Recently in Television news I saw a news about Anna University Coimbatore implementing a complete automated Exam Management system. They seem to have implemented online solutions to manage all the phases of examinations in an university. This includes Question Paper Authoring, Hall Ticket printing, Secure Question Paper delivery and Evaluation of answer sheets.

In all this, what caught my attention was the Answer sheet evaluation process.  Normally when you think of automation, you tend to think of students taking the test in a computer (CBT like model). But here, the tests are taken by students with traditional paper/pen; after which the answer sheets are scanned by a back office operation; then each examiner sitting in their own college/university can login online, see the answer sheets and evaluate. This saves lot of costs incurred by each of the examiner travelling, lodging, venue and more.

Good luck to the university for success of this scheme.

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.

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.

In the Forbes Asia June 16, 2008 issue I came across these interesting facts about Adobe (the makers of Photoshop and Flash).

• According to Adobe, Flash Player is the most widely available software on Earth (Is it?)
• For every 1000 users of free Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Acrobat Reader, there is a Web Programmer or Graphic Designer behind creating the content
• 80% of Creative Professionals or 2.6 Million people use Adobe's Creative Suite
• Adobe has 1 Million developers using its products compared 4 Million Software developers using Microsoft .NET Tools

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.

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.

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.

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.

If your laptop like mine is part of a domain, then updates are likely to be controlled by your IT Team. In our office, our IT team uses WSUS to download the updates locally, test them on local machines and then approve the updates for general consumption across the organization. I am one of the few in the office to use Windows Vista, so these updates are approved at the last and I have to wait. More so, ultimate extras don't flow correctly through WSUS. Since they are controlled by WSUS, even if I am a local system administrator I cannot directly run Windows Update locally or go to Microsoft Update and get updates.

This week one of my IT Engineer gave me a tip. It was to login locally to the machine, using a local machine user name and then use Windows Update. I used it and it worked perfectly. Please be warned that doing updates this way, may not be supported by your IT Team!

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 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!

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.

I read in IEEE Spectrum July 2007, a detailed technical analysis of how a high profile mobile phone bugging that happened in 2004. It was of Greece Prime Minister, his cabinet colleagues in defense and foreign affairs, MPs and others. The interesting thing the authors (Vassilis Prevelakis, Diomidis Spinellis) point out was the fact the whole episode was undetected for several months. The hackers (till date even after a Greece Parliament Commission was not identified) had used very sophisticated techniques to hide traces of their activities and ensured they left no entries in any logs.

The cellphones of Greece PM and others were wiretapped to unauthorized numbers by hacking into Ericsson's AXE Switches used in Vodafone Greece mobile network and installing RootKit softwares. Ericsson switch software has the ability to patch its Operating System code without rebooting by using something called has Correction Area. The hackers installed about 29 blocks of code in this correction area, tampered all checksums to go undetected, modified (made itself hidden) the list of active processes in memory. The rogue software stored all the mobile numbers that has to be tapped in memory (there by avoiding any disk entries) and copied the voice calls to parallel numbers.

From a software best practice angle, what was interesting was this could have been identified much earlier if Vodafone had purchased a front-end (GUI) software called IMS (Interception Management System) that maintains a list of legal wiretapping numbers. This list could have been compared periodically with what was in memory and any differences between the two alerted immediately. In this case, the backend OS in the switch had legal wiretapping capabilities enabled and working, but the front-end to manage it was not purchased by customer. Clear case of not reducing the attack surface area by removing unwanted piece of software in live environments. 

This post is more of my thinking than a finite point on the present world economic achievements.

If you stop and think about what has been achieved in the last 10-15 years in Economy and Wealth Creation, it is amazing on any parameter you take. Whether it is China with a Trillion Dollar Foreign Exchange reserve, World's large corporation Market Cap (Google, Citi, WalMart) of each over several hundred Billion Dollars, Governments Trade Surpluses, Indian Government Direct Taxes Growth of over 60%, Worldwide sustained economic growth for last 5 years even though Oil is selling at record high of $70+ per barrel - on any account what has been achieved now is unprecedented in the modern history.   

There are several complex happenings that have enabled this including Globalization. Being an Engineer and Software person, I would like to think it is because of Computers and Internet revolution (When I say Computers I do include Mobile Phones as well). Think about any task in modern research/science, business, life, medicine, banking/finance - there is no task that is not influenced by Computers and Internet. 

It can range:

• From preparing a thesis for a PhD, where you can research papers from around the world (which would have been impossible to do  2 decades back at this cost and time)  and hence stand on other giants shoulders
• Exchange real-time data and do complex calculations for fundamental research including DNA analysis
• Access to best written courseware and training materials used for Education
• Access to world wide economic trends
• Learning from Management best practices and mistakes from around the world

and so on... In all these (and you can add hundreds of more items) Computers and Internet have touched and improved productivity at every facet of our present day life.

Do you have a say on this, leave your comments.

At Vishwak, we value the openness of WWW and importance of standards for our business; so we are members with W3C. Representing Vishwak, I am a member in the Advisory council in W3C. Yesterday, while browsing my profiles page in W3C site I came across two interesting items.

ForgeProofing: SPAM in email is a huge problem nowadays and this becomes worse if you are in a email group. W3C has added few interesting filters to prevent EMail Forgery. The way it works is by examining whether mail claiming to be sent from an email address matches a pattern that you have specified. If so, it is allowed through. If not, it is assumed to be a forgery and is rejected by our mail hubs. For example: Identify a pattern in the "From:" line of mail that you send. For example, suppose the From: line in email you send includes your full name and your email address. Or it can be a pattern identifying your email client software, indicated in the User-Agent Header. Though these techniques are not fool-proof they can certainly limit casual spammers.

FOAF: The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is about creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do. In short, FOAF is about your place in the Web. FOAF is a simple technology that makes it easier to share and use information about people and their activities (eg. photos, calendars, weblogs), to transfer information between Web sites, and to automatically extend, merge and re-use it online. You can access my FOAF here (it is a machine readable XML file).

One of the best way to keep in touch with the hundreds of technologies from Microsoft is to read the monthly MSDN Magazine. I have been a reader for more than a decade even when it was called MSJ. To get it in India it meant you paid prohibitive price for shipping, now all that is past.

You can now subscribe to the digital editions of MSDN Magazine and Dr. Dobbs Journal for FREE!. Please click here to subscribe. Go to here to see samples of the digital magazines.

In the 90's Microsoft was felt closed and distanced from customers, but in the last few years the company has become very transparent. This was through active blogging from thousands of softies - senior level to engineers; community engagements; product roadmap shared early and regular CTPs (Community Technology Preview) of all major releases including Visual Studio, Silverlight, SQL Server and more. I believe no other large software company (even the OSS) has been so transparent in the last few years.

In this article of PC World, the author argues that Apple is the new bully on the block, using strong arm tactics with partners. Do you agree, post your comments below.

Many times we find Google able to give appropriate answers when you are looking for something, especially with their built in calculator/formulae/conversion and other tools integrated in search. Today I wanted to know when was Deepavali (note the Tamil word I am using here instead of Hindi Diwali) this year. Without thinking much, I typed in IE 7 Search Box Deepavali 2007 and to my surprise I got the correct answer from Live Search. Check out the screen shot below. Google didn't understand what I wanted and gave me usual web links as results

Interestingly, Live Search seemed to know about most of the Indian Festivals including Pongal, Holi and others.  Impressive stuff by Microsoft, please keep it up.

