Day Zero of Tech Mela yesterday was Invite Only and for Enterprise and CIO audience. My expectation for the event was low and I was looking forward to hours of neck deep PPT Gyan. Though there were enough PPTs presented, overall the day was good. I enjoyed the profound speech by Mr.Sam Pitroda.

Mr.Ravi Venkatesan (Chairman Microsoft India):

As usual Ravi's Talk was brief (10 minutes) but was precise and thought-provoking - I admire this person for this everytime, he manages to make a boring Biz talk so interesting and that too without exciting with new product announcements, etc. He talked on how Microsoft came to solving a problem for an Association of Tirupur Garment (export) Houses. The problem was that the goods in production travels 15 Kms over 90 days at various stages (Colouring done by a vendor, etc.), and these are small houses who don't have the awareness and the money for in-house IT Solutions. So Microsoft came out with a Hosted solution which the small houses can connect with the now cheap Broadband connections and they pay for it as they Go - No CAPEX. It also solves Piracy!. The solution reduced the production time by 20 days (25% saving). The Top 20 Million (Earning) Households in India only 40% have PCs, but Indian households overall spend over Rs.7000 Crores for competitive exams, so Education is a big driver. Addressing this market, Microsoft India is planning to introduce a Family PC which will have in-build latest updated content for Education & Competitive Exams - some exclusive deals.

Mr.Steven Guggenheimer (General Manager, App. Platform and Developer Marketing, Microsoft):

He talked about the vision of Ray Ozzie of Software + Service and not of Software / Service. He highlighted the point that worldwide enterprises spend 70% of the money on running existing systems and only 30% gets spent on new initiatives.

Microsoft breaks Service into three:
 

He showed a video of a business application that uses Building Block Services like Live Local for BP where they can see the location of all employees worldwide (including in remote oil riggs) visually on a map interface which was build by a partner IDV Solutions. Steven was joined by MS Dev Evangelist to demo: WPF (Seattle Post Intelligence, NY Times), Silverlight (for upcmoming Jhoom Bharabar Jhoom movie), Microsoft Live Labs Relay Service (Queue). I was interested on the  Dynamic CRM Live demo by Mark Linton and the service is expected to ship by Dec '07. Currently it supports only Windows Live ID (Passport) but by release they will support Active Directory Federated Service so that corporate wide single sign-on will work.  

Mr.Sam Pitroda (Chairman - National Knowledge Commission):

• The NKC he heads is about Knowledged as opposed to Education, which other government departments are focussing. Knowledge is key because India today is a power house in Knowledge economy. They have industry stalwards like Mr.Nandan Nilekani and others who meet every other month.
• Idea is to function as a think-tank (I remembered Singapore Government equivalent once, wish ours could deliver impact like theirs)
• They are working on some 10-30 ideas over all, but at any time not more than few. They have submitted like 9 or 10 to Prime Minister (as a final few page recommendation) but the entire report is available in their website.
• Key is how do you have information and knowledge accessible to our masses. We have 54,000 libraries - how do you improve them using technology, public private partnership for a sustainable model and build a community around libraries.
• Sam was very critical of current e-governance iniatives, where each state doing the same thing, reinventing the wheel but in their own way and wasting money. He wants to see a unified federal standard and system which are web based; and states fill in data. They look and function the same but in different languages. So birth/death certificate, land records look the same across the country. Basically we need to have standards for the major processes across country
• Demography in India has 550 Million People who are less than 25 years. What future are we leaving for them, the type of jobs. We need to invest and plant the seeds now so that we can harvest them over next 20-30 years. It is like what happened in Telecom where we plannted during Rajiv Gandhi times' that we are harvesting now.
• The best of brains in the world work for the riches - who really have no problems. To solve it you have to think from the heart and not from the mind. So the question is how do we create more best brains.
• Broadband is not about fast video downloads etc, it is about how we can have the best professor in IIT, Mumbai speak to a remote college in India
• Answering questions:
• On telecom, Sam: "I care little about Telecom now, it is on its own and can take care of it"
• On mobile, Sam: "I consider all the cellphones initiatives today as Gimmicks. They don't have any real world real value applications, applications should have an utility"
• On a Single Data Repository for India, Sam: "Don't expect a Single Data Repository for a country like India. We have vast amount of knowledge in India that are diverse and does't fit into one repository. This could include age old wisdoms like Ayurveda, etc. So don't expect any quick fixes"
•  Finally Sam closed by saying a thought-provoking issue - Why do we still follow the old processes British left us 60 years back, why is that something done someway by some british officer is being followed till date and which got perfected over the years by our babus. For example: Why are we still filling 5 copies of an admission form in schools. So unless we use IT as a chance to think through and come up with new processes, there is no point in doing e-governancen, waste of money. We need to use e-governance as an oppoprtunity for change.

