Thursday, March 06, 2008

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0 CSS Compliance (Mix 08) Scott Dickens of Microsoft presented on "Cross-Browser Layout with Internet Explorer 8".

  • Main action item is to check and ensure your sites work on Internet Explorer 8.0 since it will be standards compliant by default
  • It is a good decision Microsoft has taken now by making IE 8 default to strict standards mode, you need to over-ride it for IE 7 mode. This can be done by having in your pages a meta tag <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />. You can also do this at the entire site level by including in IIS Header tag which can be overwritten at page level as well
  • IE 8 includes great Typographic foundation
  • A new layout engine was built with CSS 2.1 spec in hand, Deprecation of hasLayout
  • When there are ambiguities in the CSS spec, the idea is to check with working group, see what other browsers are doing

More features on readiness can be seen here and a complete coverage on IE 8 can be read from IE blog.

 
Thursday, March 06, 2008

(From Left to Right) Don Dodge, Kimbal Musk, 
Robert Scoble, Dave McClure, Kevin Rose, Ryan McIntyre Members in the panel where: 

  1. Don Dodge - Microsoft
  2. Kimbal Musk - CEO, Me.dium
  3. Robert Scoble - Fast Company
  4. Dave McClure - 500 Hats
  5. Kevin Rose - Founder, Digg
  6. Ryan McIntyre - Foundry Group (Representing Venture Capital in the panel)
  • Social networks today don't make much money, and that is very crucial for Myspace and Facebook on how to make money for themselves and help their ecosystem in making money
  • Remora model (A small fish latching on to a big fish to swim) of revenue. An example was Photobucket depending on Myspace and then Myspace cutting them out
  • Digg has a revenue deal with Microsoft's Advertising deal. Digg is making money from people who are submitting, how do they feel?. Digg feels it is not work that their users are doing, if it is work users will not come again. It is because users care to share. Digg is working on making it easy to share with friends by enabling submission on the homepage, all with a single-click no need to visit Digg pages at all
  • Excite when started spent few million dollars for basic servers alone which were needed to crawl few million sites and the RAM alone was like $70,000
  • The VC companies will find it difficult to find companies where they can invest less and make 5 to 10 times revenue. Most People are not doing the maths right, so ,if a VC is investing $25 Million then they are looking at exists at $100 to $200 Million levels. There are few acquiring possibilities at these levels
  • Don't focus on the run of the mill CPM rates, instead go for the niche audience where you can charge premium like a magazine model
  • There was a great question on "Why Web 2.0 revenue opportunities are being explored by startups only with USA market and not open to Europe. There is no recession in Europe, still why no monetization efforts outside USA"
  • Me.dium had to launch the beta with $0.5 Million investments mainly on hardware alone. Me.dium's long term goal is to get the real nuggets out of the click thru' data to understand and identify important activities. Google has solved 1% of this problem of what you are intending to do and that itself is working out to several billion dollars
  • Web 2.0 is a loss leader for something, nobody knows for what yet
  • Me.dium when they launched were scared about privacy because they asked users to give all information that they can give about usage. Robert Scoble says "Privacy is dead"
  • For every niche service that will cost $10 or less per month you can start to charge, there is good chances people will pay. Here again you will not get 100% conversion, but you need to give initial service free for users to taste the service and then look for some percentage conversion as paid users
  • One of the research shows that 3% of your free audience will maximum convert to paid

I had a question to panel on how all this all affects "Mobile" but I didn't an answer for it :-)

 
Thursday, March 06, 2008

Microsoft Silverlight 2.0Ed Maia from Microsoft made this presentation on Silverlight 2.0 

  • In Silverlight Media is a first class citizen
  • In Silverlight 1, you needed to use Javascript in browser as the programming model, now in Silverlight 2 there is managed code as an additional programming model
  • Silverlight 2 supports WMV 10 Pro Audio Codec in addition to other codecs supported in SL 1.0
  • IIS 7 Media Pack allows bit rate throttle to save cost and also supports Web Playlists (so user cannot ask for the 4th file without watching 3,2,1) in ASX format
  • Combining with markers from Expression Encoder you can set up markers. So that the first few seconds of video gets downloaded at full speed, then it only leads by few seconds as configured
  • Playready for Silverlight 2 is a client and server side components for DRM. There is a client side additional downloaded that is needed for more DRM support
  • Silverlight 2 supports only online DRM protected content, meaning everytime there is a DRM protected content then it goes online to License Server
 
