Linux for busy people

For people who always wanted to try out Linux but never had the time or the energy ( or courage to risk  moving to a Linux only environment) here is a great application which allows you to keep Linux as well as Windows for double booting environment . You need 256 mb ram and 5 gb hard disk and you are good to go. It is a single click download and install to try out Ubuntu Linux and it preserves your Windows too.

If you wanted to try out R with Linux , then it is an easy way out for you ( and me).

Saves quite a lot of money per desktop per OS and per office productivity software.

Sounds good to be true – well the site is http://wubi-installer.org/

Here are some screenshots courtesy of the site itself-

Ubuntu Desktop Preview

And if you need to install your favorite applications (like R , Subversion) and don’t want to command line your way the solution is quite simple – It is called Synaptic and it is free and downloadable here

http://www.nongnu.org/synaptic/index.html

 

ND_FilmingContinuing with the Slumdog Millionaire celebrations in India , we have an interview here at DecisionStats with an up and coming intense Indian film maker. Nitin Dash is a creative film maker based out of India. He has created movies like the science fiction movie “ Formula 69” , short videos like “500” (see below) . He gave up a corporate career after 5 tears of corporate experience and after studying at the renowned  Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow to pursue his creative side. Here in a candid interview , Nitin discusses the things that motivate him and passes some tips for home movie making. Coming from a person that has 200,000 plus views on his YouTube video , it is nifty and useful advice.

 

Ajay – What has been your educational and career journey so far . 

Nitin- Finished my MBA from IIML in 2000. Worked for 5 years in the corporate media sector.. Did a short 6- month course in filmmaking from New York in  2005. Started my own film production company  Filmkaar Productions.. www.filmkaar.com

Ajay – What inspires your art. What are the key things that made you decide to take a leap into movie direction from the corporate world.

Nitin – I find inspiration from people around me. A common man , his life and the simple conflicts and challenges that make it interesting..
I felt that the corporate world was stifling my creativity and the work was very operational and mundane. I had some friends from Jamia mass comm.. school. We got together and started making short films over the weekend. After a few months I decided that film making is my calling in life.

Ajay – I have a Sony hand camera and I would like to be Steven Spielberg while shooting my son’s videos. Comment please. Give me 5 bullet points or tips.

Nitin –  The following links would help you.

www.video101course.com
www.cybercollege.com

Learn windows moviemaker. It is a very simple to learn and easy to use software and already installed on PC’s with windows xp / vista

Ajay- How effective do you think is viral marketing . What paradigm changes do you think have Web 2.0 ,blogs, YouTube brought about in the traditional content business.

Nitin- Viral marketing is very effective, but the content has to be right. Getting a good
content that turns into a viral is very difficult and most of the times unpredictable. Web 2.0 has given access to people to express their creativity and share it with the world.

Ajay-What do you think about the  casting couch as a director ? 1 line comment please

Nitin- It’s unofficial term for networking in the film industry.

Ajay- What has been your most successful movie- short film. Which short movie do you like the most and why ?

Nitin-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35u0J4p26Fg
A magical tale about a young boy who finds a solution for Global Warming from a monk in the mountains. I like the simplicity of the story and the beautiful location it is shot in.

Ajay- Well there is no telling when Nitin would bring home an Oscar , but you can preview a short 2 minute video by him. Its called 500 and describes how different people would spend Rs 500 if they found it. Simple and powerful on the ways money moves us in different ways-and the social disparities in India shining.

 

 Filmkaar Productions has been set up to promote thought provoking cinema.To create entertaining films that are socially relevant. Engaging films that can transform minds.Our mission is to make ‘Extraordinary films with Ordinary people’. Visit them at www.filmkaar.com

India arrives at the Oscars party

While watching the Oscars today  in which eight were won by Slumdog Millionaire based in India- I could help but note the fact that the song and dance musical routine (vaudeville) is now back in Hollywood , while in India’s Bollywood it never went away.

A R Rahman won two Oscars , one more Indian won for sound mixing, while the poet Gulzar won for best song as well. 4 Oscars for 3 Indians – is unprecedented for the nation of a billion movie watchers- India produces and consumes more movies in more languages than any single other nation. What took India so long- the cocoon of isolation in which movies were released 3-4 years in India after they had been released abroad  was finally waved off in the mid 1990s.

And thanks to the globalized world, Indian movie goers learn the pleasures of multiplexes , off beat movies, award ceremonies while teaching the world – how to dance when the wallet , stomach and the home is empty. To the newly impoverished Western citizens in the global folly of the financial recession , Indian citizens , at least 80 % of whom live below 1 dollar a day, these citizens ask – “ As long as there is music in the movies , life and  it’s surprises are worth living for.” And like the 18 year old actor who debuted in a low budget movie which won 8 Oscars, you too can win the Millionaire show. If it is written. Because it is written.

