Today, I thought of vomiting my feelings out about Silly Mistakes.
Silly or careless mistakes (whatever you may call them) have always assumed a special position in my life. Now its almost as if they have become my friends, a part and parcel of my life...haunting me all out.
Many a times the toll of these mistakes is light but sometimes heavy...but always better if you can avoid them.
I often think whether the mistakes are careless or am I ?
In the X Board exams I applied the formula for the volume of a sphere as
4/3 pi r*r ...LoL...lost 5 marks for this and got 95 . OK...doesnt matter much.
I would have sacrificed hundreds of marks to these mistakes...and dont know how many more would I...
So this time I tried to find out the cause behind these mistakes discerning something from one of the latest happenings.
Yesterday, we were shown Computer Graphics II Mid Term papers. I was quite confident of getting 10 on 10. Neeta Nain ma'am checked the first 2 questions and I got full marks in there...then came the 3rd one. In the 3rd question we were given 8 coordinates of a polygon and were asked to give the pixels that will be filled in by the polygon filling algorithm.
Now lets take the life into the reverse gear to see how I proceeded to solve this question in the examination:
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I marked all the points given on my answer sheet with the utmost attention. Then as I was joining them one by one a deja vu struck me which soon converted to a nostalgic feeling - hey i used to do the same thing in the newspapers.
Finally I got quite a decent looking polygon. I applied the filling algo and wrote down all the pixels that would be filled; confident of getting it all correct
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Now the denouement and the climax. I got this question completely wrong... :P
How ? Why? Where? did I make the mistake ! How could I screw up this simple question ?
Answer:
I had joined the points in a random order forgetting that they had to be joined only in the order they were given in the question paper. Hence I got a completely different polygon and completely different answers. And the reaction of the teacher...U can imagine :P
ANALYSIS :
Lets analyse here a bit and think what could be the possible reason behind commiting this trivial mistake.
Remember the deja vu feeling....immersed in a feeling of nostalgia, I cherished thinking about those sweet days of my childhood...that was the point where I lost my concentration and I commited another Silly Mistake !
Had I remained focussed and stoic, I could have possibly avoided it.
Uptil now the consequences of these mistakes were light weight but WHAT IF
while working for a multi national firm I screw something up in a financial deal.
I could possibly lose my job.
Thus at this juncture of my life it has actually become imperative that I stop making these Silly / Trivial / Careless mistakes and I believe better concentration and focus are the way out...the challenge lies ahead.
COME ON Silly Mistakes !
A stock market, or equity market, is a private or public market for the trading of company stock and derivatives of company stock at an agreed price; these are securities listed on a stock exchange as well as those only traded privately.
The stock market is one of the most important sources for companies to raise money. This allows businesses to be publicly traded, or raise additional capital for expansion by selling shares of ownership of the company in a public market. The liquidity that an exchange provides affords investors the ability to quickly and easily sell securities. This is an attractive feature of investing in stocks, compared to other less liquid investments such as real estate.
The index is a diversified portfolio. It includes oil companies, banks, software companies, etc and is not sector specific.
It includes listings from every facet of the economy.
The stock market has sometimes been a remarkably good forecaster of the economy. For example, in the early 1990s, stock prices rose sharply, in anticipation of a doubling of profit in 1994 and another doubling of profit in 1995. From late 1994 onwards, stock prices did badly. This was in anticipation of big declines in profit: -38%, -22% and -50% from 1996-97 to 1998-99. Similarly, in 2002-03 and 2003-04, profits grew sharply, and the stock market captured this in prices ahead of events.
The price of shares and other assets is an important part of the dynamics of economic activity, and can influence or be an indicator of social mood. An economy where the stock market is on the rise is considered to be an up coming economy. In fact, the stock market is often considered the primary indicator of a country's economic strength and development. Rising share prices, for instance, tend to be associated with increased business investment and vice versa. Share prices also affect the wealth of households and their consumption.
But from experience we know that investors may temporarily pull financial prices away from their long term trend level. Over-reactions may occur—so that excessive optimism (euphoria) may drive prices unduly high or excessive pessimism may drive prices unduly low.