Thursday, March 06, 2008

Angus Logan, Sr. Technical Product Manager from Windows Live platform presented on:

  • 400 million live ID users, 1bn authentications / day
  • All services of Windows Live free upto 1 million users / month
  • Today you have to go login.live.com to sign in, you can customize the page for select msn/microsoft sites only. Later 3rd party sites will be allowed to do this
  • Windows Live tools for Visual Studio makes it super easy to implement Live Platform
  • Windows Live you can associate with your local user/password store
  • You can share your Windows Live Contacts Ids safely and under control to the sites you want to
  • Increased Silverlight streaming hosting capacity for free
  • ADO.NET Data Services (aka Astoria) which consumes AtomPub service end points for Application Base Storage, Photo API, LINQ to cloud capabilities
  • Check out the new version of dev.live.com for new 7 Quick-Apps which are open source that are end to end scenarios.

  Windows Live Messenger Library

 
Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Chris Wilson from IE talked about the new features.

  • Beta1 is all about developer and web authors features, getting the platform ready. A later beta will have user experience improvements
  • Predictable Experience for Users:
    • Domain Name is Highlighted in Address bar
    • Improved Manage Add-Ons Experience
    • Improved ActiveX: Per User ActiveX Install without admin, Per Site ActiveX Controls, DEP/NX code execution prevention
    • Users Sites & Applications must continue to work with a new browser
  • Improved User Productivity
    • IE 8 is resilient after crashes - the frame continues to run, only the tabs gets reloaded
    • Support unlocking the web with W3C ARIA
    • Improved Zoom capability (Page layout is preserved)
    • Everyone uses lots of web services and it is manual.For this there is Activities now. It is implemented with OpenService. As a service provider you can check for your service being installed, if not prompt for install. (ie8.ebay.com has a sample)
    • Portions of a page is important, that's where Webslices comes. (ie8.ebay.com has a sample). It uses the Windows Feed infrastructure to keep it refreshed.
    • Complete CSS 2.1 Compliance
      • Generated Content and Counters
      • New 'display' values for tables
      • Outlines
      • CSS 3 Box-Sizing Property
      • CSS 3 Vertical Text
      • Unbiased CSS Test suites
  • All IE8 CSS/JS have a debugger in the box.
  • Most of the performance problems were Network Perf is frequently the problem
    • In Broadband the parallel connection limit increased to Six from two
    • JScript improvements
    • CSS Selector API
  • HTML 5.0 Offline storage, offline/online events

Beta 1 is available from here | Complete coverage on IE 8 can be read from IE blog.

 
Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Ray Ozzie

There has been lot of releases in the last one year and then Yahoo!... There is a wide range of product + services that will come from Incubation to release from Microsoft including IE 8.0. Microsoft might seem to be doing random releases, so I will give a background on how they are all tied together - first is Advertisement as a revenue engine, second Internet reshaping Microsoft products and Services. Right from day one Internet has been about Content + Community + Commerce which are all innovative & greater user engagement models.

Three principles:

  1. Web is the hub of social, device mash, networking. The concept of one PC is gone, the new world will be a collection of PCs connected by cloud. Your own device mash.
  2. Enterprise, virtualization and commodity hardware (storage grid, computing grid). Utility computing model. All Microsoft software will be refactored for symmetry from enterprise to partner hosted models.
  3. For Developers & Designers, we need to join small pieces to make big items. Loosely coupled composition and cooperated of pieces. Transparency and open standards are important.

Half a Million people worldwide are using Office Live & Dynamics CRMS Live. We also released last Monday, options to run Exchange, Sharepoint, OCS on the cloud. We are also announcing SQL Services Data Services today.

