become a well-recognized place in diagnosing chest pain. Blink says “And if you are given too many choices, if you are forced to consider much more than your unconscious is comfortable with, you get paralyzed. Snap judgments can be made in a snap because they are frugal, and we want to protect our snap judgments, we have to take steps to protect that frugality.”).

Another distortion for snap judgment is priming. Priming effect is the effect of a stimulus to a subsequent stimulus. A person who treated with politeness will be behaving in a different way than a person who treated in a strange way. Blink advices “Once you become conscious of being primed, of course, the priming doesn’t work.”

How to make use of Blink

Malcom says “When we talk about analytic versus intuitive decision making, neither is good or bad”. Thus identifying when to make rapid judgments and when not to make them is the key factor for success in Blink type rapid decision making. We can be trained in rapid decision making by making ourselves conscious about such decisions made by us in day to day life.

The Influence of Culture on Leadership Development

2010-06-08T00:03:00.001-07:00

Introduction

With the expansion of the global economy, companies are forced to go global in order to become success. All the functions of organizations are increasingly demanding a global touch. Companies need to sell globally, hire globally, and they need to compete globally. In order to be successful in the global competition, tomorrow’s global enterprise need to understand and operate in different cultures. They need to understand how different cultures affect the core management functions. The purpose of this report is to critically analyze how the national culture influences the leadership development.

This discussion is based on several well accepted models in management. First one is the five dimensional model of culture by Geert Hofstede (2001). Hofstede identified five cultural dimensions that can be used to visualize the differences in culture between different countries and regions. We will discuss how the differences in each cultural dimension can lead to the development of different leadership traits in people. Next, we will use the traits to identify the leadership style associated with them. We will use three major leadership styles introduced by Kurt Lewin et al (1939), Authoritarian Leadership, Participative Leadership, and Laissez-Faire Leadership. Finally, we will see how this argument can be justified using a case study where several countries namely, Sri Lanka, Norway, Brazil, United States, Japan, and Germany compared for their culture and leadership style.

Fig 1: Cultures Influences on Leadership Style

Hofstede’s five dimensional Model

Hofstede defined 5 dimensions of culture and with them we can describe a particular culture and also can compare and contrast different cultures. They can be summarized as below.

1. Power Distance – The extent to which the less privileged people and communities accept and except unequal distribution of power.

2. Individualism – The extent to which the people are less likely to be responsible for in-groups such as families, clans, organizations, and for the entire society.

3. Masculinity – The extent to which people are driven by achievement, success, and power as opposed to caring, harmony, and quality of life.

4. Uncertainty Avoidance – The extent to which societies are intolerant to changes and more likely to be threatened by the uncertainty of the environment.

5. Long-term Orientation – The extent to which the societies show a future-oriented perspective rather than a short-term view.

Leadership Traits

Traits are patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior which define certain personal characteristics. Psychologists have done lot of studies in this area and identified various traits which can be positively and negatively contribute to leadership development. There are some traits which are found universally in every person; more or less to the same degree. Another set of traits are differ from person to person. Some traits, known as common traits, are shared within societies with the same culture and are observed similarly in persons who belong to that society. Culture is a important factor which causes traits to become strong or weak. We will take each cultural dimensions discussed above and analyze what are the leadership traits that can be influenced by them.

Leadership Styles

In 1939, Kurt Lewin identified three broad categories of leadership styles and named them as Autocratic, Democratic, and Laissez-Faire. Autocratic leaders plan, control, and make decisions by their own and they expect the subordinates to work towards the goals they set and obey the rules they placed. Democratic leaders collaborate with the followers, guide them and use a collective approach in planning, control, and decision making. Laissez-Faire leaders offer very little guidance to subordinates and expect them to plan and control their work themselves and let others to take their own decisions.

Culture Reinforces Leadership Traits

In this section we will discuss how each cultural dimension reinforces leadership traits.

