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August 2009 - Posts
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Read
in The Hindu few days back about an exhibition with display of British era items
in Lalit Kala Academy, Greams Road Chennai – this place is near the Greams Road-Pantheon
Road traffic signal, few hundred metres away from Apollo Hospital. The exhibition
(free entry) which runs till tomorrow (August 30) features a collection of what the
British have left behind – furniture, personalities and their ideas. The items in
display are from private collection of Steve Borgia (chairman and managing director
of INDeco Hotels). Today I took my son in the morning and we spent a good part
of a hour looking at the various items on display. The organizers have done a fine
job of neatly categorizing items, clear sign boards for every item, provided handy
cards which explained the items and had many volunteers who were happy to explain
the significance of the items on display.
The exhibition had quite a collection of interesting items – Twin blade fan (first
in this part of the world), first metal lunch box, a old coin-based shooting game
for kids, picnic set, camera, printing press and more. See the entire
photo album here that I took today. Some of the items (like the Fridge which runs
on Kerosene oil) I had seen earlier in their Swamimalai
resort during my vacation there few years back.
While seeing the display, I was called to talk in Tamil for 30-seconds about the exhibition
by Big FM Radio, which I did. Overall, an interesting
hour spent, please take your kids to it.
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Free is
the new book by Wired Editor “Chris Anderson”. His earlier book “Long
Tail” was an acclaimed work that is quoted in almost every conversation with the
word “Web” in it over last few years. This book’s title though had the potential
to capture the same level of imagination, unfortunately doesn’t.
First, Chris Anderson should be congratulated for handling such a controversial topic
like “Free”. Each of us have our own understanding of the word, how it works, whether
it works or not and so on. In trying to answer these questions he has done a good
job. He writes his findings on “Free” from history, culture, marketing to economics.
He does a great job of explaining how “Free” became popular in modern days, its power
and potential. He does a fine job of categorizing various near-zero business models
and how they work with examples. He clearly disambiguates English word “Free” into
“Gratis” (free of charge) and “Libre” (freedom), often people confuse between the
two, especially in the software world. His re-quote of “Information wants to be free”
is certainly true and thought-provoking.
Where he falls flat is in his generalizations and in his examples of success stories.
For examples he repeatedly points only to Google and in few cases of open source software
& Web 2.0. I am unable to shake off the feeling (of-course unfounded) the book
could a PR campaign sponsored by the Mountain
view chocolate factory (thanks Register UK for the term) Google. For me, Google
certainly is not the epitome of “Free”, it makes its money by selling advertisements
for hard-cash and that’s not free. Wikipedia and FireFox would have been more befitting
candidates, but probably Chris Anderson felt obligated to Google – as he was using
their free Google Docs to write this book (as he says himself). To be fair to
the author, he does quote in two places where Microsoft offers “Free” through its
BizSpark program and Internet Explorer. I also fail to understand how he says Apple
through its iPod wants content to be free so that it gets paid for the device. iTunes
through the sales made from iPod and iPhone are the big money earners for Apple and
it is not free!
The other area where I disagree with him is on what seems to be his attempt at equating
“Piracy” to “Free”. “Piracy” is stealing, plain and simple. Though many of us may
be guilty of the crime (knowingly or unknowingly) to various degree, it can’t be praised
or supported. If in China music piracy is rampant, then it is the mistake of pricing,
distribution and education. It is certainly not that people there will not buy Music.
If Hulu.com and CBS.com today are making some money out of their advertisement driven
site it is because the money from advertisements comes to the producers who made the
shows, not to the pirates and other video sharing sites. If everyone in the world
moves to “Pirated” version of watching TV shows from YouTube, then soon there will
be no new professional TV shows to watch. Google too is very much aware of this threat,
that’s why it is trying
hard to woo producers into building legal channels for them on its site and share
revenue with them. The real question is whether this money alone will be sufficient
for producers to compensate for their investments. Even in the example the author
begins his book, MontyPython group deciding to put their clips legally free in YouTube
– they too made their money by selling legal versions of their CDs and DVDs. If their
entire collection is made “free” in YouTube HD then how will they survive to make
new episodes. The author leaves us with many of these questions unanswered.
A disclosure: I listened to the Audio book (unabridged) version that was offered free
of charge by Wired
from here. The e-book download seems to be time-limited (for a month and that’s
over) and geography limited (US only) from
here. Though I got the entire book free as an audio book, this limited free distribution
of the e-book seems to be more a 20th century free, than the 21st century free that
the author preaches throughout the book. He should have known better, he says repeatedly
that “Free” is the most powerful marketing tool ever invented and he should have known
to handle it with better for his book.
My recommendation: If you are in the Internet/Software business then this book is
a must read, but for others you may want to think twice before opening your wallet
to buy it. You may want to listen to the free
audio book like I did :-)
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I have written in the past about lack
of Tamil unicode rendering support in all popular smartphones (iPhone,
Windows Mobile, Nokia). This week one of my colleague who uses a Windows Mobile 6.0
(HTC branded) phone showed me SkyFire browser.
SkyFire is a free mobile browser that uses a proprietary proxy server technology to
encode all Web contents (Text, Images, Videos, Flash, Silverlight) at their server
that gets rendered in the Mobile client. Because of this technology the individual
device limitations don’t affect their ability to render any language.
