Many times I am asked on how to enable Tamil Unicode support (both display and Keyboard) in many Operating Systems. I have written posts on how to do with Windows, but today I found this well written article from Wikipedia that gives step by step instructions. The article includes steps for most Operating Systems including Windows, Mac and many variants of Linux and applications.

Thanks to Scott Hanselman (my fellow RD) for this post where he had pointed to a four part series by Microsoft's Michael Kaplan on this topic. MichKa's post talks in detail with sample code on how you can embed fonts in a Windows Forms Application and have it run in any target machine where that font is not available & doesn't get installed permanently. Please note that I am talking about Windows Client Applications here and not a Web Application where you can use WEFT (Microsoft's IE only option for embedded font) or sIFR (Flash based technique) to embed fonts. 

I found the part of creating a font from a file, loading and using dynamically very interesting. It opens interesting possibilities especially for Indic Language applications.

I have been reading this book on and off for last few weeks, finally finishing the last 100 pages yesterday night.

The book was "The Long Tail" by Chris Anderson (Editor Wired Magazine). The book talks in detail how the Long Tail of endless choices is reshaping the world economics by creating unlimited demand.  It talks about how the Digital World like Amazon, eBay, Rhapsody, iTunes and others are changing the fundamentals on Music and online industry - they have Zero cost of holding inventory which allows them to carry unlimited choices. So customers now have a choice to get music hitherto they could not have found in a mainstream store. It adds how consumers are now becoming Tastemakers and Buyers snatching the power of selection from Magazine Editors and Walmart Buyers.

The book closes with talking about 3 types of hits:

1) Type 1: Authentic Top Down hits: These are like your World Cup and Olympics

2) Type 2: Synthetic Top Down hits: These are lame products that are marketed and hence created to be hits

3) Type 3: Bottom-Up Hits: These rise on word of mouth and community support

Out of this, Type 1 will continue to do well. Type 3 will do even better, but it is Type 2 that will suffer.

Overall, I enjoyed reading the book and will recommend it for anyone connected with Online Industry and with Retail/Consumers. I just wish Chris Anderson using 50% less of 230 pages he currently used to talk the same concept repeatedly at many places in the book.

While development and testing many times we need to change the IP addresses manually to a given IP and then switch back to Dynamic IP (DHCP). Doing it everytime through GUI especially in Vista (finding the Network Option from Start, Right Click, Selecting Network Connections, then Right Click on the Interface, Choose IPV4, ...) is tiresome and waste of time.

For doing it easily Windows exposes a great command called NETSH. NETSH exposes too many options, the help (/?) and online documentation runs for several pages. Because of this, everytime I tried I was put off. Today I spent last 5 minutes and cracked this. For changing IP address, we need to use the NETSH INTERFACE IP command.

To display current IP settings (equivalent to your ipconfig command):

C:\>netsh interface ip show addresses

Configuration for interface "Local Area Connection"
    DHCP enabled:                       No
    IP Address:                           10.10.99.222
    Subnet Prefix:                       10.10.0.0/16 (mask 255.255.0.0)
    Default Gateway:                   10.10.10.11
    Gateway Metric:                    256
    InterfaceMetric:                     20

To change your IP Settings to DHCP:

C:\>netsh interface ip set address name="Local Area Connection" source=dhcp

To set IP to a manual config (replace with your own values):

C:\> netsh interface ip set address "Local Area connection" static 10.10.9.22 255.0.0.0 10.10.10.111 1

Here after static command, the first value is your IP Address, second is NetMask, third is Gateway and fourth is metric.

Similar to set address command in netsh interface ip there is set DNS command that can set the DNS values as well. If you put the above in a batch (.bat) file then you can just double-click on it everytime you want the IP config to be changed.

This week I got my System's team at Work to assemble a super fast PC for me. The Monster PC is loaded with:

• Intel Core 2 Quad Core Q6600 @2.40 GHz Processor
• ASUS P5w64WS Professional Mother Board
• 8GB RAM - Transcend 2GB DDR2 RAM x 4
• NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 1GB PCI Express Card
• Western Digital 150GB 10000 RPM SATA Hard disk for OS
• Seagate 320GB 7200 RPM SATA Hard disk x 2 in Hardware Mirror/RAID 1 Config for Data
• ASUS 18x SATA DVD Combo
• Sony 18x SATA DVD Combo
• Sony Internal Memory card reader

The machine scored a very impressive Windows Experience Index of 5.5. According to Microsoft Website the maximum score now for a Vista PC is 5.9 and this machine scores for most of the items 5.9 and only for RAM 5.5. I am pretty pleased!

10/Sep/2007: I got myself pampered by adding to this machine, two wide 22" LCD monitors (ViewSonic Vx2235w). Each display does a resolution of 1680 x 1050 and I am loving the wide extended desktop.

In India we often observe Mediocrity everywhere. It is deep rooted, right from Office Assistants to Politicians. Other than in Education, we are often satisfied with Average performance. That's why we still hear grandfather's talking of how things were punctual and better under British rule 60 years back - how Trains ran on time, etc. I was reminded of this topic today when I read this article in LiveMint that has brought made this observation nicely.

