We’re set to have our 2^nd meeting this coming Thursday, the 28^thof August, in Ta’ Xbiex where we have graciously been donated a board room and projector (and parking space, luckily) for use. I’m trying to get one of our members to give a session about security (not only on MySQL, but also on the OS level to secure the process), and I know there is work being done on a presentation on MySQL Cluster, which I personally find very interesting and can’t wait to see.

In this second meeting, we’ll again focus on general best practices and free discussions, in order to share our knowledge as much as we can. The last meeting was in Mellieha and it was a success — we had a good turnout and some very interesting discussions. Darren, one of our members, blogged about our meeting here and so did I in one of my previous posts.

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• 10g RAC on RHEL4 using ESX Server and NFS
  
• 11g RAC on RHEL5 using ESX Server and NFS
  

If you’re interested in the enterprise VMware kit it’s worth taking a look at the site. New stuff is being added all the time. I think it’s official launch is at vmworld2008 in about 3 weeks.

I’ve also added an overview article for the ESX Server installation to my website.

• VMware ESX Server 3.5 Update 2 Installation

Cheers

Tim…

• 10g RAC on RHEL4 using ESX Server and NFS
  
• 11g RAC on RHEL5 using ESX Server and NFS
  

If you’re interested in the enterprise VMware kit it’s worth taking a look at the site. New stuff is being added all the time. I think it’s official launch is at vmworld2008 in about 3 weeks.

I’ve also added an overview article for the ESX Server installation to my website.

• VMware ESX Server 3.5 Update 2 Installation

Cheers

Tim…

Like the first film, it’s not without its faults, but overall I thought it was cool. After some of the recent film dissapointments, I was really thinking this might go down the toilet also. Thankfully it didn’t.

The trailer for Max Payne looked interesting. I also enjoyed the trailer for the film Pineapple Express. The film itself doesn’t look that good, but the soundtrack features Paper Planes by M.I.A. I think they only used it because it has the sound of gun shots in the chorus. That kinda misses the point of the song, but never mind. Very cool track.

I came out of the cinema and had a message from my Mom. She couldn’t get on the internet. I had to ring her up and talk her through restarting her ADSL router. Hi Mom. That’s one more reader for my blog.

Cheers

Tim…

Like the first film, it’s not without its faults, but overall I thought it was cool. After some of the recent film dissapointments, I was really thinking this might go down the toilet also. Thankfully it didn’t.

The trailer for Max Payne looked interesting. I also enjoyed the trailer for the film Pineapple Express. The film itself doesn’t look that good, but the soundtrack features Paper Planes by M.I.A. I think they only used it because it has the sound of gun shots in the chorus. That kinda misses the point of the song, but never mind. Very cool track.

I came out of the cinema and had a message from my Mom. She couldn’t get on the internet. I had to ring her up and talk her through restarting her ADSL router. Hi Mom. That’s one more reader for my blog.

Cheers

Tim…

Moreover, i was looking for Lotus short cuts today and found that there is no short cut in Lotus for Send/Receive mail.

At our client’s site, i have seen IBM people having kept an exe killnotes.exe on their desktop which they use to quickly exit from Lotus. What bullshit ?

Outlook/Outlook Express rocks, seriously !

Anyways, Nokia’s capture in Indian market is going to be impacted terribly. They are already into the launch of N96. Lets see how things go on.

BTW by pricing iPhone at 31k, they just lost one customer. I am not buying it

It started when Ethan Post posted a link to this fascinating story at the Ludwig von Mises Institute about how the U.S. dollar’s collapse affects the outsourcing industry. As many of these posts do, the idea of outsourcing gets conflated with that of offshoring. What the author really means to say is that the “downward dollar delivers a blow to offshoring“, not outsourcing.

Let me explain further. I am now cribbing shamelessly from my oracle-l post and so if you read this already this spring, my apologies.

Ethan had posed the following question:

Interesting article on the effects of the dollar’s fall on outsourcing. Would be interesting to hear a few of you who are perhaps feeling these effects to comment.

To which I replied:

Our margins were definitely squeezed painfully from April 07 until late last year (follow that link to see a 20% or so decline in the USD/CAD exchange, and remember that a substantial chunk of Pythian’s costs are in CAD and about 70% of our income is in USD). So it hasn’t been really that much fun adjusting to our new currency realities. That being said, I think there is a meaningful difference between offshorers and outsourcers and that these different ideas get conflated a lot, including in this case.

If your company’s entire business model is simply shifting work from a country where wages are high to a country where wages are lower, you have two problems. First, you are very vulnerable to this type of currency shift because it is at the core of your profit model. This is called labour arbitrage. Second, as time marches on and we continue our trend to a global rate for any given IT service, your company will cease to have any reason to exist. This article from the Economist covers general India inflation, trust me focus on labour inflation in the information technology sector and the situation is much, much worse.

However, outsourcing properly conceived can be highly successful even when the resources are hired locally to the market being targeted; meaning without relying on exchange rate differences nor differences in global payscales. These companies are successful because by concentrating expertise, adopting best practices, innovating and reusing work they have found efficiencies that add up to more than their direct costs of services delivery + overhead (meaning, that profit model has nothing to do with currency or wage geography).

I would count Pythian among companies conceived along those lines, we are far from alone, certainly our direct competitors based only in the U.S. dbaDirect, Contemporary and DCC (hi guys! well done!) do not rely to any degree on wage differences or exchange rates as parts of their profit models. To put things into perspective, although Pythian has a presence in 10 countries now (including four U.S. cities), our profit model also has innovation, expertise, scale and re-use as it’s heart and soul, not labour arbitrage.

So anyway, we’ve successfully adjusted over here and I think offshoring will lose a lot from the collapse of the USD, but these companies that are offshorers only will be forced to morph into something better to survive, which is good for everyone.

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