The original blog post from which I took the above chart is from here. It talks about how any one at any age with learning and practice can become an Expert. A nice piece to read and think about.

In the last two to three quarters we are seeing a huge surge in SharePoint projects and as a result the demand of SharePoint developers is sky rocketing. Initially we were thinking this to be a local (India) phenomena but when I talk to many of my contacts in the industry worldwide and check out articles in the Internet, it turns out to be a worldwide phenomena.

Below are some random resources on SharePoint that might be useful for developers:

• A site from Microsoft with lots of material for .NET Developers looking at Sharepoint - MS SharePoint Developer
• New release of a Visual Studio 2008 extensions for SharePoint
• Best practices on SharePoint workflow applications
• Best practices on SharePoint memory management
• SharePoint developer forum in MSDN

One of the compelling reasons I tell customers and friends for upgrading from Windows XP to Windows Vista is the extremely easy to use yet powerful backup feature. All it takes is three clicks to backup your entire computer to a removable USB storage or DVDs. You can backup a partition or folders to another partition. And the entire backup procedure for few hundred gigabytes of files takes less than an hour the first time itself, after that the incremental backup get done in minutes. The best part is that the backup is stored in VHD (Virtual PC format) format, which is a fully documented and free to use file specification. This means even if Microsoft restore utility is unable to open the VHD file, some 3rd party utility may be able to open it. I have been using the backup feature for nearly a year and I am very pleased with it. Recently when I had trouble with Windows in my Home PC, I restored my backup that was taken few months back - the entire restore process worked flawlessly and my Windows installation was good as new. 

Today before I did a routine backup of my Home PC, I wanted to clear some space in the external USB drive. I deleted all the previous backup files in the drive. Then I ran the complete back up. Unfortunately after several minutes the backup utility failed with the following strange error.

The backup did not complete successfully. An error occurred. The following information might help you resolve the error:
The system cannot find the file specified. (0x80070002)

I tried doing Vista Disk cleanup, no use. Doing few Internet searches with the error number 0x80070002 I found a forum post that talked to clean up registry keys in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList that pointed to orphan profile paths. I checked that, in my case all the profiles had correct paths. So that was not the problem. Then one of the forum post talked about running Chkdsk on the drives, I did that. Rebooted the machine. Tried the backup again, this time it went smoothly.

Now my love is back for the Vista Backup tool. I just wish Microsoft wrote the backup utility a little bit more tolerant or instructive error messages for handling these occasions.

Though I purchased this DVD a year ago (at a steep price @ Rs.499)  I didn't get the time to watch it till now. Today being a Sunday and free from any work luckily I had the time to watch the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" made by Former Vice President Al Gore. I didn't know Al Gore was such a powerful speaker, he was amazing on stage - I have noted down few presentation tips from his speech. He seems to have come out as a more powerful person after his dramatic hair-splitting loss of the US Presidency to George W Bush in 2000.

The movie is brief and runs only for about 90 minutes and it is completely on a presentation given by Al Gore with clippings in between. Since enough has been said about this movie and global warming, all I will say - this is a very compelling movie for the cause of reducing our effects on environment. I pledge to start doing my small baby steps on this from today.

The hugely anticipated release of Kamal Hasan's mega budget movie - Dasavathaaram got released yesterday after many delays. Apart from the inherent delays due to the complexity of producing the movie, there were many court cases against the movie and the producer V.Ravichandran had to even change his film production company's name from OSCAR to AASCAR due to a legal notice from Hollywood (Economic Times news yesterday) in the last few days.

Kamal stars in 10 roles in the movie. The movie (details here) is released in almost all theatres in the city (and in the state) and in all the shows. Adding to this Government has also allowed few extra shows at 9AM, etc. , even then when I checked with few theatres I was told the movie is full for next 15 days. Luckily my wife got two tickets for today (second day of the movie) 11:25AM show at INOX City Centre. Show started 10-15 late as the earlier show got delayed, the movie is a long one nearly 3 hours with a brief 5 minute intermission. There was a huge queue to even get into the theatre

The story line of the movie is very simple and nothing exceptional - just a routine action chase film. The first half of the movie was boring and very long, the intermission came only after 2 hours. Kamal has done the story, screenplay and dialogue, so in his signature style there are few atheist touches - the  13th Century "Nambi" story possibly hurting a bit of religious sentiments. The second half was more interesting, especially where all the characters converge into the single climax moment. Lot of hard work seems to have gone into making of the movie - in the direction, acting, makeup, stunts, planning, etc. which has to appreciated greatly. Tamil movie industry has been elevated several steps with this movie - no doubts on that. The story and music could have been better. Movie is all about Kamal, with only two other characters having some role - Asin and M S Baskar. Kamal has roped in Jayaprada for a role in a Tamil Movie that too a song after a long time. Mallika Sherawat doing a song sequence and few fight scenes.

The ten roles Kamal dons are:

1. Rangaraja Nambi - 13th Century Vaishnavaite
2. Govind Ramasamy -the "Hero", a scientist
3. Christian Fletcher - Villain (Ex-CIA Agent)
4. Balaram Naidu - The funny CBI officer with nice Telugu Accent
5. George Bush - American President (surprising why Kamal wanted to do this role, compared to other roles not very impressive)
6. Avtar Singh - A Punjabi singer
7. Shinghen Narahasi - Japan Marshal arts master (Impressive fighting scenes)
8. Krishnaveni - Iyengar Great grandmother (Excellent in the makeup)
9. Vincent Poovaraagan - Social Activist (nice black skin makeup)
10. Kalifullah Khan - The 7 Feet Tall Role (An antitode to the Aboorva Sagatharagal shorter Kamal)

Will I recommend the movie, "Yes" to watch a brilliant cinema and appreciate the hard work. Do you need to rush to see the movie - No Need!.

