A real Pentathlon

Just finished watching the Asian Games and thought about how we could have a real pentathlon - one which checks skills soldiers need rather than fencing and Show Jumping (The original Modern Penthlon was created for similar reasons from the old Greek Pentahlon)

So I propose replacing Horses with Cycles. (The Japanese used Cycles to great effect to invade SE Asia. Originally I thought of having obstacle race course but that would be too expensive for organizing committees and too different from existing Olympic sports)

And I thought we should bring back the shotput from the original pentathlon but with a twist. Now it will represent Grenade tossing.

So here are my 5 events

1) Grenade Toss
2) Obstacle Running
3) Swimming
4) Cycling
5) Shooting


Now for putting them together

First the grenades will be dummy grenades with radio transmitters and the rifles will be laser rifles.

Further each competitor will also have to carry a 20 Kilo backpack throughout the game to represent what a modern soldier goes through. This 20 Kilo will include their water, change of clothes as well as grenades and laser rifle.

So first the competitors start off with their backpacks and their cycles.  Cycle 5 km on a Stadium track.
On finish they immediately go to the Shooting competition where they have to shoot 25 targets - each target will take at least a 9 or at least 2 5s to go down. As soon as their target is down they will then run 3000 m on the track with backpacks(They can leave their rifles but must carry their swimming gear and grenades). The track shall have hurdles like in Steeplechase and  shall also have penalty areas (minefields) marked. 10 such areas of 3 m length will be marked on the track. Competitors will have to jump across these areas. Each foot down in an area will count as a penalty (I will get to those later). As soon as they complete the running they will go to the grenade toss area where they will then proceed to throw dummy grenades and try to knock down 25 targets. The competitors have as many grenades as they carried with them in their pack.
When all 25 targets are down the competitor marks his ending time. Drops the backpack and either goes directly to swimming (for stadiums where this is possible) or waits.
For competitors who cannot knock down all targets before they run  out of grenades there is one penalty for each target left standing.  (Targets shall be at 15,20,25,30,35 m each target to be brought down 5 times)
To knock down a target a grenade must land within 1 m of the target. Targets will be automatic with radio transmitters and fold down as soon as the grenade lands next to it within 1 m.

At the end of the 4 events all competitors will head to the swimming pool for an 400 m swim.  The competitors will start in the order in which they finished the previous 4 legs with a 10 s penalty time added for each landmine(penalty) they landed on during the running phase and 1 penalty for each target they left standing during the grenade phase.

Comments Please

Herding Cats Pishtosh - try herding mobile developers

With the advent of the AppStore model of development something changed in how software was built. Apple would earn 30% from any app built so Apple spent considerable investments into making it very easy to develop apps (The coding is still the same but the ecosystem overheads were taken care of by the Appstore model, Xcode, the UI and other frameworks). To the extent that it was actually possible for 1 designer and 1 developer to build a real app. This is very different from most app development in the real world where the work needs to be split across a larger team and hence you have to have specialized roles like Developer, Project Manager, Business Analyst, Architect, BPR, QA, Devops etc.
Now with the popularity of Mobile Consumer Apps , Enterprises have taken to creating Mobile Enterprise Apps in a large way but here we run into a few differences from the consumer world
1) Enterprise Apps need to have approved budgets so have to go through an approval process
2) Enterprises are risk averse hence they will not just throw away their existing systems. Rather the mobile app has to work with existing backends even if the backends are not developed for Mobile. (Related problems a generation of IT managers who have come into the field after the advent of Web Based apps have no idea what is Client Server Programming. They tend to think of Mobile as just another UI fronted instead of a full fledged computer. They still want to do all their business logic in Backend Java code)
3) Enterprises have hierarchy and politics. You have to build consensus and have people go along not just because you have the best technical solution but also by showing what you are doing is going to help their own mandates (and sometimes they won't and you will face resistance)

Into this environment imagine hiring a team of iOS developers who have been used to working alone and working at light speed and try to execute an Enterprise Mobility project.


