Microsoft kills Windows 7E, puts IE back in upcoming OS

Microsoft kills Windows 7E, puts IE back in upcoming OS

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Change in content

The blog is in for some window dressing. I have made changes to the template and hence the new look and feel. I've decided to focus my y blogging on Business Processes and Re-engineering, BPM and BPEL. To this end I've made changes to several aspects of the blog. One noticeable change has been the byline. "My views on software and occasional posts on my hobbies" has been removed as this not reflect the purpose of the blog. The new byline is "Swimlaning process for your business".

Twitter

Twitter is the latest craze in Social Media. I hopped onto to this micro-blogging platform a couple of months back to make sense of all the noise. I tweet, but not very often, nor am I able to set up Twitter on my Treo. This morning newspapers carried two radically different opinions on Twitter.

The Hindu's syndicated piece from The Guardian UK traces the reasons behind the remarkable rise of Twitter while The Times of India carries a news item that quotes a survey commissioned by Morgan Stanley which says that its "Not Cool" among teens.

I plan to continue tweeting.

Reading as a Habit

I seem to have come a long way since I read my first book, Enid Blyton’s The Secret Seven that I borrowed from a local library some 30 years back. Noddy, Asterix and TinTin saw me through Primary School while Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys kept me company through my days in High School. Summer Holidays were spent reading, Reading in the morning, in the afternoon and in the night. Sometimes three Hardy Boys’ books in one day! I then graduated to more mature authors like Agatha Christie, Irving Wallace, Ken Follet, Alister Maclean, Arthur Hailey, Jeffery Archer, Sydney Sheldon and other contemporaries. A good book can be very gratifying. The ones I have read brought out the setting in such vivid detail that the lingering taste of Stout on my tongue or the directions to Saville row comes from books. During School and College I spent most of the time reading Fiction and was addicted to it for over fifteen years. Sometime during my stint in Mumbai I discovered the literary world – Non Fiction, since then I have hardly read any works of Fiction, one exception though has been Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Literally one thing led to another and today I am surrounded by books on various arcane (not in my opinion) subjects – From Freud’s Interpretation of dreams to John Adam’s Wealth of Nations. Looking back I sometimes wonder, How did one thing lead to another? How did reading become so addictive? What do others have to do to develop reading as a habit? Here are some notes from my trunk.

An excellent way to start is to read a page a day. Or better still read when you have your morning tea. Read while commuting to work. Place books by your bedside table and read before going to bed. .You’ll be surprised you would have read more than a page.

Pick up something that interests you. It could be the latest Jeffery Archer thriller or some self improvement guides. But pick up something interesting and something that you need not plough through by brute force.

Carry a book with you. You’ll be surprised at the opportunities you get to read a page. Take a book while you commute to work, take it during a journey. If there is time when you have to wait like for an appointment with a doctor you just flip it open and read a few pages.

Make a list of books that you want to read. Better still make a list of books that you want to buy. You can maintain a journal where you can write this down. During the course of your reads you would come across interesting anecdotes or facts Note these down in your journals. You can also create a list on Amazon and add to it. This way you would also get a picture of the cover. Literary reviews appear in every major newspaper and magazine. Cut the interesting ones and paste them in your journal. Use your Journal to keep a log of all your reads. You can also write a short review piece on each of the books you have read along with the start and Finish dates.

Enroll in a library. Its possibly the cheapest way to get access to books. The next best option is to visit a second hand book shop to get dirt cheap books.

Enroll yourself in a good Book Club. The weRead Book Club on Facebook is probably the most popular network for Books. They also have a list of top 200 books that one should read during a lifetime. It’s a good place to start.

And finally turn of the television, the cellphone, your gaming devices and be off the Internet.

My reading habit has broadened my horizons, made me savor life that would have other wise been boring, it has made me taste stuff that I would have never dared, it has taken me places that I have never been to. After all there is no point in being literate if all you do everyday is to watch soap.

