Archive for June 12, 2010

Defining Leadership

Written by admin on . Posted in Business

When we think of successful, high-profile leaders, we think of people such as General Colin Powell, who led the American forces during the Gulf War; or Bill Gates, the Harvard dropout who founded Microsoft and became the richest man in the world.

In your own field, you can probably name one or two men or women who are successful leaders—people who seem almost visionary and have an intangible knack for getting things right and inspiring their subordinates.

Leaders are able to define a goal, persuade others to assist in achieving that goal, and lead their teams to victory. But what is the definition of leadership?

Leadership is crucial to managers in the business world, but it also plays an important role for coaches, teachers, and parents.

There is not one single definition of leadership. Understanding this is the first step toward becoming an effective leader. Some common definitions or beliefs about leadership include the following:

  • A leader is the appointed head of a group, team, or organization.
  • A leader is a charismatic person who is able to make good decisions and inspire others to reach a common goal.
  • Leadership is the power to communicate assertively and inspire others.
  • Leadership is the ability to influence others.

Not one of the preceding definitions is more correct than any of the others. All of the definitions, however, agree on one common fact: Leadership involves more than one person.

You cannot be a leader without a group of people following your direction and putting their trust in you. Remember, as a leader you have a responsibility to your employees, group, organization, or team to lead fairly and ethically. The title “Boss” or “Manager” does not automatically make you a leader.

To be a good leader, you’ll need to fortify yourself by keeping up with the latest leadership trends, observing other leaders (including leaders in your own chain of command and leaders in the news), and recognizing that your own unique brand of leadership will change as you gain experience.

Tip

Keep up on the latest leadership trends by reading trade publications, watching the news, and observing successful leaders in your own organization.

Leadership Qualities

As defined in the preceding section, a leader is someone who inspires, who makes decisions that affect the organization in a positive way, and who can pull together a diverse team to work toward a common goal. But if all managers are not leaders, what are the qualities that set leaders apart?

Plain English

Charisma
is an almost intangible quality that inspires loyalty and great results from subordinates.

Charisma is one quality that is often mistaken as the most important leadership requirement. However, you can attain charismatic leadership more easily if you work to develop the following qualities:

  • Knowledge. Know your facts and use them. A leader must know the details of the business in order to act for the entire organization.
  • Trust. Don’t micromanage. If your employees feel you are constantly peering over their shoulders, you will create an atmosphere of distrust. Be aware of what team members are working on, but don’t make them feel like “Big Brother” is watching.
  • Integrity. A leader will be ineffective if subordinates and superiors do not trust him. The organization soon learns to work around a leader who is untrustworthy or does not keep his word. For example, a leader who tells his employees one thing but does another could be viewed as untrustworthy—even if the difference seems inconsequential to you.
  • Standards. As a leader, your public and private lives should be exemplary. Lead by example. A leader who expects a certain code of conduct from the employees but does not practice the same standards can suffer a loss of respect. A staff that does not respect the leader will suffer a loss in work quality.
  • Decisiveness. Leaders are valued for their decision-making abilities, especially in high-pressure situations. When confronted with a tough decision, fall back on the knowledge mentioned earlier in this list. The best decisions are decisions made with full possession of the facts.
  • Assertiveness. Leaders are chosen to lead a team, group, or entire organization. Often, you’ll be in situations where your staff is not present—for example, high-level organizational meetings. Your assertiveness can and must represent the employees who have put their trust in you.
  • Optimism. Be realistic but not fatalistic. Your employees and your superiors may soon lose confidence if they are constantly confronted with pessimism or negativity from you. Situations aren’t always ideal, but as a leader you’re expected to find the best way to turn the situation around. Figure it out and concentrate on the positive.
  • Results. A leader has a track record of solid decisions and outcomes to point to. If you’ve been managing for some time, try to compile a list of successful decisions and events that you’re responsible for. Not only can you point out these successes to others, but you can use them to build your own confidence in your abilities.
  • Vision. A leader is expected to set goals that will guide an organization in a specific direction. A leader must think broadly and far into the future to set those goals and help the team grow in the right direction.
  • The appearance of power. As “casual Friday” becomes “casual every day” at a growing number of companies, you still must give off the aura of power in your dress, carriage, and surroundings. In a traditional environment, men should wear suits and remain relatively conservative in their choice of tie and shoes. Women, too, should dress tastefully and err on the side of looking conservative. In a casual environment, both men and women should avoid wearing jeans and T-shirts.

