This week I am on vacation in Mysore and Coorg. The first day was in Mysore. To reach Mysore from Chennai, you can drive all the way for about 450 Kms or take an overnight Train/Shatapthi Express (Super Fast) Train. But we flew down to Bangalore (45 minute flight) and then hired a Cab from Bangalore to Mysore – a 3 hour journey. The Bangalore-Mysore highway is under maintenance for expansion, to be made into two lanes. Once this massive operation is over, it will reduce significantly the journey time between the two cities.

Every Sunday, from 7PM to about 8PM, the palace, its four entrances are lit with thousands of lamps. The lighting is accompanied with Police Band music, it is a feast of lights and music. Instead of writing more about it, see these photos for yourself.

Main Palace glowing with Lights

Sri Varaha Swamy temple inside the palace

Inside view of Southern Entrance (With my son turning the other way )

Palace and the moon on top

Finally the political drama and suspense came to an end today evening, with Dr.Manmohan Singh becoming India's 13th Prime Minister. While I feel happy that India is headed by a senior, experienced Bureaucrat turned Politician, his Jumbo cabinet of 68 Ministers leaves much unsaid.

The reality of coalition governments in India forces the need for these Jumbo sized cabinets. Some time back, there was only a talk to enact a law to restrict the cabinet size to say 10% of the total number of members of Parliament/Assembly. I feel it is high time we enact a law to restrict to 5%. Having said this, there is also an easier alternative; We the People of India instead of giving fragmanted verdicts favouring regional parties for Parliament, should vote decisively in favour of any one of the National Parties.

The country looks to Dr.Singh for lot of deliverables. Personally I think the priorities should be

• Expansion of Economy (which in turn will mean more Industries and Jobs) throught Privatization and other measures
• Continue and give more thrust to Goldern Quadrilateral and National Highway schemes started by earlier Mr.Vajpayee's government. One of the reasons why economy grow in USA in 20th century, I feel is because of excellent Interstate and Freeways. There was free movement of material, people, idea, money, which resulted in massive expansion of economy
• Improvements in Agriculture sector
• Implementing Value Added Tax, simplify all indirect taxes including Service Tax, Excise Duty & Customs
• Enact any pending laws which will further encourage free trade and competition in Telecom, Insurance & Banking
• More trade cooperation with all neighbouring nations including Pakistan, Sri Lanka and to Singapore & Malaysia
• Finally, continue the benefits given to Software and increase the benefits given to Hardware industry.

Today, after you have your base Operating Systems setup, Antivirus has become the first application to be installed. In fact, most manufactures now ship PCs with pre-built A/V programs in them.

At workplace, we have been using Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition for several years now. Protecting all our 50+ workstations, file servers, web & db servers. The product has got good Admin tools, central update server and auto-update features.

Still many users (especially home users) find these A/V products to be expensive for them (from an Indian Standpoint) costing Rs.2000 or more. With today's falling PC prices this is about 10% of a HomePC cost and they have to keep paying it for every year for renewal. About a year back, I found a Free Edition A/V Product (free for Home Users) and I have been using it in my Home PC; Recommended it as well to my relatives and friends with good feedbacks. The product is called "AVG Free Edition" from Grisoft. It has all the basic A/V features and also auto update. Give it a try in your Home PC and put in your comments below.

Check out my earlier entry if you are wondering whether “We can get the upper hand at Virus”.

We all are used to the convenience of Mobile phones. I love my Nokia 6610 due to its small size and less weight. Added reason is my son's photo seen well thanks to the great color display. I am eagerly looking forward to switch to a good versatile Microsoft Smartphone soon. This will give me the ability to write custom programs in .NET, do PowerPoint or Excel or Outlook on the move without needing a Laptop.

So we all love buying new mobile phones every other year or 2 years once. We don't think much about this, because of the rate of obscelence and the free price fall of new models. But there is a other dark side to this.

Environmentalists around the world are now very concerned about this trend. As this PTI article says there are going to be over 130 Millions mobile phones thrown by Americans alone next year. Extend this to rest of the world, you can understand this fully. Dumping them in landfills or sea dumps is going to create this big environment problem, mainly due to their toxic content, mainly lead discharge.

So the next time I am buying a new phone, I am not throwing my old one. I will hand-it over to a low-end user!

Thanks to a suggestion from Sanjay Vyas, I have fixed the problem of Tamil texts not rendering properly in my blog.

Analyzing the problem, I found that my Blog Name which is in Tamil and my blog entry text in Tamil were not rendering properly. The encoding is getting set correctly to "UTF-8" in all browsers.

Currently I am using the DasBlog theme in my blog. If I select Just HTML, as my Theme then the texts gets rendered correctly. So it turns out to be a problem with the main CSS that gets applied for DasBlog them. With this, I narrowed the problem to be with the file at "/themes/dasBlog/dasBlog.css". 