Firefox 3.5

Being Organised - DIY Planner

For several years I have been using a leather planner from "Business India". To Order refill pages and other forms I ticked the items I wanted in the ordering sheet and sent it along with a cheque to "Business India" and this continued every year for the yearly refill pack untill sometime after the year 2000 "Business India" decided to stop the planner refills. So I had to settle for "Business Today" and later "Sanka" from Landmark (the book store) but then getting this in time for my yearly planning exercise (just before christmas) was a pain. At times I could procure these yearly refill pages only during mid Jan. This threw all my planning out of gear untill I discovered DIY Planner.

This blog is dedicated to personal productivity solutions and offers a software application - Dynamic Templates that prints out planner pages. I use the 2 page per day format by printing these on an A4 stationery with two pages per sheet and using the duplex option to print like a booklet. I created my own templates for Itinerary Sheet, Project Planning, Notes. I use a simple two ring binder to keep it all together. Will post pictures of it soon.

I am creating additional templates and adding more capabilitites to my binder like having a pen loop, a place to keep post-it flags, a transperent sleeve to carry stuff, a business card sleeve and a lot of other stuff. Will post the photos of the project soon.

Flexible Keyboard

I watched "Die Hard 4 - Live Free or Die Hard" this past Sunday and was intrigued by the gadget used by the protagonist hacker Farrell (played by Justin Long) - a flexible keyboard. It appears in the scene where Mai Linh (played by Maggie Q) starts the shutdown procedures for the powerplant. Also visible are two Smartphones/PDA's similar to the HP iPAQ.

Checked out the pricing of the flexible keyboard on Indiaplaza it costs about Rs 844 and you get to take one free when you buy one.

Also visible in the movie is a white iPOD. Its in the scene when Fareell and McClaine (played by Bruce Willis) meet WarLock (played by Kevin Smith) in his command centre.

Objects of Desire

I love gadgets and so that first thing that caught my eye was the launch of the new phone from Palm the Palm Pre. Stunning looks and very functional, Initial reports on engadget and gizmodo place it ahead of the Iphone in many aspects. Being a palm fan and an owner of the Treo 680 I'm looking forward to acquire one. Awaiting the pricing info in the meantime, If Rumours rae to be believed it going to be first launched in the US by Sprint at about $399. Looks like we'll have to wait a bit longer for the unlocked version.

Integration Live

Its been business as usual for the last nine months. Successfully completed and cut over to production of an important integration project in first week of Oct 08. It involved integrating the retail assets portfolio of two leading banks in India. Used native SQL for code snippets for the ETL portion. Oracle databases at both source and destination but still posed several challenges. For the tech stuff read the Oracle guy's blog here.

Suse Enterprise Desktop 10

My Windows XP laptop is down and so borrowed my better half's Acer (TravelMate 2403NWXCi) loaded with Suse Enterprise Desktop 10. Great speed in rendering the TFT screen. Haven't got to configuring the WiFi and the software updater to read from the Suse Repository. Is Open Suse a better option. Looking forward to some ideas?

Firefox 3

Social Networking

In the good old days when friends wanted to catch up, we would cycle to the nearest shack and sit on stone benches sipping Masala Chai and voicing our take on the world that past week.

Over the years things changed. All of us went in search of greener pastures after College and for a few years we relied on terrestrial phones to keep in touch with each other. Often these used to result in multiple calls with an unwritten code on who would call whom, but then those were the days dialing was a lot easier then cycling. For a brief period, with the advent of computers came BBS (Bulletin Board Services) hosted by geeks with deep pockets for a subscription fee. Though it was popular amongst the nerd crowd, it vanished into cyberspace without a blip and soon was replaced by Email. It was a privilege having an email id and for about two years it served as a means for keeping in touch. You had to pay for an Email account until Sabeer Bhatia changed the rules of the game with HotMail and then all of a sudden you were connected with everyone across the world – you could send the same mail to you classmates working in India or to those studying abroad.

