Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.” — Mark Twain

The philosophy of one century becomes the common sense of the next — anonymous

“Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It is a very mean and nasty place and it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t how hard you hit; it’s about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward. How much you can take, and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done. Now, if you know what you’re worth, then go out and get what you’re worth. But you gotta be willing to take the hit, and not pointing fingers saying you ain’t where you are because of him, or her, or anybody. Cowards do that and that ain’t you. You’re better than that!” - Rocky Balboa

IPL! IPL! IPL! Everyone Indian is just crazy about it! There is a whole lot of buzz of the millions and billions of dollars that are shelled in the name of IPL. I was just curious to know the flow of money which is of course defined in the business model of IPL. Read on!

There are four parties involved : the media, the IPL, the franchisees and the players.

1. Media

Cost : US$108

A consortium consisting of India’s Sony Entertainment Television network and Singapore -based World Sport Group secured the global broadcasting rights of the IPL. The record deal has a duration of ten years at a cost of US$1.026 billion. As part of the deal, the consortium will pay the BCCI US$918 million for the television broadcast rights and US$108 million for the promotion of the tournament.

Revenue : Sony-WSG then re-sold parts of the broadcasting rights geographically to other companies all round the globe.

Sources of money (which gets divided in the following ratio IPL : Franchisee : Prize money):

1. Broadcast rights - $108 million - 20 : 72 : 8

2. Central revenue -title sponsorship of the tournament, licensed merchandise and so on - 40 : 54 : 6

2. IPL :

Sources of Revenue :

1. From 1st source of money - US$200 million approx.

2. Central Revenue - some amount from 2nd source of money

3. The amount bid by the franchisee owners

4. 20% of Franchisee rights - 20% of the revenue of the franchisee in short. Franchisee in the sense franchisee owner!

Cost :

To pay the players there regular fees

3. Franchisee :

Cost :

1. Cost of bidding the franchisee = $10 million approx/year

2. Cost of bidding the players = $8 million/year

Revenue :

1. From money source 1 = $10 million/year

2. From money source 2 = some amount.

3. From all the rights that they have for their match = $10 million/year

Variety of means like selling advertising space in the stadia for home matches, licensing products for their team like T-shirts, getting sponsorship for the team uniform, advertising on tickets and so on, apart from the gate money.

Players:

Revenue :

Apart from the annual fee contracted with the franchisee, they get a daily allowance of $100 through the IPL season, which lasts about a month-and-a-half. The total amount spent on player fees for an IPL team cannot be less than $3.3 million each year and is actually expected to be significantly higher. In other words, players will earn about Rs 80 lakh or more per season on average, though the amount would vary from one member of the team to another.

Players could also get bonuses from the team owners and perhaps even the prize money that the team wins by virtue of where it finishes in the tournament. But it is for each franchisee to decide whether these payments are made to the players or not.

Even in the case of the annual fee negotiated between a player and the franchisee, not all of the negotiated amount may actually go into the player’s pocket.

This is because the IPL is reaching two different kinds of agreements with players when it gets them on board. Under one arrangement — called the “firm agreement”, the IPL commits a certain fee to the player. If a franchisee bids more for that player in the auction between franchisees for different players, the IPL gets to keep the excess. Under the other - the “basic agreement” – the player gets whatever is bid for him. Not surprisingly, most players so far have opted for the “basic agreement”

Hope this helps!!

References :

1. ^ Indranil Basu. “Does the IPL model make sense?“, The Times of India, 2008-01-27. Retrieved on 2008-03-21.
   
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Premier_League#Player_signings
   

Well, this is my first blog in this category! After contemplating a lot, I decided to create a new category in my existing blog rather than create an altogether new blog. This was because I thought maintaining two blogs is a real pain in the neck and I thought this will also help the fellow bloggers to maintain there blogroll!

For intro, I am the same old IT professional working in the product development domain aspiring for MBA in US/India in 2009. I hope to jot down my journey to the MBA in this category. I was going through one of the blogs today where I got across something very interesting. I suddenly realized that someone was speaking my mind. I can bet it is true for you as well! Here it goes:

Rocky Balboa- “Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It is a very mean and nasty place and it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t how hard you hit; it’s about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward. How much you can take, and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done. Now, if you know what you’re worth, then go out and get what you’re worth. But you gotta be willing to take the hit, and not pointing fingers saying you ain’t where you are because of him, or her, or anybody. Cowards do that and that ain’t you. You’re better than that!”

