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We all like to have good wireless signal throughout our house, so that we can freely
roam between the rooms and use our iPhones or Laptops. But if you live in multi-storied
concrete houses (like the one’s we have in India) then getting good signal strength
with one Wireless Access Point will be a challenge.
In my case, I have Broadband connections (one from Airtel and a manual failover from
BSNL) terminating in my study room in first floor. A NETGEAR
Wireless Router connects to Airtel Modem and acts as the firewall. A 8 port Ethernet
Switch connected to the NETGEAR Router and makes more LAN ports available. Two desktop
PCs in the same room are connected through wire (CAT-6) to the Ethernet switch, apart
from wired connections from other bedrooms (2 in each floor) and living rooms (1 in
each floor) in the house. The two XBOX 360s that we (primarily) use as Media Center
Extenders are in the two bedrooms (1 in each floor) connected through Wire. I get
good signal strength if I am in rooms that are near to the Study, but as I move away
and go to my bedroom, the signal drops to zero at one point where there are two solid
wooden doors between the Wireless Router and the Mobile Device.
The solution I figured will be to have one wireless access point installed in my bedroom,
connect it via the wired connection coming from Study, then connect the XBOX 360 in
the room to the Wireless AP. When I looked around in the shops, I found only Wireless
Routers, no plain Wireless Access Points – but in this case I don’t need Routing or
Firewall. Just a Wireless Access Point will do, as connection to the Airtel Modem,
Firewall, etc will be provided by the NETGEAR Router. Finally, I bought a wireless
router itself (LINKSYS
WRT54GH) from CROMA for around Rs.2500. Initially I tried to connect the wire
from Study Room to the Internet Port in LINKSYS Router, then tried out different settings
in the web console. Nothing worked. After few trial and error I figured how to get
this done.
Steps to do in the second Wireless Router (Linksys) (In my case the
Linksys router in my bedroom, first one being the NETGEAR Router in my study Room):
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Connect the wired connection from the Study Room (NETGEAR Router which acts as the
primary gateway for my house) to one of the 4 Ethernet (LAN) ports
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Connect the XBOX 360 console to one of the other ports in the same LINKSYS Router
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Leave the Internet port in Linksys Router to be empty
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Turn off firewall & DHCP server in the Linksys Router
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Give it a static IP, Configure Gateway and DNS to be the IP address of the NETGEAR
Router
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Configured the wireless settings with a SSID and a WPA2-PERSONAL passcode
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Add the new wireless access point and the passcode in your iPhone, mobile phones and
Laptops
That’s all. Voila!. Now my XBOX 360 is able to connect to the PCs in the house, go
to the Internet; I get excellent signal in my iPhone whether I am in my bedroom or
study room or any place in first floor. This way I have avoided using cellular network
and hence save on the costs on data transfer. Now I am thinking of a third access
point in the ground floor so that I can cover all the areas in my house with a Wi-Fi
umbrella!
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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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All of us get SPAMs all the time and most of us feel frustrated as there is little
we can do to stop it other than marking the email as Junk/SPAM in your email reader
(Outlook/Thunderbird/GMail/Hotmail). However, this doesn't stop the source of SPAM
but just moves the message to a Junk folder in your storage - basically you still
get the SPAM message. If you are running your own mail server, you pay for the traffic
consumed by SPAM which can as high as 70-80% in some cases. Adding to this, some SPAM
sources manage to keep sending your Junk mails even if you block it, as they keep
changing the source email IDs and servers.
The next step is to get into the hood of the email message and find the source ISP
that is used for sending the SPAM and then complain directly to the ISP webmaster.
Most of the ISPs take these seriously and shut down when they see number of complaints
against a server(s). Doing this though requires good understanding of TCP/IP technologies
(method
to do this is outlined here) making it out of reach for most users. That's where
this website (SPAMCOP) comes
in, SpamCop offers a service (accessible after free registration) to copy 'n' paste
the SPAM email. Once this is done they analyse the email and deduct the source ISP
and then send a complained message automatically to the ISP webmaster.
Recently I posted a complained for a newsletter that I kept getting from a Online
Health magazine. The newsletter didn't have an Unsubscribe link, so I had to send
a request email to the sender. Even after a month I continued to get the newsletter.
I posted a complained against them in SpamCop and then send them an email saying that
I have done this and next step I will directly complain to their ISP. This worked,
the next day I got an email from the Marketing Manager saying they have removed my
email ID.
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The recent issue of IEEE ITPro Magazine (July/August 2008) had carried a very interesting
Editorial. It raised the question "A Moving Target: Try to Define the IT Workforce",
where it pointed that job titles in IT industry were being invented and qualifications
were shifting daily. It uses the US
Bureau of Labor's List of IT Jobs and arrives at a suggestion of a short list
of 3 distinct "identities" in IT today:
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computer scientist
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software engineer, and
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IT Professional
In the above list probably it is easier to understand "IT Professionals" as a broad
designation. And the other two as niches within that.