Tip

The qualities that make a leader are charisma, knowledge, trust, integrity, standards, decisiveness, assertiveness, optimism, results, vision, and the appearance of power.

What a Leader Is Not

A leader is not merely the manager who sits in the corner office, the person who controls quitting time and paychecks, or the person who can hire and fire people. Managers in this day and age must be flexible and willing to adapt to an increasingly more demanding and younger workforce that questions authority.

Technology companies have taken the lead in showing that a less autocratic chain of command can produce phenomenal results. Companies such as Bill Gates’s Microsoft boast of campus-like atmospheres where permissiveness is no longer the exception, but the rule.

As a leader, you should avoid the following:

  • Micromanagement. Consider whether you might be keeping too close an eye on your staff or handling too many of the responsibilities in your organization yourself. Are you viewed as overbearing?
  • Closeness. Steer clear of getting too close to your staff. You are a leader, not your employees’ best friend. It’s hard to criticize or chastise someone you view as a friend, and even harder for that employee to see the criticism as unbiased.
  • Temper. Put your negative emotions aside. We’re all human, but as a leader you must avoid negative outbursts or personal attacks on coworkers.
  • Arrogance. You are not a supreme deity. Remember that you wouldn’t be a leader without a staff. Avoid autocratic behavior.

A leader is also not synonymous with a manager. Management involves specific business-critical functions such as tending to a budget, developing a product, and generating reports.

However, leadership is an important part of being a manager. A manager who works to improve his or her leadership skills can surpass the status quo to improve the unit’s performance.

Caution

Don’t confuse management with leadership. Management and leadership are not the same thing. Management involves specific organizational functions such as budgeting and producing a product. Leadership is one part of management that deals with how you communicate with the others in your organization.

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Adjust Your Gmail Layout

Written by admin on . Posted in Communications, Computers and Technology

By adding a user stylesheet to your browser, you can tweak the design of any web page, including Gmail.com.

The default Gmail layout is already good, but you might want to adjust some details to improve on it. For instance, you might think the font size of messages is too small to comfortably read. One thing you can do is press Ctrl-+ (Command-+ on the Macintosh) in your browser (this works in Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2, among others). But, depending on your browser, this technique may also change other web pages that you read.

Another approach to tweak the Gmail layout is to add a user stylesheet. Stylesheets—or CSS (short for “cascading style sheets”)—come in two flavors: user stylesheets and author stylesheets. An author stylesheet is created by the webmaster and delivered to you from the server. (In theory, the webmaster can create several author stylesheets, one for each medium—printed hard copy, mobile devices, computer screen, and so on.) A user stylesheet, on the other hand, is stored locally on your computer, and can override the settings of the author stylesheet. Together, the two styles will be merged into what you will see displayed in the browser.

Let’s use a simple stylesheet that will turn the background of every web page (not just Gmail) gray:

body {
     background-color: gray !important;
}

The CSS syntax is always written in the order selector (body), property(background-color), and value (gray). The important keyword just makes sure the author stylesheet delivered by the server is overridden.

Internet Explorer

To add a user stylesheet in Internet Explorer 7, first create a new text document on your computer. Use Notepad or your favorite text editor. Just be sure to save the file as plain text without any formatting. Open it and type the stylesheet code in the previous example into it. Save your file as user.css. Next, select ToolsInternet => Options => General => Accessibility => “Format documents using my style sheet.” Click Browse to select your user.css file. To stop using this stylesheet, uncheck the box labeled “Format documents using my style sheet.”

NOTE

Internet Explorer caches your stylesheet. You may want to rename it and reselect the stylesheet every time you make a change to it, so that your latest CSS is used.

Firefox

In Firefox on Windows XP or Vista, use a text editor to create (or if it already exists, to edit) the file %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\foldername\chrome\userContent.css, add the CSS to it, and restart Firefox. Note that foldername is a random sequence of characters followed by .default (for example, dph0cj4b.default) that is different for each Firefox user. %APPDATA% is a Windows variable that you can type into the Explorer location bar, the “File name” field in file save/open dialogs, and the Command Prompt. It expands to the full path of your Application Data folder, such as C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\.

For Firefox on Linux, the path to your user stylesheet is usually ~/.mozilla/firefox/foldername/chrome/userContent.css.

For Firefox on Mac OS X, it usually is the Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/foldername/chrome/userContent.css folder in your home folder.

