2011 October | Venkatarangan Blog

Outlook 2010 People Pane

When MS Office 2010 came last year, the first thing I did in my Work PC’s MS Outlook was to switch off some of the new Panes and Add-Ons. I noticed when you are reading an email either in preview or full-screen you got a window at the bottom that showed all the conversations, activities, tasks associated with the sender of that email. I didn’t understand the need for it, immediately switch it off and never thought about it again. Few days back while using my Home PC, I noticed this Pane again, spend some time with it and thought it might be useful to have. Instead of switching between Inbox/Sent items and so on, you got all the details in one convenient window. Now I wanted this feature back in my Work PC but didn’t know its name and it turns out I couldn’t find it nor could my System Administrator.

After few Bing! searches it turns out the feature I was looking for is called “People Pane”.

But I couldn’t find the button in Ribbon to turn-it ON. The button & feature appears only if you have installed and enabled Microsoft Outlook Social Connector Add-On (File->Options->Add-Ins->Manage:COM Add-Ins). Enabling it I got the feature and I am giving it a spin for few days before deciding on retaining it.

Happy Deepavali 2011

Wish you all a Happy Deepavali 2011 – the festival of lights. Today I had enjoyed my Deepavali celebrations with lots of crackers & sweets (yes, but I didn’t eat them all). Sharing a video below of a Multishot firecracker we fired from our house terrace today. Enjoy & play safe with crackers – remember there is no such thing as being overcautious when it comes to firecrackers.

Extending life of my Media Center PC

I have two PC’s in my house. One is my primary desktop which is the family PC running Windows 7 Ultimate. The other is used a Media Center Server (lets call it MCPC). After I got my iPhone, iPad and AppleTV I have moved all my digital media from Zune to iTunes (who knows when I buy Nokia Lumia 800 or a later Windows Phone, I will need to do the reverse all over again). My favourite application to convert DVDs and VCDs that I own into iTunes/Zune format is a free tool called “Handbrake” (that I had written about earlier).

My MCPC was about 4 years old, has outlived and needed an upgrade very badly. The MCPC had a AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 6000+ CPU, 4GB DDR2 RAM and a ASUS M2NBP motherboard with NVIDIA Quadro NVS210S GPU. Instead of throwing away the entire PC I decided to retain as much as I can and upgrade only the portions I needed to, which meant I can’t change the CPU or RAM, without changing all the three (Motherboard, CPU and RAM).

1. First item that I replaced was the 3 year old 1 KVA UPS from APC that I had been using to connect both the PCs. I shopped around for a 2 KVA with 2 Hours backup, but it turned out to be expensive (Rs.40,000 to 60,000 depending on features & brand) and huge in size to fit under my desk. Instead I went with 2 separate UPS each giving about 30 minutes backup time, first was a 1 KVA (APC Back-UPS RS 1000) and the second was a 1.5 KVA (APC Back-UPS RS 1500). Both costs together Rs.18,200 and it provided the convenience of using one of the PCs even when the other UPS dies out of its power. Both the UPS came with PowerChute client software which helps you to monitor the input voltage, set the input power sensitivity, set the voltage range and importantly shut-down the PC automatically when Power is about to run out – which ensures your drives are not corrupted. APC provides a RJ-45 to USB cable and software drivers to do this magic.

2. With the ever expanding size of my Digital Media (Music, Photos, Movies and TV Shows) stored in iTunes and as folders, I needed bigger hard-disks and also redundancy. So I replaced all the hard-drives and went in for 3 new HDDs – 1 x Seagate 500GB (Rs.2350), 2x 2TB (each Rs.4350). I didn’t choose Solid-State as they were expensive and anyway I thought I can buy a new PC with SSD in next few years. I configured the 500GB for the OS (Boot & System Partition for Windows 7) and the two 2TB as one single drive (Windows 7 Mirroring). I went for Software (Windows OS) Mirroring and not the BIOS which I was using earlier, as BIOS mirroring kept getting broken very often (may be due to the frequent Power shut-downs and problems with my UPS). It turns out this works great, only the first time I had to open Disk Management (Computer Management) and leave it open for the drives to Resync.