The authors Keith W.Miller and Jeffrey Voas clarifies those two roles in detail as
"Both software engineer(s) and computer scientist(s) think of software artifacts
as means to ends, but those ends are distinctive. A computer scientists sees the artifact
as an object of study, a source of experiments and data to analyze. A software
engineer sees the artifact as a tool to accomplish a customer goal, a method to solve
a practical problem. Both could be interested in exactly the same piece of software
- perhaps even the same aspect of it - but their goals will likely be quite different".
You can read the full article from here (for short time only unless you are a member)
from IEEE
IT PRO - JULY/AUGUST 2008
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The recent issue of IEEE ITPro Magazine (July/August 2008) had carried a very interesting
Editorial. It raised the question "A Moving Target: Try to Define the IT Workforce",
where it pointed that job titles in IT industry were being invented and qualifications
were shifting daily. It uses the US
Bureau of Labor's List of IT Jobs and arrives at a suggestion of a short list
of 3 distinct "identities" in IT today:
-
computer scientist
-
software engineer, and
-
IT Professional
In the above list probably it is easier to understand "IT Professionals" as a broad
designation. And the other two as niches within that.
The authors Keith W.Miller and Jeffrey Voas clarifies those two roles in detail as
"Both software engineer(s) and computer scientist(s) think of software artifacts
as means to ends, but those ends are distinctive. A computer scientists sees the artifact
as an object of study, a source of experiments and data to analyze. A software
engineer sees the artifact as a tool to accomplish a customer goal, a method to solve
a practical problem. Both could be interested in exactly the same piece of software
- perhaps even the same aspect of it - but their goals will likely be quite different".
You can read the full article from here (for short time only unless you are a member)
from IEEE
IT PRO - JULY/AUGUST 2008
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According to a recent
release from market research firm Gartner where it listed the Top 10 disruptive
technologies it believes will reshape between 2008-2012:
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Multicore and hybrid processors
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Virtualisation and fabric computing
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Social networks and social software
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Cloud computing and cloud/Web platforms
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Web mashups
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User Interface
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Ubiquitous computing
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Contextual computing
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Augmented reality
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Semantics
 When
I see a list like this with overused and often repeated items like Multicore and Social
Networking (though both of them are important technologies in the next 5 years),
I get a feeling they overshadow the others. If you ask me for one technology that
is under-hyped from this list but most important it will be "Contextual
Computing".
I don't know Gartner's definition of this term, but when I think of "Contextual
Computing" and its possibilities it is mind boggling - sky is definitely the
limit with this. Contextual Computing is applicable in both enterprise and in consumer
facing applications. Particularly in the consumer space it is all about catering to
the basic human emotion of wanting to be listened and get a feeling of being cared
for. Present day examples of this can be seen (roughly) in the Microsoft Office
2007 Ribbon user interface or more clearly in Amazon's
recommendations feature. Even these two are just scratching the surface. All of today's
software (Internet/Enterprise) applications are mostly designed for doing a single
task at a time with the user interface and workflow almost linear, but in real world
we are never linear, our thoughts are always in parallel running various tasks each
triggered by the context at that time. This is were I feel "Contextual Computing"
can make a great impact. For realizing the true potential of this the software development
tools and all the other 9 technologies listed above have to evolve greatly. When computer
scientists understand how to implement this, only then we will harness the benefits
of the digital world to the fullest.
What are your thoughts on this , post your comments
here.
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In the Forbes Asia June 16, 2008 issue I came across these interesting facts about
Adobe (the makers of Photoshop and Flash).
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According to Adobe, Flash Player is the most widely available software on Earth (Is
it?)
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For every 1000 users of free Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Acrobat Reader, there is
a Web Programmer or Graphic Designer behind creating the content
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80% of Creative Professionals or 2.6 Million people use Adobe's Creative Suite
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Adobe has 1 Million developers using its products compared 4 Million Software developers
using Microsoft .NET Tools
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The other day on the Internet I saw the above photos of the next version of One Laptop
Per Child Program. What struck me very interesting was the absence of Keyboard (hence
absence of mechanical failures) and the ability for two children to share it at the
same time - very valuable in developing countries and for play. You have a touch-screen
that works as a keyboard - hopefully doing Non-English language with this Virtual
Keyboard will be supported and native.
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The original blog post from which I took the above chart is from
here. It talks about how any one at any age with learning and practice can become
an Expert. A nice piece to read and think about.
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About 18 months back I was surprised to find a convenient checking-in
process done by Kingfisher (Yes, I know that this was the only item I am in praise
of an airline other than my favourite Jet Airways). It is by what they call "Roving
Agents" who are airline staff roaming around near the entrance and checking counters.
If you just have a hand baggage they check you right there with the help of a PDA
and print your boarding pass as well (with the printer connected to the hip belt).
I noticed the PDA they use was a Windows CE based Symbol Technologies device, but
I was interested in knowing the entire solution story.
