Some of the ‘general signs’ include the following: “Your child quickly turns off the computer or changes the computer screen when you enter the room. You discover your child is hiding CDs or DVDs from you. These could contain pornography, illegal music downloads, or hacking programs. Your child spends an inordinate amount of time on the Internet. You find your child up late at night using the Internet after you have gone to bed…” Emotional giveaways can be that your child gets moody and withdrawn for no apparent reason, becomes suddenly secretive, or starts to have problems sleeping. On the last, the author alerts that the symptom could indicate he or she is being bullied, or is scared or worried.

These apart, watch for financial signs too, Lenardon advises parents. For instance, you might find unusual credit card charges. “These charges could be small amounts or a monthly charge and might indicate your child is buying hacking software or signing up for gambling sites. Many of these sites do not use a company name that indicates what the company sells.” Another sign is unusual phone charges.

In the face of all these possibilities, it is important to follow the motto ‘trust but verify,’ the book counsels. Children need to be trusted, and made aware of the dangers they face; yet parents should verify that they are properly protecting themselves.

Compulsory read.

The phrase ‘large objects’ may bring to your mind aircraft carriers and giant boulders, outsized books and packaging cartons. But LOBs, as they are abbreviated in Oracle Database 8, are for storing binary data (containing images, music, video, documents, executables and so on), and character data. “LOBs can store up to 128 terabytes of data, depending on the database configuration,” explains Jason Price in Oracle Database 11g SQL ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com).

“Today’s Web sites demand more than just the storage and retrieval of text and numbers: they also require multimedia. Consequently, databases are now being called upon to store items such as music and video,” Price reasons. “Prior to the release of Oracle Database 8, you had to store large blocks of character using the LONG database type, and large blocks of binary data had to be stored using either the LONG RAW type or the shorter RAW type.”

It may help to know that LOB types are four, viz. CLOB (for character data); NCLOB (the National Character Set LOB type, which is used for storing multiple byte character data, typically used for non-English characters); BLOB (the binary type); and BFILE (the binary file type, which is used for storing a pointer to a file). “The file can be on a hard disk, CD, DVD, Blu-Ray disk, HD-DVD, or any other device that is accessible through the database server’s file system.”

One of the 11g enhancements is the facility to encrypt LOBs (for preventing unauthorised viewing and modification of data), to compress, and to de-duplicate data (to automatically detect and remove repeated data).

For the avid professional.

As a boss you may be routinely sending down the organisation pipeline tonnes of e-mail to your staff, and expecting their problems to disappear. Alas, such naiveté rests on the blind assumption that if you tell your employees what the company’s problems are, if you tell them ‘the facts,’ they will understand, observes David Freemantle in Superboss ( www.jaicobooks.com).

“In organisations rife with distrust, top-down communication campaigns will always be perceived by employees as company propaganda and brain washing,” he adds. “Employees will be suspicious of the catch. ‘They’re trying to con us once more,’ they will say, or ‘they’re trying to soften us up again.’”

To communicate effectively you must have trust, says Freemantle. “To achieve trust you must create an environment in which your employees can genuinely communicate with you, and you must genuinely listen and take the appropriate follow-through action.”

How does a ‘superboss’ handle communication? He starts at the other end, the author describes. “He allows his people to communicate with him, allows them to ask questions on issues that interest them. He devotes time to it.” The superboss, says Freemantle, devotes 80 per cent of his time to communications. “He is the company when it comes to company communications.”

Don’t let the grapevine take over, warns Freemantle. “It will distort things and reduce your credibility.”

As the sub-title says, the book is ‘the A-Z of managing people successfully.’

In 1988, AT&T was developing its cordless phone, and hoped to reduce the product development time by 50 per cent. “The main obstacle that the company was facing was a tightly-formed hierarchical structure,” narrates Ashok Chanda in Strategic Human Resource Technologies ( www.sagepublications.com).

AT&T was used to approaching product development through a process resembling a relay system in which the product development group would hand over a design to the manufacturing group, and subsequently the manufacturing group would hand over the product to the marketing team, explains the author. “In the entire chain, there was no complete connection.”

Revamping the process, the company formed teams comprising engineers, manufacturers, and marketers. “Team members were granted the authority to decide about how much the product would cost, how it would work, and its appearance as well. Rigid speed requirements were established…”

The empowered team achieved tight deadlines; for, it did not have to send decisions across hierarchies seeking approval. The cross-functional taskforce approach resulted in cutting development time to half, and also saving the company costs, even as ‘quality became more customer-oriented’.

Useful reference.

What they routinely do at Wagah may remind you of ‘border gateway protocol’ between India and Pakistan. But to those who are deep in the world of communications, BGP is likely to ring a different bell. “The Internet is becoming a vital resource in many organisations, resulting in redundant connections to multiple ISPs (Internet service providers). With multiple connections, BGP (border gateway protocol) is an alternative to using default routes to control path selections,” write Catherine Paquet and Diane Teare in CCNP Self-Study: Building Scalable Cisco Internetworks (BSCI), second edition ( www.pearsoned.co.in).

“BGP is not always the appropriate solution to interconnect autonomous systems,” the authors advise. “For example, if there is only one exit path from the AS, a default or static route is appropriate; using BGP will not accomplish anything except to use router CPU resources and memory.

Network enthusiasts would like to read on: “BGP is sometimes categorised as an advanced distance-vector protocol, but it is actually a path-vector protocol. BGP has many differences from standard distance-vector protocols, such as RIP (routing information protocol). BGP uses TCP as its transport protocol, which provides connection-oriented reliable delivery. In this way, BGP assumes that its communication is reliable and, therefore, doesn’t have to implement any retransmission or error-recovery mechanisms, like EIGRP…”

Tailpiece

“Sometimes the clients don’t know their own IP address, so they use BOOTP or DHCP to obtain it…”

“Uh… sounds quite violent, doesn’t it?

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

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