தமிழில் வெளிவந்த நகைச்சுவை நாடங்களில் மிகவும் பிரபலமாக கருதப்படுவது அய்யா... அம்மா... அம்மம்மா...

என் சிறு வயதில் சென்னை தொலைக்காட்சியில் முதல் தடவையாக பார்த்ததில் இருந்து என்னை மிகவும் கவார்ந்த மற்றும் ஒலிநாடாவில் (Audio Cassette) பலப்பல முறை நான் கேட்ட நாடங்கமும் இது தான். ‘கிரேசி’ மோகன் எழுதி காத்தாடி ராமமூர்த்தி நடித்த இந்த நாடங்கம், இதற்குப்பின் தமிழில் வெளிவந்த அனைத்து நகைச்சுவைப் படைப்புகளிலும் (சினிமா, நாடகம், கதை) தனது தாக்கத்தை பதித்துள்ளது. பிற்காலத்தில் ‘கிரேசி’ மோகன் எழுதிய பல பிரபலமாக நாடங்களில் அவரையும் அறியாமல் சிலயிடங்களில் இதன் துனுக்குகளை நாம் கேட்கலாம்.

ஒலிநாடாவில் மட்டுமே வெளிவந்த இந்த படைப்பு இப்பொழுது ஓளிதட்டு (VCD) வடிவில் வந்துள்ளது. போன வாரம் Landmark கடையில் பார்த்தவுடன் இதை வாங்கியதில் (ரூ 199) எனக்கு மகிழ்ச்சி. ஒரு சிறு ஏமாற்றம் இது சென்னை தொலைக்காட்சியில் வெளிவந்த காத்தாடி ராமமூர்த்தியுடன் டெல்லி கணேஷ் மற்றும் பலர் நடித்த மூலப்பிரதி அல்ல சமீபத்தில் பதிவு செய்யப்பட்டது,  

இருந்தாலும் இந்த நாடங்கத்தை இதுவரைப் பார்க்காதவார்கள் உடனே இந்த ஓளிதட்டை வாங்கிப் பார்க்கலாம்.

The other day I was in Landmark (Nungambakkam High Road Branch) and saw the largest collection of Original Tamil DVDs and VCDs from Moserbaer and other manufacturers. It was several hundreds of movies spanning last several decades of Tamil movie including those released in last few years. Before this the largest such collection of original Tamil movies I have seen only in Singapore Serangoon Road (where VCDs are priced at SGD 10 and DVDs at SGD 20). In Landmark that day for instance I bought காக்க காக்க DVD at Rs.49 and வீரா, குரு சிஷ்யன் DVD combo at Rs.65.

After several decades, Tamil Film Producers & copyright owners seems to have come to their senses. Instead of fighting piracy they seem to have realized making their recent and old assets widely available as Discs in affordable rates will bring a new revenue stream for them. Just like T-Series in early 80's brought out affordable Cassettes and pioneered in India the original music market, Moser Baer seems to have now done the trick for VCDs and DVDs by bringing out original discs at Rs.39 and Rs.49/-

Ten days back when I reached Singapore from Los Angeles by Singapore Airlines (my favourite next to Jet Airways) I realized my checked-in bags haven't reached Singapore. I had through checked in the bags with United from Seattle, and though in LA there was over 3 hours time before the Singapore flight the bags didn't make it. It was not only my bags, but that of 10-12 other passengers. The saving grace was when I went to the Lost and Found counter of Singapore Airlines (SG), they already had a printout ready with information tracing my bag, where it was and when it will come to Singapore. So the bag technically didn't go missing, but didn't make it in the flight I came.

SG teller at the Lost and Found, gave me a printout acknowledging the incident, SG$120 to cover one day of my incidentals, a toiletry bag with a spare T-shirt all without asking - the way it should be done. I was promised the bags will be coming in the next flight from LA, they will call and leave the bags with my hotel; and the next day morning when I get up the bags will be in my hotel. So it was there next day. I really felt I was handled with respect, professionalism and the incident was resolved quick and well by Singapore Airlines.

Windows Live Search seems to have introduced a video search recently. When I searched "Vishwak" the results page impressed me - you can mouse over on a result image and see the video playing in place with audio. Surprisingly it included results from Google's YouTube as well and playing it in a Live branded page.

