Good source of info on Port scans that I saw on my machine.
FAQ: Firewall Forensics (What am I seeing?)
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19 minutes ago
Sunday, November 02, 2003
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
Intersting read.
CommentWire by Datamonitor - Indian call centers: cracks begin to show
Job disillusionment is perhaps the most general way to describe the problem facing India's call center workers. According to Manesh Mathew, director of HR consultancy PeopleEquity, "A number of unique factors peculiar to the call center work environment impact the call center professionals and their perception towards their work. These range across a gamut of human issues which include peculiar working hours, working days/holidays determined by geographic considerations, assuming pseudo identities, learning foreign accents, operating in alien business environment, altered social and family life, besides harboring the risk associated with working in a nascent industry."
CommentWire by Datamonitor - Indian call centers: cracks begin to show
Job disillusionment is perhaps the most general way to describe the problem facing India's call center workers. According to Manesh Mathew, director of HR consultancy PeopleEquity, "A number of unique factors peculiar to the call center work environment impact the call center professionals and their perception towards their work. These range across a gamut of human issues which include peculiar working hours, working days/holidays determined by geographic considerations, assuming pseudo identities, learning foreign accents, operating in alien business environment, altered social and family life, besides harboring the risk associated with working in a nascent industry."
Thursday, October 09, 2003
McD franchisee in Colo. routing orders through call center
Here's the text:
A McDonald's restaurant operator in Colorado is funneling customers' orders through a telephone call center to improve service speed and accuracy.
Here's how it works: Customers at six McDonald's restaurants in Colorado Springs, Colo., call in their orders on telephones sitting on each table.
The employees at the call center electronically relay the orders, as well as orders made at the drive-through, to the appropriate restaurant's kitchen. The orders appear on a screen in the kitchen, and identify the table or car where the order originated.
Inside the restaurants, McDonald's employees take the orders to the tables and collect payment. Customers at the drive-through pay for their orders and pick them up as they always have.
A seventh McDonald's restaurant, this one in Brainerd, Minn., recently set up the high-speed data line necessary to run its customer orders through the Colorado Springs call center.
Though the call center employs as many as eight workers -- it reaches a peak during busy times -- the system halves the 35 to 40 cents in costs that a restaurant normally incurs to take a customer order at the counter, said Craig Tengler, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Exit 41, an Andover, Mass.-based firm that supplies the system's software.
The call-center workers are trained to urge customers to buy more, so an average order is 10 to 15 cents greater under the new system than an order taken at the counter, Tengler said Wednesday.
Corporate executives in Oak Brook are impressed enough by Colorado Springs franchisee Steve Bigari's idea to expand the call-center test to as many as four additional restaurants by early 2004, said McDonald's spokesman Bill Whitman.
"We see that it has some potential to help reduce customer wait time," Whitman said, declining to release numbers. "It also reduces order time."
Those are magic words to McDonald's, which has consistently ranked at the bottom of customer service surveys and consistently lagged in speed-of-service surveys. CEO Jim Cantalupo, who took over in January, has begun efforts to grade each restaurant's quality and hold the managers accountable.
Bigari could not be reached for comment, but Tengler said Bigari intends to expand the initiative to include cell phones. It's hoped that by early next year, customers will be able to call in orders on their cell phones, with those calls also being routed to the call center, Tengler said.
One possibility is to let a customer hit a number on his cell phone to relay his most frequent order, without having to say anything.
The Colorado Springs restaurants already have set up new drive-through services to speed order times and improve accuracy.
Digital cameras are set up at the drive-throughs to take a photo of each car. The photo is matched to the order that the driver made.
The restaurants also feature new Zoom-throughs.
The Zoom-through drive-throughs have no menu boards, so customers must know what they want. Customers place their order, swipe a credit card, bypass the drive-through line, and pick up their orders at a window separate from the normal drive-through pickup window.
Plans call for a Virtual Zoom-through sometime in the future, in which customers would call in their orders and the payment would be deducted from a prepaid McDonald's card.