In the fierce war on Search Engines this can be a new page - for all of you out there who are wondering what war, hasn't it been won by google I do believe it is not. Anyways, as the book "The Search" talks about how much can be known about you by Search Engine companies with your search behaviour/data. Accussing Google is doing this today and tracking everyone is rubbish, as it will take enormous processing power and no one has yet figured out a way to monetize that information for profit. But in the future this will become a possibility when computing power and data mining software become more sophisticated.

So online users worry about their privacy will become a genuine concern. I was happy to see a news today that Ask.com is planning to do something on this. They promise to protect your privacy by not storing information on your searches in their database with AskEraser (to be introduced by this year-end). If People like and flock to this feature, Google can implement the technology overnight - they have to stop doing their logging . But the challenge for Google is not Technology but business, because of the impact this will have on their advertisement business.

All said, privacy has every chance of becoming the next battle ground in search. It will be interesting to see any path-breaking innovation Google Engineers can come up with which protects Advt. revenue and privacy.

Till then, let us continue searching on the net as usual ...

I get this question from our customers most of the time, on what should be the ideal time for a WebPage to load that consumers will be bear with and will not switch to an other site. It is not an easy question to answer, as each webpage (and its site) is different, offers varied functionalities, delivers wide range of contents and each sites objective is different. In my opinion only a Search Engine (like Google) can have the simplest (smallest) homepage as it just needs to have one TextBox and still do something useful. For all other sites it is a careful orchestration (and comprimises) between features exposed, richness, content & speed.

On this same topic I read in Business Line an interview "Trends in the making" with Chris Schoettle (EVP, Akamai Technologies) and he sa:

"End users today expect a page to load faster. Average user satisfaction for a page to download is now four seconds. If it takes longer than that, they will typically go to another site. People do not have the patience to wait for pages to load. A couple of years ago, it was seven seconds. And soon, it will be no more than three seconds"

At Vishwak, few months back we collected data on time taken for page load of Google and Yahoo! for academic interest. We did this from various Indian metros both with Dial-up connections and from browsing centres (Broadband).

Disclaimer: This study was done purely for academic interest and we don't guarantee accuracy nor we will be responsible for any consequences of usage of this data. Yahoo! and Google are trademarks of their respective companies.

PCQuest Magazine in its June 2007 issue has listed 250 IT Implementation Projects in India. I am happy to say our Vishwak Portal Framework based solution we provided for Live Mint (Hindustan Times & WSJ Business paper) is featured as one of them. (Case study of LiveMint)

(Courtesy: PC Quest June 2007)

Also interesting is the article's observation that ASP.NET is the preferred platform of choice for Portals in India for its ease of use. Our VPF is based on ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005.

"Most of the portal solution projects that we received were developed using ASP.NET or VB .Net. We spoke to the project heads of these portals to find out why they chose this platform. The answer was simplicity. According to them, creating projects on ASP.NET is mush easier and requires less code to write"

Earlier it was expected by Industry pundits that Sun in their JavaOne conference this week, Sun and Adobe will announce a version of Flash with Java Runtime to combat Microsoft's Silverlight. But Instead Sun has gone alone with their announcement of JavaFx which promises to give a Scripting Runtime, access to Java VM, 2D Graphics and more.

Adobe with its Flash, Flex and Apollo is clearly the incumbent with over 98% of installed base of Flash runtime. For Microsoft Silverlight is a huge step forward in this space and they have the advantage of bringing on board day 1 - millions of existing .NET Developers to Silverlight. Sun looks more as a late comer to the party. I am yet to study in detail on JavaFx - so I will hold on from making any technical comparisons at this stage.

If you look historically, what is happening now is clearly a re-run of the Browser Wars (to be precise Browser Based Applications war) between Microsoft with ActiveX and Sun with Java Applets. In the first round Java Applets got a slight majority, but Sun as a company didn't cash on it. Sun and Netscape let Microsoft eat from their hands royally.

What was interesting was what happened later - Adobe (Macromedia) who never were in the platform business suddenly in the early 2000s became a dominant force with the ubiquitous of their Flash Player. Thanks to Microsoft who bundled Flash Runtime (probably without realizing how much reach it will have later) with every Windows/IE installation and there-by making Flash the de-facto plug-in. In the last few years, YouTube's of the world made Flash, a great Media Platform. Now Adobe wants to build on this huge advantage of Flash with Apollo and there-by make the Operating System (Windows) irrelevant - let us wait and see. Read here on what Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe has got to say on Microsoft's Silverlight. Interesting days ahead ...

Another entrant gaining ground in last few years is the camp of Web 2.0/Ajax with Google Map's and SalesForce's of the world trying to build everything with HTML/JavaScript. I have my doubts on the scalability of these Ajax solutions for serious business applications - even for simple effects the amount of lines of JavaScript and CSS you have to write is mind-boggling.

When I was writing this I was reminded of a presentation I made in 1997 titled "Building Browser based Applications (PPT)". Worth checking it out.
(The presentation is given as last edited on 22/11/1997 - My contacts and company logo are all out-dated)

Yesterday Hutch-Microsoft soft launched Mobile Search in their PlanetHutch Portal. PlanetHutch (www.planethutch.in) is a web portal accessible only by Hutch Mobile Subscribers in India who have a GPRS capable handset and Data Services enabled. Though Google-Airtel have announced a similar service, the Live Search from Microsoft is the first to market in India.

To quote from Jaspreet Bindra, MSN India Country Manager "What this means is that the default search bar on the Hutch WAP portal is branded Live. The service is both on-deck and off-deck search: If you type ‘Aishwarya’ the search results will give you Aishwarya related content (music, wallpapers, etc.) on the PlanetHutch portal, as well as Web search results for ‘Aishwarya’ "

So why am I writing this here, because I am proud that at Vishwak we worked with Microsoft in developing the backend content integration modules for this service. Vishwak is also the "Development and Operations Partner" for Microsoft in the PlanetHutch portal for last 4 years.  

Hindustan Times in content partnership with Wall Street Journal launched a new Business Paper in India "Mint" on Feb 1st. Designed by well-known newspaper designer Dr. Mario Garcia and edited by former Wall Street Journal deputy managing editor and European editor Raju Narisetti, the paper brings some fresh perspective in the Indian Business News area.

So why I am writing about it here?, because at Vishwak we developed the technology for the online edition "LiveMint.com" and it runs on our Vishwak Portal Framework (VPF).

It was a great team effort to launch such a prestigious portal between our teams at Vishwak, HT Media and other partners. Read here the peek on the technology case-study of LiveMint.com Portal (PDF).  Please post your technology comments below and anything about the portal to newsroom@livemint.com

Yes, "Gut Feel"  doesn't look nice to use in public. Is there a better term, I learned one today, to find out read on...

In casual conversations to indicate something is very easy, we say it is not "Rocket Science". I feel only a Rocket Scientist (like our President ABJ Abdul Kalam) can say for certain whether one is or not. This term is more often used in Software Development Lifecyle to indicate a module that the person feels is not difficult to build - I am a little skeptical whenever I hear this (I am also guilty of using it). I am skeptical because we are not talking metrics to indicate the complexity but relative terms, which vary person to person.

Anyways, what is definitely "Rocket Science" is to do Software Estimate. Scientifc Methods to estimate do exist and they should be used always - which I am firm believer when validated by experience inputs and risk analysis. Deliberations on this is for an other day.

Most often in the industry we hear the excuse there is no enough time to do a scientifc analysis and we have to go with "Gut Feel" estimates. Today while conducting an Interview, I learned a new term for saying this from the candiate and it is "Expert Judgement". Sounds Professional, isn't it!

