The D-Class

Mercedes-Benz offers the A-Class, B-Class, C-Class, E-Class, etc. … but no D-Class. Is it because the size of a sedan between the C-Class and the E-Class wouldn’t make sense? Or could it be that “D” carries with it bad connotations in Germany? Or are these letters just an arbitrary set of labels, with no meaning […]

Economy, Reliability and Quality

Toyota took out a full-page ad on page 7 in The Star today: “Economy, reliability and quality” The ad is about the Avanza. The last time I saw ads for the Avanza was in 2004 or 2005. So why the splurge of advertising dollars on a model that’s about 6 years old? The huge emphasis […]

Why the Honda City is no longer ugly

Previously I posted that the Honda City was deliberately made ugly in order for Honda to reap the higher profit margins of the Civic. My theory was that Honda wants people to go for the Civic if they could afford it and not be content with the City. What economists would call price differentiation, and […]

Indispensible Unix commands

The first lab session of my Computer Science course consisted primarily of learning the following Unix commands: pwd, ls, cd, cp, mv, rm, mkdir, chmod, more, man. Although I’ve been using nothing but Windows throughout my career – from Windows 95 to 2000 to XP – these commands have proven to be indispensible for those […]

Automated scp on Linux

Scenario You would like to automate the export of SQL dump files from one Linux server to another using scp. These dump files are to be generated and exported once every two weeks. You also wish to archive these dump files on the source server. So let’s say the servers and directories are as follows: […]