How Outsourcing Looks from New Delhi

I am really excited to blog on an issue which is so dear to my heart. Beforehand I must tell you that I have seen this industry from all the angles, I was a CCE in Convergys India (Gurgaon) and was working in a UK process so I have the real floor experience, then I worked as a feature writer for India's national daily The Pioneer and tried to analyze the ill-effects of outsourcing, like aping Western culture, sleeping disorders (insomnia and bad health) etc. If that was not enough many Indian Left parties were against outsourcing as they were and are against FDIs in India. And finally I started to know this industry in detail after joining Global Services. So at the age of 23 I have researched a bit on the outsourcing industry.

I know it is very tough to convince anyone who has lost his or her job because of outsourcing, but blaming India and other countries will not solve their problems. Various reports and studies come out with contradicting statements like "outsourcing is over" and others say it will stay forever, some will say India is losing its advantage and some will say India can never lose its advantage.

From my own views I can very well say that outsourcing is extremely beneficial for SMEs (small and medium enterprises) as I have seen that many companies who were about to close down their shops because of the rising wages -- and also after the dot-com bust -- came to India for survival. They not only survived but also started to compete universally. But as usual, revenue-wise, it is the big companies who gain the most.

I know many jobs are being lost but there are many new jobs which are being created. A person has to forecast what kind of a job is indispensable and should strive for that to retain one's job. I am absolutely sure that now the time is here where a person cannot relax in his job and must keep adding extra qualifications and training on a regular basis.

Curbing free trade is not the best idea anywhere, as all of us who have had our business economics courses in college must know. Restrictions over free trade affects both parties.

I just wanna ask one thing: If some American company invents a machine that can replace 100 laborers working in India, does it mean that the Indian company should not buy that machine which is economical and efficient? Just because the situation is the other way around, there is a such a hue and cry about it -- that we should make a policy to retrain those displaced and provide them employment.

End of the day, all of us benefit from software that is cheaper and more uniformly distributed. If it wasn't for us, software would have become much more expensive.

This post was written by Vivek Seal.

Outsourcing · Politics · Programming · 2006/05/30 · 85 COMMENTS · Link

This Weblog is Being Sent Overseas

For the next week, I've outsourced this weblog to Vivek Seal, 23, a technology reporter for Global Services in New Delhi, India.

Seal recently posted a comment here touting the benefits of outsourcing:

If a person from Bangalore is able to do a job in less than half the cost and with more efficiency then that rationally a best thing for all the parties around it. No matter what. ...

All I wanna say is give India a chance to improve this world.

We hear a lot of dire statements in the U.S. about how our jobs and our standard of living are being lost to workers overseas, especially in technology. Seal covers this trend and is in part an embodiment of it, working in journalism for a media company that's partially based in the U.S.

As a technology writer and programmer, I'm facing competition in both fields from Seal and the people he covers in India.

Since he believes in outsourcing, I decided to give him a chance to make his case directly to an American audience by outsourcing this weblog.

He's not being paid for the work and has full editorial license to write about anything he likes, since anyone who reads Workbench has absolutely no idea what I'm going to cover. If you have any questions for Seal, please use the comments on this weblog.

Programming · Politics · Outsourcing · 2006/05/30 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

Adding Atom 1.0 Support to RSS Sites

I switched to Atom 1.0 on Workbench two months ago, a move that hasn't been as smooth as I'd like because of one popular aggregator that doesn't support the format.

This site is created using Wordzilla, a LAMP-based weblog publishing tool that I've developed over the last year. Writing code to generate Atom feeds in PHP was extremely simple, since most of the code used to generate RSS feeds could be applied to the task.

Atom uses a different format for date-time values than RSS, so I had to write new date-handling code:

// get the most recent entry's publication date (a MySQL datetime value)
$pubdate = $entry[0]['pubdate']);
// convert it to an Atom RFC 3339 date
$updated = date('Y-m-dTH:i:sZ', strtotime($pubdate));
// add it to the feed
$output .= "<updated>{$updated}</updated>n";

This produces a properly formatted Atom date element:

<updated>2006-05-27T11:03:17Z</updated>

One thing I haven't been able to do with Really Simple Syndication is indicate an item's author, because RSS requires that an e-mail address be used for this purpose. Spammers snarf up e-mail addresses in syndicated feeds.

