Here’s a collection of some interesting facts about Steve Jobs and Apple
Inc.

-Steve Jobs was born to Abdulfattah John Jandali and Joanne Schieble (later
Simpson). He was a Syrian origin by birth who was adopted by Paul Jobs and
Clara Jobs.

-Steve’s biological sister, Mona Simpson, is the famous author who penned,
“Anywhere But Here” — a novel about Simpson’s relationship with her folks.
He had learnt a lot about his biological parents through his sister. He had
never got a chance to meet his biological sister until the age of 27.

-Steve never wanted to meet his biological father, though his father yearned
to meet his genius son.

-Steve was a Zen Buddhist and once thought about joining a monastery.

-Steve was a college dropout.

-He was a millionaire at the age of 25.

-He was offered an internship with Hewlett-Packard in his eight grade, As an
eight grader he called William Hewlett co-founder of HP to inquire about a
missing part from a frequency counter he was assembling. Hewlett reportedly
offered him a bag of parts and a summer internship.

-Steve Jobs first worked in an Apple Farm. When he decided to start his
business, he joked with his friends that if they did not suggest a name for
his company he will name it as ‘Apple Computers’. Obviously his friends
could not come out with a name and hence Steve named it as ‘Apple
Computers’.

-The apple logo bite/byte has a fitting reference for a tech company

-After Jobs and Wozniak founded the company with Ronald Wayne, the initial
Board of Directors decreed that every employee need to be issued a name
badge and an employee number based on their date of hire. Wozniak got
number one and Jobs was left with two. This made Steve unhappy. He made so
much of stink that the number two badge retired and was issued a new badge
with number zero.

-Steve was known for his aggressive personality and erratic management
style.

-Fortune magazine once wrote that Jobs was “considered one of Silicon
Valley’s leading egomaniacs.”

-Jobs was fired from his own company in an internal power struggle.

-He eventually stepped back as the interim CEO and served as the CEO till
August 2011.

-When Jobs resumed control as Apple’s CEO in 1997, he stopped all of its
philanthropic programs, saying, “Wait until we are profitable.”

-Even after rising to the top to become a $40-billion company, Apple still
doesn’t donate to charity.

-As the CEO of Apple, Steve earned $1 a year, 50 cents for attending the
meetings and 50 cents for his performance.

-On August 24th, 2011 Steve Jobs resigned his position as Chief Executive
Officer of Apple before his long battle with pancreatic cancer took his
life on October 5th 2011

-Jobs stake in Disney was twice as big as his stake in Apple

-He was the 110th richest person in the world when he died

-Today, Apple is the largest technology firm in the world, with annual
revenues of more than $60 billion

Thought could post a few details about cron for the benefit of some of my
friends. A cron is a utility used for scheduling jobs on unix environment.
It’s used to automate a system administrator’s work. If you are good at
writing a shell script you can automate most of the administration tasks
like archiving logs, checking for stuck threads, Exceptions and errors in
log files, Listener port status etc. Crontab is the configuration file that
specifies the shell commands to run periodically. Cron is set up as a
daemon in unix which constantly checks the /etc/crontab file and
/var/cron/tans directory for new crontab files. Crontab file stores
information about the task the cron is supposed to perform.
Each line in a crontab represents a job, the cron expression and the
command to execute. You can also instruct the cron to run a shell script at
specified time.

Crontab Syntax:*    *    *    *    *  command to be executed
┬    ┬    ┬    ┬    ┬
│    │    │    │    │
│    │    │    │    │
│    │    │    │    └───── day of week (0 - 7) (Sunday=0 or 7)
│    │    │    └────────── month (1 - 12)
│    │    └─────────────── day of month (1 - 31)
│    └──────────────────── hour (0 - 23)
└───────────────────────── minutes (0 - 59)
<> <> <>

Name	Mandatory	Values	Special
Minutes	Yes	0-59	* / , -
Hours	Yes	0-23	* / , -
Day of the Month	Yes	01/31/11	* / , - ? L W
Month	Yes	1-12 or JAN - DEC	* / , -
Day of the week	Yes	0-6 or SUN - SAT	* / , - ? L #
Year	No	1970-2099	* / , -

Special characters and their meaning
  *     All values
  /     Repeat pattern like /2 for every 2 minutes or /10 for every 10
     minutes
  ,     Separate items eg “MON,WED,FRI"
  -    Used to specify range, Range specified is inclusive, Lists are also
     allowed.  A list is a set of numbers (or ranges) separated by commas,
     Eg: “1, 5,9” or “1-3, 8-11”
  ?    Used to omit the value
  L    Stand for Last
  W   Stands for Weekday (Mon ? Fri)
  #     is allowed for day of week. Allows specification like 2nd Friday
     of the month

