Informative Talk on Entrepreneurship

It took me 29 and odd years to understand that simplicity and modesty is the way to start. I was fortunate to attend a talk by Mr. Raju Venkataraman, a serial entrepreneur at IIT Madras, Chennai. He was talking about entrepreneurship and qualities. When to take risk, how to take risk and how to sustain the own venture talking examples from his life. He quoted in many places about Tata, Ambani, Gates, Steve Jobs and many others.

During his talk one thing that stood out was his - simplicity and modesty. He quite often connected the dots and making the participants to know the unknown through known simple principles of life. He never tried to force things. When some asked a question about being ethical. Without any prejudices, he answered "being ethical" is part of your value system. I would say that is an important take away for me and anyone who is trying to become entrepreneur. Apart from whole a lot of inspiration, having a value system is quite important.

Being ethical or unethical is the manifestation of one's value system. It is "ok" to rob if you are a thief because it is your value system. He doesn't mean or want us to have low value system but his point was to convey the importance of "value system". I feel that I need to spend sometime reflecting about my value system and make it "real" value system.

Great Insights.

Most Fruitful Day

Today was a fruitful day. As I told yesterday, I needed to give a technical talk to Bank of America office at Chennai (this is Merrill Lynch office to be precise) on Security. It was raining later in the afternoon, but I had a little window when the rain stopped and started from my office around 3.15 pm. The journey to Merill Lynch took almost an hour. After going through security check (like the one in airports), I met my friend who invited me for the talk. Within few minutes we were ready for the talk.

The talk itself was very interesting to me and the audience asked me questions from basics to advanced. The management made the event lively by giving away some gifts to participants who answer questions. I felt like this was most interactive session I ever presented. I talked about Security, why it fails, myths and attack spectrum of a banking application. Due to lack of time, I cut shot the presentation by 15 minutes but overall I felt that I learned a great deal by giving this talk. I received a feedback of 3.5/5 and shows that I got to improve. During this talk, I met new friends.

On the way back to my home, I had an appointment with my college friend (who is research scholar in IIT Chennai). He was explaining me about his new venture and his business plans. We discussed about his consulting experiences, stock market, education system, social responsibility. We planned to collaborate in few initiatives that greats impact in society. I spent around four hours with him and it was quite a learning for me. We also discussed about algorithms, mathematical modeling, fiber optics, network security, open source and philosophy.

Overall, today (particularly the afternoon), went like a super fast express.

Security For Thinkers - Tech Talk

Tomorrow (26-Aug-09), I will be giving a technical talk in one of the famous US banks IT department at Chennai. After reading few pages of Beyond Fear and few pages in System Thinking, I tried to put together a presentation that primarily focused on security from system thinking point of view. So many things fail or produce adverse effects due to poor understanding and security is one. The attacks that are published are only very few percentage of the attacks and many do not like to report it. We never think about how to have our software/hardware secured. It is quite a irony that an attacker who knows about our application hardly anything cracks the software in no time or in few hours.

This shows the incapability in thinking and still we are playing a catching up game. In this presentation, I am planning to give system thinking view about security, the proactive security and sensible security. Unlike other security talks, I will not be presenting or discussing about Top 10 attacks as we never know which will be in Top 10 and we cannot predict when 100th attack will move to Top 10. We need a view that protects us always. Here is what I m planning to cover.

Credits should go to my friend M.S. Rajkumar Pandian for recommending me to BoA friend. Thank you Raj. I would have been much happier if we present this talk together.

Speaking Experience @ ILUG Chennai Monthly Meet

This is the first time that I am speaking in Indian Linux User Group, Chennai. ILUG is most active LUGs in India. The meeting generally happens in IIT Madras (the place I wanted to study). Again, I want to reiterate the fact that speaking about Open Source in Open Source meeting gives me enough motivation and abundance of energy. I registered the topics with Mr. Bharathi Subramainan and he gave be slot immediately. Today, I also noticed what happens when people with passion sign up to do something. Unlike other meetings, the members were very punctual and I could see considerable number of people waiting in the hall and some people working in computers in another room. Today's incident enlightened me about valuing others time and I will never forget this in my life. Apart from that we also had good knowledge sharing session.

The talks started at 3.15pm and the first talk was hosted by Selvakumar K from NRC-FOSS on KTechLab, an Open Source IDE for Electronics and PIC Micro Controller Circuit Design and Simulation. He talked about analog and digital simulation tools in Linux. I feel that the tool will help any electronics student to do experiment in his/her laptop/computer. The colleges should seriously consider to have this tool in their department and encourage students to use when they are doing practicals or learning theory.

Next, I started my talk on Java Code coverage and explained about need for code coverage and features of Emma. I talked about various ways of using Emma such as with IDE, nightly build, from command line, online instrumentation and off-line instrumentation. Towards the end, I gave a quick demo on using Emma with Eclipse, on-the-fly instrumentation from command and HTML reporting.

Towards the end, Prof Dr C N Krishnan talked about NRC-FOSS and its Phase 2 initiatives. He requested the help from ILUG-Chennai. He also expressed his concerns on giving feedback to NRC-FOSS.

We have also been given some stickers, pens and Fedora CDs sponsored by Ubuntu and the speakers have been given caps (so, I got one) from Ubuntu. This Saturday was fulfilling and exciting as well. Looking forward for more such knowledge sharing session.