Many times you might have got stuck not being able to open a Word/Excel/PowerPoint file because MS Office is not available in that machine. Though OpenOffice/Office Suites in Linux can open MS Office documents, it is doesn't work perfect with all documents.

Microsoft has for long provided for free, viewers for these formats. These viewers can be downloaded from Microsoft.com website and allows you to open, view and print the documents without requiring you to have full blown (paid) MS Office in the machine. The viewers now support the new Office 2007 formats as well, with the additional requirement being to download and install the Office 2007 Convertor as well.

Links to download:

• Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Viewer (Doesn't require the Convertor)
• Microsoft Word 2003 Viewer (Install after this MS Office 2007 Convertor)
• Microsoft Excel 2003 Viewer (Install after this MS Office 2007 Convertor)
• Microsoft Visio 2007 Viewer

Remember, to visit Microsoft Update and install the latest security fixes as well for the above software. The MS Office 2007 File Format Convertor can be installed in MS Office 2003/2000/XP/97 versions as well to open and save in the new formats.

June 2007 issue of IEEE Spectrum carried a comprehensive report on growth of Megacities. It talked about the pollution levels being highest in Karachi (Pakistan) followed by shamefully New Delhi (India), world urban population to constitute 60% of world population by 2030. London - New York has the highest international Internet Connection at around 387Gb/s.

The report also talks about Sao Paulo's complex bus system, building a green city in China, Unseen City below New York in the Subways, Earthquake warnings in Japan & Tata Power in Mumbai.

I realized so much we don't know about our cities.

This post is more of my thinking than a finite point on the present world economic achievements.

If you stop and think about what has been achieved in the last 10-15 years in Economy and Wealth Creation, it is amazing on any parameter you take. Whether it is China with a Trillion Dollar Foreign Exchange reserve, World's large corporation Market Cap (Google, Citi, WalMart) of each over several hundred Billion Dollars, Governments Trade Surpluses, Indian Government Direct Taxes Growth of over 60%, Worldwide sustained economic growth for last 5 years even though Oil is selling at record high of $70+ per barrel - on any account what has been achieved now is unprecedented in the modern history.   

There are several complex happenings that have enabled this including Globalization. Being an Engineer and Software person, I would like to think it is because of Computers and Internet revolution (When I say Computers I do include Mobile Phones as well). Think about any task in modern research/science, business, life, medicine, banking/finance - there is no task that is not influenced by Computers and Internet. 

It can range:

• From preparing a thesis for a PhD, where you can research papers from around the world (which would have been impossible to do  2 decades back at this cost and time)  and hence stand on other giants shoulders
• Exchange real-time data and do complex calculations for fundamental research including DNA analysis
• Access to best written courseware and training materials used for Education
• Access to world wide economic trends
• Learning from Management best practices and mistakes from around the world

and so on... In all these (and you can add hundreds of more items) Computers and Internet have touched and improved productivity at every facet of our present day life.

Do you have a say on this, leave your comments.

Being a Sunday I took my son to see the normally huge Ganesha that will be kept near JYM Mandapam in T.Nagar for Vinayaga Chathurti (Yesterday). Unfortunately this year they don't have one huge idol, but many smaller Ganesha's. Not wanting to disappoint my son, I took him next to the display at "Sri Krishna Sweets" shop in Pondy Bazaar, where 2500 Vinayaka Idols are kept. I was told these are from the personal collections of the Proprietor of the sweet stall.

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.