All the speakers had something novel to present and that kept it very interesting. Had the privilege of listening to the following speakers:

Dr.Robert.E.Niebuhr: I was able to catch only the last part of what he presented. But I did hear him mention about the fact that Florida Tech was one of the 30 schools to have achieved accreditation from PMI for its MBA PM program – so that is a good thing for all of us.

Dr.Harold Kerzner:
Dr.Harold kind of said that the stuff in the PMBOK is kind of getting stale. Some of the things he said:
-The term project needs to be redefined as an endeavor that adds value.
-Measuring projects by just using the triple constraints is not the way now. Value,quality and Reputation are also to be factored in. Disney has more-safety and aesthetics too.

-Multiple criteria(like above) are applied to figure out if a project is a failure or success(not just the triple constraints, iow)
-Capturing the best practices is a strategic weapon.
(e.g:Feds used to contract out 90% of their work; hence lost all best practices to the contractors;now want it all back and want to build a library of best practices and hence the Feds are into creating PMOs to accomplish this-hey there is a job opp there for PMPs and such. IBM has been doing that for long and has a library of best practices and 25000 PMPs!)
-The management PhD candidates target writing about “best practices”

-There is a push to see the needed data/criteria on a dashboard interface. The data seen are not just the time, cost and scope variances. It can be value, quality, reputation. And weightage is given to each of these multiple criteria and that weightage can differ from org to org.
-EVM is dead. VMM(value measurement methodology) is the new kid on the block
-The “measurement technique” of any of the criteria used in the dashboard is also to be shown on the dashboard.
-Today’s PM is also a Biz mgr.

Dr.Tom Sheives:
Tom presented his experiences with 711. Seems 711 is not just a coffee shop- it does many kinds of projects including IT. 711 used proper processes for managing projects and hence were highly successful. PMs exhibited consistency and transparency at 711. Kept very close tabs on the projects on a daily and weekly basis for success. Tom also added that scrum is used in the development phase only and in all other phases the old traditional PM processes are still in vogue.

Nani Sadowski:
Nani presented about the role of the PM in the healthcare arena with her experience in setting up PMOs in the healthcare arena. Seems there is a shortage of PMPs in that arena. Most of the nurses and clinicians are moving on to being PMs(which further increases the shortage of nurses and clinicians). The push towards EMR is one of the factors fueling the need for PMPs. If you get into this area, doctors will fight you tooth and nail with the it seems that the doctors will fight tooth and nail in resisting the new processes you propose or impose.
Chuck Millholan:
Chuck was an extremely interesting speaker after lunch. Chuck works at Churchill Downs(home of the Kentucky Derby) and talked about how requirements were elicited from rich owners for moving from the legacy ticketing system to a new enterprise ticketing system. To not let egos get in the way he had to use the Delphi method -secret ,requirements gathering and then weighting and ranking them. Once ranked everyone got together and re-prioritized the requirements.

Frank Saladis:
Frank talked about “Architechting the Future through PM”
He stressed the fact that you have to be a leader to get the vision done. Iow, PMs should have or develop leadership qualities. PM is still not considered to be a core competency by many organizations. So we as PMs should strive to help organizations make it a core competency. Frank wanted us as a homework to listen to the Project Manager Blues(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej66TiINaRc). Frank had many sayings…notably “Begin with the end in mind”. PM is evolving and hence “What got you here, may not get you there”.

Rick Morris:
Rick talked about the various games that a PM has to play to get upper management to think about the various facets of a project-time, cost and scope for example. Rick’s talk was extremely humorous. For example Rick said that while walking in the hallway once, he was asked for an estimate and Rick replied, “less than 5 million dollars” And the C-suite said “I was thinking like somewhere in the 200,000s” for which Rick replied “I am still correct”:). In essence don’t just be pressured to give a number-question and understand what is behind the numbers. Rick had another example for how to survive the “when will it get finished” qn. He said that he always relies on the PERT equation which gives a best, possible and worst case dates. “Force the decision without confrontation!”, was his message. Also don’t get pressured to move on without a plan, invest money in learning MS Project well -as it can do funky things unbeknownst to you -never ever be pre-judgemental about a previous PM and be a constant learner of new ways of doing things(take minor risks to improve processes)

The main takeaways:
a)Passing the PMP is key to advancing in this field.
b)The demand for PMPs is high, even in this economy.
c)There is a need specifically for “Global Project Managers” (as in when monitoring outsourced projects; Have to “get with the program” of learning the other culture to deal effectively with the person at the other end of a phone or face-to-face)

ORM with JPA is all good, but sometimes the ORM tools generate odd code and as a Java developer you should have the knowledge to correct if there are any anomalies with the relations within auto-generated code. Hope this post helps you understand the innards of  relations within the ORM-generated JPA code.

