Today in the supplement of one the tamil newspapers carried a piece that the English word "Cash" came from Tamil "Kaasu". "Kaasu" means smaller money - coins. European merchants travelling to India and China, have taken this word to Europe and it was later adapted as "Cash" in English.

The Tamil word in turn is believed to have its influence from Sanskrit word "Karsha" - which denotes weight of precious metals like Silver and Gold.

Anyway I am proud as a Tamilian that the most important word in English has its origin from my mother tongue

Today all FM Radios in Chennai were talking only about the birthday of Dr.ABJ Abdul Kalam - Hon'ble President of India. He is a great self-made man and I am big admirer of him. Born today (15-Oct) makes him a Libran (I do come up with such great discoveries once in a while ) and it is a great feeling to know I share the same Sun Sign with him.

Finally I have made the full switch to Vista RC2 and Office 2007 Beta2TR as my primary work environment, from last weekend. I should say I am very happy with the results so far.

Read my earlier post on my experiences with Vista.

Vista - Pop Ups asking Elevated Credentials: One of the things I like in Vista, is that when I run as Normal user, then try to do something like Change settings in Control Panel that requires Administrator priveleges, the OS automatically pops-up a dialog box asking for a different credential (Username and Password). This seems to work in almost all situations - including the upgrade of MSN Messenger. This one in MSN Messenger always used to irritate me, for I had to quit Messenger, rerun it (using Run As command) as Administrator and then upgrade.

Office 2007 Beta Installation: After spending several hours installing Beta 2 Office (separately Office Pro, Groove, Project, Visio, OneNote) and then applying Technical Refresh (TR) for each of them, I realized I can’t run Office 2007. I initially didn’t give a Product Key as I didn't want to waste an activation if things didn't work in my hardware, hence activation didn't happen while installing.

For every user login I try to run Office, it gave an error “Not installed for Current User, rerun setup”. After searching in Office beta site, it turns out that you need to switch off UAC, run each of the Office 2007 applications once, activate them (or supply with the key) and then turn ON UAC.

Yesterday when I heard the news that Aptech has bought a majority stake in Synergetics, I was happy for the promoters. Synergetics is a mumbai based training company offering advanced programs in .NET. One of the founders of the company is a good friend of mine Sanjay Vyas - a dedicated trainer who is known in Microsoft technology circles for his brilliance on C/C++/COM/C# expertise. 

The existing board will continue to run the company and I wish them all the best in the years to come. Having a strategic investor like Aptech is going to help the founders in improving the business and removes them the trouble of cash flows and risk taking.

As a responsible citizen, I casted my vote for the ongoing Localbody elections in Chennai (Tamilnadu). Though localbody elections are not high-profile, they have the most direct impact for citizens.  

Last 3+ parliament/assembly elections that I voted have been on Electronic Voting Machines, but I was surprised that today it was paper based.  May be they don't have so many voting machines.

Today in Intel Developer Forum, I saw Intel Classmate PC. It is a small little Laptop for students. It runs on Celeron, 256MB, Wi-Fi, 1GB NAND Storage (no HDD), a fanless/noiseless desgin and Windows XP Embedded. I would love to have one to carry around rather than my big laptop. It is supposed to be available Q1 2007, for around < US$400 and for general consumer as well.  For educational institutions, they have a great classroom management software that allows teacher to see the screens of everyone in the class (thru' Wi-Fi), lock the laptops, etc. This S/W will be useful even in professional environments.

Update 10/5/2007: Intel seems to have started the piloting of these classmate PCs in India. I wish it good luck.

Today in New Delhi, Microsoft India is conducting a showcase of Innovative solutions build by partners using Microsoft Office Platform for Public Sector Enterprises and E-Governance space. My team is showcasing our Multilingual Content Management solution developed for Microsoft's BhashaIndia.com Community Portal.  Chris Capossela (Corporate VP, Microsoft Business Division) is expected in the evening to visit the showcase and get a first hand feel of India Innovating.  

Update: The next day we demoed our Lotus Notes to SharePoint forms solution for Banking Industry.

I have received a Invite to attend "Intel Developer Forum" happening next week in Bangalore.

I am (and Vishwak) not into much on system level software that get impacted the most from new Chipset/CPU designs and API from Intel. Like any other ISV and SI the new generation of chips from Intel and AMD open up a new possibility and better ROI for our customers. That's my interest in attending the event. Also wanted to attend a Non Microsoft for a change and a chance to sit and relax as an attendee - no pressure of being a speaker.

The objective of this post is that I liked the way Intel India is organizing the pre-event. I got email and phone follow-ups, then I registered online which took less than few minutes. Upto this is normal for any major event of this scale. What pleasantly surprised me is that I received by courier today, the Badge with an RFID Tag that should hopefully allow me to walk to the event straight, without the need to stand in a queue for registration on the day.

Kudos to the organizers. Hoping the event itself will impress me equally.

 If you have been programming in Windows API/C++/VB 6.0 for long, you will feel the pain of DLL Hell. Dotnet framework solved it, but here is a good song to remember the DLL Hell.

Link to DLL Hell Song Page

Some incidents disturb you a lot and make you question about the world we are living in. One such incident that affected me was the Kumbakonam School Fire incident - 2 years back, the other one was the shooting that happened yesterday in a US School.

During these times, the only thing we can do is to pray.  

I have been using various versions of Outlook for almost 6 years now - before which my email reader of choice was Eudora. Even now I wish Outlook can get some EMail features (especially the handling of POP3 downloads) from Eudora, I love Outlook as a great PIM (Personal Information Management) tool.

Anyways, coming to the issue for this post - for some reasons after my last install of Windows XP in my laptop some of the rules where not running, I couldn't edit those rules either. I found no way to get rid of these rules altogether.

(Delete/Change grayed in Rules Dialog)

After some web search I found this article on "Everything You Need to Know About How To Troubleshoot Microsoft Outlook" and found a command-line switch /CleanRules, running Outlook.exe using this switch, all the client rules got deleted and I am good to go. I then found this official Microsoft Article which lists all Outlook Command-Line switches. Check them out, they could prove useful on a rainy day.

India Image is a portal to access all of Government of India websites.

Americans and People familiar with USA, know "Uncle Sam" is a national personification of the United States. Several years back when I first came across this term , I didn't understand it but eventually figured it out from the context. Over the years many times when I came across the term, I was curious on its origin and official status but never bothered to check it out.

Today I took the effort to find out and got the answer from here & here. It dates from the War of 1812 and there are multiple theories behind the actual origin.