Every year the Electronics and Computer Software Export Promotion Council (ESC) of India holds an exhibition of Indian technology companies.  The purpose of which is to encourage and facilitate global trade between India and foreign companies.

I was invited, and attended IndiaSoft 2011, I was very impressed, not just with the quality of the conference/exhibition, but more so with the lengths the ESC are willing to go in order to achieve their objectives.  So much so, that i’ve volunteered to help them IndiaSoft 2012, both in terms of social media for the conference itself (there has been very little coverage for previous events), and to help them find delegates.

If your company currently outsources, or is considering outsourcing to India, please apply to attend IndiaSoft 2012.

Legitimate applicants will receive complimentary (return) air tickets to India so they can attend IndiaSoft 2012.  You have to pay for your own accommodation and other transport (to/from airport etc), but the flight itself is totally free.  The ESC team will even help you make all the required arrangements in terms of hotels/taxis etc.

Last year I flew to India a few weeks before the conference and caught up with other contacts/friends out there, as well as taking a break in Rishikesh.  You can do the same, either fly in earlier and/or leave later, making the most of the free air tickets, and explore India

I am merely acting as an event promoter and introducer of potential delegates, there are no fees to pay, if you are a legitimate potential buyer, its all free to attend.

IndiaSoft 2012 will be taking place on the 23rd & 24th March 2012 in Hyderabad, India.

To apply to attend IndiaSoft 2012, please download, complete and return this form: http://zxv.me/vDJmGF

Applications need to be submitted by the 11th November 2011.

You can find out more about the conference/exhibition on indiasoft.org, but you need to make your application via the form linked above to qualify for the free flight.

INDIASOFT 2012 opens a plethora of opportunities IT Buyers globally looking for wide array of IT solutions & services including innovative outsourcing IT products, services & solutions such as KPO, BPO. LPO, e0security, Banking, Finance, Insurance, Telecommunications, Media & Entertainment, Bio Informatics, Engineering Design, Travel, Hotel, Hospitality, Logistics, Transportation, Educational, Pharma, E Governance, and much more…under one roof.

Whenever people visit my office or see my workspace, they are always amazed by the sheer number of screens.  The next question/statement is usually “what the heck do you need all those screens for”, or “you can’t look at more than one screen at a time”.

I’m not going to go into the awesomeness of multiple screens, but talk a little about how I have things setup.  To be honest, this is a reduction in screens for me, heres a pic from a previous office setup (theres actually another 3 screens on the left of me which you can’t see in that picture).

Anyway, the current setup, starting from the far left.

This is an XP machine, which I use mainly for Forex trading.  Although I prefer to work on OSX, and I know I could run this as a virtual machine, its just not the same experience, regardless of what any “tech gurus” might say – simply, they are disagreeing with me, and by default, wrong.  Kidding of course

When I sit in in “trading mode” on this machine, MetaTrader takes up both screens.  When not actively trading, I leave woopra.com up and running.  For those of you that haven’t seen woopra; its a real time website visitor analytics tool.  It displays visitor info/metrics in real time, including where in the world they are – which it maps (being a little boy inside, I find this very cool!).  At the time I’m writing this post, I can see there are 8 visitors viewing the zovo.co website, and which countries they are in, queue some sort of cheesy world domination music here.

The last screen on the XP machine runs Bloomberg TV, which occasionally gets muted, if you’ve ever watched Bloomberg TV, you’ll know why!  Another excellent web app is used here, check out zattoo.com, which lets you watch live TV channels.  Unfortunately the BBC feeds have been pulled now, but Bloomberg TV is there (which save me getting a Freeview TV in here).

Coming round to my much loved Macbook, running an Apple LED display (mini DVI straight off the macbook), and a Samsung LED (BX2350), running on an ezCap USB to DVI adaptor.

I do most of my browsing, document editing, chatting, etc on here.  The macbook screen gets used mainly for instant messaging and viewing youtube/ted.com etc.  The Samsung LED (on the far right) has all of my social media feeds via, Twitter OSX app, and TweetDeck as well as NewsBar (lightweight, no nonsense RSS feed reader).

Tell me about your desk/workspace, and feel free to ask any questions.  Usually a mention to @hamlesh on twitter will get a quicker response.

