I was looking for long on how to enable Hibernation option in Vista, as the sleep doesn't work in my laptop all the time. After spending lot of time in navigating through the confusing menus of Vista and Windows Help, I turned to Google, got the answer in the second search link.

Here it is:

1. Click Start, All Programs, and then right click on "Command Prompt".
2. From the context menu click on "Run as administrator".
3. If User Account Control prompts you to allow the action, click on Continue.
4. In the command prompt window, type "powercfg –h on" (without the quotes).
5. Close the Command Prompt window.

Does a city need so many FM Radio Stations all playing the same music?. In Chennai there are currently 8 major FM Stations:

1. All Indian Radio Rainbow
2. Suryan FM (Sun TV Group)
3. Radio Mirchi (Times Group)
4. Big FM (ADAG Group)
5. Aahaa FM (Kumudam Group)
6. Radio One (Mid-Day)
7. Hello FM (Malaimalar Group)
8. Radio City

The license issued by government prohibits them (other than AIR) from broadcasting NEWS, but that doesn't mean they can't play different music. All the above 8 channels (again exception being AIR) play only latest Tamil Film Albums. Each of them have few slots for other types of music but even that is miniscule compared to their overall Tamil Film programming.

Though I don't listen to Hindi or Telugu film music, I am wondering who will cater to those diaspora living in Chennai or for that matter Tamilians who are interested in Hindi Music. All the channels are same, with similar sounding RJs blabbering, SMS Polls, talk shows, etc. in between the same music collections. Why is there no niche stations playing different genre of music - say one for old Tamil songs, Carnatic Music, Western classical, Hindustani, Hindi Film Music and the likes.

If you have an idea why this is not happening, I am interested in reading your comments.

I don't know whether any other country in the world (just kidding, it is not as if I am an expert on Budgets around the world just felt good saying it) has its budget strewn in such mystery and secrecy like the Indian Budget. In today's Globalized world the role of a central budget has diminished over the years which certainly is good. In my view a Central (a.k.a. Federal for those of you who are from USA) Budget should be more of a report card recording the performance of the government spend in the last 12 months and the outlook for next 12 months. The way Indian Budget has become over the years and is expected to function by common people, as the platform for all ministries and the entire governments policy announcements. This has made the Finance Ministry the nodal point and hence the single biggest bottleneck of every government departments functions. If you ask what is the alternative, it is to let each ministry on a regular basis announce its plan for next 12 months after consultation with respective industry bodies. This can be much like the way the commerce ministry does its EXIM policy but with more teeth and power to each ministry to do its job better than what it is today.

Anyway coming back to the topic, I read this good pictorial workflow of how the Indian Budget process happens in LiveMint. It has some surprises like the key people in budget preparation are locked in the basement of North Block for the last 7 days and the only people allowed to see from outside world is the Finance Minister!. Good Read.

After I moved to Windows Vista about a year back, I hardly had to worry about Firewall settings. Though initially I found the UI of Vista Firewall Settings different and a little hard to understand, I soon realized its power and flexibility. Most of the time I found the firewall in Vista to automatically configure itself for many of the applications I installed including Zune, Zune Network Sharing, XBOX Media Extender and others.

Last week I evaluated K7 Computing Total Internet Security and found it to be the most light-weight and fast in its class. Its Firewall interface was simple and effective with almost all the time it popped up a dialog (user configurable) for any new application so that I could set the access the way I wanted. Since I had no complaints with Vista Firewall, I decided to just go with K7 Antivirus (Rs.690) alone for my laptop. Compared to Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition I had before in my laptop on a Vista x84, I found K7 Antivirus to be less resource hungry and overall I found the machine to more snappier.

For my home PC, I went with Norton 360 (bought it locally in India from a dealer) after studying in their website how Symantec have slimmed the whole product in terms of resources. I installed it in Home Server (Windows XP 32bit with 500GB Mirrored HDD, 2GB RAM, AMD 64) and in my Home PC (Intel Quad Core 2.4Ghz, 8GB RAM, 160 GB, 500GB HDD, Dell 20" Monitor). I found NAV 360 to take very little resources and snappier. But I have been having trouble with its firewall to open ports for Zune Network Sharing and few other applications. I wished NAV 360 had a database of known applications and their firewall settings. I found the lack of an option to backup your firewall rules and restoring it a serious limitation. It didn't have a Zone preset as well - meaning for every rule you have to define your local subnet and range.

In the end, I will recommend Vista Out-of-box firewall plus either K7 Antivirus or Norton Antivirus 2008/NAV 360 AV Module alone.

