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I remember when Windows 95, the themes (desktop wallpaper, icon packs and sounds)
were a craze. You had a whole load of beautiful themes distributed by Microsoft and
more by third parties. But over the years the interest for themes dropped, mainly
due to the inertia associated with change and we all became used to the standard dull
defaults. Windows
Vista was the worst offender in this with the most boring set of themes ever shipped
by a version of Windows – it took the remaining charm out of themes.
Now with Windows 7, Microsoft seems to have turned attention to making Themes interesting
once again. The other day I noticed two new theme sets online, one titled “India”
and other “Colors
of India” – both showing the essence of India very nicely. Later I found more
beautiful themes, like the Bing’s
Best for Japan and more.
If you are still using default theme, it is time you changed it. All it takes is a
right-click on the Desktop in your Windows 7, select Personalize, then clicking on
“Get
More themes online”. And remember to download Themes only from Microsoft.com website
for safety.
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Background: Tomorrow marks the beginning of the World
Classical Tamil Conference in Kovai and with it the Ninth “Tamil
Internet Conference” (TI2010) organized by INFITT. I am honoured to be the Chair
of INFITT for this term and to be part of the TI2010 organizing committee. Tonight
we wanted to send emails to participants and speakers (who may not have got the information
yet) of TI2010, informing them about the Hotel and the Room Number they are booked
in Coimbatore. And this we had to do in next few hours (it was already 11.50PM when
we started) and I am in my Hotel Room along with my good friend and INFITT Member Badri
Seshadri who is being a great help in running TI2010 at the venue.
Problem: We had the entire data in a MS Excel spread sheet (as shown
below). Each row had information unique to an individual along with their email ID.
Initially we thought of sending the emails manually - open GMail, compose new message,
cut and paste the information, repeat it 220 times. We quickly realized this is not
tenable within the time we had, and if we have to catch some sleep, we have to automate
this. After doing some Web searches, I remembered that MS Word Mail-Merge may be able
to help us.
Solution: Turns out MS Word with Outlook has a feature to send customized
email to multiple people with the data coming from Outlook contacts, Excel or any
relational database that can be connected to. The feature is called “Mail Merge”,
the same feature that many of us have used in MS Word to print customized letters
or print labels. Badri had in his laptop MS Word 2002, but didn’t have Outlook configured,
so the “Mail Merge” feature didn’t show up “Send by Email” option in his laptop. I
had in my laptop MS Word & Outlook 2010, but I had my official email ID configured,
and for obvious reasons I didn’t want 220 emails going from my official email. I removed
my official email and instead configured my Hotmail.com email ID with MS Outlook 2010
(this required downloading and installing Outlook
Hotmail Connect 32-bit). Then I used the “Step by Step” wizard for Mail Merge
in MS Word 2010 - configured the data from MS Excel, selected the columns, created
an email template and finally previewing the output. All this initial research and
setting up took about 30-40 minutes.
After which we started sending out the emails in blocks of roughly 50 emails (I wanted
to be nice with Hotmail SPAM filters). To our surprise we completed sending out 220
customized emails in the next 20-30 minutes. And all this was on a “Fair” Wi-Fi connection
provided by the hotel where I was staying.
Conclusion: As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. Without
the urgency we were in, I may not have explored or learned this nice feature of “Mail
Merge” for emails in MS Word, instead would have used an online service for sending
out bulk mails or worst-case written a small application in VB.NET!
References and step-by-step instructions:
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How to use mail merge
to create e-mail messages in Word
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How
to Create and Send a Word 2010 Mail Merge E-Mail
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Mail
Merge: How to send a personalized e-mail to many people at once
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From TechEd India 1999, I have been speaking every year the event has happened. This
year I presented on “Your Data on Cloud – Windows Azure Storage”. I was told this
year TechEd India 2010 attracted several thousand attendees and nearly 21 technical
tracks. Thank you all who attended my talk on Day 3, here you can download the Slide
Deck (Your Data on Cloud –Azure Storage) I used for this talk.
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As one of the Windows 7 Beta testers, about a week back I received a commemorative
edition of Windows
7 Ultimate DVD. It was special with a nice “Thank You” message signed by Microsoft
CEO Mr.Steve Ballmer.
In general I liked Windows Vista - its engineering improvements on Security, Stability,
Aero Glass & many other features; except for its slow boot-up and performance
of routine file management tasks. Microsoft made a wise move of not introducing any
major kernel level changes for Windows 7 from Vista, instead concentrating on improving
all round performance. I have been using Windows 7 for last few months in both my
MacBook Air (MBA) & in my Desktop (Quad Core, 64-bit, 8GB RAM) and I love it.
Windows 7 simply rocks in my MBA that I have completely removed Mac OS X and use only
Windows.
Windows 7 – the best Windows OS ever made!