(Mobile IE not able to render Unicode Tamil)
 
(Windows Mobile running Skyfire displaying fine Unicode Tamil web pages)
SkyFire is a great technology and seeing Tamil being rendering seamlessly makes me
happy. But I am sceptical on the success of SkyFire – First, Mobile devices processing
power are increasing every day to support iPhone Safari like true desktop browsers
itself without need of a proxy server; Second, I don’t see a viable revenue model
on how SkyFire will make money to run the operations especially the high server costs.
Nevertheless a cool technology for now. If you have a Windows Mobile give it a try,
better than waiting for IE 6.0 in Windows Mobile or WM 7.0 :-)
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Though we have done lot of Microsoft SharePoint projects, I find it difficult to give
a single answer to everyone for the question on “What is SharePoint?”. Depending on
who (their job role) is asking the question and for what they are asking it, the answer
for the question “What is SharePoint” varies. It is different things for different
people. One thing is sure – it has been a very successful product franchise for Microsoft
and has been the fastest growing Billion Dollar business for Microsoft.
From a technology perspective it provides Content Management, Document Management,
Blogs, Wiki, Rights Management, Workflow, Forms and data capture, Search, a limited
RAD (Rapid Application Development) framework and more.
The Microsoft’s
site for SharePoint doesn’t make answering this question any easier, it says “Microsoft
Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can
help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management
and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing
across boundaries for better business insight”. After few words my head has started
to spin - this definition is nothing but a boring soup of all possible technology
terms that Microsoft has managed to find. This didn’t help, so let us throw it outside
the window.
Till now the elevator pitch for SharePoint I have managed to come up with for answering
this has been to say “Connecting People and Information”. This was inspired
by the Microsoft
.NET initial days messaging that vaguely said Microsoft .NET is software for
connecting people, information, systems, and devices. Today I came across this
short video that introduces SharePoint in Plain English, finally
a good job by Microsoft marketing on this.
SharePoint
in Plain English
On a related note, you may be interested to watch this sneak peek video on the upcoming
release of SharePoint, SharePoint
2010 here.
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When it comes to Antivirus products I am particular on using few brands only. I look
for three parameters:
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Protection (Detect and protect against latest threats)
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Performance (not slowing the machine)
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Ease of use (normally an antivirus should be invisible)
My first choice for individuals will be K7
Total Security. It is the fastest and the least intrusive Antivirus out there.
In our office, we have been using Symantec
Endpoint protection for several years. Our system administrators love the central
deployment & management of the Antivirus client, updates, etc. from the central
server.
When I got my Windows Vista x64 Desktop few years back, I went with Norton
360 v1.0 as I got a good deal from them. And it offered an online backup of 2GB
free with it, which was an added advantage to have safe backups for ultra important
files. Over the years I have stuck with Norton 360, though at times it has given me problems
with Firewall configuration. And Symantec support has been good, whenever I had
issues I could reach them by email or web site or their online chat. Once there was
a problem at their end, they apologized and gave 30 days extension in the subscription
as a token gesture. My complaint at the product (especially Norton 360 v1.0 and v2.0)
is that at times in one of the 3 PCs I have, it will suddenly refuse to get Live Updates
– a quick uninstall and install will fix it.
Recently I was prompted to update free (subscription is valid) to their new version Norton
360 v3.0 which contains their newly optimized version of their core engine that
greatly improves on its speed and resources utilization. Though Norton was the leader
in protection its sore point was its drag on resources. This new version is supposed
to have improved on that. I downloaded and installed the new version, it did an in-place
upgrade pretty smoothly. I disliked the earlier interface of Norton 360 v2.0, now
in v3.0 they seem to have made it more streamline and configuration settings are easier
to find. Overall I will recommend this product.
In Norton 360 the online backup and how it handles it was always a mystery in v1.0
and v2.0. In v3.0 they have given many interface options to see what is being backed
up, where and when (in fact the UI tabs are named with the same words as shown below).
Using the new interface shown below (accessed from Home->Backup-Backup Details->Manage
Backup sets) I figured out that I had over 3 years of backup taking nearly 5GB of
storage which I can get rid of and reduce the online storage size.
After using the option (Delete previously backed up files) shown in the bottom left
of the screenshot below I realized you can only delete by selecting individual folders
and files; not the entire backup set. I wrote to Symantec support and they promptly
responded back with this option. It turned out even that was less optimal. Accidentally
I discovered that there is an integration of Norton backup to Windows Explorer. You
can use Windows Explorer to navigate to “Computer\Norton Backup Drive\Backups
on Secure Online Storage”. There you can see all the backup sets, you can
right-click and delete the one you don’t want. It takes a bit of time, but it works
and is much easier than the product’s user interface. As always, be careful when you
are deleting backups.
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Reserve Bank of India has been a Banking
Ombudsman programme for a long time, today I was glad to see prominent advertisements
about it in major newspapers with an aim to popularize it. For me, whenever I
had grievances and send them a fax threatening them to take it to RBI Ombudsman,
they seem to act with more care. In general, I feel RBI is doing a fabuluous job in
protecting Indian consumers rights, whether it is on Don’t
Call Registry or Credit
Card online additional protection and on many of the other items.
So for what items you can approach RBI Ombudsman (more
details in RBI website here), here is a short list:
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Your bank fail to adhere to the written promises it made
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Your bank fail to disclose up-front the important terms and conditions while selling
a product/financial service
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Your bank didn’t communicate clearly about rates and charges
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Your bank not adhering to RBI guidelines or Banking Codes and Standards Board of India
So what you have to do if any of the above happens to you. First write to your bank,
if they don’t respond or fix the issue by one month, you can approach RBI
ombudsman through letter, fax or email.
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