I am optimist and I certainly see things improving, especially with globalization and more awareness to world wide events.

I am not much into listening to music on the move. Most of the audio I listen happens in my car, office room or in my home office. So I use my Zune most of the time to show the pictures in the Living room TV to my parents using the Zune A/V cables. I tried to put Zune to better use by connecting it to a Car Kit and tune into FM from the Car stereo, but the reception was very bad. Lastly I thought the best use of Zune will be to listen to songs in my home office and retire my conventional CD/Cassette player.

So recently I got from Amazon - the Altec Lansing speaker set for Zune which includes an automatic charger for Zune. I am impressed with the voice quality and the remote is convenient too. I recommend this speakers if you have a Zune, unfortunately no Bose Speakers are yet out for Zune, but I am not missing it.

I am unashamed to say I am a fan of Nokia phones, especially the communicator series. For last 18 months I have been using Nokia 9300 which is  a fantastic phone. In between briefly I used Nokia Communicator 9500, when my 9300 was taken by our mobile team for testing. Both 9300 and 9500 (which is heavy) are great phones and if you are used to them its very difficult to move to another phone.

My experience with Windows Mobiles have not been pleasant (read this earlier post on Benq P50) so I am skeptical about buying one. Anyways, both my 9300, 9500 were taken away from me for testing, so I was left shopping for a new phone. I was tempted by Nokia E90 Communicator & E62 but I wanted to give Windows Mobile another chance. So hesitatingly for last few weeks I was using Dopod (HTC S620) borrowed from Vishwak's Mobile test lab. Being a Nokia user, I did encounter some nuisances with Windows Mobiles, but overall I got hooked to this phone. This is the first Windows Mobile that I had used which has a good battery life of few days without charge. Most items about the S620 phone were good - it was sleek and light, but it was difficult holding it during long calls and I don't like using Bluetooth headsets. Its keys were too small for my big fingers. So I wanted a clone of S620 but in smaller form factor convenient for single hand use. I am not a fan of PocketPC form factor, so I was not attracted to the new HTC Touch. So when it was time today to buy a new phone, I went with HTC's new SmartPhone - HTC S710. This runs Windows Mobile 6.0, Camera/Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, mainly no stylus and a good spaced QWERTY keyboard that pops out when needed.

Chennai (my city) proudly celebrates its 368th Birthday today. It was on this day on 1639, a British East India Company officer bought a strip of land and the city was born. I am proud to be a Chennaite - Happy Birthday Chennai!

One of my good friends is a doctor. Few years back when we were chatting he was talking about how Opposing Fingers (a.k.a Thumb) are very important to us humans. He went on to give a lecture on how Thumb as the only finger opposing the other 4 fingers helped apes/human ancestors in using Tools for hunting and eventually to invent Fire/Wheel, etc. I hardly gave this any thought, until few days back. Reason?.

An Infection few days back in my right hand thumb possibly through a cut or piercing I am not sure how. My thumb is swollen and entire right hand is numb and painful. My Doctor has assured I should be fine in next few days, but till then it is painful. This episode made me remember my friends comment and what little I can do with my right hand without using my thumb. For example, I can drive my car with my left hand, but how do I turn the ignition key without using Right Thumb?.

Uninteresting update (22/Aug/2007): After 3 painful surgeries to cut the infection(s), drain the puss and several tiring dressings - my thumb is healing. It should take another week or so for the thumb to be fully functional.

When you thought most of the basic innovations are done in the web search (at least to what is searchable on the WWW) there comes a new feature from Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft. That is the power of competition.

Last month it was Microsoft's turn, where Windows Live Search team posted about the enhancements they have done in their image search. This one is interesting - it allows you to look into the photos and describe about the image inside. For example I can say, show me only Black and White Images (filter:bw) or only images with face closeups (filter:face).

Google too has these features, but I found the face filter to work well in the Windows Live Search.

In Web today there are plethora of Encoding used for Tamil including TAB/TAM (Tamilnadu Govt. standard), TSCII (popular 8bit), TUNE and more. For each of these sites you need to download and install respective fonts, definitely a pain. Recently I found this Firefox Addon that aims to solve this problem. After downloading and installing this addon "Adhiyan" - press Alt-2 (for TSCII), Alt-5 (for TAB) and it changes the text in the page to Unicode. So without installing the respective fonts, you can read all the text in Unicode. Since it finds and replaces characters in the webpage, not all pages come out correctly. But still a very handy utility.

TiE Chennai usually brings practitioners & champions of Entrepreneurship to speak about their story in its monthly sessions. Recently it brought out one such session (29/06/2007) by the 2003 women entrepreneur of the Year Ms. Hemu Ramaiah, CEO of Landmark.

Hemu Ramaiah, who needs little introduction, shared her truly inspirational entrepreneurial journey especially the challenges & triumphs in setting up one of the leading and famous bookstores in India - LANDMARK. I have recorded my notes taken during the session as a PDF document here (352.53 KB)