Power Distance Traits

High power distance makes the leaders more dependable on their positional power and less on their personal power. With the authorities they possess, they simply make quick and independent decisions without getting the other people involved. As their authorities are less questionable in the society they feel confidence on themselves even thought the decisions are not guaranteed to be the best. People in high power distance cultures expect leaders to be more decisive and straightforward.

Individualism Traits

Individualistic societies show “I” consciousness rather than “we” consciousness. People are expected to be more independent and manage themselves. They are less dependent on the support of the collective entities such as team, organization, family etc. So the leadership allows people to be more independent while leaders becoming more flexible, facilitating and participative. Self respect and mutual respect are essential to maintain such a society. Tasks are getting high prioritized over the relationships, thus people are focused more on productivity.

Masculinity Traits

Masculine cultures live in order to work as opposed to work in order to live. For them big and fast are more beautiful than small and slow. People including leaders are highly motivated, decisive, and performance driven.

Uncertainty Avoidance Traits

People in cultures with strong uncertainty avoidance expect agreements, rules, and laws for maintain a rigid cultural framework. Leadership is characterized by judgment, less fairness, and less flexibility.

Long term Orientation Traits

Short-term oriented cultures greatly respect traditions, and expect quick results. On the other hand, long-term oriented cultures adapt their traditions to changed conditions and focus on saving and invest. Driven by short term visions and eager for quick results leaders shape themselves as straightforward, productive, and decisive persons. In contrast, with the long-term orientation they possess qualities such as quality, guiding, and inspiring.

Mapping Dimensions to Styles

The previous section discussed what the dominant leadership traits are when particular cultural dimension is high or low. Now, let us look at what are the leadership traits which can be observed in different leadership styles. Figure 2, figure 3, and figure 4 shows the dominant leadership traits found in each leadership style; autocratic, democratic, and laissez-faire. The size of the font indicates to what extent each trait can be observed in the corresponding style. We can see a clear alignment in traits in each style with traits in each dimension and can observe which style is prominent in cultures where a particular dimension is high or low.

Autocratic traits are more aligned with high power distance, high masculinity, and high uncertainty avoidance. Also the traits which are less observable in autocratic leaders are aligned with low individualism and low long-term orientation.

Fig 2: Leadership Traits of Autocratic Leader

Democratic leaders can be found in high individualistic and low masculinity cultures. Power distance is showing an average value. High individualistic and high long-term orientated societies seem to be encouraging the democratic style.

Fig 3: Leadership Traits of Democratic Leader

Laissez-fair leaders cannot exist where the power distance is high so that when a society exhibit low power distance laissez-fair leadership can emerge.

Figure 4: Leadership Traits of Laissez-Faire Leader

Case Study

By mapping the cultural dimensions to leadership styles we can understand how each cultural dimension can influence leadership development. However more insight can be gained by analyzing how the combination of all dimensions maps with different leadership styles. Figure 5 shows how each cultural dimension is varying within six different cultures. We can see some interesting figures there. It clearly shows that each dimension is independent from others to a greater extent. While having closer values in some dimensions, some countries have highly shifted values for the others. For example, Sri Lanka and Norway are having very low values for the masculinity than the other countries.

Figure 5: Comparison

Figure 6 is a graphical illustration of the comparison. The magnitude of each dimension has plotted using a line graph and background cells have been colorized according to the leadership style. The boundaries between each style have been placed according to the arguments made in the previous sections.

By analyzing the data we can see each country is showing a dominant leadership style over the other. For example Brazil’s curve is aligned with the autocratic leadership style in most of the dimensions. So according to the results we can say that leaders in Brazil are tend to be more autocratic. Norwegian leadership is aligning with the democratic style. We can derive similar patterns for the other countries as well.