The Colorado Springs restaurants also each have an Internet kiosk, and most tables have Internet access hookups.
Separately, McDonald's announced Wednesday it will provide its New York, New Jersey and Connecticut customers with literature and information on how to order their favorite McDonald's food and still stay on a low-fat, low-calorie or low-carbohydrate diet.
The program, to start in January, is part of McDonald's "Real Life Choices" initiative. It is being created in part by nutritionist and wellness coach Pamela Smith.
Here's the text:
A McDonald's restaurant operator in Colorado is funneling customers' orders through a telephone call center to improve service speed and accuracy.
Here's how it works: Customers at six McDonald's restaurants in Colorado Springs, Colo., call in their orders on telephones sitting on each table.
The employees at the call center electronically relay the orders, as well as orders made at the drive-through, to the appropriate restaurant's kitchen. The orders appear on a screen in the kitchen, and identify the table or car where the order originated.
Inside the restaurants, McDonald's employees take the orders to the tables and collect payment. Customers at the drive-through pay for their orders and pick them up as they always have.
A seventh McDonald's restaurant, this one in Brainerd, Minn., recently set up the high-speed data line necessary to run its customer orders through the Colorado Springs call center.
Though the call center employs as many as eight workers -- it reaches a peak during busy times -- the system halves the 35 to 40 cents in costs that a restaurant normally incurs to take a customer order at the counter, said Craig Tengler, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Exit 41, an Andover, Mass.-based firm that supplies the system's software.
The call-center workers are trained to urge customers to buy more, so an average order is 10 to 15 cents greater under the new system than an order taken at the counter, Tengler said Wednesday.
Corporate executives in Oak Brook are impressed enough by Colorado Springs franchisee Steve Bigari's idea to expand the call-center test to as many as four additional restaurants by early 2004, said McDonald's spokesman Bill Whitman.
"We see that it has some potential to help reduce customer wait time," Whitman said, declining to release numbers. "It also reduces order time."
Those are magic words to McDonald's, which has consistently ranked at the bottom of customer service surveys and consistently lagged in speed-of-service surveys. CEO Jim Cantalupo, who took over in January, has begun efforts to grade each restaurant's quality and hold the managers accountable.
Bigari could not be reached for comment, but Tengler said Bigari intends to expand the initiative to include cell phones. It's hoped that by early next year, customers will be able to call in orders on their cell phones, with those calls also being routed to the call center, Tengler said.
One possibility is to let a customer hit a number on his cell phone to relay his most frequent order, without having to say anything.
The Colorado Springs restaurants already have set up new drive-through services to speed order times and improve accuracy.
Digital cameras are set up at the drive-throughs to take a photo of each car. The photo is matched to the order that the driver made.
The restaurants also feature new Zoom-throughs.
The Zoom-through drive-throughs have no menu boards, so customers must know what they want. Customers place their order, swipe a credit card, bypass the drive-through line, and pick up their orders at a window separate from the normal drive-through pickup window.
Plans call for a Virtual Zoom-through sometime in the future, in which customers would call in their orders and the payment would be deducted from a prepaid McDonald's card.
The Colorado Springs restaurants also each have an Internet kiosk, and most tables have Internet access hookups.
Separately, McDonald's announced Wednesday it will provide its New York, New Jersey and Connecticut customers with literature and information on how to order their favorite McDonald's food and still stay on a low-fat, low-calorie or low-carbohydrate diet.
The program, to start in January, is part of McDonald's "Real Life Choices" initiative. It is being created in part by nutritionist and wellness coach Pamela Smith.
Tuesday, October 07, 2003
New Study Predicts Call Center Spending Will Rise Silicon Valley Biz Ink :: The voice of the valley economy
Wednesday, October 01, 2003
Presentation Tips from one of Microsoft's finest. See "My Way".