So the question arises: Can the stock market be considered as a reliable barometer of a country's economy?
Lets move forward by taking a few examples.
ZIMBABWE:
Zimbabwe is in the middle of an economic disintegration, with GDP declining for the seventh consecutive year, half what it was in 2000. Ever since President Mugabe's disastrous land-reform campaign (an entire article in itself), the country's farming, tourism, and gold sectors have collapsed. Unemployment is said to be near 80%. And to add to the misery inflation has sky-rocketed to unbelievable 100000% !
Yet something odd is happening.
The Zimbabwe Stock Exchange (the ZSE) is the best performing stock exchange in the world, the key Zimbabwe Industrials Index is up some 595% since the beginning of the year and 12,000% over twelve months.
BHUTAN:
The small Royal Bhutan Stock Exchange (RBSE) currently trades only 13 companies. Does the growth of Bhutan depends only upon these 13 companies?
INDIA:
There are nearly seven lakh companies in India, of which only 6,000 or so are listed on our exchanges.
Though nearly 9,000 scrips are listed on our exchanges, more than half are not quoted or traded.
Another 25 per cent were quoted only a couple of times last year. The shares of just the top 10 companies commanded nearly 45 per cent of the trade turnover last year.
Contrast this with the NYSE, where no single scrip normally enjoys more than one per cent of the turnover.
Though market players and exchanges brag about India having the largest number of listed scrips (like having the largest cattle population in the world), only about a hundred are active.
More than 70 per cent of trading, even in these hundred or so scrips, is not for delivering these shares. It is for squaring-off purposes. In other words, the participants do not even see these scrips, and a true "scripless trading" is in place.
A substantial portion of the transaction is for gains or losses at the margin and it is the day-traders (who square-off within the day) who are active in the market. Hence, the stock market is no barometer, either for India's corporates or its economy.
The stock market is known as being one of the most volatile markets with ups and downs much difficult to comprehend than highs and lows in corporate profits. Swings in stock markets are known to be driven more by the speculative psychology of investors than actual economic analysis.
While stock market capitalization in India has increased by four times in the decade of 91’-92’ to 2001-02, capital formation in the country had barely increased over that decade. As a result, investment has also not risen commensurately which again suggests that the financial markets dance to a tune of their own. Upward swings in the stock market in early 90’s were mainly caused by a rise in Foreign Institutional Investment which only led to increase in the country’s foreign exchange reserves.
Although Stocks can mobilize savings into investment and can cause the growth of the company and increase its market share, it is not always a barometer of the economy in its true sense.
But often it is manipulated to give an untrue picture. The aim is to boost the stock prices of certain corporations through stock market manipulations. Unscrupulous profiteers jack up stock prices to earn huge profits leading to losses for the small investors.
Today I am writing something on Ethics and Education (as we have been given an assignment in our Technical Comm. class :P). Here are some of my views:
Ethics are concerned with what is right or wrong, good or bad,responsible or irresponsible, obligatory or permissible, praiseworthy or blameworthy. It is associated with guilt, shame, indignation,empathy and compassion.
Ethics are norms for conduct that distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable behavior.
Ethics are about making choices that may not always feel good or seem like they benefit you but are the "right" choices to make. Ethics is something one has to feel for himself.
Ethics are the premise on which the whole social and corporate structure is functioning. The absence of ethics in our daily life can seriously hamper the progress of any nation. But what is being observed lately is that the ethical practices are blithely floundering. Here comes the need to incorporate the ethical education into our education system.
School education is something that we remember throughout our life. Thus if the seed of good ethics has to be sown we should catch the students young.
It is much easier to influence the DNA of a child in the right direction when he just starts to develop his thoughts.
It is very important to include ethical education as a compulsory part of the primary education. It should be given a high priority. Students will grasp the importance of ethics only when educators take it on an even plane with science and mathematics. If some fixed guidelines are not provided the students will end up making their own set of ethical codes.
Ethical guidelines will help students figure out for themselves what actions they should take when faced with ethical issues. Leaving it to the individual judgment is highly risky. Such an individual is more vulnerable to get misguided at any point of time.
