Virtualization (the ability to run multiple OS simultaneously) is gaining lot of traction nowadays. In the PC world this started initially with VMWare and Virtual PC (which Microsoft acquired from Connectix) for development and testing purposes soon gained popularity in the servers. In servers virtualization is used to consolidate servers and applications into fewer servers and also used for running legacy OS and applications.

Today the entry barrier is greatly removed for Virtualization software with many of them available free (as in free beer), following is a partial list of them.

1. Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 for desktops
2. Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 for servers
3. VMWare Player for desktops
4. VMWare Server for servers

Recently few more has joined the list, they are:

1. VMWare ESXi - A hypervisor that allows you to run production applications at near-native performance is now free
2. Sun Microsystems' Virtual Box - A popular desktop virtualization software that Sun Microsystems recently acquired from Innotek and turned into an Open Source GPL software
3. Microsoft recently released its Server class production ready Hypervisor product called Hyper-V that is going to be part of Windows Server 2008 for a nominal fee of $28.

Two weeks back on my way back to Chennai in Mumbai Airport I picked up this book - Cold Steel "Lakshmi Mittal and the Multi-Billion-Dollar Battle for a Global Empire" by Tim Bouquet and Byron Ousey. The book is about the story of the world’s biggest and most hard-fought industry takeover of recent years. It is the story of Lakshmi Mittal taking over (or merging) with European steel giant Arcelor to form ArcelorMittal.  What I liked about the book was that it is told in a thriller fashion on what happened each day of this six month battle. Each day is being narrated by the authors in a scene by scene fashion including dialogs spoken. Once you start reading the book you can't keep it down.

I always admired Mr.Mittal for his humble beginnings to become the "King of Steel" and for his vision which he followed to grow his company at unprecedented rates. His growth story is something that is made of numerous acquisitions of assets around the world which have all been successfully integrated. My admiration keeps growing as I read more - all his ventures have been outside his home country (India) in all far off places of the world and he still proudly sports an Indian Passport.  This book goes into detail of all the things (Politics and Racism) that happened behind closed doors to prevent him from taking over Arcelor. As the book says it - Mr.Mittal certainly is someone who is "Stoic" - a term meaning someone who just puts up with whatever is thrown at them. It is a very apt term to summarize what Mr.Mittal had to put up with during this battle - right from Racist like comments to protective behaviour of several European governments and finally the unprecedented stone-walling by Arcelor board for every step of Mr.Mittal.

The takeaway for me as a Corporate head from the book was how the entire team at Mittal Steel worked together as a single team to triumph over the fragmented Arcelor team. Consider the fact that Mittal Steel team was not composed of one organization but it nearly a dozen entities from Investment bankers, lawyers, PR Agencies, to Mr.Aditya Mittal and Mr.Lakshmi Mittal himself. The whole battle is pure project management brilliance of how all of them were kept in sync, said the same story, were in the same page all the time. Add to that the fact they used modern communication tools (Email and Blackberries) for effective collaboration increased my interest on reading the book fully.

I highly recommend this book for any one wanting to survive in today's globalized corporate world.

If you are following US Business news you would have read about Starbucks closing over 600 of their stores around USA. I am wondering on what took them so long to do it.

For instance every time I visit Seattle (their headquarters) I am puzzled on how come Starbucks have nearly half-a-dozen stores in the downtown area around WA State convention Center. Aand all of them in walking distance to one another. In one of the streets for every block they have a Starbucks store. Naturally each of their store will eat into their other stores - if it is carpet bombing strategy against competition, I don't find it impressive.

Here is the full list of stores that they are closing.

While returning from the USA in my flight I saw this movie "The Bank Job". The Bank Job is supposed to be a true life story of a bank robbery that took place in London in 1971. The robbery was allegedly plotted by UK's secret police to cover up a prominent member of British Royal Family. It involved thieves digging a tunnel below a shop into a near-by bank, get into its vault and rob it. After finding millions of pounds in the vault they also discover lot of dirty secrets - and realize why the secret police plotted them into this. They use the mud uncovered to negotiate for getting their safe passage. In the true life it is claimed none of the robbers were arrested due to their safe passage given by the government.

A good movie that is enjoyable and also well taken. A must see if you like this "Genre" of movies.

After spending few hours in San Jose Tech Museum I took the local VTA bus 180 to travel to the Great way mall. I was not sure on the direction of the bus to take, their call centre was unhelpful answering my query, then I asked one of the bus driver who guided me to take the bus going in the"Fremont BART" direction. After Seattle Bay Area seems to have a decent public transport system, which made me like this US city a bit. There is nothing exceptional about the mall other than it is big and you get all designer stuffs here.

To kill time I went to Century Cinemas there to watch "Hellboy II" - why Hellboy, because there was no other movie I would have liked. The movie's story is completely fictitious and unbelievable, but the graphics and effects are superb.

I was in San Jose area and had the whole day to spend before my return flight (Jet Airways from SFO to BOM) in the evening. So I started the day with my friend dropping me in San Jose Tech Museum.

First I went to see the IMAX movie "The Alps" which had breath taking views and an emotional story - an expert climber had been wanting to climb the "Eiger" mountain in the Alps which had killed his father 40 years back.

