Sometimes the best possible way to visualize something really complex is to see it as a graphic and have it printed on a huge poster. Few years back in one of the Microsoft Mix event, they released this super cool visualization of an illustration of the process of launching a web site. It was released into a website as well called “A website named Desire”, which made the huge poster available as a SilverLight  Application using Deep Zoom. It is super cool, check it out.

(I saw this few years back and today I was trying to find it. Few hours of Google & Bing search, I couldn’t find it. Then with some help from a friend, I found it back. This shows how much more work has to be done in Web Search)

The poster below was given to my son studying in Padma Seshadri Bala Bhavan School (KK Nagar) last year when he was doing his U.K.G. I have been saving this poster to do a blog post and managed to do it only now. The poster talks about simple ways to educate kids about private body parts, hugs, touching and other similar issues. It was issued by Tulir in support with the school.

You can download the posters from Tulir website in English or Tamil or Hindi.

One of my favourite getaways from Chennai is Yelagiri hills (details in my earlier post). This time I went there with my family and my brother in law Mr.Badri Thirumalai’s family for the XMas holidays. Staying in Yelagiri is a very relaxing experience and I love it. This time 3 of us (myself, Badri and his son Aravind) decided to do the 4KM trekking into Yelagiri forests. We went and came back on our own, but not sure whether we went in the correct trekking track.

We ventured up to an old pond (360 degree view done with Windows Live Picture Gallery below) in thick of the forest and a little beyond it and when the tracks ended we turned back

The experience was wonderful and relaxing. The trek route was peaceful, clean and green, absolute silence almost all the way in the forest – you can hear only the occasional bird chirps (see the video below), that’s all. It took us less than 2:30 Hours to complete the trek & return. Next time, probably I will take a “Guide” so that we can venture more into the forest.

Last week while in San Jose (CA), my good friend “Ranga” took me for a change to have Ethiopian food for dinner at “Zeni Ethiopian Restaurant”. I readily agreed as I like to experiment any food that is Vegetarian (As I say in foreign lands - No Fish, No Meat & No Chicken).

We went through the menu and decided to play safe with their ready-made “Vegetarian Combo” (shown above). I didn’t understand a single item contained in the combo (YE-MISER WOT ,YE-KIK ALITCHA, ATAKELT WOT, YE-GOMEN WOT, YE TIMATIM FITFIT) but once served and tasted figured out that all of them are names of different gravy (side-dishes). Each of them tasted like “Yellow Dal”, “Tomato/Onion Salad”, “Green Salad” and so on. All of these side-dishes were served on a big bread they call “Injera” (it looked to me and tasted like a big South Indian Dosa).

Overall it was spicy, tasty, filling and I loved it!. Thanks Ranga.

As one of the Windows 7 Beta testers, about a week back I received a commemorative edition of Windows 7 Ultimate DVD. It was special with a nice “Thank You” message signed by Microsoft CEO Mr.Steve Ballmer.

In general I liked Windows Vista - its engineering improvements on Security, Stability, Aero Glass & many other features; except for its slow boot-up and performance of routine file management tasks. Microsoft made a wise move of not introducing any major kernel level changes for Windows 7 from Vista, instead concentrating on improving all round performance. I have been using Windows 7 for last few months in both my MacBook Air (MBA) & in my Desktop (Quad Core, 64-bit, 8GB RAM) and I love it. Windows 7 simply rocks in my MBA that I have completely removed Mac OS X and use only Windows.

Windows 7 – the best Windows OS ever made!

There are tons of cool stuffs for Silverlight 4 that are being shown in Day 2 keynote of PDC ‘09 and in the SL4 overview talk by Karen Corby. I am amazed at the speed in which the Silverlight team in Microsoft has been able to churn out releases at rapid pace – SL 1 in Nov ‘07, SL 2 in Oct ‘08, SL 3 in Jun ‘09 and SL 4 Beta in Oct ‘09.

The main features of Silverlight 4 that caught my attention are:

1. Access to Webcam, Microphone and other devices like Digital Camera
2. Print Preview and direct Print support
3. UDP Multicast, very useful for organization wide network distribution of live video
4. Authorization support in client HTTP Stack (NTLM, Basic and Digest)
5. Same .NET compiled code runs in SL 4 and .NET 4
6. Offline DRM play support
7. Drag/Drop, Clipboard support
8. Audio and video local recording capabilities capture RAW video without requiring server interaction
9. Embed a HTML control including a Flash control inside that HTML, all usable from Brush
10. Styles support
11. RichtextArea control and better internalization text support

I am in LA for Microsoft PDC ‘09. One thing in Day 1 I was happy to see in real was a Azure container that was on display in the exhibition floor. These are containers (shipping container) that have all included in them – Hundreds of Dell Servers, Climate controlled, Networked, Monitoring and so on. When a container arrives at a new Microsoft Data Center location, all they need to do is plug in power and network uplink. Everything else is included in the container box. A typical data center will have hundreds of these containers

Today my mother while cleaning her book shelf, found few of my envelopes. They were from my High School days. One was Rs.51 Cash Prize I won in Twelfth Standard for “Most Deserving Student of the High School”. The other was a First Prize with Rs.150 for “Best Speaker” in a debate competition – I am trying to recollect whether this was in any Inter School or Intra School event. Going back nearly two decades is quite challenging, but nevertheless seeing the prizes feels good.

It is my birthday today (I am not telling how old I am) and I am in Cologne, Germany attending Tamil Internet Conference 2009 away from my family & friends, missing the gifts they might have given me

Anyways, Mr.Steve Ballmer didn’t disappoint me. He has given me a wonderful gift – he has released Windows 7 today. No doubt Windows 7 is getting raving reviews, it got released on my birthday!. On a serious note, I have been using Windows 7 for almost two months now in my laptop (Apple MacBook Air) and my Quad-Core x64 Desktop and it is simply the best OS I have ever used in last two decades. I like its fast boot, fast response time for common tasks, lovely wallpapers/background, Aero effect, quick search, easy to find devices/printers applet and libraries.

And I love those Windows 7 commercials featuring the cute little girl – Kylie, don’t miss those videos here. 

The other day one of my colleagues asked me how he can have emails from a distribution list sent to him, go automatically to certain people even when he hasn’t downloaded the emails in his MS Outlook client. A server-side rule can be setup by the individual in their own MS Outlook client itself. Here are the steps I gave him.

1. Launch Microsoft Office Outlook, Select "Tools" Menu
2. Select "Rules & Alerts" Option
3. Press "New Rule" Button
4. Select "Start from a Blank Rule" -> "Check Messages when they arrive"
   
5. Check "Sent to People or Distribution List". Then at the bottom (Step 2), click on the blue link "People or Distribution List"
   
6. Type in the "To" Textbox ABC@EMAIL.COM (Type the distribution list email ID, it is fine if this ID is not listed in the address book). Press OK.
7. Scroll down and ensure to have UNCHECKED "on this machine only" option. Enabling this option makes the rule run only when you have downloaded the email in your Outlook client. Leaving it Unchecked makes this a server rule. This runs every time an mail hits your Exchange Server, it is not necessary for you to be in office or have got the email in your Outlook client
8. Select "Forward it to People or Distribution List". In the below options (Step 2), click on the hyperlink for People or Distribution list 
   
9. Enter the intended recipients email IDs. Press OK. Press Next
10. In the next dialog box titled “Exceptions”,  include any exceptions you may have or otherwise skip the dialog box by pressing Next
11. Press Finish, give a Title and complete the wizard

Being a long weekend, we decided to go out for few days from city. I generally like going to beach resorts near Chennai in ECR road for a peaceful stay. Since I had been to GRT Temple Bay & Fisherman’s Cove in Mamallapuram, Ashok Resort in Pondy I looked out for a different resort. After reading about Dune in The Man magazine, I narrowed down on Dune Eco Village in ECR Road at Pudhukuppam, Tamilnadu near Pondicherry University.

Dune is a Eco friendly resort with most of the materials used for construction being reused and with little chemicals as possible. They say they used more lime stone than cement, Solar water heaters, the doors & furniture are from old houses, no tar roads inside the property and so on. Each of the rooms are different than others and with unique characteristics, the room we stayed had a nice display of Golu (coincided with the seasonal holidays as well). The resort provides 2 cycles for each room for the guests to go around the huge property (over 30-40 acres) on the Bay of Bengal sea shore. The food in their F.U.N (Food U Need) restaurant promotes the hypotoxic diet of by a French biologist (from their brochure I learned his name was Doctor Jean Seignalet).

I liked the fact there was no Satellite connection in the room – so no boring TV Soaps and Serials that my wife can watch or the usual Pogo/Cartoon Network for my son. Each room had a small TV with built-in DVD Player and you can borrow DVDs from the restaurant for free, they boost a collection of over 1000+ titles on various Genres. They have programs to entertain the kids in evening like Milking the Cow, Pot Making, Sand Pit, etc.

The room rates are expensive especially for an Indian tourist, guess the rates are fixed primarily with Foreign tourists in mind (I am in disagreement to this practise, Indian Resorts and Hotels should make it attractive if India wants to attract more tourists, India happens to be the most expensive tourist destination even for Indian’s in South East Asia region). They also have programs for Meditation (everyday free for guests) & Ayurvedic Health treatments (some of which for 14 days were priced at few lakhs of rupees!)

The items where Dune has to improve:

1. ECO friendly tag doesn’t mean cutting corners in service & providing poor amenities – they need to improve on the quality of the Television, Cycles, Furniture's, Bathroom Amenities they provide
2. Providing a Mobile Phone to all guests instead of In-Room Intercom is a good idea, but they need to ensure the signal is good. I had to step out of the room every time when I needed to talk to reception or to FUN restaurant (which was very near to our room, so I went directly to speak to Chef)

Overall, I will certainly recommend Dune Eco Village for spending few days (not worth for shorter stays of 1 or 2 days) to relax. Service by staff was generally very friendly, good ambience and nice food.

Read in The Hindu few days back about an exhibition with display of British era items in Lalit Kala Academy, Greams Road Chennai – this place is near the Greams Road-Pantheon Road traffic signal, few hundred metres away from Apollo Hospital. The exhibition (free entry) which runs till tomorrow (August 30) features a collection of what the British have left behind – furniture, personalities and their ideas. The items in display are from private collection of Steve Borgia (chairman and managing director of INDeco Hotels).  Today I took my son in the morning and we spent a good part of a hour looking at the various items on display. The organizers have done a fine job of neatly categorizing items, clear sign boards for every item, provided handy cards which explained the items and had many volunteers who were happy to explain the significance of the items on display.

The exhibition had quite a collection of interesting items – Twin blade fan (first in this part of the world), first metal lunch box, a old coin-based shooting game for kids, picnic set, camera, printing press and more. See the entire photo album here that I took today. Some of the items (like the Fridge which runs on Kerosene oil) I had seen earlier in their Swamimalai resort during my vacation there few years back. 

While seeing the display, I was called to talk in Tamil for 30-seconds about the exhibition by Big FM Radio, which I did. Overall, an interesting hour spent, please take your kids to it.

Free is the new book by Wired Editor “Chris Anderson”. His earlier book “Long Tail” was an acclaimed work that is quoted in almost every conversation with the word “Web” in it over last few years.  This book’s title though had the potential to capture the same level of imagination, unfortunately doesn’t.

First, Chris Anderson should be congratulated for handling such a controversial topic like “Free”. Each of us have our own understanding of the word, how it works, whether it works or not and so on. In trying to answer these questions he has done a good job. He writes his findings on “Free” from history, culture, marketing to economics. He does a great job of explaining how “Free” became popular in modern days, its power and potential. He does a fine job of categorizing various near-zero business models and how they work with examples. He clearly disambiguates English word “Free” into “Gratis” (free of charge) and “Libre” (freedom), often people confuse between the two, especially in the software world. His re-quote of “Information wants to be free” is certainly true and thought-provoking.

Where he falls flat is in his generalizations and in his examples of success stories. For examples he repeatedly points only to Google and in few cases of open source software & Web 2.0. I am unable to shake off the feeling (of-course unfounded) the book could a PR campaign sponsored by the Mountain view chocolate factory (thanks Register UK for the term) Google. For me, Google certainly is not the epitome of “Free”, it makes its money by selling advertisements for hard-cash and that’s not free. Wikipedia and FireFox would have been more befitting candidates, but probably Chris Anderson felt obligated to Google – as he was using their free Google Docs to write this book (as he says himself).  To be fair to the author, he does quote in two places where Microsoft offers “Free” through its BizSpark program and Internet Explorer. I also fail to understand how he says Apple through its iPod wants content to be free so that it gets paid for the device. iTunes through the sales made from iPod and iPhone are the big money earners for Apple and it is not free!

The other area where I disagree with him is on what seems to be his attempt at equating “Piracy” to “Free”. “Piracy” is stealing, plain and simple. Though many of us may be guilty of the crime (knowingly or unknowingly) to various degree, it can’t be praised or supported. If in China music piracy is rampant, then it is the mistake of pricing, distribution and education. It is certainly not that people there will not buy Music. If Hulu.com and CBS.com today are making some money out of their advertisement driven site it is because the money from advertisements comes to the producers who made the shows, not to the pirates and other video sharing sites. If everyone in the world moves to “Pirated” version of watching TV shows from YouTube, then soon there will be no new professional TV shows to watch. Google too is very much aware of this threat, that’s why it is trying hard to woo producers into building legal channels for them on its site and share revenue with them. The real question is whether this money alone will be sufficient for producers to compensate for their investments. Even in the example the author begins his book, MontyPython group deciding to put their clips legally free in YouTube – they too made their money by selling legal versions of their CDs and DVDs. If their entire collection is made “free” in YouTube HD then how will they survive to make new episodes. The author leaves us with many of these questions unanswered.

A disclosure: I listened to the Audio book (unabridged) version that was offered free of charge by Wired from here. The e-book download seems to be time-limited (for a month and that’s over) and geography limited (US only) from here. Though I got the entire book free as an audio book, this limited free distribution of the e-book seems to be more a 20th century free, than the 21st century free that the author preaches throughout the book. He should have known better, he says repeatedly that “Free” is the most powerful marketing tool ever invented and he should have known to handle it with better for his book.

My recommendation: If you are in the Internet/Software business then this book is a must read, but for others you may want to think twice before opening your wallet to buy it. You may want to listen to the free audio book like I did

I have written in the past about lack of Tamil unicode rendering support in all popular smartphones (iPhone, Windows Mobile, Nokia). This week one of my colleague who uses a Windows Mobile 6.0 (HTC branded) phone showed me SkyFire browser.  SkyFire is a free mobile browser that uses a proprietary proxy server technology to encode all Web contents (Text, Images, Videos, Flash, Silverlight) at their server that gets rendered in the Mobile client. Because of this technology the individual device limitations don’t affect their ability to render any language.

 
(Mobile IE not able to render Unicode Tamil)

(Windows Mobile running Skyfire displaying fine Unicode Tamil web pages)

SkyFire is a great technology and seeing Tamil being rendering seamlessly makes me happy. But I am sceptical on the success of SkyFire – First, Mobile devices processing power are increasing every day to support iPhone Safari like true desktop browsers itself without need of a proxy server; Second, I don’t see a viable revenue model on how SkyFire will make money to run the operations especially the high server costs. Nevertheless a cool technology for now. If you have a Windows Mobile give it a try, better than waiting for IE 6.0 in Windows Mobile or WM 7.0

Though we have done lot of Microsoft SharePoint projects, I find it difficult to give a single answer to everyone for the question on “What is SharePoint?”. Depending on who (their job role) is asking the question and for what they are asking it, the answer for the question “What is SharePoint” varies. It is different things for different people. One thing is sure – it has been a very successful product franchise for Microsoft and has been the fastest growing Billion Dollar business for Microsoft.

From a technology perspective it provides Content Management, Document Management, Blogs, Wiki, Rights Management, Workflow, Forms and data capture, Search, a limited RAD (Rapid Application Development) framework and more.

The Microsoft’s site for SharePoint doesn’t make answering this question any easier, it says “Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight”. After few words my head has started to spin - this definition is nothing but a boring soup of all possible technology terms that Microsoft has managed to find. This didn’t help, so let us throw it outside the window. 

Till now the elevator pitch for SharePoint I have managed to come up with for answering this has been to say “Connecting People and Information”. This was inspired by the Microsoft .NET initial days messaging that vaguely said Microsoft .NET is software for connecting people, information, systems, and devices. Today I came across this short video that introduces SharePoint in Plain English, finally a good job by Microsoft marketing on this.

SharePoint in Plain English

On a related note, you may be interested to watch this sneak peek video on the upcoming release of SharePoint, SharePoint 2010 here.

When it comes to Antivirus products I prefer to only use specific brands known to me. I look for three parameters in a good protection product:

1. Protection (Detect and protect against latest threats, we have to take their word in this)
2. Performance (not slowing the machine)
3. Ease of use (normally an antivirus should be invisible)

My first choice for individuals will be K7 Total Security. It is the fastest and the least intrusive Antivirus out there.

In our office, we have been using Symantec Endpoint protection for several years. Our system administrators love the central deployment & management. The entire Antivirus client, the updates can be remotely done from the central server, without touching physically the individual clients. 

When I got my Windows Vista x64 Desktop few years back, I went with Norton 360 v1.0 as I got a good deal then. And it offered an online backup of 2GB free with it, which was an added advantage to have safe backups for ultra important files. Over the years I have stuck with Norton 360, though at times it has given me problems with Firewall configuration. Symantec support has been good, whenever I had issues I could reach them by email or web site or their online chat. The first time not able to find their phone number, I wrote a letter to their singapore office with copies of my purchase invoice, CD serial number, etc. – and I promptly got a call from their Bangalore office in few days with a solution to the problem. Once there was a problem at their end, they apologized and gave 30 days extension in the subscription as a token gesture.

One recurring issue for me with the the product (especially Norton 360 v1.0 and v2.0) has been that at times in one of the 3 PCs I have, it will suddenly refuse to get Live Updates – a quick uninstall and install will fix it. Recently I was prompted to update free (my subscription is valid) to their new version Norton 360 v3.0. This version contains their newly optimized version of their core engine that improves on speed. Though Norton Antivirus is a leader in protection its sore point was its drag on resources. This new version is supposed to have improved on that. I downloaded and installed the new version, it did an in-place upgrade pretty smoothly. I disliked the earlier interface of Norton 360 v2.0, now in v3.0 they seem to have made it more streamline and configuration settings are easier to find. Overall I will recommend this product. 

In Norton 360 the online backup and how it handles the backup sets was always a mystery to me in v1.0 and v2.0. In v3.0 they have given many new interface options to see what is being backed up, where and when (in fact the UI tabs are named with the same words as shown below). Using the new interface shown below (accessed from Home->Backup-Backup Details->Manage Backup sets) I figured out that I had over 3 years of backup taking nearly 5GB of storage which I can get rid of and reduce the online storage size.

After using the option (delete previously backed up files shown in the bottom left of the screenshot above) I realized you can only delete by selecting individual folders and files; not the entire backup set. I wrote to Symantec support and they promptly responded back with this option. It turned out even that was less optimal.

Accidentally I discovered that there is an integration of Norton backup to Windows Explorer. You can use Windows Explorer to navigate to “Computer\Norton Backup Drive\Backups on Secure Online Storage”. There you can see all the backup sets, you can right-click and delete the one you don’t want. It takes a bit of time, but it works and is much easier than the product’s user interface. As always, be careful when you are deleting backups.

Reserve Bank of India has been a Banking Ombudsman programme for a long time, today I was glad to see prominent advertisements about it in major newspapers with an aim to popularize it. For me, whenever I had grievances and send them a fax threatening them to take it to RBI Ombudsman, they seem to act with more care. In general, I feel RBI is doing a fabuluous job in protecting Indian consumers rights, whether it is on Don’t Call Registry or Credit Card online additional protection and on many of the other items.

So for what items you can approach RBI Ombudsman (more details in RBI website here), here is a short list:

1. Your bank fail to adhere to the written promises it made
2. Your bank fail to disclose up-front the important terms and conditions while selling a product/financial service
3. Your bank didn’t communicate clearly about rates and charges
4. Your bank not adhering to RBI guidelines or Banking Codes and Standards Board of India

So what you have to do if any of the above happens to you. First write to your bank, if they don’t respond or fix the issue by one month, you can approach RBI ombudsman through letter, fax or email.

One of my fellow Microsoft Regional Director recently gave me this link to a talk by David Chappell given in Dutch DevDays (of course the talk is in English, otherwise I would not have understood to repost here). A little history here - I first came to know about David Chappell from his legendary book Understanding ActiveX and OLE. Before this book (released in 1996) the more I read on Microsoft OLE from books like Inside COM and Inside OLE, the more I got confused (purely due to my lack of my experience with advanced C++). Instead Chappell’s book on the subject made OLE/COM approachable to every Software Engineer and finally I could understand it. Chappell followed this home run with his other book Understand .NET, which introduced and explained then the new .NET platform in the finest fashion.

Coming back to the subject of this post, so when I got this link to listen to David Chappell talking on Application Platform, I immediately spent the next 60 minutes on it. If you are involved with Application Platform in any manner then I recommend you see this video too.

In this video Chappell in brief goes through the history of Application Platform, why they came into being, the war between Microsoft and Java on dominating this trend and the current status in his view with Java world fragmenting. He then goes on to talk about why he thinks SOA (Software Oriented Application/Architecture) has failed in general – I concur on his observations that most of the time it is not about technology, it is about People, Power and Money. Traditionally in large businesses “Data” sharing between departments is achievable but “Application” sharing is just not practical and unfortunately that is what SOA vendors kept pushing. Finally he provides a model of cloud platform and an excellent comparison between the various vendor’s cloud offerings – Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, SalesForce, Oracle & IBM.

I am not an academician or a teacher, even then I fail to understand on how  Photoshop can be a theory subject?. It seems it is so in some schools in Chennai (may be in other schools across India) for students of VII standard. See the below notebook of a Class VII student who has written about Photoshop “Brush” and selecting Colours from the textbook. When I saw my niece having a textbook on Photoshop I was curious and on examining it turns out they teach in class “Photoshop” as a theory subject and are expected to answer exams on the same.

I may be biased here, as I didn’t have any formal computer science education and my engineering discipline was Electronics & Communication and all my computer learning have been practical and self-taught.

In the past I have done two posts on how to use Pinnacle PCTV 330e TV Tuner USB stick to view TV (set-top box) signals from Windows x64 operating systems (Windows Vista x64 or Windows 7 x64). Yesterday while trying to update the driver from Pinnacle site I realized that with the two earlier posts I haven’t documented all the pieces, so I am writing this updated post. My instructions are for using Tata Sky DTH service (set-top box) that’s available in India and my machine running Windows Vista x64 & Nero 8.0 – the same steps should work for most other DTH services (set-top boxes).

Step 0:
Windows Vista x64 SP2 should find the driver for Pinnacle PCTV Hybrid Tuner (330e) automatically, if it doesn’t you can download the latest driver from Pinnacle support site here – Direct link to download here. Look for “PCTV Hybrid Pro Stick (330e)”.

Step 1:
Buy from market a composite video cable (RCA) and a Stereo audio cable (RCA). You get this in various brand names “Belkin Composite Video and Audio Cable Kit” or “Mediabridge - RCA Component Video Cable with Audio”. This cable is not included with Pinnacle PCTuner USB product.

Connect the Audio & Video output (RCA component connectors) of your set-top box to the audio/video adapter cable (the small black colour pin with wires coming out that is connected on the side of the USB stick on the photo below) using the RCA cable kit purchased in Step 1. The small black colour Pinnacle adapter cable is specific to Pinnacle PCTV and is included in the box, you will not get this outside.

Step 3:
Connect your Pinnacle USB stick (with the small black pin and cable connected) to a free USB port in your machine. I will recommend using the USB extension cable (found in the box) and connecting to a free port in the rear of your desktop (also for the fact that most rear USB ports are USB 2.0 for better speed) so that the wires are hidden away from the view.

Step 4:
Now it is time to configure your software to receive the signal and view. I am using my favourite Nero 8.0 (Nero 9.0 should work as well and provide scheduling capability) software. The trick here (which I forgot yesterday while configuring and wasted two hours) is to use the Nero MediaHome software (accessed from Start search menu or from "C:\Program Files (x86)\Nero\Nero8\Nero MediaHome\NeroMediaHome.exe") and not the Nero Home (whose Easy Setup option doesn’t allow us to set the TV input as composite).  

After running Nero MediaHome, select the TV->Launch Nero TV Wizard. In the dialog box that comes, select the video device as “PCTV 330e/8x0e Device”, video input as “Composite”, Audio device as “Use audio from video device”. You are good to go, complete rest of the steps and close the dialog box and MediaHome.

Step 5:
Now run Nero Home from desktop or start menu, select “Video” option from “Video and TV” menu – don’t select “Live TV” (that works only with TV Antenna/Cable as input). Then in the next screen (shown below) select “Composite” (ignore the numbers 1, 2 or 3 that may appear in brackets). You will now be able to see the live TV in the “Watch TV” screen that will appear now. You can double click on the playing video to maximize or double-click again to get controls (to play, pause/time-shift, record, stop & volume control). Enjoy!

Don’t waste your time trying to get Windows Media Center in Windows Vista x64 to work with this Pinnacle product (PCTV 330e TV Tuner USB stick), it doesn’t work. Windows Vista insists on input coming via TV Antenna/Cable, where as in our setup above we are using a set-top box and the TV input comes as composite audio/video signal. As I have written in my Windows 7 beta post the above setup (even with a composite audio/video signal) seems to be working for India in Windows 7 Media Center.

Today in one of the groups I am a member, there was a question on the cost benefits of Windows 7 over Windows XP. In these recessionary times, everything is about cost and RoI. No CIO is interested to spend on an upgrade just for technology sake. With that background this was an interesting question, so I set out to answer him, which I have reproduced below.

The first answer for such a question is that any new version of any software product improves “productivity” by XY%, where XY are dependent on how you feel on that day.

Jokes apart, in my opinion I think the upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7 saves cost by the following:

1. Productivity, certainly. Common tasks are easier and faster. For example with the built-in Windows Search, finding documents really saves you time. And for techies tasks like IPConfig /Renew can be done from GUI itself
2. Avoid recreating lost documents. Built in version-control and transaction file-system in Windows 7 (Vista has this too)
3. Avoid bandwidth costs by some Spammers using your Windows XP as a SpamBots or Zombies with better stateful firewall (Inbound and Outbound) in Windows 7 (Vista has this too)
4. Data Theft, Security and reinstall time spend with UAC in Windows 7 (Easier to use than in Vista)
5. Less power consumption through better sleep/hibernate support
6. Save time by building web standards Web Applications with built-in Internet Explorer 8.0
7. Save time and cost with built-in CD Burning, DVD Maker (Vista has this too)
8. My personal favourite is an enhanced System Restore (life saver) and time saved with fixing a rogue software install (Vista has this too)
9. A superb Windows Backup (this alone is worth every dollar of Windows 7). Third party products purchased separately for Windows XP store in proprietary backup file formats, where as Windows 7 (as in Vista) uses open VHD file format. This VHD files can be mounted and read/write natively in Windows 7
10. Built-in hardware enhanced virtualization free – Windows Virtual PC, which helps you to continue to run older applications
11. Save time with the more powerful task scheduler (so you don’t need to keep your machine switched ON or be there to run a program)
12. If you are a games developer, Windows 7 saves time by better 3D hardware accelerated graphics support/DirectX
13. Built-in applications like Snipping tool to take screen shots and so on (Vista has this too)

Microsoft has published a "Windows client features comparison chart" between Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista and Windows 7 here.

This is an update to the earlier post on my experiences with getting my XBOX 360 US version work in India, it was basically how I got a 220V Power Adaptor for XBOX 360 in India.

