No formal training, poor nutrition in childhood, parents working as labourers in brick kiln yet S.Santhi has made all Indians proud. In the Doha Asian Games, S.Santhi a girl from Kattakurichi village in Pudukottai district, Tamilnadu has won Silver in 800metres.

Best Wishes to Santhi and her parents who had the courage to see her through this. Great, Quick decision by Tamilnadu Government to award her with Rs.15 Lakhs to help her to continue. We need more such cash awards from all quarters - so that young prospective atheletes go for it big and not suffer for economic considerations.

I hope and pray that more Santhi's of India won worldwide regonization. India cannot rest on its laurels just as World Economic powerhouse, when out of 1.2 Billion people we score pathetic in all atheletic events including olympics.

Read the full story here from "The Hindu"

Update 19/12/06: It was disappointing to read about the sudden turn of events in this story. Shanti had failed a "Gender Medical Test" and OCA has asked for return of her medal.

This week I was mildly infected by Conjunctivitis (Madras Eye) and was quarantined by my family in my sister's house. This gave me two days to do some peaceful reading apart from the occassional office phone calls. I picked up this book iWoz from my bookshelf - long abonded and read it. The book is about the co-founder of Apple "Steve Wozniak" who is an engineer who designed the original Apple-I and Apple-II computers.

Disclaimer: Though I have used a Mac Mini and love its Hardware Design, I grow up in a PC environment, that makes me a hardcore Wintel fan. So before this book I had little idea about the story behind Apple and its investors other than reading occassionally about Steve Jobs.

Wikipedia carries here a brief on what this book talks about and a positive review of this book is at a blog by Guy Kawasaki (Apple Engineer), so I will skip the basics.  

The simplest way for me to describe this book is a bell curve . A bell curve just like the one in the image on left shows, peaks in middle and tapers at both ends, that's exactly how the book was for me. The initial chapters were boring, where Steve is talking in detail about his childhood and his father (as hard as I try I am unable to remember details other than the school and few friends of mine in LKG to Sixth Standard, but Steve remembers everything).

Then the interesting part about his designs, Apple-I and then Apple-II. Apple-II is covered in few pages, then few chapters on non-apple passions and then when you are expecting more on Apple the book ends abruptly - not even a brief mention of his next 20 years of his life (Post US Fashions till date). As an engineer myself and who has been through the second half of PC revolution, I felt Steve is incorrect to miss completely the IBM PC and DOS Story - it is as if he and Apple-I/II existed in a world without any competition.

If you are an Apple fan, please buy a copy of this book for your own collection. If not please read it only if someone lends a copy, don't waste your own money.  

Now that .NET Framework 3.0 (WPF, WCF, WWF) has been released you may want to start programming, so here is the download list you will need to do that:

• .NET Framework 3.0 Runtime (Vista has it pre-installed) - dotnetfx3setup.exe
• Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation (EN).exe
• Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF), November 2006 CTP - vsextwfx.msi
• Windows SDK

Read my earlier posts on CTP of .NET Framework 3.0

I had bought this book sometime back, but didn't proceed more than few pages at that time. This week I took it again from my bookshelf, I became interested on the topics discussed by the Authors (Economists) - Steven D.Levitt and Stephen J.Dubner. With reading for few days - few hours every night I finished the book.

The book has a good followup resources including website, a blog and a wikipedia entry - so I will skip the introductions and details about the book. Instead I will just list here on what I liked/learned from this book:

• US Crime rate falling and connection with Abortion made legal two decades back (I think I have read this somewhere earlier as well)
• It is a fact that Real Estate Agents do sell for more there own properties
• Cheating happens even in a disciplined elite group like Sumo Wrestlers
• Drug dealers (other than the big bosses) don't earn great monies
• Sudhir Venkatesh (An Indian born American Citizen) had the courage to spend considerable time with Drug groups in Chicago in order to understand their behaviours.
• 50% of a child's chance of success is determined before its birth (Genetics, Family Income, Parents Education, etc.)
• The name of a child does make a difference in the chance of success, but that's more a side-effect and changing a name doesn't have a proven effect for reversing fortunes.

