Project & People Management

Project management has been very much talked about and PMBOK is an excellent resource to get all the relevant information. I think people everywhere in public & private life do understand the value of project management. Simple tasks in everyday life (eg: go for an offsite meeting on Friday evening ;)) are looked upon as projects by parents. Everybody involved (husband, wife & children in this case) needs to be on the same page when it comes to execution.

In a professional project that I am involved with right now (automotive), the project initiation factors are manifold including “New Technology”, “Competitive Forces”, “Market Demand” & “Strategic opportunity” as well as “Business Need” to stay relevant in a slow-changing industry. The automotive industry by itself has been very innovative and has been incorporating new technologies as fast as it can. But the processing of artifacts in the industry has more or less been the same from the beginning.

Typical projects in the industry last for 15 years with about 5 years of development lead time, 5 years of shelf time and 5 years of support services. The SW projects, on the other hand, are not that long (typically the life of an SW is maxing 2-3 years) after which a new version or upgrade needs to be issued. The contradiction in the industry now is to get the people in the industry to understand SW methodology and to get the people in the SW to understand the automotive industry!

People working in their respective fields are excellent in their field of knowledge and very reluctant to change their way of thinking and/or processing information. If I take an example, fully autonomous vehicles will be running multi-core HW with a full-fledged POSIX compliant OS plus applications running on it. Now the SW for such a complex system needs to be updated. The size of updates is up in GigaBytes. So the downtime for automobile during servicing, production, etc. might increase if the old way of doing updates is not modernized. But doing this modernization will in effect change the whole process of procurement, production, and service in the industry.

In general, I find that people, especially in the automobile industry are unable to grasp the importance of changing the processes and philosophy to fit in with the needs and demand for modern-day technology. The project manager is more involved with doing people management in this particular project. Some of the tasks like:

  • Getting different teams to talk to each other
  • Promoting common vocabulary
  • Plugging in the core software into the electrical and mechanical engineering teams
  • Requirements management
  • Communications towards stakeholders including 3rd parties
  • Driving infrastructure changes related
  • Assigning ownership (especially because the old ways of attributing ownership is not applicable anymore)
  • Most importantly, changing the mindset of people

I personally do think that people management in this project is as important as project management if not more. Since a lot of things are new, people are afraid of executing tasks since they might end up on the wrong side of the door. People hence needs to be managed so that they feel more confident and more cozy with the changing environment. So according to me, it is not only the project that one needs to manage, but one also needs to manage all the multitude of people who are even remotely going to be affected by the product/services change that the project is driving. And this can be quite overwhelming especially because of cultural differences as well as the fear of failure. Plus there are no real guidelines here.

Digitalization – What is it?

Before I start writing on Digitization/Digitalization, maybe we should spend a little time in exploring the alternative “Analogization”! Now I have made up that word and probably the more appropriate word might be “Materialization”[1][2] but comparing the past/existing with the upcoming/future will give a perspective and provide a context for my thoughts.

As human beings, we have been generating information right from the start of our existence and materializing it as physical objects. These physical objects were hard to manage, cross-reference, study & derive from. With the new age technologies, we are now at a stage where we can convert all the physical form of materializing information into digital bits & bytes that can be read, stored, coded and decoded by computers (Digitization).

Digitization of information is not only limited to converting materialized formats (image, text, sound, etc.) to digital ones but also to create an environment / eco-system around data which had no prior existence in any usable sense.

To give an example, I get stuck in traffic while going to the workplace every day at certain times. Digitization of this information allows for something known as extrapolation[3] which when combined with similar data from millions of users allows one to predict accurately as to for what time he/she will be stuck in traffic and probable solutions to avoid the same!

Targeted advertisements[4] and the more recent and sinister Cambridge Analytica scandal[5][6] and “vote steering”[7] are very much applicable (maybe somewhat immoral) uses of such information. But before I write more, I would again like to differentiate between data[8] and information[9]. In general, data by itself makes little sense unless and until it is put into a context which then gets transformed into information.

So “Digitalization” itself allows for converting data into information very quickly and in most cases in very sensible ways. This allows for and facilitates changes in processing, interpretation, replication, and application of the information in various aspects. The impact of Digitalization is not local and can have an impact on totally unrelated fields/markets. An example is an enhancement in Artifical Intelligence algorithms[10] which can create fake videos!

Can you see Mona Lisa talking in the above picture? Now the impact of this research is not only on Mona Lisa or image processing fields. This technology can be used to create information which can influence morals, ethics, freedom, democracy, art, literature, etc.

Digitization has helped with:
– Faster collection of data
– Faster generation of data
– Faster and deep cross-referencing of data

Digitalization, on the other hand, has helped with:
– Replication, extrapolation & interpolation of data
– Finding relationships between variables in totally unrelated/unexpected ways
– Contextualizing data and generating information impacting
* Eco-system
* Processes & ways of working
* Influencing individuals & societies alike

To end, I would say that “Digitalization” is here to stay. It is up to us to accept it, embrace it and drive it in a more thoughtful pattern. Materialization (Analogization) is of a foregone era. Transformation of various markets, innovation, business, eco-system, technology, rules & regulations, IPRs, etc. is happening at an unimaginable pace because of digitalization.