Then I went to see the exhibits, which included a Silicon IC (Chip) manufacturing, Gene therapy, inventions, solar energy and many more. It is a must see museum for today's students.

I wish we had something like this in India - may be in Bangalore Indian IT giants can take a clue from their Silicon Valley counterparts to fund one. What impressed me was the web page creation kit they have - in every exhibit you can insert your bar coded ticket to get a photograph of yourself and at the end you can post all of them into your own custom web page, cool!

This time while travelling within the USA, I selected to fly with Southwest Airlines. Most other airlines especially in the USA are using the Oil price rise as a good excuse to cut all the "services" they are offering to customers and deteriorating in every aspect. Southwest seems to be using this great risk as a clear opportunity to differentiate itself as a provider of great service. You might ask what great service, I could list the following:

1. On time arrival and departure
2. Courteous Staffs
3. Accommodating change request whether it is to prepone a flight at the gates or with no fees postpone your ticket online even for the lowest fare
4. Wide choice of beverages on board - Starbucks Coffee, Tea, Soft Drinks & Juices
5. Quick arrival of bags
6. Affordable fares and no charge for two check-in bags (In one sector Alaska charged me $25 for the second bag)
7. Finally, few tables in every gate with 110V Power sockets to charge your laptops/accessories and USB Power sockets to charge your iPods and phones.

I had written earlier about Microsoft Surface, but today I got a chance to play with it in person for sometime. I am in Redmond, WA this week and was visiting one of the Microsoft offices where they had kept a Surface computer for demo. Surface is one cool technology that you got to use for getting a good feel. It definitely has great potential of changing the way we interact with computers.

Even if you have a hard disk with hundreds of GBs, you will run out of space soon. At that time you want to see what is taking most of the space. Using Windows Explorer and going to each folder is a time consuming job. Several years back I got introduced to a tool called "Tree Size" that displays chart like bars against each folder so that you can easily see the usage. Today I found a free tool to do the same thing better - WinDirStat. Apart from bars, it displays a beautiful squarisish picture of the usage based on file types. Check it out.

I was in our US office today and at the end of the day I had few hours to kill and a few Mbps of Internet pipe. So I made the best use - watch some videos in Hulu.com. For those of you who are outside USA, Hulu is promoted by NBC and News Corp media houses, that has only legal videos and tons of it - including popular TV shows like "The Simpsons" & "The Office". These are supported by naturally advertisements.

While browsing I came across this movie "Casino Royale (1967)" which was said to be a spoof on the original James Bond movie. I didn't know this was a real movie, I assumed it to be a short fun clip but it turned out to be a 2 hour full movie. This is an all-star 1967 spoof of Ian Fleming's 007. David Niven comes as the aging Sir James Bond, called out of retirement to take on the organized threat of SMERSH. After watching the movie which was fun I learned about its creation - which involved 5 Directors,  6 James Bonds and one of the James Bonds' Peter Sellers leaving in between.

Note: Hulu I guess is accessible only in North America due to geographical limits of its copyright reach.

The other day in a dinner conversation the topic was on how India has a nation has grown in spite of everything - Corruption, Inefficient bureaucracy and all the differences. That's when this book came up "In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce". I bought the book immediately and I finished reading it during my travel now.

The book is an excellent work done by Mr.Edward Luce, who is a journalist with Financial Times. During his various assignments he had worked in London, New Delhi and now in Washington. Mr.Luce  is best suited to do this book because of his long stay in India, his wife being an Indian and finally he being a Britisher (lot of things in India are still colonial hangovers). Without these background he couldn't have done such a wonderful job.

Mr.Luce finely balances a westerner viewpoint and Indian insight in a lucid manner - you don't see contradictions anywhere. Many things about India is puzzling to understand even for Indians, and many times you have to go back to long gone history to truly understand. For doing this Mr.Luce start with detail of larger than life figure of 3 modern day Indians - Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and BR Ambedkar. People who know India know that North India is very different from South India and so on., so Mr.Luce seems to have done extensive travel to report both sides.

I was happy to read about the good things he talks about the work of my state (Tamilnadu) government. I learned many things from the book about India that I didn't know before or haven't seen it that way. One observation I really liked is Mr.Luce's case on how several welfare programs in India like anti-poor program, literacy programs, free power, labour laws which are all created with good intentions are not effective because of the very bureaucracy that is created to run it.  Mr.Luce talks with ease of both India's strength and weakness.

If you are an Indian or someone interested about India, this is a must read book. Thank you Mr.Luce.

Few weeks back I had a strange problem, my Vista installation kept saying it is going to expire in 11 days. If you see the above image of the Control Panel-Systems says Windows is Activated. So I was puzzled, how can something that is activated can expire. Strangely the same error kept coming in few other machines in our office. 

After several hours with Microsoft PSS on phone, they diagnosed the issue in my machine to be a time-bombed SP1. Since I was in the beta program of SP1, I had downloaded the RTM of SP1 from Connect which was time-bombed. The safe way is to get SP1 through Windows Update or Microsoft Downloads.

I uninstalled this SP1, installed a fresh one from download.microsoft.com; now my machine is fine. I had trouble with installing Windows Search 4.0, which also got resolved after the fresh SP1 install.