It was exciting to see the Indian economy growing closer to becoming a mature economy. My random thoughts below on the subject as a novice.

You should give credit to the brothers (Mukesh and Anil) because in the last 2 years after their split-up it is amazing the amount of wealth they have created for themselves and their shareholders. The overall market capitalization of Reliance Industries and ADAG after the split-up is multiple times of the value when they were as one single unit. So it is not surprising if you are wondering like me whether the whole story of differences between the brothers and the split-up episode was orchestrated. Anyway it is, the split-up seems to be only for the good and has made all the stakeholders more wealthier and happier.

Today Reliance Power announced their IPO which they are claiming on TV to be India's largest public offering. The IPO opens on January 15 and closes on January 18 in the price band of Rs.405-450/share. They have announced incentive for individual investors by the flexibility to pay say Rs.110 or so while applying and the balance within 21 days from the date of allotment and a 5% discount. You can read the full news here.

Having bought the DVD several months back, I managed to watch the movie "Guru" staring Abhishek Bachchan yesterday. The story was widely rumoured to be based on Reliance Dhirubhai Ambani's life. Abhishek definitely has done a superb performance in the movie coming as the ambitious businessman. Though Aishwarya Rai comes throughout the movie, she has very little role and leaves no impact.

The first half of the movie, where Gurukant Desai raises to fame fast was well taken, but the second half resembles more a routine Hindi Movie with a fight (not physical) and the Hero winning at the end. Overall, if you remove the Reliance Ambani connection from your mind, this is a very ordinary movie - Director Mani Rathnam could have done better.

During my christmas vacation now, I just finished reading the book "Five Point Someone" by Chetan Bhagat. Few months back I read the author's (Bhagat) second book "One night@the call centre" and was interested to read his first book "Five Point Someone".

The book is a story on life in IIT campus and what not to do at IIT. Though the story is somewhat usual, the author has a fantastic way of narrating it in first person. Certainly a good read to pass time.

Microsoft recently announced their new virtualization technology  "Hyper-V" (codename Viridian) as part of Windows Server 2008 that will replace Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. I wanted to understand the differences between the two virtualization products and how to use Hyper-V. In my search, I came up with the following list of references and understandings.

Rough Technology differences between Hyper-V and earlier products:
One way to think about these new chip technologies is that they introduce a “-1” ring essentially to the usual four rings in the x86 CPU architecture. With the VPC and Virtual Server offerings, they use a trick called ring compression where the kernel of the VM is placed into Ring 1, instead of the expected Ring 0. This is so that the host can absolutely ensure that VMs are running in their own sandbox and can’t gain access to any resources of the host or other VMs. There is something like 14-17 CPU instructions in the x86 instruction set that can’t be executed directly because of sandbox violation. Hence, the need to place the child VM’s kernel into Ring 1 so that the host can place itself in Ring 0 to intercept those calls to protect them directly or to emulate them. By introducing a “-1” ring, the hypervisor lives here and controls the access to the various virtual machines. So, with the introduction of a hypervisor living in ring -1, the need for ring compression of child VMs is essentially removed. At least, this is one way to think about. They hypervisor itself is not a complete OS, per se. The hypervisor is a VERY thin and small, trusted computing base.

Technical References:

• Hyper-V Architecture, API overview from Wikipedia
• Windows Server Virtualization (WSV/Hyper-V) Preview
  
• Hyper-V Documentation from MSDN
• Install Hyper-V Beta
• Step by Step document on Hyper-V
• Installing Windows Server 2008 on Hyper-V
  

VM Additions for Linux

Earlier Microsoft Virtual PC and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 didn't have VM Additions for Linux, recently Microsoft released fully supported VM Additions for Linux (Download from here).

