Relevance Found

Skimming the newspaper yesterday I caught sight of UOB’s one-page advert (in both the BB and the BT) about its award-winning Asset Management division. So I thought of reading up a bit on on Brunei’s financial services industry – particularly in the Corporate side of things. For example … who should Brunei SMEs consult when seeking advice on how to best arrange their Treasury operations? Or how about for SMEs that are struggling with managing cash flows, and need ways to finance the acquisition for badly needed income-generating assets and arrange the insurance thereon? Or how about for SMEs that need expansion capital and want to seek ways to invite more Equity participants in to their business?

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How does one estimate a Cost of Equity (K_e) for a business in Brunei?

Here’s a rough-and-ready way to estimate a Cost of Equity, using the timeless Capital Asset Pricing Model:

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I came across an article in the “Daily KOS” today regarding AIG and it’s role in the glbal recession. Here’s a short excerpt:

The size of our [editor's note: the US] national economy this year is roughly $15 trillion. The size of the Credit Default Swaps (CDS) market is $64 trillion. The whole world GDP is about $56 trillion. How could the CDS market be larger than the world GDP combined?

More analysis after the break:

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A recent IDC report on piracy in Brunei states that for every $1.00 spent on software licenses, an additional $1.25 is also spent in value added services.

Why is this important to us? And why is an OSS friendly guy blogging about software licenses?

Turn the equation around.

More after the break:

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I was reading up on the audit profession and I came across a CFO article on “Top 10x ways to cut your audit bill“. Article has some good practical advice on managing the auditors.

More after the break:

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Reading through Guy Kawasaki’s twitter stream, I came across a productivity blog post advocating people write personal mission statements. The gist of the article is that one very powerful way to attain success is to begin with clarity. I am definately an advocate of having a clear statement of purpose!

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So the shop somehow managed to deliver my custom PC with 2x EADS drives and 1x EACS drive. Normally, to rectify this kind of mishap would require backing up the data on the drive and restoring the data to the replacement disk.

Not so with ZFS. Because my three drives are in a raidz storage pool, ZFS automatically partitions and manages my data. This allows up to one device in the pool to fail (single parity).

Replacing the drive was a case of:

1. Pulling out the old disk.
2. Cabling up the new disk in the, now-empty slot.
3. Booting the OS as normal.
4. Resilvering the raidz zpool with a single command: zpool replace <name of device to replace>
5. Go get coffee, rebuilding the array will take some time. Once it’s done, check status with: zpool status

After the break I give some examples of what you may see:

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ZFS saved my data!

root@opensolaris:~# zpool status -x
pool: tank
state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error.  An
attempt was made to correct the error.  Applications are unaffected.
action: Determine if the device needs to be replaced, and clear the errors
using ‘zpool clear’ or replace the device with ‘zpool replace’.
see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-9P
scrub: scrub completed after 0h44m with 0 errors on Thu Feb 12 13:27:23 2009
config:

errors: No known data errors
root@opensolaris:~#

I wonder if this is a symptom of poor PSU performance? I’ll be monitoring that disk c6d0 (SATA3).

In a “zero-sum game“, there is always one loser and one winner. Just like in a game of poker, what one party wins, the other party loses. I’ve been reading a lot about the economic downturn lately and it reminded me of a conversation I had with one of the chaps at the office –> The Chinese character for “Risk” is written as = Crisis + Opportunity.

So – in these times of economic downturn and crisis, who stands to gain? Sun Microsystem’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz blogs:

In the midst of this economic downturn, discussions related to free and
open source software have substantially heated up - this is no longer a
peripheral discussion with CIO's - cost reduction related to open
source adoption has become a focal point for decision makers across the
world.

I also found this gem of an article about a hedge fund manager who bet big on the eventual credit crunch and failure of large financial services institutions.

This really shows two completely opposite ways to squeeze an opportunity out of these current crisis. Either (1) through leveraging on cost efficiencies and delivering a lower TCO product than the competition and competing on price, or (2) winning through zero-sum games on the way the market is going to go. John Paulson made a filthy amount of return on (2), although at a staggering amount of risk. The jury is still out – whether Sun can pull the fat from the fire and turn around that great company and really make a comeback.

One other benefit of using ZFS and it’s ability to take snapshots of an entire filesystems … is that I can upgrade my boot environment inside a clone of my existing system. If I have problems, I can always roll back with a single command line.

Those days of maintaining a 2nd set of hardware for testing operating system patches may be numbered!

[see: OpenSolaris getting started guide, and OpenSolaris Boot Environments docs] (continue reading…)