There are two options to get a 220V (India) Power Adaptor for your XBOX 360:

1. The XBOX 360 220V Adaptor I was using stopped working, may be because of the frequent voltage fluctuations in Chennai for last few months. Hence I went back to Ritchie Street and bought a new one. This time I made it a point to note down the shop name for benefit of others (and may be for myself again) as this was most asked in the comments I received for the earlier post. I purchased a new XBOX 360 220V Power Adaptor (without warranty) for Rs.2500 + VAT from "Shah Trading Co.", 15, Narasingapuram Street, Off. Mount Road, Chennai - 600002; Phone: 044-2841 5874.
2. After this, I contacted Microsoft Support in India and asked whether they have a solution now?. Surprisingly this time around, they right away offered a solution. They asked me to go a near by service center in Chennai and drop the original 110V (USA) power adaptor. Within 20-30 days of doing this, I received a replacement of a new 220V power adaptor absolutely free. Great service by Microsoft, keep it up. You can contact  Microsoft support in India at toll-free 1800 102 1100 and select Option 7 for XBOX support. Please keep your XBOX 360 Serial number, original purchase invoice handy with you when you call and request them for a replacement to make your XBOX 360 US version to work in India. Considering that officially XBOX 360 support is available only in the region you bought I was lucky to get this replacement in India. I feel this replacement offer is a nice gesture by Microsoft and note that it is available only for original XBOX 360 accessories (not third-parties made).

I just now watched this documentary movie “HOME” by Director Yann Arthus-Bertrand (a french photographer and world renowned environmentalist). The full movie is available in HD Quality free in Youtube from yesterday till 14th June 2009. Don’t miss this opportunity to watch this must see movie.

I came to my office on a Saturday today so I can watch the movie in High Definition (HD) with the high-bandwidth that is available in the office – the privileges of being the CEO .  The quality was amazing, unbelievable it was playing over the Internet. Like I mentioned last year when I watched “Casino Royale (1967)” in HD from Hulu.com, the availability of these high quality content over the Internet is now becoming more and more wide stream than ever. These compel me to predict that in next 10 years we will see the end of distribution of entertainment content (movies and songs) in any physical form – it will happen much faster than the best of Internet evangelists have dreamed of and it will happen even in developing countries like India at nearly the same pace.

Coming back to the movie “HOME”, the documentary chronicles how life on earth came into existence 4 Billions years back, how we humans came into existence 200,000 years back and how we started farming 10,000 years back. This background helps you to understand and appreciate the destruction we are making on our planet, after the discovery of OIL and our dependence on it. The movie emphasizes the fact of how all organisms and the Earth are linked in a "delicate but crucial" balance with each other, and how no organism can be self-sufficient. I really liked the fact, the movie didn’t end with a pessimistic note of all being lost on climate change, but on a positive note that worldwide change is happening (though in pockets) and we can reverse the trends.

After a gap of few years, I am happy that Microsoft premier event "TechEd" is happening again in India. For many of the regular speakers in the event, TechEd India is an annual ritual that we enjoy and look forward to eagerly. It gives a rare opportunity to meet, interact and network with brilliant participants, to hear what they are working on currently and how they are using Microsoft technologies in real life.

When the organizers told me the venue is Hyderabad I was at a loss - why on earth anyone will hold an event in Hyderabad at the middle of peak summer?. After few minutes of reaching the venue "Hyderabad International Convention Centre" I understood why. The Convention Centre was great, with world class infrastructure and I guess the best in India for years to come. And commuting to and from the new Hyderabad Rajiv Gandhi International Airport was not bad either. Though it is far from city, the roads are not that crowded like in Bangalore. I reached from Airport to City in about an hour and while returning from Hi-Tec city to Airport through the new ring road it took less than 45 minutes. The ring road named after Rajiv Gandhi (like many other things in Congress  ruled AP) was good, they allow only four wheelers (cars and vans), trucks and two-wheelers are not allowed to ply in the road to prevent accidents. I couldn't say the same pleasant things about Paramount Airways - which delayed my return flight by some 4 hours (8:30PM flight took off at 12:30AM).

This year, I presented on Windows Azure - an overview session where I covered the need for Azure, Azure fundamentals and few demos on using Windows Azure.

This is election time in India so politicians are in limelight, let us talk about them too. Before this global economic melt-down it was fashionable for Indian IT Czars to give suggestions and advice to our politicians and ministers on how to run the country. Recently in an IT event in Chennai I heard about what the IT industry can learn from Politicians. After all, Indian Democracy is older than the IT industry and Politics is as old as the time the second human (or women) was born in the world.

1. Politicians always play to their galleries. Politicians are the greatest social people, they ensure they constantly appear in the media – good or bad doesn’t matter. Keeping in touch with your audience is very important.
2. Politicians ensure they get themselves to the most advantageous position.
3. Politicians have no un-necessary historic baggage - No EGO & No Emotional attachments. This helps them to undo and redo ideologies/alliances on an ongoing basis.
4. Politicians always maximize their value. Look at what an MLA/MP/Minister earns during his tenure compared to what he/she invested during the campaigns. Politicians are also the biggest risk takers in that sense, because Elections are events where winner takes all.
5. Politicians realize and understand their weakness.

Few weeks back I decided to repave my Laptop (Macbook Air) and go with Windows 7 Build 7000 (yes I know in few weeks we will have RC ). After fixing few issues with drivers and boot camp, I am overall happy. Occasionally Windows doesn't shut-down gracefully, when it happens you got to force switch-off (which in MBA means holding the power off button for few seconds till you hear a POP sound).

The basic installation of the OS (Windows 7) is similar to doing it for Vista using Boot Camp. You start with Apple Boot Camp CD 1 and proceed from there. My installation was dual-boot configuration - having both Mac OS and Windows 7. Once Windows is installed , you continue with the devices installation which can be a little tricky. Below are few issues I faced before I could get everything working fine.

1. In Mac OS, you can select one of the OS to boot into after a restart. Unfortunately Mac OS didn't show the Windows 7 installation. Nothing to sweat. When you switch ON your machine you need to keep holding Alt (option) key till you the see the boot options. Here you can select Windows 7.
2. In Windows 7, initially for some reasons Boot Camp icon didn't show up in System tray. I had to run it from C:\Program Files\Boot Camp\kbdmgr.exe. I found it useful to update all Apple software then it seems to have got fixed.
3. Audio (Sound card) didn't get its driver installed correctly. MBA has a Realtek HD Audio, so I went to Realtek site and downloaded the latest Vista driver (R 2.22) from here or here. The site is designed a little counter-intuitive so be patient.
4. If some devices like in-built Camera didn't get installed correctly, go to device manager, update driver and point to the BootCamp CD.
5. For Apple Ethernet USB Dongle there is no official driver either from Microsoft or Apple, I found one at this blog (Your mileage may vary)
6. I have a HP Photosmart C6288 Printer (part of HP Photosmart C6100 series). The default setup from HP will fail to install as it couldn't find either Windows XP or Vista. To fix this, right-click on the setup program (AIO_CDA_Full_Network_enu.exe). Then use the "Troubleshoot Compatibility" option or select properties and the compatibility tab:
   1. Set the compatibility mode to Windows Vista
   2. Set the privilege level to "Run this program as an administrator"
7. I have a Tata Indicom Plug2Surf USB data card. To install this, first time when you run the setup, Run it as Administrator. Even then when you run the application it will not detect the modem. You will need to ignore the application and create yourself (manually) a dial-up network connection. Customize and follow the instructions from this blog post (which talks for Huawei card though), skip the portions specific to Huawei, but it gives the correct username/password phone number to dial, etc.
8. For PDF creation, I was using CutePDF which doesn't work with Windows 7, so I went with PrimoPDF (free).
9. For Antivirus, I went with my good friend Kesavan's - K7 Computing Antivirus which works fine in Windows 7.

You should be all set by now, as for me (as seen below) all the devices are working fine. Eagerly waiting for Windows 7 RC.

One of the strengths of iPhone is the now famous iTunes store, which helps you buy applications/music/movies/TV shows seamlessly. Lot of companies have tried the concept (which is not new) as old as 10-15 years back, for example Microsoft has tried it multiple times (Zune, Windows Player) in the past. The winning difference has been the flawless execution and the simplicity that Apple has delivered. Apple has managed to satisfy both ends  - with their clout they got the big media companies to sign uniform pricing's and they also made it easy to get the casual developer on-board. The formula from Apple was simple - you make the application, we manage the hosting, delivery, installation, payment gateways, legal/taxation, etc. The developer gets 70%, Apple gets 30% - a neat deal for both parties. And Apple's new iPhone OS3 is pushing the envelope much further - check out this cool preview of iPhone OS 3 or here in YouTube.

Few months after my purchase of my iPhone, I searched for some applications. I found thousands of applications in their store, but I was looking for something that will be useful for me and not clutter my phone. A phone for me primarily is for Voice, SMS, Camera, email & web browsing (in that order of priority). I was not sure on the number of applications that will be available for India - as so far many of the American companies have avoided dealing with copyright/licensing/taxation trouble for India market. They feel the trouble is not worth for the size of the Indian market for these (how wrong they are). Traditionally Indian mobile users have not followed the global trend (and other advanced Asian markets like Korea and Japan) in purchase of applications, games, music & movies, but that I think is due to content for their taste not being available. Since iPhone store is one of the biggest USP's of iPhone and buying apps is not popular in India is probably a reason for iPhone being sold only 20,000 units in India since its launch. 

In iPhone store I found a plethora of apps to be bought for India, there was no shortage - I have tried few iPhone apps and the shopping experience from the phone was seamless. No punching of credit cards (you do that when you create your iTunes account in the web) and no multiple confirmations/redirections/instructions. You click on buy, then install and you are done.

The apps I use regularly are two (both free)- TwitterFon and Skype (recently released). I also bought a Tetris game for $4.99. Regarding the apps, I found TwitterFon to be very convenient to use, I am finding myself twittering more when I am outside the office - waiting for something in a queue or participating like y'day in a boring session for CIOs by IBM India. About Skype for iPhone it is great to note that in India it works over both Wi-Fi and 2G connections. The quality of Skype calls using iPhone is great and the convenience of speaking with a mobile phone anyday for me is better than a headset or holding a USB Skype phone.

I came across this article by Krishna Kumar of DARE India magazine on “19 mistakes online businesses make”. A well written article with good compilations of points that every business going online should note. It talks on most common assumptions that are wrong about doing business online. It demystifies some of the common myths that traffic is infinite, Google Adsense will make you a millionaire, Technology is everything and so on. I especially liked the points where it talked about server sizing and need to plan for adequate man power – which are something we tell our customers all the time.

At Vishwak, we believe on the potential of the Internet and the innovative advertising that's possible in Web to keep the Online industry growing. Yes, the slow-down is affecting this industry too, much worse than expected. Still countries like India, Indonesia and China are showing reasonable growth even in this recession climate. And the online Ad industry is very different that it was in the Dot-com days. Today we have seen for many of our customers in Vishwak, their online revenues constitute 10-15% (the variation depends on how successful is their sales and new products team) of their overall revenue. For many of them their primary media (Newspaper or TV) currently yields majority of their revenues but that's been affected by this slow-down. If you take by medium, globally advertising expenditure in Internet is around 11% today.

In a recent forecast released by Zenith Optimedia, a unit of the Publicis Groupe S.A., the global ad spending is likely to slow by 6.9% to $453.2 billion. Ad expenditure in India is likely to grow at 6.4% growth (down from 18.9%). The internet is the only medium we expect to actually attract higher ad expenditure in 2009, thanks to its accountability and innovation in ad formats. We forecast 8.6% growth in internet expenditure in 2009, down from 20.9% in 2008. New formats are enjoying greater growth (29.8% from Internet video and rich media, 29.7% from internet radio and 11.9% from podcasts), but these represent only 12% of US internet expenditure between them. Once a modicum of confidence returns to the market we expect the growth of internet advertising to pick up again, to 11.3% in 2010 and 15.3% in 2011. We expect its share of the ad market to rise to 14.6% in 2011, up from 10.4% in 2008. However, in recent years the number of sites on the web has increased about twice as rapidly as internet ad expenditure, most of which goes to a handful of big players. A number of internet companies that have based their business model on advertising may find their model unsustainable now that credit is drying up.

Another report, this one from eMarketer reinforces this by predicting that online ad dollars will jump about 5% by 2013 (see the above chart). "The spending shifts predate the recession," says David Hallerman, eMarketer senior analyst. "But the current economy is reinforcing the new advertising models—and making them more permanent". "Digital marketing offers compelling benefits, especially for cash-conscious companies," he continues. "Marketers can more readily measure the results of Internet advertising than with most traditional media. This produces more-efficient advertising and higher ROI, which in turn pushes traditional media to compete with lower pricing."

In last month TED conference, Pattie Maes' from MIT & Pranav Mistry demonstrated a wearable device.  It's a wearable device with a projector paves the way for interaction with our environment. The device which they call "Sixth Sense" enables new interactions between the real world and the world of data. A very exciting idea which opens up boundless possibilities if lives up to its claim.

One of the uses of this device they show is a live video (latest on the relevant headlines) being projected in the newspaper in your hands. When I saw this, I was reminded of a old Tamil movie - Pattanathil Bhootham (released in 1967). In the movie there is a scene where the "Genie" shows (then) latest movie songs on top of the movie's advertisements that is in the newspaper.

What was a dream and thought super-natural 40 years ago is now a reality. Exciting to look forward to the reality of the coming decades.

Video links:

1.The clip from Pattanathil Bhootham (பட்டணத்தில் பூதம்) Tamil Movie released in 1967, showing the idea of videos being projected on a newspaper

2.Full movie Pattanathil Bhootham (பட்டணத்தில் பூதம்), free and legal from Rajshri.com

3.Sixth Sense demo by Pranav Mistry (forward to the minute 6:30 for the newspaper demo)

Part 1

If you are like me who grew up in 1980s, you will no-doubt have a huge collection of old Audio cassettes (Tapes) that contains your childhood favourties but now lying somewhere collecting dust. Today you should be lucky to be having a cassette player in working condition to play them. A decade back I started hunting for my favourite albums/movies and managed to buy most of them as Audio CDs or MP3 CDs, but I still long for digitising my old tapes so that I can listen to them where-ever I want. So few years back I bought an inexpensive cassette player which has a stereo speaker out (1/8" TRS Jack in USA or 3.5mm miniature EP Jack in India, which is the standard type used in your iPod, Computer speakers) . To record involved four steps:

1. I connected the Speaker-out from the player to Line-In in my PC using a standard 3.5mm Stereo Audio Patch cable like the one shown below. The audio quality depends on the quality of the cable and the pins used, so buy the best looking one or a branded one that you can find in your local electronics store.
    
2. Recording quality turned to be good, but to set the correct volume level in the player and Mic-level in PC was tricky. That part took me few hours to set it right, too high the volume in player then you can listen to the audio in your PC speakers but nothing gets recorded and too low the recorded song can't be heard while played back.
3. Setup Line-In as default "Recording Device" in Windows. This can be done in Windows Vista by Right-Clicking on the Speaker system tray icon (bottom-right before time) and selecting "Recording Devices". Then in the dialog (as shown below) that appears Right-Click and select "Set as Default Device". You might want to double-click on the Line-in Icon and adjust the audio-levels for fine-tuning. If everything is working well, then when you play something in your player you will see the bars on right-hand side of the Line-In row moving up and down.
    
4. The software used to record took some experimentation as well but was easier. I settled down with using the free Windows Media Encoder to record the songs as WMA files and then converting songs that I needed in my iPhone alone to MP3 files using Nero WaveEditor. I was not comfortable with directly recording into Nero WaveEditor or the free Audacity equivalent. If you are using Windows Vista, you can also try the in-built Sound Recorder as well that now supports durations longer than 60 seconds but it doesn't offer the level adjustment controls found in Windows Media Encoder.

That's all it takes to record your tapes as WMA/MP3 files. You are now good to throw-away your cassettes.

Part 2

Part 2 of this story happened about six months back when during my trip to USA in June '08 I had purchased a device to make the conversion easier. The device was ION Audio's Tape2PC. I saw it online and ordered through Amazon for $130 or so.  The device claimed to make it easier for converting the tapes to MP3 using bundled software and the USB connection (so no cable hunting). I presumed the software does auto rewinding to beginning of cassette, identifying each track automatically and auto-reverse once one side of the tape is over, so that we don't need to baby-sit during the entire tape.

After I got back to India, I never found time (or the interest) to set up this device until last Sunday. That's when I unwrapped the box, connected the cables and without a moment's thought switched the Power-ON. I got the display lights for a second and the device went blank. That's when it stuck me that the device was 110V and I connected to 220V (in India), and the power supply inside the device should have got burned . Next day I gave the device to my local Electronic Repair shop (Rajam Electronics, Station Road, West Mambalam, Chennai -33. Phone: 044-2474 0106) to fix it. They diligently worked on it, fixed it and gave it to me today. They charged me Rs.400 (USD 8) towards their service charge and for replacing the 110V transformer to 220V and few other components that got burned. I brought the device home and plugged in, Windows Vista promptly deducted the device as a USD Audio CODEC and it worked just fine. The burning episode was a blessing in disguise, now I don't need to keep connecting every time a 220V-110V Step-Down adaptor.

The device turned out to be a slight-disappointment. The audio quality was great due to the USB interface, but the software functionality was limited. No Auto Track Identification, No Auto-Rewind, No Auto-Reverse - you need to baby sit throughout the cassette play time, no escape from that. The in-built software (EZ Tape Convertor) does make it easy to mark each tracks, tagging easier and moves automatically the completed tracks to iTunes. You can find a detailed product review of Tape2PC from UK's PCAdvisor here - I suggest you read it before you decide to buy this device. My opinion is that if you don't mind spending few minutes extra for each cassette and you don't have that many cassettes then you can safe yourself some money by not buying this. Instead go with my alternate method suggested in Part-1 of this post.

I am not active into Twittering. Frankly, I didn't get the idea of it for quite some time after its launch - even after I created a twitter account two years back. But over the last few months I am seeing more buzz around twitter than ever before. For me it is becoming to be an interesting tool as I seeing more use for twitter as a professional business tool. Marketing agencies using it to follow it buzz around their products, business houses using it for networking and so on. Today Microsoft's PR agency Waggener Edstrom released a tool "twendz" a new tweet-analysis tool. Few months back there was this blog post on the CEOs around the world who are twittering.

With all this around, I dusted my twitter account and have started to use it. Let us see if I do it with some discipline and at least the same frequency I do my blogs (of course tweets are supposed to be quick tiny updates unlike a blog). You can follow me on twitter here.

You can’t stop marvelling at the lack of speed in which the Indian Finance Ministry operates. It has taken 5 Years, change of a finance minister, a global recession for the finance ministry in India to start to “look” into this issue. About 5 years back Mr.P.Chidambaram as then Finance Minister cancelled the exemption given to Exporters from paying “Service Tax” on input services (which amounts at current rate @12.36%) that were rendered towards manufacturing/rendering an item/service that will get exported out of the country. The idea being you can only export a service/item not the tax of the originating country with it and to prevent India from becoming non-competitive compared to its neighbours. Instead of the exemption the Hon’ble minister announced Exporters can claim a refund (which in India means pleasing the bureaucracy & adding infinite delays) for the service tax they will pay, this the minister said was to prevent leakages and misuse of the benefit. In India “Refunds” or for that matter any policy announcements (other than the written law) are mere intentions and are like “Poll” promises – they will always be kept as a promise by then finance minister and his successors. Keeping up this tradition, there has been no clear announcement or notification on the procedure and the forms to be used for this refund claim. For last several years at my company, we have asked every Service Tax & Excise Tax official we have met for the procedure we need to follow to get the refund, every one has said anything but a consistent answer.

Hence, I was surprised Today to see some movement on this with this article in Economic Times Newspaper - “Faster Service Tax refunds on cards”. With today’s budget turning out to be a disappointment (it read more like UPA government poll propaganda) for Indian Inc. and Exporters in particular at least if the FinMin can do this refund notification quickly, it will give us some relief in these testing times.

For little more than a year I was using HTC S710, as my usage of emails grew after my company moved to Exchange Server the phone was feeling to be too small & slow - it was time for a new phone for me. After waiting for few months (iPhone got released in India around Aug '08) and deciding between Sony Ericsson X1, Samsung Omnia & HTC Touch Pro, I went with the original and the popular Apple iPhone 3G. After the purchase of iPhone in Dec '08, and playing around with the phone for few minutes wiped away all my doubts about iPhone. It is the best Smartphone out there in market. It is going to take Symbian (OS that powers Nokia) & Windows Mobile (OS that powers HTC, Omnia and X1) few revisions before they can catch up with the ease of use and ergonomics of iPhone.

The purchase itself was different from other phone purchases I have made. I had to go to Vodafone store (no one else seems to be selling it) in T.Nagar (Chennai) and pay Rs.26,400 by credit card (only CC and Cash, no cheques - even though our company has over 30 post-paid connections with Vodafone), I had to read and sign a 7-page license agreement from Apple - promising that you will never download pirated content, you will indemnify Apple for any claims out of usage of iPhone and the likes. I learned that my exiting data plan with Vodafone will not work with iPhone, I had to opt for a different iPhone dataplan at Rs.499/699 per month (which will not work on other phones, so you need to have two plans at the same time if you want to use in different phones).  The phone's packaging was minimal. It seems the small pin (like a office paper clip) that you need to use to remove SIM card from the phone if lost will cost you Rs.500! . The sales guy informed me that the phone comes with warranty against any manufacturing defect, but if I happen to drop the phone and anything other an air-crack happens, it can't be repaired and I better throw the phone in the nearest trash can.

Regarding the features of the phone, enough has been talked by reporters around the world. I would like to highlight few of my experiences.

Highlights - Apart from the positives above, few other points impressed me the most and they are:

1. My company uses RADIUS certificates based authentication implemented at the Windows Server 2003 level for Wi-Fi security. Even on a Windows Mobile (better integration between Microsoft Products) you can't connect that easily to these Wi-Fi access points. With iPhone it was seamless. It automatically detected that I had this authentication method, prompted for my Domain Credentials, downloaded & installed the certificate. Everything worked flawlessly. More over with half-a-dozen Wi-Fi AP's that I have configured across my office, house, relative's houses where I frequent - the overall Wi-Fi experience has been outstanding. Even with-in my office just as I get out of Wi-Fi zone, it seamlessly moves to EDGE (Cellular network) and back.

2. The design idea of having a Toggle switch in the side for Silent mode - brilliant. Other than this and Volume Control (two buttons on side) everything else in iPhone is touch. It is not practical to access your phone through Touch when it is in your pocket and you want to turn it to Silent when you are in a meeting. And having it as a Toggle switch, you can easily feel / see whether your phone is in Silent or not. And you can configure when in Silent mode whether the phone should vibrate or not.

3. The Exchange Server integration through ActiveSync is outstanding. Next to having Outlook 2007 client this is the best client software for Exchange server - period!. It is so good that nowadays I hardly bring home my laptop to work on emails.

4. The firmware upgrade process through iTunes software is extremely easy. I have my reservations in general about iTunes software, but the updates to the phone through this has been implemented very well. Other OEM's should learn to mimic this.

5. The MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint & Adobe PDF viewers that are built-in are much usable. I could open the most complex Excel Sheets and Word documents that I received in the last few weeks at it and it opened all of them without any fuss. What is better is that the viewer supports the latest MS Office formats (Word 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007). 

Blank screen bug

I was wanting to do this post for over a month now, but it didn't make it. Today my phone had its first serious problem - suddenly the display and touch were not working entirely. I guess it was to do with a video I was downloading from YouTube with the built-in app. When it gets a call though it was ringing, I was not able to pickup the call. Any number of Power button presses, Home button presses didn't help. I started to feel worried that it had developed a hardware  problem and I had to give it to Vodafone/Apple for servicing. That's when I searched and found this page which had a solution to the same problem. The solution is to keep pressing both the Home and the Power ON button for 10 seconds and the device will do a reset.

Recently I was checking out one of Nokia's entry level phone (Rs.2000) - Nokia 2626. The phone had "Hindi" letters printed on the keyboard, so I was doubtful whether it will have Tamil fonts. I launched the built-in browser and went to INFITT website (HTML page in Unicode), it said loading and processing for over 2 minutes; but I was delighted finally to see the page display properly in Tamil (you can see the image in right).

This means that this entry level device has 1. Unicode support, 2. Tamil Unicode font, 3. Rendering support for Indic languages in particular to Tamil.  This proves the present Unicode system for Indic languages does work even on the most basic/low-end devices and processors. So the reason Tamil Unicode is not yet supported widely on all phones especially high-end Windows Mobile, iPhone, Blackberry & Nokia Smartphones is not because of any technical limitations, but a lack of interest from the manufacturers to ship Tamil (Indic) support. It is mostly got to do with the wrong assessment by them, that all Smartphone buyers in India can read and care only about "English" and not their mother tongue.

References: Hindi support in mobile devices in India.

Yes, Prime Minister, is a British TV Serial by BBC which ran in late 80's and was a sequel to Yes Minister. This was shown in Doordharshan during my school days and I have heard great comments about them. Though I watched few of the episodes I couldn't appreciate it then. 

Few weeks back, while shopping in Landmark I saw the VCD version of Yes, Prime Minister Series 1 and 2 at Rs.350 per series. Over this weekend I watched the 8 episodes of Series 1. I had 4 hours of non-stop laugher and I had to marvel at the brilliance of the writers who have portrayed what life could be inside 10, Downing street in the most humorous way. This is a must see for anyone remotely interested with politics in general.

Yes, Prime Minister is now second in my list of favourite political satires of all time, First in the list is Cho's Muhammad Bin Thuglak.

Wish all of my readers in Tamilnadu a very happy “தை பொங்கல்”, for others a Happy New Year 2009. As everyone else is predicting and media shouting from the roof, this year is going to be a tough one “economically” world wide, all I pray is that the bottom is reached and it doesn’t go any worse than what is it now.

Tomorrow marks the sixth year anniversary of this blog.  Thank you all of my readers for your continued encouragement through emails and comments that you keep sending it my way. Though my blog was never intended to be a serious journalistic work of any kind or meant specially for anything other than being my scribbles and rattlings, I am gratified and humbled to see a good number of dedicated following. The page views have been growing Year-On-Year from last year to this year it has shown about 20% increase. Thank You all.

All of us get SPAMs all the time and most of us feel frustrated as there is little we can do to stop it other than marking the email as Junk/SPAM in your email reader (Outlook/Thunderbird/GMail/Hotmail). However, this doesn't stop the source of SPAM but just moves the message to a Junk folder in your storage - basically you still get the SPAM message. If you are running your own mail server, you pay for the traffic consumed by SPAM which can as high as 70-80% in some cases. Adding to this, some SPAM sources manage to keep sending your Junk mails even if you block it, as they keep changing the source email IDs and servers.

The next step is to get into the hood of the email message and find the source ISP that is used for sending the SPAM and then complain directly to the ISP webmaster. Most of the ISPs take these seriously and shut down when they see number of complaints against a server(s). Doing this though requires good understanding of TCP/IP technologies (method to do this is outlined here) making it out of reach for most users. That's where this website (SPAMCOP) comes in, SpamCop offers a service (accessible after free registration) to copy 'n' paste the SPAM email. Once this is done they analyse the email and deduct the source ISP and then send a complained message automatically to the ISP webmaster.

Recently I posted a complained for a newsletter that I kept getting from a Online Health magazine. The newsletter didn't have an Unsubscribe link, so I had to send a request email to the sender. Even after a month I continued to get the newsletter. I posted a complained against them in SpamCop and then send them an email saying that I have done this and next step I will directly complain to their ISP. This worked, the next day I got an email from the Marketing Manager saying they have removed my email ID.

Next to Google search or sometimes more often than that, a website I turn to most often is Wikipedia. It has helped in resolving many arguments that I have had with my wife on who a signer for a song was, which movie Rajini acted in the 1980s and in which state is Darjeeling and so on. A good example was after we watched Mani Ratnam's "Guru" we were curious to find out how closely the movie portrayed the original story of Sri Dhirubhai Ambani, turning to Wikipedia told us more on Sri Ambani and his life than what we could have got even from Reliance website. Especially after I bought an Apple iPhone, browsing Wikipedia for an information has become a near addiction.

