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Investment strategy

International market is increasingly important to the world economy. The United States has seen its share of the global equity market decline from 68% in 1970 to 46% in 2004. Therefore, if you wanted to construct a total world stock market index portfolio today, you could devote 46% of your portfolio to the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund and 54% to the Vanguard Total International Stock Index Fund. For more fine grained control, in lieu of the Total International Stock Index, you could split the international part of the portfolio between the Vanguard Developed Market Index Fund and Emerging Markets Index Fund; in his book “Global Bargain Hunting”, Burton Malkiel wrote, “Over an eleven year period ending in 1995, the mix that provided the highest return available with the least risk was 61% U.S stocks, 26% developed country stocks, and 13% emerging market stocks.”Swensen suggests the following reference portfolio for investors to consider (and to tweak to suit their individual circumstances): U.S. Stocks 30% International Developed Markets Stocks 15% International Emerging Markets Stocks 5% U.S. Government Bonds 15% Inflation-Indexed Bonds (TIPS) 15% Real Estate 20%. Overall, I thought Swensen’s book had many valuable insights for individual investors. An individual can mimic his reference portfolio on the cheap by buying Vanguard index funds for the six core asset categories: Total Stock Market Index Fund (5-Year return: -0.59%) Developed Market Index Fund (5-Year return: 2.92%) Emerging Markets Index Fun (5-Year return: 14.27%) Intermediate-Term Treasuries (5-Year return: 6.5%) Inflation-Protected Securities (5-Year return: 8.79%) REIT Index Fund (5-Year return: 14.09%)

Quote of the week

The difference between where you are today and where you'll be five years from now will be found in the quality of books you have read - Jim Rohn

Thaughts on Traditional MBA:
Whatever be the qualifications of your tutors, your improvement must chiefly depend on
yourselves. They cannot think or labor for you, they can only put you in the best way of thinking and laboring for yourselves. If therefore you get knowledge you must acquire it by your own industry.

Gas (DIS)Advantage Homes

When we baught our house in 2000, it was touted as Gas Advantage Home. Natural gas was touted as the best residential energy buy. People even recommeded to run additional lines to the dryer unit and buy gas powered dryers. The U.S. Department of Energy says natural gas homes consume 35 percent to 45 percent less total energy than comparably sized all-electric homes. But the prices for the residential average price of natural gas has sky-rocketed from $6.50 to $15.33(Source http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/steo/pub/contents.html). Our heating bills have gone up from $75 to $200+ and this winter experts are forecasting an even higher increase. With this price spike, the homes should be classified as a Gas Disadvantage homes. Watch out for the “Gas Advantage Home” logo on construction signs and in real estate magazines and start avoiding them like a plague.

US Financial markets obsession with Greenspan

Why is the US financial markets so much obsessed with Greenspan. Let the man do the job of managing the interest rates. Every month or so, the week prior to and the week following the FOMC meeting there is this frenzy of news/notes/analysis/economic theories and what not as to what this guy is going to do. Mr. Greenspan has been the chairman since 86, but I think this obsession with him only started in the late 90 and 2000 era. Especially right after the meeting, people try to disseminate every sentence of his and try to make conclusions on what he meant. I think the only reason why Greenspan defaults his speech to this complexity and vagueness is because irrespective of what he does, the economy will takes its own path that nobody can predict and thus he can cover his A^^ by giving out not so clear statements that can be interpreted in many number of ways.

Bad state of the dollar bills

I do not use cash in most transactions but in some cases where I have to use it ( most fast food restaurants ) I have started seeing a trend in getting back highly soiled and dirty bills ( $1 and $5 especially ) back in change. This never used to be the case when I first came in 93 and even as late as 2000. Most of the time I used to get decent quality bills as change. Reminds me of my times back in India ( 12 years back) where this was the norm. In fact it became so unmanageable that the Indian government banished the bills for 1,5 and even 10 I think and have substituted them with the coins.

Human nature for blaming

Here is an analogy to the blame game between problems that occur in IT and when terrible natural disaster like Katrina or Mumbai monsoon rains occur. During natural disasters people start blaming various government departments or even specific individuals for long ignoring upgrades. Similarly when a bug is found in production, who's to blame? Is it the tester for letting the defect slip through? Is it the developer for introducing the bug into the code into the first place? Is it the analyst who neglected to anticipate the myriad ways in which the system could be used? Or is it the project manager who did not allocate enough time for testing? Clearly there is an element of accountability on behalf of the entire team, but this fact is too often obscured by the need to find fault. I guess it is just human nature to try to place blame. Imagine the productivity improvements we can get if people do NOT focus on the blame game, but if the blame analysis efforts can be channeled through to better avoid future problems from occurring.

How to bring a new person upto speed in a development environment

Here is an idea. If the development environment does not have any Unit tests, start him/her off to write Unit Tests. This will help improve the stability of the system, get additional documentation, have some of their real-world work to evaluate, and they can learn about the system in pieces...
If the system already has unit tests, check what the existing code coverage is and provide a resonable new target % to achieve code coverage upon with new Unit Tests. This is a bit more tricky and would require some hand holding.

DB2 deadlock issue

I have been experiencing this issue: SQL0911N The current transaction has been rolled back because of a deadlock or timeout. Reason code "2". This is on a newly developed j2ee based SOA app that uses db2 jdbc driver to access the db. Quick search on google groups and google regular revealed as usual a plethora of settings that needs to be done on the db2 sie of the house. Reminded me of the plethora of settings that we had to work with websphere and WSAD. This makes me wonder, Is this one of the value points or corporate manthra of IBM's products to just make even the simplest features appear complicated and thus earn revenues thru service and support?

