Linux, Wikinomics and Mining the Gold!

Currently I am reading a book titled Wikinomics. This book is all about how web2.0 have changed the way we do business and how collaborative models are proving to be successful against those of conventional and closed approaches of doing businesses.

Very first chapter of the book starts with an impressive example of Goldcorp a gold mining comapny. It is simply more optimistic piece about the power of mass human collaboration to solve problems. It is interesting not only because it is about Goldcorp, but also because it is about a leader willing to take a big risk and put faith in the collective intelligence of the crowd.

You may get confused that what Linux has to do with Gold mining and why I am writing this blog entry in joyoflinux blog but let me uncover the blanket. The story goes like this:

It’s the year 2000 and the CEO of Goldcorp Inc., a gold producer headquartered in Vancouver, Canada was concerned about an underperforming mine in Ontario. The company’s Red Lake mine was only producing a relatively small 50,000 ounces of gold a year at a high cost of $360 an ounce. The main deposits were deeper underground, but his company’s geologists were not sure of the exact location of the precious metal.

Goldcorp was in trouble. Besieged by strikes, lingering debts, and an exceedingly high cost of production, the company had terminated mining operations. Conditions in the marketplace were hardly favorable. The gold market was contracting, and most analysts assumed that the company’s fifty-year old mine in Red Lake, Ontario, was dying. Without evidence of substantial new gold deposits, Goldcorp was likely to fold.

McEwen wanted new ideas of where to dig and he figured that if his Red Lake employees couldn’t find the gold then someone else would be able to.

McEwen Finds a way too simple but too hard to implement!

McEwen was not a miner, nor did he come from a mining background. Before being bitten by the gold bug he worked in the investment business for Merrill Lynch. And so he did not feel constrained to adopt conventional mining wisdom. Not having grown up with the assumptions of the industry he felt able to question them. Confidentiality and secrecy are industry watchwords and yet here was the CEO apparently giving away the family jewels.

The trigger for solution to his problem was an MIT conference he had attended in 1999. The story of Linus Torvalds came up and how he used the Internet as a collaborative resource to build the Linux software operating system. It fired up his imagination and he headed back to company headquarters full of ideas which culminated with the Goldcorp Challenge.

Gold Rush

So he triggered a new gold rush by issuing an extraordinary challenge. He put all his company’s geological data (which went back as far as 1948) into a file and shared it with the whole world. McEwen hoped that outside experts would tell him where to find the next six million ounces of gold. In return he offered $575,000 in prizes to the participants with the best methods.

Unsurprisingly his colleagues were skeptical, particularly as it was such a risky venture. The company was, after all, giving over its proprietary data as well as admitting to the industry that they were unable to find these elusive gold deposits.

The Goldcorp Challenge was launched in March 2000 and 400 megabytes worth of data about the 55,000 acre site was placed on the company’s website. Everything that the company new about the Red Lake mine was a mouse click away. Word spread fast around the Internet and within a few weeks submissions came in from all over the world as more than 1,000 virtual prospectors chewed over the data.

Some were from geologists, but many were from individuals in unrelated sectors. There were mathematicians, military officers, students, and consultants. The top winning entry was a collaborative effort by two groups from Australia. From the opposite end of the Earth and without having ever visited that part of Canada Fractal Graphics, in West Perth, and Taylor Wall & Associates, in Queensland developed a 3-D map of the mine. It included powerful computer graphics that allowed McEwen and his geologists to see the potential in Red Lake.

Goldcorp Challenge was a Goldmine

In all more than 110 sites were identified and 50% of these were previously unknown to the company. Of these new targets, more than 80 per cent yielded significant gold reserves. McEwen believes that this collaborative process cut two, maybe three years off the company’s exploration time. And the worth of this gold has so far exceeded $6 billion in value. The prize money was only a little over half a million dollars, so it was a fantastic value for money investment, and much cheaper than continuing with unproductive exploratory drilling.

By going outside his company’s walls McEwen turned Goldcorp from a struggling enterprise into one of the most profitable in the industry.

Watch Live Interrupts

To see the interrupts occurring on your system, run the command:

amoal-desktop:~$ watch -n1 “cat /proc/interrupts”

CPU0       CPU1
0:        168          0   IO-APIC-edge      timer
1:          2          0   IO-APIC-edge      i8042
3:          2          0   IO-APIC-edge
4:          2          0   IO-APIC-edge
7:          0          0   IO-APIC-edge      parport0
8:          1          0   IO-APIC-edge      rtc0
9:          0          0   IO-APIC-fasteoi   acpi
12:          4          0   IO-APIC-edge      i8042
14:      13262          0   IO-APIC-edge      ata_piix
15:          0          0   IO-APIC-edge      ata_piix
16:      92707          0   IO-APIC-fasteoi   radeon@pci:0000:01:00.0, eth0
18:      12428          0   IO-APIC-fasteoi   uhci_hcd:usb4
20:      44825          0   IO-APIC-fasteoi   ata_piix
21:          3          0   IO-APIC-fasteoi   ehci_hcd:usb1, uhci_hcd:usb2
22:        527          0   IO-APIC-fasteoi   uhci_hcd:usb3
23:       2301          0   IO-APIC-fasteoi   uhci_hcd:usb5, Intel ICH7
NMI:          0          0   Non-maskable interrupts
LOC:     714523     421205   Local timer interrupts
RES:       2900       4929   Rescheduling interrupts
CAL:         38         87   Function call interrupts
TLB:       1726       2426   TLB shootdowns
SPU:          0          0   Spurious interrupts
ERR:          0
MIS:          0

The watch command executes another command periodically, in this case “cat /proc/interrups”. The -n1 option tells watch to execute the command every second.