For last month or so I have been seeing the "Donate to Wikipedia" banner in the site and today I decided to the good deed as the first transaction in the new year. I went ahead and donated $30. Rather than putting up with Advertisements, any day I will prefer to pay to get the content that I want - but I know I am part of a minority who feel this way. How about you, do you feel the same?. Post your opinion in the comments link above.

I am working on uploading to our publishing house web site several of the interviews we made in connection with my grandfather Sri Krishnaswamy Sarma's centenary. Initially I went with uploading the videos to Google Videos, but several users complained of heavy buffering of videos even on broadband connection. YouTube and MSN Videos were not valid options as they limit the videos to 100MB Filesize & 10Minutes in length, but our videos were larger than that. After several trials I have settled with using Adobe Premiere Elements 7.0 to convert the DVD Video to Flash Video (FLV) format, upload it our web site and serve it with JWPlayer. With this arrangement the videos seem to play out smoothly.

When importing the DVD to Premiere Elements I wanted to have the project format as the same one in which the video was made. When I searched I found no way to determine this automatically, eventually I found a way. It was to open the DVD with Nero ShowTime and select the option "Show Additional Info on OSD". This displays information about the current video that is played (like the one below):

Still this doesn't say whether the DVD Video was in PAL or NTSC. It turns out that you can figure this from the above displayed information:

• If the frame is 720x480, video is NTSC; if it's 720x576, it's PAL
• Frame rate for PAL is 25 fps; NTSC is 29.97 (aka "30 drop")

Like any other Indian I was devastated at what happened in Mumbai on 26th Nov 2008. Watching Television over the last 4 days it was a mixed feeling of Anger, Scare, Sorry & Disappointment. I pray for the departed souls to rest in peace and for almighty to give strength to the families that lost their loved ones and for the injured for speedy recovery. 

Since lot has been reported about the incident around the world, I was not sure whether I too should be writing about this. Then I decided that every Indian has to raise his/her voice against this atrocity, so here is what I feel on this:

• Indian Political establishment, the government & the intelligence machinery have failed spectacularly once more. There is no point in blaming the present Central or State Government for this, this is a failure of government at all levels over the last two decades - ever since the fall of "Cold War" and the raise of "Global Terrorism"
• Over the decades, time and again Indian Government and Indian Civil Service have shown by their non-action that they don't value the loss of a life especially of a ordinary Citizen. For them only the lives of Political Party Chiefs, Ministers and their immediate family members lives have any value
• I just can't come to terms on how easy it was for the Terrorists to come into India without being stopped and how easy it was for them to smuggle huge arms and ammunitions. Does India have any coastal guards and navy worth mentioning?
• I am glad that there was no negotiation or surrender were made. Unlike previous incidents were our government was ready to bend backwards rightaway in the Indian Airlines - Khandagar incident in 1999 or in the Rubaiya (daughter of then India's Home Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed) incident in 1989. In the Mumbai Incident now, it appears that the security forces were given a free hand to do their job, which they have done
• Though I felt the operation by security forces was very slow, we should commend them for handling it skillfully with no civilian lives lost due to their firing, for not using disproportionate gun power and for capturing one terrorist alive
• I am at loss on why our security forces don't seem to be taking advantage of technology. For two days they kept saying they don't know the number of terrorists and where they are inside the buildings. Why didn't they use any Infra-Red Scanners, Motion Detectors, Satellite Sensors and the other modern fighting gadgets we see the American Armed Forces using skillfully in Iraq?. Does Indian Armed Forces have any of these or just like everything else in Indian Government was the budgets allocated for these swindled by Corruption?
• Without these modern gadgets how does Indian Armed Forces dream about fighting even a conventional battle - with the changing world order wars are fought nowadays in Cities and not in deserts. Are these gadgets too expensive for India to buy, I don't think so especially when treasury can spent US$14 Billion (INR 70,000 Crores) on the famous farm waivers and for issuing government bonds for subsidizing "Fuel" - both of which yielded Political capital
• Though it is purely symbolic I still welcome the resignation of Central Home Minister Mr.Shivraj Patel
• Though I don't agree with American & George Bush policies on their International Policies and Iraq War. Still due credit should be given to them for protecting their country (USA) in the last 8 years. After the devastating 9/11 there have been no major Terror Attacks with in the United States. In a sense they skillfully moved the battlefield of the Global war on Terror from being within USA borders to outside USA
• As an Indian, I feel ashamed that we still don't have any Crisis Management Infrastructure in India as Mr.Ratan Tata rightfully pointed out. We don't even have the basics like a US "911" helpline in India. I am not sure how many people who got stuck inside the hotels knew who to call for help - I certainly don't know
• India needs all the help it can get especially from US, Israel and other countries with huge expertise on fighting terror. Now is not the time to trumpet how great Indian Scientist are, or on how great our technology is, or being self-reliant, etc. But I am afraid our civil service will ensure this opportunity is missed to work with the world to our advantage by their outdated bureaucracy. A fine example of this happened today when the FBI was detained for hours in Mumbai Airport 

One of my friends sent me a nice email summarizing on what he feels will happen from here which is worth reproducing here on his own words: "I really don't want any more cries of "Indian resilience", peace and harmony. Indian resilience is nothing but casual indifference if not directly affected. We'll go back to watching our stupid soaps and reality shows once the real-life "reality show" of the terror attacks are over. A few discussions over dinner and drinks and we're done. We're mostly peaceful and harmonious people - but the ones massacring us aren't. So these kind of displays don't really do anything. What we need now is a strong government with a strong anti-terror law. One that can have the guts to take out terrorists wherever and whoever they are...Till then, I will remain cynical and angry"

Having said all this I am still an optimist at heart and that is the reason I have a photograph of the NSG team on the start of this post. Finally, I salute the brave men and women from Mumbai Police, National Security Guards & Army who lost their lives in the battle.

Bookmarks:

1. Video - NDTV's Randeep Nandl explaining what an alleged terror suspect may be telling Indian authorities about the planning of the Mumbai attacks
2. Attack in India - Summary by NewsWeek, Summary by New York Times
3. We're all Bombayites today by Vir Sanghvi
4. BigB on the anger of the ordinary citizen and on complete loss in faith in the system and in the governance

Today Prof.A.G. Ramakrishnan from IISc, Bangalore posted an announcement in INFITT discussion group announcing openings for BE Graduates for Research Positions at Mile Lab, IISc, Bangalore. This caught my eye as the project described was exciting one involving software applications for visually challenged.  I am giving a link in this post to the announcement for the benefit of graduates inclined towards research who will find this position interesting.

MILE Laboratory at Indian Institute of Science is actively involved in developing an automated book reader for the visually challenged. This research involves image mosaicing, page layout analysis, script recognition, speech synthesis and natural language processing. You can read the announcement from the IISc page here or in PDF format here

Like everyone else I get unsolicited unsolicited calls on my mobile phone. What is more irritating is when you are already a customer with the bank that is calling - they don't even check whether someone is their customer or not, instead they randomly call numbers. To communicate our displeasure with this, if we decide to switch banks, it is not so easy to do. And almost all private banks and insurance companies in India seems to be doing this, so you will not be able to find a company that doesn't. I bank mostly with Public Sector banks but for some convenience like Web Banking, Credit Cards and ATM I bank with a private bank. As consumers we need a remedy to this problem.

About a year or so back, TRAI introduced the National Do Not Call Registry (NDNC Registry). Telemarketers are needed by law to check with the NDNC database before making a call or face a penalty. You can register in NDNC by sending a SMS with text "START DND" to 1909 or register in your Mobile Service Provider's website (for me it will be Vodafone). Apart from TRAI's NDNC Registry, RBI recommended about 3 years for all Banks under it to have an individual DNC registry with them, you can register in each of them by going to their respective websites. I have registered myself in all of these sites, after registering the number of calls I get have certainly come down. If you still get calls you can complain to the callers that they are violating law by calling a DNC number.

Last week on a single day I got two marketing calls from ICICI Bank and one call from ABN Amro. Irritated I was looking for a remedy, I found a page in ICICI website to complain if you keep getting calls even after registering. I emailed to the id donotcall at icicibank.com that was in the page quoting the time, my mobile number and the phone numbers from which I got the call. I added in the email that if I continued to get calls I will seek remedy by lodging a complaint to RBI Ombudsman and TRAI consumer cell. I was not hopeful of any reply, but I was pleasantly surprised to get a reply within 2 days from ICICI stating that they have taken note of my complaint, apologized and assured that I will not get any further calls. I was certainly impressed by this service from ICICI and I hope other banks will follow this good practice.

Necessity is the mother of invention they say. How true is this statement!. When you thought the Music Industry is doomed because of piracy from free MP3 downloads, someone out there comes with a new model. 

In the above chart from Economist you can see that the falling sales of physical (Audio CD) media is not being compensated by the rise in Digital sales. The Digital sales comes predominantly from iTunes (and other similar pay per download services) and from subscription services (like Rhapsody) which offer a flat fee per month for unlimited songs. Both the models have produced mixed results and are expected to continue with no clear winner as the choice depends on individual preferences. One clear trend that emerged in the last one year was the death of "DRM" with Apple leading the way and Amazon following it. As Nicholas Negroponte wrote in his classic book "Being Digital", you can never categorize an individual "bit" (Binary 1 or 0) to be of a particular character (Porn, Politics, News, Sports and so on), so policing the Internet for Piracy can never be fool-proof. I believe policing is certainly not the fix for increasing music revenues, instead a new business model that ensures ubiquitous DRM free music to listeners world over and fair-price/compensation to content producers will assure more success. World over many models are being experimented including Ad funding - which I feel will be of limited success, will not be a failure but also not a block-buster. In this connection, a new business model tried out by Nokia in its "Comes with Music" (CWM) looks very promising. 

CWM simply reverses the economics of Music Industry. Instead of paying for each song or track, your music cost is loaded on to the listening device. You buy the Nokia handset for around $230 and you get unlimited songs for one year, after which you can buy a subscription or buy a new device. Of course, Nokia wants you to buy a new device every year and that's the attraction for them to try this model. This bundling of content cost on to the device is in a way similar to TV License fee in UK, where a tax that is collected to watch TV in UK helps government to subsidize BBC content production costs. This is the reason why many of the content in BBC websites are restricted by IP to permit UK viewers only. 

For me, I hope someone in India (may be Reliance Big or Hungama or Airtel or Times) brings out this model for India. Unfortunately, till date there is no comprehensive subscription based sites in India offering Indian Film and Classical music. You are left with buying physical media then ripping it yourself (which is what I do) or paying blatantly expensive price for each track to legal sites or simply pirate.

Few weeks back while at my US trip I read this book "Notes from a Big Country" by Bill Bryson. Like his other books, Bryson's humour is unmistakable in this book as well. Like others have said in the Amazon's book comments you will find yourself laughing loud in many places.

The book is a collection of a weekly column in Mail on Sundays Night and Day magazine in UK. So this book has been written more for an international audience who will find things different in USA from their country. Having visited USA many times I can say I was baffled too at many of similar scenes observed by Bryson. So in many places of the book I could relate to his experience and enjoy the scene. Commenting on common American living habits, you might be mistaken like some Americans (who have commented in Amazon) that Byrson is making "fun" of Americans at large.  This being my fourth book written by Bryson, I can say that he has nothing against America, this is his style -  It is the same when he writes about UK, Europe or even Shakespeare, so nothing different here. More than the scenes described, what I really liked is Bryson's extraction of Humour from all the weird situations like the once I have mentioned below:

• Picture ID to be shown in US Airports (Bryson calls this as Permissible Visual Cognitive Imaging)
• Junk Food Heaven - "We don't usually clean our fridge - we just box it up every four or five years and send it off to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta with a note to help themselves to anything that looks scientifically promising"
• The countless forms used by American Immigration - "You can spend days repeatedly dialling a phone number that is forever engaged, only to be told when you finally do get through that you must call another number, which the person tells you once in a mumble and you don't quite catch before you are cut off"
• Commercials - "The new Dodge Backfire. Rated number one against the Chrysler Inert for Handling. Rated number one against the Plymouth Repellant for mileage"
• Cupholder Revolution - "But our computers don't come with cupholders"
• Why no one walks - "Not long after we moved here we had the people next door round for dinner and - I swear this is true - they drove"
• The great indoors and the obsession for living always in a climate controlled environment - "Skywalks - enclosed pedestrian flyovers"
• Abundance of choice in American super markets - "Thirty five varieties of Crest Toothpaste"
• Spinning the truth - how the "special offer" advertisements exasperates the truth

If you have visited USA and felt things are different from your country then this book is a must read for you.

While doing my morning walking today (after a long time) in my neighbourhood, I saw these Public Safety Message boards kept by Chennai City Police at various places. These are aimed to educate people with simple lines along with an image on importance of common safety messages. A good initiative by the police and we should congratulate the sponsors who helped for this campaign.

(Click the above image for the entire album in full resolution)

In this PDC2008 talk, Chuck Lenzmeier - the Architect in Azure team explains how the Virtual Images of OS works in the Azure cloud data centers. His Bio in PDC2008 says that Chuck has been with Microsoft since 1989, and worked on all versions of Windows from NT 3.1 to Vista. The below video really helps to understand how the Virtual Images are being managed to achieve Windows Azure manage while retaining absolute compatibility with existing OS, Software and Applications.

His co-speaker Frederick Smith from Microsoft explained the other aspects of Windows Azure.

• Windows Azure provisions and monitors hardware elements (Compute nodes, L2 Switches, LBs, Routers), hardware lifecycle management (burn in tests, diagnostics and repair, failed hardware are replaced) and capacity planning
• Azure Fabric is highly available: Network has redundancy built in, services deployed across fault domains, load balancers route traffic to active nodes only, Fabric Controller state check-pointed periodically, FC state is stored on multiple replicas
• PDC 2008 CTP release of Azure has Automated Service deployment, Three Service templates, change number of instances, simple service upgrade/degrade, Automated service failure discovery and recovery, external VIP Address/DNS name per service, Service network isolation enforcement & automated hardware management
• For 2009 release will have ability to model more complex application, richer life-cycle management & richer network management

I was in the talk by Andrew Fitzhugh from HP's Magcloud.com. The site is HP's attempt to do on demand publishing of magazines and allow anyone to publish, sell and distribute magazines. An interesting statistics that was shown that in USA about 3.6Billion magazines were delivered to US News stands last year and out of which 2.3Billion was never read.

He talked about how Magcloud moved their front-end systems and portions of storage to Windows Azure.

Magcloud.com on-premises architecture	Magcloud.com utilizing Windows Azure

Seeing the title I had good expectations, but the session turned out to be disappointing. The speakers completed the talk in 30 minutes and didn't have anything more to talk or go into architecture or code details. The project seemed to me to a half-hearted attempt to test drive Windows Azure and was a simple project to showcase anything interesting. 

Today was the keynote by Rick Rashid, Sr. VP from Microsoft Research. Notes on the session:

• Why is fundamental research important to a company like Microsoft or country like USA. It is to survive tough times, about agility through your earlier investments and having smart people
• Talked about Terminator, liveness property. Basically if you create a lock in say "C" will the code release it and so on
• Talked about Dryad - Dryad is an infrastructure which allows a programmer to use the resources of a computer cluster or a data center for running data-parallel programs, without knowing anything about concurrent programming
• The study on computer "programs" help us to understand more on human "cells", similarly study on "cells" is helping us to understand "programs"
• Microsoft has been working with Washington university for Collaborative technologies - ConferenceXP
• Microsoft released today a new version of Microsoft Worldwide telescope Autumnal Equinox Beta

Feng Zhao (Principal Researcher) talked on the energy usage, how to sense and how we can reduce. He showed a small device made by Microsoft Research that uses a 16-bit CPU, 10K RAM, 40K ROM to collect humidity, temperature and  other parameters. It then transmits it using a low-power Radio as they are powered by batteries which need to last long.

He showed the below demo on how this data can be visualized:

These visualizations used in Data Center has helped them to map and plan on how cooling happens, where to place heavy computing loads, etc. He talked about Senseweb - a Wikipedia of Sensors  which is used by over 11 universities worldwide. This is used primarily in Swiss alps to collate data from different instruments on alps and study them for impact of humans on climate change.

David Heckerman in a video talked about how they are helping to find how HIV mutates in a person using technology from SPAM identification and statistical analysis.

Matthew Maclaurin talked about Project Boku - Lightweight programming for kids. Boku is a character/robot, he needs programming to succeed. Why for Kids - because it is a life skill, demystify and engage & make it easy for learning. All programming is done with XBOX Game Console, no keyboard use. See the demo below:

Finally they showed "SecondLight" an innovation based on Microsoft Surface. In SecondLight you can show over the regular display, which gets shown only when you move an ordinary paper above the display. There is an infrared sensor that follows you on the second display. This is exciting stuff, so don't miss seeing this video from Tech Flash showing this.

1. 34 top level events sorted by icons
2. At the peak, 17 live separate events were happening
3. 2000 hours of live content and 2200 Highlight content that was created
   

1. Live Content were delivered with Windows Media Server, with commentary was coming from commentators typing in a CMS which got moved as XML to production
2. Rewind - Video on Demand play of live content
3. Highlight NBC pulled out 50 Interns from college put them in 30 ROCK and make them create these 3-5min highlights of individual events.
4. Encores – Broadcast replays
   

• Planning of capacity was most important. When, Where and Size (each sport is of different length) was to be planned to determine the CPU, storage and ingress/egress needs.
  
• NBC was helped by Intel Penguin processor, NBC waited for it and the servers got shipped around in May and took 6 weeks to go to Beijing
• Bandwidth out of Beijing was limited to a 40 meg (DS3). 40 encoders were running live, so about 1MB per encoder (Digital Rapid). All this went into two windows media services box in Beijing, this got patched to window media services in 30 Rock, New York so that they can control if they had to. Which was then mapped to Limelight & Level 3 CDN's massive WMS boxes. More details of encoding process in the blog post here
  
• No full screen due to IOC Advertising requirements on the percentage of advertisements to video
• Many partners were involved: Deltatre (Italy) had the CMS the best in the world to do live score on web
• HTTPWatch Professional (and Fiddler) was useful to see what’s going on
  

• Scrum and Scrumming builds better teams as the teams were distributed worldwide
• Meeting Face to Face was very important, especially to bring this up cost in RFP stage
• Everyone should know all roles and all architectural touch points
• Reduce complexity via common schema
• Long-tail delivery hides issues, when you are watching current items you needed to focus on the older contents that were being watched by the long-tail
• The industry needs better telemetry and monitoring solutions
• “Chunked” workflow (smaller sized thousand of files created) presented new challenges – Now IIS 7.0 Smooth Streaming in Media Pack announced yesterday does this better
• Over 250 people between Microsoft, NBC and all other partners
  
  

The announcements made in this keynote today was picked by every media around the world, so I will be brief. You can watch the full keynote from here.

Windows 7

1. The improvements were on decreasing Memory, Disk I/O, Power consumption and on Increasing Speed (Faster Boot, Device Ready), Responsiveness (Start Menu) and Scale up to 250 Processors
2. BitLock on USB Drives to protect your data
3. Native VHD support to mount and boot
4. Remote Desktops now support Multi-Monitor, cool
5. Multi-touch, Start Bar UI improvements and more...

On seeing this I was initially disappointed to see no new UI or major changes. However, after using Windows 7 in the labs and attending more sessions, I realized Microsoft was not throwing what was done in Windows Vista, but improving on it, which is good.

The UAC improvements made me think why not introduce "Roles" like in Windows Server for Windows 7 (Client) also. This way "Developers", "Power Users" and "Home Users" can have different settings and security prompts.

.NET 4.0

The idea to have the "Web" guy Scott Guthrie do the talk on Windows 7 developer improvements and on WPF was a "major coup" to promote it.

1. AutoCad was showing how they are using Windows 7 Multi-Touch, Ribbon APIs for their native C++ rendering
2. A new WPF Toolkit and Silverlight Toolkit were announced today
3. In .NET 4.0 you will have side by side hosting in the same process both .NET 4.0 and .NET 2.0 CLR
4. A new managed extension framework which was shown in VS2010 on how the Text Editor can be customized
5. VS 2010 is being rebuild on top of WPF, this I felt will certainly force Microsoft to improve the performance and invest more on WPF and make it better
6. Having JQuery (an Open source project) supported is another major coup within Microsoft
7. ASP.NET 4.0 will support multiple web.config, one each for Debug, Production and so on
8. Today Silverlight 1.0 is in over 25% of all machines in Internet and nearly in 100 million of them have Silverlight 2.0

Live Services

1. David Treadwell showed Live Services which consists of Search, Geospatial, Live ID, Communication & Presence and Directory services
2. Live ID will now support Open ID. This if works well, has the potential to make it come alive the dream of a single identity provider on the Internet
3. The demo of BBC Live Player using Live Mesh services to sync up was cool. The BBC Engineer talked that "Last Year Broadcaster decided what you saw, This Year you decide what you saw, Next Year will determine what you see". What they are watching, which segment is good will all be shared using Social networking tools and powered by Live Mesh

Office "14"

1. This was perhaps the most interesting demo of the day, with a lightweight of office (Word, Excel and OneNote) for the Web
2. The cool thing was how it synced up in real-time changes done in Client version and the Online version. All working behind the scene with "REST" protocols
3. Microsoft claimed this to be "Office without Limits"

Reviews on the Web: Windows 7, Office 14

After showing preview of Silverlight for Mobile two years back, Microsoft has been absolutely silent. Since there was no news for a long time I presumed they have killed this project. After seeing this session today I am glad the project is alive and getting closer to release. In this session by Amit Chopra and Giorgio Sardo, they talked more about this - both the speakers did a fabulous job of entertaining the audience and making the session fun. Notes on the session:

• The Mobile version of Silverlight will be Silverlight 2.0 with .NET Managed code support and not the SL v1 with JavaScript (Thank god)
• Public CTP will be released in Q1 '09
• Most of the Silverlight applications written for desktop today can run in SL for Mobile
• A new emulator for debugging Silverlight for Mobile is now integrated with Visual Studio
• By using the User-Agent and Platform class you can determine whether your application is running in Desktop, Windows Mobile or Nokia phones, etc.
• Lot of optimisation work is happening to play media well on SL for Mobile

You can see one of the demos in the video below that was shown running in a Windows Mobile:

You can read here an interview with Amit Chopra by Register, where talks about what's in and what's out.

I am right now in Microsoft Project “Velocity” talk in PDC2008 by Muralidhar Krishnaprasad. Microsoft has been promising a distributed (and in-memory) cache system for a long long time. If I remember right it was first talked about in COM/ASP days. After that in every Microsoft event a version of it was shown (by a different team each time) in pre-release stages, but none of them got released. The story from Microsoft on the need for one, how to solve it and roadmap kept changing all the time. As for me, having got tired of this I have been using SQL Server as the distributed cache for few years now.

Notes from the session:

• “Velocity” is Microsoft's Distributed Cache .
• Usage scenarios are: Reference Data, Vendor Catalogs, Activity Data, Resource Data (Flight Seat Inventory and like)
• It is an explicit, in-memory, distributed cache
• Any .NET Objects that can be serialized can be cached
• Scale very easily, add as much memory and add as much machines as you can
• Velocity is going to be free and released in MSDN
• Runs on standard Windows PC. If machines go down, the data is preserved and not lost. High Availability (HA) is ensured
• Velocity releases: CTP2 now in PDC, CTP3 in Mix ’09 and release at Mid ’09 timeframe
• In V1.0 simple Add queries can be done. In later versions LINQ queries will be available.

You can read more on the CTP2 that got released today from the Velocity blog post here .

With what we were shown today of Velocity, especially its high availability, monitoring tools, ease of use and scalability are pretty impressive. I just hope this time they ship this and not go the previous paths.

This was by far the best session for me in PDC2008. It was SQL Server: Database to Data Platform - Road from Server to Devices to the Cloud by David Campbell, a Microsoft Technical Fellow and SQL Server guru. David was brilliant, you could clearly see and appreciate his deep expertise on the subject. He gave an overall view of what's happening with Database in the last few decades, how you can write very complex huge data applications today easily. And then he talked about where this SQL on cloud fits in, where it doesn't and so on. You can see two brief demos shown in the talk below.

David Campbell talking about Sync in Action with Sync Framework in the talk

Zach Skyles Owens of Microsoft showing the Trey Research Demo application

If you want to catch up fully on what David talked about here, you can watch this video he did few weeks before PDC2008 covering the same topic - I highly recommend you watching this.

You can see the photos I took from here.

Ray Ozzie

• For the last few years, the scope of enterprise applications are increasing. IT departments have to manage more of outside users (their customers) than their internal users
• More of IT Pros and Developers have to work together and learn together in this new cloud world
• More than ever the web site of an enterprise is critical to the overall business health
• Hat's off to Jeff Bezos and his team at Amazon for the phenomenal work they are doing with EC2 and Windows hosting. In ways we collaborate with them and in other ways we compete with them
• Today this cloud is another tier. The first tier is your PC or Mobile, it is all about you. The second tier is the enterprise and its scope is the size of the enterprise. The third tier is this cloud. To do this we had a team headed by David Cutler, Amitabh Srivatsa and others in Microsoft
• Today's systems whether it is Windows, Java or others are all modelled for scale-up. We need for the next 50 years, we need something that can scale out & parallel computing
• We announce today "Windows Azure". It is our new Windows (new OS) that supports all the infrastructure to power this cloud design. It is not a software, but a service that is running on Microsoft Datacenters, initially in USA then to be rolled out worldwide
• It will be the most environmentally sensitive, scalable, reliable service for all Microsoft hosting over the years
• Windows Azure works with the same tools - VB.NET 2008, C#, C++, .NET, etc. including both managed and un-managed code. Initially managed will be supported and later support for un-managed will be introduced
• There was a demo of a new services, a Mobile Phone discovery in neighbourhood using Bluetooth - bluehoo.com and client can be downloaded from m.bluehoo.com

Note: For the first time I saw Microsoft keynote speakers (Ray Ozzie and Amitabh Srivatsa) in a developer conference not wearing T-Shirts but are in formal attire with a blazer.  

Ray Ozzie's closing notes video below:

Bob Muglia

• There was demo of using .NET Services and SQL Services by RedPrairie and also of System Management "Atlanta". Atlanta uses SQL Services for customers to compare their instrumentation data with others and best practices
• This week we are releasing "Oslo" a new modelling tool and a language "m"

Dave Thomson

• Vice President of Microsoft Online, he has headed the team that developed Active Directory and in Exchange Server
• One of the problems to solve is federated identity. This is done by using Microsoft Services Connector which sites on-premises and then syncs it to the online cloud. This is currently used by Microsoft online services and will be the same used by Windows Azure.

I have been using as my primary laptop a Macbook Air running (obviously) Windows Vista for last six months. Everything is great with the laptop - the lightweight and the very cool design. There are only three things I don't like in this laptop: No right mouse button, Only one USB port, Problem with Wake up after sleep. The first two I can't do anything about, but the last one I can try to fix by a driver update. A check in Apple site didn't show up any updates for Bootcamp for Vista. Then looking into Device Manager I realized the graphics card in Macbook Air is Intel Mobile 965 Express, so going to Intel support site I downloaded the latest update: Mobile Intel® 965 Express Chipset Family Ver.# 15.11.3.1576 Date: Oct 11, 2008 for Windows Vista 32

Installing this, solved my wake up problems. If you have a Macbook Air, running Windows Vista and having problems with the machine coming up after sleep, I highly recommend this upgrade.

Today I got a chance to visit Cray Inc. (The supercomputer company) headquarters in downtown Seattle. I got to see in their lab the recently arrived Cray CX1 Supercomputer. This is the first product to be made after the partnership between Cray, Intel and Microsoft to bring the benefits of High Performance computing to desktops. This is a cool (with Cray's patented cooling systems and low decibel noise) computer that you can put it under your desk (or as a Cray engineer said on top of the desk to show the world you have a Cray machine) and run demanding applications without a datacenter.

The machine sports state of the art specifications of Up to Eight Blades per Chassis and in each chassis - Single or Dual Intel Quad-Core Xeons (overall upto 16 Quad Core Xeons), 64GB per Blade (or Node) and so on.