The most common question I get about Tamil Unicode / Tamil IT is how do I input Tamil text in Windows?.  Over the years my answer has varied and if you ask others it certainly varies between individuals and their choices. There are plethora of choices now available:

1. My first in the list will be Murasu Anjal. If you are using Windows 2000 or older this is the best software out there. Rock Solid and supports multiple keyboard formats, has convertors for various encoding and the paid version ships with high-quality Tamil Fonts. Unfortunately my good friend Muthu Nedumaran hasn't updated Anjal for Windows Vista and x64 platform.
2. Inbuilt IME in Windows 2000, 2003, XP & Vista. The upside to this is that OS out of box solution and downside it supports only ISCII layout.
3. Microsoft's Indic IME 1 (v5.0) from BhashaIndia.com. The upside is that it supports multiple keyboard styles, downside it is buggy and not works in all software.
4. Keyman software and plug-ins for Tamil. The upside is that Keyman is a very popular IME framework that support hundreds of languages. Downside the plug-ins are made by individuals as voluntary effort and may not be without errors.
5. E-Kalappai - This is another variation of Keyman and is widely popular in blogosphere.
6. Azhagi - Works well, supports multiple keyboard formats. Unfortunately only the paid version supports input into Microsoft Office and other applications.
7. Finally, this is what I am using nowadays - NHM Writer. This software is from my another friend Badri Seshadri's publishing firm New Horizon Media. Thanks to NHM you have a free Tamil Keyboard Software (less than 1MB download) that works in Windows XP, 2003, Vista & Vista x64. It works across applications as it uses Windows Text Services Framework (TSF)

My earlier blog posts on related items:

• Enabling Tamil Inputs and Fonts
• Indic Languages in Microsoft Software
• Read multiple encoding Tamil pages in Firefox
• Indian Language Open type fonts

Nowadays, with the poor QoS of Telcos in India many users are forced to carry more than one phone. Some are doing it so that they can separate their personal and official calls. For me in all my years of having a mobile phone right from the first Motorola brick phone when a single call costed Rs.16 to now,  I never carried two mobiles at the same time. The first time I did that was this Tuesday when I travelled down to Delhi for a business meeting, and it turned to be a complete disaster. The idea of two connections (Vodafone & BSNL) was to tackle a problem I have been having in all Delhi trips in the last 12 months. Whenever I was in Delhi roaming from my Vodafone (Hutch) connection I couldn't dial a BSNL Landline (044) number, everything else works fine including CellOne numbers in Chennai.

After I landed in Delhi Airport I tried switching on one phone after other and both failed.

• First was my regular phone (HTC S710) which was continuously rebooting itself on the welcome screen with the only time it booted was when I removed the SIM card (so what good is a phone without a SIM card). 
• Second was Dopod 720W (a.k.a HTC S610) which showed up a dialog box saying something like "Repeated attempts to unlock failed, to ensure this was intended, Press A1B2C3". And as soon as I press the first key to do this, it popped up another dialog-box saying "Enter your device PIN to unlock and press done key". Interesting user experience of having one modal dialog-box over another on a device with no Stylus or ability to switch windows. Adding to my woes here, the done key was disabled. So even after I entering the correct PIN there was no way for me to press a disabled "Done" key. I wonder how this version of Windows Mobile 5.x software ever passed its test cases?.

I was left with a fully useless phone and a 50% working phone - with the Dopod 720W allowing me to receive calls only. No amount of reboots or anything worked with both phones.  That's when I realized how important Mobile phones have become for business productivity. I managed to complete two of my planned meetings earlier so I had ample time for a third but I couldn't schedule it or for that matter could not even call my cab driver from lounge. 

When I came back to Chennai Vishwak's mobile team gave me these options:

• For the HTCS710, do you have a micro SD, if yes, can you remove and then try.
• For both the phones to reset to manufacturer defaults, press 'power', 'left softkey', 'right softkey' simultaneously when the phone is powered down.

I tried both. For S710 the problem turned to be in the micro SD, once I removed it the device booted fine. The same Micro SD is working on a PC, so I am wondering can't a device on finding a problem with SD can't it just timeout and not load the module and proceed?. For Dopod 720W after resetting to manufacturers default, everything was working fine.

I am strongly tempted to throw my HTC devices out (I wonder why Microsoft is not investing on designing a good phone themselves), go out and buy my all time favourite - the rock solid, dependable Nokia Communicator in its new avator (E90). I am giving S710 one more chance as I don't want to waste my investment of Rs.16,500 in just 5 months. 

In the end, the moral turns out that you should have a simple, low-end Nokia phone  always as a backup with you for those moments when the smartphones behave stupidly. The phone should have minimum software, no GPRS, no Camera, just plain old Voice and SMS. And for me an old Nokia 2310 in the office fitted the bill fine. Wish me good luck with that.

After nearly 4 years with an out-of-box theme from dasBlog, I managed to get one of my designers to do a new design for my blog. Do you like this new design?. Please post your comments.

If you are like me who moved to Windows Vista early, the two biggest pain areas you would see are Outlook 2007 performance and time taken to do file copy operations. I will never go back to Windows XP but Vista should have done better on these two day to day areas.

What used to take like few seconds to copy from your hard-drive to a USB thumb-drive (or vice versa) in Windows XP, takes several minutes (or even hours as estimated by Windows Explorer) in Vista. Now with Service Pack 1 for Vista RTMed finally, help seems to be on the way for file copy problems. Microsoft is claiming over 50% to 1000% percent improvements in file copy performance. RTM bits are not yet available for download, so stay tuned for a world-wide verdict on this. In the meanwhile if you like to understand the under the hoods technology on how file copy works in Windows XP, Windows Vista and improvements in Vista SP1 read this indepth article from Mark Russinovich