Even professions which have been termed as less likely to be automated (eg: Teaching) is already heavily influenced. My daughter’s MATH teacher is a website named “Nomp.se” and for many people, YouTube is a better place of learning than traditional classrooms (MIT OpenCourseWare)!

[1] – https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/materialization
[2] – https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/482439/a-word-that-means-the-opposite-of-digitization/502604?newreg=8446bb56c8dd4deaacc9c3385ba3ad26
[3] – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrapolation
[4] – https://medium.com/better-marketing/the-great-hack-reveals-facebook-ads-arent-just-selling-leggings-ea50b2191bf
[5] – https://epic.org/privacy/facebook/cambridge-analytica/
[6] – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal
[7] – https://www.wired.com/story/moveon-sway-midterms-with-facebook-ads/
[8] – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data
[9] – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information
[10] – https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/new-ai-can-create-fake-videos-of-people-from-a-single-picture?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1

Compile Gargoyle for Netgear R6220

I recently got a Netgear R6220 router, an AC1200 dual-band router with very impressive specs. It was awarded the best router in 2016 and now in 2019, I still think it is a very good router. It has a 2 core Mediatek MT7621 (MIPS) processor with 128 MB RAM & 128 MB ROM i.e. ample space with some good processing power. Below you can see the impressive specs. BTW: I got this for almost 15 USD which was a steal!

root@OpenWrt:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo
system type             : MediaTek MT7621 ver:1 eco:3
machine                 : Netgear R6220
processor               : 0
cpu model               : MIPS 1004Kc V2.15
BogoMIPS                : 584.90
wait instruction        : yes
microsecond timers      : yes
tlb_entries             : 32
extra interrupt vector  : yes
hardware watchpoint     : yes, count: 4, address/irw mask: [0x0ffc, 0x0ffc, 0x0ffb, 0x0ffb]
isa                     : mips1 mips2 mips32r1 mips32r2
ASEs implemented        : mips16 dsp mt
shadow register sets    : 1
kscratch registers      : 0
package                 : 0
core                    : 0
VPE                     : 0
VCED exceptions         : not available
VCEI exceptions         : not available

processor               : 1
cpu model               : MIPS 1004Kc V2.15
BogoMIPS                : 584.90
wait instruction        : yes
microsecond timers      : yes
tlb_entries             : 32
extra interrupt vector  : yes
hardware watchpoint     : yes, count: 4, address/irw mask: [0x0ffc, 0x0ffc, 0x0ffb, 0x0ffb]
isa                     : mips1 mips2 mips32r1 mips32r2
ASEs implemented        : mips16 dsp mt
shadow register sets    : 1
kscratch registers      : 0
package                 : 0
core                    : 0
VPE                     : 1
VCED exceptions         : not available
VCEI exceptions         : not available

root@OpenWrt:~# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:         124016 kB
MemFree:           67696 kB
MemAvailable:      50560 kB
Buffers:            2460 kB
Cached:            12820 kB
SwapCached:            0 kB
Active:            25640 kB
Inactive:           5116 kB
Active(anon):      18372 kB
Inactive(anon):      144 kB
Active(file):       7268 kB
Inactive(file):     4972 kB
Unevictable:           0 kB
Mlocked:               0 kB
HighTotal:             0 kB
HighFree:              0 kB
LowTotal:         124016 kB
LowFree:           67696 kB
SwapTotal:             0 kB
SwapFree:              0 kB
Dirty:                 0 kB
Writeback:             0 kB
AnonPages:         15476 kB
Mapped:             2920 kB
Shmem:              3040 kB
Slab:               9628 kB
SReclaimable:       2636 kB
SUnreclaim:         6992 kB
KernelStack:         448 kB
PageTables:          336 kB
NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
Bounce:                0 kB
WritebackTmp:          0 kB
CommitLimit:       62008 kB
Committed_AS:      23588 kB
VmallocTotal:    1040376 kB
VmallocUsed:           0 kB
VmallocChunk:          0 kB

I am running OpenWRT on this router. You can use the OpenWRT information page to install OpenWRT over the stock FW.

Now OpenWRT is good but I miss some of the user-friendly features from Gargoyle FW, which is another open source FW based on OpenWRT. One of the best features is the Quota & throttling support in the UI. I can do all these things in OpenWRT but again, it is a lot of manual steps and I also want somebody like my wife to be able to manage the router as well if needed.

The current binaries available for the MT7621 does not have R6220 profile and also, it does not have the latest OpenWRT base. Hence the only option is to compile Gargoyle and create a working FW. Below are the steps for the same. The code below is self-documenting but do ask me your questions in comments as needed.

The original source is: https://github.com/ericpaulbishop/gargoyle. I have a forked version available at: https://github.com/wolverine2k/gargoyle. Start working on the master branch since that is up-to-date and being actively worked upon upstream.

git clone git@github.com:wolverine2k/gargoyle.git
cd gargoyle
git checkout master
make ramips.mt7621

If the compilation is successful, you should have the necessary binaries generated in: ramips-src/bin/targets/ramips/mt7621

View post on imgur.com
Gargoyle R6220 Firmware Images

You might face error with obfsproxy-legacy which I faced. So I had to apply the patch to get it to compile. Now simply do a sysupgrade on your OpenWRT FW to enjoy Gargoyle. I will put another blog post if I find any instabilities.