Internet Explorer 8.0

  • CSS 2.1 will have the biggest impact so went for CSS certifications. We have contributed 702 test cases to W3C CSS Test working group in BSD license so that everyone can have the same test cases.
  • Performance has been improved over 2.5 times
  • HTML 5.0 support enables Ajax functions to understand browser back button, support Network Connection event, store data locally
  • Rich Debugging and Developer tools integrated in the browser
  • Activities are in place. They work on OpenService Specification
  • WebSlice (which slices the page and allows me to monitor them and get alerted on changes) specifications under Creative Common License
  • Internet Explorer 8.0 Beta 1 released

Silverlight

  • 1.5+ Million installations per day are installed now
  • Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 available for download
  • Adaptive Streaming for automatically choose speed of delivery based on network and your CPU. You can plugin any algorithm for this
  • IIS 7.0 Media Pack can help you to serve only 10% (or any other figure) from the point user is watching now with bandwidth throttling
  • John Harris from Expression team showed: Silverlight Advertisement Template makes it easy doing advertisements with Silverlight, Atlas AdManager was shown, IIS 7.0 Media Pack allows Media Playlists which allows you to control how something is skipped or not, Expression Encoder 2.0 allows you to overlay advertisements with text, XAML or Video
  • Ari Paparo VP from DoubleClick talked about how they are supporting Silverlight Overlay ads.
  • Perkins Miller from NBC Sports & Olympics showed for the first time the product. We have 150 days to go. We are going to be putting 2200 hours live.
  • Beta 1 of Silverlight 2.0 is about 4MB download. Partnering with Novell to release this in Linux. And lot of new controls are released
  • AOL showed their new mail client with Silverlight
  • MS Announced Sharepoint webparts for embedding Silverpoint
  • Demoed Silverlight for Windows Mobile 6.0 and promised to bring it out on mobile devices that have a SDK
  • Nokia will deliver Silverlight on Symbian S60 (which is a big win for Silverlight against Adobe Flash in my opinion) first then with S40 phones & Internet tables. Demoed it working in Nokia N95 by WeatherBug

Silverlight 1.0 on Nokia N95 Mobile Hard Rock Demo by Scott Stanfield devigner (Developer + Designer)

 
Saturday, March 01, 2008

In my earlier post I have given my guess list. My list was correct by more than 3/4th.

What happened from my list:

  • FM had done nothing for Dollar hit export industry including IT
  • Increase in Defence spending
  • Dividend tax was tweaked
  • Income tax exemptions increased by good percentages
  • 6th Pay commission was accepted
  • Farm credits /benefits were announced

What didn't happen from my list:

  • Service tax rates were not changed (Good)
  • A new committee for simplification didn't happen (Good, we have had enough committees)

The points I liked about the budget:

  • Promised allocation for Minimum Work / Employment schemes
  • Pushing the states for more accountability on central funded projects
  • Drinking water availability in all villages and in all schools in India
  • Allocation of over Rs.200 Crores for Chennai's Desalination plant
  • Service tax for Customized Software (though I don't like the tax, it at least put an end to all arbitration on whether it is applicable or not)
  • No change in corporate tax rate (Good)
 
Thursday, February 28, 2008

Like his previous 4 budgets Mr.P.Chidambaram has taken this year too considerable efforts in listening to the public & Industry on their wish list for India Budget 2008. Like previous years this year too he will stop with listening and the budget will be a political compulsion/election oriented one. Following are my guesses on what he will do tomorrow:

  • Some marginal concessions for Rupee/Dollar Hit export industry will be announced, only for the worst affected like Textile, Leather & accessories
  • The biggest wish of the IT Industry, the extension of STPI scheme beyond 2009 will not be done. If mentioned, it will just say the decision is being left to the next government
  • The duties and customs will be brought down and aligned with commitments given by the government to ASEAN and other trade pacts
  • Income Tax rates will be left untouched. The minimum income level will be increased, some more exemptions for senior citizens & women will be given
  • He will certainly promise setting up a new committee to simplify direct/indirect taxes to take advantage of the buoyant collections this year
  • Service Tax will be increased by 2% (or) Educational Surcharge will be increased by additional 1% and it will be promised for further infrastructure/power developments/oil under recovery
  • Implementation of 6th Pay commission which might give over 25% hike to government employees salaries and benefits. Possibly removal of new hiring restrictions in selective departments
  • Increase the budget allocation for Defence especially the Nuclear & Missile programmes
  • New farm oriented credit announcements will be made
  • Dividend tax will be tweaked a bit to appease the stock market
 
Wednesday, February 27, 2008

My corporate IT (Exchange Server) enforces security policy on all mobile devices that connect to it. So my phone is locked by a PIN. When I connect the Windows Mobile Phone (HTC S710) to PC, Vista displays a dialog box (like the one below). This dialog box certainly has useful information that needs my attention, but I am irritated on the fact it doesn't have a minimize/close button. Absolutely no way to get rid of the window other than keying the PIN in the device or disconnecting the device.