To stop using this stylesheet, delete the lines you added from the userContent.css file, delete the file, or move it out of the way (like into another folder). For a little more luxury in managing stylesheets in Firefox, you can also download an extension called Stylish. To stop using the stylesheet, click “None Selected” on the Style Sheet pop-up menu.

Safari

If you’re using Safari, choose Safari => Preferences => Advanced. Choose Other from the Style Sheet pop-up menu and select the user.css file that you created.

Admittedly, a gray background on every web page isn’t too pretty, but as you can see, your change took effect immediately. For a more subtle change of design, you need to define a more precise selector (this determines which HTML elements the new styling is applied to) than just body (which selected everything). To do so, open the HTML source of the Gmail page. In Firefox, you can simply select a portion of the page, right-click, and select “View selection source”. At the time of this writing, the HTML preceding a Gmail message had the following format—but as with any web page, this is subject to change over time, so you will need to view the source of a Gmail web page to see exactly where things are these days:

<td class="cbln">
<div class="mb">
<div id="mb_5">
<div style="direction: ltr;">
                 Hello Jane!
                 ...

In the user stylesheet, you can now specify the classes highlighted in the example to increase the font-size:

.cbln .mb
{
     font-size: 17px !important;
 }

This CSS means that any element of the class mb that is nested within an element of the class cbln is selected, applying a font size of 17 pixels. The use of the important keyword ensures that styles defined elsewhere are being overruled. The default Gmail font size will now be increased for you. You might also want to tweak the font size to a relative font size: “95%” will make the font 95% the size of the default.

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L-Attributed Definitions

Written by admin on . Posted in Computers and Technology

A syntax-directed definition is L-attributed if each inherited attribute of Xj for i between 1 and n, and on the right side of production A X1X2,Xn, depends only on:

  1. The attributes (both inherited as well as synthesized) of the symbols X1,X2,, Xj1 (i.e., the symbols to the left of Xj in the production, and

  2. The inherited attributes of A.

The syntax-directed definition above is an example of the L-attributed definition, because the inherited attribute L.type depends on T.type, and T is to the left of L in the production D TL. Similarly, the inherited attribute L1.type depends on the inherited attribute L.type, and L is parent of L1 in the production L L1,id.

When translations carried out during parsing, the order in which the semantic rules are evaluated by the parser must be explicitly specified. Hence, instead of using the syntax-directed definitions, we use syntax-directed translation schemes to specify the translations. Syntax-directed definitions are more abstract specifications for translations; therefore, they hide many implementation details, freeing the user from having to explicitly specify the order in which translation takes place. Whereas the syntax-directed translation schemes indicate the order in which semantic rules are evaluated, allowing some implementation details to be specified.

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IPv6: Internet Protocol version 6

Written by admin on . Posted in Communications, Computers and Technology

Protocol Description

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the new version of Internet Protocol (IP) based on IPv4. It is a network-layer (Layer 3) protocol that contains addressing information and some control information enabling packets to be routed in the network. IPv6 is also called the next generation IP or IPng.

The most significant change in IPv6 is increasing the IP address size from 32 bits in IPv4 to 128 bits, to support more levels of addressing hierarchy, a much greater number of addressable nodes, and simpler auto-configuration of addresses. There are three types of IP addresses in IPv6: Unicast, Multicast and Anycast. Broadcast no longer exists in IPv6, which becomes a special form of multicast. IPv6 addresses are expressed in hexadecimal format (base 16), which allows not only numerals (0-9) but a few characters as well (a-f).

IPv6 fixes many shortages in IPv4 in addition to the limited number of available IPv4 addresses. IPv6 has enhanced network layer routing in two main areas: 1) Improved support for extensions and
options; 2) Flow labeling capability to differenciate the packets at network layer. The key benefits of introducing IPv6 are:

  • 340 undecillion IP addresses for the whole world network devices

  • Plug and Play configuration with or without DHCP

  • Better network bandwidth efficiency using multicast and anycast without broadcast

  • Better QOS support for all types of applications

  • Improved support for extensions and options with better routing efficiency

  • Native information security framework for both data and control packets

  • Enhanced mobility with fast handover, better route optimization and hierarchical mobility

The following table compares the key characters of IPv6 vs. IPv4:

