HTNet

Have you heard about the Pareto principle? It is also known as the 80/20 rule. The Pareto principle states that 80% of your profits come from 20% of your actions. There are some analysis of the principle that concluded that it actually means 80% of your income comes from 20% of your customers.

My beef with the Pareto principle is that I believe that it is too general and scientifically borders on the impossible. By sheer definition, it means that you should focus on the 20% of your activities that brings 80% of your revenue. Right?

Now here’s the weird part. If you eliminate the 80% of activities that only bring in 20% of your revenue, you’d essentially be left with 100% of income that comes from 100% of your work. This means that applying the Pareto principle effectively negates the principle itself!

So does this mean that the Pareto principle is a paradox of itself? Or am I just reading too much into it?

I did my tax filing yesterday. It was the second time I filed my taxes online. Last year the experience was horrible! The stupid e-filing system forced me to use Internet Explorer to submit my income and expenses details. It used some weird IE-only security certificate which I find very troublesome.

This year though, LHDN (Malaysia’s Inland Revenue Board) has done some major improvements to the e-Hasil e-filing system. It now supports almost all modern browsers.

I performed my income tax submission without any problems and it was much easier than last year. The deadline to file your income tax submission is until the end of this month (April 2008). If you haven’t filed your income tax submission, I suggest that you do so as soon as possible.

After moving it to its new home, the web server at my office decided not to boot up. The server runs on CentOS4 and is configured to perform updates daily. It choked during init and the last messages shown before the system froze are as follows:

VFS: Cannot open root device "<NULL>" or unknown-block(8,22)
Kernel panic - not synching: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,22)

Read the rest of A Tale Of An Unnecessary Linux Reinstall »

• The Unix Toolbox describes a bunch of useful Linux/Unix/BSD commands to help you use the command line more effectively.
• If you like to have a list of common (and not so common) Linux commands in alphabetical order, then check out O’Reilly’s Alphabetical Directory of Linux Commands.
• Pixelbeat also has a nice list of Linux commands grouped categorically.
• If you’ve just started with Linux, you’d appreciate Linux Newbie Guide’s Linux Shortcuts and Commands.
• Want to really get up to speed on your Unix command vocabulary? You’ll find it hard to beat Learn UNIX in 10 Minutes.
• Want a printable Linux guide? Download Unix/Linux Command Reference, a one paged PDF document that you can print out and stick somewhere near your terminal.

Read through, try out, understand, enjoy and more importantly share!

How important is instant messaging (IM) in your online life? For me, I don’t spend much time at all on IM. However, it is an important communications medium for me as a lot of my colleagues, friends and clients use it as the main method of staying in contact.

There are many popular IM protocols; Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger and Google Talk (which actually runs on the Jabber protocol) are among the more well-known. I have contacts on all these protocols, but running dedicated IM clients for each of them would be out of the question.

Read the rest of Miranda: The Light Instant Messaging Client »