Testing? Automation? Automated Builds? Automatic Code Analysis?

It all exists but is not as mature as in the Java or .Net world.

Herding cats would be far easier.

Is the California Weather Tax worth it?

Have moved back to the US and this time its California not Texas. Yes California the land of the Rocky mountains, the pacific ocean, the sky high taxes ....

Well the news this week has been all about the cold snap in the central and eastern US but out here in Cupertino when I drove to the store on the weekend I was actually using the AC.

Made me wonder if the high taxes in California (as I call it the weather tax) might actually be worth it.

Then again I make 3 times what I was making in India, have cost 4 times higher than in India and save half of what I was saving in India so I am paying the US and California govts for the privilege of making myself poorer.

Sometimes I wonder if the weather is worth it?

SpiderSense or how to fake it: Trends in the Geospatial Space

Superhero’s spider sense is not working so uses his computer instead.


SuperHero: “Computer show me on the map if any of my friends are in danger”


How would the computer answer the above question? Is it even possible? Well a few years back the answer would have been no but today it would be a qualified “Maybe”. Let us look at a few technologies which have made this possible

• Real time Location Tracking
  
• Business Intelligence
  
• Cloud Computing
  
• Natural Language processing
  

How do these make the answer possible? Well first lets tackle cloud computing. With the advent of cloud computing it has become possible for folks to have access to large amounts of computing power at low cost. Of course here we are talking of a superhero who is not a multimillionaire like Batman but more of the garden variety working class Spiderman type who would still like to have on demand access to large amounts of computing power.


OK so we have low cost access to cheap computing power but it still does not tell us how to tell us where the superhero’s friends are or if they are in danger. First where are the hero’s friends? Well if they are carrying cellphones as almost anyone nowadays does then there are services like Google Latitude which can tell us (or the hero) where the friends are.


So next we come to how does the hero know they are in danger. Well suppose this hero does not have a spider sense but he does have a spatio-temporal database of crime statistics which tells him at which parts of the city and at what times crimes are high. He also is using sophisticated OLAP driven Business Intelligence software which is tracking when his friends are making purchases like jewellery (and then walking on dangerous streets) or alcohol (and then getting behind the wheel of their car. The cars lo-jack will tell the hero the car is moving and the friends cellphone will tell him the friend is in the car).


So now the hero knows his friend is in danger and he wants to do something about it but our hero is an efficient hero. He wants to know where he can fly to first so as to do the maximum good so the best and easiest way for him to see the answer is on a map and that is where he sees it on a GIS application deployed on a cloud computing platform like Windows Azure or Amazon S3 and driven by geospatial business intelligence such as GeoMondrian or Oracle Business Insight Suite.


And lastly our hero does not like sitting and typing and clicking so he would like to speak his questions and get his answers and that is what Natural Language Processing provides him (this is probably the biggest contributor to the maybe instead of a yes)


So now our superhero can simulate a spider sense and go help his friends but couldn’t you the average Joe do so too?


And suppose you are not out to save people but to sell to them (yeah I know its not so noble but a mans gotto live. A woman too).


And suppose instead of finding out where to go save people you want to figure out where to do an imprompto sales promotion. You would like to do it where it would have the maximum effect hence you need to make sure of the following


1) The area contains people who are your target audience aka friends


2) They have just indulged in activities which increase your chance of
selling to them. E.g. If they have just watched a romantic movie and
are taking a seaside walk instead of the car they might be interested
in brochures of diamonds to buy for their girlfriends


3) And you would like to do this in a focused manner instead of sending
out SMSs to the entire city


So you use your Geospatial Business Application to create a realtime map of areas with good sales targets and then on the fly set up a geofence so that all cell phones within the geofence receive a MMS with pictures of the diamonds/roses and an attached digital coupon for a 10% discount.