For this post let me define the CROW (Course Registration Over the Web) db: It has five main tables: Course, Department, Professor,  Student, PC with relations like so: a 1-to-1  relation between Student and PC,  a 1-to-many relation between Department and Professor,  a many-to-1 relation between Professor and Department,  a many-to-many relation between Student and Course.

Relationships can be further classified into Single-Valued associations and Collection-valued associations.

Single-valued associations would be 1-to-1 and many-to-1:  Here the most important JPA annotation you will see is the @JoinColumn, which would refer to the relevant foreign key for the table mapped.  So, for example “PC_ID” is the foreign key in Student table and it would be referred within the @JoinColumn annotation placed over the “pc” field. PC_ID will be the PK for PC table.  The owning side of a relationship is the one that has the @JoinColumn annotation(also simply, the side that contains the FK in the relationship). The inverse side is the other side of the relation(the one without the FK)

1-to-1 :

Uni-directional:

@Entity
public class Student {
@Id
private int id;
private String firstName;
@OneToOne
@JoinColumn(name=”PC_ID”)
private PC pc;
// …
}

Bi-directional: note the “mappedBy” in code snippet. “mappedBy” is always used on the inverse side (or the side without the FK in the relationship) and tells us what the name of the field is called in the owning side of the relationship.

@Entity
public class PC {
@Id
private int id;
private String brandName;
@OneToOne(mappedBy=”pc”)
private Student student;
// …
}

Many-to-1 :

@Entity
public class Professor {
@Id
private int id;
@ManyToOne
@JoinColumn(name=”DEPT_ID”)
private Department department;
// …
}

Collection-valued associations would be 1-to-many and many-to-many

1-to-Many:

If Department referred back to Professor, it would be a bi-directional relationship. One department would thus have a collection of professors. So 1-to-Many in effect would be a Many-to-1 bidirectional relationship from Professor to Department with the owning side being the Professor and the inverse being the Department.  So the Professor mapping would be as before like in Many-to-1, but the Department mapping would change like so.  Department is the inverse side of the relation as it does not refer to a FK and would contain the “mappedBy”.

@Entity
public class Department {
@Id private int id;
private String name;
@OneToMany(mappedBy=”department”)
private Collection<Professor> professors;
// …
}

Many-to-Many :

There is always a join table connecting the two tables. Here I have picked Student as the owning side of the relationship(it is up to you). There is no one join column and hence. But it is a must to pick one as the owner and the other as the inverse. Also the owning side(again your choice) would have the@JoinTable annotation.

@Entity
public class Student {
@Id
private int id;
private String firstName;
@ManyToMany
@JoinTable(name=”STUDENT_COURSE,
joinColumns=@JoinColumn(name=”STUDENT_ID”),          inverseJoinColumns=@JoinColumn(name=”COURSE_ID”))
private Collection<Course> courses;
// …
}

@Entity
public class Course{
@Id private int id;
private String courseName;
@ManyToMany(mappedBy=”courses”)
private Collection<Student> students;
// …
}

[Note: the above only works if you don't have  fields other than STUDENT_ID and COURSE_ID  in the join table STUDENT_COURSE.  Means, if you have other fields within the tables, then you would be forced to map STUDENT_COURSE also into an entity with STUDENT and COURSE each having a 1-to-Many relationship with the STUDENT_COURSE table.]

I did not have a family doc till then. Ok now was the time to get one, I thought. Anyhow scrapped work the next day and went to see a doc at the mini-ER here. They ran a battery of tests and declared me a-ok! As I was walking out of the mini-ER I noticed a family practice opposite the road.  So I walk in there and decide to give this doc named Joe Gallagher a chance to be my family doc.  His credentials were excellent – viz., 30 years of experience! What could go wrong.

Had to wait some time to see doc Gallagher. I told him about my symptoms and mentioned that I had a sleep issue when this panic attack like thing came on.  Doc finished his test and handed me over a prescription and said…”Have this for a month and come and see me”.  It was for a drug called Zolipedum Tartarate(generic name for “Ambien”; with strength=10mg).  CVS filled the prescription and that day had one.  Wow! the sleep was extremely good and I felt so relaxed the first day.

