With the hundreds of usernames and password every typical Internet user has to remember, it is necessary to use a Password Manager. A typical Password manager is an application with a secure database that will store and retrieve hundreds of Usernames and Passwords with one key “Password“. Most of these tools have high level of security measures ensured to protect the passwords stored, both from in-memory and from-disk attacks.

I have been initially using Password Safe, then moved to Keith Brown's Password Minder that we extended in Vishwak. Password Minder was not managed by a community and we also didn't want to commit resources to keep the project alive - earlier 3 years back Password Minder filled a vacancy neatly. As a result the application has bugs that needs to be fixed in our extension and poor Windows Vista compatibility. In Open-Source now you have lots of Password Managers which have more features, works across platforms, offers better security - most important has vibrant communities behind them that keeps the projects updated regularly.

I have weight between the choice of commiting resources to fix Password Minder or to move to a new application.In the end, I decided to move. After evaluation of many products, I have ended my search with KeePass. This is a perfect Password Manager that offers state of the art security, works on multiple platform (Windows, Windows Mobile, Linux, MacOS, J2ME, PalmOS) and very easy to use.

I still run Password Minder, but every time I need to access a site that is in Password Minder I first recreate it in KeePass, delete it in Password minder. This way I hope to fully move to KeePass in few weeks.

I feel someone in Civil Aviation Ministry is reading my blog posts on Airports or I am just lucky. Eitherways so far it has been only for the better.

Few months back I posted an idea on developing Puducherry Airport and boom few weeks later government is considering it. I talked about improving connectivity to green field Airports and now it seems Civil Aviation Ministry is considering a plan to do high speed rail links. The trains will run from city centre to the respective airports at 160-180 kmph, will allow city check-in. They are considering 10 ten major cities in the country to have this facility. But the cost looks staggering, just for Delhi Connaught Place to Delhi Airport (a project in piepline) will cost Rs.3,200 crores. This was reported in 30/Jul/07 Economic Times Page 13 of Chennai edition (I couldn't find the story online).

In every Indian Marriage (especially Tamil Marriages) in the evening there is an event called "Reception" where you have friends and relatives gathering and wishing the newly wed. In the event you have something named appropriately as "Loud Music" which is a performance by a local orchestra singing popular film songs, wishing the newly wed and to entertain the audience - so that there is festivity in the air.

A decade or so back, it used to be primarily classical / carnatic music that will be played which makes it enjoyable especialy by the elders, but nowadays it is only Film Music and "Kutthu" songs. With the advent of portable electronics and powerful speakers, the orchestra sets the sound volume to its maximum. On top of it, imagine these playing in indoors in a closed atmosphere - you have a perfect recipe for a headache. With nuclear families and with people having less time to meet friends/relatives face to face, marriages are the only occassion to meet and catch up on happenings. But songs at these sounds levels ensures no one hears anything, even the person next to him. The whole atmosphere becomes no more enjoyable, but leaves you irritated. 

I think the only reason the orchestra's do this is so that they can get away with any person pretending to be a singer - because at these levels the instruments shadow completely the human voice.  In my mariage (2001), we were lucky to have one of the popular carnatic singers Mrs.Nithyashree singing - and we enjoy hearing the CD even today. I am not saying everyone should have only classical music, but all I am saying is whatever music you have please have it set to low-medium decibel levels.

I get this question from our customers most of the time, on what should be the ideal time for a WebPage to load that consumers will be bear with and will not switch to an other site. It is not an easy question to answer, as each webpage (and its site) is different, offers varied functionalities, delivers wide range of contents and each sites objective is different. In my opinion only a Search Engine (like Google) can have the simplest (smallest) homepage as it just needs to have one TextBox and still do something useful. For all other sites it is a careful orchestration (and comprimises) between features exposed, richness, content & speed.