Now that’s just one small example of what is becoming possible. (Yes I cheated we did not talk to the computer but soon we shall be able to)


So what does it mean for companies in the GIS space. Well it means that GIS is becoming something common which is both good and bad – bad because the commodity creation of GIS data is no longer profitable as companies like Google are giving it away for free. However the cheap cost of GPS chips and integration with the worlds of Business Intelligence and Cloud computing are making new wondrous applications possible and opening opportunities for GIS companies to climb up the ladder to more value added applications.


Heres to hoping GIS will soon make all of us superheroes.

End of Dollar Imperialism?

Currently the entire world is an American colony. Some like Europe Britain and Japan have Commonwealth status but have the same head of state as the US. Sounds like the British Empire and its relation to Australia , Canada, NewZealand (commonwealth) and India(outright colony). Well thats because it is. The British empire was based on the British pound being the legal tender for trade in the commonwelath. The British would buy goods and raw materials from their colonies and in return pay with Pounds. As the colonies were taxed so much they could not buy anything British so the Pounds were held in Colonial office accounts in London and lent out to British businesses. Well after the 2 World Wars the British were bankrupt, the Euopeans and Chinese were devastated, the Japanese were radiated and the Russians had lost most of their young male population. The USA had come out unscathed from WW2 so it got to dictate the new world order. So they decided to not have the headache of administering direct colonies and just have indirect colonies via the Dollar. Hence the Breton Woods system under which the Dollar became the instrument of foreign trade. Imagine their outrage when the damn Russkies decided to use the Rouble for their trade with Eat European Countries. Hence the world was divided into 2- those who trade in dollars and those who trade in rubles and the Cold War was on. The Cold War was not strictly based on Communism vs Capitalism proof of which is the Communist Chinese and Yugoslavs were in the American dollar trading block while the Capitalist Indians were in the Ruble trading block. Well after the fall of the Russians(a job well done by the CIA. They were not always as incompetent as they were in Iraq) the dollar was king. USA and its citizens had a sweet deal. Consume as much as you want, borrow to consume and all you have to do is pay for it in dollars. Dont have any dollars because you didnt produce anything ? Just print more. What ? If you print more dollars the exchange rate of dollars will go down making imports expensive or the interest rate will go up making Credit cards expensive! NO!! The exchange rate will not go down as other countries need dollars to buy oil and to settle their trade so no matter how many dollars USA prints its exchange rate stays strong. And China needs to drive their economic growth through exports so they need to keep the Yuan weak against the dollar. So they will keep buying dollar treasuries keeping the interest rates low. Before the Chinese it was the Koreans and the Japanese who did the same and after the Chinese it will be the Vietnamese and the Indians. So a pretty sweet deal. But now the deal is coming to an end. The Chinese have raised the Bogey of replacing the Dollar with the SDR. Make no mistake the SDR is a red herring, afterall the IMF is controlled by the US so China has no real hope of getting the Yuan into the SDR which would give them too the right to print money. But the SDR issue helps to divert attention from the real fun part where China is busy signing currency swaps with countries from South Korea to Belarus to Argentina to settle international trade in Yuan. Yes you heard that right international trade without the dollar!! Once this becomes widespread enough the Yuan will become an international reserve currency and other nations will start holding yuan. As this would ensure a Soros cannot do a run on the Yuan China would no longer have to hold dollars. Once that happens thats the end of the free run and the dollar empire

Appropiate punishment

I have been following the Chinese Melamine in Milk scandal and wondering what would be an appropriate punishment for those who in their greed for fast profits caused kidney failures in infants. I would say force them to donate a kidney each (for those convicted shoot them and take both kidneys) or even more appropriately ; since adult kidneys cant be grafted on the infant victims, take the kidneys of the culprits' children. Let them use their ill-gotten profits to keep their children on dialysis for life. As you can tell THIS makes me very very angry.

Credit bailout and the nuclear deal

For those worried about Congress not having 30 days to vote on the nuclear deal hurray for the credit crisis. Congress may now stay on to pass the bailout law and that just might make it 30 days for the nuclear deal to get an up or down vote without amendments. Now the clincher for the conspiracy theorists - Did Westinghouse trigger the credit crisis?