I have been a Microsoft Regional Director from 1999. Everyone I get introduced to first ask me what is Microsoft Regional Director Program and who can be a RD?. So far the best way I could describe was by saying "RDs are not Microsoft Employees. They are third party technical evangelist who are passionate on Microsoft Technologies".  

This week one of my fellow RDs, Jonathan Goodyear has written this piece on "Who is a MS RD" in ASP.NET Pro Magazine. Thanks Jonathan.

I was mistaken when I thought after all the hype about Origami there is no development happening in the Ultra Portable PC space. Today I noticed in the Internet, news about two new Ultra Portables:

• Samsung's SPH-P9000 - Read this Engadget review and you will understand it is a brand new form-factor combining the best of mobile and PC, but in the size of a mobile. I will reserve my comments until I feel one in my hand and try it out.
  
• Brule Raon Vega - A cute beauty weighing 350-grams / 160×80×27.5-mm

Recently Microsoft announced Mix '07 - the conference for web developers, designers and business professionals. It is around April end 2007 in Las Vegas and as of now I am planning to attend it.

I was there in last year event (Mix '06) and it was big fun. The event had good technologies talked like Atlas, AJAX, Mash-ups, WPF & MOSS 2007. For a relief, the event was not Microsoft only affair. It had good participation from other new age web companies like Yahoo & Amazon. This gave the event a good breadth of topics and speakers. I also liked the format and restriction to few hundred partipants.  

(Click on the photos to see more from the same album)

This week in Mumbai a version of the event (IndiMix '06) is being conducted on 9th Nov. You can watch the live webcast or register for the event free here. If you happen to be there, say a "hello" to me.

Recently I was asked to prepare a brief presentation about Web 2.0 - Understanding the scene and kind of a 10,000 feet view. Below is the link to download the presentation that I completed.

WEB 2.0 an Analysis.ppt (130.5 KB)

Please note that this was created for a specific target audience and so it may not fully the cover the wide world of Web 2.0.

Nowadays tons of product teams and folks at Microsoft blog and some of these blogs are excellent resources on a given topic, especially since they are from the horses mouth. The problem has been on how do you discover the existence of a particular blog. If you go to homepage of blogs.msdn.com it does the latest posts and also you to search, but very basic.

Now Microsoft has released Microsoft Web Feeds Home, which is a directory of all Microsoft Product Groups, Teams, Employees blogs irrespective of whether it is in MSDN, Technet (or) in other places. It has got an excellent search (Powered by MSN Search) that allows you to easily discover the blogs on a given topic. I was surprised to see there are more than 3500 entries for "Sharepoint"

With the huge technology developments happening in Mobile and VoIP today, it is easy to miss out on how it all started. It started 130 years back in Boston, in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell summoned his assistant, Thomas Watson, in the world’s first telephone call with his famous words "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you".

Check this IEEE article that talks about this event in detail.

After months of waiting (after several attempts registering my hotmail id for beta, including once in PDC '05) I got a invite in my Hotmail InBox for Windows Live! Mail. I will leave the details out for you to try, but I found the experience to be much superior to anything you have used before - including Gmail/Yahoo/Outlook Web Access.

Copyright 2006, Microsoft Corporation

Last week, Microsoft relaunched beta of Windows Live Search. Though I like Google and Yahoo's simple search result interface and find it extremely usable during searches, I guess at times you need something more than "Google's One Size Fits All" vanilla white UI. I feel this to be the precise spot that Microsoft is targetting with its new Live Search service.

Copyright 2006, Microsoft Corporation

What I liked in the new service is its intelligent use of scroll bars in your search results page - no more you need to keep moving between previous and next pages; instead you can keep scrolling and the results keep adding at the bottom. Also useful is the new zoom in and zoom out capabilities which works for both search results and for images.

These new features of Windows Live search are by no means perfect, but they clearly show that there is enough scope for Search vendors to innovate. If I were to be Google, I will concentrate on doing just this and not spread myself too thin going after Microsoft in every space!

While hearing the announcement in PDC '05 for MS Expression and Visual Studio (Orcas) set of web designer IDEs  and playing with Office 12, I had mixed reactions. The positive was Expression and Orcas going full throttle with supporting XHTML and other web standards, at the same time introducing awesome new features that makes web development easy. My dissappointed was for lack of no such new standards support with the popular MS Web Designer product - MS Frontpage. I have been a fan of Frontpage even before MS bought the product and had built several websites using it. But over the last few years I was forced to switch to Visual Studio and other 3rd Party products as Frontpage was stagnating.  Also MS was confusing with two product streams - both aimed at doing Website Development.

Today all my fears and criticism was put to rest with the Announcement of Sharepoint Designer 2007 replacing MS Frontpage. Sharepoint Designer will be supporting all web standards including XHTML and full CSS compliance. In the same press release MS has clarified the position and the roles played by this new product and Expression Web Designer.

May MS Frontpage's soul RIP (Rest in Place)

Today MS also announced the final naming for Office "12" (Codename) as MS Office 2007 and the packaging, pricing of Office 2007. Thank god, they didn't name it "Office Vista"

One of the cool features of MSN Messenger (unfortunately not widely known) is MSN Alerts. Alerts lets you get notified through a toaster popup for the alert services you have signed up. Alerts can include popular news, weather, stocks or any other event. From a content provider perspective MSN Alerts was not widely available - you have to sign elaborate agreements with MSN and pay a licensing fee.

Recently MSN announced MSN Alerts for bloggers free!. Using the service, bloggers can sign up and make MSN Alerts facility available from their blogs. Users who click on the link and subscribe, can receive notification whenever a new blog entry was posted. Try this in my blog - use the MSN Alerts in the right hand panel in the navigation section. Post your experience in the comments section.

If you are looking at using Windows Sharepoint Services (a.k.a. WSS that ships with Windows Server 2003), check out these 30 ready to use templates from Microsoft. They range from Expense Reimbursements to Marketing campaigns.

There is also the Sharepoint team site at Gotdotnet, this has tons of information on Sharepoint, FAQs and more.

If you are administrator then the official Adminstrative Site for Sharepoint has valuable info on Capacity Planning, Upgrade Options, Deployment scenarios and the likes.

I started my programming way back in my 8th Standard (8th Grade) with GWBasic. Then during my high school moved to FoxBase+ and Clipper. I still remember the joy of my first Basic programs running - as a matter of fact my very first program was actually written in a paper, before I was permitted by my "Basic" tutor to key it in a PC.

My exposure to serious programming was with FoxBase+, while attempting to enhance a simple Invoicing application written to run in MS-DOS 4.0 (Do you remember this OS?). Then at my family business they bought a custom developed Inventory Management written in Clipper Summer 87. The consultant who developed it, abandoned us during a Virus attack (strangely he had the entire source code only on our machine and we lost it) and I had to reverse engineer the application and develop it afresh in FoxPro. Thanks to my Uncle Mr.T.N.C.Veeraraghavan who actually pushed me into doing this project. If not for him I was merrily playing Games and experimenting with PCTools. PCTools was a suite of power tools for MS-DOS that allowed you to extend beyond limits of DOS – the good thing about using it was that it allowed me to understand the PC Architecture and File System very well. PCTools was eventually bought and amalgamated into Symantec’s Norton Utilities.