On this same topic I read in Business Line an interview "Trends in the making" with Chris Schoettle (EVP, Akamai Technologies) and he sa:

"End users today expect a page to load faster. Average user satisfaction for a page to download is now four seconds. If it takes longer than that, they will typically go to another site. People do not have the patience to wait for pages to load. A couple of years ago, it was seven seconds. And soon, it will be no more than three seconds"

At Vishwak, few months back we collected data on time taken for page load of Google and Yahoo! for academic interest. We did this from various Indian metros both with Dial-up connections and from browsing centres (Broadband).

Disclaimer: This study was done purely for academic interest and we don't guarantee accuracy nor we will be responsible for any consequences of usage of this data. Yahoo! and Google are trademarks of their respective companies.

One of the common things you want to do after you created all your content slides in a presentation is to put an Agenda slide or TOC (Table of Contents) slide. This was easy using the Summary Slide button in Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 as shown below. For reasons best known to Microsoft, this feature to have a summary slide automatically generated is not available in PowerPoint 2007. This MS Knowledge base article confirms this behaviour, and it suggests a tedious manual process of copyring each slide title and pasting it to create a summary slide

If anyone from Microsoft is listening here, please add this feature back. It will take hardly an hour to write a Macro that can achieve this..

Steps to do this in PowerPoint 2003:

• Click on View Menu
• Then on Slide Sorter
• Select the slides that you want in the TOC
• On the "slide sorter" toolbar, 3rd icon along is the "summary slide" clicking it will make a slide automatically

21st June is a special day for me - it is when Vishwak Solutions Pvt. Ltd was incorporated in 2001 and my Son was born in 2003.

This 21st June, I decided to go with my family to Sivaji "The boss", what a mistake - we should have celebrated the happy occassion in a much better fashion. The movie for me was a big dissapointment. BOSS for me implied "Blatant Omission of Story and Screenplay".

Since this movie has been commented to death, I will make this post ery brief. 1) The movie runs for too long (3 hours+), 2) I am not able to figure out how a software architect in USA working for 20 years can earn Rs.200 Crores and 3) Sankar has used the RobinHood theme to death.

Overall Rajini looks young in the movie; but Director Sankar's creativity seems to have aged and in coma!!!

Update 22/Jul/07: I came across this honest review of the movie which was different from every thing else around. Due to the hype created for movie (Hat's to AVM for a great marketing job) everyone seems to be acting like in Emperors New Clothes  when in public.

In Western countries this may not be a news item, but in a country like India where infrastructure works are known to take years due to Democratic party politics, Bureaucracy, Lack of planning, Corruption this is indeed news item worth being blogged. I was pleasantly surprised to hear this news. Last week in Srirangam (my mother's home town) Southern Railways have in 5 Hours (yes you read it correct) have completed a sewage work by removing and fixing the tracks. This rail line is a busy one and it was commendable they finished the work with minimum disruption to traffic.

"The work started at around 10 a.m. Around 150 labourers were engaged in the exercise. A total of 24 pre-cast concrete box segments, each weighing 18 metric tonnes, were placed one by one after removing the earth up to 3.8 m below the formation to a total length of about 40 metres"

Many times you have the need to access data (XML) from other sites than the current page, browser security settings prevent it as it could lead to Cross Site Security issues. I came across these two good references on solving this:

1. Yahoo! Developer Use a Web Proxy for Cross-Domain XMLHttpRequest Calls
2. Mash-it Up with ASP.NET AJAX: Using a proxy to access remote APIs

PCQuest Magazine in its June 2007 issue has listed 250 IT Implementation Projects in India. I am happy to say our Vishwak Portal Framework based solution we provided for Live Mint (Hindustan Times & WSJ Business paper) is featured as one of them. (Case study of LiveMint)

(Courtesy: PC Quest June 2007)

Also interesting is the article's observation that ASP.NET is the preferred platform of choice for Portals in India for its ease of use. Our VPF is based on ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005.

"Most of the portal solution projects that we received were developed using ASP.NET or VB .Net. We spoke to the project heads of these portals to find out why they chose this platform. The answer was simplicity. According to them, creating projects on ASP.NET is mush easier and requires less code to write"