FI1 - Hygiene certification

 You have certifications for food and products but none of them are agnostic. Kosher is jewish certification, halal is an islamic certification, jhatka certification is only for sikhs, then you have certifications and verification by each countries which are limited to a country or a geography. None of these have a reliable reverification of such standards by the consumer or the customer himself.

I propose:

1. Every corner of the kitchen & the cleaning area should have a camera supplied by us which is monitored & controlled only by an AI which streams all the cameras to a streaming service, 1 random camera at a time.

2. Each stream with it's anonymised name will have a bounty on it where users can make money by pointing out misses by the restaurant. These misses then will be used by the restaurants to improve their hygiene system & process. Restaurants with most such misses in a quarter or a year will lose its certificate and can only apply after a year. They have to buy the gear again when they get certified.

3. Such video footage gets auto deleted after 31 days. Clips of misses will be extracted and stored forever to train the AI to identify such misses.

4. optionally, food outlets have to use a light scanner to scan for pesticide recides from the ingredients. This is a very cheap gadget which is based on the fact that different pesticides are visible in different spectrum of light and reflect a specific spectrum of light. Such a PSAI (Pesticide Scanner with Artificial Intelligence) will give more confidence to customers.

This is a one time investment, small CAPEX, minimal fixed OPEX, unlimited market share, no competition (yet).

Mushrooming streaming services and a solution

Which streaming services are you using? The big 5? What about some of those titles, shows, movies which are not on those subscription services? Do you have to upgrade to the max tier to get the full quality streaming or no? Are you sharing your logins with others? so that 5 of you can buy 1 services each and share with each other?

Sooner or later it will be a headache for consumers and they would rather use illegal downloads than subscribe to a streaming service only to get a delayed or degraded service. I am in india, many of the shows that I like are not available immediately in my country. When they are available, they are available in a degraded 720p [half HD] quality in an ugly rectangle box at the center of the screen. These streaming services many a times won't play in full resolution if the cable or the monitor or the graphics card that you have on your PC are not compatible or not the right ones (If you are watching on a laptop or PC). If you are using a television, many a times, many have faced a problem of not being able to watch it in a quality for which they have paid for, because the cable or the TV is not compatible. There are many artists, small indie movies struggle to put their movies on the streaming platforms because if they dont place it on the top streaming platforms, it is almost as good as invisible. Artists also end up losing a lot of money, sometimes streaming platforms overvalue a content and end up overbidding for some content. Solution?!

It is a very old solution. torrenting. yes. p2p. most of the cost of these OTT (streaming services) is the infrastructure. Each of these studios or group of artists can have a their own private torrent tracker. An opensource p2p client for the user. This client can subscribe to or add as many torrent sources as it wants. netflix/disney/hbo/prime torrent trackers and/or more. Let the user have a pay as you go model for this p2p client streaming app, charged per hour. Then let 99% of the money collected will be distributed amongst the torrent sources based on the number of hours or minutes their torrent tracker was used. Users can also get a discount if they let the p2p client use the user's network/storage for caching. Depending on what % of outgoing traffic the user's p2p client has contributed against what it has consumed, some discount can be given to the user. More people use this p2p client, less burden or work or load on the original content owner or creator.

This will definitely be cheaper, easier than illegal download or illegal torrenting. Today most users subscribe to 1 or 2 platforms, pirate the rest of the content from other platforms to which they haven't subscribed.

This p2p client has to be opensource, 1% of the user's money can go to it's development and maintenance. 

Windows bluetooth crackling sound [cause, solution]

 So I had/have this issue with windows where bluetooth speakers start producing cracklintg/cracking sound for no reason. scraping the internet yielded no solution. Windows troubleshooter has solved no problem in all these years and that stays the same today. Here are the details:

Type of PC: laptop

make: 2023

Ram: 32GB

GPU: Integrated RTX4080

OEM: Asus

CPU: AMD

Wireless I/O devices:

1. keychron k2 wireless keyboard (bluetooth)
2. logitech m720 mouse (bluetooth)
3. logitech g pro mouse  (2.4ghz unifying logi dongle, not bluetooth)
4. harmon kardon aura studio 3 (bluetooth)

What didnt work?