Connectivity was still limited to using Hotmail at Work! And so for about two years till Yahoo introduced IM, Hotmail was the means of keeping in touch. During these years connectivity improved and so did the popularity of Instant Messengers like Yahoo. Yahoo essentially improved upon the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) which was used to run the BBS’ and made it work on HTTP over TCP/IP. So now I had an official mail account, a personal mail account on Hotmail, a Yahoo mail and IM account. Managing addresses on these servers and syncing them to your paper based organizers became a nightmare. Disruptions in internet models continued to happen and soon businesses jumped onto the bandwagon to exploit this annoyance as a business opportunity.

First on the scene was Plaxo. A web based application that managed your business contacts. It would read your email client’s address book and store all the mail addresses on its servers and at some predetermined intervals send mail to these recipients asking them to update their contact details obviously the mail would also encourage the recipient to sign up. It was a large database of contact information with almost something about everybody who had nothing but an email id! This heralded the first step in Social Networking. Where you could exchange notes without the hassle of sipping cocktails and handing out business cards. Obviously someone could see that Plaxo had a one is to one relationship when in reality the relationship was many to many.

Then slowly on the scene came Social Bookmarking, where as you traverse the web, you flag interesting pages and share it on sites like Stumble Upon, del.icio.us, furl, spurl, etc, for others to discover. Like this you built up a collection as you unearthed little treasures while traveling through the web and shared it with others, the sites on their part ranked these bookmarks based on the number of people who clicked on them. As the bookmark collections grew exponentially, you tagged them with keywords to make these links easier for others to locate.

If you could share your links, then you could and would, obviously want to share your snaps. Flickr was the first one to answer this inner calling. You posted your snaps, tagged them and then flagged it Public, if you want others to see. Others saw left comments for you to respond. You responded and they responded and so the story goes. Over the years things have changed, the anonymity that internet offered by allowing you create the avatar you wanted to portray to the world, resulted in several so called value added social networking sites, that combined all the above features, sprouting like wild oats strewn across cyberspace. My first invite was to join Orkut followed by Hi5 followed by LinkedIn and then Followed by FaceBook then followed by something then something else until I stopped responding to invites. But the invites continue to pour in.

But first Orkut, it took a little under 3 minutes to sign-up and then allowed me to search for friends by name or their known Avatar. Then pictorially tag them based on their “coolness” you could also assign other pre-defined sobriquets. You posted scraps on your friends scrap book and they reciprocated the gesture by posting scraps on yours. Anything goes. The more stupid, the merrier. The person with most scraps was the most popular. There are other silly stuff you can do on Orkut to get cheap thrills – Declare someone as Hot Babe or Cool Guy by assigning little hearts. Express yourself was the motto. But then all excesses should come to a stop. You could find hoards of people realizing that this pastime was addictive and boldly declaring that they would stay away from Orkut much to the chagrin of their cyber buddies, many of whom didn’t have a form other than their online Avatars.

However in the dark recesses of the internet were small evils waiting to strike. Soon MW.Orc masquerading as an image file copied itself to other peoples scrap books and propagated itself until Orkut’s staff identified and removed it only to be hit by other JavaScript Fauna. Of late Orkut has deprecated its nonsense features like coolness and Hotness to a more sober and calm interface like those on Facebook.
My next invite was from, I don’t remember who, to Linked In. I signed up not to disappoint a friend. LinkedIn allowed me to import all my contacts from my Nokia, Thunderbird Client, Yahoo and Google address books. LinkedIn is strict business networking and limits personal expression to a photo and a resume. Contacting others is always through an intermediary thus reducing the annoyance of unsolicited invites. But it could do better. I still have a few invites to accept.

Then came an invite to Hi5 and the Psychedelic MySpace that allows me to decorate pages with background images and themes. These punk accoutrements were so heavy to render that they crashed my browser. The chaos was so intense that its been sometime since I checked out what’s happening to my network on these sites. I did like listening to free music on Hi5 and flagging my favorites. However I dread visiting them for fear of unsolicited mail and spam.