The basic chassis costs about $8000 and an average configuration including few compute, storage and graphics nodes costs between $25,000 to $60,000. Not that expensive for owning a supercomputer. The part I love is that it runs Windows HPC 2008 and the front-display panel sports a Windows CE for showing the status.

I wish I can get one of our media customers to pay for this and then we can deploy their web servers onto this!

I am in Bay Area, USA for 2 weeks which will take me to Silicon Valley, Redmond (WA) and Los Angeles (for Microsoft PDC '08). Sunday evening I went along with my cousin who lives here to Fremont Temple. This is a well maintained and spacious (considering it is outside India) temple and I was impressed by the newly build area for the south indian gods.

On Monday morning I went to the Intel Museum in their campus in Santa Clara (CA). The museum covers about the history of Intel from memory chips, 4004 to the latest chips; chip fabrication process and basics of silicon, etc. The self visit doesn't take more than 30 minutes and I will recommend visiting this only if you happen to be in Silicon Valley area. Not worth travelling from anywhere far for this. I was told most of this is available online in their website as well.

Seeing the Intel 386 PC on display brought old memories for me. I started learning and doing extensive programming first on this PC - a 386SX (without the math co-processor) computer from Wipro during my school days. It is on this PC I learned my first business programming language - FoxBase and then Clipper. It is amazing the progress we have had in terms of speed and features over the last 23 years - unbelievable.

Mozilla in their upcoming Firefox 3.1 release is introducing an experimental feature "Geode". Geode is about browser (and server) automatically deducing your location and provide appropriate location based information. Though Location-aware applications are present in Mobile Phones using Cell-Tower Triangulation or GPS, this is the first major effort to do something similar on the PCs.

Geode provides an early implementation of the W3C Geolocation specification and location information will be provided by one or more user selectable service providers and methods - GPS-based, WiFi-based, manual entry, etc. What I was curious is how they deduct location information using Wi-Fi. It seems they use a technology from a company called SkyHook, whose hybrid positioning system (XPS) is a software-only location solution that allows any mobile device with Wi-Fi, GPS or a cellular radio (GSM/CDMA) to determine its position with an accuracy of 10 to 20 meters. Click on the video below to see how it works - basically they are building huge database of Wi-Fi access points and correlating them with Latitude/Longitude information from other sources like GPS for each access point profiled.

All these are transparent to developers and users, for developers it is just a Javascript call like the one shown below:

navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(pos) {
  alert( pos.latitude + ", " + pos.longitude );
})

Before these initiatives web applications were limited to deducing user's location based on your IP. Technology is not standing still with IP based deduction, earlier they were limited to US cities, now database are more complete and are able to identify cities world over including India.

Related links: ZoneInfo database, GeoNames

Before I proceed let me state my position on this topic: I am not against Open-Source Software, at the same time I I believe like all other literary (creative) & engineering works software too needs to be based on a sound viable commercial model.

I came across this video of Stephen Fry celebrating 25 years of GNU and introducing "Free" Software. Being an award winning broadcasting professional Mr.Fry has done a great job of delivering a simple yet powerful message on what he believes on. But his introduction to "Free" Software and especially his plumbing analogy to be incorrect and can misguide general public. (Please see the video below before continuing)

Why?. He says just like you can change the plumbing in your house any way you want, "free" software allows you to change your computer the way you want it. Operating System vendors like Microsoft prevent you from doing this. Nothing can be far from truth.

All software vendors including Microsoft, Adobe or Apple have never placed any restrictions on how you can use your computers or on what applications you can write on top of them. The licensing comes when you want to change the core of their work (operating systems or software written by them) and then redistribute that resulting work. Going back to the plumbing analogy (which is a bad pick by Mr.Fry) this is like you wanting to cast your own steel pipes in a furnace and for doing it you want the pipe vendors to share their blue-prints and chemical composition "Free". Of course, there is nothing wrong in you wanting to do your own steel pipes if you want to, similarly no one prevents you (Microsoft/Adobe/Apple) from writing your own operating systems.

My whole point is it relevant for the masses, is it necessary?. I feel there are more pressing problems that can be attempted in the applications space, in the industry domains where the scarce human creative energies can be used on. Not on writing yet another Operating System, yet another UNIX/LINUX, yet another MS Office clone and so on - which is precisely what GNU has done.  To see this clearly you don't need to look far - just look at the number of Linux Distros that are out there.

In terms of software licensing if it is all about "Freedom" as GNU claims it to be, then my pick is always BSD style licensing over GNU. The difference being that GNU is of viral nature, meaning any resulting work needs to be GNU licensed, whereas BSD licensing doesn't put any such restrictions - you can do pretty much whatever you want.

Few months when the Petrol/Diesel shortage happened in India I decided I will buy an electric two-wheeler. Apart from the advantage of driving when Oil is scarce, I thought it will also give a personal satisfaction of being environment friendly. Of course, nothing is more "Green" than a bi-cycle. So about a month and half back I purchased the Ultra Velociti - an electric powered scooter. It runs only on Electricity with no Oil at all, the dealer claims there is nothing to maintain or service in the vehicle other than periodic Tyre Air-Pressure and Battery check.

Specifications of the scooter (* Under Standard Test conditions and a payload of 75 Kg):

• Speed    45 Km/ Hour*
• Range    50 Km/ Charge* (Each full charge takes about 6 hours)
• Vehicle weight    88 Kg

The only dealer I could find in Chennai when I searched was GEE GEE Motors in Royapuram, but they were willing to come down and give a test drive in my office. The scooter on road including Road Tax, Registration & Insurance costs about Rs.41,000/-. After paying the full money I had to wait for nearly 2 weeks before I got the vehicle complete with registration and Number - I don't like to drive vehicles without number and insurance.

Having been driving only a car for last several years, when this scooter arrived it was a experience of "Freedom" for me. I was able to go for local shopping in crowded market streets in West Mambalam & T.Nagar easily, without having to worry about parking and traffic. When I am driving this scooter and see the vehicles next to me I feel good that I am not polluting and I am spending negligible money for driving. Though the manual says maximum load is 120Kgs, I was able to ride it myself with my wife and kid comfortably - obviously a bit slower than riding it alone, but nevertheless you can. The one problem I faced was of charge, the power meter is unreliable - from full, once it drops to half it takes only few minutes to drop to zero. While it is in this region, it runs in kind of a stop-n-go motion. But this was because I didn't charge for over a week (though I didn't drive more than few kilometres as well), but it will be a wise idea to charge it every few days once - to avoid this problem.

 
(You can see the charger in the left picture, the other end can be plugged to any 5V socket; The Power-meter and Speedometer in the picture on right)

Overall I found it to be a great second vehicle. Can it be the only one?, I doubt. I feel the technology, power of the motor and the engineering have to undergo one or two more iterations before the first time two-wheeler purchaser can go for this, selecting this over a motorbike. 

Reference: GEE GEE MOTORS, 73, Mannarsamy Koil Street, Royapuram, Chennai.Phone: 044-43528008, 43528009

The recent issue of IEEE ITPro Magazine (July/August 2008) had carried a very interesting Editorial. It raised the question "A Moving Target: Try to Define the IT Workforce", where it pointed that job titles in IT industry were being invented and qualifications were shifting daily. It uses the US Bureau of Labor's List of IT Jobs and arrives at a suggestion of a short list of 3 distinct "identities" in IT today:

1. computer scientist
2. software engineer, and
3. IT Professional

In the above list probably it is easier to understand "IT Professionals" as a broad designation. And the other two as niches within that.

The authors Keith W.Miller and Jeffrey Voas clarifies those two roles in detail as "Both software engineer(s) and computer scientist(s) think of software artifacts as means to ends, but those ends are distinctive. A computer scientists sees the artifact as an object of study, a source of experiments and data to analyze.  A software engineer sees the artifact as a tool to accomplish a customer goal, a method to solve a practical problem. Both could be interested in exactly the same piece of software - perhaps even the same aspect of it - but their goals will likely be quite different". 

You can read the full article from here (for short time only unless you are a member) from IEEE IT PRO - JULY/AUGUST 2008

According to a recent release from market research firm Gartner where it listed the Top 10 disruptive technologies it believes will reshape between 2008-2012:

1. Multicore and hybrid processors
2. Virtualisation and fabric computing
3. Social networks and social software
4. Cloud computing and cloud/Web platforms
5. Web mashups
6. User Interface
7. Ubiquitous computing
8. Contextual computing
9. Augmented reality
10. Semantics

When I see a list like this with overused and often repeated items like Multicore and Social Networking (though both of them are important technologies in the next 5 years), I get a feeling they overshadow the others. If you ask me for one technology that is under-hyped from this list but most important it will be "Contextual Computing".

I don't know Gartner's definition of this term, but when I think of "Contextual Computing" and its possibilities it is mind boggling - sky is definitely the limit with this. Contextual Computing is applicable in both enterprise and in consumer facing applications. Particularly in the consumer space it is all about catering to the basic human emotion of wanting to be listened and get a feeling of being cared for.  Present day examples of this can be seen (roughly) in the Microsoft Office 2007 Ribbon user interface or more clearly in Amazon's recommendations feature. Even these two are just scratching the surface. All of today's software (Internet/Enterprise) applications are mostly designed for doing a single task at a time with the user interface and workflow almost linear, but in real world we are never linear, our thoughts are always in parallel running various tasks each triggered by the context at that time. This is were I feel "Contextual Computing" can make a great impact. For realizing the true potential of this the software development tools and all the other 9 technologies listed above have to evolve greatly. When computer scientists understand how to implement this, only then we will harness the benefits of the digital world to the fullest.

What are your thoughts on this , post your comments here.

From Venkatarangan's Jaipur Photo Album (See the other photos as well)

We had a wonderful trip last four days, no rain and we got clear views of all places we went. As I said in the previous post we stayed in "The Trident", Jaipur. Trident is on the highway going to Amber fort, opposite to Jal Mahal. When I booked after seeing the hotel in their website, I thought the Hotel is on the river bank (as shown in the left photo below) and it will be great.  When I actually went there I realized that the hotel is on the other side of the road, and in between there is a park. One good service in the hotel is that of "Kids Club" where you leave your kids safe and they have toys, TV, books, games and trained people to take care. My son Vaageesh loved the place, I wish all other vacation hotels adopt this. The view from the park to Jal Mahal is beautiful but the park maintenance and cleanliness have to be improved greatly.

Day 1: In Mumbai we had few hours for transit from Chennai to Jaipur, I decided to go out of Airport rather than spend few hours inside. We took a taxi and went to Oberoi Mall (Dindoshi, Gen AK Vaidya Marg, Off Western Express Highway) which is probably the closest mall to Mumbai Domestic Airport. It took some 20 minutes one way, we had a good time there and had a great UP style vegetarian Thali (set lunch) at Sanskriti restaurant. We arrived in Jaipur in the late evening and after check in I went to their travel desk (which is oddly not manned by the Hotel but by Avis). When I approached the Avis representative, for planning my itinerary for sight-seeing next few days, he was only interested in selling his "Car Rental" services. He started the conversion by saying and then repeating Avis'es full-day/half-day charges, I had to raise my voice before he started to talk about the itinerary. Though he said it was not required, I insisted on having a "Guide" to accompany on both the days so that we can understand what we are seeing.

Day 2: On the second day we started around 9:30AM and went first to Amber Fort, which is near-by to the Hotel. The fort is not at a high altitude so the car journey to the top took only few minutes. If you wish you can travel royally in a Elephant Ride to the top which costs about Rs.550 per person. Amber fort has a beautiful palaces used by the kings then - a Summer palace and a Winter palace. We then went to see the Madhavendara Palace inside Nahargarh Fort. The palace has 9 compartments for king's 9 queens - it struck me if the king married once more for 10th time, he would have had a tough time expanding the palace!. Each Queen's compartment is self-contained with a Kitchen, Bedroom and Living area - you can see most of these rooms intact with the furnishings & fittings removed. The top of the fort has an excellent view of the entire Jaipur city. Our guide Mr.Rajiv did a great job in showing us all the places and explaining it in detail. (You can see the photo album for more details on what we saw).

For lunch we went to Pink City Restaurant which served good Thali and you can see the cooking clearly as they have an open kitchen. After lunch, we went to Jaipur Mall we saw how the block printing is done in textiles using natural vegetable colours.

Our guide recommended us to try staying in heritage hotels like Samode Haveli in our subsequent trips to Jaipur.

In the evening: We went to the famous tourist restaurant - Chokhi Dhani which is nearly 1 Hour drive (closer to airport) from Trident. It is a theme restaurant on a wide open space modelled like a typical village market of Rajasthan. Entry fee is Rs.300 per person which includes Dinner. They are open only from 6PM to 11PM. My son loved the rides - you have camel rides, elephant rides, horse cart rides and more. There is also model Rajasthani village houses for you to see. We stood in the dinner queue for over 30 minutes before being let in (crowded). The seating was in the ground with traditional low-height table for eating. The food was rich with lots of butter and ghee in almost all dishes- so be careful to eat limited if you wish not to gain weight. You can unlimited helpings of all the served items.

Day 3: Today we had another guide Mr.Vijay Singh for our city tour of Jaipur. We saw Hawa Mahal from road, I believe there is nothing much to see nowadays inside. Then we went to Birla Mandir and had a good darshan there.  

Then we went to Jantar Mantar (which is near city palace) the centuries old Sun Dials and other instruments which were way ahead of their times in their accuracy of readings. The large instruments there are believed to be used for both Astronomy and Astrology. Our next stop was City Palace.  We saw the 350Kgs Silver urn used by one of the earlier Kings to carry Ganges water during his visit to London. Apart from the usual items that you will see in a palace, there was a huge display of weapons in the Queen's Area of the palace. It had variety of daggers - one that can open up and be turned for maximum damage to the victim, one that shoot apart from the cut, 15Kg swords, metal helmet cutters and more. The kings seem to have spent a lot of money and talent, on fighting wars and building weapons. (You can see the photo album for more details on what we saw)

We had lunch in Peacock Restaurant which had a decent food but a very ordinary service, so if you are not near-by you may want to skip this restaurant.   

In the evening: We went for shopping to Jaipur Haat (which was walkable distance from the hotel) and bought some traditional style dresses. The varieties and the service was excellent, though the dresses were little pricey.

Day 4: We left this day intentionally free, spending the time relaxing in the room. In the evening we went for a walk to Jal Mahal (the mosquitos were too much on the road, making it difficult to walk).

In the afternoon there was a lively session by TV fame (Cricket Commentator) Harsha Bhogle. He was representing his management consultancy firm Prosearch Consultants. The talk was on T20 Cricket game and the differences of the format with One-Day / Test cricket. The title was very apt as the Microsoft Event was also titled "Together To Outperform - T2O". Harsha drew brilliant parallels (in a extremely light manner) between T20 as a sport and situations in today's corporate world.

He was extremely hilarious, throwing many funny punch lines, few of them below:

- All Good Lines are Unfair (including whatever I just now said)

- He didn't have time (came that fast) to drop the ball

Amongst the points he covered:

- The T20 format demands that "Performance on the Day matters, not reputation", "Shape up or ship out", "Any team can win, no underdogs", "No time for course correction". In T20 you need Wartime leaders and not Peacetime managers.

- When you have right partnerships, the sum of 1 + 1 can be 3. Like Paes/Bupathi, West Indies Past bowler pack including Malcolm Marshall (they hunted like a pack, it was We over Me), Cycle champion Armstrong and his US Postal team colleagues who went before him uphill and he rode on their slipstream

-Unlike earlier formats in Cricket,  in T20 you had to go after audience and advertise. You have to excite people on their second identity (apart from an Indian) which was of their city/region. This was a litmus test, which IPL passed. 

- Players in IPL T20 were not needed to be trained, you paid (bought) for them - just like in business with 30% attrition rates today why will you want to train, you will only want to hire from others . You could source talent not locally but from around the world, so your incentive for training got reduced in IPL T20.

- Another thing that IPL T20 did was to put world champions and unknown local players in the same team. They had to get together and work as a team nearly overnight. They didn't have any bonding glues - no common heritage, no common geography, no common in experience; still had to perform as a team.

- Marketing was new to cricket with T20. You had owners from 3 diverse fields came together - Cricket, Film & Business houses.

Switching on to serious subjects discussed during the Partner Summit:

• I heard this nice management quote "Accelerate at corners", that's what F1 champions do. Everyone can accelerate in straight road and everyone slows down in corners, that's an opportunity for you to accelerate". The famous Lance Armstrong,rides on the rider's slip stream in front of him
• In India especially in E-Governance the discussions mostly are hijacked by technology arguments. It has to be debated on outcome and objectives
• In India for education there is no dearth of funds for education related IT. It is about sustainability and proving their effectiveness
• Microsoft India on their part through Project Shiksha have trained over 265,000 teachers over last 4 years, each for a minimum of 15 days
  

For last two days I am attending Microsoft India Partner Summit titled "T20" at Mumbai. Yesterday there was a written quiz on Microsoft Virtualization , I attempted just for fun. Generally I am not lucky to win any prizes, but today was my day.

In the morning they announced my name as one of the winners for XBOX 360, I was happy to collect it. On my way back to my room I was invited to a game show where they had questions on Windows Live/Vista/IE 8 and were giving prizes up to 10 Grams of Gold. I played and answered a simple question on Windows Live (being a Windows Live MVP does help) and won a 2GB USB Thumb-Drive.

Since I got my prize, I helped the gentleman next to me to answer the next question and he won the 10 Grams of Gold

More than 70% of Indian IT Exports are to United States and exports outside of United States as well are mostly priced in US Dollars (USD). So the movement of USD with respect to Indian Rupee (INR) is of paramount importance to the industry. The economical concept at play here is very simple, gains made by USD are better for us - we get to make more Rupees per Dollar of revenue. In other words we favour INR to depreciate. This is directly opposite to what the Indian Government and other importers will desire - as for every dollar they import they have to pay more Rupee. Government is the largest importer especially of Oil which is mostly priced in Dollars.

Unlike the bigger players in the Industry, SME companies like Vishwak have little room to maneuver to get end customer prices (marked in USD) increased, most of the time our contract prices are negotiated a year in advance. We can improve productivity and reduce operational costs, but their impact is limited to few percentage points, nowhere near the 10% swing that has happened in the last one year in Dollar value. Till about few months we were worried due to strengthening of Rupee, but in the last two quarters the trend reversed. Today the Dollar hit a high note of Rs. 44.89, compared to Rs.40.63 exactly a year before - exactly a 10% swing the other way. One of the financial instruments available for exporters is Forward contract (Hedging).

Forward Contract: It is a contract between the bank and its customers in which the exchange/conversion of currencies would take place at a future date at a rate of exchange agreed in advance under a contract. The essential idea of entering into a forward contract is to peg the price and thereby avoid the price risk.

RBI allows you to take these forward contracts for next 12 months (sliding window). Like many other SMEs at Vishwak we normally cover say 60-70% of our receivables for next 12 months. This has been helping us when the Dollar kept depreciating like it did for the first half of this year and whole of last year. But since the trend reversed in the last two quarters we have started losing nearly Rs.4 per dollar (10%) - of course this risk was always there just like in any other financial instruments. Our Hedging taken last year (in July/August '07 for July '08 and so on) for this financial year (Apr '08 to Mar '09) has been at various levels around Rs.39 to Rs.41, but the current rate is Rs.44.89.

This made me interested to dig into this a little deeper, so I headed to RBI's archive site and pulled out last 13 months data and plotted it into a chart in Excel (you can download the excel sheet I prepared from here). Below is the chart - you can see clearly the wild swings of Dollar.

I noticed the following few points of interest from the above chart:

1. Dollar made a decline from Rs.41.24 to Rs.39.91 between 29/Aug/07 to 20/Sep/07. Nearly Rs.1.33 change.
2. Continued to stay in the band of Rs.39 for next 7 months till 23/Apr/08
3. Dollar made a rise from Rs.39.95 to Rs.42.56 between 23/Apr/08 to 26/May/08. Nearly Rs.2.61 change.
4. Dollar made a rapid rise from Rs.42.82 to Rs.44.21 in just 15 days between 14/Aug/08 to 01/Sep/08. Nearly Rs.1.39 change.
5. Dollar continues to rise with hitting a high note at Rs.44.89 today

If you have tried to do a decent chart or graph or any line drawings in HTML/CSS you would have felt extremely frustrated, more so you want it to be cross-browser compatible. Though SVG and VML have been around for years, the support for them is not uniform between browsers. Recently in a newsletter from Sitepoint I came across Raphaël - a small JavaScript library (less than 19Kb in filesize) written by Dmitry Baranovskiy of Atlassian, that allows you to create and manipulate vector graphics in your web pages. It's simple to use and supports Internet Explorer 6.0+, Safari 3.0+, Firefox 3.0+, and Opera 9.5+. Internally Raphaël uses VML in IE and SVG in the other browsers.

Raphaël is published under MIT License which basically allows you to use the code in both commercial and non-commercials applications and even redistribute freely (as in free beer).

To do the above graph, you need to write only 30 lines of Javascript. Check it out.

Truly one of India's 20th and 21st Century industrial success story is of Tata Steel. The first time I read about them was in the earlier book of R.M.Lala "Creation of Wealth", which was more of an overview of entire Tata Group. In his new book "The Romance of Tata Steel" Lala has focused only on Tata Steel. The author traces a hundred years and more of exciting history of Tata Steel—from men searching for iron ore and coking coal in jungle areas, traversing in bullock carts before the site was found, to the company’s modern status as a world-class company.

Though the writing style makes it appear like a Textbook, you can still enjoy it. You learn that though the initial crew of the plant in Jamshedpur was of a medley of nationalities, it worked well to a great extend  - the Crew of Steel works and superintendent were Germans, the English worked in the Ring Rolling Mills, Clerical Staffs were chiefly Bengalis and Parsis, a certain number of Austrians, Italians and Swiss worked in other departments, and the Chinese worked as carpenters and in pattern shop.  One of the interesting quotes in the book is made by R.D.Tata on 4th June 1925:

"We are like men building a wall against the sea. It would be the height of folly on our part to give away any part of the cement that is required to make the wall secure. That is why we and you have to use this money ... to build this great industry"

For any entrepreneur like me, it is inspiring to read the innovative HR practices that Tata Steel has pioneered over the years. After finishing the book we are left with true admiration for the vision of Jamshedji Tata in setting up Tata Steel and Jamshedpur city.

I have never been into reading poetry, poems or other forms of heavy literature. I have only read Shakespeare's works in few chapters in English textbooks and seeing the plays in few movies. So why did I pick this book, which is a biography of Shakespeare - simply because of "Bill Bryson" name in the title. I have enjoyed so much his previous books "The Thunderbolt Kid" and  "Neither here Nor there", that the minute I saw his name I bought the book. Anyways after buying it, I decided to read it. And in the course of reading I learned a great deal about Elizabethan times and of course about Shakespeare. Of course, Bryson with his signature humour has handled the subject very easy to read and enjoy.

Little is known about Shakespeares life, and in this biography Bryson makes no attempt to expand on the known details. Starting by presenting the paucity of facts, he goes on to sketch the life of the worlds greatest playwright, from Stratford to London and back again. He also discusses the theories suggesting that Shakespeares works were written by someone else, dismissing them as ludicrous. We learn a great deal from the book:

• That Shakespeare names is written with different spellings throughout his life and after. Oxford English Dictionary endorses the spelling Shakspere.
• He created the most number of un-prefixes words including unmask, unhand, unlock, untie, unveil and more
• He created numerous new words in English including excellent, extract, frugal, critical, antipathy, hereditary, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, well-read, indistinguishable and others. Imagine an English language without these words!
• In his works, Shakespeare is known to have used over 29,066 words
• If we take Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as our guide, then Shakespeare produced roughly one-tenth of all the most quotable utterances written or spoken in English. These included Vanish into thin air, budge an inch, bag and baggage, cold comfort, flesh and blood, foul play, tower of strength, foregone conclusion and many others.
• English was rising in his times as it is telling, that William Shakespeare's birth is recorded in Latin but that he dies in English as "William Shakespeare, Gentleman"

I searched for articles on India's performance in Beijing Olympics so far and so I typed in Google "India Olympics". I was surprised to the see the first result as the medal count tally (see screen shot below). Checked it in Live Search as well on how smart it was behaving. It too gave similar results and added more details than Google. If Search Engines improve at this same rate, I guess we will one day have them answer any question we throw at them (Do you think this will happen or it is only a science fiction, please post it in the comments)

I am very happy when I first heard the news in Radioone while driving to work in the morning now. India's Abhinav Bindra has won a gold in men's 10-metre Air Rifle event in Beijing.This is India's first ever Olympic gold in any individual event and ninth in total. So far the nine gold medals have been won in group events like Hockey. India is growing by every other parameter in the last 50 years - whether it is eradicating poverty, education, economy, Nuclear Power, IT Services, etc. but it was a shame that India hasn't performed well in sports. We are all celebrating this in our company now with some Cadbury's chocolates. 

 
(Image Courtesy: NDTV and DD Sports Live)

The New Imperialists (How Five Restless Kids Grew up to virtually rule your world) by Mark Leibovich is a book I read recently. Though the book that talks about 5 technology leaders and visionaries is little old (it was written in 2001/2002 and a lot happens in technology industry in 5 years) I still purchased the book as I got it for a steal in Landmark sale last year (Rs.149 against the original price of Rs.1025, a saving of nearly $22). 

Leibovich a technology reporter for the Washington Post sets out to explain why he selected this particular 5 people whom he calls "The New Imperialists". The list of 5 are AOL's Steve Case, Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos, Cisco's John Chambers, Oracle's Larry Ellison and of course Microsoft's Bill Gates. Leibovich tries to show throughout the book that these men's ruthless drive must stem from childhood and the reason he calls them imperialists are because they are near equivalent of modern-day emperors. Leibovich's narrative style which makes the reading very lively and you can't keep the book down without completing it. If you thought you know a lot about these 5 people, Leibovich tries his best to show a side of them public haven't seen before. At the same time the book is not imtruding their privacy and most of it seem to be written with the individuals (or their PR) permission. 

He talks about Ellison's Larryland near hills of Woodside designed by a Japanese Zen Monk; about how Jeff Bezos wrote the business plan for Amazon on a car trip with his girlfriend to Seattle and about Jeff's thing; How John Chambers battled dyslexia and for a time believed he was stupid; The equation and friendship between Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer and how the loss of his best friend Kent Evans 30 years affected Bill Gates; How Steve Case saw with clarity what was happening with the connected world.

For nearly two decades now we haven't seen any innovation in design from makers of Wintel PCs or laptops. Over the last few years it has been solely Apple that was coming out with cool designs - whether it was Mac Mini or Macbook Air. So I was happy to see finally a PC manufacturer investing on design. I am talking here about the new Dell Hybrid desktops. Check them out they don't seem to have compromised on the technical specifications either which seems to include everything you may want in an average desktop PC - Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, Vista OS, 320GB HDD, DVD Writer, 5 USB, IEEE 1394, Ethernet, Wi-Fi and more. What is very cool is the availability of a Eco-Friendly Bamboo casing.

I wish this is just a beginning of design innovation coming from all the competitors in the Wintel PC world (Dell, Lenovo and HP) and we will see some new form factors in laptops as well.

Two weeks back on my way back to Chennai in Mumbai Airport I picked up this book - Cold Steel "Lakshmi Mittal and the Multi-Billion-Dollar Battle for a Global Empire" by Tim Bouquet and Byron Ousey. The book is about the story of the world’s biggest and most hard-fought industry takeover of recent years. It is the story of Lakshmi Mittal taking over (or merging) with European steel giant Arcelor to form ArcelorMittal.  What I liked about the book was that it is told in a thriller fashion on what happened each day of this six month battle. Each day is being narrated by the authors in a scene by scene fashion including dialogs spoken. Once you start reading the book you can't keep it down.