To make a long story short, every day from then I took the pill as ordered by the doc.  Slowly I changed..I was getting depressed. Also one fine day as I walked into the long corridor at my office, everything looked blurred.  I panicked..is this a stroke?? I ran to the eye doctor and he prescribed me glasses for distance vision.  I had double-vision from then on thanks to this drug.  I started seeing halos around everything. So I checked-out this drug on wiki…and was alarmed…It said to not have this drug for more than 2 weeks…and I was on it for close to a month.

So I rush to the doc again..My wife and I beg him to take steps to get me off this awful drug-in effect reduce the dependency slowly. To which, our doc Gallagher said “I don’t think you can get off that drug now. It could be a lifelong thing. You could try and eat half of it” ..the rest I didn’t hear.  Here I was..a person who strived to  keep away from docs all his life (because of the suspicion that most docs were sophisticated drug dealers) at the  mercy of a doc!!

I had planned in the beginning of Aug to go to NY and then onwards to India at the end of November. And the plan was to spent 4 days in NY. Our plan was to reach NY on the 26th of Nov right after T’giving 2010. Two days before T’giving day the Zolipedum drug stopped working on me…So I increased it from 10 to 15 mg and that worked for a night…Now I had a few days to spend in NY and was worried.  We landed in NY…I did not sleep for the next few days at NY…and my flight out to India was a nightmare.  I landed in Dubai and thought I was going to die there…but luckily with a massage from my wife I had an hour’s worth of sleep and hence was able to spent some quality time with some family in Dubai.

I land in India…and since I come from a family of docs and nutritionists, I was kind of lucky. The day I landed, my mom made me some idlis. I had 10 of those with something called “dosha podi” ( made from powdered grams and spices”) and a glass of sweetened milk. Within an hour I fell asleep and slept for like 7 hrs!!!! The first non-drug sleep in ~ 4 months.  The next week was full of tests(blood, brain-scan etc).  My brother(a fine doc) looked at my results and found it perfect….Only one thing…my HB was low..So he prescribed me ferrous sulphate tabs.  From then on my sleep became natural. Also massages from wife before sleep seemed to work well. Also there was this ayurvedic oil called NeeliBringadi- which you apply on your head and later wash off-  which helped with my sleep.  On top of all that I went and joined a yoga class which made me tired enough and taught me mental relaxation techiniques to fall asleep.  Anyhow…I was cured…not by some Godforsaken drug, but due to natural remedies!

So in short, if faced with insomnia, never treat the symptoms…get to the problem.  In my case, I needed some time off, perhaps.  If you can’t sleep for a few days, that is ok.  Don’t follow some stupid doc’s advice of getting yourself dependent on some weird drug – all these drugs have side effects and once you are  on, you are on for good – unless you run away from it like I did.

Wanted Messi to score, but never happened. Well he’ll have his time in the next WC. Also wanted to see Argentina win it all, but to be honest they didn’t have the best team -defensively speaking, they -lack of a better word- sucked!. Spain had the best I’d say and they deserved to win it all. Uruguay was the second best team in my opinion. Forlan was my hero this time around – the only man to do real bananas with the Jubalani ball

USA – yes! We have improved a lot. And we didn’t have world-famous coaches or players, but had an extremely strong team. We need to grow talent here by bringing in big players and increasing the viewership- the induction of Thierry Henry into Red Bulls(they suck judging by the game they played with Hotspurs week before last) is a good thing.

Anyhow…I miss the World cup days! Waking up to the buzz of vuvuzelas (I ordered one in for the finals ) was something. I like games between countries rather than games between clubs. So I am waiting patiently for the Olympics soccer and the European championships – the fillers between world cups. Maybe I will go to Brazil and watch the WC in 2014. Let me work on my Portuguese in the meantime..where is that Rosetta stone thingie I bought?

Anyways..this is the quickest and the tastiest biriyani one could ever make(labor ==1 hr max)..Made it for 6 people with 3 cups of Basmati rice. Soaked the rice in water for 30 mins & dried it up first by passing it through the sieve and then keeping it on the side for 15 mins) Then switched on the cooker and in a pan poured one tbsp of vegetable oil and one tbsp of butter. Sauteed the rice with 3 cardamoms, 3 cloves, 1 bay leaf and a 3 inch long cinnamon stick until the rice turned golden-brown. Transferredthe golden-browned rice to a pressure cooker, poured in 4.5 cups of water and added 1 teaspoon of salt and closed the lid and cooked for 10 mins(exact time). Did not open pressure-cooker for another 15 mins(must do!!)

