Today I got to present on a "Career Guidance" event organized by Rotary Club of Central Madras and Vidya Mandir Senior Secondary School. Audience were parents and students of Class X and XII students of Vidya Mandir School in Chennai. Vidya Mandir is one of the prestigious education institutions in the country and I was happy to be invited for the event.

I didn't want to take the usual approach of listing all possible jobs in IT and the education needs to achieve them. Instead I went to dispell the various myths associated with a career in IT (especially in India) and then elaborated on the "not so obvious" needs of the IT industry.

You can download the presentation Career Opportunities in Indian IT Industry.ppt (250.5 KB) I used today.

It is a problem of plenty - I am talking about the Rains this season in Tamilnadu. All major rivers, lakes and ponds are full/ over flowing / about to over flow.The biggest casualty for this has been about 140 people being washed away in flash floods while travelling in two seperate buses plying on different places in Tamilnadu. Read more about the tragedy.

Let us pray for their souls to rest in peace. SARVE JANA SUKINO BHAVNTHU

When you view tamil texts created with dasBlog like my blog indic page, you will see the tamil contents not getting displayed properly in Mozilla or Firefox. It turns out to be a problem in the CSS with the text-align:justify; property. I have described this in my earlier blog post last year.

After I upgraded to latest dasBlog version (1.8.5223.2) I selected "Project 84" as my theme, this problem resurfaced. All it needed was going to /themes/Project84 and editing the style.css file. In the file,  you need delete the above said property in the #content style.

As you might be knowing I use dasBlog.NET server software (a community developed blogging engine) to power this blog. Today while going through the activity list that shows the statistics of visits and search result referrers, I noticed that all the referrers from Google Search are being blocked by dasBlog. This was not good news.

On investigating I found out that the "Movable Type Blacklist" option in dasBlog configuration has to be disabled to get this problem resolved. This is due to the fact that the blacklist has been discontinued and that causes havoc with dasBlog. My fellow Regional Director and one of the Volunteer Project Managers Scott Hanselman has a post on this.

dasBlog download: The latest version of dasBlog can be downloaded from this SourceForge project and support forum is here

Thank you Reserve Bank of India (RBI, which is the US Fed equivalent of Government of India)

RBI yesterday issued its final guidelines on credit cards, to all Banks and NBFC's (Non Bank Finance Companies). This guideline is a "God" sent answer to the long prayer of Indian Credit Card users, who were at the mercy of issuers. The guideline addresses several of consumer pain points:

1. Credit Limits cannot be enhanced unilaterally by the issuer
2. "No" to Unsolicited Card/Charges/Loans
3. Every customer complaint will have to be issued a docket number
4. Issuers should not make any intimidating or harassing collection calls to customers
5. Banks should also maintain a Do Not Call Registry (DNCR) containing phone numbers of customers as well as non-customers. People can register to this through website or offline. DNCR should be set up within two months
6. Method of calculation of rates for interest, late fee with clear examples to be published in their websites

I have had a mixed (Good and Bad) interactions with Banks on Credit Cards. If the above guidelines are followed in letter & spirit by the issuers, I can certainly say Indian Card industry will become a role model to the world.

Related Post: Housing Loans – Asset or Liability?

Due to secure by default design philosophy, IIS in Windows Server 2003 SP1 doesn't allow unrecognized MIME types to be served. Clickonce (that ships with VS 2005) needs few new MIME types to be mapped. If this is not done, after you deploy a ClickOnce application from VS 2005, though it gets deployed successfully the application doesn't run in the clients. To fix this the following MIME types need to added in the deployment IIS server:

FileExtention : MIME Type

.application   : application/x-ms-application

.manifest      : application/x-ms-manifest

.deploy         : application/octet-stream

More information is available from these Microsoft websites:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fb94w1t5(en-US,VS.80).aspx
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=10606&SiteID=1

Two weeks when I was in New Delhi, my meeting for the day got cancelled and I had few hours to burn; We (me and my friend Bala) were in Connaught Circle and after visiting Palika Bazaar and few other stores, I noticed a "Bose" Store. I have heard from my friends that Bose systems sound great and they equally cost a fortune to own. As an electronics graduate, Bose speakers have also amazed me on how they can engineer such audio brilliance into such small speakers. Recently one of my friend had also mentioned about the Bose Experience in their live theatre (inside every Bose store). So curious we went in and when we came out I should confess I was blown away.