Hope this is a good start! After all attitude determines the altitude :). Adios!

Well its said that “Laughter is the best medicine”. And ofcourse it is cause it helps you stay away from many chronic diseases. Here is the another side of the same coin that i would like to explore.

How do you think that the spare time must be utilised? With the growing influence of computers and internet, people are developing a tendency to remain glued to their seats for hours together. The fitness factor has taken a backseat in the priority list of almost every individual, be it a child (who wants to play video games), a student (who wants to waste countless hours on chatting and so called futile surfing, not to forget the advanced 3D computers games with realistic graphics!) and the working class who is busy boozing or partying due to the stress factor. So who plays the actual physical games?? Who understands that one needs to forgo the supposedly high quality entertainment to stike a balance between the mind and the body!

People have a tendency to become professional these days and add feathers in their caps by material achievements and becoming complacent towards their health. The society is breeding individuals in such a way that peole are trying to outperform and take out the frustration during the spare time by indulging in reprehensible activites (yet considered “COOL”). Even those who resolve to exercise daily become sporadic gradually and eventually renege their decision. Most of the people today follow this suite. But their are still a handful who beg to differ (and follow the notion of health is wealth). Its not that they are gambling their carrier or that their work life is at stake; cause all it takes is a half an hour of twenty four which is not imaginary. Also their are people who despise these and think that it is such a waste of time. Fifty years later most of them will not be there to regret their mistake and realise that a jog of ten minutes everyday would have increased their life expectancy by ten years!!

Its not that i am sermonising or patronizing the youth in the today’s ‘high-tech’ world. Those who are sensible enough can easily read between the lines!!

Hmm…this is a million dollar question I guess. I have seen many fundoo people who know almost everything about everything. But when it comes to stock market…tie tie fiss!! (as in hindi)

Even I was keen on how it works especially with the BSE making such a roar all over India crossing 17k and stuff!! So what is this 17k? How do they reach this figure? Follow the links in order:

http://money.howstuffworks.com/stock.htm

http://www.indiahowto.com/how-to-calculate-bse-sensex.html

The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, or LDAP , is an application protocol for querying and modifying directory services running over TCP/IP
A directory is a set of objects with similar attributes organized in a logical and hierarchical manner. The most common example is the telephone directory, which consists of a series of names (either of persons or organizations) organized alphabetically, with each name having an address and phone number attached. Due to this basic design (among other factors) LDAP is often used by other services for authentication

Is an LDAP information directory a database?
Just as a Database Management System (DBMS) from Sybase, Oracle, Informix, or Microsoft is used to process queries and updates to a relational database, an LDAP server is used to process queries and updates to an LDAP information directory. In other words, an LDAP information directory is a type of database, but it’s not a relational database. And unlike databases that are designed for processing hundreds or thousands of changes per minute - such as the Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) systems often used in e-commerce - LDAP directories are heavily optimized for read performance.

The LDAP protocol is both cross-platform and standards-based, so applications needn’t worry about the type of server hosting the directory. In fact, LDAP is finding much wider industry acceptance because of its status as an Internet standard. Most LDAP servers are simple to install, easily maintained, and easily optimized.

LDAP is particularly useful for storing information that you wish to read from many locations, but update infrequently. For example, your company could store all of the following very efficiently in an LDAP directory:

• The company employee phone book and organizational chart
• External customer contact information
• Infrastructure services information, including NIS maps, email aliases, and so on
• Configuration information for distributed software packages
• Public certificates and security keys

A client starts an LDAP session by connecting to an LDAP server, by default on TCP Port 389. The client then sends operation requests to the server, and the server sends responses in turn. With some exceptions the client need not wait for a response before sending the next request, and the server may send the responses in any order.

The client may request the following operations:

• Start TLS - optionally protect the connection with Transport Layer Security (TLS), to have a more secure connection
• Bind - authenticate and specify LDAP protocol version
• Search - search for and/or retrieve directory entries
• Compare - test if a named entry contains a given attribute value
• Add a new entry
• Delete an entry
• Modify an entry
• Modify Distinguished Name (DN) - move or rename an entry
• Abandon - abort a previous request
• Extended Operation - generic operation used to define other operations
• Unbind - close the connection (not the inverse of Bind

Directory Structure:

The protocol accesses LDAP directories, which follow the 1993 edition of the X 500model:

• A directory is a tree of directory entries.
• An entry consists of a set of attributes.
• An attribute has a name (an attribute type or attribute description) and one or more values. The attributes are defined in a schema (see below).
• Each entry has a unique identifier: its Distinguished Name (DN). This consists of its Relative Distinguished Name (RDN) constructed from some attribute(s) in the entry, followed by the parent entry’s DN. Think of the DN as a full filename and the RDN as a relative filename in a folder.

