Microsoft today announced through Soma's blog - the official name of the technology that they have been previewing as "WPF/E". It is now going to be called Microsoft Silverlight. "Silverlight" is probably the most fanciest name that has come from the company (MS) that is known to keep its product names long and uninspiring like "Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Office System".

What I found interesting in WPF/E betas was its ability to use XAML and JavaScript for interesting solutions. Now with the official announcement that Silverlight will be cross browser, cross-platform and will work as a rich media serving platform, it sounds more convincing to succeed. I am dying to see this closer in person at Mix '07 in next few weeks at Las Vegas.

If you have been using Vista, Outlook 2007 combination and using POP3 (Non Exchange Server) for downloading emails - you may be experiencing slow email download. This might be due to the auto tuning of TCP/IP in Vista. Here is a Microsoft Support KB that helps to resolve this.

Update (20 April 2007): Similarly if you feel that search is slow with Outlook 2007 (I liked Lookout, unfortunately it doesn't work with Outlook 2007) then download this fix from Microsoft.

I feel myself very divided on this subject. As an Indian Citizen, I feel I shouldn't be criticizing or commenting on other countries immigration policies - more so on American Immigration Policies.

I generally subscribe to the idea that you like what they offer go for it, you don't like it then don't go. This is for many reasons one of them being - Nearly a decade back when I applied for the first time a US B1 visa I felt bad about standing in line from pre-dawn till evening in front of American Consulate in Chennai. Then in one of my trips to UK, I met a second generation Indian - a UK Citizen who is doing extremely well and working for a leading MNC bank there in their investment division. He says that whenever his work takes him to India, he has to go through the ordeal of getting an Indian visa and how the officials in Indian Embassy there are not helpful at all. I am sure people don't queue in front of Indian Embassies, but neverthless it showed that my own country's immigration policies and procedures may not be all that great too. Each country has its own problems, compulsions and reasonings.

On the other hand, I feel America should be more welcoming in their immigration policy (At Vishwak we have our own subsidiary in USA we have an interest on the H1 and immigration rules). Last year the overall H1 limit of 65,000 applications got exhaused around May 3rd week. This year on the opening day of April 2nd itself over 150,000 applications have been received. It is surprising that the country which was formed on the basis of freedom and welcoming people to immigrate now has a limit on the number of most-skilled and intelligent people from around the world who can come in to their country. In this regard I found the recent "Economist" article titled "America's useless immigration system" to be well-written on this subject. Reading that is when I decided to write this post.

Today's Economic Times - Corporate Dossier supplement carried an interesting piece. It was about "When hard decisions need to be taken, Corporate India has one solution - fly in an expatriate".

There are two possible impressions you may feel after reading the article. First one may be that "Why should we need foreigners to tell us what to do, Indian Managers and CEOs are equally capable", but if you read the article carefully it says "one solution is to have expatriates", it doesn't say it is the only way. Second which I thought was that "expatriates don't have the cultural baggage (not always bad in my opinion) Indian Managers will have to carry with an Indian team, because the team expects CEO to relate and understand them closer. This is not expected from an expatriate, as the news an expatriate is being appointed as a CEO itself signals (certainly wrong impression to carry) tough decisions are in coming. In India there seems to be too much personal emotions attached in everyday workplace - our work life balance is not always maintained distinctly".

On the same issue, we need to remember that India Inc.  cannot be different than what other market and countries are doing worldwide. Remember, we are in a Globalized (flat) world. You don't need to compromise your core values and ethos, but at the same you will need to be smart and sensitive with prevailing conditions or get killed. And death happens faster in today's corporate world than ever before. 

As far as the above quote concerned is concerned, as a CEO myself I couldn't have said it any better. You face it everyday with your team members not speaking up opennly, they are unnecessarily courteous and shy for all the wrong reasons.

On a more general note all these issues are not new, but for India - it is, because in living memory India hasn't seen the consistent growth rate that is seeing for the last few years. We have to pay some price for this economic boom market. The other countries including Asian Tigers have gone through this before, but India is going through it now.

Please leave your thoughts in the comments below - do you agree with the above or not?    

Today I got my new car delivered - a "New Warm Silver" colour Honda City ZX GXi.

I have been planning for a new car to replace my Opel Corsa 1.4 GLS, for last 12 months after its warranty (1 year base and 2 years extended warranty) expired, but the interia of acting on it was too much for me to do anything. Personally I am not a Car "Lover" - car is more a utility to commute that's about it for me. 