My first attempt at doing the application with FoxPro was disastrous. Though I got the DB Schema, Screen and Reports working reasonably well; the application will run out of memory (remember the 640KB and 1MB Memory) after few screens. It turned out that when the user closes a screen and wants to go back to the main screen, I was doing things totally wrong. Instead of calling “EXIT” function to get out of the current function and return to the callee, I was basically calling again the main function. So within few calls, the stack was getting overflowed. Though I am explaining what happened then very well now, I was clueless at that time and had to go to an expert - Mr.Shivraj of Sysreader Magazine, who asked me “Venkat, why is that your functions don’t end!”. 

After that I immersed myself in FoxPro books and manuals (no Internet was available those days) and finally got the application working correctly. And it did work correctly for next 10 years. Moving from one machine to another over the years and on the way seeing various versions of OS - MS-DOS 4/6, Windows 3.x, Windows 95, Windows 2000 and finally Windows XP.  The remarkable thing was during these 10 years, no one had ever (almost) touched the source code or took more than 10 minutes in backing/restoring/setting it up in a new machine.  Around 2002, I was fed up with this MS-DOS application, so replaced it with a Visual Basic Application. The new VB application did pretty much the same functionality of the old FoxPro application, expect this time it was a Windows Application.

After my stint with FoxPro, I graduated to Nantucket Clipper Summer ‘87 for a short while and then to CA Clipper 5.x. CA Clipper 5.x was my stint on Object Oriented Programming (OOPS) and I still cherish my first full fledged OOPS application for a fleet management system – but that story and details are for a different day!.

Coming back to the reason on why started this post is that I got reminded about my Foxpro experiences after reading this blog posting by Drew Speedie. Drew has written his comments about a recent interview by Anders Hejlsberg (The Father of C#)  where Anders has talked about his aim of bringing FoxPro like Data handling capabilities to next version of Visual Studio called “Orcas”.

Reading this post I couldn’t help recollecting my views of FoxPro and xBase. For many years, especially during the days I was programming and then designing Windows Client/Server Applications - I always wondered on why it was not as easy doing common DB tasks in Visual Basic like it was in good ‘ol xBase. For example, even FoxBase+ had very powerful input controls out of box through its Picture clause, that allowed fine control over what users can type – whether it be a phone number, a numeric value or text (today we call this as mask edit controls). Another example could be that in FoxPro/Clipper days we had the ever powerful Browse Command which allowed rich data editing capabilities that will envy today’s sophisticated Data Edit controls. In CA Clipper 5.x with its TBrowse Class  (Am I not good for remembering all this after so many years) , you got absolute control over how it appearance on screen and behaviour. You could wire up 100’s of events in TBrowse to Code-Blocks – which were flexible and powerful Macro’s that gets compiled during runtime and can do almost everything that was possible in design time coding.

Over the last two decades VB, C# and Java have evolved and made programming easy and approachable to millions of developers. They have certainly realized into applications thousands of dreams, especially in Web and Enterprise scenarios. Building a huge multi-user, multi-location application with FoxPro/Clipper was unimaginable, but today anyone can build that with reasonable effort using say Visual Basic and SQL Server or Java and MySQL. My only complaint is that FoxPro and other xBase languages understood and identified themselves with underlying data much better that today’s programming languages – be it VB or C# or Java. This could be because of the fact that xBase languages had the underlying data engine as part of them. They were a combo of a programming language + Database Engine (in today’s parlance) + Runtime. Because of their close ties with database engines, they had some really useful features/commands that simplified presenting/managing/manipulating data. Identifying and bringing back these into today’s mainstream programming languages like C# and VB.NET, will certainly go a long way in the aiding developers. 

Related Links:

1. UnOfficial History of Clipper
2. The History of Microcomputers

Generally the Internet and especially the contents in the World Wide Web (WWW) are perceived to be dominated by Americans companies. Example cited by many for this includes the well known Internet Giants (Yahoo, Google, MSN), Technology sites (C'Net, SlashDot) and more.    

The reason many attribute for the numbers favouring US Company's is the entreprenuer spirit of the americans and the availability of funds. Funds in the form of Venture Capitalists and private investors make it possible for ventures on the Internet to get conceived, born and more importantly grow upto adulthood.

Nowadays, I am noticing change in the spread of contents on the Internet. It is becoming very global in nature, than anything known to Humans before. Though the dominance of "English" is still high, it too will change and it is changing faster than many can even realize. As many predict, the rising red giant (China) and its rapid adoption of Internet over the next few years will make "Chinese" the language used by most on the WWW. At the same time many are missing the rise of Indian Language content as well on the WWW. Though Hindi or Bengali will never overtake Chinese, which is because of the sheer number of Indian languages, the rise of overall Indic contents cannot be ignored. The reasons I believe which is helping (which in future will accelerate) the increase in Indian Languages are the following:

1) Platform Technology: Almost all the popular OS and Browsers now support Unicode and have in-built support for all major Indian Languages. The list includes MS (Bhashaindia), Redhat (Indic Fonts in Linux), Mac OS X (Tiger) and others.

2) Mobile Telephony: The rise in the number of mobile subscribers. India is the fastest growing market in this and the investments made by Telecom companies (Telcos) in India are mind-boggling. Already the metros are saturated with growth, so obviously Rural India is the next big forte for the Telcos. Here Voice Traffic growth alone is unlikely to improve ARPU's (Average Revenue Per User - a technical gargon in the mobile industry to say how much many they make per customer). Growth in Data traffic is paramount and to do it, English Content alone is not going to be sufficient. Regional Language content, like what Reliance Infocomm seems to have realised very early, is certainly going to be the big need of the hour. Consolidation in the mobile industry will also be a huge influencer in the spend. It is expected by Telecom experts that in the next 1 or 2 years India will have only 5 Telcos (BSNL/MTNL, Airtel, Reliance, Tata & Hutch) across the country. This is certainly a need of the hour and which will propel Mobile and Data in India to new heights.

3) Media: This is the most important, the fierce competition that is happening in India on the Media scene. All major players (Times Group, Hindustan Times, India Today, Sun TV, Zee, Star) are expanding into every possible space of media and also spreading their reach with in the country. They are spending 1000's of Crores (of Rupees) in producing Content in various formats. This is certainly to result in huge amount of content, that too regional/local language content. Many of these content will also find their way into WWW as well.

Please post below in the comments section, your thoughts and sites on this topic.

Apart from my laptop (HP nx7010) I always have a powerful workstation in my desk. The Desktop serves as my experiment (R & D) machine - in other words, the machine that I trash every few weeks with beta software (like VS 2005 CTPs!) and have it reinstalled. Because of this, the desktop gets outdated very quickly and I get a replacement done every 12 months or so.

The latest desktop in this series has been my new AMD 64 based beast with 2GB RAM and Sony 17" LCD. Though I got it about two months back, only early April 2005 I installed Windows XP 64-bit on it.

Though I was skeptical initially (mainly due to the claims on the media that 64-bit is only for Servers campaign for years) about 64-bit, after using the machine for almost 2 weeks+ I should confess that I have fallen in love. Everything about it has been good, Windows boots up in seconds (unlike minutes with my co-workers desktops) , all applications I use including Visual Studio.NET, Word or Excel come up almost instantly. The reliability is unbelievable.

