Writing skills

I genuinely want to improve my writing skills. I can't write as well as I speak. The first thing I did was to look up Google for 'Great Writing Tips'. Two points that I remember are to use the active voice and to keep sentences short. In fact, I'm trying to do exactly that in this post :)

Another obvious piece of advice is to write frequently. I plan to do that as well. I think I've adhered to the first 2 rules fairly well till now. Let me know if I didn't.

My Bravia

Set up an all new Sony Bravia 32 inch LCD yesterday. It had been my dream TV for ages (literally, since there have been umpteen innovations in TV technology :). Loved the big screen. Need to explore all the menu options over the course of this week.

One disappointment was that I was unable to stream movies directly from my external hard drive. Need to figure out a solution to that problem.

Meanwhile, it's happy TV watching for some time!

The Devil's Advocate - A review

After wanting to watch 'The Devil's Advocate' for a long time, I finally got a chance to watch the movie over last weekend.

The movie was a mixed bag.

In terms of cast, the film had stellar performances from Al Pacino and Charlize Theron. However, the protagonist Keanu Reeves was his usual expressionless self. Perhaps an actor with more ability to display histrionics might have been a better fit?

Also, the entire concept of the entire film being kind of a thought process of the protagonist was incomprehensible, at least to me. There was no 'Aha!' moment at the end when we discover that the entire movie was actually played out in the mind of Reeves. In fact, I found it mildly disappointing that Milton, essayed by Pacino was actually a figment of Reeves' imagination.

One thing that can be said for the movie though is that there never was a dull moment.

Worth a watch for the performances.

What is "anycast"?

Came across the term "anycast" when researching Managed DNS yesterday. Sounded interesting so looked it up. It was interesting. This is basically a routing methodology where the sender sends a data packet to that receiver which is topologically closest among multiple receivers. Wow! That was quite a mouthful :)

It's use in DNS? Think of a clustered DNS nameserver environment. When there is a request for an IP address, the anycast mechanism enables the system to route the request to the server which is geographically closest to the sender, i.e. the route with minimum hops. This ensures lower latency, i.e. faster speed.

Managed DNS

I'd come across the term 'Managed DNS' on a number of occasions, but gave it a pass. Today, decided to delve a little deeper into the concept. Below is a quick summary of my learnings:

1. Basically, this is a service whereby the provider 'allows' you to use its nameserver(s) for storing your DNS records.

2. There are providers who offer this for free (haven't explored their business model in detail).

3. There are others who offer this for a fee for enterprise customers.

So, what really are the benefits for an enterprise signing up for a provider who offers this for a fee? Essentially, the service provider purports to have a globally distributed, redundant set of nameservers. This provides redundancy, so that requests for the nameserver seldom return error responses. Using technology, they are able to detect the origin of a request and serve DNS data from an appropriately close location. This improves speed.

In summary, this makes business sense only for enterprises. This model would never work for shared hosting and hence many providers provide this for free.

Switch MFIs

Over the weekend, I did something I had been planning to do for a long time. I switched mutual fund units from an under-performing sector to one which "experts" recommended. Need to track my portfolio to see if my decision was correct.

From a broader perspective, it seems to me that tracking your portfolio and dropping under-performing funds is a difficult exercise. These are the typical problems I foresee:

* Time to track the portfolio on a regular basis

* Expertise required is an issue - how do I know if a particular fund is under-performing?

* Timing - They say you can never time the market. This applies to exiting a fund as well.

Bottom-line: It's going to be some time before I can confidently say I know what I'm doing when I'm switching funds :)

Innovative negotiation concept

I read an article by famed HBS professor Howard Raiffa on "Post-settlement Settlement". It was a truly innovative way of looking at achieving integrative negotiation (where participants in the negotiation process believe the negotiation will yield a pie bigger than the sum of its parts). The antithesis of integrative negotiation is distributive negotiation where participants view the negotiation process as a win-lose proposition, i.e. my win can only be had at your expense.

Raiffa theorizes (and backs it up with experiments) that in any negotiation, negotiators rarely reveal the true weights they place on different negotiation parameters. What ends up happening is that both parties end up in a settlement that is sub-optimal. This can be likened to the classic Prisoner's Dilemma problem of Game Theory. His solution: once a settlement has been reached, bring in an interlocutor. This person will go to each of the negotiation participants and offer to get them a better settlement in return for candid information on the true value of their weights on the negotiation parameters. Each can review the new settlement and reject it if unacceptable. Raiffa's argument is that this will invariably result in a better solution.

Although this sounds great in theory, I had some issues on how it will work from a practical perspective.

a) People will rarely share their true interests even to a reputed interlocutor. Hell, they might not even know what their true interests are!

b) It is quite difficult to isolate a negotiation into distinct line items and place weightages on each parameter. This in itself would require tremendous effort on the participants.

Overall though, it was a fascinating concept in negotiation theory. Go Raiffa!