Other Key Points:  - Blank Lines, Leading spaces and tabs are ignored
  - Lines beginning with pound sign (#) are considered as comments, Comments
     are not allowed on the same line of the command or environment
     variable. If it’s found on the same line they would be treated as
     part of command.
  - The specification of days can be made in two fields: month day and
     weekday. If both are specified in an entry, then cumulative meaning
     of both the entries will get executed
  - Names can also be used for the ``month'' and ``day of week'' fields.
     The first three letter of the day or month are used case doesn't
     matter.
  - The last field i.e 6th specifies the command to be run.  The rest of the
     line after the 5th field is considered as part of the command until a
     newline or % character is found. Percent-signs (%) in the command,
     unless escaped with backslash (\), will be changed into newline
     characters, and all data after the first % will be sent to the
     command as standard input.

     Eg:    ``30 4 1,30 * 4'' would cause a command to be run at  4:30 am
     on the 1st and 30th of each month, plus every Thursday.

Crontab Commands:export EDITOR=vi  To specify a editor to open crontab file.
crontab -e    Edit your crontab file, or create one if it doesn’t already
exist.
crontab -l      Display your crontab file.
crontab -r      Remove your crontab file.
crontab -u      To change other users crontab, Only privilleged users can use this
crontab -v      Display the last time you edited your crontab file.

Other Config FilesThe following two files play an important role:

1. /etc/cron.allow - If this file exists, your user id must me listed in order
  to have the privileges to run the cron jobs.

2. /etc/cron.deny - If the cron.allow file does not exist but the
  /etc/cron.deny file does exist, then your id must not be listed in the
  /etc/cron.deny file for you to run the cron jobs.

Environment Variables: SHELL is set to /bin/sh, and LOGNAME and HOME  are
set  from  the  /etc/passwd

By Defaults if MAILTO is defined (and non-empty), mail is sent to the
user/DL so named.   If MAILTO is defined but empty (MAILTO=""), no mail
would be sent.  Otherwise mail is sent to the owner of the crontab

If no email is required then end of the cron job line with the below
command
>/dev/null 2>&1

Google one of the fastest growing companies with an outstanding
contribution to the internet world has celebrated its 13th Birthday on
September 27th 2011.
It all started in 1995, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin Stanford computer
science grad students began collaborating on a search engine called
BackRub. In 1997 they thought BackRub needs a new name. After a
brainstorming discussion they decide to go for Google a Mathematical term
“Googol” which means a numeral, 1 followed by 100 zeros or 10 to the power
of hundred. The name reflects Google’s mission: “To organise the world’s
information and make it universally accessible and useful". In 1998,
August, Andy Bechtolsheim co-founder of Sun writes a check for $100,000 for
Google Inc. In September the same year Google sets up a workspace in Susan
Wojcicki‘s garage at 232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park. On September 4th
Google files an incorporation in Califonia, shortly after which Larry Page
and Sergey Brin open a bank account in their newly established companies
name and deposit Andy Bechtolsheim‘s check. They hire Craig Silverstein as
their first employee; who was a fellow computer science graduate student at
Stanford.
Since it's start Google has been coming up with continuous innovations, making a conspicuous approach in the internet world that has
been advancing with rocket speed. The birthday date has been a topic of
debate as Google had filed incorporation on 4th September 1998, was
established on 7th September 1998 and Google.com domain was registered on
15th September. The dates did change a couple of times. As for Doodles, the
special logos have been around since Aug. 30, 1998. The first Doodle was
created when Page and Sergey Brin attended the Burning Man festival. The
first Google Doodle celebrating their birthday appeared on Sept. 27, 2002,
for their fourth birthday. Every year since then Google has been coming
with birthday-themed Google Doodles on 27th September as a remark of their
celebrations.

Most applications today go for Load Balancing Methodology to distribute
work across different servers, and to enhance continuity of business. Going
for a load balancing methodology increases system reliability by providing
redundancy. A load balancer is a software program that is listening on the
port and forwards the request to the server which responds to the load
balancer.  Mechanisms are available to forward request to backup servers in
cases of failure of the main server. There are a variety of scheduling
algorithms in place for distributing the work among different servers.


The diagram explains how a simple load balancing architecture looks like
and works.
The request from the client is forwarded to either of Server 1 or Server 2
whichever is relatively free. The decision is made by the load balancer
based on the algorithm. The algorithm could be as simple as random choice,
round robin or sophisticated based on the resource utilization and
performance. Suppose Server 1
fails, then there is a process set up to handle such situations “ON FAILURE
SWITCHOVER TO BACKUP SERVER”. The switchover happens automatically in most
times; In case it fails then the administrators do a manual switchover. The
Backup server acts as the main server and responds to the requests till the
main server is completely restored. This ensures continuity of business.
The failure of one of the servers is not a hindrance to progress or
production. A load balancing architecture could include more than 2 servers
as well based on business need.