Don Box's Spoutlet
Here's the extract:
Everything you know about network protocols applies. How do you know people got it? You need an ACK. What happens if you transmit too much data too fast? Buffer overflow. How do you ensure successful reception in the absence of ACKs? Forward error correction via redundant transmission.
Preparation is a lifestyle. I never rehearse talks - I want to have a genuine experience when I talk and rehearsals always feel contrived. That said, I try to only speak on topics I'm focused on in my daily life, so hopefully I have tons of relevant data in L0 cache. I also try to avoid staying up late the night before - being rested is far more important than any benefits you may get from cramming the night before.
Less is more. This applies on many fronts. Smaller/minimal code examples (preferably coded up on the fly) are preferable to opening up a huge sample app and highlighting 7 lines of code. Less content in PowerPoint is preferable to 200+ word slides (damn that auto-font-downsizing feature). At most, PowerPoint should give you visual cues as to the flow of the talk and give attendees visual reinforcement. A little PowerPoint goes an awfully long way - don't let it ruin your talk.
It's all about attention span management. It's your responsibility to keep attendees focused no matter what. There are countless tricks you can use to snap people back on track. My favorite example was a United Airlines flight back in 2000. The flight attendant decided she wanted people to pay attention to the safety lecture - so out of the loudspeaker came the following:
Your seatbelts are useless [pause] unless they are buckled low and tight across your lap with your belongings stowed…
The entire cabin snapped to attention. It was quite stunning and I now think of that experience every time I fly.
Contrast is your friend. If you normally speak fast, occasionally slow it down. If you've had PPT in the foreground for 15 minutes, Alt-Tab to something else fast. If you've been sitting for 30 minutes - stand up and walk around.
Just the facts ma'am…not! Facts are great. Concepts are much better. Your job is to convey concepts and/or demonstrate techniques - facts are at most a means to an end. Also, don't underestimate the importance of motivation - this is both the "why is this this way" as well as "why should you care."
Selecting text looks like crap using the default settings for Windows. OK, this one may not sound very profound but you have no idea how important it is. By default, Windows displays selected text using white text on a black background. On most projection equipment, this means that when you highlight some text, what you just selected is virtually unreadable (which is the opposite of the effect you were hoping for). To deal with this, I set the selected text colors to black text on a Cyan (light blue) background. That makes selection look much more like running a highlighter over the text.
Don Box's Spoutlet
Here's the extract:
Everything you know about network protocols applies. How do you know people got it? You need an ACK. What happens if you transmit too much data too fast? Buffer overflow. How do you ensure successful reception in the absence of ACKs? Forward error correction via redundant transmission.
Preparation is a lifestyle. I never rehearse talks - I want to have a genuine experience when I talk and rehearsals always feel contrived. That said, I try to only speak on topics I'm focused on in my daily life, so hopefully I have tons of relevant data in L0 cache. I also try to avoid staying up late the night before - being rested is far more important than any benefits you may get from cramming the night before.
Less is more. This applies on many fronts. Smaller/minimal code examples (preferably coded up on the fly) are preferable to opening up a huge sample app and highlighting 7 lines of code. Less content in PowerPoint is preferable to 200+ word slides (damn that auto-font-downsizing feature). At most, PowerPoint should give you visual cues as to the flow of the talk and give attendees visual reinforcement. A little PowerPoint goes an awfully long way - don't let it ruin your talk.
It's all about attention span management. It's your responsibility to keep attendees focused no matter what. There are countless tricks you can use to snap people back on track. My favorite example was a United Airlines flight back in 2000. The flight attendant decided she wanted people to pay attention to the safety lecture - so out of the loudspeaker came the following:
Your seatbelts are useless [pause] unless they are buckled low and tight across your lap with your belongings stowed…
The entire cabin snapped to attention. It was quite stunning and I now think of that experience every time I fly.
Contrast is your friend. If you normally speak fast, occasionally slow it down. If you've had PPT in the foreground for 15 minutes, Alt-Tab to something else fast. If you've been sitting for 30 minutes - stand up and walk around.