Conclusion

The result of this study showed that the culture has a very clear influence on the leadership development. For any organization which is operating in the global environment or has plans to do so, it is very important to understand the leadership style each culture is expecting. Also organizations can use this knowledge to tailor the leadership development strategy for different cultures and build the desired leadership style in their leaders

Figure 6: Comparison

References
1. Hofstede, Geert (2001). Culture's Consequences: comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and organizations across nations. Chapter 1.
2. Lewin, K., LIippit, R. and White, R.K. (1939). Patterns of aggressive behavior in experimentally created social climates. Journal of Social Psychology, 10, 271-301 ( as cited in http://changingminds.org/disciplines/leadership/styles/lewin_style.htm)
3. http://www.tnellen.com/ted/tc/schein.html
4. http://www.culturegps.com/About.html

The "One minute manager's secrets"

2009-11-30T09:56:00.000-08:00

It has been long time since I read a book to completions. But I couldn't able to put "The one minute Manager" aside until I read the whole thing. Here a a summary of the text.

"Once there was a bright young man who was looking for an effective manger. He wanted to work for one. He wanted to become one. His search had taken him over many years to the far corners of the world." Finally he met the "One minute Manager" who shared the secrets of "one minute management". He was neither autocratic nor democratic; neither tough nor nurturing. He taught three secrets of the one minute management to the young person. We also going to learn them.

"People who feel good about themselves produce good results"

Secret #1 : One minute Goal Setting

The first secret of the three is "One minute Goal Setting". It is about making sure that we know what good performance is. One minute manager sets each goal and its performance standards with his subordinates in a paper with less than 250 words, something can be read in less than one minute. Once a while people can spend a minute and read the goal and see whether the behavior matches the goal.

Goal setting is so important so that the people can feel that they are achieving. When you go for bowling and if there are no pins standing, would you ever roll the ball? When there are pins but if they are covered with a paper screen, you would try rolling and might hear some sounds which makes you happy. But you would not enjoy the game much. So the manager responsibility is to make the pins visible and then there is no doubt that the people will enjoy the work.

Secret #2 : One Minute Praising

"Help People to Reach Their Full Potential. Catch Them Doing Something Right"

Most often manages catch people when they do something wrong. They are watching behind the paper screen so that they can see the pins well. They would say that you missed eight pins instead of telling that you hit two. The second secret of one minute management is "One Minute Praising". People should told right from the start that you are going to let them know how they are doing. Once a good work done people should be praised immediately and it should be specifically about the particular work and not a general praise. Just spend only one minute for this. Tell them how good you feel and let them feel it and encourage them to do more of the same.

Secret #3 : One minute Reprimand

"We are not just our behavior. We are the person managing our behavior"

The third secret of the one minute manager is "One minute Reprimand". Sometimes really bad things happen and then, you need to go for one minute reprimand. As in the previous secret your should do this immediately. Divide your minute into two. In the first 30 second, tell what went wrong and tell how you feel about it and let them also feel it. During the second half you should remind them how valuable they are to you and to the organization. Reaffirm that you condemn the behavior but you value the person because the person is not just the behavior. Finally agree not to repeat the same.

"The best minute you spend is the one you invest in people"

"Everyone is a potential winner. Some People are disguised as losers, Don't let their appearances fool you"

Finally our young guy became an effective manager by learning and practicing the above secrets and came up with a new principal.

"Share it with others"

Techiness cannot be used as a warp thread

2009-04-26T05:15:00.000-07:00

Software development is one of the industries where the teamwork plays a very critical role. Most of the teams and companies are aware about the difficulties they are facing due to the ill shaped distribution of the 'effectiveness of skills' among the people.

This is not happening automatically. Due to many reasons, the distribution of 'effectiveness of skills' is gradually transforming into this shape.

One can argue that you need to go far in your area of speciality and it is enough to have a certain level of skills in the other areas. Very true, and the above diagrams are not showing the amount of knowledge you have in each area or amount of time you spend on each area but the effectiveness of applying each skill set at your work.

In order to build teams, specially distributed teams which is getting common in practice, people need to be effective in many areas.

If teams need to produce better results the technical skills of the team members need to be weft using their soft skills.

Our techiness cannot be used as a warp thread.