An ERP is a combination of Business Management and Technology. The
functionality of different systems is integrated to form an ERP where the
individual applications share information and assist with the core
functionality of an enterprise as a whole. They put across the information
depicting the key performance index (KPI) of an organization. They help in
planning, design and decision making. The individual system could be
in-house built or third party supplier systems enabling sharing of required
data between the organization, vendors, customers and the suppliers.
Each organization has its own challenges to meet the growing customer
demands, market competitors and to deliver on time. On time delivery can be
achieved only if there is a proper plan in place. For example let us
consider a food industry; nobody buys the ingredients for the product years
in advance. They would definitely get wasted. At the same time they need to
anticipate the demand for the product for the coming cycle and should have
a margin to expand their sales. So for a food industry the average time
required to dispose an order could be one week, one month etc based on the
product. Now let’s consider a software product. I wonder where we would
have landed if we could develop new products over a week. Definitely the
turnaround time here is more and the plan is for a longer period. Likewise
they are several other factors that have to be taken into consideration; a
product may experience high sales during summer and low during winter,
there could be an internal dependency (Sales of one product, could have an
impact on the other) etc. An ERP model is a blending of Business logic's
with technology by integrating systems that share data for analysis to
arrive at appropriate conclusions. There may not be an exact match in the
predictions however a well implemented ERP gives the best fit to growing
business needs and reduce wastage.

ERP technology is divided into the below modules based on the business
purpose they serve
  FRM – Financial Resource Management
  MRP – Manufacturing Resource Planning
  CRM – Customer Relationship Management
  HRM – Human Resource Management
  SCM – Supply Chain Management

The diagram shows a rough sketch of MRP module as I have been considering
product manufacturing as an example in my Blog.
The referential system here holds the basic information (Product Names,
Suppliers, and their Contact Information etc) All other systems use this as
a base for fetching the basic information.  The planner holds the bill of
material or the recipe to build a product. The information provided by the
planner is substituted by the actual values when a customer places an
order, the forecast systems help to predict the upcoming sales/market
conditions; there are systems through which the third party suppliers and
vendors access information, place orders, assist with sales, distribution
and marketing. The model also includes systems which generate invoices,
send bills to customers and for making payments. The other modules (FRM,
SCM, CRM, HRM) also hold an integrated group of systems which assist with
the proper functioning of an enterprise.

Microsoft with their slogan “Be what’s next” is moving business to the
cloud with their new release of Office 365 on June 28th 2011. Recently this
is been a topic that is highly discussed, so thought why not take some time
out for it. Cloud computing considers service as a whole than as a product.
Shared resources, software’s and information are provided as a single
utility in a Cloud.  Office 365 is an enhancement over ‘Business
Productivity Suite (BPOS)’ which had been offering software as a service on
branded Microsoft applications. According to the reviews, this new cloud is
expected to greatly reduce the cost of IT with the easy to administer
features. A 30 day trail version is available for use which would assist in
arriving at a decision if you are looking for the actual results.

Office 365 is a collaboration of tools that rightly fits in any office
needs, needless to mention if it’s a small business or a professional or a
big multinational firm. Microsoft has come up with specific pricing to
address small, mid-sized and large firms with monthly subscription plans.

Office 365 includes
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Exchange Online
Microsoft SharePoint Online
Microsoft Lync Online
Giving a new opportunity to work and share ideas. Active Directory
Federation Services 2.0 with single sign-on is a new addition with Office
365. With Office 365 you can do anything from instant messaging, video
conferencing, file/work sharing, commenting, reviewing, email migrations,
website developments etc.  It addresses the security features and provides
hierarchical access control and restrictions to sensitive data.

Google Docs is also a similar product to Office 365 however Office 365 is
more in sync with the desktop clients and has better functionality. Google
Docs holds an edge in terms of interoperability. I am not going to get
deeper with the comparisons. Opting for a cloud provides a strategic
approach to cut down maintenance cost.

Today with business continuity and customer focus as primary goals, the
need to identify and fix problems before a service interruption occurs has
increased. Manual checks are tedious, as most of your time goes with
identifying the issue, then concentrating on fixing.  We have several
monitoring tools in place which help us identify where a problem has
exactly occurred. They warn about data overflows, slowness, high
utilization etc in advance so that the engineers can fix it, lest there is
a business impact.

While browsing I came across this article comparing the two social networking sites.