(Image Courtesy: Amazon)

I don't have formal learning in any music, nor understand the basic and intricacies of it (Ragas and so on) - but I enjoy listening to good (that I can relate to). I mostly listen to Classical Carnatic Music, Tamil Film Songs, Tamil Folk Songs & Instrumentals. I am definitely not into jarring loud music.

6 to 7 years back one of my good friends "Asokan P" introduced me to Chieftains (Irish Folk Songs), after one of his trips to USA. I immediately liked it and started buying 2 to 3 more of their CDs. In recent years Irish Folks Songs became very well known due to "Titanic" movie - it is the same music that the couple in Titanic dance for in the lower levels with the common men.

Today while going through my CD collections, I realized in the last 2 years I haven't heard Chieftains. Following which, I have been hearing to it for last few hours and I still love their music just as much as I did few years back. Hence this blog post!

Though I am in my early 30's, just like millions of other sedentary lifestyle folks (especially those in IT jobs) I have started to get concerned about my Weight and lack of Exercise.

In my case I have been doing Yoga twice a week for almost 5 years now, which has helped me to control my stress and to a large extend bring in flexibility in my back and joints. But Yoga has to be practised every day along with proper diet for weight control. That not being the case for me I have started gaining weight in recent years, especially due to working late and disturbed sleep. I have tried walking, but didn't suit my timings, so decided to exercise in my own timings and indoors, I finally bought a treadmill yesterday. The machine (2.5HP) got delivered today and I have started my first work out. Hopefully I should do it every day.  

The purchase was an interesting experience y'day in the shop (ACME, K.N.K. Road, Nungambakkam, Chennai). The machine costed about Rs.45K but the sales tax in Tamilnadu was 21% or so. It seems in neighbouring Karnataka (Bangalore) it is half of this and I can end up saving say about Rs.3-4K if I give a Bangalore address. I strongly declined the offer (the guy looked at me pretty strange and surprised though) and instead requested for a Chennai billing for two reasons: One, of course doing this is the right thing (by law); Second, I don't believe these sales guys when they say you can save money - I have burned my fingers enough over the years and become wise (I suppose) to know there to be hidden costs and trouble to pay. Especially when it comes to service, they will certainly take you circles just because you have done an out-station billing.  

I am delighted today – Hon’ble Minister Mr.Dayanidhi Maran (Govt. Of India, IT & Communication) mentioned my name in his speech today in Tamil New Encoding Conference (a.k.a TUNE).

The context is this - a conference that is happening currently today by Govt. Of India (Information Technology) and Tamilnadu Govt. to discuss about an Alternate 16-bit encoding for Tamil. I wrote about this alternate encoding a year back (TUNE) and my views on the same in my blog.

Since I came to know this conference earlier, this Monday (28th Aug) I wrote to Hon’ble Minister and IT Secy (TN Govt) to let them know about a common man views on this. When I sent it I had no expectations that this will be read by them (or) acknowledged by them due to the overwhelming responses they will be getting from different quarters.  Surprisingly on Wednesday, I got a call from Mr.Maran’s office (New Delhi) and minister spoke to me directly for a minute and acknowledged my letter – and he even summarized the issue I have raised precisely. He invited me to attend the event today. My honest appreciations to him for his amazing energy levels.

Today in the inauguration of the conference Hon’ble Minister while talking about the issue in question – both pro and cons and he mentioned my name. Saying that “Mr.Venkatarangan” has written to me with his views and I have invited him to say his views here. Thanks Sir!

Technical Committee's Report
Here is an update to the day's event published in "The Hindu" by Prof.Anandakrishnan who chaired the Technical Committee.

தமிழில் வெளிவரும் வார இதழ்களில் நான் அநேகமாகப் படிப்பதும், எனக்கு பிடித்ததும் வாசகர்களால் ஆவி (a.k.a Ghost) என்று அன்பாக சொல்லப்படும் - "ஆனந்த விகடன்" பத்திரிகை.