I came across this brilliant site called "Geonames.org" - a Geographical database for download free of charge containing over eight million geographical names. The site allows you to search for any city or place or postal code and the best part is all of this is also available through a number of webservices and a daily database export. This can be useful while you are developing a website and have to get input of a city or determine a place in a transaction.

Check out these examples:

1. Chennai
2. 600017 (Postal Code in India)

GeoNames was founded by Marc Wick. Marc is a self-employed software engineer living in Switzerland. Thanks to Marc Wick & the other volunteers of the site.

I have come across Developers and System Engineers who have trouble with networking time and again. The principle reason I have observed is a lack of thorough understanding of the underlying TCP/IP layer. Most engineers assume that if they know what is an IP Address, Subnet and DHCP they know networking. How wrong can they be?. This gets more complicated with the introduction of IPv6,  Security and Performance features newly introduced in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

Till now the hurdle in solving this was availability of easily accessible and digestible materials on the subject. Today thanks to one of my fellow MVPs who pointed me to this resource from Microsoft - a free book on "TCP/IP Fundamentals for Windows". It is available both for online viewing and downloadable as a PDF file. Don't let the 559 page count scare you, the book is easily readable with some effort. I highly recommend downloading the PDF file and saving - it will be a worthy reference.

For years, I seem to have a love and hate experience with HP Printers especially with the accompanying software. With the centralized laser printers in my office things are normally OK, you give a print command it prints. The issues are only with the All In One Printers - should we be calling them super smart printers?.

I use dedicated HP All-In-One Printers (Photosmart 7288 and 6188) at my work and at my home. While I love the HP software for scanning, I am at loss on few other things.

• Why does the installation need to take so much for installing a simple scanner and printer software?.
• Every time I turn on the PC why should the HP software keep checking for updates - is scanner and printer so cutting edge that you need daily updates for new technologies?
• In Vista with UAC turned on, every time when it checks for updates it pops up the UAC elevated privileges dialog for the HPUpdate.exe program. My wife is always at loss on why this comes every time she logs in?.
• Frequently the HP software looses the networked printer. It says "No supported device can be found". May be it is users' fault or some configuration changes that was done. The way to resolve it is to get your installation media (or downloaded driver file) and run the installation again. In the installation dialog you see "Add a device" option (see the image on right). When the application can't find a device why can't application (Solution Center or Photosmart essential) itself display an option to search for a network printer and add it instead of requiring a rerun of the installation. It is not available today.
• When I rerun the installation today for this problem it displays the dialog shown below. I was puzzled for few minutes. Then pressing "OK" made it run fine. Why can't the software first check whether the necessary files are found in the path (that it anyway seems to detect) then if the files are not found display this dialog.

• The last item I have is on Paper Jams. When a paper jam happens, the printer says clear the jam and press "OK". But I am at loss on how to clear the paper jam - there is absolutely no instruction, and the space in the paper tray is so small that you can't insert your fingers and pull the paper out. 

After much deliberation and delay, Govt. Of India has increased the retail fuel prices - Rs.5 for Petrol, Rs.3 for Diesel and Rs.50 for Household LPG. Though delayed for long we need to praise the Prime Minister for finally biting the bullet - especially with all the political compulsions of coalition politics he has and for getting the powerful finance ministry to agree for deep tax and duty cuts.

On the other side, I am wondering why Government has to be involved in fixing the price of retail fuel. Other than Household LPG, the fuel price should be left to free market. Just like anything else the fuel price has to be determined purely on demand and supply economics. With Oil prices at record levels of $135 from levels of $30 before 4 years, retail price have to naturally increase. You cannot make Oil Marketing companies loss over Rs.200,000 Crores and make the common shareholders in those companies suffer (Disclaimer: As on date I have no investments in ONGC, IOC, BPCL or HPCL). It doesn't make any sense to buy oil at ever increasing prices and keep selling it at loss, eventually sinking the Oil companies. Leaving it without a price increase the loss would have been ultimately burdened on the miniscule compliant Tax payers in India. Somehow political parties in India are of opinion that increase in taxes affects only the rich and any burden on them is allowed - if you keep doing that, there will be no investments by companies and eventually no new jobs.

There is other side to the need to increase the prices and that is Environment. India is consuming Oil at historic levels that definitely has significant green house effects. The logical answer according to me is to increase the fuel price even more so that people feel the pinch and start reducing their consumption; and government can use the increased income to build on war footing world-class mass transport facilities in all cities.

I am glad to be doing this post. Our INFITT Chair Dr.Kalyanasundaram has been awarded the prestigious "Sundara Ramasamy Award for Tamil Information Technology" on 18th May, 2008, in a function held at the University of Toronto, from the Canadian Tamil's initiative TAMIL LITERARY GARDEN. Sundara Ramasamy (Sura) award citation mentioned few of Dr.Kalyan's numerous contributions in the area of Tamil fonts, development of font encoding standards such as TSCII, Project Madurai and INFITT. Pioneer Dr. K. Srinivasan of Montreal was the first recipient of this award last year.

It was one of several Awards given out that day. Well known Tamil writer and translator Lakshmi Holmström received the main "Lifetime Achievement Award for 2007", also known as Iyal Virudhu. Prof. George Hart III of Univ. Califoria, Berkeley and Mr. Padmanabha Iyer of UK were earlier recipients of the "Iyal Viruthu" awards.