Remember the bad ol' days of Win16 to Win32 upgrade?. Oh' god, I don't want to relive it. But this time the upgrade to 64-bit has been without any major compatibility problems. The only two issues I faced are:

1. Non of the major Antivirus vendors support Windows XP x64 (they do support Windows Server 2003 on Itanium platform). I tried unsuccessfully with our existing AV Vendor - Symantec (we use in all machines NAV CE) who said they have no firm dates for support, CA E-Trust Eval & AVG Eval. Amongst this NAV and E-Trust gets installed but their Real-Time Support don't work - what good is an AV without Real-time protection anyways?. After a Google Search, I found this E-Week Article "Windows x64 Lacks Major Anti-Virus Coverage", that confirmed my findings. But the same article pointed me to "Avast! Pro", writing to their sales, got me an instant reply with a path to download. I downloaded and installed their eval today morning. It seems to work like a charm!
2. Non of the HP printer drivers that came with your printer will install. Windows XP 64, requires all drivers to be 64-bit. But after experimenting with a few HP printer drivers that comes along with Windows from Microsoft, I got our Network Printer working.

In Windows XP 64, 32 & 64 bit applications run side by side, with the 32 bit legacy application (the new application you wrote yesterday with Win32 API is now called legacy) running on a WOW (Windows on Windows) layer. Notice all the major applications that comes in Windows are now 64-bit, this includes your Explorer and Internet Explorer.  Notice in the screenshot below after the application name *32 indicating these are 32-bit applications.

So if you are buying a machine any time soon, go for the big jump - the 64 bit jump. For me, I am now waiting for the jump to 128-bit

If you are a developer and feel developing Web Pages that render the same in IE, Mozilla & Safari where difficult, think again. In PC's atleast the client test matrix is mainly “3” (even if you include OS dimension, it will be less than “6”) which will target more than 98-99% of your users. This has been possible (though still not perfect) mainly due to W3C standards on HTML. In contrast if you consider mobile phone web browsers - the scene is anything near order. There are “3” main platforms on the smartphones - Symbian OS, MS Windows Mobile OS & Palm OS. Within each of the OS, the first difference comes from the phone's Form Factor (Width & Height of the display), next from their markup language support (WML 1.0, 1.1, HTML, XHTML and more) and the third (strangely) from the firmware version loaded in the phone. This leads to your test matrix having to include all the mobile devices that you wish to target. The firmwares adds a dimension here, especially in many Symbain OS based phones, where each new firmware upgrades the web brower on the device also, which gets your page rendered differently. The firmware (or browser version) problem is very significant in Mobile, because in Mobile, doing a firmware upgrade means you have to take it to Manufacturer's service centre and most of the time pay upgrade charges. This is in total contrast to PC world, where almost all the time, the browser version upgrade is free and is matter of a simple download from Internet and install. Even the firmware upgrade seems to be an option available, many times only in Asian Countries like India; it is almost unheard of in the USA and sparingly available in countries in Europe (like in Germany). The only way you can upgrade your phone web browser is to throw the existing phone and buy a new one. Other than Environment concerns of Battery garbage, this exchange offer of phone by itself is not a bad thing, when the smartphone prices plummet to US$100 or so; but till then it is too expensive to even consider as an option.

In this connection, I was happy to see the news today “Opera and Orange seek phone browsing perfection”. This is a welcome development if this effort also means standardising on the browser rendering on Mobile Devices. Let us wait and watch...

1. Listen to great speakers: Attend as many programs of great speakers as possible. Subject spoken is immaterial here, what you are learning is the “Master's” way of doing it.
2. Read about doing presentations: There are now plenty of books on doing effective presentations and Internet has numerous pages on this. Read them.
3. Keep Doing it: Get on stage as many times as you can and just do it. As they say, your mistakes teach you more than anyone. So as you keep doing more and more presentations, you will learn on your mistakes and improve.

1. Know your audience well – try to get before-hand, the profile and the number of audiences. It is also a good idea to ask the event organizers, what they consider as the success of the event. 
2. Prepare on the subject - a time honoured tip!
3. Before the start of the presentation, try to get into the hall and spend few minutes looking around it. This is to make yourself comfortable with the place and ease your anxiety.
4. Before your presentation, if you get a chance to sit on the stage with other speakers, use the opportunity. Try to sweep the hall with your eyes and make few eye-contacts with the audiences. Don’t take the eye-contact to extreme and stare at one person for long time, they will get nervous. Just do it for a second with one person and then keep moving. This will boost your confidence.
5. Start with a “Joke” or “Tidbit” or “Exciting News” relevant which is related to the day’s topic but not part of the topic directly.
6. Introduce yourself – You have worked for it, you have put in effort, you deserve your limelight. Speak your name, loud & clear in a way you will like to hear it to being pronounced by others. Tell about your background especially relevant experiences to today’s topic. Having said that, If the host already has introduced you, don’t repeat your “Profile” all again. Always keep the introduction short.
7. Learn to study the body language of your audience. Most of the time, when they are bored or if they think you are lying, you can read that from their body language.
8. Deliver your presentation in clear voice, don’t use any accents.
9. During your presentation, don’t keep looking at your laptop or the screen all the time. Stand Straight, make frequent eye contacts with the audience. Sweep the hall (across all the four corners) with your eye.
10. If you can walk during the presentation walk but don’t run on stage. Make small and firm strides. If you keep walking left-and-right across the stage too fast, audiences will get a stiff neck. Remember, they are not watching a tennis-match!
11. Never overshoot your time. Always keep a tab on time. Rehearsing your timing beforehand really helps here. {I normally keep my wrist watch in a comfortable viewing position for me to check the timing}.
12. More than overshooting the time, it is very embarrassing if you finish well in advance. If you do it, you will appear to your audience as someone who doesn’t know enough on the topic.
13. Finally once the presentation is over, speak to your friends (if they were present) or to the hosts and ask them for a honest/frank feedback. This is super critical for you to improve in future. Also speak to few of the audience, and casually ask them questions with an objective to understand how much of your topic has reached them.
14. If the event was recorded (Video or Audio) asks your hosts to give you a copy of it. It is a good idea to carry a blank CD or Mini-DV cassette and give it to them along with your business card. This way they will remember to do the favour for you. 
15. If there was a feedback form, take time after the event, talk to event organizers and go through atleast few tens of completed feedback forms in person. This is important, even if they promise to send an excellent report with all statistics and chart after the event. Reason being, by the time the well-prepared report comes, it will be couple of days/weeks and you would have gone to a different job/forgotten about the specifics of the presentation. So when the event is fresh in your mind, try to gather first-hand opinion.
16. Presentations and Speaking are good oppurtunities to network. So carry good number of your business cards and give it to people whoever asks for it. If it is a product selling presentation you are doing, then it is a good idea to even keep some of the cards on the podium/dias for people to self-service. Also remember to talk to walk around with people if there is a lunch/dinner happening after the dinner.
17. How irritating it is to hear a mobile phone ring during a presentation. Before you asking the audience, please remember to switch off your mobile and put it in away (say in your laptop bag). At times it will be a good idea to do it on stage while you start talking, this way you will set an example and reminder to others' to do it, rather than asking them to do it.
18. Finally, don't leave your mobile or wallet or other valuables on podium/dias. There is every likelyhood, that after the presentation you will be preoccupied with questions from audience and you will forget to collect your items back.  

1. Try to get a good-night sleep. For the audience, your eyes are the window to you, so a well-rested body has relaxed good-looking eyes. {Having said it, most of the times, I prepare my slide-decks the day before, but everytime when I practiced this, I felt my presentations to be much better}.
2. Be in Rome as “Romans” do. So check with your host/event organizers on the dress code they are expect you. I normally stick to formals (no-tie or suit) for technical presentations, Suits for Business Presentations and Relaxed-formals for other presentations.
3. Keep a bottle of water handy in the podium. When you are speaking, especially in an Air-Conditioned halls, your mouth gets dry very quickly.
4. After a long presentation (60 - 90 minutes) when you are back home, a good mouth-gargle (with water/glycerin or salt-water) has a soothing effect.