This is yet another post on Chennai's traffic. Traffic in T.Nagar area is becoming worst day by day due to the bridge constructions.

Every month TiE Chennai conducts their monthly events at 7PM mostly at Hotel RainTree, St.Mary's Road. I don't attend every month, but whenever I attend I get stuck bad in traffic and go late. I leave my office (Habibullah Road, T.Nagar) around 6:15PM and reach the venue around 7:15PM or so, though the actual journey shouldn't take you more than 15 minutes. I have tried all the different (so called side roads) routes but of no use, either I get stuck at Pondy Bazaar/Mount Road junction or at Vijayaraghava Road/Mount Road junction and so on.

Today I decided to brave it out. I left office at 6:30PM, went through Panagal Park, Venkatanarayana Road, Nandanam Signal and believe it or not, I reached the venue at 6:50PM. And this at the peak time driving through two of the Chennai's renowned traffic choke points. I am now more than ever confused on the routes that take less time in Chennai.

Being in the IT Industry you can feel the energy of growth, innovation and excitement that's in India now. You can relate the present scene to the one that was there a decade back when IT professionals were rushing to United States and India suffered a brain drain (as it used to be called). Now the scene is completely the reverse where you are seeing many of those professionals returning back to India. They have had time to enjoy the western lifestyle, save some money and return back to India which was unheard of few years back. I personally know few of my friends at least who have returned from their high-paying/senior profile jobs in companies like Siebel, Microsoft, etc. in the last few years to India. In this connection I saw this Video in Hindustantimes that quantifies this to be about 60,000 Indian IT professionals who have moved back to India in last few years.

Moreover, nowadays people in the mid to senior roles don't want to leave their family behind and want to go to USA - they are getting salaries in India itself that are attractive and comparable.

I came across these two references today.

One was Web Browser Standards Summary that summarizes the level of support for web standards and maturing technologies in popular web browsers. It covers the Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera web browsers, with focus on the HTML, CSS, DOM, and ECMAScript technologies.

Second one is the Audio interview with Chris Wilson, the Platform Architect for Internet Explorer at Microsoft. "Chris has been building web browsers for as long as there have been web browsers, and it was a pleasure to sit down with him at the end of the final day of the conference. In his talk at the conference, Moving the Web Forward, Chris gave the audience a glimpse into the realities of developing the most popular web browser in the world. With over 500,000,000 users to answer to, the words Don’t break the Web have become an overriding mantra for the company in its work to develop the next version of Internet Explorer (currently known as IE.Next)".

How times have changed?

When I was in school, we had this orange cool drink called "Gold Spot" that was hugely popular. They had a campaign at that time - to collect the stickers inside the crown of each bottle, stick it in an album and exchange them for gifts. The gift I was eagerly collecting the stickers for months was a full colour book of Walt Disney's Jungle Book. Remember at those days we had no CD/DVD and books were fancied items that had mystical powers to tell you a story, transport you to a new world. And the world I wanted to be in (just like every other kid around me) was to the wonderful jungle world of Mowgli.

Unlike today's kids I was not given any pocket money, for that matter I was hardly allowed to handle currencies till I was grown up. So there is no way I could drink those many Gold Spots to collect the stickers needed that would have got me the book. So whenever I got a chance (which is not so often) I drank a Gold Spot - I did this months but I could hardly collect more than few. That's when I sought out the help of a local Pan shop vendor who gave me permission to collect thrown-away crowns in his road-side shop. Living in Ranganathan Street, T.Nagar had advantages like you being known to every shop keeper in the bazaar. Then one day my mother came to know that I was scavenging (can this be called scavenging, I was on a mission) and I was warned severely not to go to the shop and my cousin warned the shop keeper not to let me near the shop anymore. With this supply cut-off, I was deeply disappointed. Then thanks to my maternal uncle Nandakumar who knew someone in Goldspot office, who got me the book directly. Though it removed the fun associated with collected the crowns and exchanging it with friends, I was delighted that I got the book.

OK, why I am going in this nostalgic journey now?. Recently when I was in Canada I purchased the Platinum Edition of Jungle Book (DVD) for $23 for my son and that's when I remembered these childhood memories. Just now I told the story and played the DVD to my son who is enjoying the fun. Coming to think of it, what a timeless piece of work Walt Disney has created. His work captivated me 25 years back, today it is being enjoyed by my son and I am sure it will be magical for future generations as well. Interestingly I noticed it in shops today that the DVD is available for Rs.600 ($15) in Chennai itself, I needn't have bought it abroad.