The theatre experience (Free) itself was great - it is about 20 minutes on a self running Audio Visual; this definitely changes your outlook about Sound/Audio listening. The 20 minutes time spent was worth every second. You can listen to such small notes in there true colours. Next time you are near a Bose store, I recommend this. The other best part in a Bose store is their Sales Staff's service and explanation - each of them say the same about the systems, in the same order and with the same body language. This was true in their stores in other cities as well; I validated this in their Chennai Store, which I visited this week. Definitely very effective Staff Training!

Two systems impressed me the most - One was their high end LifeStyle 48 system that stores, plays Audio (CD/MP3/Radio) & Video (DVD/VCD), controlled with a 65-feet range Radio Remote that works across Walls/Ceilings/ Controls TV/VCR/DVD as well, suggest tracks as per your mood/listening pattern and of course includes the legendry Bose speakers; The other was their WAVE Audio Player with Radio. Though I certainly love to own the LifeStyle system, the price tag of Rs.2.5 Lakhs+ made me postpone the buy. Instead this week when I was back in Chennai, I went to their store in Ispani Centre, Nungambakkam High Road and bought the WAVE Player for Rs.33K. Since I had done all evaluation in their New Delhi store, I was in and out of the Chennai Store in like 10 minutes (Probably in Bose history the quickest sale ).

So for the last few days I am enjoying my WAVE Player thoroughly!.

Update 12/Jun/07: After nearly two years of buying this, I finally cracked on how to set the correct time in the device. It was too easy - just hold the Time +/- button(s) for few seconds, that's it. Courtesy to Bose Owners Guide page where I found this Manual (768.69 KB)for the device.

Couple of days back I was nominated as a member in the board of studies for Computer Science Department - Govt. of Pondicherry, Bharathidasan Government College for Women. Indeed this is an honour for me - I was pleasantly surprised when I received the nomination letter from their Principal S.Kumuda.

BGCW is an Arts and Science college conducting UG and PG degree courses. The college is run by Govt. of Pondicherry with a social inclination of providing quality education to girls from not only urban area but from rural and most-rural background as well - in fact, for a good percentage of students who graduate every year from this college, they are the very first in their village to study beyond higher secondary school eduation. Recently BGCW became a Deemed college, but continuing to award degree of the well recognized "Pondicherry University".

As per UGC (University Grants Commission of India) guidelines all Deemed institutions are required to constitue a Board of Studies for each department which will be chartered to design and approve all the course curriculum and syllabus. The consituents of the board are to be picked from various background - from the college faculty, university, academia, industry and past students. I was nominated as a representative of the "IT Industry".

Today was the first meeting of the board. Before this I had little academia exposure (other than as a student), so I was not sure on what to expect. But at the end of the day as I write this, I am pleased with our output. The computer science board was fortunate to have experienced academician - Mr.Subramanian from Pondy University and Mr.Arumugam from Madura Kamaraj University. Since they had done similar work several times in their career, the others in the board like me found it on easy ground.

Wearing my developer hat, I am super excited today on the launch (finally) of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 & BizTalk Server 2006. I have been talking about the great features that .NET 2.0, ASP.NET 2.0, VS 2005 is bringing for last 2 years+. In fact, the first time I saw ASP.NET 2.0 nearly 3 years back during one of Microsoft's selective early preview in Reading, UK. From that time I know that this platform is going to be huge jump for web developers worldwide.

• .NET Framework - 1.0, 1.1 & 2.0
• Visual Studio (After .NET) - 2002, 2003 & 2005
• SQL Server (100% of MS own codebase) - 7.0, 2000 & 2005
• BizTalk Server - 2000, 2002, 2004 & 2006