3. Then I went on to replace the graphics card (NVIDIA Quadro NVS210S GPU) which started producing washed out colours and lack of sharpness in the output. This meant purchasing a new add-on PCI Express Graphics Card. I selected an affordable one from ASUS called “HD 5450 Silent” costing Rs.2300 and featuring AMD ATI Radeon HD 5450 & 1GB DDR3 video memory.

(Output from my old GPU, taken with iPhone4)

(Output from my new GPU, taken with the same iPhone4)

4. You can’t get an improvement just by changing the GPU, you will need a matching monitor as well. So I replaced my old HP 15” TFT with a new ViewSonic VA1931WMA-LED 19” Monitor which costs Rs.5390. I wanted a monitor that is not state of art (and hence expensive) and one which had a built-in speaker (which limited the options dramatically). Remember I am using this as a Media Center PC with occasional YouTube & iTunes watching, so there was no need for a real speaker or a higher resolution display. I tried to have built-in USB Hub, but I couldn’t find one.

5. Now it is time to to focus on USB ports. The built-in USB ports tended to be slow and flaky (may be due to MagicJack or many other USB devices that I connected over the years). Getting new USB ports was the easiest and cheapest, it costs about Rs.250 to buy a 4 Port USB 2.0 add-on card. To get the USB ports in the front (instead of bending and reaching in the back of the PC) I purchased a Belkin 4 Port 2.0 Powered Hub for about Rs.800.

6. The next item was to look at the Network equipment (Ethernet Switch). I was using a 100Mbps Switch to connect my Wireless Router, Desktop, MCPC and other Ethernet ports in the house (like the one going to Apple TV or Daisy Chain). I upgraded this with a faster switch – a Netgear GS608 8Port Gigabit Switch which costs Rs.2475, this gives a smoother playing from iTunes Home sharing.

7. The last item was a WD 1 TB USB External HDD which costs about Rs.5000. This is to carry select media that I will be interested to have during my travel trips.

Overall the PC now manages to get about 4.0 (from 3.0 or so earlier) in Windows performance rating:

Final steps was to setup Windows to auto-login, launch iTunes automatically. I did the first using “User Accounts” (instructions here and here) and the second was done using Task Scheduler with a Trigger “When I log on”.

What are FaceBookUpdate & GoogleUpdate?

Compared to architecting & releasing web applications, Windows Apps (client apps in general) needs more care. The main reason being if you detect any bugs or want to do any enhancements you can’t simply do the changes in your server and be done with it. You need to get the new binary to each one of the client machines and overnight you can’t get everyone to the new version. Look at Microsoft – they are unable to get everyone rid of Windows XP or IE 6.0 & upgrade to new versions. It is tribal knowledge in the industry that users prefer to be notified and asked for consent before upgrading. So most of the apps for Windows ship with an thin installer executable that checks for new version of the app from their server and prompts to download and install the new bits – think of the frequently appearing and annoying Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Acrobat upgrade prompts.

In this background I considered Google Chrome process of silent auto-upgrade to be an interesting exception. It appears Google Chrome is not alone in this, FaceBook is doing the same. Today when I happened to launch Windows Task Scheduler applet I noticed two tasks which were set to execute FaceBookUpdate.Exe at a regular frequency. My first instance was “Oh my god” my PC has got malware and how is it possible?. After few minutes of research I figured it out to be the new Skype-FaceBook video chat client bits. What I found interesting here is the close similarity in the name of the app and parameters between the FaceBook & Google Chrome tasks. Look for yourself on the images below, you will see how both follow the same naming convention for the file name, parameters and folders exactly.

Preserver of century old customer service practices

If there is an award for preserving historic business practices and customer service methods I will recommend Indian Railways without hesitation.

