Nowadays I access my mailbox in Hotmail mostly through Windows Live Mail client. So I didn't notice the increase in storage until I saw this post. All Hotmail users are supposed to have got their mailboxes upgraded to 5GB of space and Hotmail Plus (paid) users like me get 10GB of space. I thought 2GB in GMail was lot of space, now what do I do with 10GB?. Will GMail now give 100GB or like Rediff/IndiaTimes offer unlimited storage, let us wait and see.

Thanks to flyover (bridge) constructions in T.Nagar and Kodambakkam, the roads here look barren now. The few roads in Chennai that had trees for over half-a-century included North Usman Road and G.N.Chetty Road. Sadly all of those trees have been cut down by Corporation in the last few weeks. While driving I noticed the diameter of the trunk of some of the fallen trees, they should be more than 5 to 6 feet each. I was feeling sad to see them vanish. Isn't any way to save them and still construct flyovers? 

One of the best way to keep in touch with the hundreds of technologies from Microsoft is to read the monthly MSDN Magazine. I have been a reader for more than a decade even when it was called MSJ. To get it in India it meant you paid prohibitive price for shipping, now all that is past.

You can now subscribe to the digital editions of MSDN Magazine and Dr. Dobbs Journal for FREE!. Please click here to subscribe. Go to here to see samples of the digital magazines.

In the 90's Microsoft was felt closed and distanced from customers, but in the last few years the company has become very transparent. This was through active blogging from thousands of softies - senior level to engineers; community engagements; product roadmap shared early and regular CTPs (Community Technology Preview) of all major releases including Visual Studio, Silverlight, SQL Server and more. I believe no other large software company (even the OSS) has been so transparent in the last few years.

In this article of PC World, the author argues that Apple is the new bully on the block, using strong arm tactics with partners. Do you agree, post your comments below.

Many times we find Google able to give appropriate answers when you are looking for something, especially with their built in calculator/formulae/conversion and other tools integrated in search. Today I wanted to know when was Deepavali (note the Tamil word I am using here instead of Hindi Diwali) this year. Without thinking much, I typed in IE 7 Search Box Deepavali 2007 and to my surprise I got the correct answer from Live Search. Check out the screen shot below. Google didn't understand what I wanted and gave me usual web links as results

Interestingly, Live Search seemed to know about most of the Indian Festivals including Pongal, Holi and others.  Impressive stuff by Microsoft, please keep it up.

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.