27/08/06 தேதியிட்ட ஆவியில், சத்குரு ஜக்கி வாசுதேவ் ஒரு வேண்டுகொள் விடுத்திருக்கிறார். 15/10/2006 அன்று அவரின் ஈஷா அமைப்பு 7லட்சம் மரக்கன்றுகளை ஒரே நாளில் நடும் பணியில் ஈடுபடுகின்றனர். இது நடந்தால் இது ஒரு கின்னஸ் சாதனையாகும். உங்களுக்கு நேரமில்லை/இடமில்லை என்றால், உங்கள் பெயரால் மரக்கன்றுகளை "ஈஷா" நட்டுப் பராம்ரித்து வளாக்க நிங்கள் கன்று ஒன்றுக்கு ரூ.10 வீதம் "Isha Foundation", 55 Moosa Street, T.Nagar, Chennai 600 017 என்ற முகவரிக்கு, உங்கள் பெயர்/முகவரியுடன் ஒரு வங்கி காசேலை (DD) அனுப்பலாம். என் பங்களிப்பு வரும் திங்கள் காலை அனுப்பி வைக்கப்படும்.

இது ஒரு நல்லப் பணி, இப்பொழுது உலகிற்க்கு தேவையான நல்ல முயற்சி. வாழ்த்துக்கள்.       

Virtualization is a very handy arsenal in an IT Pro toolkit, especially if you are managing large number of servers with different software combinations for development/testing (or) if you are like me trying out various OS and softwares.

Business and Dev Environment - Keep them seperate
Nowadays, I use a vanilla Windows XP/Windows 2003 VPC image and use it to try out new softwares. In fact, in my laptop I have only basic softwares to do my daily job (Business Environment: Windows XP, Office 2003, Antivirus, Windows Live Messenger, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Nero Burner, WinRAR,PDF Printer/Reader); everything else runs out of Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 (or Virtual Server 2005 R2). So my development environment (Windows Server 2003, IIS 6.0, VS 2005, SQL Server 2005, EasyStruct 4.5, etc) is itself an image - I run the VPC image only when I want to development. I also have VPC images for doing Beta Development, like MOSS 2007, WinFX (.NET 3.0), etc. This way my business environment is always simple, clean and always working - I don't get into a broken/slow PC while doing a client presentation/deal document.

Virtual PC and Virtual Server - Free!
The good news is that both Virtual PC and Virtual Server 2005 R2 are now free from Microsoft. Recently MS has finally announced the successor to Virtual PC 2004 - Virtual PC 2007 and have even committed to provide the new version too free. The new version will support Vista OS both as Host and Guest; and also x64 hardware.

Support Windows Vista
Until Virtual PC 2007, you can download VPC 2004 VMAdditions for Windows Vista if you are in MS Connect Program. If you have tried to run Virtual Server 2005 R2 in Windows Vista HOST OS, you would have realized it is not possible to run the Virtual Server Administration website - here is a solution for that.

References:
If you are using Virtual PC/Virtual Server, then a great reference is Microsoft's Virtual PC Guy Blog. Also if you have built a VPC image and then clone it to multiple PCs then this blog entry from Microsoft David Wang is useful. Today we ran into a problem that was addressed in this blog entry - we installed a new VPC image, copied it to another machine, ran both the images, but we were unable to ping from one Guest OS to another; though we are able to ping individually each of Guest OS from any HOST PC; it turned out that the two Guest OS had the same MAC address and we had to change it in the .VMC file - it can't get simpler than this!

Everytime I visit flash based webpages with audio content I wonder why there is no mute button in the right-click options of a flash file?. Why you may ask - I am listening to music in Windows Media Player like I am now and so I don't want to mute my entire machine; I keep browsing and to my annoyance a webpage starts playing loud audio and I can't mute that webpage alone.  

Since I haven't heard any one else raising this, I kept saying to myself I should be crazy. Thank God, I am not alone (or crazy) - I recently came across this same ask in an Adobe Employee's blog, scroll down to the third comment section.

Adobe doesn't seem to be listening (may be they have muted themself out to user comments ) as I don't see this feature even in their new Adobe Flash Player "9" version released several months after this post.

I have known about technorati.com for quite some time. It is one of the popular sites that keeps tracks of millions of blogs and their postings. I never took the effort of knowing more about it or registering my blog link in the site until today. I stumbled on their site through an Internet Search and noticed an advertisement "Claim your blog", couldn't resist the urge, went ahead and registered my blog. You can see here my Technorati Profile.

Everybody knows that Apple builds cool hardware - whether it is iPods or Mac Minis, Apple's device designers are the best in the world. For reasons I couldn't figure out, no one in the PC (Wintel) world has been able to copy Apple's designs and then to exceed them. Our PCs and Laptops continue to look boring with no major design innovation happening for last 20 years - what I am talking here is not the Internals Engineering like Motherboard, Ports, OS, etc; I am talking purely the external appearance.

