Blog Y » work

Kiva: I just reached 50 loans :))

vidurgupta — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 13:25:10 +0000

As I have posted earlier, I been lending through Kiva.org for about 2.5 years now. Recently, I reached a landmark of 50 loans. These are some of the stats. There are more stats and info if you are interested @ http://www.kiva.org/lender/vidur3752

The interesting things to me are:

I have no defaults till date and
I have been able to use a small some of money and reinvest it multiple times
I have loaned to folks all over the world

My Impact

Statistic Name	Me	Avg. Kiva User*
Number of Loans Made	51	6.5
Number of Successful Invitations	2	0.23
Number of Loans Made by My Invitees	13	1.07
Number of Kiva Cards Given	0	0.47

My Loan Statistics

	Me	Avg. Kiva User*
Total Amount Lent	$2,150.00	$217.87
Total Amount Repaid	$1,555.53	$171.17
Total Amount Lost	$0.00	$1.60
Total Amount Refunded and Expired	$100.00	$2.86
Outstanding Portfolio	$494.47	$42.73
Delinquency Rate	2.72%	2.01%
Amount In Arrears	$13.47	$0.86
Outstanding Portfolio	$494.47	$42.73
Number of Loans Delinquent	2	0.01
Default Rate	0.00%	1.06%
Amount of Ended Loans Defaulted	$0.00	$1.59
Amount of Ended Loans	$1,300.00	$149.30
Currency Exchange Loss Rate	0.00%	0.00%

Distribution By Country

Country	%
Philippines	7.8%
Afghanistan	7.8%
Mongolia	7.8%
Cambodia	5.9%
Pakistan	5.9%
Bolivia	5.9%
Azerbaijan	5.9%
Uganda	5.9%
Dominican Republic	5.9%
United States	5.9%
Lebanon	5.9%
Sierra Leone	3.9%
Nicaragua	3.9%
Peru	3.9%
Tanzania	2.0%
Togo	2.0%
The Democratic Republic Of The Congo	2.0%
Paraguay	2.0%
Guatemala	2.0%
Moldova	2.0%
Samoa	2.0%
Senegal	2.0%
Tajikistan	2.0%

Filed under: kiva, micro-finance, work

How To: Pine on Fedora 8

vidurgupta — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 23:50:47 +0000

I am sure half the world knows this but I having been using pine at work on the servers. I recently moved from Windows to Fedora 8 as my work-station OS and wanted pine. This is when I came to know that I am supposed to use alpine instead of pine now

These are instructions to install alpine:

alpine: if you read your e-mail with pine (the latest GNU-friendly version is now called alpine) on your machine, there is good news in Fedora 8. alpine, because of its new GNU licensing, is now available through the normal fedora repository. so, simply:

$ yum -y install alpine

This is the source of the info.

Posted in office, tech

How To: Copy to/from VNC Viewer

vidurgupta — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 16:28:56 +0000

I use VNC regularly and for quite a while I struggled with the fact that I could copy from my VNC window to my PC. Finally, I had a breakthrough couple of weeks ago. This is what should work:
- logon to your VNC session
- open a terminal window (like Xterm)
- type ‘vncconfig &’ which should result in a small window with 3 options.
- enable all the options, put this little window somewhere in the corner and forget about it.

This should do the trick

Posted in tech, work

Chrome got my PC!

vidurgupta — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:40:19 +0000

After reading a few blogs and praises of Chrome I decided to give it a try. The one reason was that Firefox, my current browser, seems to take ever increasing amount of memory as the day progress and makes my notebook sluggish. This is my experience with Chrome on a Windows XP notebook.

I downloaded Chrome from the official website and followed the instructions for installation. The first glitch was that it hanged while trying to retrieve Firefox passwords and bookmarks, at least that’s what the installer said it was doing. The CPU utilization was upwards of 97% and the memory usage was 16,828k. I decided to kill the process after 10 minutes. Chrome was installed but it failed to get the Firefox user data.

Next, I went to Chrome settings and tried to import the bookmarks and passwords. It did get them but the support for passwords seemed to be a bit patchy. It worked for some sites and didn’t for others. This is some data I collected: -

	Firefox	Chrome
Start Time (seconds)	1.60	0.90
Memory Usage (K)	42,940	28,448
Shutdown Time (seconds)	1.80	0.70
Memory Usage after a minute(K)	43,928	28,836

I liked the fact that each instance of Chrome ran as a separate process, the memory footprint in smaller and seems to be faster. But, not much data to go by

This is when Chrome got my PC, I think it was my visit to cricinfo.com (no malice intended, just a fact) when all the trouble started. It could have been some other site but these were the same sites I visit with Firefox. My notebook was infected by both Ad-ware and multiple viruses. This caused a 3 day downtime, not very convenient as works piles on.

In the end, I have decided to go back to Firefox. The good thing which came out of this is that I used my home notebook w/ Linux in office and decided to get a linux desktop for work. I am a new user of Linux as my base OS but have been working on Free BSD based OS (JUNOS) for a few years and use Linux servers for development, so lets see how it goes.