A few of my twitter followers were asking for a wider shot, so heres one I took a few days after originally writing this

I have a number of my websites setup with @cloudflare, its free, and offers a lot of security and optimisation filtering.  Its dead easy to implement and theres very little maintenance to do.  I highly recommend you check them out.

You can read more about the free ipv6 gateway for cloudflare users in their blog post.  Theres a really nice infographic on their post

Anyway, I’m now IPv6 ready – why aren’t you?

Click for the bigger (1024 x 768) version.

Be warned, this might be very geeky/techy for some of you, but I find it cool, and wanted to document/talk about it

Going from top down;

Tv.drobo

4 bay USB2 drobo unit, currently running 2x 2Tb and 2x 1Tb drives. It’s a first generation drobo, thus only supports USB2, and max 2Tb drives, hopefully drobo will release firmware to support larger drives in the future. Once 2Tb drives drop below the £50 mark per drive (inc vat and delivery), or when I run out of space, I’ll replace the 2x 1Tb drives. This unit holds all of my TV episodes and shows, hence it’s name.

Dell PowerConnect

24 port gigabit switch, not much more I can say, it’s managed and very good in a “non ISP” environment. Not sure if I’d use one in the data centre though, other than perhaps as a storage network switch (supports multiple bonded port groups, and jumbo frames, with a 10Gpbs backplane).

Ironhide

Netgear ReadyNAS, with 4x 250Gb drives, holds all of my music. The main reason I still use the ReadyNAS is that it has squeezebox server built in as part of it’s base operating system. I have two jogglers (little openpeak photo frame tablet things) around the house, running jolicloud, with squeezecentre on them. So this setup for music “just works”, which is all I care about; for music anyway, throughput isn’t critical. If I needed to I could bond the network interfaces, but there’s really no need for that!

Allspark

1Tb Lacie Etherdisk (4x 250Gb) running Debian, this spends most of it’s time powered down, I only fire it up when I need it. It’s on a separate storage VLAN, and I use it as an NFS based datastore when I need to move virtual machines between different vmware ESXi servers.

Bonecrusher

1Tb Lacie Etherdisk (4x 250Gb) running Debian. This runs hellanzb and hellavcr, which knows what TV shows I follow, and grabs them when they are available (in the formats I like, ie hidef). Not going to go into too much depth on how these are setup, google, or ask me on twitter (@hamlesh) and I’ll tell you

Soundwave

Dell Poweredge SC1425, my primary vmware ESXi server, running various things, perhaps I’ll do another post about the virtual machines at some point. There’s usually another SC1425 (ESXi) called Optimus underneath this server, but at the time this picture was taken Optimus is in the office.

Sideswipe

Dell Poweredge 1800, my primary storage control server, and the central point for media sharing across the network. It also has some internal storage, about 4Tb worth, used when I need to move large amounts of data around.

Apple Xserve RAID

Multiple arrays deployed on this, mirrored for documents storage, two large arrays for movie and software storage. The throughput of these units is really something else, I need to put up the disk bench stats at some point. Having 14 spindles and fibre channel access (4 Gbps) is really something else, but some could argue, it overkill for a home setup

I would like to get a pic when the xserve is working really hard, as all the blue indicator lights on the front are really quite mesmerising

Cabling is currently relatively neat, I have serious OCD when it comes to cabling neatness, still need to velcro tie the cables

The Xserve RAID is running fibre channel to the storage server (Sideswipe), which has bonded gigabit onto the network (bonded ports on the switch too obviously).

There are some other machines missing in these pics, all that are used for various virtualisation testing etc, but they are currently with clients doing proof on concept delivery, or being borrowed by friends.

Everything is running on an APC remote reboot unit, so I can power cycle anything remotely, or usually when I’m feeling too lazy to go downstairs. I’ll have to do another post on my power provision at some point too. Ive built a custom distribution unit which can be switched between the mains, or a little petrol generator thats sitting in the garden (just outside the comms room)… Yep I have power backup / generator capacity for all of this kit at home

In total I probably have around 24Tb of storage running in this setup, all of which is backed up on zovo, who provide unlimited storage online backup. With everything running, this setup uses just under 4 amps (thanks to power metering on the APC power bar).

Anyway, hope this has been informative, why not comment and tell me about your setup?