As this article details out Microsoft is striving to make huge improvements in Hardware in areas like DirectX/Graphics, Dual Core, 64 bit, Audio, DVD Playback, Readyboost and more. All these are commendable and I am looking forward to a new Vista PC - but still I see no "Cool" H/W design ideas here.

I guess we need to wait for Apple to start supporting Windows Vista with a new Boot Camp version and then go out and buy a Mac and run Vista

Microsoft has released recently few new Themes for Windows XP. I came across them while I was downloading some other files in Microsoft Download - I couldn't find a landing page for a list of all themes, so following are links to download each theme.

1. Microsoft Windows Theme Nunavut
2. Microsoft Nature Theme 2
3. Microsoft Windows Theme Ontario
4. Microsoft Egypt Nile Theme
5. Microsoft Thème Québec
6. Microsoft Historic Monuments

Last weekend (28-30 July) I excused myself from work for a much wanted (long promised) short vacation with my wife (of course!) and our 3 year old son. One of my colleagues at office has been recommending Yelagiri to me for almost a year now (Thanks Akhila Arun for the recommendation). Decided to go for it, I booked the room at Taj Gardens in advance – the resort I was told tends to get filled up during the weekends due to high bookings from IT folks from Bangalore and Chennai.

Taj Gardens is a family run farmhouse owned by one Mr.Rahman (who is a retired Leather Businessman). Fortunately when we stayed there we were the only outside guests, so we had the luxury of entire staffs hospitality shown towards us. The rooms are decent bare bone accommodation - No TV, No In-Room Phone and Mobile Signal is also (thankfully) weak in the rooms. The resort area of course is large, with huge playground, park, plantations, rose garden, etc. Best part during the stay for us was that the menu for Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner were decided by them – no need to strain your brains in ordering; and the food is delicious/non-spicy home cooked food.

Yelagiri (thankfully again) has literally no major sight seeing spots. The complaint I have with popular tourists destinations are that you go for vacation and end up being more tired and stressed – as you have to get up early, plan and stick to a timetable as everyone around you wants to see the entire place. And you don’t get the much needed rest that you actually went in there for. For me and my wife, we both enjoy the rest, peace and quite – but our son ensures we don’t get it and keeps us on our toes all the time

The only place to see in Yelagiri is a Tamilnadu Govt. Herbal farm which has a Garden, Park and a small lake (boating included) inside. Next to the Farm is a small Lord Murugan Temple.

If you are in Chennai or Bangalore and want to go for a short weekend get away – I highly recommend Yelagiri.

Journey to Yelagiri

Yelagiri is 240 Kms (220Kms from T.Nagar to be precise) from Chennai. You take the Bangalore Highway (NH 4); keep heading towards Bangalore, just after Vanniyambadi you have to take a diversion on to your left from the main highway. This small road goes up to Jollarpetai Railway Station, but we go only up to a small village in the plains called “Ponneri” and then in the market place take a left into the Yelagiri hills.  The route up to Hilltop is easy with just 14 Hairpin bends – the road is narrow, but not difficult to climb up. We started from Chennai on Friday evening 5PM (though initially slotted for 3PM) in my Car and reached the Hilltop by 9PM. On the return journey to Chennai on Sunday we clocked little slower – b’cos we stopped in between at Vellore Hotel Saravana Bhavan for a scrumptious lunch.

Bangalore Highway (NH 4) is part of the golden quadrilateral project of Government of India initially envisioned and started by former Prime Minister “Atal Bihari Vajpayee” and was continued (though a bit slow) by present Prime Minister “Manmohan Singh”. Thanks to Vajpayee’s initial thrust the country now boasts near world-class road infrastructure. What impressed me were the overhead bridges for nearly every passing town, so that you don’t get bogged down by local township traffic. There is however work pending as you near the Chennai end (you can see the status in NHAI website).

I am not a big fan of driving on the highways; I would rather get some eye-closure with good music in the background or sight see during the road trip, so I managed to get my driver Sankar for the journey. I always believe in leaving the work to the professionals – it is the sure way to get the work done best. Sankar dropped us on the hill, returned to Chennai by bus next day; came back on last day to take us back. On the hills it was for me to drive around – which I enjoyed thoroughly.

More about Yelagiri

1. Outlook Traveller - Yelagiri
2. Tamilnadu Tourism - Yelagiri