Though the title may make the book sound serious read, in reality it is not. It is a light reading book that can be enjoyed over a long journey.

Nowadays the telemarketing calls from Banks, Insurance Companies and Telco's at all times in your mobiles are becoming worser; All of us are very familiar with this menace, so I will just talk about two quotes here and then a possible remedy

Few weeks I got an automated RingTone marketing call from Airtel in my landline and the stupid call doesn't end even if I disconnect that too on a Sunday Afternoon. Last 2 days I am getting calls from CitiBank selling Credit Card, the irony is I am already a Gold Card customer with them. Today my wife answered the call politely, but I interrupted and answered the way I saw was fit - in the call the agent asks me if I refer anyone else, what a stupid question I wonder do I have no other job other than referring customers to them.

After these incidents I spent good amount of time recently in searching the Internet for Don't Call Registries of major Indian banks and listed my name in that. For your benefit the list is reproduced here, please list yourself there. I suppose the recent RBI warning has been the reason for these webpages to be made available.

Don't Call / Do not Disturb webpages of Banks in India

• ICICI Bank (15 Days to remove)
• Standard Chartered Bank (30 days to remove, only bank to give a Request ID)
• Citibank
• ABN Amro Bank
• Deutsche Bank (30 Days to remove)
• HDFC (45 days to remove!)
  

For a similar list containing Telco's, check this The Hindu Article on Rejecting SPAMs. For Insurance company's I am yet to find this service in their websites - if you know about them, please post it in the comments section below.

Read my earlier woes boot (BCD issues) with Vista Beta

After completing the download of Vista RTM, I got ready to setup my Laptop. Used Acronis Disk Director to create 3 partitions (C:\ Vista, D:\Data, E:\WinXP) and formatted all of them using Acronis. Installed WinXP SP2 in E:\, installed Office 2007, AV and other softwares - got the entire WinXP setup completely.

Then I started Vista setup in C:\, Setup copied the contents from CD to HDD and machine rebooted. Nothing happened, I got a blinking cursor and that's about it. 

I guess Vista doesn't like the boot partition to be formatted by any other OS other than itself. So I used Vista Recovery Console

• Format C:\ /FS:NTFS
• Bootrec.exe /fixmbr (Refer earlier post)
• bootrec.exe /fixboot (Refer earlier post)

Now I needed to fix Windows XP to boot. So booted using WinXPSP2 CD and went to XP Recovery console and executed the following:

• FixMBR.exe (this said there is a non-standard MBR, understandable, as we have Vista MBR now, so skipped it)
• FixBoot.exe C:\
• Copied NTLDR and NTDetect.com to C:\ from CD i386 folder
• BootCFG.exe /Scan
• BootCFG.exe /Add to add a new boot.ini file and entry

Rebooted - Windows XP SP2 from E:\ booted and ran perfectly.

Started Windows Vista Installation again. Since this time the C:\ was partitioned by Vista itself and MBR is Vista MBR things went fine and Vista installed & booted fine. I am able to Multi-boot to previous version of Windows (XP SP2) as well.

In my HP nx7010 the display (ATI Mobility Radeon 9200) problem continued, I was happy to see a Windows Update coming up with a new driver for it, but that too didn't work. Then I had to do:

• Boot Vista in safe mode
• Enable Remote desktop
• Login again
• Uninstall the Default Vista Driver for ATI Radeon 9000/9200 (Microsoft), Reboot
• Install the latest HP (SP30204) WinXP driver through Windows Device manager (Don't install through Driver Setup)
   

About a month back, Microsoft came up with a challenge to all its MSDN Regional Directors (which includes me). It was to come up with the best Quote and Photo of the RD in their City landmark. Selecting the landmark for Chennai was tough - how can I manage to take a photo of Marina Beach without professional equipments from air (or) how do I get a photo of LIC / Central Station without Police suspecting me of terrorism . I wanted to go to Mamalapuram - but that whole week was hectic to get out of my desk and when I thought I can, it started raining.  