I discovered Facebook early this year. Facebook allows you to add applications (developed by third part developers) that enable you to share restaurant reviews (Local Picks), reviews on Books (Books IRead), You Tube Videos and a host of other Trivia. I can stuff a lot of things in my SandBox even without buying them. My friends can post notes on the Wall to grab my attention. MyMusic allows me to listen to my favourite track while Qloud will update the tracks I am listening on ITunes to my Facebook Profile! However, everytime I install these small applications they have access to my personal data on Facebook which legally allows them to target unsolicited advertising. The NewsFeed application informed me a few days back that Ajay Alex and Ravi Jerome Barnes are now friends, as though they weren’t before! Another application tells me that Ajay wants to play a 9X9 Sudoku with me, yet another tells me that a friend has just Poked me and then Zombie bit me! Ouch! One message tells me that Tom just brushed his teeth! Someone sends me a Bottle of Booze (Hic!). Someone sends me a gift. And so on and on it goes until I am sucked into this networking quagmire that hopes to keeps you on top of what the heck your pals are upto across the world. These silly apps sometimes try to get your attention by asking you to invite other friends. You can make them go away though. But unsubscribing from these sites is not easy as signing up!

I just realized that all I wanted to do a few years back was to keep in touch with friends. Phone numbers gave way to email id’s then to IM’s and now to Avatars on these annoying Social Networking sites. Managing these Multiple Social Network Syndrome is getting difficult. As I write this my friend Ravi Jerome Barnes in Tokyo is tired and wants to crash!
I prefer Masala Chai on a stone bench with some real faces around. Wouldn’t you?

Go Live

Posting this from the Chennai International Airport which generously offers travellers a whopping 54MBps internet connectivity without any fees.

On my way to Colombo for the "Go Live" event of a product implementation. (See my previous posts for details). Travelling economy on UL 122. Updated Facebook.

Going Live

Last night when the world was sleeping my collegaues working on the project for a prestigious Colombo bank sent me an SMS - "We are going Live". Apparently the final round of testing went on till wee hours in the morning. I happened to read it at 4:30 am ( I am an early riser) and promptly sent a quick reply "Great". Indeed this is a great achievement to have this day stare at us. When I first drew the project plan I wasn't sure if we would see this day so quickly considering the that we had to customise the applications in two flavours - one set of features made its way into the core application while another set were delivered as separate artefacts; migrate the legacy data; and implement and configure the application. All the while working with people of different culture and paradigm. We missed the date in the schedule, however within a span of 30 days we were on track and are ready to transition the application to "Business As Usual". Thats about a month behind the original schedule of 9 months thats a delay of about 11%.

Colombo

My trip to Colombo this time was rather hurried. To make it worse there were meetings scheduled throughout the day. I hardly had the time to explore the city. "Explore SriLanka", which I picked up at the arrival lounge listed a new restaurant "Thambapani" on Duplication Road however incessant rains kept me indoors. I had to skip even my regular stops - Barefoot, Lanka Ceramics, Paradise Road. I had Shashsi Tharoor's, Bookless in Baghdad for company.

"Bookless in Baghdad" is a collections of essays and personal reflections of Shashi Tharoor on matters literary, several of which have been published in newspapers like The Hindu and New York Times in the past.

The book gives has an excellent start and the prose is fluid, spiced with anecdotes, quotes, humour and unconsciously a bit of trivia. Tharoor's writing is light as he approaches each essay without prejudice; difficult for someone who is a writer and a reviewer of books himself. He refers to his own works - The Great Indian Novel, Show Business, Riot in several of these essays, the motivation for writing them and the reviews each of them have received. However these have been without literary blasphemy, which usually creeps in when an author talks or writes about his own work.

There is an essay for Wodehouse fans aptly titled "Right Ho, Sahib" capturing the Author's fascination for the master from his days in College at the prestigious St. Stephens, Delhi. The pleasure he derived from reading the Masters oeuvre is evident from the casual introspection of his collegiate days as a member of the Wodehouse club and his near attempt to write a letter to the Master himself.