Though Microsoft Silverlight is a cool technology, it pales in front of Adobe Flash (98% of browsers have it) in terms of availability. It is not an unique MS problem, it is a problem for any new offering when there is an incumbent who has a majority market share. To change this requires education, awareness creation and put it in front of users at many as possible in exchange for an added value to them. I was pleased to see Microsoft doing some steps in this direction (unlike their pathetically nil action to have .NET Framework Runtime in desktops widespread in its earlier days) by having a beta of Silverlight enhanced downloads when people come to MS Download Center site. 

நேற்று பக்ரித் - அலுவலகம் விடுமுறை.  இரண்டு நாட்களுக்கு முன்பே இணையத்தில் பார்த்ததில் பிர்லா மற்றும் அழகிய தமிழ்மகன் போன்ற ஏந்த படத்திற்கும்  இடம் கிடைக்காதால்,  "கண்ணாமூச்சி ஏனடா" படத்திற்கு முன்பதிவு செய்து நேற்று போனோம்.

படத்தில் கதை என்று எதுவும் இல்லை. அடிதடி, கொலை, கவர்ச்சி என்று எல்லா மசாலா சமாசாரங்களைத் தவிர்த்து குடும்பத்தோடு பார்க்க கூடிய ஓரு  முழுநீள நகைச்சுவை படத்தை கொடுத்துள்ளார் இயக்குனர் பிரியா.  படத்தில் பெரியாதாக பேசும்படி எதுவும் இல்லையென்றாலும் படத்தைப் பார்க்காலம்.        

Yesterday I attended a Balanced Scorecard session organized by SPIN Chennai and the speaker was Mr.SUDIPTO MARJIT (Practice Head of QAI Limited).  Before the session my exposure to Balanced Scorecard was limited (or lower), but Mr.Marjit did an excellent job in giving an overview within the 60-75 minutes he had that at the end I felt I know a lot on the topic. Though this is a theoretical topic he made it very lively with his engaging style, with every sentence he spoke we could easily sense his passion for the topic and experiences he has had on ground.

He introduced the need for having something like Balanced Scorecard before going into the actual topic. This approach helped in appreciating this concept better. "Balanced Scorecard, is a world-renowned management technique for implementing strategy and creating a performance management system. Designed by Drs. Robert Kaplan and David Norton, it has been recognized by the HBR as the leading management tool in the last 75 years"

Two key Areas that Mr.Marjit concentrated on the talk were

• Balanced Scorecard methodology and understanding of a Strategy Focused Organization
• Aligning Strategy through Strategy Maps

I really liked his example of SouthWest Airlines using a strategy map.

Over the years I have tried with little success various models of Wireless input devices (Keyboard and Mouse), right from the early Logitech desktop sets. I see only one advantage of a wireless over the wired models is the convenience of giving it to the person on the other side of the table for a quick demo. Most of the wireless models anyway have wires for their base station and you need to keep the base station almost touching the keyboard for any good signal reception.

I am particular about ergonomics and I prefer keyboards that have a natural curve for hand comfort with a good play of the keyboard buttons as I type pretty fast. So when I saw the new "Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Desktop 7000" few months back it seemed to fit my bill - came with a small USB Dongle as a base station and had ergonomic styling. I got the desktop set few weeks back and been using it, but I found the keyboard to be unresponsive most of the times. I was using the native drivers that came with Vista x64 and didn't install the CD that came with the desktop set. As a try, I downloaded and installed the OEM drivers and software from Microsoft site and now it seems to be working perfectly well. The software also gives you additional tabs with customization features in the control panel applets. Download drivers for Windows Vista x64 from here.

One thing I keep wondering, why are the names for products from Microsoft always too long and confusing. Look at the names below, I guess only Microsoft marketing can come up with such creative inspiring names

• Microsoft Natural Wireless Ergonomic Keyboard 7000 (Natural Wireless - hmm, I didn't know all the other wireless technologies we used were all artificial)
• Microsoft Natural Wireless Laser Mouse 7000 (the keyboard was Wireless Ergonomic, but the mouse is Wireless laser - does this mean the mouse is not ergonomic but only laser?)