At Vishwak, we value the openness of WWW and importance of standards for our business; so we are members with W3C. Representing Vishwak, I am a member in the Advisory council in W3C. Yesterday, while browsing my profiles page in W3C site I came across two interesting items.

ForgeProofing: SPAM in email is a huge problem nowadays and this becomes worse if you are in a email group. W3C has added few interesting filters to prevent EMail Forgery. The way it works is by examining whether mail claiming to be sent from an email address matches a pattern that you have specified. If so, it is allowed through. If not, it is assumed to be a forgery and is rejected by our mail hubs. For example: Identify a pattern in the "From:" line of mail that you send. For example, suppose the From: line in email you send includes your full name and your email address. Or it can be a pattern identifying your email client software, indicated in the User-Agent Header. Though these techniques are not fool-proof they can certainly limit casual spammers.

FOAF: The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is about creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do. In short, FOAF is about your place in the Web. FOAF is a simple technology that makes it easier to share and use information about people and their activities (eg. photos, calendars, weblogs), to transfer information between Web sites, and to automatically extend, merge and re-use it online. You can access my FOAF here (it is a machine readable XML file).

I was part of history yesterday (at least let me feel it that way), watching among millions through TV of course the first ever Twenty20 match played by India. This was the 10th International Twenty20 match. Having watched a cricket match after few years, I feel the 20:20 format has great potential and in all likelihood become mainstream cricket just the way One-Day did for Test matches. The four hours (half-a-day) is very convenient for audience to enjoy a good cricket match and sight-seeing all within a day.

In yesterday's match (India vs Pakistan) it was good cricket with typical swings of a India-Pakistan match till the last ball. I really enjoyed watching the bowl-out which decided who got the 2 points with each side nominating 5 bowlers who bowled one ball each. Of course, the way Indians played left much to be desired!. One thing was obvious, though Indians may not be the champions in the game - Indian businesses (sponsors) are clearly who are paying for the tournament.  

Regular readers who waste time reading this blog know that I have a 4 year son and I buy lot of DVDs (CDs) for him. We try and restrict his TV viewing to an hour or two per day, not easy many times and requires all tricks of parenting.

Few months back I bought from Amazon (USA) a series of DVDs titled "Max and Ruby". This series has appropriate content for kindergartners, the main characters are two rabbits (Max the boy and Ruby his elder sister). Max is a usual next door mischievous boy and Ruby tries to teach Max lot of basic etiquettes and behavior on daily settings. My son loves the series and it reduces his time watching Chutty TV (Sun TV's Kids channel, which most of the time has content not for his age).

OK, let me come back to why I started this post. These original DVDs that I bought should be ideally commercials free, at least  not disturb me before the main story. The DVDs start with half-a-dozen commercials promoting other products from the same company (Nick Jr), which I will have to keep skipping it till the main story starts. With some other similar Kids DVDs they start with promotions for movies which are not appropriate for kindergartners. When the content producers and Hollywood keep complaining about piracy, they should understand to respect the wishes of a paid user. 

Do you feel the same way? 

If you are a web developer you might be familiar with the great free tool - Firebug. Firebug is an add-on for Mozilla Firefox that allows you to easily inspect the HTML DOM/CSS for a page, edit them inplace and many other useful tricks. Recently I came across another useful tool YSlow -which is an addon to Firebug. YSlow is from Yahoo! which analyzes web pages and tells you why they're slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. Check them out!

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.