In one of the essays the Author dismisses Nirad C Chaudri's Anglophone affiliation by dissecting the Autobiography of an unknown Indian (pun intended) and mocks his xenolatrous allegiance. "The committed Poet" is about the Spanish diplomat and Nobel Prize winning Litterateur Pablo Neruda. I must mention the piece on Sir Naipaul is particularly illuminating and goes on to trace Sir Vido's humble beginnings and the days in Oxford, particularly the correspondence between Sir Vido and his fond Pa, as he used to call his father. Salman Rushdie makes his appearance in several essays and the Authors description of Rushdie's first public appearance after emerging from hiding lets you relive the moment. Very interesting though is the Author's take on Indianness and his attempt to answer the question, Who is an Indian? The author traces the roots of the INC and systematically demolishes the statements of several politicians and takes pride in the rich diversity of our Rashtra. This critical commentary has me convinced, and has helped change my perspective on what is true nationalism while it has also made me realise there are still others waiting to be educated on this.

I must emphasis "Illiteracy in America", a shocking account of how 50 million Americans cannot read or comprehend things above the 8th grade level. What that means is that, these people don't possess the comprehension ability to understand the instructions for an antidote on an ordinary can of cockroach poison. Astonishing? Worse, to quote the author functionally illiterate which means they don’t have the ability to understand traffic signs or product labels. which makes these people unequipped for life in a modern society. And these it seem exist predominantly in the inner cities. All in a country with a single major language. Compare this with a developing nation like ours with 1200 officially recognised languages and about 22,000 dialects, we seem to be better off with the illiteracy being relegated to the rural areas. Paradoxically the following essay 81% of Americans feel that they should write a book! In several essays the theme is to portray India and its culture and dispel the western notion of India being a chaotic, poor and sluggish country though I am unsure if the Author set out to achieve this.

There is a hilarious account of the making of 'Show Business" by a Blondie Singh who called the Author from his bath tub. I cant imagine someone can have the arrogance of calling an Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations during his ablations. So Blondie Singh, Mr. Bikram Singh to some and BJ (no mischievous smiles please!) to several others was excited and wanted to make a movie of the novel "Show Business" after the deal was signed Blondie showed the first draft of the screenplay - it was almost the entire novel, verbatim! The final movie had the credits "Lyrics by Shashi Tharoor"!

The book is an eclectic mix of Indian culture, Authors, Book Bazaars, about reading, writing and reviewing and is a delightful read especially in moments of solitude. Once you are done with the book you are likely to add items to your reading lists. I for sure did. I hope to read this book again in a few months.

Current Reads

Picked this up at the Landmark sale along with several other books last week. Onto the 4th chapter. Dylan Jones describes his adolescent years with LP's and Cassettes and his graduation to the MP3 era with an iPOD. As an ardent music fan with a collection of over 200 cassettes and an equal number of CD's its not very difficult to understand his plight. I got my 80GB iPOD a little over 6 months back, Only last week did I manage to complete loading all my CD tracks onto this. A good read if you grew up listening to Brian Ferry, Fleetwood Mac, Floyd...etc. The book has some interesting bits of Trivia LP : Longer Programming, iPOD : Internet Portable Object Device. The book is loaded with Dylan's experiences with alternate chapters covering the iPOD. Wish Dylan had a much wider coverage of the iPOD and kept his experiences to a bare minimum.

If you own an iPOD guess you should download the iPOD book and iPOD buyers guide from iLounge

Podcast

I was thrilled to get my first portable MP3 player - a 5G Apple iPod Video. I was in Colombo when the iPod arrived, sent across by a generous old colleague who's yet to collect the money. I have been told that several other players like iRiver, Creative Zen (http://www.cnet.com/) etc have the same capabilities as the iPod, but then the iPod does have real killer looks and a generous dose of snob value.