Subjects IPv4 IPv6 IPv6 Advantages
Address Space 4 Billion Addresses 3.4 x 1038 addresses 79 Octillion times the IPv4 address
space
Configuration Manual or use DHCP Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) with or without
DHCP
Lower Operation Expenses and less
error
Broadcast / Multicast Both Broadcast is a form of multicast Better bandwidth efficiency
Anycast Not part of the original protocol Explicit support of anycast Allows for newer applications in mobility,
data center, etc.
Routing efficiency Need to process Option and Checksum by every
router
No checksum; Extended header for options. Flexible extensions and options; better
routing efficiency.
Network Reconfiguration Mostly manual & Labor intensive By design; Facilitate the re-numbering of
hosts and routers
Lower operation expenses and facilitate
migration
QoS support ToS using DIFFServ Flow classes and flow labels More Granular control of QoS
Security IPsec for data packet protection IPsec is the native technology to protect data
and control packets
Unified framework for security and more secure
computing environment
Mobility Mobile IPv4 Mobile IPv6 Better efficiency and scalability; Work with
the latest 3G mobile technologies and beyond.

Few in the industry would argue with the principle that IPv6 represents a major leap forward for the Internet and the users. However, given the magnitude of a migration that affects so many millions of network devices, it is clear that IPv4 and IPv6 will coexist for a long period of time.

Protocol Structure

4 12 16 24 32bit
Version Traffic Class Flow label
Payload length Next header type Hop limit
Source address (128
bits)
Destination address (128
bits)
Next header Extension Header Information
(optional and variable length)
Data (Variable
Length)

  • Version — Internet Protocol Version number (For IPv6 it is 6).

  • Traffic Class — enables a source to identify the desired delivery priority of the packets. Priority values are divided into ranges: traffic where the source provides congestion control and non-congestion control traffic.

  • Flow label — used by a source to label those packets for special handling by the IPv6 router. The flow is uniquely identified by the combination of a source address and a non-zero flow label.

  • Payload length — the length of the data portion of the packet.

  • Next headertype — identifies the type of header immediately following the IPv6 header. Hop limit specifies the maximum number of routers (hops) through which a packet can traverse before discarded. It is decremented by one by each node that forwards the packet. Source address – 128-bit address of the originator of the packet.Destination address – 128-bit
    address of the intended recipient of the packet (possibly not the ultimate recipient, if a Routing header is present). Extension Header Information – an optional field with variable length. The following IPv6 extension headers are currently defined.

  • Routing — Extended routing, like IPv4 loose source route

  • Fragmentation — Fragmentation and reassembly

  • Authentication — Integrity and authentication, security

  • Encapsulation — Confidentiality

  • Hop-by-Hop Option — Special options that require hop-by-hop processing

  • Destination Options — Optional information to be examined by the destination node

The format of IPv6 address is:

16 bits 16 bits 16 bits 16 bits 16 bits 16 bits 16 bits 16 bits
aaaa aaaa aaaa aaaa aaaa aaaa aaaa aaaa

IPv6 address is classified in three types: Unicast, Multicast and Anycast. Unicast Address is applied to one network interface. The common global unicast address divisions:

Global Routing Prefix (N bits) Subnet ID (64-N bits) Interface ID (64 bits)

Link-local unicast address divisions:

1111111010 (10 bits) 0×00…0 (54bits) Interface ID (64
bits)

Site-local unicast address divisions:

1111111011 (10 bits) 0×00…0 SLA Interface ID (64
bits)

(Interface ID is based on hardware MAC address.)

Multicast Address: applied for multiple network interfaces, and communication is conducted with all hosts with the same address.

0xFF (8 bits) Flag (4bits) Scope(4bits) Group ID (64
bits)

Anycast Address: applied for multiple network interfaces, but actual communication is conducted with one of them. It has the same format as the Unicast.

IPv4 mapped to IPv6 address:

0×00…0 (80 bits) 0×00…0 (16 bits) IPv4 Address (32
bits)

IPv4-compatible IPv6 address:

0×00…0 (80 bits) 0×00…0 (16 bits) IPv4 Address (32
bits)

Related Protocols IPv4, TCP, UDP, ICMPv6, Mobile IPv6, OSPFv3, BGP-MP, IPsec, RIPng

Sponsor Source IPv6 is defined by IETF (http://www.ietf.org) RFC 1883 (original) and RFC 2460 (latest).

Reference

http://www.javvin.com/protocol/rfc1883.pdf
IPv6 Specifications (original)

http://www.javvin.com/protocol/rfc2460.pdf
IPv6 specifications (the latest)

http://www.ipv6forum.com
A good informational site

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