Atom supports author elements that can be a username instead:

<author>
  <name>rcade</name>
</author>

The most significant difference between RSS and Atom is the requirement that Atom text elements specify the type of content that they hold, which can be HTML, XHTML or text.

The content type must be identified with a type attribute:

<content type="html"><![CDATA[I own some Home Depot stock ...]]></content>

My Atom feed offers the text of weblog entries as HTML markup:

// get the entry's description (a MySQL text value)
$description = $e['description'];
// add it to the feed
$output .= "<content type="html"><![CDATA[{$description}]]></content>n";

Putting this text inside a CDATA block removes the need to convert the characters "<", ">", and "&" to XML entities.

When an Atom element omits the type attribute, it's assumed to be text.

The following PHP code creates XML-safe text for entry titles:

// get the entry's title
$title = $e['title'];
// convert the title to XML-safe text
$title = utf8_encode(htmlspecialchars($title));
// add it to the feed
$output .= "<title>$title</title>n";

The last difference I had to deal with is Atom's requirement that each entry have a title. Because I haven't written titles for all entries on Workbench, I wrote a function that can create a title from the first 25 words of an entry's description:

function get_text_excerpt($text, $max_length = 25) {
  $text = strip_tags($text);
  if (strlen($text) <= $max_length) {
    return $text;
  }
  $subtext = substr($text, 0, $max_length);
  $last_space = strrpos($subtext, " ");
  if ($last_space === false) {
    return $text;
  }
  return substr($subtext, 0, $last_space);
}

I switched to Atom whole hog, dropping the RSS feed and redirecting requests to the new Atom feed.

I quickly reinstated the RSS feed because I'm getting 4,000 requests a week from subscribers running Radio UserLand, which doesn't support Atom 1.0. Trying to subscribe in the current version, Radio 8.2.1, results in the error message "Can't evaluate the expression because the name 'version' hasn't been defined."

That's the only popular aggregator I've tested that doesn't support Atom 1.0, though I've read that the OPML Editor's River of News also can't handle these feeds.

I'm not going to support both formats on new programming projects just for Radio, because its users ought to nudge UserLand to upgrade Atom support to version 1.0. I'd like to redirect RSS requests to the Atom feed so that all subscribers are seeing the same thing and sites like Bloglines offer one subscription count. But dropping existing RSS support makes little sense.

Atom's content type requirement is a great improvement to syndication, allowing publishers to specify exactly what they're using a feed to carry. The RSS engine built in to Microsoft's next version of Windows produces RSS 2.0 feeds that have an extra type attribute in each description, even though it's not defined in the spec.

Wordzilla · Rss · Php · Mysql · Linux · Atom · 2006/05/27 · 12 COMMENTS · Link

Home Depot's Board Dodges Shareholders

All but one of Home Depot's 11-member board of directors was a no-show at the company's annual meeting Thursday, where several proposals questioned the huge executive compensation paid to CEO Robert Nardelli.

Nardelli was the only board member present at the meeting, which ended quickly because he didn't give the customary speech and took no questions from the audience.

In a statement prepared in response to this article, the retailer said that, although its approach to the annual meeting this year was a departure from past practice, it should not be seen as a lack of respect for shareholders or a lessening of its commitment to sound corporate governance and transparency.

I know it's quaint to believe that publicly traded companies serve at the discretion of their shareholders, but this demonstrates outright contempt for the idea:

Each time Mr. Nardelli was addressed by someone presenting a shareholder proposal, he let them speak but then replied firmly that Home Depot's directors had urged voting against it, and moved on to the next agenda item. After about 30 minutes, Mr. Nardelli said "preliminary" results indicated that the company's slate of director nominees had been elected, adding that the only proposal to win a majority of shareholder votes was a recommendation led by the United Brotherhood of Carpenters pension fund to change the director-election process to require that nominees receive a majority of votes.

Mr. Nardelli then adjourned the meeting and left the building.

Home Depot's leadership must not believe there's even the slightest possibility any of them will be accountable for their decisions, and they seem to be right: The entire board was re-elected for another term.

Business · 2006/05/27 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

A note on the home page of Planet Apache:

Planet Apache provides its aggregated feeds in RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.9, and its blogroll in FOAF and OPML (the most horrific abuse of XML known to man).