1. windows inbuilt troubleshooter
2. driver update
3. driver reinstall
4. reinstall OS
5. Unpair all bluetooth devices, uninstall, pair them again, update their drivers (via windows udpate driver)
6. External USB bluetooth 5.0 dongle

What worked?

1. Except bluetooth speaker and bluetooth keyboard, dont use any more bluetooth devices

Cause:

Theoretically bluetooth supports 6 to 7 bluetooth devices but in practice due to bandwidth throtting by OEMs & bandwidth limitation of the BT technology, if BT speakers are used, then use just 1 more BT device and not anymore.

So currently the 2 mice that I have from logitech, they both come with their proprietory dongle to connect with, it takes up 2 more USB ports on the laptop (So I bought a docking station) but at least it is headache free.

Suggestions to OEMs:

1. Make multi device bluetooth keyboards but which can be paired with mouse, so whenever I switch connection between devices, the mouse+keyboard switch together.

2. Make PC, Laptops support multiple bluetooth interfaces, just like multiple NIC/PCI/PCIe cards, and we can connect our devices to any of the BT interface in the OS.

Postgresql on cloud, self or hosted, if self then monolithic or k8s? which k8s operator?

 So I have been planning to move my django sites to kubernetes to get that automated horizontal and vertical scaling, failover, high availability, fault tolerance and other good stuff. Database on kubernetes has been a very huge topic of , to do or not to do...yes a year back, I would not have recommended it. Operators were just kicking in. Now many seem to have matured everyone has their own querks and problems.

Why not hosted?

There are many DBaaS. All cloud providers provide one. Many provide only DBaaS such as elephantSQL. What I am afraid about is freedom, loss of freedom. We all know what happened to parler.com, they got just booted off their cloud account, data gone, applications gone. One day their account just got locked out. So all these DBaaS providers do not offer replication, backup to intracloud target (that is, having a standby node on another competing cloud provider, or your own on prem server or an object storage from some other provider or a NAS server at home etc.,). Sure they provide headache free, automated, regular backup, PITR - point in time recovery, base backup, incremental backup, differential backup, standy node etc., You dont have to have a team of DB engineers who maintain it and do all these day 2 operations. You remember what happened to gitlab dont you? Engineer accidentally deleted their entire primary postgresql database. Yes, they did and they found out that the backups that they had were no good.  So you are outsourcing all your headache to someone else. This is good, but not enough.

I want to be able to have my backup or replication or DR solution on some other site, some other cloud provider or a target of my choice. 

Self hosted: Monolithic or k8s

If you go monolithic then I highly recomment citus. It is an extension, which allows you to scale, shard at will and it is a clustering solution so you get the HA. There are of course the OG solutions like perconi, patroni, EDB, many paid, free and opensource solutions. You do however have to learn all these implentations, do a POC in house, verify all DR options, test HA, FT before going for any of them.

Self hosted: k8s operator

I considered and evaluated

crunchydata

zalando

kubedb

stackgres

percona 

but went with cnpg aka cloud native postgresql operator. Why? because of the first 2 words. Cloud native. Everyone else is trying to adopt what has been tested in the monolithic world to kubernetes world to get that autoscaling, inbuild HA, FT, auto recovery options from k8s but they are built for cloud or k8s, they are adopted to cloud/k8s. cnpg is built for k8s. Also their documentation was a lot better than any of the top above,udpated and their example deployment manifests per different options, just work. 

So wish me luck. I hope all my django apps stay afloat and sail smoothly because their DB is sailing smoothly.

The Coma question!

 In any organization, employees play a crucial role in determining the success or failure of the company. As a result, it is essential for companies to identify the different types of employees and understand their behavior to create an efficient and effective work environment. In this blog post, we will discuss the three types of employees and how companies can handle them.