Now to the chicken. As a prelude to cooking the chicken, cut up four red onions(not very big four, medium sized four) & cut up 1.5 lbs of boneless chicken breasts. In a large teflon pan poured 5 tbsps of vegetable oil and fired up the cooker. Sauteed the onions with one tbsp of ginger paster, one tbsp of garlic paste and 3 tbsps of “Periyar Garam masala”(you could make your own with coriander, chilli, turmeric, pepper powders..but hey this is easy! ) and 1 teaspoon of salt. When the onions looked dry (well use medium fire, ok?…) tossed-in the cut chicken breasts and mixed it all for a few minutes and then closed the pan with its lid(do NOT pour water before closing…chicken cooks in its “own” water. The chicken sh(w)ould be done in 15 mins. After the chicken is affirmed as cooked, remove lid and let the water inside pan evaporate.

Now cut up 3 stalks of coriander/cilantro leaves and 5 mint leaves(each should fill up a tbsp). Grasp the coriander leaves and do a coriander-leaf-confetti on the chicken. Open the pressure-cooker with the cooked rice and do a mint-leaf-confetti on the cooked-rice. Now empty the pan containing the cooked chicken into the pressure cooker with the cooked rice. Mix it all! Don’t squash the rice when mixing(unless you are into eating rice paste )…mix it from the sides with a large spoon.

Make the Indian salad(5 cups of butter-milk+3 diced-up tomatoes+1 diced onions+salt…mix well), a few pappadams (throw in the micro-wave one at a a time for a minute for quickness), serve the mixed rice+chicken..called a biriyani and EAT!

I made an amazing tasting biriyani(not blowing my own horn…my wife seconds that!) Moreover, taught my son Genesh to do it…Got him involved from the very beginning and he knows this recipe by heart now..and he is only 7 !

Well some people try to do a 3-layer biriyani in this style…it is very time-consuming and results could be not so satisfactory, if you ask me..and boring to do. In case, your wise old Indian momma insists on doing that…throw momma out of the …

This attack on Toyota is very politically motivated, imo, and I don’t think Toyota can be killed like that. It is a mountain out-of-a-mole-hill story. There are lots of loyal customers out there like me who would not care for this minor blemish on Toyota’s record. In the meantime, I see tonnes of ads for GM and Ford cars. You got to put a gun to my head to make me buy another one of those American junks. It will be either a Toyota or Honda next time. Hyundai I think might be part of this conspiracy to bring Toyota down. Btw, I hate those tinny-looking Hyundai cars!

For its part, Toyota thought they could get away with this problem. The management got too caulky. Toyota has to drive home the culture of quality into its workforce every now and then. It is an utter failure of management to palm off an issue with the sticky accelerator by saying that was caused by floor carpeting! Ridiculous! The guy who thought the company could get away with that should be send back to an MBA class and be made to do all the case-studies pertaining to ethics!

My 1995 corolla had NEVER any issues. But the Sienna had issues with faulty fuel door, melting boot handle, driver seat belt issue and the whole sound system is junk(when you compare it with that of a Chrysler minivan). So why was my 1995 Corolla better made? I think it was made by people in Japan and then exported out. There was no globalisation like today in 1995. Nowadays, with globalisation, these things are assembled by people in cultures that don’t have quality ingrained in them. So Toyota should either make all their cars in Japan and export it out OR be extremely strict with the quality at places where these cars are assembled. So in effect, globalisation did have a bad effect on Toyota.

Toyota will make a BIG comeback to its former glory soon and with better quality cars. In the meantime folks, don’t throw away your money on junk American-made cars. Also don’t get me wrong: If I were to buy a bike some day, it would definitely be a Harley! But cars, Americans somehow have to master.

Well here is another thought if you are not convinced that JME is going to die…Sun is no longer alive and is owned by Oracle…So Larry E might choose to kill it himself!

That said, iPhone will be a thing of the past in 3 years. It is cumbersome to dev an app for the iPhone because of the difficulties in developing(need a mac, need an acct approved by the Gods and the use of a God-forsaken language ) The only thing setting iPhone apart now is its AppStore. Google has to get up to speed with the MarketPlace(?) plus give two paths for downloading apps..the official tried and tested apps path(like apple does for all of its apps) and a place where cowboy apps can be gotten from.

Go Google & Android!