I am not the only one who is nostalgic about Jungle book and Goldspot, when I googled I saw many other posts who feel the same (one more). Finally my son today didn't scavenge, he didn't even ask for it, yet he got the DVD on his bedroom. That's why I started by saying - Times have changed.

I have started on a journey to centralize all my digital assets in a central computer (a.k.a server) in my house. The server will have all my digital photographs, music & video. The easiest of the three is to move my photos from my desktop to this server. Current plan is to stream audio to the music systems in the house, use XBox 360 Media Extender to stream video (DVDs) to the TVs in the house. I am considering using Windows Home Server for the central server. Though I planned it long time back only today I am finally started it, will keep you posted on how it goes.

The time consuming and manual process is to convert all my old audio cassettes into Audio files (MP3, WMA) and to convert all the DVD/CD into Video files (WMV, MPEG-4). This is the reason I was lazy to actually kick start the process. 

In this effort to have a fully digital archive, I bought Slim devices Squeezebox from Amazon to stream audio to music systems few months back. Only today I focussed and got it working. The device was extremely easy to configure both Wired and Wireless. The tough part was getting the SlimServer installed in the Windows PC and have the firewall opened correctly. These two articles were very useful: How to setup in Vista & Firewall Settings in Window. When I finally got the device working, I was surprised to see it showing Tamil (Unicode) characters. It didn't come correctly (as I guess it doesn't have full Indic Rendering support) but it showed Tamil Glyphs and we could guess the rest.

Microsoft announced recently a new Sync Framework. This is a CTP release that is targeted for release in Q2 2008 and it supports P2P and Online/Offline synchronization of data. Currently though customers require Outlook like Offline/Online Sync scenario, it means developers doing custom coding. The Sync Framework is claimed to support P2P sync of any type of file including contacts, music, videos, images and settings. And has built-in support for synchronizing relational databases, NTFS/FAT file systems, Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS/ATOM, devices and web services.

I welcome having a standard framework for doing this repetitive job, it also removes the complexity of handling multiple connection types, scenarios, fail over, retry, etc. Download CTP from here.

Today I saw in The Hindu/Business Line newspaper an advertisement from Emirates Airlines about their new route from India to Toronto. It talked about Toronto having the world's longest Road - Yonge Street at 1900Kms. I was surprised on this for two reasons - 1) I thought the longest road will be in Russia just like the longest train track which is the Trans-Sibera rail which runs for 10,000Kms, 2) How come a city have 1900kms of one road, no city can have a diameter of more than a hundred kilometres, so this road had to be running across the country and I thought the longest road will be US I101 which runs from Canada to Mexico - some of the stretches of this which I have been to in San Diego county happen to be beautiful pacific coastline drives.   

When I searched in Wikipedia I learned that Yonge street was called as the longest road way back in 1998 when people wrongly attributed it to be the same as Highway 11. Currently as per Guiness Book of Records the world longest road is Pan-America Highway. Pan-Am Hwy is a network of roads nearly 48,000 kilometres in total length. Except for an 87 kilometre rainforest gap, the road links 15 countries in mainland of South and North Americas.

WOW, writing the above headline made me wonder how far software has come from the time you bought it from guys with coat and suit, to online, to free and now to rental. And what better product to signify this, other than MS Office.

I read in news that Microsoft India has announced MS Office 2007 in Prepaid model - which for me essentially resembles a rental/subscription model, as software always has been prepaid in the true sense. May be MS didn't want to use either subscription or rental words, they probably want to embrace, extend and change the game. Whatever said this is certainly a welcome move especially for a country with low income like India, where MS Office at say Rs.15,000 can be about 50% of a PC price.

The price of Rs.1499 for 6 month usage is affordable, but each extension there after at Rs.1299 for 3 months somehow looks exorbitant. Hopefully they are testing the waters on the pricing and will come to their senses. Ideally for bottom of the pyramid (for whom this is targeted) I will love to see a price of in the range of Rs.100 to 200 per month (in the same range as your cable TV fee per month) and it should include license for usage of Windows OS as well.