I feel this to be a classic case of bad user interface design.

Unlock Device - Windows Mobile

 
Sunday, February 24, 2008

Swadeshi Aiyar Drama

Y.Gee.Mahendra's UAA has released a new tamil play (drama) called "சுதேசி ஐயர்" (Sudeshi Iyer). The first show happened yesterday in Bharat Kalachar and today there was shows in Rani Seethai Hall. Seeing the banner near Duraiswamy subway yesterday, I went for the third show of the play today with my family. It was advertised as "சிரிப்போ சிரிப்பு, புதுமையோ புதுமை”, but my expectation was limited due to previous experiences with plays.

Fortunately, it turned out to be true, the play was certainly hilarious and enjoyable. Worth seeing. The story was not much, a 70 year old Swadeshi type Father wants to teach his family the illness of deteriorating value system in the materialistic world now. He takes them in a time machine to 1945 and the family gets to experience the world and value system in 1945, gets to see Mahatma Gandhi and they realize their mistakes. All this is told in a very hilarious and filled with jokes. My 4-1/2 year old son and my 75 year dad both enjoyed the play, that I guess speaks for wide audience satisfied by the play.

 
Sunday, February 24, 2008

bajaj scooterThe first motorized vehicle I learned driving (after learning Bicycle) was my father's Bajaj Scooter with Gear. This was a Vespa style scooter with engine on one side and gears on the left hand steering bar. The trick to learn in riding one of these is that you should keep only your left feet on ground whenever you are stopping as the right feet is needed all the time near the brake (the brake is near right feet). This should have been 15 years before and I was driving it for just few years before I moved to other vehicles. This is one of the most dangerous two wheelers on the planet, as even in medium speeds it is impossible to control it from skidding especially because of the engine (and hence the weight) on one side.

So why I am writing about this here?. I became nostalgic about this today, when I rode my Uncle's scooter (it was the same Bajaj Chetak model that my father had) for a short distance from my home to a restaurant to have my breakfast. I was left marvelling at how our human brain works - for almost 10 years I have never rode a geared scooter (for that matter hardly I drive a two wheeler nowadays) and when I got on to one today it was easy. Instantly I remembered how to operate one and I was up and running. If only computers and software applications worked like this (human being) we all would be better off...

 
Saturday, February 23, 2008

Electronic Packaging CD Packaging

One thing I hate about buying Electronics (Computer accessories as well) and Compact Discs (VCDs, DVDs) is the chore of cutting open the plastic packaging without hurting your fingers or the product. I just don't understand why the manufacturers want to put so much plastic on the covers with the idea of hurting you. If the idea is to protect (RFID tagging) from stealing and to have a frame for hanging/displaying then I am sure there are better ways. Ways that are environmentally friendly, more than environment friendly to the poor consumer who paid money. This is true especially for CDs that you buy from a Music chain (In India Music World, Landmark, etc.) where apart from the manufacturer cover the chains put RFID in a layer, then a layer of plastic to protect the RFID and so on., finally you end up having to cut open 3 layers before you can reach to the music. Similar pain for Electronic items, say a Mouse/Mobile Charger, etc. where you need a steady and 200 pound fingers to cut that thick layer of plastic before reaching to the product.  I guess the idea is to make it difficult for you to reach to the product, so that you cannot use it. Obviously a product still in the box, won't go bad and you won't call for support. Smart idea of electronics companies to save money especially with their margins dwindling all the time.