Water for Fuel

2008-07-20T01:19:00.000-07:00

There were some news items published on papers and electronic media saying that a Sri Lankan inventor has developed a technology which can be used to run internal combustion engines with water as the fuel. There are some photos in the papers where he is explaining his invention to the prime minister Rathnasiri Wikramanayake. This is not the first of the same kind of incidents. Couple of years ago a person who was claiming that he has discovered a new way of generating energy from sea waves says he will not reveal the secrets to anyone but the President.

Producing Hydrogen or Oxyhydrogen from water by electrolyzing and use them as a fuel for automobile engines is not an original idea. There are thousands of people who did various experiments on this subject and there are hundreds of patents on various methods of doing this. The most famous story of all is the Stanly Meyer's water fuel cell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Meyer%27s_water_fuel_cell). He obtained several patents on his technology (http://www.google.com/patents?id=lLcjAAAAEBAJ&dq=stan+meyer+water+cell) and invited investors to start business based on his findings. After the investors realized that they have been cheated they went to court against Mayer. Mayer was ordered to repay the money he has taken from the investors. Finally, Mayer was poisoned in a restaurant and people say the oil companies were behind the murder. In this video, Mayer is talking about his invention (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6yRn4IAsrU&feature=related) and the Sri Lankan guy is telling more or less the same story.

If you search in the web you will find dozens of web sites dedicated to this technology, some sites even providing all the detailed instructions for convert your car to water (ex:- http://water4gas.com). You tube is also contains lot of videos about the subjects and if you try the Google patent search you can find hundreds of patents related to this area.

So what is the truth behind this technology. Water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. By electrolyzing water we can produce different combustible gases like hydrogen and oxyhydrogen. In order to do this, electrical energy should supply to the system. The output of burning these gases with oxygen is again the water. So the fuel is water and the output is also water and we need to provide electric energy to achieve this. If the amount of energy generated by this method is greater than the amount of energy we supply to the system, this is a perpetual motion machine and in theory, it will violate the fundamental laws of thermodynamics. So it is obvious that we cannot generate enough energy to recharge the battery without charging it from a outside electrical energy source. So the question is whether the electric al energy required for a mile is cheaper than the fuel required for a mile. If we use gasoline to generate the electricity the answer is 'NO'. But as there are much cheaper means of generating electricity there is a possibility to implement this solution effectively.

The Sri Lankan guy has not stated anything about the amount of electrical energy that needs to be supplied to the system and the cost of it over using the gasoline. Instead he is talking about how many liters of water required to travel from Colombo to Anurashapura and the amperage of the electrolyzer. Personally I do not believe that this solution will have an overall economic value to the country. Also this person should learn a lesson from Mayer because lot of companies are seeking avenues for making money out of the oil reserves in the Sri Lankan sea and the politicians also dreaming about the commissions and bribes they can get when the deals are materializing.

Two Day Workshop on UNIX Shell Scripting

2008-04-14T05:09:00.000-07:00

Last February I said goodbye to "Primecluster high availability wizards" project. So I have to pause C programming and Shell Scripting and move to Java again. However, it was lucky that I could able to share some knowledge in the two day shell scripting workshop organized by LKLUG; before my memories are gone. I did two sessions, "Advanced Shell Usage" and "Designing advanced Shell Programs". Some materials can be found here and here are some details of the workshop.

Free Host <=> Paid Host. Can You Believe It? Read Now!!!

2007-11-13T02:02:00.000-08:00

Usually I do not getting spams in my GMail Inbox because GMail spam filter takes care about them. But last week I got a mail with the subject "Free Host <=> Paid Host. Can You Believe It? Read Now!!!". That was a unusual mail for me because I am not getting this sort of mails regularly. I was wondering why Google put it into my Inbox rather than tag it as a spam. Anyhow I wanted to host several sites so that I visited the site, created an account and hosted two websites. One week after I am feeling that this free service is much better than paid services which I am using for long time. Order your free account HERE. You will get 250MB plus 100GB bandwidth with PHP, MySQL, Perl, and a very good control panel.