Ethics education should incorporate not just teaching the code of professional or social conduct, but rather a process whereby individuals become more consciously involved in making ethical decisions.
One of the main goals of ethics education should be to encourage students to recognize social responsibilities within their profession and as citizens. Ethical education should be implemented to consistently reinforce the desired behaviors and to skillfully reduce the undesired ones.
Recent corporate accounting scandals have brought ethics back into the limelight. The sight of CEOs and CFOs parading into courtrooms has raised public awareness and concern about ethical behavior in management and accounting.
If India has to maintain its reputation of an ethical nation and lest another Satyam strikes hard at our roots we should implement a revolutionary ethical education system without wasting any more time!
There have been a lot of discussions and debate regarding whether Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, the lone terrorist caught alive in the midst of the Mumbai terror attacks on the November 26th, 2008 should be provided with an advocate to defend him or not.
That would just be a wastage of time.
Leap seconds were introduced in 1971 to reconcile astronomical time, which is based on the rotation of the Earth, and physical time, which can be measured with amazing accuracy using atomic clocks. Tidal friction within the Earth, caused by the gravitational pull of both the Moon and the Sun, continuously slow down the daily rotation of our planet. The modern-day definition of the unit of time, one second, approximates the length of the day divided by 60×60×24 as it was in 1820. Since then, the length of a day has increased by roughly 2.5 ms, and continues to increase in the order of 1.7 ms per century. With the invention of atomic clocks in the mid 1950s, a means of measuring time became available that is far more stable and accurate than the rotation of our planet about its own axis. This led to two alternative definitions of time: TAI and UT1 were approximately equal at the introduction of TAI in 1958. But UT1 fluctuates all the time and is slowing down increasingly in the long term. As a result, TAI is now more than 32 seconds ahead of UT1. With two different definitions of time available, the question arose, how exactly the civilian time zones according to which we set our clocks should be defined. In 1971, a committee of the ITU (International Telecommunications Union), which is in charge of setting up international rules for the operation of radio time signals, proposed a third definition of time, as a practical compromise: UTC is a time scale defined by atomic clocks, just like TAI, but these atomic clocks are adjusted by inserting or deleting an additional leap second whenever UTC and UT1 drift apart by more than half a second. From 1972 on, UTC quickly replaced GMT as the international reference time for setting clocks, because it was easily available from time-signal radio stations. UTC had the advantage of being generated by atomic clocks, which are far cheaper and easier to operate than the precision telescopes used earlier, without changing the relationship to the traditional astronomical definition of time by more than a second, an amount negligible for all but a few specialist applications (such as pointing telescopes). Today, most civilian time zones are defined in relation to UTC, from which they typically differ by an integral number of hours (sometimes half hours). As a result, civilian time zones have leap seconds simultaneously with UTC. If a leap second is announced, it is inserted as the 61st second (23:59:60 UTC) of the last “minute” of the month June or December. Leap seconds have to be inserted on average every 1–2 years during this century. However, due to an unusual temporary acceleration of the Earth, no leap second was needed during the 7-year gap between the end of 1998 and the end of 2005. Uptil now a total of 24 leap seconds have been introduced. Out of these 9 have been added on the June 30th and 15 of them on December 31st. Recently, 1 Leap Second was inserted at the end of the year 2008 on the 31st December. The UTC Clock ran like this:What are they and why do we have them?
31 DEC 2008 23 HOURS 59 MINUTES 59 SECONDS 31 DEC 2008 23 HOURS 59 MINUTES 60 SECONDS 01 JAN 2009 00 HOURS 00 MINUTES 00 SECONDS
For Replication we follow the following steps:
1. Stop the master server's slapd daemon.
2. Reconfigure the master server's slapd.conf to enable replication to the new slave server.
3. Copy the database from the master server to the replica.
4. Configure the replica server's slapd.conf.
5. Start the replica server's slapd process
6. Start the master server's slapd process.
7. Start the master server's slurpd process.
1. MASTER SIDE:
replica uri=ldap://192.168.1.21:389
suffix="dc=mnit,dc=ac,dc=in"
binddn="uid=easypush,ou=people,dc=mnit,dc=ac,dc=in"
bindmethod=simple
credentials=******
updateref ldap://192.168.1.20:389
# ./slurpd –d 1
slurpd reads entries in the replication log file one at a time and propagates the changes using basic LDAP commands (e.g., add, modify, delete, modrdn, etc.). If a change cannot be made, slurpd writes the entry and reason for the failure to a reject log named
LDAP (Light Weight Directory Access Protocall) is used as a central storage directory for storing user information. All the clients authenticate via a single LDAP server. It reduces data redundancy.
