Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

News

Why Smart People Do Dumb Things

By 1 Comment

Guy Kawasaki just blogged about Why Smart People Do Dumb Things and Why Smart Companies Do Dumb Things.

Both are very very interesting to read. And many things that Guy writes ring so true. For example, he mentions that many smart people are arrogant and narcissistic…

Guy also points out, for example, that consensus may be a bad thing in companies:

“once consensus starts to build, it’s harder to alter a decision. It’s one thing to argue against a few people; it’s much more difficult to argue against the wisdom of a crowd. Individuals who hold out, question, or disagree are labeled as clueless, uncooperative, and not team players.”

Guy Kawasaki was one of the original Apple Computer employees responsible for marketing of the Macintosh in 1984. He is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist.

I’m in The Official Ubuntu Book

By 14 Comments

I’m delighted to tell you all that The Official Ubuntu Book has been published and that my name appears in it!!!

Some time ago there was an announcement that the authors were looking for recipes and I sent one by email (mine was the technique I use to update /etc/fstab in order to be able to access all your Windoze partitions safely in Ubuntu).

Today, I’ve just received the book (as promised by the Prentice-Hall guys) by Fedex and here’s what they say:

In less that a week, we collected useful recipes from Alabama, Australia, California, England, Jamaica, Mauritius, Minnesota, the Netherlands, Paris, Quebec and Sweden.

and

Hearty thanks go to the following avid Ubuntu users for sharing their knowledge: David Bain, Alan Barnard, David Clayton, Manu Cornet, Scott Dier, Oskar Jonefors, Avinash Meetoo, Julien Rottenberg, Stephen Sandlin, David Symons, Paul van Genderen and Andrew Zajac.

And my own recipe appears on page 238 of the book.

I guess I still qualify as a Ubuntu (or more precisely Kubuntu) user as, even though my personal computer is an Apple MacBook, I have:

  • My AMD64 PC at home running the x86_64 version of Kubuntu 6.06
  • My Pentium IV PC at work running x86 Kubuntu 6.06
  • A Pentium IV-based server at work also running x86 Kubuntu 6.06
  • and one computer lab at work containing 45 Pentium IV PCs all running, once more, Kubuntu 6.06

1 Mac OS X Tiger + 48 Kubuntu 6.06 + your name in a book = joy :-)