More documentation on the same can be found at: https://www.gargoyle-router.com/wiki/doku.php?id=developer_documentation

To Docker or to Vagrant

To Docker or to Vagrant, an eternal struggle for a dev-ops / smart people (like me!) who wants to automate stuff is a big life and death question! No seriously, I mean there are just 2 camps of people, one is hardcore docker supporters who want docker everywhere (without realizing that docker is not a full virtualization solution but uses Linux kernel’s namespaces and cgroups functionality. So what does it mean? Well for starters, anything that requires mounting operations inside the docker container, for instance, requires special privileged access and these have the possibility to change your actual host filesystem (eg: mounting filesystems inside the container will mount it indirectly on your host as well and rest is history. It is not just mount operations, simple things like socket access, changes to locale or local-gen will not work inside docker containers without passing special access privilege flags while running the docker container.

Vagrant is a straightforward configuration script for Virtual Box (VB) which is a full virtualization solution. So one basically installs an OS and does everything inside that container itself. Also, vagrant vbox files are easier to share (since it is a single file itself, unlike the layered approach in Docker). In any case, doing privileged operations in VB/Vagrant is more reassuring then doing the same on Docker. So even though I am a docker supporter, I also like vagrant because of the full virtualization support and next to impossibility to mess up with your host system.

Anyways, that’s that. So to Docker or to Vagrant is a personal choice depending on the use case one is trying to implement as well as the need for distribution (private or public). Cheers & send in your comments.

Update Anaconda Navigator

Everybody using Python would nowadays be using Anaconda instead. And if you aren’t, my recommendation is to use it. Why may you ask? Because with python comes a lot of packages and each such package comes with a host load of dependencies and it is difficult & time-consuming to resolve those dependencies manually. Also, anaconda allows one to create multiple environments (basically environment containers for package isolation). So let’s say you need package1 for some type of work and package2 for some other type of work. But package2 inherently depends on a different version of package1. Now if you have the same environment, you will have conflicts but creating different isolated environment containers helps the use case.

Anyways, just use it. Its simple and allows you to spend more time focussing on the business logic. Now then, once you have installed Anaconda and when you launch the Anaconda Navigator application, it will give you an upgrade dialog box showing that a new version is available. If you have installed it somewhere in “Program Files”, the auto-upgrade mechanism will not work. So instead of being frustrated or trying to install it somewhere else, go through the following steps.

1. Open the command prompt using “Run as Administrator” option from Windows Start Menu
2. Go to the location where conda.exe is installed. In my case, it was ” C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Shared\Anaconda3_64\Scripts ” (Yes, I got the anaconda installed with Visual Studio Community Edition :).
3. Execute the following code
conda.exe update --prefix "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Shared\Anaconda3_64" anaconda-navigator

Now your anaconda-navigator will be upgraded and something similar to the following text will be seen.

Fetching package metadata .............
Solving package specifications: .

Package plan for installation in environment C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Shared\Anaconda3_64:

The following packages will be UPDATED:

anaconda: 5.0.0-py36hea9b2fc_0 --> custom-py36h363777c_0
anaconda-navigator: 1.6.8-py36h4b7dd57_0 --> 1.6.12-py36hdad2993_0
conda: 4.3.27-py36hcbae3bd_0 --> 4.4.7-py36_0
pycosat: 0.6.2-py36hf17546d_1 --> 0.6.3-py36h413d8a4_0

Proceed ([y]/n)? y

anaconda-custo 100% |###############################| Time: 0:00:00 131.17 kB/s
pycosat-0.6.3- 100% |###############################| Time: 0:00:00 662.27 kB/s
conda-4.4.7-py 100% |###############################| Time: 0:00:01 904.57 kB/s
anaconda-navig 100% |###############################| Time: 0:00:02 1.96 MB/s
DEBUG menuinst_win32:__init__(185): Menu: name: 'Anaconda${PY_VER} ${PLATFORM}', prefix: 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Shared\Anaconda3_64', env_name: 'None', mode: 'None', used_mode: 'system'
DEBUG menuinst_win32:__init__(185): Menu: name: 'Anaconda${PY_VER} ${PLATFORM}', prefix: 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Shared\Anaconda3_64', env_name: 'None', mode: 'None', used_mode: 'system'

Don’t worry about the DEBUG prints, it just says that I have run the command outside of a container environment. Now voila, your anaconda navigator is updated. As a bonus, you might also see a list of packages that are upgradeable in the UI. The UI, unfortunately, will now allow you to carry on the upgrades. Instead, just write the following in an environment window (a python window opened via the environment from anaconda-navigator)

conda update --all

If you run the command outside of an environment, the base/root environment will be updated. You can also use the –name argument to the command to give a specific environment name. Running it from inside a contained environment will only update the packages for that environment. To update the environment itself, you can use  conda env update . Check the conda documentation for the same.

So long people, ENJOY learning!