The only boring session was the Connected Experience - Windows Mobile/Embedded session. The speaker had tons of TV ads and that's about it.

Management Technologies in Windows Server 2008 - by Ranjana Jain (IT Pro Evangelist, MS India)

• Session talked briefly on Power-Shell, Server Manager, Windows Server 2008 Core, Windows Remote Management (WinRMI)
• Server Manager allows you to manage everything in one Window:
  • Event Viewer has a collector service to get events from other servers and bring them in one place. Also tasks can be activated when an event happens.
  • Task manager with more features is integrated with server manager
  • Reliability Manager is integrated with service manager, which tells what happened / how reliable was the server on a time scale.
• Windows Server core - only a Command Prompt (The WOW stops here). Four core services - DNS/DHCP/Active Directory/File Services and I suppose she missed to mention the recently added IIS.  
  • Just Starts the Command Line
  • To Set an IP adddress
    • See the Interfaces: NetSh Interface ipv4 show interfaces
    • netsh interfaces ipv4 set address name=4 address ...
    • To add to a domain: NetDom Join /domain:contoso /user:Administrator *
• WinRMI - how to do things remotely including remote machines' IP address.
• Power Shell
  • Create and access process like Notepad as a .NET Variable
  • Access Registry store as a drive like HKLM:
  • Winrm command to execute remote commands
  • WinRS command to create a remote shell
• Instead of asking all the questions before installing, it takes a different approach, it takes default and then after reboot presents with a list of activities where it asks questions
• Once setup, then the only window opens up - Server Manager. it presents everything including PerfMon.
• Now Active Directory service can be stopped and started 

What's new in Windows Mobile 6.0 by Loke Uei

• .NET Compact Framework 2.0 SP2 installed in ROM
  • 20% Performance improvement
  • Easy to send and receive SMS
• SQL Compact Edition installed in ROM
• Support for AJAX in Pocket IE
• New native APIs - allow you to play WMA/MP3, Ink Platform
  • WISP Lite ported from Tablet PC
• New Windows Mobile 6 SDK, One tool for developing native and managed code - VS 2008
• A good session to check from MEDC DVD - ILL303: Data Replication Session on how to repliace between thousands of clients with SQL CE with SQL Server
• Windows Mobile 6.0 has 3 editions - Standard (Smartphone with no touch screen), Professional (Pocket PC with touch Screen) & Classic. Also in Pro, all applications run in priveleged mode (One-tier), Standard has multiple tiers
• You can use Security Configuration Manager to setup security and install parameters
• You have a FakeGPS, Cellular Emulator (Fake Voice Calls), FakeServer (If you need to call a Web Service but right now not connected to the server), Hopper in the SDK Tools
• Cellular Emulator allows you to do calls to the emulator, fake reject calls, send SMS etc from PC to emulator
• An interesting point was of his boss doing Elbow testing, where by he asks you to be away and pushes his elbow on the keyboards. Similarly Hopper is a great random testing tool
• He demoed an application where by his device will send the current GPS coordinates by SMS to his wife. His wife can see where in the world he is, in a map
• You can get GPS Position, Check whether device is currently in Roaming (or not, then decide to make a call/data connection)
• You can monitor SMS and take actions based on the SMS contents

 Windows Cardspace by Vineet Gupta (Microosft India)

• Talked about the basics of cryptography, WS Trust (Implemented by WCF), WS-MetadataExchange, WS Security Policy (Implemented by WCF), Security Token Service (AD and ADFS) and Consistent user experience (Implemented by Windows CardSpace)

IIS 7.0 Overview by Vinod Kumar (Microsoft India)

• Vinod started as usual brilliantly but the title came up as an Overview session - he too emphasized on that, so I got out. Sorry Vinod

