Yesterday was a proud moment for all Indians.It was the placing of Indian tricolour on the Moon’s surface on Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s birthday.  The Indian flag was painted on the sides of Moon Impact Probe (seen above), one of the 11 payloads of Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, that successfully hit the lunar surface today at 20:31 hrs (8:31 pm) IST. This is the first Indian built object to reach the surface of the moon. The modern Indian space programme was initiated in 1962 when Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was the Prime Minister of India.

I have been reading in some sections of media where critics are arguing against spending for space programs in a country like India, when much has to be done here for Poverty eradication, Healthcare and Literacy. I don't see merit in this argument. If you say that space can be explored only when everything is completed in ground then no country can qualify for doing it - ever. I am against arms race and space wars, but scientific space programs are must for a developing nation like India. It has several benefits including Employment, Challenge, Ambition for youngsters without which literacy or poverty eradication becomes meaningless.

What do you think, please post your comments.

Few weeks back while at my US trip I read this book "Notes from a Big Country" by Bill Bryson. Like his other books, Bryson's humour is unmistakable in this book as well. Like others have said in the Amazon's book comments you will find yourself laughing loud in many places.

The book is a collection of a weekly column in Mail on Sundays Night and Day magazine in UK. So this book has been written more for an international audience who will find things different in USA from their country. Having visited USA many times I can say I was baffled too at many of similar scenes observed by Bryson. So in many places of the book I could relate to his experience and enjoy the scene. Commenting on common American living habits, you might be mistaken like some Americans (who have commented in Amazon) that Byrson is making "fun" of Americans at large.  This being my fourth book written by Bryson, I can say that he has nothing against America, this is his style -  It is the same when he writes about UK, Europe or even Shakespeare, so nothing different here. More than the scenes described, what I really liked is Bryson's extraction of Humour from all the weird situations like the once I have mentioned below:

• Picture ID to be shown in US Airports (Bryson calls this as Permissible Visual Cognitive Imaging)
• Junk Food Heaven - "We don't usually clean our fridge - we just box it up every four or five years and send it off to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta with a note to help themselves to anything that looks scientifically promising"
• The countless forms used by American Immigration - "You can spend days repeatedly dialling a phone number that is forever engaged, only to be told when you finally do get through that you must call another number, which the person tells you once in a mumble and you don't quite catch before you are cut off"
• Commercials - "The new Dodge Backfire. Rated number one against the Chrysler Inert for Handling. Rated number one against the Plymouth Repellant for mileage"
• Cupholder Revolution - "But our computers don't come with cupholders"
• Why no one walks - "Not long after we moved here we had the people next door round for dinner and - I swear this is true - they drove"
• The great indoors and the obsession for living always in a climate controlled environment - "Skywalks - enclosed pedestrian flyovers"
• Abundance of choice in American super markets - "Thirty five varieties of Crest Toothpaste"
• Spinning the truth - how the "special offer" advertisements exasperates the truth

If you have visited USA and felt things are different from your country then this book is a must read for you.

I saw this movie, Will Smith's Hancock in my return flight from US in Cathay Pacific. Comparing to his other movies, this is relatively a easy role to be played by Will Smith and he has done it without any disappointment. The movie is about John Hancock (Will Smith) a drunkard with superhuman powers, including supersonic flight, immortality, and super-strength. Though he uses his powers to stop criminals in his residence of Los Angeles, his activities cause millions of dollars in property damage due.

This is an average movie, can be seen if you are a Will Smith fan or a Special Effects fan, other than those two there is nothing worth mentioning.

I came across an advertisement about a product that can charge your mobile on your bicycle during a 15 minutes travel. I thought it was a cool innovative idea that will serve well the millions of rural people in India and China. I was disappointed when I visited the company's website as it carried no information about the product. Doing a web search revealed this was a concept showcased by Motorola in January 2007 itself. Anyways this is definitely an useful innovation for millions.

And if you are DIY type, doing this should not be very difficult or expensive. It can be done with an ordinary cycle-light dynamo and some circuitry to match and stabilize the output voltage.

While doing my morning walking today (after a long time) in my neighbourhood, I saw these Public Safety Message boards kept by Chennai City Police at various places. These are aimed to educate people with simple lines along with an image on importance of common safety messages. A good initiative by the police and we should congratulate the sponsors who helped for this campaign.

(Click the above image for the entire album in full resolution)

The last view days I am staying in Cupertino, CA - One of the cities in Silicon Valley which includes San Jose, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Fremont, Milpitas, Sunnyvale and others where you find the largest number of Computer Software & Hardware companies. What was interesting to me when I drove around to find few of the well known one's are headquartered in Cupertino alone. The list includes Apple, Symantec, SugarCRM.

Yesterday I watched in Comcast, the movie "The Pursuit of Happyness". Will Smith has superbly portrayed the character of a struggling salesman who takes custody of his son as he's poised to begin a life-changing professional endeavour. The story is inspired by a true story of an investment tycoon (of the same name portrayed) Chris Gardener. An emotional story told very well, the boy (done by Will Smith's real son Jaden Smith) has acted great especially in the scenes - where they are moving from place to place after a long day when they don't have a place to sleep.

Don't miss seeing this award winning movie.

In this PDC2008 talk, Chuck Lenzmeier - the Architect in Azure team explains how the Virtual Images of OS works in the Azure cloud data centers. His Bio in PDC2008 says that Chuck has been with Microsoft since 1989, and worked on all versions of Windows from NT 3.1 to Vista. The below video really helps to understand how the Virtual Images are being managed to achieve Windows Azure manage while retaining absolute compatibility with existing OS, Software and Applications.

His co-speaker Frederick Smith from Microsoft explained the other aspects of Windows Azure.

• Windows Azure provisions and monitors hardware elements (Compute nodes, L2 Switches, LBs, Routers), hardware lifecycle management (burn in tests, diagnostics and repair, failed hardware are replaced) and capacity planning
• Azure Fabric is highly available: Network has redundancy built in, services deployed across fault domains, load balancers route traffic to active nodes only, Fabric Controller state check-pointed periodically, FC state is stored on multiple replicas
• PDC 2008 CTP release of Azure has Automated Service deployment, Three Service templates, change number of instances, simple service upgrade/degrade, Automated service failure discovery and recovery, external VIP Address/DNS name per service, Service network isolation enforcement & automated hardware management
• For 2009 release will have ability to model more complex application, richer life-cycle management & richer network management

I was in the talk by Andrew Fitzhugh from HP's Magcloud.com. The site is HP's attempt to do on demand publishing of magazines and allow anyone to publish, sell and distribute magazines. An interesting statistics that was shown that in USA about 3.6Billion magazines were delivered to US News stands last year and out of which 2.3Billion was never read.

He talked about how Magcloud moved their front-end systems and portions of storage to Windows Azure.

Magcloud.com on-premises architecture	Magcloud.com utilizing Windows Azure

Seeing the title I had good expectations, but the session turned out to be disappointing. The speakers completed the talk in 30 minutes and didn't have anything more to talk or go into architecture or code details. The project seemed to me to a half-hearted attempt to test drive Windows Azure and was a simple project to showcase anything interesting.