I always admired Mr.Mittal for his humble beginnings to become the "King of Steel" and for his vision which he followed to grow his company at unprecedented rates. His growth story is something that is made of numerous acquisitions of assets around the world which have all been successfully integrated. My admiration keeps growing as I read more - all his ventures have been outside his home country (India) in all far off places of the world and he still proudly sports an Indian Passport.  This book goes into detail of all the things (Politics and Racism) that happened behind closed doors to prevent him from taking over Arcelor. As the book says it - Mr.Mittal certainly is someone who is "Stoic" - a term meaning someone who just puts up with whatever is thrown at them. It is a very apt term to summarize what Mr.Mittal had to put up with during this battle - right from Racist like comments to protective behaviour of several European governments and finally the unprecedented stone-walling by Arcelor board for every step of Mr.Mittal.

The takeaway for me as a Corporate head from the book was how the entire team at Mittal Steel worked together as a single team to triumph over the fragmented Arcelor team. Consider the fact that Mittal Steel team was not composed of one organization but it nearly a dozen entities from Investment bankers, lawyers, PR Agencies, to Mr.Aditya Mittal and Mr.Lakshmi Mittal himself. The whole battle is pure project management brilliance of how all of them were kept in sync, said the same story, were in the same page all the time. Add to that the fact they used modern communication tools (Email and Blackberries) for effective collaboration increased my interest on reading the book fully.

I highly recommend this book for any one wanting to survive in today's globalized corporate world.

I had written earlier about Microsoft Surface, but today I got a chance to play with it in person for sometime. I am in Redmond, WA this week and was visiting one of the Microsoft offices where they had kept a Surface computer for demo. Surface is one cool technology that you got to use for getting a good feel. It definitely has great potential of changing the way we interact with computers.

Even if you have a hard disk with hundreds of GBs, you will run out of space soon. At that time you want to see what is taking most of the space. Using Windows Explorer and going to each folder is a time consuming job. Several years back I got introduced to a tool called "Tree Size" that displays chart like bars against each folder so that you can easily see the usage. Today I found a free tool to do the same thing better - WinDirStat. Apart from bars, it displays a beautiful squarisish picture of the usage based on file types. Check it out.

The other day in a dinner conversation the topic was on how India has a nation has grown in spite of everything - Corruption, Inefficient bureaucracy and all the differences. That's when this book came up "In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce". I bought the book immediately and I finished reading it during my travel now.

The book is an excellent work done by Mr.Edward Luce, who is a journalist with Financial Times. During his various assignments he had worked in London, New Delhi and now in Washington. Mr.Luce  is best suited to do this book because of his long stay in India, his wife being an Indian and finally he being a Britisher (lot of things in India are still colonial hangovers). Without these background he couldn't have done such a wonderful job.

Mr.Luce finely balances a westerner viewpoint and Indian insight in a lucid manner - you don't see contradictions anywhere. Many things about India is puzzling to understand even for Indians, and many times you have to go back to long gone history to truly understand. For doing this Mr.Luce start with detail of larger than life figure of 3 modern day Indians - Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and BR Ambedkar. People who know India know that North India is very different from South India and so on., so Mr.Luce seems to have done extensive travel to report both sides.

I was happy to read about the good things he talks about the work of my state (Tamilnadu) government. I learned many things from the book about India that I didn't know before or haven't seen it that way. One observation I really liked is Mr.Luce's case on how several welfare programs in India like anti-poor program, literacy programs, free power, labour laws which are all created with good intentions are not effective because of the very bureaucracy that is created to run it.  Mr.Luce talks with ease of both India's strength and weakness.

If you are an Indian or someone interested about India, this is a must read book. Thank you Mr.Luce.

Few weeks back I had a strange problem, my Vista installation kept saying it is going to expire in 11 days. If you see the above image of the Control Panel-Systems says Windows is Activated. So I was puzzled, how can something that is activated can expire. Strangely the same error kept coming in few other machines in our office. 

After several hours with Microsoft PSS on phone, they diagnosed the issue in my machine to be a time-bombed SP1. Since I was in the beta program of SP1, I had downloaded the RTM of SP1 from Connect which was time-bombed. The safe way is to get SP1 through Windows Update or Microsoft Downloads.

I uninstalled this SP1, installed a fresh one from download.microsoft.com; now my machine is fine. I had trouble with installing Windows Search 4.0, which also got resolved after the fresh SP1 install.

Following Microsoft's retiring of Windows XP on 30th June, there has been lot of talk on the Internet on how Windows XP is better Windows Vista. I love Windows Vista and I have been using it from Beta days. I will never even dream of going back to XP. Why?.

• The UAC prompts are certainly annoying, needs to be turned off for a "Developer" machine which is what I did in my Work PC. I have it ON in my Home PC and Laptop and it works great in both machines. It gives me confidence that no rogue application can harm my PC or data
• The Visual Aero interface certainly makes the user experience more pleasing. After all you are starring at your PC for more than 8 hours a day, so why not have some pleasing effects in it
• Last and the most important for me is the integrated Search. With the new Windows Desktop Search 4.0 which made search in Vista faster, I cannot think of going back to Windows XP. The convenience of searching from Start button or in any Explorer Windows is a sure productivity gain

If you are wondering why am I talking about Vista here which is not connected to the title of this post, answer is in the next paragraph.

Microsoft rightfully abandoned the original Windows XP code and started Vista (internally called Refreshed the code) from the more stable Windows Server 2003 code base (as reported few years back in WSJ). Now few critics of Vista are asking Microsoft to scrap Vista code-base and to start a new Windows OS from scratch - something like basing it on MinWin kernel. Within "Techies" there is always an urge to do everything from scratch - this is one of the never ending arguments in Software industry. Is it good to keep patching a code/application (or) to bite the bullet, scrap the code and rewrite from scratch. I believe there is no single correct answer for this and it depends on the parameters.  But the question keeps coming up in daily situations. To answer that read Joel Spolsky's post back from 2000 - I don't agree with many of his recent posts but this post is a master-piece and a must read for all developers.

Last weekend while doing some room cleaning, I came across an old photo album (you remember those chemically processed photos from photo studios). It was the photographs of my first USA trip in 1999. I selected few of them and uploaded it to my online album. You can see me "younger" than today and without spectacles .

(Below) With Actress Ramba in Frankfurt Airport (1999)	(Below) With Actor Vijay in Frankfurt Airport (1999)
(Top) In 1999 in New York with World Trade Center (Twin Towers) behind me in the horizon	(Top) In 1999 in New York on top of the World Trade Center (Twin Towers) observation deck

BTW, I don't know Actor Vijay or Actress Ramba in person. Just happened to get out from the business class together with them and I requested them for a quick "snap". Fortunately I remembered to carry my pocket camera in my backpack then (of course, nowadays every one has a Mobile Phone with Camera).

Last few days there has been buzz around Adobe's announcement of collaboration with Google and Yahoo! to improve the ability of search engines to index Flash files better - which are normally .SWF binary files. Instead of coming with open XML based file formats Adobe has chosen to offer an "optimised" (basically a server component) version of Flash Player that sits on a search engine's server and checks for Flash at the same time as HTML.

Compare this with Microsoft's Silverlight. Silverlight applications are packaged in a XAP file (which are simply a zip) format and any static textual content is in the XAML files. XAML files are nothing more than a well-defined XML file, this means even today without any special API search engines can index Silverlight Applications. In addition Silverlight apps supports deep linking which is important for facilitating relevance, very much like HTML's nested links concept. For more details see this post here by Microsoft's Nikhil Kothari on how Silverlight by design is Search Engine friendly.

Anyways, this is a very important step that Adobe that has announced. Flash is currently the entrenched player in the RIA space having more than 95% of market share. This has resulted in enormous amount of content being out there in the Web in Flash file formats. These have been so far out of reach of Search Engines and any attempt by Adobe to make it reachable is welcome. And any competition here between Adobe and Microsoft is also a welcome one.

Recently I received a report on the vision of Tamilnadu Government for how the business climate should be in year 2025 in the state. The report was a joint work by CII (Confederation of Indian Industries) and Tamilnadu Government (TN Gov). 

I saw one interesting statistics that stood out among the report's many pages. It was the number of days it takes to start a business in Tamilnadu (to a large extend it is same across India) - it is currently a whooping "41" days. I was not surprised, since I run my own business for last 10 years and have been through these hurdles of bureaucracy many times.

Most recently I had to do this (starting a business) once more, this time for my family business and it took me nearly 5 to 6 weeks. At this time we still we have VAT registration pending. To be fair, few days out of this was due to my end delays as well.

1. We started with registering the new "Private Limited" (Limited Liability Company)  with Registrar of Companies (RoC). For this the first step is to get name clearance (name of the company shouldn't be conflicting with the said/unsaid guidelines or with other existing businesses). This took some time.
2. Then comes the actual registration which involved multiple iterations of submission of our MoA and AoA (Memorandum of Articles and Article of Association). Each time we had to take a print, sign the paper, scan it, then digitally sign it and then upload it as a PDF file to the site. Once approved, you need to follow this by a hard-copy submission(sometimes they may ask for the hard-copy for each iteration as well) of the documents.  Once this is done.
3. First board meeting and resolutions to be passed
4. Followed by getting an Income Tax PAN Number
5. Then comes opening of a Bank Account
6. Then comes applying for Service Tax Number or TIN (Tamilnadu VAT Number) and CST (Central Sales Tax). The choice between Service Tax and Sales Tax registration is depending on the nature of your business.

After all this only you can start your functioning. There will be more steps if you are involved in manufacturing, which depending on the industry has various other registration formalities. Compare all this is the time it took to open a business in USA - we opened our 100% subsidiary sitting from India in less than few days through the help of a CPA locally in India - everything happened through online. I remember reading that New Zealand, Canada and Australia with USA tops for the shortest days required to open a business. For information on doing businesses around the world, see this world bank funded site.

With the above experience I should say it is definitely commendable of Tamilnadu Government to even dream a "2" day timescale for this by 2025.

Few weeks back I was with a developer doing a code-review for one of his application. The application was a Windows Forms Application written in C# that monitors several running jobs and reports on any event/failure found in the log file.

Many gaps came up in the review which made me thinking (me thinking is surprising isn't it), hence this post. The abstractions in the form of frameworks and IDEs that are available today make programming definitely accessible but at what cost. Do they make a formal (structured) learning of programming unnecessary?. Are today's engineers getting away by not following any coding disciplines like the one's enforced by my mentor(s) and teachers when I learned programming. Before I continue this rattle and list the items let me clarify, I am not intending this post to be a comprehensive check list - it just happens to be the issues I noticed in this particular incident. I have grouped few of my findings in sections.

Reading a configuration file

• When reading a configuration file (like .config/xml) to load values, validate whether the file exists. If file is not present either load default values and proceed  (or) exit gracefully. Having a simple try/catch  block doesn't mean you have handled all exceptions and you no further work
• Try not to read the entire file to memory. In .NET this will be for example using StreamReader.ReadToEnd method. Think about what will happen if you the file has been corrupted or wrongly replaced with a 10GB video file. You will crash the machine by running out of memory. In typical configuration files especially for your applications you can identify the maximum likely size which will be say few MBs. So in .NET try to use StreamReader.ReadLine for as many lines as you will need
• Similarly don't load the entire XML into XMLDOM (like by using XmlDocument) where it is not necessary. Instead try to use XmlReader which is a stream based XML processor and doesn't take up memory (many times of the full XML filesize)

UI Related items

• While designing design the work flow and the steps with the user of the application in mind. Think about the likely steps the user will follow. Do not design with your code flow as the steps. In this application this meant not having to select a configuration file and global settings screen as first step in the Tab order. Instead have the first screen after application launch as the one the user will use repeatedly

In an earlier project I gave the complete UI design specification in Visio format to a developer that avoided all the iterations and confusions. You can read about that in this earlier post.

According to Taxman in India, from 1st June 2008 (after this year Union Budget was passed) a licensed software like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office is both a Service and a Product. While world over taxes are being simplified, streamlined and modernized keeping pace to technology - in India our Finance Ministry has proven its fondness for complicating existing laws and getting into legal word tangles. This is in spite of record tax collections in the last few years, this year TDS (with holding tax) collection were up by a whopping 60% from last year. 

While change of classification of software may seem insignificant it has real impact on the tax that a consumer/business is charged while buying a software package. Earlier all Packaged Software/License were treated as a sale of product and charged VAT @ 4% to 12% (varied by state). Now all software are treated as a services as well. It is not reclassified from Product to Service but classified to be both - strange is India's tax laws!. The industry is suffering for the last few weeks with all major dealers and distributors waiting for some clarity from government as this change will result in a tax of 24% on licensed (legal) software, which is absurd. In India Service Tax is Central (Federal) subject, VAT is State subject - so both don't want to clarify this situation.

This week I couldn't buy a software that I needed because of this issue. My regular dealer refused to give me a quotation for few products that I wanted because of this legal mess. He said in his 25 years of being in the business this is the first time he has stopped billing for over 3 weeks. What is even more strange is that none of the software industry bodies are vocally raising this issue to the government - may be they feel the government has no ears to serious issues like these, they are busy listening to the daily threats from the left parties

The other day I wanted to password protect for privacy a word document before emailing it. I came across 3 different features in Word that are related to security and it was confusing at first. It took me sometime and few web searches to figure it out. Though the features can be accessed from the Ribbon they are spread over different places. It is much easier to access them from one place - which is the Office Button on the Left Hand Top corner, then selecting the "Prepare" option as shown below.

1. Digital Signature: This requires you buying a Digital (SSL) certificate from a Third Party costing around USD 90 per year before you can do anything useful. Signing with this gives it legal validity in countries that support it. Any changes made to the document after the signing, breaks the signature. This way it validates the integrity of a document (as long the signature is present, the document hasn't been tampered). It doesn't offer any significant privacy benefits.

2. Restrict Permission: This uses the Microsoft IRM (Information Rights Management) service. Using this with a Windows Live ID (Free) or a IRM Server running in your company, you can assign permissions and access level to the document.  With the Windows Live ID feature, the recipients need not be in your corporate network, it will as long as they have a Hotmail ID (Live ID).

3. Encrypt Document: This is a simple password protect feature. Assign a password and then only people with the password can open the document. 

All the above three features are present in Excel and PowerPoint 2007 as well.

The other day on the Internet I saw the above photos of the next version of One Laptop Per Child Program. What struck me very interesting was the absence of Keyboard (hence absence of mechanical failures) and the ability for two children to share it at the same time - very valuable in developing countries and for play. You have a touch-screen that works as a keyboard - hopefully doing Non-English language with this Virtual Keyboard will be supported and native.

The original blog post from which I took the above chart is from here. It talks about how any one at any age with learning and practice can become an Expert. A nice piece to read and think about.

In the last two to three quarters we are seeing a huge surge in SharePoint projects and as a result the demand of SharePoint developers is sky rocketing. Initially we were thinking this to be a local (India) phenomena but when I talk to many of my contacts in the industry worldwide and check out articles in the Internet, it turns out to be a worldwide phenomena.

Below are some random resources on SharePoint that might be useful for developers:

• A site from Microsoft with lots of material for .NET Developers looking at Sharepoint - MS SharePoint Developer
• New release of a Visual Studio 2008 extensions for SharePoint
• Best practices on SharePoint workflow applications
• Best practices on SharePoint memory management
• SharePoint developer forum in MSDN

One of the compelling reasons I tell customers and friends for upgrading from Windows XP to Windows Vista is the extremely easy to use yet powerful backup feature. All it takes is three clicks to backup your entire computer to a removable USB storage or DVDs. You can backup a partition or folders to another partition. And the entire backup procedure for few hundred gigabytes of files takes less than an hour the first time itself, after that the incremental backup get done in minutes. The best part is that the backup is stored in VHD (Virtual PC format) format, which is a fully documented and free to use file specification. This means even if Microsoft restore utility is unable to open the VHD file, some 3rd party utility may be able to open it. I have been using the backup feature for nearly a year and I am very pleased with it. Recently when I had trouble with Windows in my Home PC, I restored my backup that was taken few months back - the entire restore process worked flawlessly and my Windows installation was good as new. 

Today before I did a routine backup of my Home PC, I wanted to clear some space in the external USB drive. I deleted all the previous backup files in the drive. Then I ran the complete back up. Unfortunately after several minutes the backup utility failed with the following strange error.

The backup did not complete successfully. An error occurred. The following information might help you resolve the error:
The system cannot find the file specified. (0x80070002)

I tried doing Vista Disk cleanup, no use. Doing few Internet searches with the error number 0x80070002 I found a forum post that talked to clean up registry keys in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList that pointed to orphan profile paths. I checked that, in my case all the profiles had correct paths. So that was not the problem. Then one of the forum post talked about running Chkdsk on the drives, I did that. Rebooted the machine. Tried the backup again, this time it went smoothly.

Now my love is back for the Vista Backup tool. I just wish Microsoft wrote the backup utility a little bit more tolerant or instructive error messages for handling these occasions.

Though I purchased this DVD a year ago (at a steep price @ Rs.499)  I didn't get the time to watch it till now. Today being a Sunday and free from any work luckily I had the time to watch the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" made by Former Vice President Al Gore. I didn't know Al Gore was such a powerful speaker, he was amazing on stage - I have noted down few presentation tips from his speech. He seems to have come out as a more powerful person after his dramatic hair-splitting loss of the US Presidency to George W Bush in 2000.

The movie is brief and runs only for about 90 minutes and it is completely on a presentation given by Al Gore with clippings in between. Since enough has been said about this movie and global warming, all I will say - this is a very compelling movie for the cause of reducing our effects on environment. I pledge to start doing my small baby steps on this from today.

I came across this brilliant site called "Geonames.org" - a Geographical database for download free of charge containing over eight million geographical names. The site allows you to search for any city or place or postal code and the best part is all of this is also available through a number of webservices and a daily database export. This can be useful while you are developing a website and have to get input of a city or determine a place in a transaction.

Check out these examples:

1. Chennai
2. 600017 (Postal Code in India)

GeoNames was founded by Marc Wick. Marc is a self-employed software engineer living in Switzerland. Thanks to Marc Wick & the other volunteers of the site.

I was in Bangalore the other day, there I saw a different type of Aldrop used to lock the main gate in one of the house - don't ask me why I noticed it!.

Normally the Aldrops (which are bolt latches with a provision for putting a padlock) will be vertical and you lift the handle and move it sideways (mostly right hand side to open) with the padlock in vertical orientation. This one that I saw was oriented differently - you lifted the latch up and down vertically with the padlock in horizontal (lying down) position. Thinking hard with my little brain I couldn't figure out the advantage of this model - please post in the comments if you know the advantage.

While writing this post I had to find out the name of this device, I was wondering whether to call it Gate Latch or Bolt Latch or Gate Bolt. After few searches I found an item in Amazon with the name "Aldrop", then after few more searches confirmed that this is how it is called in India.

Today I came to Bangalore for a meeting. Having heard the horrifying stories of travel from city to the new airport at Devanahali I got booked by train. I should have left by Shadapti Express leaving Chennai at 5:30PM yesterday, but due to last minute business meetings I reached Chennai Central station late. I was in the platform only at 5:32PM, by then all I could see was the last bogie with a giant "X" mark as seen in Bollywood movies. I had to avoid the glaring look of a porter in the platform at me. Missing the train, I travelled today by flight from Chennai to Bangalore and return.

After long delays, several false starts and Protests against closing the old Airport, the New Airport at Devanahali was built by a consortium of Siemens (Germany), Zurich Airport & L&T finally opened itself on May 24, 2008. The old HAL Airport was certainly brimming out of capacity and facilities, Bangalore certainly took a long time in getting a new airport. Is the long wait worth it?. Overall "Yes", but several things could have been done better.

• For one, a Metro (Train) facility should have been planned and executed which could have provided convenient connectivity from City to Airport. Without a train link the new airport is putting pressure on the already crowded Makkri Circle Area and Bangalore-Hyderabad National Highway. For me it took 75 minutes in the morning (9AM) today to reach Jeevan bhimanagar from the new Airport and while returning in the evening (5PM) took me nearly 90 minutes. I was told by the taxi driver that 90 minutes in the evening is good, it had taken him two days before over 2 Hours (120 Minutes) to get to Airport.
• Second, the waiting area and facilities in the departure terminal could have been better, at this moment they are very basic and ordinary. For example as the photograph below shows there is hardly 30-40 chairs for people to sit in each gate. Certainly each gate will have a flight capacity of over 100 passengers on average, so it was more crowded than the old airport. The lack of facilities at the gate made me wonder whether Siemens wanted to recreate in Bangalore Airport, the same poor facilities that you will find in Frankfurt Airport. The last time while transit to USA I was in Frankfurt Airport and I could get to buy only a Bagel and a Donut to eat - I couldn't even find a Pizza outlet.

The best mode of transport to and from new airport seems to be the  A/C Buses (Vayu Vajra) run by BMTC. It costs about Rs.150 for travelling from Old Airport area to New Airport. To know more about Bengaluru Airport you can go to the official website, which unfortunately seems to be down at this moment.

Last few days I had a firewall issue in my desktop that made web browsing irregular. It was a peculiar problem, I was able to browse few sites like Google, Vishwak.COM but not others. I had to keep running the same diagnostic commands many times to take values to be sent to my support team. Finally I ended up writing this handy tool that copies to clipboard diagnostic informations from IPConfig, Tracert, Ping & WebGet commands. This information can be used for further investigation or email to support. I also added features to FlushDNS, Renew IP & Turn Auto Tuning (Vista and Windows Server 2008) OFF/ON.

• Download the Install: EasyTools Web Browsing Test Installer.zip (192.17 KB)
• Visual Studio Solution (Source code): WebBrowsingTestSource.zip (592.62 KB)

While developing the tool over two half-a-days I learnt quite a few APIs and a bit of C# coding. This included how to call a console command like IPCONFIG /ALL and capture the output to a string from a C# application, get the Internet Explorer Proxy settings, Call Network Properties applet, create an install with VS 2008 & how to paste a code snippet in WLW.

   1: private string DoConsoleAndCapture(string sInput)

   2: {

   3:  

   4: string sOutput = "";

   5: ProcessStartInfo pi = new ProcessStartInfo("cmd.exe", "/c " + sInput );

   6: pi.WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Minimized; 

   7: pi.RedirectStandardOutput = true;

   8: pi.UseShellExecute = false;

   9: Process p = Process.Start(pi);

  10: p.WaitForExit();

  11: //p.Start();

  12: TextReader t = p.StandardOutput;

  13: sOutput = t.ReadToEnd();

  14: t.Close();            

  15: p.Close();

  16:  

  17: return sOutput; 

  18: }

The experience of using Visual Studio 2008 was interesting as it has been few years since I coded something end to end. I wish the coding surface to become more intelligent in terms of offering help on discovering commands and APIs that the developer is looking for. When VB6 came a decade or so back the help feature that it had was revolutionary and the wealth of information MSDN provided was without par in the industry. Now with Web & Internet Search prevalent the present IDE calls for a complete rethinking and revamp - unfortunately I don't feel the tools have come there yet. What I am talking here is not about wizards, smart tags or even intellisense but about how the tool helps a developer to learn/discover necessary APIs/solve the problem at hand.

Last month before boarding my long return flight from Seattle to Chennai, I checked out Borders store for some reading material to keep me occupied. I picked this book  - Think Big and Kick Ass by Donald Trump. I have heard about the US TV Reality Show - Apprentice but I didn't know anything about Trump. So I had no expectations and didn't buy the book for Donald Trump's name. I wanted an interesting lite reading book and found this to fit the bill. I finished a portion of it in the flight, but managed to complete the entire book in my vacation last week in Kodaikanal.

I don't like Copy-Pasting from other sources into my blog, but this time I am making an exception. The below snippet from a comment in Amazon for the book captured exactly what I wanted to write, so even if I had written myself it would appear to be a copy - "...Trump is an egotistical, self-serving man, no doubt. But let's be totally objective, as I was that day: good advice is good advice. And, most writers do not have the courage to dispense such advice in such raw terms as Trump does. This book holds nothing back. Trump lays it all out on the table with blatant opinions, ideas and thoughts about those who've crossed him, helped him, etc. He tells you how you need to be (not just what you need to do - read that again!) to be successful. However - and this is the most important point of my review - there's truth to so much of what he says. It's helpful. You'll look at yourself differently. You'll gain insight, and you'll learn things about yourself that you did not previously know. You might even be vaulted to a new level based on what you read; I don't know - that depends on you, the reader, and your potential application of what Trump discusses. I'm not a huge fan of Trump, the man, but I cannot argue with his success. Forget those who claim he was born into money; that may be true, but he continues to make headlines with regularity..."

Both in my home and work I have powerful 8GB Quad-Core Desktops running Windows Vista x64 and I love the machines. I use extensively Windows Live Writer for writing my blog posts and Live Messenger for IM. Now they come as a single install package (Windows Live Suite) easy to install. When you try to install it on 64-bit Windows the installer fails. I then found this article on how to get the individual MSI files and install the programs from C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\WindowsLiveInstaller\MsiSources.

Recently I bought a XBOX 360 from USA to be used a Media Extender. The AC Adapter was 110V and surprisingly unlike your laptop/mobile chargers this doesn't support multiple voltages. So to connect the XBOX in India I needed a new AC Adapter that works in 220V. I checked in my other XBOX 360 that was purchased in India and that had a 220V rating and Amazon US Store carried the 110V as an item to buy from Microsoft. So I assumed I can buy the AC Adapter locally, but bad luck. No shop (brick 'n' mortar or online) carried the AC Adapter alone separately in India. They redirected me to XBOX service centres, who said only on production of the faulty one they will give me a new one.  I wrote to XBOX 360 support, surprisingly I got a reply from them the next business day. I asked for a new 220V AC Adapter, they replied that XBOX 360 bought in USA won't work in India due to voltage and DVD Region differences. I said clearly I understand that and I take the ownership, but they kept insisting that they don't support voltage convertors (which I never wanted) and they don't support using USA XBOX 360 in India.

We have received your email and as I understand, you would like to know if there is an available power converter that can be used with your Xbox 360 console bought from the United States (110V). I apologize for the inconvenience.

Venkat, I regret to inform you that Microsoft and Xbox do not have a first-party power converter for the console's power supply. Although there may be third-party power converter sold that might be able to address the issue, we cannot guarantee the performance of the said items.  Furthermore, use of third-party or unapproved accessories with your console may cause performance issues which would void the warranty of your Xbox 360 console. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this may cause you.

Thank you for your time and understanding.

Finally before giving up, I went to Chennai's Electronic Heaven "Ritchie Street" which is a miniature version of Delhi's Nehru Place/Lajphat Rai market or Tokyo's Akihabara. There I found a new XBOX 360 220V AC Adapter for Rs.1600. This was without any warranty, but when connected worked beautifully and my problem was solved (fingers crossed). This was much better than having a separate 220V to 110V convertor, as this was a native AC to XBOX DC Voltage conversion.

Update on 8/June/2009: Check my follow up post where I have given the address of the shop in Chennai and how you may get a free replacement from Microsoft. 

About 18 months back I was surprised to find a convenient checking-in process done by Kingfisher (Yes, I know that this was the only item I am in praise of an airline other than my favourite Jet Airways). It is by what they call "Roving Agents" who are airline staff roaming around near the entrance and checking counters. If you just have a hand baggage they check you right there with the help of a PDA and print your boarding pass as well (with the printer connected to the hip belt). I noticed the PDA they use was a Windows CE based Symbol Technologies device, but I was interested in knowing the entire solution story.

In an article that came in CIO India Magazine's supplement "10 Studies in Innovation" I saw the article "Terminal Velocity" which described this solution in detail. The Roving Agent piggybacks on the Wi-fi infrastructure available at airports. Agents carry PDAs (MC-70 from Symbol Technologies) that run a client application connected to the host system. The PDA is also connected to a portable thermal printer (Cameo-3 from Zebra Technologies) via Bluetooth. Read the entire article here.

Agreed that this solution is less appealing now than 18 months before. With most of the airlines allowing you to print your boarding pass online itself it makes Roving Agents less compelling, but from a technology perspective this is a good case study.

Though I purchased the book "The HP Way" long time back, I just managed to finish reading it few weeks back. The book is written by HP (Hewlett Packard) co-founder & Silicon Valley legend David Packard. This small book of 200 pages is a must read for anyone in High Tech Industry. David talks about their early days around starting HP, how it got named and their initial challenges. One of the common business management myths the book dispels is that you need a clear laid out Vision and Business Plan to run a successful business.