Drop Box ~~ Store Your files online.

Dropbox is one of the most impressive startups  now a days, not because they’ve built anything terribly prescient or awe-inspiring, but because they’ve come up with an online storage product that I might actually use regularly.

The idea behind Dropbox, which officially enters into private beta today is that little to no effort should be put into keeping your desktop files synced with “the cloud”. So the three founders have built a Python-based desktop client (available for both PCs and Macs) that acts like a regular folder on your machine. You can manage files within this folder just like elsewhere on your machine (add, edit, copy, and delete them) and changes will be automatically synced to Dropbox’s Amazon S3-backed storage, and very quickly at that. See a screencast here.

Here’s how to get the most out of Dropbox:

• Put files in your Dropbox folder

These files will automatically be synced and backed up online. Then you can access the files in your Dropbox from anywhere by logging into the Dropbox website.

• Install Dropbox on other computers you use

Computers linked to your Dropbox account automatically sync and always have up-to-date copies of your files. You won’t need to email attachments to yourself or carry around USB drives ever again!

• Share folders in your Dropbox and invite people to them

Sharing lots of files (even large ones) has never been easier.

More details:

Home page of Drop Box: https://www.getdropbox.com/home

Microsoft office Vs. Open office

Recently I got a chance to compare Microsoft office and open office,

Here is the first factor I am putting. “PRICE”

This information is collected from microsoft office website : http://tinyurl.com/y7o4w4

2007 Microsoft Office system pricing and upgrade information

2007 Office suites

2007 Office Suites	Estimated Retail Price /Upgrade Price	Qualifying Products for Upgrade
Office Basic 2007	Available only through OEMs; price not quoted	Upgrade not applicable.
Office Home and Student 2007	$149.95/NA	Upgrade not applicable.
Office Standard 2007	$399.95/$239.95	Microsoft Works 6.0–10; Microsoft Works suite 2000–2006 or later; any 2000–2007 Microsoft Office program or suite; any Microsoft Office XP suite except Office XP Student and Teacher.
Office Small Business 2007	$449.95/$279.95	Microsoft Works 6.0–10; Microsoft Works suite 2000–2006 or later; any 2000–2007 Microsoft Office program or suite; any Microsoft Office XP suite except Office XP Student and Teacher.
Office Professional 2007	$499.95/$329.95	Microsoft Works 6.0–10; Microsoft Works suite 2000–2006 or later; any 2000–2007 Microsoft Office program or suite; any Microsoft Office XP suite except Office XP Student and Teacher.
Office Ultimate 2007	$679.95/$539.95	Microsoft Works 6.0–10; Microsoft Works suite 2000–2006 or later; any 2000–2007 Microsoft Office program or suite; any Microsoft Office XP suite except Office XP Student and Teacher.
Office Professional Plus 2007	Available only through volume licensing; price not quoted	Upgrade not applicable.
Office Enterprise 2007	Available only through volume licensing; price not quoted	Upgrade not applicable.

Open Office 3

Absolutely free with all the features MS office brings.

50 million downloads!

Open Office have recorded over 50 million downloads from their download site since it is released OpenOffice.org 3.0 last October. Find out why!

How to change root password in Linux

This is one of the problem faced by many person’s“what if i lost the root password”First thing that comes in mind is “use single user mode” but the answer is NO.

So the BIG QUESTION IS HOW TO proceed further

follow these steps

1) on grub-boot prompt. press “e” to enter edit mode

2) then press downarrow to reach the line that starts with “kernel “ press “e” again

3) at the end of this line type in “init=/bin/sh” or “/bin/bash”

4) then press enter to make that change and press “b” to boot in a few seconds you will be on your “#” prompt

5) only one step left “mount -o remount rw /”

this step is necessary coz in this case root file system is mounted as read only.

6) finally type “passwd” and you get the screen to change the password

and then type in “init 6″ or “reboot”

NOTE FOR TECHNICAL USERS
those who are looking for the technical details, the main work is the init command that we passed as an argument to kernel, it told kernel to specifically run the command specified in parameter instead of working on normal routine.

TRICK = if you have any program you wish to run instead of this then you can do that too using init command only.