In an article that came in CIO India Magazine's supplement "10 Studies in Innovation"
I saw the article "Terminal
Velocity" which described this solution in detail. The Roving Agent piggybacks
on the Wi-fi infrastructure available at airports. Agents carry PDAs (MC-70 from Symbol
Technologies) that run a client application connected to the host system. The PDA
is also connected to a portable thermal printer (Cameo-3 from Zebra Technologies)
via Bluetooth. Read
the entire article here.
Agreed that this solution is less appealing now than 18 months before. With most of
the airlines allowing you to print your boarding pass online itself it makes Roving
Agents less compelling, but from a technology perspective this is a good case study.
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In the recent months there has been good improvements in Virtual Earth's Birds eye
view. One of the reasons behind them is the camera
used for these excellent high resolution images is Ultracamx.
UltracamX is from a company (Vexcel) Microsoft acquired some time back. It supports
very large image format available (216 megapixels: 14,430 pixels across track; 9,420
pixels along track) which means they do fewer flights to capture images. It has something
like 13 CCD Arrays, each of them controlled by a dedicated CPU and instance of Windows
CE Embedded and a 14th CPU for overall control.
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In the recent months there has been good improvements in Virtual
Earth's Birds eye view. One of the reasons this was possible was due to new camera
used for these excellent high resolution images - Ultracamx.
UltracamX is from a company (Vexcel) Microsoft acquired some time back. It supports
very large image format available (216 megapixels: 14,430 pixels across track; 9,420
pixels along track) which means they do fewer flights to capture images. It has something
like 13 CCD Arrays, each of them controlled by a dedicated CPU and instance of Windows
CE Embedded and a 14th CPU for overall control.
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In the corridors of Mix '08, Scott Hanselman (PM, Microsoft and Ex-Regional Director)
got hold of me & my fellow Regional Director (Delhi) Vinod Unny for an Interview.
The topic was on "Outsourcing"
and how it affects both sides of the world - we enjoyed talking on this hotly debated
topic, hear it out and post your comments below.
Full Interview:
AAC
Audiobook (iPod) | MP3
Full Show | WMA
Full Show |WMA
Low-Fi
Hanselminutes is a weekly audio talk show with noted web developer and technologist
Scott Hanselman and hosted by Carl Franklin. Scott discusses utilities and tools,
gives practical how-to advice, and discusses ASP.NET or Windows issues and workarounds.
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Early
this week Apple released their Safari
browser for Windows. Safari is a neat, standards compliant web browser and I feel
its arrival for Windows is definitely an important step. You might think the usefulness
or the need for yet another browser. Look at it this way - with Web becoming ever
more intervened with our lifes, innovation in the browser space is super critical.
Personally, I love Internet Explorer and I think IE 8.0 will be a technically advanced
browser with dominant market share, but still we cannot leave the fate of web to just
two companies - Microsoft & Mozilla. Recently AOL closed for good Netscape, of
course Netscape has in real terms died several years back itself. This leaves us with
only one other credible competition which is from Opera but Opera never managed to
garner any significant user base in the PC. So Apple coming in to this space should
be welcomed.
While we welcome Apple, their entry has not been without controversies. Mozilla
CEO John Lilly has taken serious objections to Apple offering the new browser
to Windows users via Apple Software Update which is part of iTunes & QuickTime
Player. This means several millions of iTunes & QuickTime Player users will without
there knowledge get Safari, there by increasing the surface area of attacks on their
PC. I agree 100% with the objections raised by Mozilla CEO on this that it undermines
the trust users will have on software. Adding on to this, is Apple's licensing terms
for Safari which permits you to install this only on "a single Apple-labeled computer
at a time". This is weird considering Apple never makes or sells any Windows PC, so
you will never get a legal way to install Safari. While Register
in UK and many in blogosphere are making fun of this, I guess this is more a goof-up
and a human error (copy and paste problem) from Apple's legal team and sure to be
corrected out in days.
Finally, when I tried to install Safari in Vista x64 I get the following file corrupt
error. I tried downloading half-a-dozen times from IE, Firefox, FDM - same error.
It installs fine in a Windows XP x86 machine. Seems Apple has some more work to do.
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If your laptop like mine is part of a domain, then updates are likely to be controlled
by your IT Team. In our office, our IT team uses WSUS to
download the updates locally, test them on local machines and then approve the updates
for general consumption across the organization. I am one of the few in the office
to use Windows Vista, so these updates are approved at the last and I have to wait.
More so, ultimate extras don't flow correctly through WSUS. Since they are controlled
by WSUS, even if I am a local system administrator I cannot directly run Windows Update
locally or go to Microsoft Update and get updates.
This week one of my IT Engineer gave me a tip. It was to login locally to the machine,
using a local machine user name and then use Windows Update. I used it and it worked
perfectly. Please be warned that doing updates this way, may not be supported by your
IT Team!
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