Nuwan Online - Nuwan Weerasinghe’s Web Log

For the last couple of days i was watching CNN and Fox news on the latest happenings in Itran. None of the western media companies were allowed access into Iran and they had to rely on the video footages sent by Iranians. All these media giants were just broadcasting low quality but effective video clips of what unfolded in Iran. Traditional media companies can do little when their correspondant are not allowed into a particular area to report.

But very little can any government do to block people from capturing these moments of truth with their mobile phones and instantly uploading it to Youtube, FB or Twitter. Instead of a few media personal, hundreds and thousands of ordinary Iranians turned into photo journalists told the world what was going on in Iran.

Just like how email usage limited the applicability of a postal department, the emergence of social media will definitely have an effect on news network and news agencies. Boundries between countries are useless in the digital era and news agenciees had to rely on social network for news.

Unlike a news personal from a news agency, we cannot fully rely on some video clip captured by an unknown entity, yet this is the emerging trend and we will need to face it. For now CNN, Fox, BBC etc can continue to refer to Social Network when there is is nothing else they can do!

These are tough days for everyone and Sri Lanka has started to feel the heat. We are hearing how a renowned group of Companies in Sri Lanka is struggling these days. People are increasingly skeptical on where to invest their retirement funds and EPF funds. Given the current volatility of the private sector, most people will feel safe with the Goverment owned banks and Financial institutions. This will be the trend for sometime to come. Most likely quite a few Leasing and Finance comapnies will go into bust. This would be the case when many people will default on their monthly Leasing or Finance payments. It will be interesting to see how banks face this situation as we have already seen that some were vulnerable and the government had to intervine.

How about investing on new Assets like houses or cars? Given normal circumstances these over time depriciate as assets. But Sri Lanka had a funny situation where a used car could be sold with a hefty profit. Same was for houses. This was not long ago. But things have changed since then.

Car sales have taken a nose dive. Real Estate prices remain Sky High with very few bothered to buy. Banks are reluctant to provide any loans for Cars or Houses. Therefore financing these purchases is extremely difficult for any average person. Im not quite sure for how long this global recession would prevail, but Sri lanka will feel the heat. Our exports to US and EU will be definitely reduced, specially in Garment Exports. Thousands will be layed of. Also the sudden drop in Crude oil prices must be causing a lot of concerns in the middle east. Lot of projects which got initiated when a barrel of oil was 150 US$ must be temporarily or permanently stopped. This means that thousands of migrant workers from our country will have to return to Sri Lanka from the middle east sooner or later or shift into low payed jobs. 

In my opinion the safest investment in this climate is in Skills. Spend what ever you can on learning and aquiring new skills. Do your degree, or MSc or MBA. Get qualified. America, Europe even Australia may be laying off now. But when the global economy revives back, we need to be ready with the necessary skills to meet the sudden huge demands from the global economy. Therefore i think the wise decesion is to look at this as an opportunity and get ready since thats all what we could do.

Watched this movie last Monday. I will not comment on Will Smith. We all know how good he is. But i was curious about this guy ‘Chris Gardner’ (Of course the movie is based on a true story and the Hero is him). Did some googling and look what i found…..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Gardner

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jul2007/sb20070723_608918.htm

http://www.chrisgardnermedia.com/main/biography.htm

I just dont know what to say…. but this is the kind of people who inspires me in my ‘Pursuit of Happiness’

I have been involved in the CMMI initiative at Zone24x7 from the very beginning and after more than 2 years of hard work from the entire Zone team, we had a final assessment for CMMI Maturity level 3. I am pleased that I had the opportunity to participate in the 3 day official program ‘Introduction to CMMI’ which was conducted by our consultants. My most recent involvement was to take part in the final asssessment as an ‘Appraisal Team Member’ or ATM for Zone.

I must say that the consultant (Lead Appraiser) was extremely resourcefull and had lot of tips, best practices etc..to share with us which was a Bonus for us. The final assessment was a gruelling 2 week episode which required lot of concentration and attention to detail.

From that last two weeks of Assessment work.. my take home message is just one Acronym…

MBM (Metrics Based Management).

Lately, I have not been blogging as much as i would have liked to. But with all the good hopes for 2009, i want to make it a point to spend more time blogging on all the things i like to write about. Lets see…………

2009 is just a couple of hours ahead……….

Happy 2009

One of the Google Guys, Sergey Brin has started blogging. Its here. I always had a facination to these guys, and its great that atleast one of them decided to start a public blog. Also i got to know that Sergey is married to Anne Wojcicki, wonder if this is the lady who gave her garage to the google guys to setup Google for couple of months when google was a toddler, if i am not mistaken…

The title says all of it. From time to time its good to break away from the habbit of reading tech books and read something truly inspirational. This book is all about 7 CEOs who are either working or worked in 7 of the best managed global giants.

The book is not an exhaustive read, but a good one. I also liked the line up of CEOs since the majority are from IT industry. Michael Dell of Dell Computers, Jack Welch of GE, Lou Gerstner of IBM, Andy Grove of Intel, Bill Gates of Microsoft, Herb Kelleher of SouthWest Airlines and finally Sam Walton of Wal Mart are the featured CEOs.

Reading through the book gives you the impression of attending an MBA class.

For me, Jack Welch was the most impressive. Specially how he implemented the Quality Program Six Sigma at GE. I could get some tips from his effort to fine tune our CMMI initiative as well.

There is a new search engine which searches 3 times as many pages as Google and 10 times as Microsoft (Thats what they say). Its called Cuil. Interestingly, some of the founders are ex googlers. Something i noticed was when u type a particular search with wrong grammer or anything as such…no search results would be shown. Google in this case behaves differently and gives ’something’ maybe which is entirely irrelevant to what you searched. More info at http://www.cuil.com/info/.

By the way…………..pronounce it as cool…. so its cool search…

The latest version of Firefox 3.0 has a localized version of Sinhaleese. This is still in beta. Download from here.

For couple of weeks now i am experiencing this problem from time to time. Loging into Gmail fails with a pop up saying ‘Operation Aborted’. I’m using IE 7.0.5730.11 version on Windows XP SP 2.

I cleared the cache twice and the problem still persists. This link suggests that its an IE issue.

For the time being the only fix available is to access the older version of gmail.