Parallel Download and Install in Synaptic package Manager

Please go through this idea on ubuntu brainstorm and add your comment.
Your vote matters.
Parallel Download and Install in Synaptic package Manager

wget — Web page retrieval tool

GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive commandline tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without X-Windows support, etc.

wget is a tool that implements simple and powerful content retrieval from web servers It currently supports downloading via HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols, the most popular TCP/IP-based protocols used for web browsing.

To make long story short Here is how I downloaded one python tutorial which is available online only,

amoalsale@amoalsale-desktop:~$ wget --recursive http://www.python.org/doc/tut/

The above command will create one directory www.python.org under current directory and will start retrieving the entire website along with links, downloads and files also from website.

Things to remember
While downloading website please get to know the legal issues involved with the web page you are referring. Some websites do not permit wget crawler on their web servers. And all the events are logged.

You May find Windows version of wget here : http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/wget.htm

Installing Ruby in Ubuntu 8.04

Today I have started learning ruby and was really curious of how to install it on GNU/linux as I am newly wed with Ubuntu. Recently I divorced with Fedora and decided to happily live with Ubuntu.

So I can’t believe that it may be so simple.

Just one command sudo apt-get install ruby

And if your repository settings are upto date and if your system is well configured then here it goes.

It took just one minute to configure everything

Here is console output.

amoal@amoal-desktop:~$ sudo apt-get install ruby
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
libruby1.8 ruby1.8
Suggested packages:
ruby1.8-examples rdoc1.8 ri1.8
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libruby1.8 ruby ruby1.8
0 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 464 not upgraded.
Need to get 1430kB of archives.
After this operation, 5997kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y
Get:1 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/main libruby1.8 1.8.6.111-2ubuntu1 [1385kB]
Get:2 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/main ruby1.8 1.8.6.111-2ubuntu1 [24.9kB]
Get:3 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/main ruby 4.1 [20.7kB]
Fetched 1430kB in 34s (41.5kB/s)
Selecting previously deselected package libruby1.8.
(Reading database ... 94985 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking libruby1.8 (from .../libruby1.8_1.8.6.111-2ubuntu1_i386.deb) ...
Selecting previously deselected package ruby1.8.
Unpacking ruby1.8 (from .../ruby1.8_1.8.6.111-2ubuntu1_i386.deb) ...
Selecting previously deselected package ruby.
Unpacking ruby (from .../apt/archives/ruby_4.1_all.deb) ...
Setting up libruby1.8 (1.8.6.111-2ubuntu1) ...

Setting up ruby1.8 (1.8.6.111-2ubuntu1) ...
Setting up ruby (4.1) ...
Processing triggers for libc6 ...
ldconfig deferred processing now taking place

And here my Ruby is cooked with all the flavors in it.

And I am just ready to dance with Ruby

amoal@amoal-desktop:~$ mkdir rubyprogs
amoal@amoal-desktop:~$ cd rubyprogs/
amoal@amoal-desktop:~/rubyprogs$ vim hello.rb
amoal@amoal-desktop:~/rubyprogs$ ruby hello.rb
Hello Ruby
amoal@amoal-desktop:~/rubyprogs$

Great places to help you in getting started with linux.

Many times linux newbies search for the better place to find the learning material about linux. Here I am listing few places which will help you in starting your journey smoothly.

The Linux Documentation Project

The Linux Documentation Project (TLDP) is an all-volunteer project that maintains a large collection of Linux (and Linux-related) documentation and publishes the collection online. It began as a way for Linux hackers to share their documentation with each other and with their users, and for users to share documentation with each other. Its documents tend to be oriented towards experienced users such as professional system administrators, but also contains tutorials for beginners.Here you will find excellent collection of books, tutorials, howto. All this documentation is compiled and maintained by many great knit team of volunteers who provide documentation for many aspects of Linux.

IBM Developerworks

developerWorks is a website run by IBM for software developers. It contains a large number of how-to articles and tutorials, as well as software downloads and code samples, discussion forums, podcasts, blogs, wikis, and other resources for developers and technical professionals. Subjects range from open, industry-standard technologies like Java, Linux, SOA and web services, web development, Ajax, PHP, and XML to IBM’s products (WebSphere, Rational, Lotus, Tivoli and DB2).

Linux Journal

is a monthly magazine published by Belltown Media, Inc. of Houston, Texas. The magazine has been published since March 1994.Linux Journal publishes articles on all levels of developing and using Linux and the software that runs on it, including everything from how to write device drivers to how to edit photos with GIMP.Most articles are fairly technical, however, Linux Journal does run some user-level and business articles in every issue, and sections called “Up Front” and “EOF” tend to be less technical. Linux Journal’s web site has the entire magazine archive available to subscribers along with articles from older issues and some online-only content available to all.

Linux Commands

A very useful site where you will find everything to get familiar with Linux Shells. You can download the entire site also to view it offline.

Learn Linux

Learn Linux is an Open Source project that aims to develop Free/Open Source GNU/Linux Training Materials. The project initiative is supported by The Shuttleworth Foundation under the direction of the Open Source Team.

I hope this list will be useful. I will keep updating it.

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

Recently I came across this wonderful site. I hope you will find it useful

Read Here