Though the book talks in detail about early decades in HP, it has little information on modern day HP as we know it mainly because David handed over the reins to John Young as CEO in 1978 itself.

It has been more than 2 decades since I have been to a Stadium to watch a cricket match live, the last time was during my School Days that too only once and I remember it vaguely . So yesterday when I went to MA Chidambaram Stadium (Chepauk, Chennai) with my son to see the match it was pure fun. I didn't want to go through the parking hassles so I left my car in a relatives house in Royappetah and went to the stadium in an Autorickshaw - a wise decision that helped us to reach to our seats by start of the match at 8PM. The atmosphere was dynamic with popular Tamil film songs playing for every 6 runs, 4 runs and during breaks. The stadium was packed with people everywhere - all were enjoying themselves, cheering the entertainment below by waiving, dancing, playing music & whistling. We got good seats in Gate 13 (T-3) area which was right in front of the pitch and with an excellent view.

The match was played between the home team "Chennai Super Kings" (owned by India Cements & captained by M.S.Dhoni) and "Mumbai Indians" (owned by Reliance Industries and captained by Harbhajan Singh in absence of Sachin Tendulkar).  My home team "Chennai Super Kings" won the match by 6 runs which was largely helped by the superb batting performance earlier by the pair of ML Hayden (Australia) and Suresh Raina (UP, India). Captain Dhoni came in during last few overs but entertained the crowd with his few hits to boundaries.

Everything was great during the match, except for the main scoreboard being updated poorly and for the hot Chennai summer weather. After few overs of second innings it was getting late and becoming unbearably hot, so we had our dinner in the MCC club below and returned home to watch the remaining overs in the comfort of Air Conditioning in our house . Will I do it again, certainly "Yes" for another IPL/T-20 match but next time not during the summer.

I never thought I will buy an Apple Mac as my primary PC (laptop) but I did just that today. After nearly a month of thinking, I finally bought a Macbook Air to replace my aging Sony Vaio TX57GN laptop. The machine looks irresistibly beautiful.

I bought it from the Apple Store in Bellevue Square, the whole experience was smooth. A floor person did the entire transaction from his handheld (it looked like it ran Windows CE) including Credit Card charging, signature capture. Since I have been to Apple online before, he told they had my email Id and will send me an email receipt and not waste paper by printing it. WOW that was impressive.

Now look at the cool bag (below) they gave to carry all the stuffs that I bought including the Air and its accessories.

And look at the sleek boxes (below). Simple, clean and efficient - I could open all of them with my bare hands and never needed a scissor.

I then wanted to do the envelope test with both the Macbook Air and my Sony Vaio, both passed it well. Sony Vaio going in with room to spare on the width but less impressive than the Macbook when it comes to thickness.

I started used it for 5 minutes now - will keep you posted on how it goes. One thing is sure I will install Windows Vista in this in few days

Update: After I started using it I found that the "Delete" key was stuck and not functioning properly. I visited the Apple Store at Bellevue Square, WA again and I was scheduled a time slot in the evening 4PM to meet a "Genius". The sales person simply refused to even see the machine, their argument being once sold we got to contact Apple Service over phone (or) schedule an appointment with Genius. So going for the 3rd time to the Apple store I went to the "Genius" bar, where they identified the problem to be DOA (Defect on Assembly I suppose) and promptly replaced with a new one. They said since Macbook Air is a new machinery it takes some time for the assembling machines to settle and perfect the process. Anyways, I was glad they at least changed the unit before my return trip to India.

One thing that surprised me is that the Apple Store at Bellevue Square, WA being crowded all the time. During my three visits there every time I saw around 50 people in the store. This was the first time I am seeing a computer/electronics store in a mall crowded. I guess Apple has perfected the "Consumer" magic.

If you are from India (or Asia) and you happen to visit USA, in the first few days itself you are likely to notice the amount of food (and other stuffs) that is wasted here in this country. For example, today I was in a nearby Safeway (Grocery store) and I couldn't find a small (100 Grams) pack of Potato Chips. Most of the time, it is because it is cheaper to buy in bulk, much more than what you need and throw the rest. This is encouraged by sellers, you only get everything in really big packs - whether it is socks, handkerchiefs, envelopes, pens or Coffee or Popcorn. In my many visits over last one decade to this nice country this is one thing I wish they can do without. The good thing is that in recent years there is a very slow but sure awareness growing about this, especially due to environmental concerns.

Having said the above, it is also in this country that you see many grass root movements to encourage reuse, donations, etc. It does exist, but it has to expand to general population in large. I was impressed to see few years back Used Clothes Donation Bins (like the ones you see below) in many apartment complexes and malls. They normally place these strategically near to garbage dumps so that even at the last minute before throwing people are reminded to donate and make a difference to the life of a poor. If you are India - you can donate to a near by orphanage like Udhavum Karangal and the likes, all of them accept wholeheartedly any donations.

When posting this, I remembered my grandfather's saying "Don't buy anything just because it is being sold cheap" (or) in other words "buy only what you need when you need it"

I was telling someone yesterday on why I love the new messenger control. This is the control that you see on left hand side of this page titled "Chat with me" that allows any anonymous visitor to the page to chat with me in real time when I am logged in to Live Messenger.

I love the opportunity this simple control gives me to interact with visitors around the world. I am sure they are finding this easy to use this, rather than writing a comment and it also gives them instant gratification. Today I was having an interesting conversation with an Facility Manager from Saudi Arabia on how he came across my blog (actual chat snippet below)

What I like most is the convenience of using and the control I get with this service. I don't need to sign in to yet another site or install a client application for being available for chatting. The only thing I need to do is to be signed in to my regular Live Messenger. And including this in the blog page couldn't be more easier - other than the Microsoft style of plethora of different sites you need to go before you understand it.

To include this control in your page, there are three steps.

Step 1: Enable Permission in Messenger settings page to "Show your Messenger Status on the  Web"

Step 2: Click on the "Create HTML" on the left hand navigation on the same page. In the page select the style of the control you want to display in your page

Step 3: Copy the HTML at the bottom of the page and paste it in an appropriate area in your blog page.

For more details refer to dev.live.com/messenger. But please spare yourself by not starting with this page, it takes you to a complex looking MSDN page which finally redirects you to these 3 simple steps I have said above.

In the recent months there has been good improvements in Virtual Earth's Birds eye view. One of the reasons this was possible was due to new camera used for these excellent high resolution images - Ultracamx. UltracamX is from a company (Vexcel) Microsoft acquired some time back. It supports very large image format available (216 megapixels: 14,430 pixels across track; 9,420 pixels along track) which means they do fewer flights to capture images. It has something like 13 CCD Arrays, each of them controlled by a dedicated CPU and instance of Windows CE Embedded and a 14th CPU for overall control.

Yesterday in JAX India 2008 event at Bangalore I presented the Keynote on behalf of Microsoft India. The topic I choosed was "Living with Heterogeneity: Bridging the Worlds", covering on need for Interoperability and what is new now on this in the Microsoft world. It will cover four main areas of interoperability with Microsoft technologies – MS Office Interoperability, Web Services Interoperability, Rich Internet Applications & Dynamic Language Runtime.

Download the PPT from here: keynote for Jax 2008 - April 2008.pdf (740.24 KB)

One of the concerns for everyone in the Indian IT Industry - for both the insiders and the (abroad) customers are the rising cost of man power. In the last 3 to 4 years (Indian Financial Years Apr-Mar) the industry has grown tremendously. All the 3 Indian IT majors have joined the billion dollar club, continued to double there revenue every year and are now multi-billion corporations. All of them are close to having over 100,000 employees. They have been joined closely by Tier 2 IT companies as well in the multi-billion dollar club and many of them have over 50,000 employees with them. This is formidable human resource capital but they don't come cheap, this unprecedented growth has been pushing the salary further to unsustainable levels.

Further more, for Indian IT services firms nearly 50% (it ranges from 40%-60% depending on the size and offshore/onshore mix) of their revenue is spent in salary and related expenses. Only in few other industries, a single raw material* costs nearly 50% of the revenue. Certainly no other industry (may be Oil and Steel in recent years) have seen its raw materials* cost increase over 30% year on year. So far the Industry have been able to cope with this in several ways - productivity gains, fresh resource augmentations, training, process/tool improvements and more but this certainly gives sleepless nights to CEOs including myself. I strongly believe whether it is stock market, economy in general or salaries, all of them cannot defy gravity for long and keep growing upwards. Indian Stock market which sky rocketed with its BSE Sensex hitting 21,000+ few months back is now trading at 15,000 levels. All goes through cycles of ups and downs; bearish days are also good for the economy in the long run. In Australia conservationist welcome forest fires because they burn the outer layers of the trees which fall down and add nutrients to the soil. In the long run this helps the soil to remain fertile and nurture new life. This is nothing new, it has been happening this way there for millions of years.

Am I forecasting doom days here? - Certainly No. Tough days - Definitely Yes. There are several indicators for this trend. First is the obvious US Slowdown (and a short recession), second is the Indian Rupee to Dollar appreciation, Third is the increasing cost of raw materials and the lower margins - gone are the days of hefty profit margins in IT industry. All these have started to show their impact - news are trickling in of delayed joining dates for campus hires by the IT Majors (at this time this sounds more as rumours to me) and if slowing down in the rate of lateral hires/job market. The best indication I follow for sensing Chennai's Job market is "The Hindu" newspapers Wednesday Opportunities supplement - this week I hardly saw 1 or 2 IT related openings. Normally you see here several full page and half-a-page advertisements by all popular IT brands.

What are the consequences of this:

• First, it will separate boys from men (girls from ladies). The "me too" players will get killed and consolidation will happen in the industry, which is good for any industry to mature
• For the 3 Indian Majors this will mean little, it is likely to be business as usual. The senior teams there would have easily seen this coming for several quarters and they certainly had time to fine tune there strategies
• It will be difficult for Tier 2 companies who are aspiring to get into the elite league as their growth rates will slow down
• For small and emerging companies tough days are certainly ahead. There will be churn but the blood-bath may be limited and short
• Niche players depending on their offerings and geographies have better chances of surviving this and also growing a little due to easier talent access and lesser competition.<Shameless plug begin> This includes companies like mine "Vishwak". We are focused on Media Industry and have been investing heavily on the Indian domestic market for last few years. We are witnessing good growth on both these areas and our investments in Indian market are starting to paying off . Here first mover advantage give us significant head start along with our better understanding of the market<end>

I know this can start a lively debate here and I welcome it, please start posting your comments, observations and thoughts.

*I prefer calling them as Human Assets but that will give a different financial meaning in this context, so let us have them as raw materials here

Yahoo! has released an exclusive Women portal called Shine. You might be wondering why I am writing about a Women site!. It is to highlight a small innovation they have done in the site. Most of the times you use a newly released application or a website you may not be aware of all the features. As a result you will end up using only 20% of the features. To overcome this, Yahoo! in Shine has come up with a good idea of showing "help balloons" the first time. The balloons auto-scroll to various sections below and introduce you (this negates the complexity associated of scrolling to novice users). To top it, they don't show it (by remembering with a cookie I suppose) the next time and irritate you. Check out the screen shots and judge for yourselves.

I recently finished reading "The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho. The book reads like a novel of a story of a Spanish Boy who follows his dreams (or listens to his heart) and finds his love and treasure by venturing into the unknown in the middle east deserts. Nice self-motivating book which is fun to read and as well encouraging. Must read.

Though it has been hotly debated for last several months, I have kept away from writing on the Office Open XML (OOXML) proposed by Microsoft and currently a ECMA standard. With the ISO voting due today I thought let me write my views before the results.

Basically what OOXML means is a standardized file format based in XML for Word, Excel & PowerPoint documents. You have convertors to convert from OOXML to MS Office native formats or to ODF (ISO standard supported by Open Office & Open source). Accepting OOXML as an ISO standard increases the openness of your documents, there by you can safely assume that your grandchildren can open and read the documents created by you today long after the programs that created them are dead and not available. OK agreed, this may not be important for your monthly budget spreadsheets but certainly crucial for E-Governance applications that are used for exchange between different governments and with various departments within them.

Recently India has rejected (which I feel is sad) OOXML. Yesterday I heard the most convincing reason on why OOXML should be accepted by ISO and surprisingly it was not from Microsoft camp - it was from the Editor of the competing standard ODF 1.2. The argument from Patrick Durusau in the article "Who Loses if OpenXML Loses" where he has made several points on how ODF itself will loses if OOXML is rejected. Key arguments to note are on Spreadsheet formulas support and support for legacy MS documents. 

You can track the status of voting from this site.

2/Apr/2008 Update: NewYork Times has reported that OOXML has been approved as a standard by ISO. This is a big win not only for Microsoft, but for consumers and governments as it now provides them with a choice. IBM, SUN and the other open source backers of ODF on one side, Microsoft and its partners on the other side with OOXML will ensure that the document format area is being innovated because of intense competition. Without this choice between ODF and OOXML, this critical technology area would have been left to suffer stagnation and resulted in lock-ins for e-governance applications.

In the corridors of Mix '08, Scott Hanselman (PM, Microsoft and Ex-Regional Director) got hold of me & my fellow Regional Director (Delhi) Vinod Unny for an Interview. The topic was on "Outsourcing" and how it affects both sides of the world - we enjoyed talking on this hotly debated topic, hear it out and post your comments below.

Full Interview: AAC Audiobook (iPod) | MP3 Full Show | WMA Full Show |WMA Low-Fi

Hanselminutes is a weekly audio talk show with noted web developer and technologist Scott Hanselman and hosted by Carl Franklin. Scott discusses utilities and tools, gives practical how-to advice, and discusses ASP.NET or Windows issues and workarounds.

Early this week Apple released their Safari browser for Windows. Safari is a neat, standards compliant web browser and I feel its arrival for Windows is definitely an important step. You might think the usefulness or the need for yet another browser. Look at it this way - with Web becoming ever more intervened with our lifes, innovation in the browser space is super critical. Personally, I love Internet Explorer and I think IE 8.0 will be a technically advanced browser with dominant market share, but still we cannot leave the fate of web to just two companies - Microsoft & Mozilla. Recently AOL closed for good Netscape, of course Netscape has in real terms died several years back itself. This leaves us with only one other credible competition which is from Opera but Opera never managed to garner any significant user base in the PC. So Apple coming in to this space should be welcomed.

While we welcome Apple, their entry has not been without controversies. Mozilla CEO John Lilly has taken serious objections to Apple offering the new browser to Windows users via Apple Software Update which is part of iTunes & QuickTime Player. This means several millions of iTunes & QuickTime Player users will without there knowledge get Safari, there by increasing the surface area of attacks on their PC. I agree 100% with the objections raised by Mozilla CEO on this that it undermines the trust users will have on software. Adding on to this, is Apple's licensing terms for Safari which permits you to install this only on "a single Apple-labeled computer at a time". This is weird considering Apple never makes or sells any Windows PC, so you will never get a legal way to install Safari. While  Register in UK and many in blogosphere are making fun of this, I guess this is more a goof-up and a human error (copy and paste problem) from Apple's legal team and sure to be corrected out in days.

Finally, when I tried to install Safari in Vista x64 I get the following file corrupt error. I tried downloading half-a-dozen times from IE, Firefox, FDM - same error. It installs fine in a Windows XP x86 machine. Seems Apple has some more work to do.

This is a simple tip for MS Excel 2007. When using Outlook 2007/Word 2007 and working on a Table we get the "Design" menu which is very handy to make our tables look beautiful.

When working with MS Excel 2007 I couldn't find this feature (Design Menu for Table) till yesterday. It suddenly struck me that in Excel though everything appears to a "Table", but they are not and we need to explicitly create a "Table". That's it, feature found!

Steps to follow: Just select the cells you are interested in, choose the "Table" menu option from the "Insert" Ribbon bar. Viola. You get the Design Ribbon bar.

By default, when you insert a "Table" in Excel it comes with Data "Filter" enabled. You can disable it from "Filter" button in the "Data" Ribbon bar. 

I have been asked by many of you for the URL to watch the recordings of all the Mix '08 keynotes. Here it is:

The page has an interesting video of MIX08 Keynotes in Hyperspeed, which is a timelape video to see the whole process from bare ballroom through setup, rehearsals, keynotes, and then final teardown after the show. 

Zumobi is a new free mobile widget application that's from a company spawned from Microsoft Research. They did the whole presentation in Expression and didn't use Powerpoint

• The Zumobi application was for organizing content in a easy to find, attractive format mostly in 4 x 4 grids.
• Zumboi uses XML & JS for building the widgets
• The SDK and Emulator are free to download and use along with Runtime
• They don't use a Windows Emulator but a Zumboi runtime which runs in the PC to give a full experience
• The differences between platforms (J2ME, Windows Mobile, Palm) on Scripting, Display, etc are all abstracted by Zumobi Runtime

I was in the talk by Eric Picard (Director, advertising technology strategy at Microsoft) on the future of advertising. It started with how much potential there is to optimize and automate the advertisement buying/selling process in the industry and just for online, but for TV, Print and other media. Eric talked about how the future systems will be more open, interconnected and automated. He touched upon the future where disposable surfaces for video, OLED and more will come, also with the Nano technology how battery life with be extended and revolutionized.

Eric pointed out to a video on the Internet showing Nokia's concept technology using Nano technology, cool video check it out below:

Scott Dickens of Microsoft presented on "Cross-Browser Layout with Internet Explorer 8".

• Main action item is to check and ensure your sites work on Internet Explorer 8.0 since it will be standards compliant by default
• It is a good decision Microsoft has taken now by making IE 8 default to strict standards mode, you need to over-ride it for IE 7 mode. This can be done by having in your pages a meta tag <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />. You can also do this at the entire site level by including in IIS Header tag which can be overwritten at page level as well
• IE 8 includes great Typographic foundation
• A new layout engine was built with CSS 2.1 spec in hand, Deprecation of hasLayout
• When there are ambiguities in the CSS spec, the idea is to check with working group, see what other browsers are doing

More features on readiness can be seen here and a complete coverage on IE 8 can be read from IE blog.

Members in the panel where: 

1. Don Dodge - Microsoft
2. Kimbal Musk - CEO, Me.dium
3. Robert Scoble - Fast Company
4. Dave McClure - 500 Hats
5. Kevin Rose - Founder, Digg
6. Ryan McIntyre - Foundry Group (Representing Venture Capital in the panel)

• Social networks today don't make much money, and that is very crucial for Myspace and Facebook on how to make money for themselves and help their ecosystem in making money
• Remora model (A small fish latching on to a big fish to swim) of revenue. An example was Photobucket depending on Myspace and then Myspace cutting them out
• Digg has a revenue deal with Microsoft's Advertising deal. Digg is making money from people who are submitting, how do they feel?. Digg feels it is not work that their users are doing, if it is work users will not come again. It is because users care to share. Digg is working on making it easy to share with friends by enabling submission on the homepage, all with a single-click no need to visit Digg pages at all
• Excite when started spent few million dollars for basic servers alone which were needed to crawl few million sites and the RAM alone was like $70,000
• The VC companies will find it difficult to find companies where they can invest less and make 5 to 10 times revenue. Most People are not doing the maths right, so ,if a VC is investing $25 Million then they are looking at exists at $100 to $200 Million levels. There are few acquiring possibilities at these levels
• Don't focus on the run of the mill CPM rates, instead go for the niche audience where you can charge premium like a magazine model
• There was a great question on "Why Web 2.0 revenue opportunities are being explored by startups only with USA market and not open to Europe. There is no recession in Europe, still why no monetization efforts outside USA"
• Me.dium had to launch the beta with $0.5 Million investments mainly on hardware alone. Me.dium's long term goal is to get the real nuggets out of the click thru' data to understand and identify important activities. Google has solved 1% of this problem of what you are intending to do and that itself is working out to several billion dollars
• Web 2.0 is a loss leader for something, nobody knows for what yet
• Me.dium when they launched were scared about privacy because they asked users to give all information that they can give about usage. Robert Scoble says "Privacy is dead"
• For every niche service that will cost $10 or less per month you can start to charge, there is good chances people will pay. Here again you will not get 100% conversion, but you need to give initial service free for users to taste the service and then look for some percentage conversion as paid users
• One of the research shows that 3% of your free audience will maximum convert to paid

I had a question to panel on how all this all affects "Mobile" but I didn't an answer for it

Ed Maia from Microsoft made this presentation on Silverlight 2.0 

• In Silverlight Media is a first class citizen
• In Silverlight 1, you needed to use Javascript in browser as the programming model, now in Silverlight 2 there is managed code as an additional programming model
• Silverlight 2 supports WMV 10 Pro Audio Codec in addition to other codecs supported in SL 1.0
• IIS 7 Media Pack allows bit rate throttle to save cost and also supports Web Playlists (so user cannot ask for the 4th file without watching 3,2,1) in ASX format
• Combining with markers from Expression Encoder you can set up markers. So that the first few seconds of video gets downloaded at full speed, then it only leads by few seconds as configured
• Playready for Silverlight 2 is a client and server side components for DRM. There is a client side additional downloaded that is needed for more DRM support
• Silverlight 2 supports only online DRM protected content, meaning everytime there is a DRM protected content then it goes online to License Server

Angus Logan, Sr. Technical Product Manager from Windows Live platform presented on:

• 400 million live ID users, 1bn authentications / day
• All services of Windows Live free upto 1 million users / month
• Today you have to go login.live.com to sign in, you can customize the page for select msn/microsoft sites only. Later 3rd party sites will be allowed to do this
• Windows Live tools for Visual Studio makes it super easy to implement Live Platform
• Windows Live you can associate with your local user/password store
• You can share your Windows Live Contacts Ids safely and under control to the sites you want to
• Increased Silverlight streaming hosting capacity for free
• ADO.NET Data Services (aka Astoria) which consumes AtomPub service end points for Application Base Storage, Photo API, LINQ to cloud capabilities
• Check out the new version of dev.live.com for new 7 Quick-Apps which are open source that are end to end scenarios.

Chris Wilson from IE talked about the new features.

• Beta1 is all about developer and web authors features, getting the platform ready. A later beta will have user experience improvements
• Predictable Experience for Users:
  • Domain Name is Highlighted in Address bar
  • Improved Manage Add-Ons Experience
  • Improved ActiveX: Per User ActiveX Install without admin, Per Site ActiveX Controls, DEP/NX code execution prevention
  • Users Sites & Applications must continue to work with a new browser
• Improved User Productivity
  • IE 8 is resilient after crashes - the frame continues to run, only the tabs gets reloaded
  • Support unlocking the web with W3C ARIA
  • Improved Zoom capability (Page layout is preserved)
  • Everyone uses lots of web services and it is manual.For this there is Activities now. It is implemented with OpenService. As a service provider you can check for your service being installed, if not prompt for install. (ie8.ebay.com has a sample)
  • Portions of a page is important, that's where Webslices comes. (ie8.ebay.com has a sample). It uses the Windows Feed infrastructure to keep it refreshed.
  • Complete CSS 2.1 Compliance
    • Generated Content and Counters
    • New 'display' values for tables
    • Outlines
    • CSS 3 Box-Sizing Property
    • CSS 3 Vertical Text
    • Unbiased CSS Test suites
• All IE8 CSS/JS have a debugger in the box.
• Most of the performance problems were Network Perf is frequently the problem
  • In Broadband the parallel connection limit increased to Six from two
  • JScript improvements
  • CSS Selector API
• HTML 5.0 Offline storage, offline/online events

Beta 1 is available from here | Complete coverage on IE 8 can be read from IE blog.

Ray Ozzie

There has been lot of releases in the last one year and then Yahoo!... There is a wide range of product + services that will come from Incubation to release from Microsoft including IE 8.0. Microsoft might seem to be doing random releases, so I will give a background on how they are all tied together - first is Advertisement as a revenue engine, second Internet reshaping Microsoft products and Services. Right from day one Internet has been about Content + Community + Commerce which are all innovative & greater user engagement models.

Three principles:

1. Web is the hub of social, device mash, networking. The concept of one PC is gone, the new world will be a collection of PCs connected by cloud. Your own device mash.
2. Enterprise, virtualization and commodity hardware (storage grid, computing grid). Utility computing model. All Microsoft software will be refactored for symmetry from enterprise to partner hosted models.
3. For Developers & Designers, we need to join small pieces to make big items. Loosely coupled composition and cooperated of pieces. Transparency and open standards are important.

Half a Million people worldwide are using Office Live & Dynamics CRMS Live. We also released last Monday, options to run Exchange, Sharepoint, OCS on the cloud. We are also announcing SQL Services Data Services today.

Internet Explorer 8.0

• CSS 2.1 will have the biggest impact so went for CSS certifications. We have contributed 702 test cases to W3C CSS Test working group in BSD license so that everyone can have the same test cases.
• Performance has been improved over 2.5 times
• HTML 5.0 support enables Ajax functions to understand browser back button, support Network Connection event, store data locally
• Rich Debugging and Developer tools integrated in the browser
• Activities are in place. They work on OpenService Specification
• WebSlice (which slices the page and allows me to monitor them and get alerted on changes) specifications under Creative Common License
• Internet Explorer 8.0 Beta 1 released

Silverlight

• 1.5+ Million installations per day are installed now
• Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 available for download
• Adaptive Streaming for automatically choose speed of delivery based on network and your CPU. You can plugin any algorithm for this
• IIS 7.0 Media Pack can help you to serve only 10% (or any other figure) from the point user is watching now with bandwidth throttling
• John Harris from Expression team showed: Silverlight Advertisement Template makes it easy doing advertisements with Silverlight, Atlas AdManager was shown, IIS 7.0 Media Pack allows Media Playlists which allows you to control how something is skipped or not, Expression Encoder 2.0 allows you to overlay advertisements with text, XAML or Video
• Ari Paparo VP from DoubleClick talked about how they are supporting Silverlight Overlay ads.
• Perkins Miller from NBC Sports & Olympics showed for the first time the product. We have 150 days to go. We are going to be putting 2200 hours live.
• Beta 1 of Silverlight 2.0 is about 4MB download. Partnering with Novell to release this in Linux. And lot of new controls are released
• AOL showed their new mail client with Silverlight
• MS Announced Sharepoint webparts for embedding Silverpoint
• Demoed Silverlight for Windows Mobile 6.0 and promised to bring it out on mobile devices that have a SDK
• Nokia will deliver Silverlight on Symbian S60 (which is a big win for Silverlight against Adobe Flash in my opinion) first then with S40 phones & Internet tables. Demoed it working in Nokia N95 by WeatherBug

One thing I hate about buying Electronics (Computer accessories as well) and Compact Discs (VCDs, DVDs) is the chore of cutting open the plastic packaging without hurting your fingers or the product. I just don't understand why the manufacturers want to put so much plastic on the covers with the idea of hurting you. If the idea is to protect (RFID tagging) from stealing and to have a frame for hanging/displaying then I am sure there are better ways. Ways that are environmentally friendly, more than environment friendly to the poor consumer who paid money. This is true especially for CDs that you buy from a Music chain (In India Music World, Landmark, etc.) where apart from the manufacturer cover the chains put RFID in a layer, then a layer of plastic to protect the RFID and so on., finally you end up having to cut open 3 layers before you can reach to the music. Similar pain for Electronic items, say a Mouse/Mobile Charger, etc. where you need a steady and 200 pound fingers to cut that thick layer of plastic before reaching to the product.  I guess the idea is to make it difficult for you to reach to the product, so that you cannot use it. Obviously a product still in the box, won't go bad and you won't call for support. Smart idea of electronics companies to save money especially with their margins dwindling all the time.

The next packaging item I hate is the sharp (metal) pins used in Shirts (Menswear). I can understand the idea is to have the shirt folds stay in place, so that the shirts while in the shelf have a nice look. Here again you have safer ways to do it like Paper Clips (Gem Clips). Apart from being dangerous to remove without hurting your fingers they in some cases damage the very shirt they are meant to enhance the appearance. Also these pins could be hazardous in countries like India where dump yards are often visited by Cattle's looking for food and scavengers looking for reusable items that could be sold.   