Since the problem was with Blog Name and Entry text, I searched for their CSS styles. DasBlog uses .siteName & .itemBodyStyle styles for these.

In the .siteName section, there is a definition letter-spacing: .1em;  I deleted this. Similarly .itemBodyStyle, contained text-align: justify; I deleted this as well. Saved the DasBlog.CSS, refreshed my Mozilla, everything seems to work fine.

Write a comment if the problem still persists with any other browsers that you are using to read my blog.

Developer Days is Microsoft's premier developer event. An annual event happening throughtout US, Europe, Asia and other parts of the words. Following the worldwide tradition, DevDays in India is also eagerly looked forward by Microsoft Developers across the country. It is a one-day event, with neck-deep technology, code and visual studio insights.

After a gap of 2 years (last DevDays in India was in 2001) DevDays 2004 is happening now - May 3rd in Mumbai and May 5th in Bangalore. In Mumbai I presented on ASP.NET 2.0 along with Deepak Gulati of Microsoft India and on .NET 2.0 CLR Security enhancements with my fellow Microsoft Regional Director Sanjay Shetty from Mumbai. We had several hundred interested people and majority of them were programming in .NET on various Business Solutions.

As always I enjoy sharing the stage with Deepak, who is a good friend of mine. We first met up when he was working with me for the Microsoft NDTV Project, which I was leading way in 1999, during the last Indian Parliament elections. Happened to be an ACE “web” developer who develops at ease with both PERL and ASP.NET. After working in NDTV for couple of years after our project, he joined Microsoft where he has several successful projects to his credit. He is now in the Developer Evangelism group of MS India.

Sanjay Shetty needs no further introduction, other than saying he is the Mobility Expert in the country. Check out his blog for some photos of this event in Mumbai.

Last hour, I delivered the Keynote in the Bangalore event and managed to sneak back to my Room, to do this entry, before going down to do my ASP.NET Session.

Last week on Thursday I was in Bangalore attending Microsoft Worldwide ISV Executive Strategy Day.  It was hosted by Mark Young, Corporate General Manager of ISV Strategy.  This is what I came to hear during the day:

1) For the Keynote speaker Dilip Misry of Microsoft India Developer Evangelist group it was all “India Shinning”. In terms of increase in IT spending, PC Generation, Wireless handsets growth in India and he was optimistic of ISV growth and potential in the packaged software industry.

2) Mark Young, talked about how the Microsoft ISV program started in 1983, has grown over the years. He gave some astounding figures like 750,000 Microsoft Partners worldwide (Microsoft Customers are going to have a tough time choosing a partner), 6 Million Developers using .NET, 2200 User Groups, 400 community web sites worldwide.   

3) Manish Chopra from Microsoft Business Solutions Group (aka ERP/CRM group) it was about how Microsoft is adding value to the core Platform. First it was Operating System (Windows), then the Microsoft platform started to include Office System and now with MBS (Microsoft Business Solutions framework) it was about common ERP/CRM functions moving right into the core platform space. He briefly mentioned about the 4 different Business Solutions offering from Microsoft – Great Plains, Navision, Solomon and Axapta.

4) Vlad Martynov from the Partner Sales and Mktg Group mentioned about the new partner program and the benefits that it will bring to Microsoft Partners. The new Partner Points is aimed to differentiate partners between different levels and make it easier for customer to search and select a partner.

5) Sushant Dwivedy of Microsoft India, mentioned about the new Empower program that provides affordable licenses of Microsoft Software to startup ISVs. Through the empower program ISVs stand to get 5 licenses of Windows, Office, MSDN Universal User licenses for about $375 for a year. Sushant also highlighted on how few Indian companies generate world class IP (Intellectual Property) for their own. Companies that generate IP also don’t participate in any of the world standard body like WS-I (Web Services). I found this quite profound and thought-provoking.

This story is one of my all time favourites. Many times when we design a software, many scope creeps and feature creeps continue un-checked. At one stage, the whole project collapses because we loose sight of the core problem we were set to solve in the first place. The following story from Arabian Nights illustrates this very well.

The Bedouin was sleeping in his tent and his camel lay outside. After a while the camel came to the tent and said its nose was cold.

"Put it inside the tent then, and it will be warm", said the Bedouin.

"Master, my neck is cold", the camel soon said.

"Put it in the tent", said the good Arab.

Then: "Master, my body is cold", said the camel.

"Put it in the tent then", said the Bedouin.

"My tail is cold", said the camel.

"Alright, alright, put it inside", said the master.

So the camel settled in the tent. After a while, it spoke up. "Master, there is no room enough for both of us. Can you go out and leave the tent to me?"

There is a similar, slightly more profound Indian Folk story, but that's for a different day