Give it a try, post a comment or tweet @hamlesh to let me know what you think

7H15 M355463 53RV35 70 PR0V3 H0W 0UR M1ND5 C4N D0 4M4Z1N6 7H1N65! 1MPR3551V3 7H1N65! 1N 7H3 8361NN1N6 17 W45 H4RD 8U7 N0W, 0N 7H15 L1N3 Y0UR M1ND 15 R34D1N6 17 4U70M471C4LLY W17H 0U7 3V3N 7H1NK1N6 480U7 17, 83 PR0UD! 0NLY C3R741N P30PL3 C4N R34D 7H15.

I should just say, that I have a biased interest in zovo, being its founder and all.

From the internet: Skydrive outage

Office 365, Hotmail and SkyDrive hit by outage – Register

BBC News

Office 365, Hotmail and SkyDrive hit by outage Register But at least this time it had company as Hotmail and SkyDrive were also downed by the same Domain Name Service (DNS) issue. Luckily for Europe, outages started in the middle of last night when most of us were tucked up in bed – 4am GMT and lasting for … Microsoft services hit by outageBBC News Microsoft’s Hotmail and Windows Live knocked offlineInquirer Apple’s Store, Microsoft’s Hotmail and SkyDrive All Taking Thursday Evening OffAll Things Digital ZDNet (blog) -SBS -SmartHouse all 120 news articles »

Microsoft Skydrive and Hotmail services suffer from brief outage …

Microsoft’s online services such as Skydrive and Hotmail were hit with an outage on Thursday night for a couple of hours. It’s the second time inside a month that such an outage has occurred.

Publish Date: 09/09/2011 10:10

http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-skydrive-and-hotmail-services-suffer-from-brief-outage

By Nancy_Valdes at 09/09/2011 11:58

This has been on my to do list for a while, and finally, we are nearly there.  I’ve now moved the site over to the mediatemple.com grid service, so things should be a lot more responsive.  Part of the demise of my regular blogging was due to the sluggishness of wordpress on my old server.

As much as possible I’ve tried to preserve the link paths with this migration, but just in case, the old blog will still be available on old.hamleshmotah.com, for a short while.

I’ll also setup files.hamleshmotah.com as a more permanent mirror/repository on the old server, for downloads and resources such as the system restore ISOs, which seem to still be very popular

Anyway, just a simple / short update for now

@hamlesh

You can import these contacts, they are mainly LIONs’ (Linked In Open Networkers).

Download TopLinked OpenNetworker Linkedin Invite List Sep 2011

Once downloaded;

1. Log into LinkedIn.com
2. Select Contacts > Add Connections from the menu.
3. Towards the bottom of the page you will see “Import your desktop email contacts” – select this.
4. Upload each CSV.
5. Make sure all contacts are selected, then click “Invite selected contacts”.

You will need to repeat this for each CSV file, and you may run out of invites if your account is new. You will have to come back every week or so and try again until you’ve imported/invited all of the contacts.

Find me on facebook or twitter!

After getting soaked on my way into London, and drenched on my way out of London, riding my GSXR 600 today, I thought I’d do a quick post to get bikers thinking about raining day riding, and how to do it safely.

This article has some great pointers… in fact, even though I’ve been riding for years now, its only this year that I started to “turn your head side to side to clear visor”…

5 TIPS FOR RIDING A MOTORCYCLE IN THE RAIN | Maple Jeans | Kevlar …

At some point you get caught riding your motorcycle in the rain. Here are my best 5 tips to weather the storm.

Publish Date: 08/11/2010 8:00

http://www.maplejeans.com/5-tips-for-riding-a-motorcycle-in-the-rain/

Although this talks about mopeds, most of it still applies to big bikes…

A number of Useful Information on Using a Moped while it's raining …

A lot of people are put off riding mopeds in the rain, and many new riders will not likely even contemplate it. When you have bought a moped or a motorbike for your main method of transport for popping out and about …

Publish Date: 08/22/2011 23:44

http://trackdaiz.com/a-number-of-useful-information-on-using-a-moped-while-its-raining/

And, finally, if you think you are ace in the rain, watch this vid to see how its actually done

MASTERCLASS Kiyonari ** wet weather riding display WSBK

Race 2 highlights from Donington Park 2008. Never get tired of watching this!!