High Availability in MS Exchange Server 2007 & SP1 by Rajat Choudhary (Microsoft India)

• Server roles other than Mailbox:
  • Deploy multiple Hub Transport Server in each site
  • Deploy multiple Edge Transport Server and use round robin DNS to load balancing
  • Client Access Server - NLB or 3rd Party Load balancing
  • Unified Messaging Server
• High Availability for Mailbox Server
  • Local Continous Replication - Secondary copy of the mailbox on the same device. Works on Log Shipping Mechanism, async with a bit of time lag
  • Cluster Continuous Replication: Stretch your subnet over VLAN. Doesn't require Shared Storage (Reduced Cost), Automatic Recovery, Witness on Hub Transport. Can be replicated between two storage on the same machine or between two different machines
  • Single copy Cluster - Shared Storage Model. Up to 8-node Active/Passive, Active/Active Cut. Only Mailbox role can be clustered, other roles can be clustered using previously technologies
• Something on Transport Dumpster being 1.5 times the size of maximum mail store, I didn't understand it

 Strategies for Disaster recovery for Exchange Server 2007 by my good friend Venkatesh Ramakrishnan (Microsoft India)

• Strategy should be Effective, Efficient, Granular
• A well defined step by step procedure for backup and restore of Exchange Server 2007 when server damaged by a disaster
• Dependent Tasks: Which data is backed up depends on which Exchange Server 2007 role you have installed; The data you decide to backup as a part of the disaster recovery strategy determines the recovery process
• Cricitical Inputs: Knowing what you may have to recover from, Consider your SLA, Understanding the way Exchange Database works and the dependency on Active Directory. For example: Exchange Server 2007 is purely a 64bit subsystem
• Backup of Exchange in your organization is a necessary operational tasks. Verify the backup and restore process in a test environment. Once in production, you should periodically check restoring the backups to the test environment 
• Depending on the resources, your test environment can be a Virtual Hardware
• When do you "Repair" and when do you "Restore". Simple rule of thumb - any component which you will like to bring it to previous state without brining back the offline copy, use "Repair". Else "Restore"
• Planning the scenario's : Recover a permanently deleted mail item, recover a mailbox, recover an information store, receover a server with a specific role, recover a mailbox server & finally recover from total site failure
• For brick level backup (each item level) - leverage Recovery Storage Groups, allows you to keep a second copy of the mounted exchange store
• Go for a Streaming Backup or VSS (Shadow) backup so that you have backups at a point in time
• Even if you are doing Online backup, do an Offline backup as well

Finally, the whole day kept going, even at 7PM they had last but one session in Track 1 going on and on. I decided to call it a day. Then I got stuck in Mumbai traffic for 90 minutes for the 10 mins journey from Renaissance Powai to Hotal Rodas in Powai, with rains pouring.

Tech Ed India is one of the biggest annual events by Microsoft. I have been speaking in Tech Ed from 1999 and this year Tech Ed 2007 will be my nineth. This time around I am sitting down as an invitee and relaxing, as almost all the sessions are being presented by Microsoft Full Time Employees. Anyways, this is an event I will never miss as it allows me to catch up on technology and to meet some great brains. This year around it is called "Tech Mela", I will be here - and remember to say "Hello" to me if you see me.  

One challenge while you are blogging is to find appropriate photos (stock images) that are free for usage. While Google and MSN Image Searches will list images, they may not come with right to use. I normally try and substitute with the photos I have taken - of course this is not possible always. For these scenarios I found these sites that offer Royalty Free Images.

1. Stock.XCHNG (Tons of Free Images)
2. Morguefile (Also free images)
3. iStockPhoto (Not free, but Affordable prices)
4. Corbis (Excellent images but expensive)
5. GettyImages (One more Paid Site with good images)

I have been using dasBlog Software for running this blog ever from its start. I am extremely pleased with the software, its:

• ease of use
• ease of backup. just zip four folders - SiteConfig, Content, Logs & Themes
• zero-install. just xcopy, no databases to install or configure and
• price point (free!)

In the last 4 years I never had problems with dasBlog, it just worked, Period. Yesterday night was different - my blog was down overnight, and it was purely my fault.