Be aware that a DN may change over the lifetime of the entry, for instance, when entries are moved within a tree. To reliably and unambiguously identify entries, a UUID might be provided in the set of the entry’s operational attributes.

An entry can look like this when represented in LDIF format (LDAP itself is a binary protocol):

dn: cn=John Doe,dc=example,dc=com

cn: John Doe

givenName: John

sn: Doe

telephoneNumber: +1 888 555 6789

telephoneNumber: +1 888 555 1234

mail: john@example.com

manager: cn=Barbara Doe,dc=example,dc=com

objectClass: inetOrgPerson

objectClass: organizationalPerson

objectClass: person

objectClass: top

dn is the name of the entry; it’s not an attribute nor part of the entry. “cn=John Doe” is the entry’s RDN, and “dc=example,dc=com” is the DN of the parent entry. The other lines show the attributes in the entry. Attribute names are typically mnemonic strings, like “cn” for common name, “dc” for domain component, “mail” for e-mail address and “sn” for surname.

A server holds a subtree starting from a specific entry, e.g. “dc=example,dc=com” and its children. Servers may also hold references to other servers, so an attempt to access “ou=department,dc=example,dc=com” could return a referral or continuation reference to a server which holds that part of the directory tree. The client can then contact the other server. Some servers also support chaining, which means the server contacts the other server and returns the results to the client.

LDAP rarely defines any ordering: The server may return the values in an attribute, the attributes in an entry, and the entries found by a search operation in any order. This follows from the formal definitions - an entry is defined as a set of attributes, and an attribute is a set of values, and sets need not be ordered.

To learn about: How-To set up a LDAP server and its clients in Ubuntu, refer

http://www.debuntu.org/ldap-server-and-linux-ldap-clients

Example:

The organisation like an IT company will usually have all the details of the employees stored in the LDAP server. The admin can edit the info of any employee or update the data of the new employee. This LDAP server will have a hostname (IP). You need this hostname(ldap.ind.xyz.com) or IP when you want to do login authentication in some application using Java. This application is used by the employees in the organisation and so uses LDAP for authentication. You need to put “netscape-ldap-1.0.jar” in the classpath or include this jar in the java build path-> libraries in eclipse for that project. You can now write an EJB (stateless, session bean) which does the authentication for you and deploy it in JBoss. Using EJB Client, you can pass the employee name or id and get the authentication done. This EJB example can be found at: http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-08-2001/jw-0803-ejb.html?page=2#resources

Note: Use can even use JNDI to do authorisation with LDAP server instead of netscape-ldap-1.0.jar. However, from what i know, using netscape ldap is better.

]]> http://ambidextrous.wordpress.com/2007/10/23/ldap-ejb-example/feed/ Maverick http://ambidextrous.wordpress.com/2007/10/23/what-is-jndi/ http://ambidextrous.wordpress.com/2007/10/23/what-is-jndi/#comments Tue, 23 Oct 2007 09:15:33 +0000 Maverick http://ambidextrous.wordpress.com/2007/10/23/what-is-jndi/

JNDI is a standard Java package that provides a uniform API for accessing a wide range of services. It is somewhat similar to JDBC, which provides uniform access to different relational databases. Just as JDBC lets us write code that doesn’t care whether it’s talking to an Oracle database or a DB2 database, JNDI lets us write code that can access different directory and naming services, including the naming services provided by EJB servers. EJB servers are required to support JNDI by organizing beans into a directory structure and providing a JNDI driver, called a service provider, for accessing that directory structure. Using JNDI, an enterprise can organize its beans, services, data, and other resources in a unified directory.
The Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI) is an API for direct that allows clients to discover and lookup data and objects via a name.
The API provides:

• a mechanism to bind an object to a name
• a directory lookup interface that allows general queries
• an event interface that allows clients to determine when directory entries have been modified
• LDAP extensions to support the additional capabilities of an LDAP service.

The SPI portion allows support for practically any kind of naming or directory service including:

• LDAP
• DNS
• NIS
• RMI , EJB
  
• CORBA name service
• File system

Consider Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) stateless
session bean. Creating an EJB and using it consists of the following
steps:

1. Get the example.jar ready along with proper deployment
descriptors in the META-INF.
2. Deploy the jar into the EJB container/server.
3. Write the remote/local client.