Finally, the packaging item I hate the most because I have to deal with it everyday is the Stapler Pins used in envelopes by courier companies. I am not sure whether anywhere else in the world, courier companies stapler the routing receipt with the envelopes they carry. Removing these Stapler Pins even by using the back of Stapler machine is tricky and most times you end up damaging the cheque or the document that is inside the envelope. Can't they paste it instead?.

I was invited to do a presentation to students at my alma mater (SVCE, Pennalur). The occasion was a day long event today organized by ECE department's Alumni Association & IEEE Chapter. I decided against a technical topic for fear of boring the students, instead I made a talk on "Entrepreneurship for Engineers". Following what "George Bernard Shaw" said "I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation", I started by quoting myself  “There has never been a better time in Indian History for becoming an Entrepreneur”.

I tried my best to make the session very lively and at the end when I counted only few heads where sleeping out of nearly 100 students in the hall. And in the 90 minutes I heard no "Boos" or "Whistles" which itself I think was an achievement in itself. Download - Entrepreneurship for Engineers v2.0.pdf (292.67 KB)

In the evening I presented one more session. This time it was at Vishwak for our weekly Friday sessions organized by our team members as a forum to share knowledge and best practices. Here again I went against a technical topic as I didn't have the time in advance to prepare on any of the latest or upcoming topics, and if I presented on any of the existing technologies then my team knows more than me . The topic I talked was on "Presentation Skills" on which I have earlier posted a detailed 7 page post here and as a way of demonstration I did the talk without any presentation aids (No PowerPoint and no Projector).

Read the earlier part of this project here where I talked about the Digital Conversion of VCD/DVD and sharing in XBox.

After all the Proof of Concept, I decided it was time to go full time Digital. Bought new hardware for my house. One was a high-end desktop where I plan to do the conversions and regular PC usage. The second was for server role, where I had two 500GB HDD Mirrored for storing all my Digital Media files and sharing them. I then converted few dozen of VCD and DVDs into Nero AVC (MPEG4) format with the new desktop in few days.

I tried in the server machine, first Windows Home Server but that didn't the driver for Mirroring H/W that I had), then Windows Server 2003 but that didn't support installation of Zune Client Software, after that thought Windows XP SP2 will be the best but that didn't allow Zune sharing to be visible in XBOX whatever I tried. So I had to resort to Windows Vista SP1. Installed Media Center Extension that went through smoothly but my main requirement was to have Zune Network Sharing working so that all my Photos, Music & Videos are available for playback at my XBOX 360. These two articles have step by step instructions needed for a normal setup:

• How to configure the Zune software to share content from your Zune collection to an Xbox 360 console on a home network
• Listen to Music, View Pictures, and Watch Videos on your Xbox 360 Console

I had bought Norton 360 that contains Antivirus, Firewall and Antispyware. The firewall configuration was pathetic in Norton 360 so I switched it off and turned to Vista's default firewall. I installed and easily got SQUEEZEBox music sharing working. Zune Network Sharing was a big hurdle to cross, what ever I tried the videos and photos were not visible from XBOX. After several hours of trying I figured out the way to make it work.

1. Create a new user exclusive to run Zune Client Software, call it say "ZuneUser" make it administrator in Vista
2. Switch off User Access Control (UAC), this was the biggest problem cause
3. Reset all security settings for the drive/folders where you have your media files (Give Read/Execute for ZuneUser)
4. Go to Zune Client Software, configure your monitoring folders for media
5. Enable Network Sharing, give it a name and tick Music, Video & Photos
6. Go to Services Applet, replace the user account for the Zune Network Sharing (ZuneNSS) service from Network Service to ZuneUser.
7. Restart the ZuneNSS service
8. Give some time for monitoring job to pickup files
9. Go to XBOX 360 and look for your media files and play them

I was looking for long on how to enable Hibernation option in Vista, as the sleep doesn't work in my laptop all the time. After spending lot of time in navigating through the confusing menus of Vista and Windows Help, I turned to Google, got the answer in the second search link.

Here it is:

1. Click Start, All Programs, and then right click on "Command Prompt".
2. From the context menu click on "Run as administrator".
3. If User Account Control prompts you to allow the action, click on Continue.
4. In the command prompt window, type "powercfg –h on" (without the quotes).
5. Close the Command Prompt window.

I don't know whether any other country in the world (just kidding, it is not as if I am an expert on Budgets around the world just felt good saying it) has its budget strewn in such mystery and secrecy like the Indian Budget. In today's Globalized world the role of a central budget has diminished over the years which certainly is good. In my view a Central (a.k.a. Federal for those of you who are from USA) Budget should be more of a report card recording the performance of the government spend in the last 12 months and the outlook for next 12 months. The way Indian Budget has become over the years and is expected to function by common people, as the platform for all ministries and the entire governments policy announcements. This has made the Finance Ministry the nodal point and hence the single biggest bottleneck of every government departments functions. If you ask what is the alternative, it is to let each ministry on a regular basis announce its plan for next 12 months after consultation with respective industry bodies. This can be much like the way the commerce ministry does its EXIM policy but with more teeth and power to each ministry to do its job better than what it is today.

Anyway coming back to the topic, I read this good pictorial workflow of how the Indian Budget process happens in LiveMint. It has some surprises like the key people in budget preparation are locked in the basement of North Block for the last 7 days and the only people allowed to see from outside world is the Finance Minister!. Good Read.

After I moved to Windows Vista about a year back, I hardly had to worry about Firewall settings. Though initially I found the UI of Vista Firewall Settings different and a little hard to understand, I soon realized its power and flexibility. Most of the time I found the firewall in Vista to automatically configure itself for many of the applications I installed including Zune, Zune Network Sharing, XBOX Media Extender and others.

Last week I evaluated K7 Computing Total Internet Security and found it to be the most light-weight and fast in its class. Its Firewall interface was simple and effective with almost all the time it popped up a dialog (user configurable) for any new application so that I could set the access the way I wanted. Since I had no complaints with Vista Firewall, I decided to just go with K7 Antivirus (Rs.690) alone for my laptop. Compared to Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition I had before in my laptop on a Vista x84, I found K7 Antivirus to be less resource hungry and overall I found the machine to more snappier.

For my home PC, I went with Norton 360 (bought it locally in India from a dealer) after studying in their website how Symantec have slimmed the whole product in terms of resources. I installed it in Home Server (Windows XP 32bit with 500GB Mirrored HDD, 2GB RAM, AMD 64) and in my Home PC (Intel Quad Core 2.4Ghz, 8GB RAM, 160 GB, 500GB HDD, Dell 20" Monitor). I found NAV 360 to take very little resources and snappier. But I have been having trouble with its firewall to open ports for Zune Network Sharing and few other applications. I wished NAV 360 had a database of known applications and their firewall settings. I found the lack of an option to backup your firewall rules and restoring it a serious limitation. It didn't have a Zone preset as well - meaning for every rule you have to define your local subnet and range.

In the end, I will recommend Vista Out-of-box firewall plus either K7 Antivirus or Norton Antivirus 2008/NAV 360 AV Module alone.

Nowadays, with the poor QoS of Telcos in India many users are forced to carry more than one phone. Some are doing it so that they can separate their personal and official calls. For me in all my years of having a mobile phone right from the first Motorola brick phone when a single call costed Rs.16 to now,  I never carried two mobiles at the same time. The first time I did that was this Tuesday when I travelled down to Delhi for a business meeting, and it turned to be a complete disaster. The idea of two connections (Vodafone & BSNL) was to tackle a problem I have been having in all Delhi trips in the last 12 months. Whenever I was in Delhi roaming from my Vodafone (Hutch) connection I couldn't dial a BSNL Landline (044) number, everything else works fine including CellOne numbers in Chennai.

After I landed in Delhi Airport I tried switching on one phone after other and both failed.

• First was my regular phone (HTC S710) which was continuously rebooting itself on the welcome screen with the only time it booted was when I removed the SIM card (so what good is a phone without a SIM card). 
• Second was Dopod 720W (a.k.a HTC S610) which showed up a dialog box saying something like "Repeated attempts to unlock failed, to ensure this was intended, Press A1B2C3". And as soon as I press the first key to do this, it popped up another dialog-box saying "Enter your device PIN to unlock and press done key". Interesting user experience of having one modal dialog-box over another on a device with no Stylus or ability to switch windows. Adding to my woes here, the done key was disabled. So even after I entering the correct PIN there was no way for me to press a disabled "Done" key. I wonder how this version of Windows Mobile 5.x software ever passed its test cases?.

I was left with a fully useless phone and a 50% working phone - with the Dopod 720W allowing me to receive calls only. No amount of reboots or anything worked with both phones.  That's when I realized how important Mobile phones have become for business productivity. I managed to complete two of my planned meetings earlier so I had ample time for a third but I couldn't schedule it or for that matter could not even call my cab driver from lounge. 

When I came back to Chennai Vishwak's mobile team gave me these options:

• For the HTCS710, do you have a micro SD, if yes, can you remove and then try.
• For both the phones to reset to manufacturer defaults, press 'power', 'left softkey', 'right softkey' simultaneously when the phone is powered down.

I tried both. For S710 the problem turned to be in the micro SD, once I removed it the device booted fine. The same Micro SD is working on a PC, so I am wondering can't a device on finding a problem with SD can't it just timeout and not load the module and proceed?. For Dopod 720W after resetting to manufacturers default, everything was working fine.

I am strongly tempted to throw my HTC devices out (I wonder why Microsoft is not investing on designing a good phone themselves), go out and buy my all time favourite - the rock solid, dependable Nokia Communicator in its new avator (E90). I am giving S710 one more chance as I don't want to waste my investment of Rs.16,500 in just 5 months. 

In the end, the moral turns out that you should have a simple, low-end Nokia phone  always as a backup with you for those moments when the smartphones behave stupidly. The phone should have minimum software, no GPRS, no Camera, just plain old Voice and SMS. And for me an old Nokia 2310 in the office fitted the bill fine. Wish me good luck with that.

Just like last two years, this year too I will be going for Mix '08. Now in its third year, MIX is a good opportunity for hearing about cutting-edge web technology, creative and business strategists all in one place and in an informal style. That's why I think it is worth for me to spend few thousands grands and a travel that will take me half-way around the world to attend Mix in Las Vegas.

It was told earlier that Steve Ballmer alone will be doing the keynote this year, so I was left thinking so it will be only "English" & "Business" talk with no new technology announcements. In a way of addressing my concern, Microsoft yesterday announced that Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie will join Scott Guthrie on stage as a keynote speaker at MIX08. Ray is expected to outline Microsoft’s progress card on their investments on the web platform, Silverlight & IE. Stay Tuned!

I finally finished reading the book "It happened in India", the reason I am saying finally is because that I have been reading this book for nearly 2 months but managed to complete the last 30 pages only today. The book is kind of an auto-biography of Mr.Kishore Biyani on the story of Pantaloons, Biz Bazaar & Central retail stores.Let me say at the beginning, I am a little biased in favour of Indian success stories - apart from being an Indian, the reason is because I feel there is a dearth of good books on Indian business stories.

The first thing that you notice when you pick the book is a close resemblance of the title It happened in India with Made in America (Sam Walton's classic book). When you start reading you will continue to see the unmistakable resemblance in the presentation format as well. The chapters are presented in a fashion of first person voice intertwined with quotes from various stake holders (business partners, employees & friends of the author). While reading the first few chapters this resemblance put me off a little as I thought Kishore Biyani had nothing original to say. Only after I finished nearly half of the book I realized how mistaken I was, the chapters starting to get interesting and the experiences outlined are very much India specific and original. Definitely Kishore Biyani and his team have to be congratulated on their exciting journey in the world of Indian retail and for brining many of the now common innovations. I was happy to read in pages 116-199, Kishore Biyani quoting Chennai's own Saravana Stores as the inspiration behind their Big Bazaar venture. He writes on how his team camped in Chennai visiting Saravan Stores every day for weeks in understanding their merchandise mix and pricing. The book tapers off towards the end where the author starts talking about his personal philosophies & beliefs on business.

Overall, a good book to read at an attractive price of Rs.99 (~USD 2.5)

I just finished reading Men of Steel by Vir Sanghvi. Vir Sanghvi should be appreciated whole-heartedly for two things - first for writing a very needed book that compiles the stories of India's most successful business leaders and second for writing it in a lively, enjoyable format. The book is a result of compilation of Vir Sanghvi's articles that appeared on Hindustan Times Mumbai HT Leadership series and so each of them are not more than 2000 words.

The book covers well known people like Ratan Tata, Nandan Nilekani, Azim Premji, Kumar Mangalam Birla, Sunil Bharti Mittal & Vijay Mallaya. Apart from that about people I knew very little before - Bikki Oberoi, Uday Kotak, Rajeev Chandrasekha, Subhash Chandra & Nusli Wadia. It was revealing. Every aspiring Entrepreneur in India should read this book once.

One spelling mistake that caught my eyes - Airtel's Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal was spelled wrongly with his middle name as "Bharati". See the screenshots below - the left is from the book (wrongly given in that fashion throughout the chapter) and on the right is from their website.

MVP Award for the year 2008

MVP Award for the year 2007

I have been a Microsoft Regional Director (RD) from 1999 and I am happy to write here that Microsoft has renewed me as an RD for another two years. The RD program is a honorary title conferred to select professionals around the world who are passionate on Microsoft technologies. Over 140 software architects, developers, trainers and other professionals are selected by Microsoft as Regional Directors. The first thing to know is that, while we’re officially recognized by Microsoft and often receive inside information about forthcoming technologies, we are completely independent. We are not Microsoft employees.

Apart from being a RD, last year (2007) I was named as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) as well. I was given MVP in the category of Visual Developer - Solutions Architect. Recently, I was renewed as a MVP for this year as well. This entitles apart from other benefits, membership to a very lively exclusive email alias participated by all MVPs.  You can check out my MVP Profile here.

The last programme of TiECon yesterday was Pitch to VCs, several budding entrepreneurs presented their case for seed capital. I was surprised when I was invited next on stage to present on Vishwak's story (my good friend and our GM - Manigandan Gopalakrishnan had listed my name without my consent ).

Doing an elevator pitch in 5 minutes for Vishwak which has 10 years of experience and achievements is difficult. Hence I decided to be precise, to the point and highlighted them in 6 buckets (headings).

1. About Vishwak: When was it founded, what we do, number of people and locations
2. Solutions: That we offer and the need they fulfill in the market
3. Current Customers
4. Current Structure and ownership
5. Future plans of expansion
6. Why we are bound to succeed?

I was happy on the way I pitched and the fact my message was received well by audience. Of course, it will be fool-hardy to expect a deal from any investor with just a 5 minute pitch

Yesterday was TiECon 2008, an event organized by TiE Chennai to celebrate and recognize Entrepreneurship in the City. The event had lot of stardom with the inauguration by Dr. M. Karunanidhi,Chief Minister, Tamilnadu & Smt. M K Kanimozhi, Member of Parliament, Tamilnadu. Initially I didn't get the connection between Hon'ble CM and an Entrepreneurship event, then it got clear when the awards recognizing Entrepreneurship were given to eminent personalities like Mrs Y. G. Parthasarathy, Director and Dean, PSBB schools (Social entrepreneur of the year), and Dr Pratap C. Reddy, Chairman, Apollo Group of hospitals (Lifetime achievement). Ms.Kanimozhi (MP) in her speech talked about the similarities between Chennai Sangamam and TiECon but many in the audience including myself didn't get the connection.

Other awardees were:

• R. Subramanian, Founder and Managing Director, Subhiksha (Extreme Entrepreneur of the year)
• R. Sarabeshwar, S. Sivaramakrishnan and V.G. Janarthanam, Founding Members, Consolidated Construction Consortium Ltd (Entrepreneur of the year)
• Hemu Ramaiah, CEO, Landmark (Woman entrepreneur of the year)
• S. Abhay kumar, Founder and vice-chairman, Lifecell (large start-up entrepreneur of the year)
• Vivek Anand, CEO, FitnessOne (small start-up entrepreneur of the year)
• Raju Venkataraman, President and Chief-Operating Officer &
• Firstsource (Serial entrepreneur of the year)

You can view short videos of the event including the CM Address and Award distribution from ChennaiOnline.

PANELS

There were 3 panel discussions during the day, I have just managed to cover below the first panel on Emerging Trends in the Retail Industry.

Vivek Anand of FitnessOne talked about their emphasis on excellent equipments, world class training to trainers, hygiene, etc. He talked new opportunities that are available for Aesthetic & thrill seeking industry. And with the competition from organized retail how existing stores are upgrading to new consumer experience and the big opportunity here. He quoted that Top 10% of income group in India consume 30% of retail. A company can compete on price, compete on service, compete on innovation - but you cannot compete on all three.

G.V.RaviShankar, VP of Sequoia Capital talked about speciality stores like Coffee Day, Printo (Digital On demand printing)

Hemu Ramaiah, CEO of Landmark Books talked about how when she started 30 years back no one heard about Outsourcing. She talked about a list of emerging outsource opportunities that budding Entrepreneurs can think of starting: 

1. Infrastructure (Property, Real Estate Broking, Project Management, Visual Merchandising)
2. HR (Outsourcing Recruitment, Outsource People)
3. Training (Even basic speaking is bad in India today, language, Skill Gaps)
4. Store services (Housekeeping, Security, Software, Retail Auditing)
5. Backoffice Operations / Logistics, Imports/Clearance, Buying (Sourcing Agents)
6. Marketing (Analytics, Data Mining, Shopping trends and shopping habits, CRM, PR, Media Design, Event Management, Web Design Outsourcing)
7. Quality (ISO Certified, Balanced Score Card, Customer Satisfaction Survey)
8. Banking & Finance (VC Funds, Business Plans)
9. Travel/Tickets.

I enjoyed the last panel discussion moderated by K.Pandia Rajan, Ma Foi and he did a wonderful job in that. I liked his quote of "Punarapi Jananam, Punarapi Maranam" while saying talking about Serial Entrepreneurship. Other panelists in that session were:

• Sharad Sharma, CEO, Yahoo! India R & D
• Srinivas Balasubramanian, Chairman & CEO, Photon Infotech
• Rajesh Jain, CEO Netcore
• Mahesh Murthy, Partner, SeedFund
• Satya Prabhakar, CEO, Sulekha

KEYNOTES

Captain Gopinath in his Keynote spoke about "Dare to Dream and Do It. Most important for an entrepreneurship is to live it more than anything else. To be Uncompromising & to listen to your inner voice. To Pursue that vision to the exclusion of everything else". He spoke about how he grow from being Army Officer to a Farmer of 40 Acres borrowed from his uncles in which he did Silk Farming, starting an Helicopter company with an ex-army colleague when India had only 20 Helicopters in civil sector and finally to his successful venture Air Deccan. He stressed on the need to Dream big and act fast. Air Deccan collects more than USD 1 to 2 Million every day. Talked about how Accenture was slow to respond when Air Deccan initially wanted them to build their e-ticketing software and then how they went with a small software company for developing in the early days.

There were other keynotes as well made by the following eminent personalities during the day.

It was educative to hear each Entrepreneurship's struggle to success story.  Mr.Thiagarajan's speech in Tamil (who was the exception to speak in Tamil, even CM spoke in English) was disappointing as it was nothing more than an inaugural address and was consumed in praising Tamilnadu CM.

Last month I attended a SPIN Chennai program on Balanced Scored by Mr.Sudipto Marjit. Offline when I was speaking with Mr.Marjit he noticed the book I was reading (while waiting for the talk to start) - Profitable Growth Is Everyone's Business by Mr.Ram Charan. Immediately he recommended that I also read Ram Charan's What the CEO wants you to know?. I did exactly that this week and here is the review.

The first thing that strikes about the book (USD 20, INR 428) is its attractive title and the second is its thin size (about 140 pages). Before I say anything about the book I must say that this is a must read for anyone in any Business and it doesn't matter whether you are working, managing or leading a business. Having said that the book can be a let down if you had focused too much on its lofty title. The book should have been titled "What everyone in business should know" or better "Quick start manual for businesses" . Let me give you a brief review of the book's coverage:

• If you were wondering for a better term for saying "Business is in her blood" or "His gutfeel on business" Ram Charan has coined a beautiful phrase "Business Acumen" and he introduces the term and what it means very well.
• Introduction and simple english explanation to business speak like P/E Ratio, Return on Assets, Sales Turnovers.
• He introduces an simple formulae of R = M x V, where R is return on assets, M is After-Tax Margin and V is Velocity or Inventor turn. I found the way he talked about Velocity as a very useful idea.
• Need to have Right People in Right Job, the importance of Coaching
• Ram Charan introduces one more term "Social Operating Mechanism" which basically is how to motivate people at all levels and have them connected seamlessly as a team all the time

Overall a must read for every business person. Thanks Mr.Marjit for recommending this book.

I got the first phase of my pilot program to have my house moved to Digital Media done. I thought the toughest part will be the purchase(choice), installation and wiring of the hardware but it turned out to be the easiest part. I got my SqueezeBox connected through wireless and playing audio (WMA/MP3) from my PC seamlessly, my XBOX 360 connected through Ethernet to my PC with the media shared using Windows Media Player 11/Zune Player Sharing. Windows Media Player (or equivalent Zune) sharing was much better and easier to setup and use than Windows Media Center especially since I didn't want Live TV through this setup at this phase.

I wanted the digital media files to be playable with my XBOX 360 and with Zune Player (so that I can watch/hear on the move). The toughest part was finding a software that will rip (copy) the media from the Video CDs and DVDs that I owned. This was the main motive behind buying the XBox 360, so that I can protect the CDs from my son scratching while trying to put it in the DVD player. Audio conversion from Audio CDs was easiest with Windows Media Player doing a great job in converting it to WMA or MP3 - both of the formats played well with XBOX & Zune. Video was the most difficult. First because of the DVD Copy Protection and then finding a reliable software for doing the copying to PC. 

DVD Copy protection

I don't understand this at all. Why should the Media houses treat me (a paying customer) like a criminal when all I want to do is to convert a legally bought content to a format that is convenient for me to store and watch. On top of this is stupid DVD Region code. When I am allowed to legally buy a DVD from any country I visit during my travel, why can't I watch it in my home DVD Player. Adding to the woe is the situation in India where DVDs are sold in both Region 2 and Region 5 codes with one not playing on the players with the other mark. An instance was the Inconvenient Truth DVD Indian Edition from Saregama that I bought recently was Region 2 whereas as per DVD Region Code chart it should have been Region 5 for India.  Because of these stupidness of the technology used, I have to rely on software that will overcome the protection and copy the media to the harddisk.

For this task I found DVD Decrypter (shown in right) to be the best. Don't waste your money by buying any of the software that claims to remove automatically the CSS copy protection. I have tried almost the top 15 software on the Internet and all of them are not worth the trouble and don't even come close to the reliability, quality and speed of free DVD Decrypter. Only challenge will be to find a reliable site to download the software since it is banned in few countries, Wikipedia and Google might help you on the search.  After using DVD Decrypter I am ready to the next step. Note: I tried softwares that claims to do both the removal of copy protection and ripping to MP4/WMV but they were produced output videos files that were pathetic quality and unfriendly to use.

Encoding Software

After downloading and trying nearly a dozen software from the Internet I finally settled down to Nero Recode. Almost all of them had one limitation or other. Remember I wanted the output to be played both in my Zune and XBox 360 not a easy combination.

• First was Windows Media Encoder did a reasonable job but was very slow and didn't work well with DVDs.
• Convert2Zune  - this was a free script from my fellow Regional Director Vinod Unny. This uses Windows Media Encoder as the backend and had the same drawbacks of that, except that it automated the steps.
• Next was Video VLC Media Player - this was the only reliable software that does both removal of CSS and encoding to WMV well, but the downside it was very slow in its conversion.
• PQDVD - I bought this based on recommendation from my industry colleagues to convert videos to Zune format. Though it initially seemed to work well with DVDs, I soon realized it was unreliable and pathetic for VideoCDs. 50% of the time it produced videos that had audio out of sync by several minutes!
• Nero Recode - Here comes Nero Recode. The software doesn't remove copy protection, but once you have crossed that bridge using DVD Decrypter there is no software that comes close to the speed and reliability of Nero Recode. Couple of points I learned that you need to be before you can start using it.
  • If you choose the profile as default Nero Digital Profile the output file doesn't work with Zune and XBOX. It produces MPEG4 files that uses proprietary Nero Digial Codecs that works only with Nero Digital Certified Media players - obviously Zune and XBOX are out of that. Initially I gave up Nero Recode because of this, but later learned the next point from a forum post.
  • You will have to choose the second profile in Nero Recode called "Nero Digital AVC" which produces industry standard MPEG4 files. The output files thus produced play natively with Zune Player. To make them play in XBOX 360, you need to do two things. First is to use Zune Player Sharing option over Windows Media Player Sharing. Second, go to XBOX 360 and play one of the files - it will automatically prompt to download an optional media update (below screenshot). Once you download and install it, your XBOX 360 can now play seamlessly the MPEG4 files.

Problem solved, case closed. Everyone lived happily ever after

As I have written in the past I like Irish Folk songs. So the other day while at Crosswords I saw & picked up the CD "Ireland - The greatest songs ever". One song among the 12 songs in the album impressed me a lot and in the last few days I have listened to it several times.

The song was Four Pence a Day by Tola Custy & Cyril O'Donoghue. Surprisingly my 4 year old son has taken a liking to it and he demanded I play it twice today!.The song talks about the hard working conditions for Four Pence a day as salary. 

You can sample the songs from this Amazon page. If you like Irish Folk Songs this is a good album but the price at Rs.395 is damn expensive. You may be able to buy the few good songs online for much cheaper price. 

Over the few years our team size in Vishwak has grown from less than 50 to over 150 now. This means as the Chairman of the organization I don't get to meet every team member individually, have a chat with them and get to know them better. So few months we experimented with a program titled "Coffee with Venkat", obviously inspired by the TV talk show by a similar name. This is a bi-monthly event normally held on the first & Third Saturday's of a month. A few randomly selected team members spend an hour over coffee to have an informal chat with me. Only one condition - no work related topics. I have done over half-a-dozen of this programs so far, and mostly the topics they choose to talk are around their aspirations, ambitions, school/college days and future plans. Every time after the program I feel extremely energized and inspired. I highly recommend this to every business or organization heads. 

Microsoft recently announced their new virtualization technology  "Hyper-V" (codename Viridian) as part of Windows Server 2008 that will replace Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. I wanted to understand the differences between the two virtualization products and how to use Hyper-V. In my search, I came up with the following list of references and understandings.

Rough Technology differences between Hyper-V and earlier products:
One way to think about these new chip technologies is that they introduce a “-1” ring essentially to the usual four rings in the x86 CPU architecture. With the VPC and Virtual Server offerings, they use a trick called ring compression where the kernel of the VM is placed into Ring 1, instead of the expected Ring 0. This is so that the host can absolutely ensure that VMs are running in their own sandbox and can’t gain access to any resources of the host or other VMs. There is something like 14-17 CPU instructions in the x86 instruction set that can’t be executed directly because of sandbox violation. Hence, the need to place the child VM’s kernel into Ring 1 so that the host can place itself in Ring 0 to intercept those calls to protect them directly or to emulate them. By introducing a “-1” ring, the hypervisor lives here and controls the access to the various virtual machines. So, with the introduction of a hypervisor living in ring -1, the need for ring compression of child VMs is essentially removed. At least, this is one way to think about. They hypervisor itself is not a complete OS, per se. The hypervisor is a VERY thin and small, trusted computing base.

Technical References:

• Hyper-V Architecture, API overview from Wikipedia
• Windows Server Virtualization (WSV/Hyper-V) Preview
  
• Hyper-V Documentation from MSDN
• Install Hyper-V Beta
• Step by Step document on Hyper-V
• Installing Windows Server 2008 on Hyper-V
  

VM Additions for Linux

Earlier Microsoft Virtual PC and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 didn't have VM Additions for Linux, recently Microsoft released fully supported VM Additions for Linux (Download from here).