I have been following Scott Hanselman's blog about the daily builds of dasBlog, supporting Windows Live Writer Beta2 and Akimset Comments Spam support. I got adventurous, kept copying various daily builds; on top of it I posted some pre-dated posts from Windows Live Writer Beta 2. I suppose I somehow managed to corrupt the data-files for last two days. Today morning I realized my goof-ups, deleted two days data files, came back to release version of dasBlog, posted the two entries back. (Kiran: If you are wondering what happened to your comment, you know what happened now!).

Today when I visited the Sourceforge data repository for the dasBlog builds, I saw that I could nominate my favourite project to their Sourceforge.net 2007 Awards. I went ahead and nominated dasBlog to "Best Technical Design" category. I request all other users of dasBlog to do the same. 

Finally, after nine months dasBlog is getting a new fully supported release. All the new features like Akimset support, Windows Live Writer Beta 2 Support and more are expected in the release on 18th June 2007. That's good news and I am waiting...

BTW, I went nuts doing this post. As everytime I submitted, all the images were coming broken. It turns out dasBlog replaces all occurence of its name as hyperlinks and it can be configured in the settings.

I might be generalizing an issue here, but nonetheless here it is.

At our office (Vishwak) we have people visiting our US office for short trips every other week. Our travel desk uses our regular travel agent for booking these tickets, don't experiment a lot as the last thing they want to have people stranded in Timpakto and calling them. Most of the time, we get good fares with BA or Lufthansa for Chennai-Seattle-Chennai, though I prefer BA due to its shortest journey time. In terms of service though, my favourite is always Asian Carriers - Jet, Singapore, Malaysian (in that order). For Domestic Sector, there is hardly any margins so ticketing agencies are not interested in the business - we do these bookings through Websites like Cleartrip or Yatra or directly in Airline websites.

This week we got a last minute confirmation for a training programme in Microsoft Redmond, WA for one of our Senior Developers. I became adventurous yesterday and booked his tickets on Expedia.com instead of our travel desk. Though the routing was long (Chennai-Dubai-Zurich-Paris-Seattle), I went with Expedia as I got a good fare @US$1300 Round-trip. It generated confirmation for every sector and I got it verified by Emirates local office in Chennai as well. Today morning when he tried boarding he was refused as there was no Airline ticketing number. I was taken aback and on checking my email I find an email from Expedia (after 10 hours of booking) saying the below - basically that they are not able to issue a Ticket.

"We are contacting you in regards to your recent purchase on Expedia.com. Due to circumstances beyond our control, we are unable to process your request for a ticket. Please call us at (800) EXPEDIA as soon as possible so that we can work with you to make alternate arrangements - Expedia Inc."

And on calling the number repeatedly, we were kept on hold and no person answering the call. Finally I gave up, wrote to Expedia to cancel the ticket. I then called my travel agent and though it was a Sunday he came to work and got a ticket in Air India for the same day @US$1650 Round-trip. So finally a happy ending to the story.

I am puzzled on why Expedia failed. May be they couldn't get the fare when they did ticketing (or) Security restrictions in US/India requiring 24 hours notice (or) simply an one-off occurrence. Whatever it is I am back to my good 'ol travel agent for my international bookings.

I have been charged on my credit card and after two days still no response back on Expedia or my money back.

I always liked the lifestyle and health articles shown in top area in MSN.COM. This week MSN published few interesting articles relating to raising kids, all had some unconventional wisdom that I thought it was worth to link from here.

• Turning to nannies and day care, many working moms have mixed feelings about leaving the kids at home. How to handle this? 
• The other article was on The Making of a Modern Dad. The article says there is more than what meets the eye of fatherhood. In fact there seems to be considerable hormone changes happening in a father just like it happens to a mother after pregnancy. Fathers tend to become more caring and loving than before having a child.  Being a father of a 4 year old boy, I tend to agree with this article, though I don't understand the biological effects. The best part in the article was the phrase "Honey, we're pregnant"
• This is a question that all parents have - how good or bad is Television?. This article says that Television viewing is not encouraged for kids below 2 years, but can be good if moderated for kids between 3 to 5.

This post is about three items related to blogging.