Giant human skeletons - Divaina reporter misleads the public

2007-09-15T01:54:00.001-07:00

"Sunday Divaina" reporter misleads the pubic in an article published in 2007-Sep-16 edition describing a discovery of giant human skeletons. These two photographs (The one showing the human skeleton appeared on the article) show how smarter the original image has been converted. The original photo is a skeleton of mastodon where you can see a tusk at the bottom right corner. Notice it is in the same position in the edited version and also the man at the bottom is in same action.

When you see something like this, anybody who has an Internet connection can brows and check whether the news is true or false. But if you don't have access to the Internet, you have been "Digitally Divided", huh! . But in this version of new digital divide, in addition to the lack of access to information you get cheated by others who have the access.

Both of the images has been in the Internet since some time and there are lot of discussions and blog posts on them. But the news reporter has not investigated enough to find out whether the news is true or not. Divayina is well ahead than the other newspapers in the country but they should pay more attention to this sort of things.

Theory and Practice

2007-09-07T11:18:00.000-07:00

Whenever it comes to the implementation of best practices, it is very hard to convince people the advantage of following them. Recently I did a presentation on SCM Patterns where people found that most of the best practices I explained are the same as they already following. To a certain extend their thinking is correct, but what it implies is not that they are really following them but the fact that those priciples are quite apparent.

Sometimes I advocate people to adopt to 5S. But in that case the respond is much worst. Everybody thinks that they are already following 5S or it is very simple to follow them, but both beliefs are wrong. It is the simplicity and obviousness which prevent them from accepting its validity and usefulness.

This is where you do need a field visit. I have worked in manufacturing plants where 5S has been implemented very successfully. There is a huge gap between what one can imagine and what can be really implement if everybody is willing to contribute.

Sweet download accelerator for Linux

2007-09-07T10:55:00.000-07:00

It is axel, http://wilmer.gaast.net/main.php/axel.html. You can specify the number of connections, multiple servers etc. Interesting thing is that you can limit the bandwidth it takes so that you can save some bandwidth for other programs to consume.

Here is a sample command for download ubuntu iso image from 3 servers with 50 connections.

axel -v -a -n 50 http://{mirrors.xmission.com/ubuntu-cd,us.releases.ubuntu.com,
mirrors.ccs.neu.edu/releases.ubuntu.com}/dapper/ubuntu-6.06.1-server-i386.iso

This page has some additional information on usage. http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/download-accelerator-for-linux-command-line-tools.html

Have fun.

NASA World Wind and Google Earth

2007-08-08T09:51:00.000-07:00

Nasa World Wind and Google Earth are the most popular publicly available virtual earth software. Each one has it's own strengths and weaknesses. You should select the appropriate program depending on what you need to get.

World Wind is mostly based on Landsat7 imagery which are consistence throughout the world. Google Earth provides images with very good resolution but sometimes they are not consistent. For example, the Mahaweli river takes a mysterious bend just after the Katugasthota town and the adjacent images are very much differ in resolution and aligning. It makes a big doubt on the accuracy of the system.

But if you want to locate a place in Colombo World Wind can't help you with its low resolution images but Google Earth will show even markings in your tennis court.

I like the smooth motion of World Wind and it's 3D views. Even when you move over the tiles without tilting, you can see the 3D nature of the terrain. The colors also visually appealing than in the Google Earth.

World Wind has a very rich geocode database. If you search for a remote village in Sri Lanka, the chances are very little that you failed to get it. Also it provides several layers that you can switch to and they are in different resolutions and contains different data.

Also you can see the real time weather with animation in World Wind and some scientific visualizations.

Although World Wind provides USGS maps as a layer they are way behind features of Google Maps. Although Google Maps is a different product it is superior with its API and the coverage. Recently Google Maps added geocodes for entire India so that the detail maps are available for any place. We can expect Google will soon release maps for Sri Lanka.

There are lot of interesting things in both World Wind and Google Earth. Each will provide more and more features in the future. But more than anything, World Wind is Open Source.