A R Rahman, an Indian Muslim trained at Trinity College,England ,rising from poverty himself  —kind of summed up the Indian way of looking at things ( as opposed to the Pakistani 😉 way when he said – In  Life you can choose between love and hate. I chose love and so here I am.

ps – Hugh Jackman tried so hard .

But I would prefer Steve Martin and Tina Fey any day.

KNIME and Zementis shake hands

Two very good and very customer centric (and open source ) companies shook hands on a strategic partnership today.

Knime  www.knime.org and Zementis www.zementis.com .

Decision Stats has been covering these companies and both the products are amazing good, synch in very well thanks to the support of the PMML standard and lower costs considerably for the consumer. (http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/02/knime/ ) and http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/02/interview-michael-zeller-ceozementis/ )

While Knime has both a free personal as well as a commercial license , it supports R thanks to the PMML (www.dmg.org initiative ). Knime also supports R very well .

See http://www.knime.org/blog/export-and-convert-r-models-pmml-within-knime

The following example R script learns a decision tree based on the Iris-Data and exports this as PMML and as an R model which is understood by the R Predictor node:

# load the library for learning a tree model
library(rpart);
# load the pmml export library
library(pmml);
# use class column as predicted column to build decision tree
dt <- rpart(class~., R)
# export to PMML
r_pmml <- pmml(dt)
# write the PMML model to an export file
write(toString(r_pmml), file="C:/R.pmml")
# provide the native R model at the out-port
R<-dt

 

Zementis takes the total cost of ownership and total pain of creating scored models to something close to 1$ /hour thanks to using their proprietary ADAPA engine.

The big big Analytics Conference

The Predictive Analytics Conference (http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/ ) starts today in Hotel Nikko ,San Francisco . A whole who’s who of analytics experts is gathering there including SAS,SPSS ,SAP, Click Forensics ,Acxiom ,Amazon, Google and a big R user conference as well. It is really really huge so stay tuned for some exciting announcements happening there.

image

Interview- Endre Domiczi

imageHere is an interview with a client and partner of mine, Mr. Endre Domiczi of Sevana Oy (www.sevana.fi) .

Sevana is a Finland based company which creates excellent software and analytics  products and their latest release is their automated audio quality product. Existing releases have been a shopping cart analyzer which does wonderful automated market basket analysis.

Ajay – What has been your career journey so far ? What advice would you
give to a fresh science graduate entering the market in today’s
recession .

Endre – About my career journey 

After receiving an MSc in Electronic Engineering my first job was maintenance of the Soviet "clone" of an IBM/360 computer (I still remember some of the Russian language terminology).While doing post graduate studies (got something that would be called today Tech.Lic. in Data Communication) I was offered a job by one of the professors in a research institute. Through the research institute I got a chance to work on a nuclear powerplant simulator in Finland as a Hungarian ex-pat (important, because Tsernobyl happened in the meanwhile).

I specified and implemented the mainframe side of the communication between a VAX/VMS mainframe and several PDP’s  (I’m still proud that later on someone who saw my part of the system, written in 1986, said that it was object-oriented, but the language was Fortran 🙂

One of the jobs enjoyed most was at Fiskars Power electronics. I could design the Hardware and write all software for a microcontroller-based intelligent display of a UPS (uninterruptable (or unpredictable?) power supply), which communicated with the UPS via the power line (around 1988-89).

Then 6 years at Nokia and 5 years at Nokia Research Center, where I got more familiar with object-orientation.A brief stop at Rational, followed by lecturing at the Helsinki Technical University for about 3 years (concurrent programming; UML-related topics). Somewhere in the meantime a (or rather THE) company has been founded, where I still work.

Here is the answer to the "advice" part

My advice would be – if we were speaking of a bright graduate – that his decision to start establishing contacts with potential employers during his studies and to lay down the foundations of his professional network was very wise, and now he should start using his contacts.

Finding a good position on the labor market, or a place on the IT market with a product or idea involves a certain amount of luck but also planning and conscious self management, the sooner career starters realize this the better.

Ajay – What are the key things that you have worked with in terms of technologies.

Endre- To my opinion it’s always a matter of people rather than anything else,
because people create technologies and people use technologies.

I believe that the key technologies we worked with are the way our company is organized and managed, the way our employees treat working with us and of course that state-of-the-art products (no matter what actual technology we have in mind: C, .NET, Delphi, PHP, Java etc), which our employees develop for our customers.

Two major examples are existing product providing automated audio quality measurement and analysis and the tool to mine and manage association rules in high data volumes that we expect to release QI 2009. Both are unique on the market as technology/science wise as well as functionality wise.

Ajay- What is the most creative product that has been released or is going to be released by your company.