Just the facts ma'am…not! Facts are great. Concepts are much better. Your job is to convey concepts and/or demonstrate techniques - facts are at most a means to an end. Also, don't underestimate the importance of motivation - this is both the "why is this this way" as well as "why should you care."
Selecting text looks like crap using the default settings for Windows. OK, this one may not sound very profound but you have no idea how important it is. By default, Windows displays selected text using white text on a black background. On most projection equipment, this means that when you highlight some text, what you just selected is virtually unreadable (which is the opposite of the effect you were hoping for). To deal with this, I set the selected text colors to black text on a Cyan (light blue) background. That makes selection look much more like running a highlighter over the text.
Tuesday, September 30, 2003
Sunday, September 28, 2003
Saturday, September 20, 2003
Call Center Market
Jack Welch says that it always helps to define a market where you have no more than a 10% share. This forces thinking OOTB to new opportunities that you may not be aware of exising.
For call centers, it is instrumental to note the areas that they play in , like:
1. Multichannel interactions
2. Case admnistration software
3. Training and e-learning
4. Workforce optimization
5. Knowledge Management
6. Offshoring
Other attributes include certification, virtual call centers etc.
TBD :; Assessment of the current market size, where we are with respect to this size and projected growth.
Jack Welch says that it always helps to define a market where you have no more than a 10% share. This forces thinking OOTB to new opportunities that you may not be aware of exising.
For call centers, it is instrumental to note the areas that they play in , like:
1. Multichannel interactions
2. Case admnistration software
3. Training and e-learning
4. Workforce optimization
5. Knowledge Management
6. Offshoring
Other attributes include certification, virtual call centers etc.
TBD :; Assessment of the current market size, where we are with respect to this size and projected growth.
Saturday, May 17, 2003
Product Management
Can I ask you a question ? To what degree does a technical background help in product management ?
My perception is - a lot. Product managers are tasked with building plans for the next generation of the product. This means a lot of market and competitive analysis, and many other inputs from customers, partners and other internal subject matter experts(SMEs).
Technical knowledge is not mandatory for this. However, it is immensely helpful while interfacing with your customer for the MRD or BRD that you write - the engineering team. Since they are the audience that makes your "vision" come alive, put yourself in their shoes for a second... what does an engineer want to design something ? How close can you make sure the design meets the requirement ? what is the performance metrics do you want the system to adhere ?
I was in a meeting recently where a product manager carved out his vision for a user interface - resplendent with 3D rendering of a feature, with drag and drop and cubic representations. Think outside the box he said.But there was only one catch - the architecture needed to be on the browser with no code on the client as a basic design limitation. The engg folks admired the vision, encouraged it too. Then they walked out slowly, shaking their head in disbelief.
Answers to these key questions can make or break a product. And failure to understand these critical dimensions really is the loss of the company, and the blame rests on the product manager.
Can I ask you a question ? To what degree does a technical background help in product management ?
My perception is - a lot. Product managers are tasked with building plans for the next generation of the product. This means a lot of market and competitive analysis, and many other inputs from customers, partners and other internal subject matter experts(SMEs).
Technical knowledge is not mandatory for this. However, it is immensely helpful while interfacing with your customer for the MRD or BRD that you write - the engineering team. Since they are the audience that makes your "vision" come alive, put yourself in their shoes for a second... what does an engineer want to design something ? How close can you make sure the design meets the requirement ? what is the performance metrics do you want the system to adhere ?
I was in a meeting recently where a product manager carved out his vision for a user interface - resplendent with 3D rendering of a feature, with drag and drop and cubic representations. Think outside the box he said.But there was only one catch - the architecture needed to be on the browser with no code on the client as a basic design limitation. The engg folks admired the vision, encouraged it too. Then they walked out slowly, shaking their head in disbelief.
Answers to these key questions can make or break a product. And failure to understand these critical dimensions really is the loss of the company, and the blame rests on the product manager.
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