Jury duty experience

Was summoned for Jury duty the week of Aug 1st. I had become a US citizen just couple of months back. This was my first experience with the US judicial system. Was asked to fill in a form and asked to affirm the oath that I would tell the truth. Was surprised by the large number of people ( anywhere between 75 to 100 ). Apparently there are a lot of civil and criminal cases going on.
I organizer forewarned for the first timers that jury duty involves a lot of wait. That tells me the system has some flaws. Luckily they had a projection TV and started screening Village movie. Eventhough I had seen the movie before I didn't mind watching over again. Couple of times the movie was paused and the organizer called out 30 names in random by the order of some judge. The movie was almost reaching a climax where the blind girl is in the forest all by herself when it was paused again. This time my name was the first to be called amongst 30 chosen. After some minor procedure explanation we were taken to the court room. The judge and the defendant and the attorney were there. The clerk called in 12 names at random to sit in the jury box. The prosecuting attorney briefly introduced the case.
It was case bought in by the DA's office of NC against a 19 year old boy. The charges were taking indecent liberties with a child and committing a act against Nature. Some of the jurors were not comfortable hearing about anal sex and specifics. Both the prosecuting attorney and defense interviewed the jury and I was called into the 12 after one of the jurors had to be excused. The jury selection went on the whole day and continued on the next day. Finally they had 12 + 1 alternate juror as backup. The incident occurred on Dec 28 2003 and only now it is being heard. Whatever happened to the concept of Justice delayed is justice denied. The first witness was the victim himself. The witnesses testified the next couple of days. At the end of all the testimonies the judge explained to us what the charges are and what is the law is and what the sentence would be if found guilty.
We were off to the jury room to deliberate. We took an initial vote and it was 8 to 4 for not guilty vs guilty. Next 5 hours the deliberation went on. No consensus. We informed the judge we cannot unanimously agree on a decision. The judge declared the trial as a mistrial and sent us back home after 4 days. That is all to it.
Both the victim and defendant being boys ( 17 and 12) no big deal the claim of rape. There were too many inconsistencies in the victims story. In fact all jurors agreed that the defendant was setup. It is just the age factor that made the incident a crime.

Worthy Sentences

Though I am not perfect, I do the best that I can do at this time in my life
I deserve to take better care of my family and me
Goals of S-M-A-R-T
S- Specific M - Measurable A- Attainable R- Relevant T- Time Based

For example, a specific short-term goal may be to start strength training; the long-term goal may be easing the symptoms of arthritis, improving balance, or controlling your weight. This goal is easily measurable: Have you or have you not begun the program? Indeed, this is an attainable goal, as long as your doctor approves, and this goal is certainly relevant to living a long, healthy life. Your goal needs to be time-based

Which states of India have you been to?

Brought to you by pratibha75, quizling and teemus.

Which states in India have you been to?

We need to find a similar solution for a world traveller

SImple way to kill phising

The simple way to kill phishing is by making it harder for the phisher to make money from it. If you get phishing e-mail, go the web sites and enter false data. Make up everything -- name, sign-on name, password, credit card numbers, everything. Instead of one million messages yielding 100 good replies, now the phisher will have one million messages yielding 100,000 replies of which 100 are good, but WHICH 100?

This technique kills phishing two ways. It certainly increases the phishing labor requirement by about 10,000X. But even more importantly, if banks and e-commerce sites limit the number of failed sign-on attempts from a single IP address to, say, 10 per day, theft as an outcome of phishing becomes close to impossible.

Fundamentals of Business

From http://calacanis.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000053039351/
Business is about three very basic things:

1. Hustle
2. Passion
3. Resiliency

You have those things it really doesn’t matter what the idea is… you can change your ideas all day long, in fact evolving is what you’re supposed to do in business. However, you can’t substitute hustle, passion, or resiliency.

You can certainly learn, and defiantly enhance, those three core attributes. People get caught up in the text book theories of business and forget reality. Serving customers, being passionate about what you do, serving more, caring more, giving more...that's what makes success. Know your customer, solve a need, and deliver value to your customer.

Good developer

A good developer need to understand the business, and as as a minimum understand that you are being hired to create solutions to business problems.

Be able to look at a business, see and understand the problems the business currently faces, innovate to solve said problems, and then are able to communicate with a non-technical audience the business benefit of the technical solution. Focus more on understanding the customer than on understanding the technology ('though you need both, of course).So, things like usability are critical.

Another crucial component of any good developers repertoire is change management, a good developer has to not just cope with change, but embrace it. When you approach a problem domain you look at it without thinking about the technology. You look at it from a business perspective, find the requirements, the end-users etc and then once you have done that you then decide on the technology. Now this may be a Java solution, but then maybe it is a .NET one or PHP or VB or whatever it has to be right for the business. I would expect any developer to be able to adapt and to pick up whatever the choice may be and become productive. The forementioned reason is why I am unimpressed with those who can recite the Java API from memory, my personal feeling on this is that you should now what is available (whether it be in Java, PHP, Perl, C/C++ whatever) from a higher level and not confine yourself to a particular technical space. However, how to use it (ie the API) you don't need to know to a great level of detail until you actually start the work.