1. Learn the subject you are going to be presenting thoroughly. Today audiences have access to nearly all the information (or at times more) on the subject through Internet and if it is Microsoft Technologies through MSDN Online and various blogs.
2. If you are stepping-in last minute for a different speaker, and you don’t have time to prepare fully on the subject, at-least take the effort of preparing a map of land-mines. These are list of topics/areas on the subject that you are not fully-aware, this way you can stay clear off (or atleast step on as gently as possible) of the land-mines.
3. On an average for every slide you should budget 3 to 5 minutes, depending on the complexity. So a 90 minutes presentation, maximum you should have is 30 Slides. If you have demos, this number should come down.
4. If you are talking about a particular product Never Criticize or Attack competition directly. If you have to do it, do it only after presenting strong data and statistics supporting your product. If you do it without data, it will result in a blood bath in the hall (needless to say most of the blood, would have come from your body). Always, try to remain factual in the presentation. At the same time, don’t hesitate to point out errors/omissions/defects in competition’s argument.
5. During the presentation or especially during the demos, if you forget a particular step or point that you rehearsed don't try yourself hard to remember it. Simply ignore it and move on.
6. Don't pause for undue duration in between, even if you are waiting for something else to happen (like application to load, compilation, etc). Continue talking during that time. This gap is useful for throwing some jokes & interesting points. In a way this will shake-up the audience and wake those you are sleeping.

1. Slides should be brief: Typically a single Power Point Slide shouldn’t contain more than 1 or 2 images and not more than 5 to 6 points. Remember MS Word is a better tool to write pages and essays and Power Point is a bad tool to write long paragraphs.
2. Slides are only pointers: Continuing on the previous point, remember that the slides are only pointers for you to recollect and speak. The slides shouldn’t communicate the entirety to audience – if that is the case, you have no role to play in the hall, the audience can read it for themselves.
3. Generally keep your slide background to a solid, light colour. Remember that projectors don’t show colour as great as your monitor and from a distance dark colour fonts appear on a light background appear clearer. {This is the reason why Cars around the world have their Numberplates in White or Yellow background and with Black colour lettering}.
4. Avoid cliparts or cartoons unless they are absolutely necessary. Even if you use them, use sparingly. Remember, everyone in the audience would have for sure, seen the MS Office cliparts hundreds of time. I have seen in many PPTs, where the presenter has used almost all the Cliparts that Microsoft manages to ship with MS Office CD.
5. Spend the time to learn Power Points powerful (less-used) feature of Master Slides (View-Master-Slide Master Menu).
6. Reduce the number of times, you do changes to fonts and colours on individual slides. Continuing on previous point, try to make tweaking only to your Slide Master and let it run across your slide-deck.
7. Reduce the usage of Serif Fonts. Try to use only Sans-Serif fonts for everything in your slides. Typefaces generally fall into two broad categories: serif and sans serif. Serif fonts, such as Times New Roman have little “tails” at the ends of each character stroke that lead a reader’s eye from character to character, increasing reading speed. Sans serif fonts, such as Arial and Verdana, don’t have these tails; as a result, reading is difficult for long passages of text because the eye isn’t moved from character to character.
8. Don’t create Power Point templates from scratch. Use the templates that ship out-of-box with Power Point and then start tweaking them. For example if the background image you want use across all your slides is White-based, start with one of the standard templates that have white background, replace your background image and go from there. This way you will get best practices on fonts, colours and alignments for free and you only need to change things you don’t like.
9. Most of the projectors are capable of doing only 1024x768 resolution, so make your slides/demos look good at that resolution.

1. Even if you are carrying your own laptop with the presentation loaded, have backups. Always have a copy of your PPT in a USB Thumb drive (and remember to carry it) or email it beforehand to the host of the event and request them to have it loaded on an alternate system.
2. Check/Double-check all your hardware, cables, power-supply and software.
3. Always run your laptop from Power-Supply. Even if your laptop can run for more time without power, than the length of the presentation, don't use battery. Modern day laptops, reduce the speed of CPU if you are running with battery.
4. Keep all the applications that you are demo’ing open before the start of the presentations. Most of the times applications tend to take more time when you are on stage.
5. Increase your font size to say “20” in Notepad/VS.NET/IDE if you are showing Code.
6. Stick to simpler font-faces like Courier or Tahoma, I believe source code looks good with these fonts.
7. If this is the first time, you are doing a demo with this laptop – then connect your laptop to an external monitor and check the day(s) before.
8. If you are going to be using a laptop for the first time during the presentation, then practice using a laptop before the presentation. The usage of touch-pad/pointer is completely a different feel from a mouse. Better still, request/carry a mouse and connect it before the presentation.
9. Go 20-30 minutes early to hall/stage before the audiences comes in, then wire your laptop and check with the projectors. Try to build a “Rapo” with the A/V assistant there, remember he is your best friend in the entire hall during the presentation.
10. If you need Internet connection, inform the Event Organizers well in advance (A week really helps). I have learned the hard-way that the grander the hall (the more stars if it is a Hotel) greater the difficulty for them to give you Internet Connection or Phone Connections. This pain is now relatively eased due to Internet connection through Mobile phones and WI-FI. Here again, on most halls for some reason (because they tend to be below ground) have poorest signal strength near the stages. So test it before hand.
11. Remember that the Murphy’s law works at its best during technical presentations and especially during beta demos.

1. If you are doing the presentation with another speaker, remember to get the story-board discussed well in advance. Apart from doing this, you need to definitely rehearse once or twice. Because the chemistry on stage between you two is very important – and it doesn’t come that easily unless you know the other person very well and have worked/spoken with him before.
2. If story board is not discussed before hand, then do “Divide and Conquer”. {If I am sharing a stage with a speaker who I haven’t met before – I normally do “divide and conquer”, meaning I clearly divide the portions between us. For example, it will be first “10” slides by me and the next “10” by the other speaker or it will be that I do all the Slides and the other person does all the demos. This way I avoid stepping on his/her shoes}.
3. In the introduction slide, the hierarchy of names is important. Generally have the first name on the slide to be of the person who is going to do the major portion. If you are doing the presentation along with your superior/boss/client then it is etiquette to have their name first, even though you may be doing the major talking.
4. If you are presenting along with your colleague, remember to give him/her adequate time to introduce and talk.
5. If you finished a portion, the other speaker is starting, it is OK to say “Thank you” to you for the first time, but it shouldn’t be repeated at every switch.
6. Divide the total time between you and have a pre-agreement on who is going to reduce their portion when time becomes short.
7. When the other speaker is speaking, please don’t keep typing on your laptop or keep gesturing at your friend in the first row. Focus your attention, just like the audience on the speaker. If you do otherwise, it shows your disrespect for the speaker.
8. Similarly, when the other speaker is doing a demo and forgets a step, don’t go bullish and help immediately. Give some time and after that try to convey the idea as discreetly as possible.
9. Finally there can be only one captain to the ship, so agree between you that for the duration of the presentation, who is that captain. This basically means who can call the shots, when an emergency like demos not working, embarrassing question comes in, short of time, etc. Having a captain makes it easy and avoids conflicting fire-fighting decisions on stage. Remember, in situation like this, you have to think on your feet (sometimes it may not be logical/correct) and two people can never think the same quick-fix.