Windows Live Writer Beta 2

Microsoft have finally released the new version (Beta 2) of Windows Live Writer. I consider Live Writer to the best software from Windows Live team. After their initial release - no news from them for almost a year now. It was as bad as dead, and I thought it is one of those Microsoft's experiments that don't make it. Writer is probably the software I use most after Explorer, Outlook, Internet Explorer in that order. I am happy to see the project living and improvements made in the new version. And it supports dasBlog better than ever.  Windows Live Writer (and the new Messenger 8.5) introduces a new installation UI that gets displayed on the Right Hand Bottom of the screen area - this is unlike the regular installers which take up center of the screen and disturb your regular work.

30 Guidelines for a Good Blog

Since I have been blogging for few years now, people  ask me about what are the guidelines to follow when you start a blog. I always got away by saying keep posting often, don't just post links and don't talk about work. Today this need is solved with Scott Hanselman posting an excellent list of "30 Guidelines for a good blog". Scott Hanselman is one of my fellow Microsoft Regional Directors and a regular technical blogger.

What is a Blog?

About a year back (I read this only today) John C.Dvorak has commented on how large sites push out ordinary web pages and call them blog. He was expressing in this column his anger on the loose usage of the term "Blog" and what he expects to be in a good blog.

This week, it was news everywhere in the technology world about Microsoft's new computer interface - Surface. It is basically a Coffee Table that doubles up as an interactive computer device that recognizes Multi-touch.

At first when I read the news about Microsoft Surface, I dismissed the idea as one more Fancy world imagination. After I saw the below video, the article from Popular Mechanics that went it and this video from 10.net, I was simply blown away.

I can image a day in the next decade when I might be struggling with one of these devices while my 4 Year son zips with it. It will be just like how today kids teach their parents on how to use Mouse and Keyboards.  

The entire UI for Surface I am told is done with WPF. Surface runs a customized version of Windows Vista, a rear projection screen and five cameras that look through the screen from behind to recognize and read items placed on the surface as well as to track hand gestures and touch. It has wired 10/100Mbit Ethernet and wireless 802.11 b/g and Bluetooth 2.0 support built in.

I am not predicting that this exact one from Microsoft will be the only one or that this interface will completely eliminate Keyboard and Mouses. But I certainly feel that something on these lines will be a big hit in next decade.

Though I was thinking about this for sometime, I didn't feel like posting this till today. Today I had a general discussion with a colleague on the extremely low cost (sometimes free) pricing model of Air Deccan and other LCCs (Low Cost Carriers) in India. I don't fully agree on the extend of price cutting done, which definitely is below cost and is non-sustainable for the long-term. At the same time I feel you cannot term the whole business model unvaiable. If the same approach of low pricing was to be done by groups with deep pockets like Reliance, Tata or UB, then it will be seen by media as a bold step and a big strategy. Just because it is done Air Deccan, it is being criticized heavily.

Anyways, for these LCCs to succeed the approach has to be different in India. Unfortunately every carrier is targetting and falling over each other for the big six metros, instead it will be wise to go after Tier-II / Tier -III cities. This is more like the approach Wal-Mart in its founding years choose to do - go after towns with less than 10,000 people, which eventually makes them circle completely big cities without getting into them. Also in many cases, though the tickets are sold at few hundred rupees or even Zero (free by Air Deccan) it costs more than Rs.1500 for the consumer because of the huge Taxes. India doesn't have a Low Cost Airport like Singapore has for LCCs .

The problem for the carriers certainly is a lack of necessary Airport infrastructure in the non-metro cities. But here, I see a big oppurtunity for them. The plan should be to start tens of mini-airports in private or in partnership with Government. Each of these Airport should be situated in Tier-III towns or certainly not inside a Tier-II/Tier-I city.  The Airports themselves can be extremely small, handling the smallest commercially viable planes and should cost few hundred crores (as low as say Rs.100 Crores). Government can help by giving the non-agro lands on lease and the airports can be on a BOT (Build Operate Transfer) model. For a country as big as India, where it takes 2 to 3 days to travel by Train/over a week by road from North to South (or East to West) this will produce tremendous movement of labour and oppurtunities.

As an example, consider this. Instead of building a new Airport for Chennai, it can be build on Pondicherry. The new Airport can handle mainly International traffic and Airlines should be charged considerably less (or Zero Tax like in a SEZ) to land in Pondy than in Chennai Airport. This way consumer will get a choice, it should cost few thousand rupees cheaper if I choose to land in Pondy. As a consumer I will go for it, because it just takes just 2 to 3 hours and few hundred rupees to travel from Pondy to Chennai - which I won't mind for the savings I got. Hypothetically consider the venue instead of Pondy to be the temple town - Tirupathi. Airlines can offer a package deal of Lord Balaji's Darshan plus flying, they can even advertise with the slogan "Pray and Fly" (Pun Intended).