Another reason for the wait was that my Opel Corsa was doing well. I had no complaints about the car, was extremely easy to drive and park in City conditions, size was compact and absolutely no problems. The only minus was mileage, which in the four years I owned, I could never cross more than 7Kms per litre. For strange reasons, GM discontinued the car in India a year or so back and started pushing their "Chevy" brand of cars instead. This meant spares for Corsa became sparse (or atleast thats what the market was talking) and the value for re-sale of the car diminished significantly. After taking a price quote from two used car dealers in Chennai including Sundaram Motors and Manipal, I sold to a relative of a friend. Even then I could manage to get less than 1/4 (one-fourth) of what I paid for the car exactly 4 years back - lower than the allowed income tax depreciation :-(. If there is a moral to this story - then don't think of Cars as investments anymore in India, second buy the popular moving brands and not a niche vehicle if you plan to resell it in few years.

For the new Honda City - I went with Loan from my favourite Bank "Bank of India". I managed to get the cheque with in the same day (my long banking relationship with them certainly helped in faster processing). That's what I call service. If you want to know why I didn't go with any other bank, read my earlier post on Housing loans here.

Microsoft is releasing a suite of Designer products for Web and Windows called "Expressions". These products promise to make the designer and developer collabration lot easier that it is today. Unfortunately when first announced they decided not to include Expressions in MSDN subscriptions. MSDN Subscriptions are the most common way Microsoft developers and partners get access to Microsoft Software.

Through the Microsoft Regional Director program, we "RDs" made our disappointment known to Microsoft and why it is important for Developers to get access to "Designer" tools. Fortunately Microsoft listened to us and other similar voices and through this blog post here from Somasegar (MS VP) Microsoft has decided to include Expressions with MSDN Subscriptions.

I am pleasantly surprised at these instances where Microsoft listens to you!. 

Google, Live Search and Yahoo! have all  been supporting Unicode text searches for years. Using them you can type a tamil word in Unicode and search. Google also gives you a Tamil User Interface if it detects your Browser Language setting to be"TA" or "TA-IN".

The constraint in using them were, you needed to have a Tamil IME pre-installed in your machine. Microsoft provides its IME for Tamil free with Windows XP, Vista and more through their BhashaIndia Website, my favourite has always been my good friend Malaysia Muthu Nedumaran's Murasu Anjal due to my bi-lingual typing, Apple bundles Anjal now with its Tiger OS and above, Fedora Core 6 bundles a free Tamil IME. But inspite of all this, if you need a no-install way to use Tamil search here is a new site that is build on top of Google API that allows Tamil Unicode input through English typing. Check it out.

This Monday I saw this article in Dinamani tamil daily on few incidents of Chickenpox in Chennai and around. One of my co-workers got infected few weeks back. Though I have been vaccinated against it in Childhood, when I checked my family doctor he recommended me for taking a booster injection. Though there is a strong religious mis-belief about this disease in South India, scientifically it is caused by Varicella-Zoster Virus. If you have been infected once by the disease, or have been vaccinated you will not get it again.

When I went to my doctor on Monday, he decided to administer first a Combo vaccination against Hepatitis-A and Hepatitis-B. Earlier you needed two seperate injections for Hepatitis A and B, now the single dose cost Rs.1200 or so in private clinics. Before you jump into conclusions on why my doctor recommended me to take it - I will say it myself, the disease is commonly caused in developing countries through contaminated food/water and affects the liver. For effectiveness you need a booster every 3 to 4 years once.

Since you cannot take ChickenPox vaccination also on the same day, my doctor administered that (Okavax) vaccination on Wednesday. This costed Rs.1400.

So if you are in this part of the world, and can afford the vaccinations, it is highly recommended to take them.

I have been seeing PCs from PC-AT days and the wish has always been to see the plethora of connectors behind your PC eliminated. With USB Headphones, I see no need for EP Jacks for Audio In/Out, but they still exist. Same like that no need for the legacy COM and LPT ports for printers and accessories. Though majority of the device can now be connected to USB, including Wireless Network (and there by eliminating RJ45 Socket) - the monitor has been stubborn on its VGA and Digital sockets.

Now Samsung's new Ubisync Monitor will hopefully say farewell to this. This monitor connects to any USB, needs no graphics card and works with Software Drivers. It supports connecting upto 6 monitors in one USB port. Cool...