Shirt PackagingGem Clip (or Paper Clips) 

The next packaging item I hate is the sharp (metal) pins used in Shirts (Menswear). I can understand the idea is to have the shirt folds stay in place, so that the shirts while in the shelf have a nice look. Here again you have safer ways to do it like Paper Clips (Gem Clips). Apart from being dangerous to remove without hurting your fingers they in some cases damage the very shirt they are meant to enhance the appearance. Also these pins could be hazardous in countries like India where dump yards are often visited by Cattle's looking for food and scavengers looking for reusable items that could be sold.   

Finally, the packaging item I hate the most because I have to deal with it everyday is the Stapler Pins used in envelopes by courier companies. I am not sure whether anywhere else in the world, courier companies stapler the routing receipt with the envelopes they carry. Removing these Stapler Pins even by using the back of Stapler machine is tricky and most times you end up damaging the cheque or the document that is inside the envelope. Can't they paste it instead?.

 
Friday, February 22, 2008

I was invited to do a presentation to students at my alma mater (SVCE, Pennalur). The occasion was a day long event today organized by ECE department's Alumni Association & IEEE Chapter. I decided against a technical topic for fear of boring the students, instead I made a talk on "Entrepreneurship for Engineers". Following what "George Bernard Shaw" said "I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation", I started by quoting myself  “There has never been a better time in Indian History for becoming an Entrepreneur”.

EntrepreneurShipforEngineer
I tried my best to make the session very lively and at the end when I counted only few heads where sleeping out of nearly 100 students in the hall. And in the 90 minutes I heard no "Boos" or "Whistles" which itself I think was an achievement in itself. Download - Entrepreneurship for Engineers v2.0.pdf (292.67 KB)

In the evening I presented one more session. This time it was at Vishwak for our weekly Friday sessions organized by our team members as a forum to share knowledge and best practices. Here again I went against a technical topic as I didn't have the time in advance to prepare on any of the latest or upcoming topics, and if I presented on any of the existing technologies then my team knows more than me :-) . The topic I talked was on "Presentation Skills" on which I have earlier posted a detailed 7 page post here and as a way of demonstration I did the talk without any presentation aids (No PowerPoint and no Projector).

EntrepreneurShipforEngineerPhoto
See the event photos here
 
Friday, February 22, 2008

Read the earlier part of this project here where I talked about the Digital Conversion of VCD/DVD and sharing in XBox.

Zune Media Sharing After all the Proof of Concept, I decided it was time to go full time Digital. Bought new hardware for my house. One was a high-end desktop where I plan to do the conversions and regular PC usage. The second was for server role, where I had two 500GB HDD Mirrored for storing all my Digital Media files and sharing them. I then converted few dozen of VCD and DVDs into Nero AVC (MPEG4) format with the new desktop in few days.

I tried in the server machine, first Windows Home Server but that didn't the driver for Mirroring H/W that I had), then Windows Server 2003 but that didn't support installation of Zune Client Software, after that thought Windows XP SP2 will be the best but that didn't allow Zune sharing to be visible in XBOX whatever I tried. So I had to resort to Windows Vista SP1. Installed Media Center Extension that went through smoothly but my main requirement was to have Zune Network Sharing working so that all my Photos, Music & Videos are available for playback at my XBOX 360. These two articles have step by step instructions needed for a normal setup:

Zune Network Sharing User I had bought Norton 360 that contains Antivirus, Firewall and Antispyware. The firewall configuration was pathetic in Norton 360 so I switched it off and turned to Vista's default firewall. I installed and easily got SQUEEZEBox music sharing working. Zune Network Sharing was a big hurdle to cross, what ever I tried the videos and photos were not visible from XBOX. After several hours of trying I figured out the way to make it work.

  1. Create a new user exclusive to run Zune Client Software, call it say "ZuneUser" make it administrator in Vista
  2. Switch off User Access Control (UAC), this was the biggest problem cause
  3. Reset all security settings for the drive/folders where you have your media files (Give Read/Execute for ZuneUser)
  4. Go to Zune Client Software, configure your monitoring folders for media
  5. Enable Network Sharing, give it a name and tick Music, Video & Photos
  6. Go to Services Applet, replace the user account for the Zune Network Sharing (ZuneNSS) service from Network Service to ZuneUser.
  7. Restart the ZuneNSS service
  8. Give some time for monitoring job to pickup files
  9. Go to XBOX 360 and look for your media files and play them

 Zune video library