Thursday, September 29, 2011

Updates!

Wow, I've been busy. With school back, I've been working full time at PDFTron, one distance ed course and playing ultimate with UBC. The 2 Stanford online courses are going to start next week so I am only going to get busier. It's too bad that the weather is getting worse and it's getting dark very early. Not too much to update though. Last weekend, I was playing at the Canadian Western University Ultimate Championships (CWUUC) with one of the 2 UBC split squads. The competition wasn't that great but it was fun to play with everyone again! I look forward to playing at Sundodgers.

I found this blog about H1B salaries interesting: http://smokinn.com/blog/2011/09/28/h1b-salaries-in-the-us/ Seems like Microsoft is one of the main companies with employees on H1B. I read somewhere where companies try to save money by hiring foreigners with lower salaries. Also, what are the statistics of people on TN1?

Another thing I've noticed, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can be quite a good business tool. Seems like the main solutions are SalesForce, SugarCRM and MS Dynamic CRM. SalesForce presale staff seem to be quite pushy and they're consistently in technical magazines. However, SugarCRM doesn't seem so interested. I'm a little surprised by that as I would assume most customers would stay loyal to the CRM system for years to come due to the fact that it's a lot of work to move from one system to another. These licences aren't exactly cheap either so why would SugarCRM throw customers away that are heading to their direction?

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Need a 6PB Machine?



So I was trying to unzip a file that was about 24 GB with the extractor on Windows 7 last week and I came across this surprise. After selecting the folder to be unzipped to, I pressed "next" and expected to wait for 10 mins or so to unzip. However, after a short period of time, it says "There is not enough space". I wasn't paying much attention at this point and actually thought I did not have enough space. By going to my C: drive, I realized something was wrong. The drive has over 200 GB of free space. At this moment, I was confused. How could I possibly not have enough space?! What file am I trying to unzip again? Wait, it says 5.99PB. What's PB again? I know K, KB, MB, GB, and TB. PB? Err... No way.

With a bit of googling, turns out this is a known issue with the Windows Extractor. Apparently with file size above 2GB, it does not work. I downloaded 7Zip and turns out the actual file size is about 40GB. Too bad. I thought I found a zipper that could shrink my files by one million times.