The iPod or any other portable digital media player is a fabulous device, besides listening to my favourite Jazz I can store photos, podcasts and video clips downloaded from You Tube. I can also put it to several other uses like use it as an external hard disk. All said its the podcast feature that really caught my attention. Its probably the best utility value you can get from any portable digital media player.

A podcast is a digital media file, usually in the MP3 format, distributed over the internet using syndicated feeds such as RSS and ATOM. In short people publish these media files so that they are available for download to anybody. A typical podcast is Ram Charan speaking on leadership available for download at the Harvard Business School Publishing (http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/). Adam Curry (http://www.dailysourcecode.com/), the video jockey on MTV was the first to create a podcast, strange as it may seem he is not the inventor of the podcasting technology, Kevin Marks a software engineer at Google was the contributor to the podcasting technologies like iPodder, now called Juice and available for download at Source Forge, which started the Podcasting revoution.

There are podcasts on every conceivable subject on the internet, Music being the most popular followed by Comedy, Podcasting, News etc. Apple’s itunes store is probably the best with its cool user interface. Other sites to download good podcasts are The Podcast Directory (http://www.podcast.net/); Yahoo Podcasts (http://podcasts.yahoo.com/); Podcast Alley (http://www.podcastalley.com/); IndiePodder (http://www.indiepodder.org/) and GarageBand (http://www.garageband.com/). Most Podcasts are free and you’ll need a lot of space on your digital media player to accommodate all of them.

To subscribe and download podcasts you’ll need an aggregator like Juice and a media player. Some players like Apple’s iTunes have built in podcast features. Once you have this installed you can subscribe to several thousands of podcasts as they are published and these get downloaded invisibly onto your computer. You can then sync your media player to load these podcasts so that they are available to you when you are on the go. So how’s it different from any other audio file? Well the power of podcasts is that you can subscribe to the feeds and as and when a new audio file is published the aggregator will download it for you. Imagine this. You have enrolled into a long distance learning program and you are expected to take 20 hours of lessons every week. Before the advent of internet you’ll have to wait for the post man to deliver the printed lessons. In the age of the internet you’ll have to wait for an email so that you can log-in to the univ’s site and listen to the audio files. In podcasting the aggregator regularly monitors the RSS feeds and downloads any recently published audio lessons.

To create a Professional quality Podcast you’ll need to record the audio in MP3 format using the software available from Garage Band (http://www.garageband.com/), Sound Forge’s Audio Studio or Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/). Having recorded your piece, You’ll have to then create an RSS feed that points to these files and publish it as a podcast on your website. A RSS file is an XML file with directions for aggregators. You can use MyRSSCreator (http://www.myrsscreator.com/) or Podcast RSS feed Generator (http://www.tdscripts.com/webmaster_utilities/podcast-generator.php) to create the RSS file. Use an FTP software like Mozilla FireFox’s extension FireFTP to upload the MP3 and RSS onto your server. Use an RSS validator like http://rss.scripting.com/ or http://validator.w3.org/ to validate your RSS and you are done. You’ll probably want to advertise your Podcast in the sites that I have mentioned above or to keep it simple email your friends telling them about the new craze that’s got onto you.
But then why would you want to create a podcast? You might be the professor in the long distance education program that I mentioned above; Your are a budding musician and have just recorded your first Ghazal and want to offer it to potential fans; You are a highly paid management guru, you just spoke at a seminar and your audience wants the complete recording of the speech; You are a techno lunatic, you want to tell the whole world on the conspiracy surrounding Indian Cricket or you just want to do it for fun, whatever maybe the reason Podcasting is the new broadcasting medium.

Celebration

Been busy on an interesting project, implementing our flagship product for one of the non-banking fianancial companies in India. Incidently these guys have partnered with the largest bank in South East Asia. After 120 days (and sleepless nights!) we transitioned to a production environment and achieved a"Go Live" on 15th May 2006. Champagne (admit it was sparkling wine!) and celebration followed that evening.