RSS 2.0 Specification

Xml · Rss · Opml · 2006/05/26 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

'Over the Hedge' Rocks the Suburbs

Took the kids yesterday to see Over the Hedge, an animated comic strip adaptation by DreamWorks about forest creatures who find their home overtaken by a humongous residential community.

Computer-animated films are my favorite family movies these days, because even when the story's dull the rendering effects are worth seeing on a giant screen.

I didn't notice a single new visual in Over the Hedge comparable to the fur in Monsters Inc. or the expressive human faces in The Incredibles, but the movie had something else going for it -- music by Ben Folds.

Folds has at least three songs in the film, each with a few soulful pokes at suburbia, and the end credits include a new version of "Rockin' the Suburbs." Some critics slammed his work -- FilmCritic.Com derides him as an "elevator-music rocker" -- but I liked the songs, though Folds loses something when he can't mix plaintive piano melodies with bile and profanity. (Who else could make the line "give me my money back, you bitch" irresistible to hum?)

The funniest jokes involve the voracious consumerism of the humans, led by a homeowner's association president voiced by Alison Janney. The animals lose their appetite for foraging after being introduced to junk food, including a stackable Pringle's-like chip called Spuddie's that bears the slogan "Because enough just isn't enough."

When a streetwise raccoon named R.J. explains the world of humans to the other animals, they discover an S.U.V. and marvel at its immense size. "How many humans fit in one?" he's asked.

His answer: "Usually, just one."

I would've liked more incisive digs like that and at least one really grim moment where Folds could crank the pathos up to 11, like the part in Toy Story 2 where Sarah McLachlan sings "When She Loved Me" as Jessie's being discarded by her owner.

But this film played mostly to the intended audience, and my representatives gave it the highest compliment they bestow upon a film in the theater: They danced to the end credits.

Movies · 2006/05/25 · 14 COMMENTS · Link

RSS: Can't We All Just Get Along?

We made a little history this week in the RSS community. For the first time ever, the publishers of the two competing versions of RSS have agreed on something -- the need for a common RSS MIME type.

Six years ago, a split occurred when two groups laid claim to the name RSS.

Netscape engineer Dan Libby authored RSS 0.90, the first version of the format, in mid-1999. The initials stood for "RDF Site Summary" and it made use of the Resource Definition Framework, a Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) standard for describing web content so that it's more easily understood by software.

At the urging of Dave Winer of UserLand Software and other early RSS adopters, Libby removed RDF support from RSS 0.91, the second version of the format, upon its June 1999 release, as he explained to the RSS-DEV mailing list:

... the primary users of RSS (Dave Winer the most vocal among them) were asking why it needed to be so complex and why it didn't have support for various features, eg update frequencies. We really had no good answer, given that we weren't using RDF for any useful purpose. ... The compromise was to produce RSS 0.91, which could be validated with any validating XML parser, and which incorporated much of userland's vocabulary, thus removing most (I think) of Dave's major objections. I felt slightly bad about this, but given actual usage at the time, I felt it better suited the needs of its users: simplicity, correctness, and a larger vocabulary, without RDF baggage.

Because the format was no longer built on RDF, the name was changed from "RDF Site Summary" to "Rich Site Summary."

Shortly after the release of RSS 0.91, Netscape stopped publishing its RSS documentation and dropped support for the format on its My Netscape portal, a move that in hindsight ranks among the biggest blunders in web history. The company that made billions by seeing an opportunity in web browsers missed another goldmine in RSS, giving it up just as the format began to spark the boom in blogging and syndication. (They're just now getting back into RSS, with Netscape parent company AOL releasing a new My AOL service that reads syndicated feeds.)

In June 2000, Winer published his own version of RSS 0.91 by fiat, taking input from developers who had continued to use the format in spite of Netscape's abandonment. He explained that it was done without the company's permission or participation, dubbing the new version "Really Simple Syndication."

Neither Winer nor his company, UserLand Software, claimed ownership rights in the RSS format or name. UserLand attempted to register RSS as a trademark in September 2000 but abandoned the effort shortly thereafter.

In December 2000, the RSS-Dev Working Group released a new version of RSS called RSS 1.0, adding RDF back to the format and reviving the name RDF Site Summary. This also was done without Netscape's involvement.

Really Simple Syndication was subsequently released as RSS 2.0 and the two rival RSSes have been battling it out ever since.

Rss · 2006/05/24 · Comment · Link

Read More Entries