1. If you are new to doing presentations, don’t encourage taking questions during the talk. Announce to audience at the start, that you will take all questions at the end. Taking questions in-between, normally interrupts your flow and regaining your position is very difficult – you can very easily drift from your main message. Change this rule, once you have become an “Ace” in presentations. This is because, taking questions in-between creates a good ambience – somekind of positive interaction.
2. Never get into an argument or a lengthy discussion – cut them after 60 seconds and take it offline.
3. There are sections of people in the audience who ask questions – simply to say something they know or advertise about their company or announce to everyone that the food was bad or to say that they know the subject more than you do. If you suspect the question to be on these lines, interrupt the person immediately and request them to ask the “Actual” question they have in mind.
4. Never let a question be answered by a member of audience. If you do it, then you will completely loose the audience and it will become a discussion session. You are the boss during your presentation, so ascertain your rights.
5. If you get a question for which you are unsure of, politely say that you need to check on the facts before answering. Ask them to speak to you after session or tell them that you will check and email them back.

Microsoft has a dedicated website “Windows Server Feedback” for people to post their feedback about Windows 2000/2003 Servers and suggestions for upcoming releases.

Couple of months back I posted a suggestion for a feature in Windows Servers that will enable easy replication across Web servers - both web content and IIS/ASP.NET settings. Honestly I didn't expect much and the feedback to be lying in some Microsoft Mailbox/Database Server dormant; it is going to be one among thousands of feedbacks. Yesterday I was surprised to receive an email from Windows Server Feedback Response Team acknowledging that the feedback was “interesting” and it is being sent to the Product Team. WOW!, I just hope the feedback will make it in the next release(s).

Open Source proponents, may say the above surprise is unnecessary if I am using an “Open Source” OS like Linux, where I can develop this feature myself and need not wait till the software giant does it. But my whole point is, I don't want to re-invent the wheel, waste my time/resources in developing this feature. I want to simply buy it off-the-shelf; and focus on my core-business.

Internet Search can be Interesting and result in Unexpected findings.

AOL has announced beta of a new Netscape Browser version for beta testers. I actually tried to find news/download of this and searched “netscape beta”. Interestingly I came across this page instead.

It is of “Origin of a Browser”, a website by an individual web developer who has painstakingly worked on web archaeology. The site shows Screenshots of various Netscape Browsers (even before it was called Netscape), links to download old versions and other tit-bits on Netscape history.

A good nostalgic site to check out. Post your early experiences with web on the comments section below.

After the beta search, MSN has introduced beta MSN Spaces. Spaces is blogs on steriods. It supports Music List, Photo List, Customizable Themes, movable Modules and more.

I am yet to customize my space with any serious content, but anyways, check it MSN Spaces, it seems to be good fun.

Last week, while searching on the Internet, I came across the site for “Minix”. Minix is a free Unix Clone, that Mr.Andrew S. Tanenbaum wrote in 1987, as an example to his accompanying Operating System book. Since then his book has become the “Bible” for anyone working OS/Kernel design and Minix has hence inspired several Unix clones to emerge, including now popular “Linux”.

The Internet Search scene is really heating up.

Microsoft launched yesterday, its new search at Beta.Search.MSN.COM. It has indexed 5 Billion Pages (statiscally this means, there is a web page for every single human being).  Google immediately responded by saying that they have indexed 8 Billion Pages.

I have been using the new MSN Search today for my searches - for doing a hotel booking in Singapore. For all the different hotel names I throwed at it, MSN Search came back with the Hotel's own Website as its first result, almost all the time. Pretty impressive!. While with Google, for the same keywords the result accuracy varied. The MSN Search speed was also good.

Try it and post your comments below.

You can read my July posting on two new search engines here

It is generally said that in a complex software product like Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Visual Studio, etc., 80% of people use only 20% of the feature. I realized how true it is yesterday.

I have in my Laptop, MS Office 2003 installed, loaded with all the bells and whistles, including the new OneNote application. Though I have been using OneNote for sometime now and find it convenient to put down quick notes, audio clips, etc,  I didn't know it had a good screen capture funtion.

In my one of my earlier blog entry, I have written about how I use Zabgrab to mark and capture a portion of the screen. Yesterday, I accidentally pressed “Window Key + S”, the screen flashed and I got a “+” as mouse pointer. I was able to move my mouse, mark a region and get it captured in OneNote instantly. WOW, this was cool. This means, I don't need to have ZabGrab installed in my machine and I also have a better way to do my job.

If you have more such rarely known jewels of MS Office, please post it in the comment section below.

I learned a new term today, “Surrogate Piracy”. The term refers to the practise of licensing a cheaper priced application and then using  pirated copies of another (full-fledged) expensive application. An example of usage of the term is when some someone licenses “Star-Office” or “Open-Office” and then continues to use “MS-Office” or “Corel Office”; or licenses “GIMP” or “PaintShop Pro” and then uses pirated version of “Adobe PhotoShop”.

On a side note, while I am penning this, I noticed from JASC website (makers of PaintShop Pro) that they have been aquired by Corel. I always thought PaintShop Pro was a good photo editing product and with the support of a big company like Corel, I am sure we will start to see some healthy competition to Adobe Photoshop. What out the Photo Editing tool space in the coming months.

Most of the Internet Power users are aware of Internic's WhoIs service. Given a domain name (Say venkatarangan.com) WhoIs tells you details about the owner and name server details. But Internic's WhoIs is limited to gTLD (Global Top Level Domains like .COM, .NET, .ORG) and you are left on your own if you want to find details about ccTLD (Country Code TLDs) like .co.in or .co.uk.

This has changed now with the launch of the Universal WhoIs service that works not only with gTLDs but also with 246 ccTLD. Check it out, by giving say vishwak.co.in.

First it was Google Search, then Gmail with 1GB of Storage. Now it seems to be Microsoft's turn at the table.

Early this month, MSN launched the new look MSN Search, this version sports new sleek look. What I found more interesting was Technical Preview of MSN's new Algorithm Search Engine. Currently MSN Search uses third-party Search Engine, but with this new version, believed to be launched by end of this year, it will be completely on MS Technologies. This will take Google heads-on. Meanwhile, I am enjoying in having a choice of two very powerful searches to help me in navigating through the Wild World Wide Web (WWWW).

Yesterday my Hotmail Extra Storage, the Paid version of Hotmail, where I pay $19.95 per year was upgraded automatically to Hotmail Plus at no extra cost. Plus gives me 2GB (wait few minutes here and count the number of Zeros in this), 20MB of Attachment in one email, no Graphics Ads (Thanks Microsoft for listening to us) and more.

While on this subject, remember to get a Sneak Peak at other MSN's Work in Progress here at MSN Sandbox. You can get a free download of LookOut - Fast Outlook Search Software and Three Degrees - A family get-together software.

The search engine war seems to be hotting up. First it was Yahoo coming out with its own search engine, independent of Google. This month, MSN Search has been upgraded with brand new interface and simpler results, this currently is based on Inktomi. Meanwhile, Microsoft is working on building its own search back-end that promises improved search relevance and accruracy.

Recently two new search engines have been launced. First is A9.com from Amazon and other is Ujiko which allows you to personalize the search experience. Try them out.

Current PC Mag issue online has an interesting article and interview that talks about “Why Windows is the target of most attacks, what is the reason behind it?”. Most article's on this subject takes a blind standpoint that supports Linux and Mac as more secure without looking into the subject in depth. But this article presents both the views. It even brings out the fact that Windows had lesser number of flaws in last year compared with Linux Distros and Microsoft is prompt with fixes once problems are identified. It also highlights the strides Microsoft has made in Windows Updates and in the upcoming Service Pack 2.