Internet Access via bluetooth DUN

2006-12-14T06:32:00.000-08:00

Usually I want to boot into Windows only for two reasons. First, to check whether the Windows installation is working. Second, to connect to the Internet using my mobile phone whenever I couldn't able to find a socket to plug in. The software shipped with the Samsung E730 (has very good screen resolution and you can plug it to your USB port to charge it) is only run in Windows.

I am using a Mobitel connection and GPRS is working fine for me. The settings are as follows.

DSN1=0.0.0.0
APN=isp
use blanks for username and password

In Windows I can just plugin the cable to PC and use the program "Internet Access" which shipped with the phone to access the Internet. Also I can connect using bluetooth DUN using a bluetooth software. But in Linux I tried to talk to the modem using the cable but fed up with the error messages. So I decided to give bluetooth a try. This is how it should be done.

You need to have the 2.6 kernel which has adequate support for bluetooth.

root@sapumal:~# hcitool scan
Scanning ...
00:12:47:EB:57:AC sapumal

Open the file /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf and uncomment the following lines

auth enable;
encrypt enable;

also notice the line
pin_helper /usr/bin/bluez-pin;

create a file /usr/bin/bluez-pin and make it executable. File contents should be

#!/bin/sh
echo "PIN:1234"

the number 1234 is the PIN which you need to enter in your mobile phone when pairing the devices.

edit /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf. My file looks like this after the modifications.

rfcomm0 {
bind yes;
# Bluetooth address of the device
device 00:12:47:EB:57:AC;
# RFCOMM channel for the connection
channel 1;
# Description of the connection
comment "My Phone";
}

You need to replace the device name with the one you got when you scan for devices.

Now restart the bluetooth service
root@sapumal:~# /etc/init.d/bluez-utils restart
* Restarting Bluetooth services... [ ok ]

Connect to the device using hcitool
root@sapumal:~# hcitool cc 00:12:47:EB:57:AC
Here the phone will prompt for the PIN.

Search for DUN service
root@sapumal:~# sdptool search DUN
Inquiring ...
Searching for DUN on 00:12:47:EB:57:AC ...
Service Name: Dial-up networking
Service RecHandle: 0x10002
Service Class ID List:
"Dialup Networking" (0x00001103)
Protocol Descriptor List:
"L2CAP" (0x00000100)
"RFCOMM" (0x00000003)
Channel: 1
Segmentation fault

Create a file /etc/wvdial.conf that looks like this:

[Modem0]
Modem = /dev/rfcomm0
Baud = 115200
SetVolume = 0
Dial Command = ATDT
Init1 = ATZ
Init3 = ATM0
FlowControl = crtscts

[Dialer gprs]
Username = test
Password = test
Phone = *99***1#
Stupid Mode = 1
Inherits = Modem0

Now connect DUN
root@sapumal:~# wvdial gprs
--> WvDial: Internet dialer version 1.54.0
--> Cannot get information for serial port.
--> Initializing modem.
--> Sending: ATZ
ATZ
OK
--> Sending: ATM0
ATM0
OK
--> Modem initialized.
--> Sending: ATDT*99***1#
--> Waiting for carrier.
ATDT*99***1#
CONNECT
--> Carrier detected. Starting PPP immediately.
--> Starting pppd at Thu Dec 14 22:31:16 2006
--> pid of pppd: 13061
--> Using interface ppp0
--> local IP address 192.168.52.5
--> remote IP address 192.168.52.1
--> primary DNS address 203.115.24.221
--> secondary DNS address 12.0.0.0

when you want to disconnect just press ctr-c and the process will terminate gracefully

In case of I/O errors you can try to remove the computer from the bluetooth devices in the phone and retry connecting.

112,0-1 B

How to get the best look in the best Distro of the best OS

2006-11-15T23:02:00.000-08:00

This is how you give Ubuntu user interface a Mac OS X like look. See the screenshot of how it happened in my machine. Only thing you need to do is, find some free time and visit http://www.taimila.com/ubuntuosx.php. Also don't forget to add some of your creativity too.