Endre- I would mention the same two analytical products:

Automated audio/voice quality estimation is already released and we are searching and negotiating with companies to partner on its dissemination and integration to voice quality and quality of service test solutions.

All information about scientific approach, technology, tests and benefits is available from our web site (www.sevana.fi) partly freely and partly under NDA.We also put big hopes for the association rules mining system, which we develop trying to take into account needs of statisticians and marketing/sales analysts as well as typical demands in various industries: retail, wholesale, maintenance. I would like to give special thanks to Mr. Ajay Ohri whom we were consulting with about the features of such product and its market applications and demand. ( Ajay- Pleasure is mine)

Ajay-  Outsourcing has taken off really well in Poland and Romania. What
are the best known success stories of outsourcing that you can tell
of.What are the best known success stories of outsourcing that you can tell of.

Endre- Well, outsourcing may have different faces – it can be a big success and a
big failure or even a failure with a face of success. I believe that success story for software outsourcing is any company that has established a well operating and profitable company in any country, where doing software outsourcing makes sense.

I also believe that we have a good concept for software outsourcing projects as well, providing onshore software development at offshore prices in Finland.

We have our own know-how in order to make it possible.

Ajay- What do you think about the open source versus proprietary software debate. What is scenario in your local market ( across parts of the country ) regarding this.

Endre– Open source gives the freedom to the “evolution” of applications and services.

It can spare you from reinventing the wheel. I forgot the source, but some famous computer scientist said something like: if programmers read more they would have to write less (code)One can argue that in case of open source one doesn’t easily find a bug-fix if her/his problem is not "mainstream".

However, even in proprietary software the vendor has priorities (often market-driven) and if your wallet is not thick enough and you are at the end of the list you’ll have to wait. And fixing, making a workaround, on your own is much more difficult.

Ajay – What are the intellectual property rights conditions as well as language facilities for Russian software companies ? What is the best way to contact local Russian companies for a software contract.

Endre- Protecting intellectual property rights is a reasonable issue in Russia and a lot of effort is put to improve the situation by the government and business, however I believe that the same challenges can be found in any other country: if your IPRs are broken for instance by your outsourcing company, would you really be able to afford court trial? I am sure not every company would be able to afford it no matter where we have IPR violation: in Russia, Romania, Poland or India.

I think the best way is to try to contact individuals first, because in Russia for instance there are a lot of highly qualified people who would rather try to establish their own
business than trying to be highly recognized by local outsourcing companies. We’ll be happy to assist in providing connections to the Russian software compan
ies and individuals.

 

Disclaimer- Ajay- I advise Sevana on Web 2.0 initiatives .See more on their products at http://wordpress.sevana.fi/ and http://sevana.fi

SAS , R and NYT – The Sequel

Here is a follow up article to the SAS vs. R articles by Ashlee V of the NYT.

 

The SAS Institute has borrowed a page from Sesame Street. It is now sponsoring the letter ‘R.’

Last month, I wrote an article about the rising popularity of the R programming language. The open-source software has turned into a favorite piece of technology for statisticians and other people looking to pull insights out of data.

On several levels, R represents a threat to SAS, which is the largest seller of commercial statistics software. Students at universities now learn R alongside SAS. In addition, the open-source nature of R allows the software to be tweaked at a pace that is hard for a commercial software maker to match.

All told, surging interest in the free R language could affect sales of SAS software, which can sell for thousands of dollars. Rather than running from the threat, SAS appears ready to try to understand R by adopting a more active role in its development.

You can read more at http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/16/sas-warms-to-open-source-one-letter-at-a-time/ or even by clicking on the Bits RSS feed in the sidebar on www.decisionstats.com

Ajay –

Note SAS is only opening up the SAS/IML product to integrate R’s matrix language capabilities. The base SAS software seems to be still not integrated with R and so is the statistics module SAS/Stat (SAS Institute sells in add on modules based on functionality and prices accordingly).

Many third party sources like http://www.minequest.com have created interfaces from Base SAS to R – they are priced at around 50 $ a piece.

An additional threat to SAS’s dominance is from the WPS software from a UK based company , World Programming http://www.teamwpc.co.uk/home (which has an alliance with IBM) . WPS software can read , and write in SAS language and read and write SAS datasets as well, and is priced at 660 $ almost one tenth of SAS Institute’s licenses.

The recession is also forcing many large license holders of statistical software (like Banks and Financial Services) to seek discounts and alternatives. SAS Institute remains the industry leader in analytics software after almost 35 years of dominance.

However this is a nice first step and it would be interesting to see follow up steps from SAS Institute rivals .

We can all go on our respective open source and closed source jets now.

comments from Anne H. Milley, director for technology product marketing at SAS, who relegated R to a limited role.

In the article, Ms. Milley said, “I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code. We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.”