1. Company's interest
Prioritizes company's interest first. These employees are highly motivated and committed to the success of the company. They understand the importance of creating redundancy for themselves and cross-skilling others in the team. By automating most of their work, they reduce dependency and help the organization save resources. These employees focus on the bigger picture and prioritize the company's goals over their personal interests. They are reliable, proactive, and always look for ways to improve processes. This thereotically should benefit his upward movement since whatever that he is responbile for, has been brought to such s state and stage that it can be taken care of without him and thus he can move on or up to something else.

2. Manager's interest
Prioritizes manager's interest first. Here is manager does not necessarily mean manager or management, it is always the immediate person in heirarchy of reporting or decision making. Employees who work for their manager prioritize pleasing their superiors over the company's success. They tend to be complacent and avoid suggesting improvements or corrections, even if it negatively affects the company. These employees are not proactive, and they are not interested in acquiring new skills or knowledge. They tend to be average workers, and their performance is dependent on the management's approval. Such employees often lack the motivation to go beyond their job description, which results in mediocre output. Advantage here being, managers too are humans and thus yes men do the leg up every now and then.

3. Self interest
prioritizes self interest. Employees who work for themselves prioritize their personal goals over the company's success. They create dependency on themselves, which means that if they are not there, most of the things will be on halt or put on hold. These employees tend to be less collaborative, and they do not share knowledge or skills with other team members. They choose projects or tools that increase their dependency and keep the number of resources needed high.Now, let's discuss how companies can handle these three types of employees.For employees who work for the company, companies need to ensure that they are motivated and engaged. They need to be given opportunities to learn new skills and take on new challenges. Companies should also recognize and reward their efforts to create redundancy and reduce dependency. By doing so, companies can retain these employees and build a strong and committed workforce. As long as there is a dependency on him, he will be the gatekeeper and gets to decide who passes in or out of his domain, whether it is the domain or technology that he is working on or controls. This will not only ensure his job security but also any action by management. Management would often sacrifice type 1 and type 2 employees to satisfy this kind of employees else the business won't run or may stop.

For employees who work for their manager, companies need to encourage them to think beyond their job description. They need to be given opportunities to provide feedback and suggestions, which can help improve processes and ultimately benefit the company. Companies should also encourage these employees to acquire new skills and knowledge. This can help them become more proactive and engaged, which can benefit the company in the long run.

For employees who work for themselves, companies need to create a culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing. They need to encourage these employees to work with others and share their skills and knowledge. Companies should also identify areas where these employees can reduce dependency and create redundancy. By doing so, companies can reduce the risk of critical knowledge loss and ensure that operations continue even when these employees are not available.

When employees of type 1 feel ignored or taken for granted, they drop down to type 2 or 3.  It ultimately depends on how rewarded they are in regards to their efforts, contributions and how secure they feel about their job.

Imagine a business which charges for support for its products but their documentation is so good that you do not need support to set it up and their product is so good that it rarely crashes or has problems and if it is also opensource, people can just do a PR against their git repo for hotfix and bugfix, then they will greatness of the product will drive them out of business. Sure, there will always be bugs, new features to add etc., SUSE, Rehdat all operate on such model and they have not gone out of business. Microsoft products, apple products on the other hand are an example of the opposite business model. Their profit it directly proportional to minimal transparency (of code or product design), maximum dependency and any support you might need for fix, repair or upgrade. Businesses do the type 3 modeling against their customers all the time.

COMA Question!

So how do you know who is who? Simple!. Ask yourself this question. If X is in coma for a month, what will be the impact on the show? Low(Type 1 employee), Medium(Type 2 employee), High(Type 3 employee).  

Redundancy loop!

Your redundancy loop should try to be as big as the size of the team. A has created redundancy in B, B has created redundancy in A, that makes it the smalles loop which is wrong. It should be A's redundancy is B, B's redundancy is C, C's redundancy is A, if you have ABC members in your team. 

Employees play a crucial role in the success of any organization. By understanding the behavior of different types of employees, companies can create an efficient and effective work environment. Companies need to ensure that their employees are motivated, engaged, and focused on the company's success. By doing so, they can build a strong and committed workforce that can help them achieve their goals.