Posted in google, virus, work

The World is Green

vidurgupta — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 03:15:49 +0000

I have read a series of “green” articles in last week or so. The first is my favorite, “Whisky Power! Distillery Unveils Scotch Green Power” and I’ll drink to that

We pretty sure that the expression “drunk on power” was never meant to be taken this literally. Recently the Rothes consortium of whisky and scotch distillers announced that they have partnered with Helius Enery to install a power plant fueled by none other than, well, whisky by-products! We think that we can drink to that.

The next article, Tidal-powered datacenters: A sea of opportunity?, is very interesting specially since the blogsphere is a buzz with article on power consumption of data-centers and efforts to reduce it. Power, for cooling and machines, is one of largest costs for any data-center. Another related article was the announcement by Cisco, Automation initiative starts with computers, networks — but will expand to heat, lights:

Cisco Systems Inc. launched a major green initiative today that includes free software to help customers use their networks to automatically turn off computers and network gear at night and whenever they aren’t being used.

….

For example, the software could be used to track how many employees have left a plant or office complex at the end of a shift based on the number of workers with badges who were still inside. If everybody has left, “why keep the systems working?” Kerravala said. “It has a lot of benefits.”

Initially though the software will work with devices which use power over Ethernet. Again, the goal would be reduce power consumption in offices and possibly, data-centers. Another one is IBM Information Infrastructure to meet new emerging green initiatives and needs in IT, a report by IBM on how one could use it products to make the enterprise “greener”. For me the most interesting part in the report is “FIGURE 1. TOP PRIORITY GREEN BUSINESS INITIATIVES IDENTIFIED BY SENIOR BUSINESS EXECUTIVES”. It shows that business care least about carbon credit/offset programs which incidentally all politicians tend to favor. Go figure

The last link is New Catalyst Paves The Path For Ethanol-powered Fuel Cells from Sayan’s BlogWorld.

Posted in alternate energy, environment, tech, work

ME and MY BOSS

vidurgupta — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 15:03:00 +0000

When I Take a long time to finish,
I am slow,
When my boss takes a long time,
he is thorough

When I don’t do it,
I am lazy,
When my boss does not do it,
he is busy,

When I do something without being told,
I am trying to be smart,
When my boss does the same,
he takes the initiative,

When I please my boss,
I am apple polishing,
When my boss pleases his boss,
he is cooperating,

When I make a mistake,
you’re an idiot.
When my boss makes a mistake,
he’s only human.

When I am out of the office,
I am wandering around.
When my boss is out of the office,
he’s on business.

When I am on a day off sick,
I am always sick.
When my boss is a day off sick,
he must be very ill.

When I apply for leave,
I must be going for an Interview
When my boss applies for leave,
It’s because he’s Overworked

When I do good,
my boss never remembers,
When I do wrong,
he never forgets

The marketing guru

vidurgupta — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 14:40:00 +0000

This is a conversation that took place between (Y) and a marketing guy(X)

X: Which shaving cream do you use?
Y: Baba’s

X: Which aftershave do you use?
Y: Baba’s

X: Which deodorant do you use?
Y: Baba’s

X: Which toothpaste do you use?
Y: Baba’s

X: Which shampoo do you use?
Y: Baba’s

X: Which socks do you use?
Y: Baba’s

X (Frustrated): Okay, tell me, what is this Baba? Is it an international company???
Y: No, He is my roommate

Worm-Overload-Recreational-Killer

vidurgupta — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 15:13:00 +0000

There is a virus being passed around electronically, orally, and by hand. This virus is called Worm-Overload-Recreational-Killer (WORK). If you receive WORK from any of your colleagues, your boss, or anyone else via any means, pl DO NOT TOUCH IT. This virus will wipe out your private life completely. If you should come into contact with WORK, put your jacket on and take two good friends to the nearest grocery store.

Purchase the antidote known as Work-Isolating-Neutralizer-Extract (WINE) or Bothersome-Employer-Elimination-Rebooter (BEER). Take the antidote repeatedly until WORK has been completely eliminated from your system.

You should forward this warning to 5 friends. If you do not have 5 friends, you have already been infected and WORK is controlling your life.

Recruiting people

vidurgupta — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 05:21:00 +0000

1- Put about 100 bricks in some particular order in a closed room with an open window.

2- Then send 2 or 3 candidates in the room and close the door.

3- Leave them alone and come back after 6 hours and then analyze the situation.

Now, watch this

If they are counting the bricks…Put them in the accounts department.

If they are recounting them…Put them in auditing.

If they have messed up the whole place with the bricks…Put them in engineering.

If they are arranging the bricks in some strange order…Put them in planning.

If they are throwing the bricks at each other…Put them in operations.

If they are sleeping…Put them in security.

If they have broken the bricks into pieces…Put them in information technology.

If they are sitting idle…Put them in human resources.

If they say they have tried different combinations, yet not a brick has
been moved…Put them in sales.

If they have already left for the day…Put them in marketing.

If they are staring out of the window…Put them on strategic planning.

And then last but not least.

If they are talking to each other and not a single brick has been moved.

Congratulate them and put them in Top management

I work 4 money

vidurgupta — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 06:56:00 +0000