Steps:

1. and 2. Ensure you have this ready under some common directory
or project:

HelloWorldLdap/
EjbLdapbean.class
EjbLdap.class
EjbLdapHome.class

META-INF/
ejb-jar.xml
xyz.xml : optional - usually contains the jndi name used for lookup
by the bean. This needs to be customized for the particular EJB
servers(where the Bean is deployed) like

1. BEA WebLogic 6.0 (Service Pack 2)-> Here the xyz.xml is called
weblogic-ejb-jar.xml
2. JBoss 2.2.1 -> Here the xyz.xml is called jboss.xml
Certain servers provide a GUI tool for deploying an EJB. In that
case, you need not include xyz.xml in the META-INF folder
yourself. The Deployment Wizard will ask you for a jndi lookup
name and auto. create a customized xyz.xml and put the

HelloWorldLdap/
EjbLdapbean.class
EjbLdap.class
EjbLdapHome.class

META-INF/
ejb-jar.xml
xyz.xml

into a jar and deploy it in some specific directory.
If you are not using any GUI tool, like in JBoss or WebLogic, then
you need to add xyz.xml yourself and create a jar using

jar cvf HelloWorldLdap.jar META-INF/ HelloWorldLdap/*.class

and then put this jar in the specific directory of the server. More
details about deployment can be found at:
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-08-2001/jw-0803-
ejb.html?page=1

3. Write the remote or the local client to start using the EJB!

A glance at the imports you will need:

import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
import javax.ejb.EJBHome;
import javax.naming.*; //JNDI
import javax.rmi.PortableRemoteObject;
import org.omg.CORBA.ORB;
import java.rmi.RemoteException;
import javax.ejb.CreateException;
import netscape.ldap.*;

Ever wondered an online OS similar to Windows where you can access your own file system from anywhere? The idea is fabulous and yes, it is possible to do it now. There are various online or web OS available that give you free space up to 2 GB. But i tried Omnidrive today and am glad to say that it works great. You can upload files from your computer and create your own file hierarchy. You can even create your own text documents and edit them on the fly.

Net access with a decent speed and you can access your desktop from anywhere, anytime!!

1.0 Installing a Plug-in with an Update Site

Most plug-ins will have an update site, making it easy to add and update plug-ins within Eclipse. Steps 1.1 and 1.2 outline how to create an update site. Step 1.3 outlines how to update a plug-in from an already existent update site.

1.1 Find the URL of the update site for the plug-in.

1.2 Create an update site for the plug-in (The directions may vary slightly depending on what version of Eclipse you are using, but the idea is the same across all 3.x releases. These directions are specific to Eclipse 3.1)

1.1.1 Select Help > Software Updates > Find and Install. Select Search for new features to install. Click Next.

1.1.2 Click the New Remote Site button. Give the update site a name, such as the name of the plug-in, and type in the update site URL . Click OK. A new update site will be added to the list.

1.1.3 Check the update site that you want to update from (you may select more than one!). Click Finish.

Note: If your computer sits behind a proxy server you need to tell Eclipse how to pass through it. Refer to “Proxy Setting in Eclipse“

1.1.4 If the update site has several mirrors (like the Eclipse update site) select the mirror you wish to update from. Click OK.

1.1.5 Press the + button next to the plug-in you want to install. This will list all possible features you can install. Select the features that you want to install. Click Next.

1.1.6 You will need to accept the terms of the licence agreement(s) of the feature(s) that you are installing. Click Next.

1.1.7 A list of feature(s) you are installing will be provided. Click Finish to start the install.

1.1.8 You will need to verify the features that you installed. Click Install or Install All to finish the installation.

1.1.9 You will now be asked to restart the workbench. Click Yes.

Refer:http://subclipse.tigris.org/install.html

2.0 Installing a Plug-in Manually

If a plug-in does not have an update site, then you will be able to download the plug-in as a zip file. To install the plug-in, unzip the file into the Eclipse installation directory (or the plug-in directory depending on how the plug-in is packaged).

3.0 Updating Installed Plug-ins

If you have already created an update site for a plug-in, it is easy to look for new updates.

1.1 Select Help > Software Updates > Find and Install.

1.2 Select Search for updates of currently installed features. Click Next.

1.3 Check the update sites that you want to check for new features. Select Finish.

1.4 If there are features to install then you will install the features as in step 1.1.5.