Though Microsoft Silverlight is a cool technology, it pales in front of Adobe Flash (98% of browsers have it) in terms of availability. It is not an unique MS problem, it is a problem for any new offering when there is an incumbent who has a majority market share. To change this requires education, awareness creation and put it in front of users at many as possible in exchange for an added value to them. I was pleased to see Microsoft doing some steps in this direction (unlike their pathetically nil action to have .NET Framework Runtime in desktops widespread in its earlier days) by having a beta of Silverlight enhanced downloads when people come to MS Download Center site. 

Yesterday I attended a Balanced Scorecard session organized by SPIN Chennai and the speaker was Mr.SUDIPTO MARJIT (Practice Head of QAI Limited).  Before the session my exposure to Balanced Scorecard was limited (or lower), but Mr.Marjit did an excellent job in giving an overview within the 60-75 minutes he had that at the end I felt I know a lot on the topic. Though this is a theoretical topic he made it very lively with his engaging style, with every sentence he spoke we could easily sense his passion for the topic and experiences he has had on ground.

He introduced the need for having something like Balanced Scorecard before going into the actual topic. This approach helped in appreciating this concept better. "Balanced Scorecard, is a world-renowned management technique for implementing strategy and creating a performance management system. Designed by Drs. Robert Kaplan and David Norton, it has been recognized by the HBR as the leading management tool in the last 75 years"

Two key Areas that Mr.Marjit concentrated on the talk were

• Balanced Scorecard methodology and understanding of a Strategy Focused Organization
• Aligning Strategy through Strategy Maps

I really liked his example of SouthWest Airlines using a strategy map.

Over the years, I have tried with different operating systems (Windows 3.1, 98, 2000, XP, Vista), newer & faster CPUs, different hardware brands (WinTV, Pinnacle, Aver), newer interfaces (PCI, USB) but I was never successful in getting a stable working setup of TV playing in a PC. At one point, it looked like I was having a curse against getting a TV Tuner working on my PC. In all cases my hardware exceeded the manufacturer's minimum required specification. So in the last two years, I have put TV Tuner in my list of technology "hypes" whose time haven't arrived yet.

With this background I tried again and I bought a Pinnacle Hybrid TV Tuner Kit (USB) for Vista during my Singapore trip. The minimum specification said Vista Home Premium/Ultimate (32bit) and it was Certified for Vista, this meant they have drivers for Vista. When I came back to my office, I tried to install it in my Windows Vista x64 Enterprise OS machine with 8GB RAM. I got the beta driver for Vista x64 from Pinnacle Support site, the card got installed but there was no Media Application to play the TV signal.

Windows Vista Enterprise x64 to Ultimate x64
After some search, I realized that I needed either Vista Home Premium or Ultimate because only those two Vista Editions include Windows Media Center that was needed to play the TV signal from Pinnacle tuner. I thought this should be simple, since Vista allows easy upgrade between editions, but it turns out officially you cannot upgrade Vista Enterprise to anything else. I found a hack here to do it, by tricking the setup to treat Enterprise as Business edition. Instead, I decided to reinstall Windows Vista. I did that and got Windows Vista x64 Ultimate working.

Pinnacle x64 Driver from Windows Update
When I now connected the TV Tuner USB Device, Windows Update detected the device, installed the correct driver for Pinnacle PCTV 330e and got initialised. I followed the instructions given in Pinnacle manual, connected the IR Blaster (this sticks in front of your set-top box and replays the IR instructions of set-top box remote) to IR Receiver and then the IR Receiver to a free USB port.
(IR Receiver / Remote sensor receives the signal from the Media Center remote control and relays it to the Media Center PC. When you plug the IR blaster/ control cable into the remote sensor and the set-top box, then the remote sensor also relays the signal from the PC to the set-top box)

Windows Media Center shows only TV Tuner as Signal source
I connected the Tata Sky DTH satellite set-top box's composite video/audio (RCA jack) output to Pinnacle Tuner. I ran Windows Media Center software, unfortunately it detected only the TV Tuner as an input source and refused to recognize the Satellite (Composite) as an available input source. Taking the suggestion from documentation for setting a set-top box from Microsoft site I ensured the IR blaster was connected. Still it didn't detect my composite video signal. For a strange reasoning best known only to Microsoft, Media Center doesn't enable input sources other than TV Tuner unless it detects the IR blaster. But in my case even with IR Blaster installed correctly, it didn't show up.

I tried the TV Tuner in two other Vista 32bit (x86) machines:

• Dell Vostro with 4GB RAM where I had the same problem of not being able to select composite signal source (Dell support said they don't support Media Center with Vostro series)
• Lenovo Desktop (with 1GB RAM) where it worked perfectly. Windows Media Center on first start, automatically detected the IR Blaster (allowed me to even control the Tata Sky set-top box successfully) and let me select composite as signal source.

It looks like Windows Media Center/Pinnacle Hybrid tuner doesn't support more than 1GB RAM for Satellite input. Strange!

I wrote to Pinnacle Support asking them on how to get the product working with Vista x64 Media Center. They said this is a MCE question so you should write to Microsoft. Filling a case with Microsoft PSS which they refused to take it as it is a how-to question and also it is a device capability issue. Writing back to Pinnacle, they promptly replied that the product is not supported in Vista x64 - "The tuner kit for Windows Media Center will only work on a 32 bit version. There is no update for a 64 bit version yet. We are sorry for any inconvenience the product has brought your".  This was surprising as Windows Update has a driver for the product and Pinnacle themselves have a beta driver.

So it was time to ditch Windows Media Center and do it on our own. After some research I found out Nero has a TV Tuner Player software - I am big fan and loyal user of Nero for years. I downloaded the trial of Nero 8 and after few configuration steps I got the device working.

Nero 8.0 configuration with Satellite Signal and Pinnacle Hybrid Tuner
The step to configure involves the following four steps:

Step 1: Launch Nero MediaHome software and then the "TV Wizard"

Step 2: "Pinnacle 330e/880e Device" as Video Device (you will see two entries, the other one is for TV Tuner Signal) and "Composite" as Video Input

Step 3: Launch Nero Home, select Video in Video and TV applet

Step 4: Scroll down and select Composite as the video to play

Finally, you will see this player with signal from Tata Sky working fine:

Note: If you are planning a TV Tuner card for Vista x64, before you buy it please visit the Microsoft HCL site to ensure you buy a hardware that is certified for x64.

Being in the IT Industry you can feel the energy of growth, innovation and excitement that's in India now. You can relate the present scene to the one that was there a decade back when IT professionals were rushing to United States and India suffered a brain drain (as it used to be called). Now the scene is completely the reverse where you are seeing many of those professionals returning back to India. They have had time to enjoy the western lifestyle, save some money and return back to India which was unheard of few years back. I personally know few of my friends at least who have returned from their high-paying/senior profile jobs in companies like Siebel, Microsoft, etc. in the last few years to India. In this connection I saw this Video in Hindustantimes that quantifies this to be about 60,000 Indian IT professionals who have moved back to India in last few years.

Moreover, nowadays people in the mid to senior roles don't want to leave their family behind and want to go to USA - they are getting salaries in India itself that are attractive and comparable.

I have started on a journey to centralize all my digital assets in a central computer (a.k.a server) in my house. The server will have all my digital photographs, music & video. The easiest of the three is to move my photos from my desktop to this server. Current plan is to stream audio to the music systems in the house, use XBox 360 Media Extender to stream video (DVDs) to the TVs in the house. I am considering using Windows Home Server for the central server. Though I planned it long time back only today I am finally started it, will keep you posted on how it goes.

The time consuming and manual process is to convert all my old audio cassettes into Audio files (MP3, WMA) and to convert all the DVD/CD into Video files (WMV, MPEG-4). This is the reason I was lazy to actually kick start the process. 

In this effort to have a fully digital archive, I bought Slim devices Squeezebox from Amazon to stream audio to music systems few months back. Only today I focussed and got it working. The device was extremely easy to configure both Wired and Wireless. The tough part was getting the SlimServer installed in the Windows PC and have the firewall opened correctly. These two articles were very useful: How to setup in Vista & Firewall Settings in Window. When I finally got the device working, I was surprised to see it showing Tamil (Unicode) characters. It didn't come correctly (as I guess it doesn't have full Indic Rendering support) but it showed Tamil Glyphs and we could guess the rest.

Microsoft announced recently a new Sync Framework. This is a CTP release that is targeted for release in Q2 2008 and it supports P2P and Online/Offline synchronization of data. Currently though customers require Outlook like Offline/Online Sync scenario, it means developers doing custom coding. The Sync Framework is claimed to support P2P sync of any type of file including contacts, music, videos, images and settings. And has built-in support for synchronizing relational databases, NTFS/FAT file systems, Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS/ATOM, devices and web services.

I welcome having a standard framework for doing this repetitive job, it also removes the complexity of handling multiple connection types, scenarios, fail over, retry, etc. Download CTP from here.

WOW, writing the above headline made me wonder how far software has come from the time you bought it from guys with coat and suit, to online, to free and now to rental. And what better product to signify this, other than MS Office.

I read in news that Microsoft India has announced MS Office 2007 in Prepaid model - which for me essentially resembles a rental/subscription model, as software always has been prepaid in the true sense. May be MS didn't want to use either subscription or rental words, they probably want to embrace, extend and change the game. Whatever said this is certainly a welcome move especially for a country with low income like India, where MS Office at say Rs.15,000 can be about 50% of a PC price.

The price of Rs.1499 for 6 month usage is affordable, but each extension there after at Rs.1299 for 3 months somehow looks exorbitant. Hopefully they are testing the waters on the pricing and will come to their senses. Ideally for bottom of the pyramid (for whom this is targeted) I will love to see a price of in the range of Rs.100 to 200 per month (in the same range as your cable TV fee per month) and it should include license for usage of Windows OS as well.

I was recorded on Day 1 of Digital Hollywood to say our pitch about Vishwak by Vator.TV and it was published now (click the above video). Vator.tv is a professional network and marketplace for ideas and businesses. Anyone, across all industries, at any stage, can share ideas, products, services and businesses with the rest of the world, mainly through video.

When they recorded with a small handycam I doubted on how well it will come. Not only it has come out well but they have published our About us and also enrolled us in SDForum Competition.

Today is the last day of DH and I have my panel discussion in another hour or so. I am sitting currently in The Next Generation in Mobile & Broadband Platform Personalization: Widgets, Search, Information & Commerce.

Joyce Schwarz, JCOM Emerging Entertainment Marketing, talked about her blog at Hollywood2020. You should give some content free, so that consumer will upsell, upgrade, etc. It is sickening everytime you have register when you want to see some content. She says she is an active believer that move toys will connect to Internet - Nicholas Negropante has said you will have more Barbies connected to Internet than PCs.

Martin Russ, Chief Architect, Real Time Content talked about documentary where you can give consumer a small teaser and then that keeps expanding as you go into it. There should be able to have an open API for exchanging profile from one social site to another. It is not possible to automatically move the profile content from facebook to linkedin. Future always has the habit of being what is least expected. 3

Jonathon Wolfe, CEO, Maxiem talked about his company having a framework around MPEG21. And content producers in future are going to let go of the content to be distributed over all places, but have embedded transaction points and revenue shares.

Collin Bruce, Director of Marketing, Embedded Business Group, Hitachi America Ltd. talked about their investments on embedded database for search. We will accept adverts when we want to do something/buy something. If we force advertisement with content, people will move to free options.

Scott Fedewa, Executive VP & Executive Producer, LiveNation.com talked about how they are building technology that shows text and picture sent from SMS go through moderator and appear on the screen in the front during a concert. A spam is a spam only if you are not interested. If you target correctly then you will want it, even rich people will want it, done correctly advertisement becomes programming.

Jim Benz, BDM, CSG Interactive talked that they are 1.2 Billion USD company there customers are most of the cable companies. DRM seems to be come and go depending on which seminar you are in.

Digital Music & Its Transformation

Artistnation has been recently launched which brings under one umbrella the pandora of revenue sources for artists including Music Rights, Mobile Rights, Merchandising, Product branding, touring, etc. It has recently signed up with Madonna for 150 Million over 10 years. Artists are now being realized as the center of universe and they never had distribution going better for them than now. Another speaker says he wants to dispel this vision of artist quitting their day job, over the weekend distribute music and make millions. Traditionally there has been an adversary relationship between label and artists - now they will move into more collaborative relationship just like artist and managers. Labels were controlling 90% of video distribution, now you have MSN, Google & Yahoo! doing it. There was mention about Ruckus which is legal music free for college students.

Alby Galuten from Sony says it is a myth that labels makes artists. Music sales in their heydays had users immersed in music when they buy a CD put up their headphone and hear it, do nothing. Now they do many things. It is going to be very difficult to get subscribers to keep paying $15 per month.

Jessica Stoner of Pandora (Radio) talked about how users will get more ways to get music easily - as easy as get getting terrestrial music, now they are getting broadband music in PC, later it is going to broadband in their cars. People want to discover/get introduced to music in their radio and then hear it till they drop from their iPod. 

John Jones talked about how music will be mixed / consolidated in everything that MSN, Yahoo! does.

Charlie Moore of Ruckus feels that students feel comfortable paying money per semester terms, they are comfortable for charging through mobile/landline numbers than through credit cards. They will feel better to pay $50 per year one time, rather than $5 per month.

There was a question of where Microsoft is with Zune with all their monies and where is there $50 million campaign equivalent of iPods. Microsoft historically leads in 3rd round, they have patience and perseverance to lead. They did with software, now they are likely to get it in entertainment with XBOX leading. 

Reinventing Advertising: Broadcast vs the New Platforms

Dean Scheu from Charter Media says That the 30 seconds spot is not really dead, it is evolving into interactive spots. The thought process that went into creating it is changing. Charter is in 300,000 houses in LA. Lot of people want to know more if the product advertisement is targeted and appropriate for them.

Mitch Oscar from CaratDigital says The ads are now made to work wherever they are, whether it is time shifting, place shifting and all that. When technology people come to the advertising agencies like his, they say they have done a new technology before but they don't add value like what worked what is the ideal time how users are behaving to this, etc. Agencies need this information to understand this and are not getting help, also the manpower shortage in agencies is also not helping.

Charles "Chip" Meehan from Comcast spotlight talked about their Telescopic spots that helps to cross promote their 110 other channels to people who normally watch only 16 of them and are not aware of the others.

Kenneth Papagan from Rentrak Corporation talked about how their company measures user behaviors in theatre and DVD just like in Internet. When advertisers have tried to make their 30 seconds into 21, 11, 5 seconds consumers are moving out of it lesser.

Jeff Schultz from CONCERT who were the first on demand TV channel in US. There is no inherent thing fixed about 30 seconds spot.

DH Fall 2007 just started. The first session "Media, Entertainment and Social Change" talked about how Digital Film Making Tools helped the campaigners behind the "Darfur Now" movie to produce it. "Ted Braun" said how they are using the Community tools to spread the message through viral marketing (embed the original videos produced during the movie). Participant.net company's "Adrian Sexton" says their goal is to be make entertainment meets social action meets social media. For them using the community/social networking technology tools means not only making profit but action social awareness. Most of the Social causes sites and places are not engaging and compelling, they are largely inert communities and no entertainment proposition. People want to be in active communities and have entertainment as well. Good Philanthropy should also give good entertainment and they call "Social Action Network". There tenets are to "Connect, Collaborate, Engage, Activate" basically take part!.

I was pleased to know that the technology we feel is only for the urban elites are helping greatly in effecting a social change.

Few other points - YouTube has a new initiative "Broadcast your cause" where they give free cameras to community journalism, Al Gore has launched Current.com (2.0) Digg Like System for social causes sites, Kiva.com is about loans that change lives (based on Micro finance) and Clinton plugged it in Oprah on Sep 4, 2007 and they got more money they can give, MSN Messenger works with the IM donations model, Development of original multimedia content based upon community engagement in a subject area.

"We Make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give" - Winston Churchill

Mobile TV & Video: Content & Commerce: A movie clip was demoed by Motorola using Mobiclip player from Actimagine corp. Transpera demoed their solutions to connect multiple devices, multiple gateways, etc and also social community sharing features. MediaFlo (Nalco) shows their TV Experience in Mobile and channel surfing as fast as in tv and not battery draining, uses Qualcomm's nationwide 700Mhz spectrum. Actimagine says they expect the Nokia, Motorola & Windows Mobile Smartphone will be 400Million+ by next year. Choicestream talked about their personalized recommendation software. Verisign talked about their DNS Services, SSL, Mobile Messages (60% of world wide messages are routed through them) and they have more TELCO integration than anyone else. Fun Little movies demoed their family/kids/international friendly comedy in Sprint Mobile channel.

• How do you make people watch the content they have already paid for, say by $100 per month for their cable connection
• Internet has taught us that Media houses will have significant share, but the hockey stick long tail approach/inflexion point is user generated content
• Discussions on whether content programming (like what they cable networks do) is important or not. Or is only the content producers (professional or user) important
• In the question hour I talked about how in India people wait for 5-10 minutes to download a paid content; it is about empowering people who don't have access to content (connecting the unconnected)
• There was another question - In TV advertisements happen because it was free; why will we watch advertisements while we pay for Mobile. It was answered as the same scenario that happened 10 years back - why see advertisements while we pay for ISP for internet, why we watch advertisements in TV while we pay for cable.

I am  writing this post on a flight from London to Los Angeles. Since I had a good night sleep on my previous leg from Mumbai to London, I didn't want to sleep now, instead spending the time got on clearing my backlogs of emails and tasks. I own a Zune Player that I rarely carry outside, I think I already have enough electronics with me all the time - Laptop, its cables, cell phone and USB drives. I use my Zune most of the time while I am at home connected to Lansec speakers. Recently I found a good use for Zune, it is to take it on long trips for watching movies that I don't get time to watch while at time. The best thing about Zune is that it has a quite big size screen which makes it comfortable for watching movies, battery that lasts for nearly 2 full movies and I can charge it back by connecting it to my laptop.

I bought the DVD of the movie "World Trade Center" few months back but never had the time to watch it at home. Before leaving I converted the DVD into Zune format using PCDVD software. The software does a good conversion, but freezes once in a while running in Vista.

Coming back to the movie, I was expecting (should I say ignorantly) the movie to be the story behind the plot & how it was executed. Instead the movie was about how two cops from Port Authority (PAPD) who risked their lives to safe people after the first tower coming down, got themselves trapped in concourse of building 5. The whole movie revolves around these two officers and their anxious family. The director has nicely handled the story on the lines of human spirit, moments before death and courage of people in uniform. After watching the movie completely, it struck me if the movie had covered any other story line or talked about the plot it would have been disrespectful to the thousands of families who lost their loved one's on that tragic day.

At Vishwak we have over 10 years of experience with Media and Mobile Portal solutions. Recently we launched www.deliveranexperience.com as a branding site for our offerings with Silverlight, Sharepoint, VPF (Vishwak Portal Framework) and MCDS (Mobile Content Delivery System).

We are showcasing this for the first time in upcoming Digital Hollywood (Fall) event being held at Hollywood from 29th Oct to 1st Nov 2007. DH is a premium event that connects Hollywood and IT industries. I will be there and if you happen to be in LA area, please visit us at Stall #60 at the Grand Ballroom at Hollywood and Highlands.

I have been invited as well as a speaker in a panel discussion on Day 3 (Nov 1):

Track III: 12:50 PM - 2:00 PM - Personalized and Innovative Mobile & Broadband Services: Advertising and Content

• Steve Bava, Group Account Director, WHITTMANHART Interactive
• Mike Fitzsimmons, CEO, Delivery Agent
• Jonathan Cobb, Founder and CEO, Kiptronic
• Venkatarangan Thirumalai, Chairman, Vishwak Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
• Jordan Greene, VP of Mobile Marketing, MindMatics
• Dina Pradel, Vice President of Marketing, StyleFeeder
• Michael J. Pinto, Managing Principal, mCapital, LLC, Moderator

For Session Description & Speaker Bios Click Here

Update 1/Nov/07: My panel went well, Michael did a good job. Though the discussions were more on the advertisement/agency topics I presented an Indian perspective on some of the innovative products that are being launched in India.

As I have said in the past, many times I find interesting articles handpicked and featured in MSN.COM homepage. Today I read one such article on World's Cheapest destinations. It covered about places where you can spend a day for $20 - Laos, Bali, Vietnam, India, Zambia, Tunisia, Honduras, Guatemala, Peru and Argentina. Sadly it has left out Sri Lanka - may be it was because of the ongoing unrest there.

Though India is featured there, don't get fooled. Anything in Travel that falls under luxury is expensive in India compared to other Asian countries. Five Star (though not everyone will be looking) accommodations are the most expensive in India, even Las Vegas is cheaper than Indian Metros. One of our abroad client is visiting us in Chennai this week and Chola Sheraton's per day rate for them is Rs.8800 (USD 225).

Last week just before my Sri Lanka short visit, I finished this audio book. It was "Tough Choices" by Carly Fiorina who spent nearly twenty years at AT & T and Lucent Technologies before working as CEO for HP from 2000 to 2005. The book is a must read (or listen) for people starting their career in a large organization and especially Women Executive's will find themselves relating well to Carly's experiences. The initial chapters are definitely inspirational for fighting against the odds in modern businesses.

If you have read Who says Elephants can't Dance Audio book by Louis Gerstner Jr., the former IBM CEO on how he transformed IBM, you will expect similar material here on what happened in HP. In which case, you will be disappointed. Though there are elaborate coverages on her interview process for the CEO post and her firing from HP board, there is little coverage on her job as CEO. I was surprised to hear her bold statements about few executives who she comes across in her career, some of them quoted by her with actual names I am sure are still around in the industry. She raises strong criticisms about Michael Capellas (Ex-CEO of Compaq) and David Woodley Packard (son of HP co-founder David Packard) in the book.

The title Tough Choices indicates the tough one's Carly had to make in her personal/career life as an individual. I liked her repeatedly used quote in the book about "my soul is still with me".

On being selected as Fortune magazine Top Woman CEO she had the following to say: “After striving my entire career to be judged by my results and my decisions, the coverage of my gender, my appearance and perceptions of my personality would outweigh anything else”

As I have kept noting down in this blog, Microsoft's Live Service offerings are improving day by day. In the recent weeks there have been significant improvement in the search relevance, breadth of offerings and more so on the improved user interface. Today when I went to Live Search Maps, I liked the Single Text box Interface (shown above), the earlier two text boxes UI was a pain to use. What impressed me most was their support for business owners - I searched for "Vishwak Solutions" looking for our company in Redmond, WA. It didn't give up any results, then I clicked on the Help button expecting no useful information or out dated links. I was surprised to see the first topic itself being what I wanted - How to list my business?. The steps that followed was easy to complete and they verified real time with a PIN number by calling the business phone number I had furnished. Overall excellent consumer experience, keep up the good work Live team!

As I wrote yesterday - On 16th October I presented in Sri Lanka DevDay 2007. The audience were more than 500 in number and were enthusiastic bunch, who were very eager to learn new things in technology. This was different from the programs in India, where Audiences are not that excited even when you show them new stuffs. This may be because in India you have lost the charm of big events as too many of them happen that too throughout the year.

Anyways, coming back I presented on two topics I like a lot nowadays - WPF and Silverlight.

WPF, a new way of looking @ your Windows Applications
Overview of Windows Presentation Foundation, the goals behind WPF and the power of XAML language. See for yourself how the UI world around you is changing forever. The session will cover the design and implementation of UI using Microsoft Expression Blend and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 “Orcas”. It will get into discussing about the popular controls in WPF including Layout, Data Binding, Audio/Video, Flow Control and composition techniques. We will wrap up the session by looking into the new features introduced with WPF 3.5.

Silverlight: The web just got richer
See Microsoft’s new arsenal for the web, the cross browser cross platform Silverlight.  In a world where designers had more say in Web Applications this session will show you how developers can get back into the driving seat. The Session will go into details of case studies of applications built with Silverlight 1.0. You will see demos working across browsers seamlessly. We will wrap up the session by discussing the new capabilities that .NET integration is bringing to upcoming Silverlight 1.1 version.

References:
1. The presentations I made (Thanks to Tim Sneath of Microsoft) are available here
2. Most of the demos (other than the demos we built for our customers in Vishwak) are taken from Silverlight and WindowsClient.net sites.

I was in Sri Lanka for last two days on invitation from Microsoft (Sri Lanka) to present on their DevDay 2007 event. The event happened in Mount Lavinia Hotel and I stayed there as well. What a beautiful place this is, with clean unspoiled beaches and adding to the vintage effect given by a Railway station right in the front of the hotel. Imagine the place that has Railway Station in Front and a long unspoiled beach on the other side. The hotel itself has 200 years of history starting as the house of the British governor and moving to various owners. Check out the photos of the place below:

MT. LAVINIA Hotel 16 OCT 2007

Microsoft gave me a beautiful gift, which was a replica of Sigiriya style of art of a Fresco maiden holding flowers. The replica was done on a irregular shaped stone giving it a genuine antique look - may be this is what made the Sri Lankan Customs question me on whether I am smuggling out one of their antique piece out of country. Of course, they allowed me to take it after they found it to be a replica. I have given below the images of the original painting (Left) and the replica (Right) I got.

Earlier today when I was doing a WPF demo in Colombo for Microsoft DevDay 2007 I wanted to show the new Solitaire and  other games rendering smooth UI in Vista. But I didn't find any of the games in my demo laptop. The last I have used the games in Vista was when Vista was in Beta and in Vista Ultimate edition. On further investigation and looking into other Vista installations (Windows Vista Enterprise x64, Vista Business x86) I realized that games are not installed by default in these editions - obviously why do you want them in a business edition of the OS?. The good news is that you can go Programs and Features applet in Control Panel, and install the games. Immediately upon installation, I played and won a game with Solitaire. Hip hip hooray!!!

If you are like me who has multiple mail profiles configured in Outlook 2007, you will be tired of selecting the profile everytime. Instead using command-line switches (parameters) for Outlook.exe you can create a shortcut for each profile that you want to run. For example I have a Profile (configured using the Mail Applet in Control Panel) named "Vishwak" and another named "Hotmail". So to run the Vishwak Profile I create a Shortcut that points to:"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE" /profile Microsoft

Needless to say, the above path is specific to my Vista with Office 2007 machine. To learn on more switches and what they can do read this article from Office Online.

Like I have written earlier Outlook.exe switches can also be used to do tasks that are not exposed in User Interface like cleaning rules, etc.

I had a small accident with my car of 6 months a Honda City ZX GXi today. Thank god, no one was hurt and more important only my car got damaged. It happened while I was driving and about to stop for the Traffic Signal to take the Right Turn in Mount Road/South Usman Road junction.  My son was sitting next to me and was constantly asking me one question or other, there was an Ambassador coming from behind trying to go straight and honking nonstop. Disturbed by the horn sound, distracted by my son's queries I turned back, and the next moment my car banged into the Mahindra Jeep in front of me which had stopped for the signal. The front of my car got hit badly but we felt no impact in the passenger cabin. Since it was my fault, I apologized to the other driver and came home feeling bad for driving carelessly. I am sure Honda will charge me a minimum of few grands of rupees to fix this, let me check with them!

Cybermedia (Publishers of PCQuest and Dataquest) have a job's portal at Cybermedia Dice. Recently I was interviewed by their reporter Harshitha B Hegde, and here is the summary of the coverage:

"Vishwak Solutions is a decade-old company offering successful desktop and mobile portal solutions. T N C Venkata Rangan, the founder CEO of Vishwak, shares his views on the market growth and career prospects in portal development". Full Article (PDF) is published here.

This is sensational at the same time scary. As the saying goes "the higher you go, the harder the fall ". India's Stock market index today closed just 150 points short of the 19,000 mark. This is happened within few days of it crossing 18,000 and few weeks after crossing 17,000 mark. Though the fundamentals of the Indian Economy now is doing good, I am not sure it can handle so much money coming in so fast. Now any bad news that can affect the sentiment of the investors either internally like fall of this government or externally, will likely to trigger a huge fall. Such a fall can wipe out few hundred thousand millions in days and push into a burst. This scene is not very different in other Asian markets, everywhere fund is pouring.