Anyways, I decided to check out a few firms to modify my loan. Round about December 2008, I saw an ad by a traffic light and called up. There was a woman at the other end. And she said, YES we can modify for anybody. She said all I had to do was to give her 3000 USD. I thought to myself “Wow! if that is all I have to go thru, then this could be it”. So in curiosity I asked her what rate she could bring it down to….and she said “Well there are no guarantees!” What???!!! 3000 USD and no guarantees??!!! Ok smelled fraud and hung up. Well this was an ad on the side of the road; So I said to myself…no more calling up numbers seen around traffic lights:)

But as the months passed I started hearing legitimate(well thru legitimate media) advertisements via the radio…from law offices promising loan mods. I called all that I heard…3 of them. They all took messages and then all called back. All wanted to see me in their offices to give me a quote(yep take a few hours from my busy life and go see them..) In the end(of the 3 I heard over the radio) I selected something called “CPLS or CPLSPA”. They had a downtown office and was in the same building where I used to work once upon a time.

So I go to this “CPLSPA”‘s office downtown. Nice office. Then the receptionist asks me to fill a form and I found all kinds of personal info asked therein, which I refused to answer(ssn, license number, dob, employer name etc). Anyways the gal at the counter overlooked that and asked me to wait. After 15 mins I was ushered in to a conference room, where I met this guy(I think he is a lawyer). The guy took data from me about my loan etc…empathized with me and said “of course we can help”. I was thrilled! So in curiosity I asked him how much it would cost me…The lawyer man told me it would be 1200 USD upfront + 250/pm for 3 months. Wow! So this was better than the 3000 deal with those guys I had from the wayside! Within 2000 USD my worries would be over . So I queried.. would my loan rate be brought down to ~4.5 -6% fixed? The lawyer man said, “there are no guarantees!” Again!!! I heard the “guarantee” word again!

In short folks, this whole thing about a third party helping to modify your loan looks a bogus deal. Without guarantees(what the end rate will be or by how much percentage your current rate would be brought down to) I think nobody should go into business with any of these law firms. The lawyers are going to milk this wealth creating opportunity to the hilt. It is too early to tell how many people will fall for this C- – - P! But this is going on. The media never seems to see all this until these snowball into another mega controversy. The fourth estate sleeps like they slept during the mortgage boom and poncy schemes :^). The fourth estate is a reactionary organization.

I tried to hire a third party because I have no time to do this on my own. I am now determined to go at it alone! And you should too, if you really want to modify your loan(no guarantees here either, but at least there would be no loss of physical money!) Third parties(as it stands today) are too good to be true. So if it is too good to be true, follow mummy’s advice!

(First install M2 Plugin if you have not..I was using Eclipse Ganymede, so Dali was already in, but M2 was not)
1) Created a mvn submodule(to a parent) using maven(m2) plugin
2) Archetype selected was archetype with group-id=com.rfc.maven.archetypes and artifact-id=jpa-maven-archetype
3) Then right-clicked on the submodule project and selected JPA Tools–> convert to JPA Project…
4) In the JPA facet selected Generic, then my db and schema and used openjpa(installed it locally and browsed to it) as the implementation library. Made sure that persistence.xml did not include class names(gives you an error “This mapped class is not specified in persistence unit..” otherwise..No clue why..but thinking it is because there were two persitence.xml files; one from the archetype in src/main/resources/META-INF and the other when using the Dali tool with a persistence.xml under “JPA Content”)
5) After converting to JPA project, right click on submodule project and select JPA Tools—>Generate Entities. This takes me to a screen that would allow me to select all my normalized perfectly designed db tables (synchronizing with persistence.xml was not checked). Once I said ok on that screen, code for entities were generated with no errors..Voila!

==================

Update on Feb 14th 2009: You could skip step 2 and use the Quickstart archetype instead of the jpa archetype and then do the rest of the steps too. Step 2 is a waste if you are using eclipse to convert a project to a JPA project.

download youtube-dl script (a python script)
download ffmpeg
run “python youtube-dl <url>” and get flv file to disk

(<url> is the youtube url)
then use ffmpeg to convert flv to mp3
ffmpeg -i <yourName>.flv -f mp3 -vn -acodec copy <someMp3>.mp3

Convert mpg to flv using this command:ffmpeg -i <somevideo>.MPG -ab 256 -f flv <aFlvFile>.flv  The -ab is audio bitrate and the default is bad quality in my experience(well that is too simple…there are a zillion options you could try..RTFM )