For every organization with IT Projects, a good source control system is essential. The actual product to be used depends highly on the team size and to some extent on the project type (Windows/Web/Mobile).

For teams working with Visual Studio, the source control was generally Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (VSS). There are many alternatives to VSS like CVS (from the Unix and Open Source world) and Sourcevault (based on SQL Server backend). But many teams, especially SME preferred it as it came along with Visual Studio and was tightly integrated with it. Though VSS fulfilled basic source control (check-in, check-out), the product was aging and was crying for an urgent update with the release of .NET.

Finally Microsoft seem to woken upto this fact and have launched a solid road-map to VSS in may here. The basic idea of MS plan is to have two products, one aimed at Small/Medium teams and other for enterprises. VSS 2005 (Sequel to existing VSS with HTTP/HTTPS, Unicode, XML and 4GB DB Size) is the SME product and Visual Studio Team Foundation will be the Enterprise product (with Sharepoint Support and other Enterprise SDLC support). 

Mobile Portals are becoming very popular, especially in Asia. Within Asia, India is interesting, for being a high growth market for Mobile and for Value Added Services (on top of basic Voice in Mobile) like Mobile Portal services and at the same time being very price consious.

In India, in Mobile Portal services you have rich content being offered by MSN-Hutch GPRS Phones followed by Reliance phones. The list of service providers are going to grow in the next 6 to 12 months and the consumer is going to decide the winner(s) based on ease of use, reliability, speed and above all relevance to their daily lifes. Currently these portals in many parts of the world are offering basic news, enterainment and downloads like RingTones, Screensavers, etc. Over time these portals will start to offer relevant content (relevant to the user based on current location and time) like travel information while I am away from home, eateries details while I am in a food court, emergency medical information, be a repository of all my personal information and more. Let me explain the shopping experience I am looking for in the long term. Today when I go to a mall and say I see a TV that I like. I would do little bit of comparison online on other options before I buy it. I don't want to do standard Internet Search and go looking for TVs for hours. Based on my location that is inside the mall, inside an electronic store near a TV, I would like to see comparable options closer to that. May be even Manufactures information about the TV, about its features, technical details, etc.

In the near term too, I see big scope for mobile shopping. In fact, I see that mobiles have great potential to make online shopping available to vast number of people in India, who otherwise cannot afford (or have) access to a PC and Internet. This can include simple shopping options like food while working late, do some gift purchases for friends in last minute, greeting cards for occassions, discount purchases, books, etc.

CDs when they came were cool, you could store 600+ MB of data, portable, light-weight, more reliable than floppies and good looking (unlike ugly tapes). Soon we wanted more and got DVDs, which can store 4.7GB on one side and mass produced industry-strength DVD's can double that capacity by writing on both sides.

The two big concerns I have on CD/DVDs, are that:
1) They are not bio-degradable, the chief raw material that goes into making one of these shinny beauty's is “black“ oil
2) To destroy a CD/DVD that contains my sensitive data is very difficult and dangerous; you can break a CD/DVD but you have to extremely careful that it doesn't cut your skin.

Last week I saw a major announcement that solves both these problems. Sony on April 15th, announced a paper-made disc that can store 25GB!. It is based on Blue-Ray and the disc is made of more than 50% paper, so can be recycled. It can be easily cut with scissors to destroy it permanently.

Read more on this from Moore's Lore (a blog that takes daily look at new implications of Moore’s Law in real time).

Today the success of a  software/website is decided not only by its feature list, but more on how easy is it and how good is its User Interface (UI). In fact, I believe at the end of this decade UI of the software we use is going to have improved several magnitudes than what we use today.

I have seen many people thinking that once you have the software (from now on this includes websites as well) build, you can quickly slap an UI on top of it. My personal experience contradicts this - developing a good UI is equally or more difficult than building the software itself. To build a great UI you need a completely different mindset. I have seen many great websites and web applications simply not flying, at the same time a mediocre/bad website with great UI initially flys and then dies because of the bad backend. So for sustained life, a mix of good UI and good backend is needed.

In this connection, it was interesting to read Eric S. Raymond (the famous OSS evangelist) blog entry titled “The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story” published on March 2004. Here Raymond talks about the pain he went through when trying to print using his wife’s shared printer connected to a Linux machine. This experience doesn’t surprise me at all. When it comes to doing day-to-day tasks, definitely Windows (more specifically Windows XP) wins thumbs-up. The research and the money the folks at Windows usability lab do are mind-boggling. I have heard that after they design a new approach in UI, they call in total strangers and ask them to do a task and record their every keystrokes, mouse movements, response time, satisfaction, ease they felt and so on. Impressive, isn't it. Think about on how many OSS projects can support this type of activity?.

Coming back to the article, Raymond’s blog entry created huge ripples both in the Linux and Windows side of world. From the Windows world, one of the interesting responses I read was from John Gruber in Ronco Spray-On Usability. I liked especially the last paragraph where he says “Fast, good, cheap: pick two.”

A career with Open Source?

I am trying to understand the lack of a serious business model in many of the Open Source Projects. The issues in question are the sustainance of the projects over a long period of time (not years, but decades), continuity and the chance to give the people who contribute their livelyhood.

One of my fellow Regional Director (Clemens F. Vasters) from Germany, Clemens has written a well crafted open letter to a student about his career with Open Source. The blog became such a hit that it was slash dotted immediately.

Read here about what I wrote about Open Source in Linux for You magazine last year.

EU Case Against Microsoft

I am puzzled by the recent ruling against Microsoft by European Union. As technology advances in every industry, consumers expects more & more features bundled (which was sold earlier seperately)into a product.

The classic example is the Cars we buy. I remember the situation till about a decade back (in late 80's) in India. The classic Ambassadors were sold with what my dad says as “nothing more than a Box & Four Wheels” . After successfully buying it (you have to pay, book and wait at the mercy of the dealer), you have to go atleast half-a-dozen vendors to make the car into something that you can use. I remember for an Ambassador we bought, we had to add a AC, add a Sound-System, changed Seats and did Interiors (Amby had no interiors),  did a complete chassis rust-proofing, changed the Petrol engine to Diesel (the company's own Diesel engine at that time was not recommended, same story as AC), ... the list goes on.

Today even the Indian Made (100% desi) Tata Indigo that my Dad bought recently came with AC, Power Steering, Sound System, Decent Interiors, Chassis Rust proofed - a ready to use car.

Going by the same logic that EU has applied against Microsoft for bundling Windows Media Player, we have to fine every automobile major - and stop them from giving anything other than a box and 4 wheels.

Taking this to new levels, a company called Nisbum has filled a case against Microsoft for shipping Calculator in Windows. Read the full story here.

About 6 months during a chat with my mobile Project Manager I was predicting that the days of proprietory Ringtones formats in Mobile phones are ending. Phones will become smarter, powerful and start supporting WAV files. Once WAV files are supported by phones, I can convert few seconds of my favourite movie song from a CD into WAV and move it to my phone. I don't need to pay exorbitant Ringtone download charges. 

Though this seemed very distanced at that time as Nokia always favored a locked-in approach. Today with the new Nokia 3660 phone, it has come true. This beauty now supports WAV Ringtone format, apart from Bluetooth and other goodies. Check it out.

Microsoft Smartphones and Microsoft Pocket PC phone editions, have always supported WAV formats. This is natural for them as they have their parentage in the Windows world where WAV originated