For authenticating clients we need to configure both the server and the client machines.
This configuration is for the deepOfix server and will work smoothly with debian clients (though the configuration is same for most of the linux clients) .
allow bind_anon_dn
loglevel 0
include /var/easypush/ldap/etc/openldap/schema/cosine.schema
include /var/easypush/ldap/etc/openldap/schema/inetorgperson.schema
include /var/easypush/ldap/etc/openldap/schema/nis.schema
include /var/easypush/ldap/etc/openldap/schema/samba.schema
include /var/easypush/ldap/etc/openldap/schema/qmail.schema
include /var/easypush/ldap/etc/openldap/schema/deepofixuser.schema
directory /var/easypush/ldap/var/openldap-data
index objectClass eq
access to attrs="userPassword,sambaLMPassword,sambaNTPassword"
by dn="uid=easypush,ou=people,dc=mnit,dc=ac,dc=in" write
by anonymous auth
by self write
by * none
access to dn.subtree="dc=mnit,dc=ac,dc=in"
by dn="uid=easypush,ou=people,dc=mnit,dc=ac,dc=in" write
by dn="uid=deepofix,ou=people,dc=mnit,dc=ac,dc=in" read
by self write
by users read
access to dn.subtree="ou=people,dc=mnit,dc=ac,dc=in"
by dn="uid=deepofix,ou=people,dc=mnit,dc=ac,dc=in" read
by users read
access to dn.subtree="ou=group,dc=mnit,dc=ac,dc=in"
by dn="uid=deepofix,ou=people,dc=mnit,dc=ac,dc=in" read
by users read
access to dn.subtree="ou=addressbook,dc=mnit,dc=ac,dc=in"
by dn="uid=deepofix,ou=people,dc=mnit,dc=ac,dc=in" read
by users read
sizelimit 1500
TLSCertificateKeyFile "/var/easypush/etc/certificates/server.ke
The easypush server manager would open up from where user accounts can be added very easily.
# sv –v up slapd
A. Install the following packages
# apt-get install libpam-ldap libnss-ldap nss-switch nscd (On Debian)
B. Change the following configuration files:
base dc=mnit,dc=ac,dc=in
ldap_version 3
binddn uid=admin,ou=people,dc=mnit,dc=ac,dc=in
bindpw ******
host 192.168.1.20
base dc=mnit,dc=ac,dc=in
ldap_version 3
pam_password_prohibit_message Please change the password using the EasyPush Server Manager.
binddn uid=admin,ou=people,dc=mnit,dc=ac,dc=in
bindpw ******
3. /etc/nss-switch.conf
passwd: compat ldap
group: compat ldap
shadow: compat ldap
hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
networks: files
protocols: db files
services: db files
ethers: db files
rpc: db files
netgroup:
4. /etc/ldap/ldap.conf
base dc=mnit,dc=ac,dc=in
uri ldap://192.168.1.20:389
ldap_version 3
scope sub
pam_login_attribute uid
pam_filter objectClass=posixAccount
5. /etc/pam.d/common-auth
auth sufficient pam_ldap.so
auth required pam_unix.so nullok_secure
6. /etc/pam.d/common-account
account sufficient pam_ldap.so
account required pam_unix.so
7. /etc/pam.d/common-session
session required pam_mkhomedir.so skel=/etc/skel/ umask=0022
session optional pam_foreground.so
session sufficient pam_ldap.so
session required pam_unix.so
►Now restart the client machine and login as any of the users present in ldap directory added through the easypush server manager. (If correct passwords are given then the user gets authenticated and is given his separate home directory)