The rider was that the RD's face, Landmark in the background and the computer screen showing Vista, Office 2007, SharePoint all has to be visible. Most landmarks are outdoor, in that how do I get the screen to show - the natural sunlight's luminosity is hundreds of time higher than your computer screen. I had to hire a professional photographer who gave up after few tries out door. He got permission to do a shot inside the Santhome Church - I felt it embarrassing to hold a PC in front of the sanctum sanctorum and staring for a camera, while in front there were few people doing silent prayers. After 1 hour of waiting for the photographer, 2 hours of posing, I got tired and came home.

The next day I went with my office graphics designer Sukumaran to Valluvar Kottam who got a good shot of me. Thanks Suku and E.Ravi for helping in the photo shot. Incidentally Valluvar Kottam is about a kilometer from my office and the whole thing got over in less than 30 minutes.

Chennai Santhome Church

Chennai Valluvar Kottam

After submitting my entries, I waited. To my surprise, this week Microsoft announced me as one of the Top 10 Photo Entries. I will be getting as gift a Zune Player (WOW). The best quote and photo award goes to RD from Norway - Jonas Folleso, who got as Gifts a Xbox 360 & a new Zune player.

If you are interested the quote I submitted (which didn't win it) is: "With Vista's WPF and Office 2007 Task Oriented UI, a disruptive change is happening in applications usability. The question for every customer now has moved from number of features to how much each of those features will be effectively used. This brings interesting days ahead for everyone"

I don't understand why the media is so intrusive behind what happened on the kidnap and release of Anant Gupta (3 Year old son of Adobe India's CEO). The truth is important but at the same time the privacy of the affected party too.

Everytime I am seeing the news about this incident this week I am reminded of two things. As a father myself of a small kid I feel the pain Anant's parents would have felt; Second I couldn't help to think about hundreds of other kids who get kidnapped around the world every day - who are less fortunate to have a high profile father like Anant. My prayers for them.  

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

If you have been playing around with prerelease versions of Office 2007 and then try to install the final RTM build like the way I did today, you will get stuck with a error "Uninstall all preleases versions of Office 2007" and setup halting. Although I uninstall all Office 2007/2003 components I can find, deleted the office folders in Program Files, Registry keys, still the setup refused to run. After some search I found this blog post that writes on the same issue.

The post pointed me to two useful articles on this from Microsoft: 2007 Microsoft Office System Known Issues/ReadMe & Support Article on setting up Office 2007. After doing all said in the articles, including uninstaling Office 2003 OWC, I couldn't get the setup working.

Then I went to the last suggestion in the post to use Windows Installer Clean Up utility. I was using Windows Vista RC2 to do the setup - in that whatever reasons the installation of this tool failed with a script error. Then I did the following to get everything working:

1) Unpacked the package file in which the utility came into a folder. In the extracted folder I noticed another installation file "msicuu.msi" I ran it directly.

2) In Mid-way the setup came up with a dialog saying it can't find unicode/msizap.exe. In the extracted folder I saw a file called MSIZAPU.EXE, I copied it to a new folder "unicode" and then renamed it as msizap.exe

3) Pressed retry in the dialog and the Installer Clean Up utility installation went fine.

4) Ran the clean up utility, which showed couple of Office 2007 components that didn't show up in Uninstall applet of Vista - I removed all of them

5) Finally I rebooted the machine, ran the Office 2007 RTM setup again - it went thru' without any more glitches.

Happy working with Office 2007.

One of the common problem in deployment of ASP.NET 2.0 applications is permissions. Developers setup IIS to run there application pool with admin priveleges and applications run fine. But when you deploy it in a production environment where the Application Pool runs in a limited permission account like "Network Service" things start to break - especially if the code accesses resources like EventLog. Today I got stuck in one such situation while deploying an application and I came across this good MSDN Article that helped me out.

A related MSDN Article talks about how to use Medium Trust in ASP.NET 2.0 as a best practise. Recommended read for every ASP.NET developer!