Today I went to Egmore Railway station to send off my mother. There were multiple entry points to platform, but the platform ticket counter was in the farthest place from Parking. After reaching the counter there was a long queue and it took me over 10 minutes to buy a Rs.3 Platform ticket that will give me rights to enter the station. As usual Indian Railways had just one counter for so many customers, no vending machines (I read in news they piloted a vending machine program and even a vending machine program Mobile SMS but withdrew them soon). The person in the counter followed what I suspect to be a British leftover way of issuing the tickets. He collected money (and gave change as needed), then picked up each ticket from storage one by one, affixed a rubber stamp to mark “MS” (indicating Egmore station), then another rubber stamp to mark today’s date and time on the back and then checked all of it before handing it over. He repeated this process over and over again for hundreds and hundreds each day. No change in the process for last 100 years old. I am sure no other business process in the world has been so untouched by Technology

I was left furious on the inefficiency of this process & the enormous waste on people’s time, but then I was reminded this is Indian Railways – the preserver of History and British legacy. Probably this is how they ensure their political correctness by ensuring employment for everyone they have in their rolls.

The Lincoln Lawyer

This movie “The Lincoln Lawyer” is about a Criminal Defence Lawyer (Mickey Haller) who is street smart in helping his clients like Drug-Dealers & others released from law. He runs his office from his Lincoln car (hence the name), certainly not creative and was not elaborated much in the movie as well. Mickey lands a big wealthy client arrested in an assault case, but then comes the twist. With his co-worker on the case killed, he realizes his client is a serial predator but can’t turn him to law due to client confidentiality.

The movie starts rather dull and usual, but after the twist makes you sit on your seat’s edge. Nicely taken and acted by Matthew McConaughey.

Tribute to Steve Jobs

The news of Steve Jobs death shook me when I learned it from a friend on the morning of 6th. I got very disturbed by the news and feeling the same for last few days. Only few months book I read this book “The Steve Jobs Way” which marvelled on his brilliance. I know Mr.Jobs was sick and when he resigned as CEO of Apple in August the worst was expected. But I was hoping that like the previous two instances where he recovered from serious illnesses, this time too he will come back bouncing. And the resignation was nothing more than wanting a longer rest. Having listened to his recent Keynote in WWDC just few months back on iOS5, it is difficult to realize the man is gone for ever and we will never see him again doing his magic on stage and off stage on his products. I respect his privacy during his life, but after death if more details on his illness by Apple had been released it would help his fans worldwide to come to terms sooner.

The man had everything at his disposal, enormous wealth, the best healthcare in the world and millions of well-wishers praying for his well being but still couldn’t live for more years and that’s the irony of life. I am unable to recollect for a Technology person’s death being grieved world over. And this alone speaks volumes of the impact Mr.Jobs had, he transgressed the typical Computer Science world. He married Technology, LifeStyle, Entertainment & Aspirations in a perfect mix.

May his soul Rest in peace

Pill bottle design–Talk by Deborah Adler in Mix ‘09

This is something that I saw two and half years back during Microsoft Mix ‘09 conference. I wanted to blog about it then but somehow seemed to have missed it. Today I was reminded of it when I was talking to my Yoga master about my experience of going to a Doctor in USA and buying medicines there few years back when I fell sick during a trip to Houston. Unlike India where prescription drugs are sold in sealed aluminium foil strips, in USA I found many of the medicines are packaged in bottles.

There was this talk in Mix ‘09 conference following IE 8.0 keynote on User Experience by Deborah Adler, Ms.Adler was an attractive young UX designer whose prescription packaging system simplified the design of Pill bottles & information presented in that. It also reduced the chances of wrong usage of pills and resulting complications. The design was adopted by Target Pharmacies and is marketed under their ClearRX brand. I found the idea of improving on an everyday problem to be quite impressive & encouraging. Check out the video here (skip to 30.30 Minute to get to this section directly).

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