15th June 2007 Update: I am surprised that my wish for a Puduchery (Pondicherry) Airport is coming true with in weeks - though not for international flights but Pondy Govt has decided to give land to AAI to make it operational and expand a domestic airport.  

I was reminded yesterday while reading Economic Times paper, of a book "Far from the Madding Crowd" by Thomas Hardy. The book was in my 12th Standard syllabus and our English Teacher "ShantiShri" was very fond of the book that she made us read it umpty number of times. The most likely question on the book was to be on "Chance Happening" - on how few of the unplanned events resulted on big turning points in the characters lifes.

(Scanned copy from my XII school book)

Anyways, the reason for me to be reminded on "Chance Happening" and hence the book, was a piece on the paper's ViewPoint section. The piece was an extract from a lecture given in New York University-Stern by Infosys Founder Mr.N.R.Narayana Murthy. The lecture was titled "Learning from experience: Some lessons I have learned from my life and career" where Mr.Murthy talks about "Chance Events" that changed his life and hence Infosys. What I enjoyed most was his first paragraph where he talks about the impact role models or a one-off speech can have on an individual. I could relate to that in an indirect fashion.

"The first event occurred when I was a graduate student in Control Theory at IIT, Kanpur in India. At breakfast on a bright Sunday morning in 1968, I had a chance encounter with a famous computer scientist on sabbatical from a well-known US university. He was discussing exciting new developments in the field of computer science with a large group of students and how such developments would alter our future. He was articulate, passionate and quite convincing. I was hooked. I went straight from breakfast to the library, read four or five papers he had suggested, and left the library determined to study computer science."

LIFCO's (our family publishing firm) guide to Far from the Madding Crowd (Published:1957)

Yesterday I felt very happy, special and humbled all at once by my well-wisher Mr.J.Kesavardhanan, CEO of K7 Computing - the makers of World Class Anti-Virus Solutions for nearly two decades.

The reason I was happy was the occassion of K7 Computing moving to a new sprawling 25,000 square feet new office in OMR (Old Mahabalipuram Road) about a kilometre from Tidel Park - in between MARG and HCL buildings on the left hand side when coming from Madhya Kailash Temple. I have great admiration for Mr.K7 (as he likes to be called), learned from him over the years on both technology and on running a business. As a matter of history, K7 Computing is the only employer for whom I worked for (for about 3 months), before I started Vishwak and I greatly cherish the experiences I went through in that short duration.

I was feeling special, because K7 after honouring his guru Mr.Pulikesi, gifted me with a "Gold Coin" for being their first customer of Vx2000 15 years or so back. In 1991 or 92, when I bought the copy of Vx2000 for Rs.190 for our publishing company LIFCO, I was in my school and honestly didn't know I was their first customer nor realized it will become history one-day. I remember seeing the below issue (November 1990 or an early issue of 1991) of SysReader, going to a small lane in Saidapet, Chennai and meeting a smart, bearded person Mr.Balu in a tiny room with a PC. Balu acted normally, sold me the product and that I time I didn't get to meet K7. In the next few years from then, I met K7 many times in SysReader office and events. It was in 1996-97 when I worked briefly (thanks to my other long time well-wisher Mr.Asokan P) in K7 Computing I got to meet K7 closer and the Balu I met in 1991-92 was my line manager (he was a tough manager to satisfy on delivery schedules). 

 
(Vx2000 Floppy placed on top of a November 1990 issue of SysReader)

See here Vx2000 earliest advertisement copy that appeared in the above SysReader issue.

Finally, I was humbled to see the simplicity of K7 - even with all these successes behind him, K7 hasn't changed a bit, he is the same person I met 15 years or so back.

Instead of gifting people items which never gets used, they kept a selection of books in the exit. People were requested to pick their choice. A very thoughtful act, considering that K7 Computing is a Knowledge (IP) Company and even on these Google days - what is more apt to symbolise knowledge than books. Earlier someone gifted me a book was in an event at TCS - read that post here.