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It is my birthday today (I am not telling how old I am) and I am in Cologne, Germany
attending Tamil Internet Conference
2009 away from my family & friends, missing the gifts they might have given
me :-)
Anyways, Mr.Steve Ballmer didn’t disappoint me. He has given me a wonderful gift –
he has released Windows 7 today. No doubt Windows 7 is getting raving reviews, it
got released on my birthday!. On a serious note, I have been using Windows 7 for almost
two months now in my laptop (Apple MacBook Air) and my Quad-Core x64 Desktop and it
is simply the best OS I have ever used in last two decades. I like its fast boot,
fast response time for common tasks, lovely wallpapers/background, Aero effect, quick
search, easy to find devices/printers applet and libraries.
And I love those Windows 7 commercials featuring the cute little girl – Kylie, don’t
miss those videos
here.
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One of my fellow Microsoft Regional
Director recently gave me this link to a talk by David
Chappell given in Dutch DevDays (of course the talk is in English, otherwise I
would not have understood to repost here). A little history here - I first came to
know about David
Chappell from his legendary book Understanding
ActiveX and OLE. Before this book (released in 1996)
the more I read on Microsoft OLE from books like Inside COM and Inside OLE, the more
I got confused (purely due to my lack of my experience with advanced C++). Instead
Chappell’s book on the subject made OLE/COM approachable to every Software Engineer
and finally I could understand it. Chappell followed this home run with his other
book Understand
.NET, which introduced and explained then the new .NET platform in the
finest fashion.
Coming back to the subject of this post, so when I got this link to listen to David
Chappell talking on Application Platform, I immediately spent the next 60 minutes
on it. If you are involved with Application Platform in any manner then I recommend
you see this video too.
In this video Chappell in brief goes through the history of Application Platform,
why they came into being, the war between Microsoft and Java on dominating
this trend and the current status in his view with Java world fragmenting. He then
goes on to talk about why he thinks SOA (Software Oriented Application/Architecture) has
failed in general – I concur on his observations that most of the time it is not about
technology, it is about People, Power and Money. Traditionally in large businesses “Data”
sharing between departments is achievable but “Application” sharing is just
not practical and unfortunately that is what SOA vendors kept pushing. Finally he
provides a model of cloud platform and an excellent comparison between the various
vendor’s cloud offerings – Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2, Google App Engine,
SalesForce, Oracle & IBM.
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Today in one of the groups I am a member, there was a question on the cost benefits
of Windows 7 over Windows XP. In these recessionary times, everything is about cost
and RoI. No CIO is interested to spend on an upgrade just for technology sake. With
that background this was an interesting question, so I set out to answer him, which
I have reproduced below.
The first answer for such a question is that any new version of any software product
improves “productivity” by XY%, where XY are dependent on how you feel
on that day.
Jokes apart, in my opinion I think the upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7 saves
cost by the following:
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Productivity, certainly. Common tasks are easier and faster. For example with the
built-in Windows Search, finding documents really saves you time. And for techies
tasks like IPConfig /Renew can be done from GUI itself
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Avoid recreating lost documents. Built in version-control and transaction file-system
in Windows 7 (Vista has this too)
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Avoid bandwidth costs by some Spammers using your Windows XP as a SpamBots or Zombies with
better stateful firewall (Inbound and Outbound) in Windows 7 (Vista has this too)
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Data Theft, Security and reinstall time spend with UAC in Windows 7 (Easier to use
than in Vista)
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Less power consumption through better sleep/hibernate support
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Save time by building web standards Web Applications with built-in Internet Explorer
8.0
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Save time and cost with built-in CD Burning, DVD Maker (Vista has this too)
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My personal favourite is an enhanced System Restore (life saver) and time saved with
fixing a rogue software install (Vista has this too)
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A superb Windows Backup (this alone is worth every dollar of Windows 7). Third party
products purchased separately for Windows XP store in proprietary backup file formats,
where as Windows 7 (as in Vista) uses open
VHD file format. This VHD files can be mounted and read/write natively in Windows
7
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Built-in hardware enhanced virtualization free – Windows Virtual PC, which helps
you to continue to run older applications
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Save time with the more powerful task scheduler (so you don’t need to keep your
machine switched ON or be there to run a program)
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If you are a games developer, Windows 7 saves time by better 3D hardware accelerated
graphics support/DirectX
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Built-in applications like Snipping tool to take screen shots and so on (Vista has
this too)
Microsoft has published a "Windows client features comparison chart" between Windows
XP SP3, Windows Vista and Windows 7 here.
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Few weeks back I decided to repave my Laptop (Macbook
Air) and go with Windows 7 Build 7000 (yes I know in few weeks we will have RC
:-) ). After fixing few issues with drivers and boot camp, I am overall happy. Occasionally
Windows doesn't shut-down gracefully, when it happens you got to force switch-off
(which in MBA means holding the power off button for few seconds till you hear a POP
sound).
The basic installation of the OS (Windows 7) is similar to doing it for Vista using
Boot Camp. You start with Apple Boot Camp CD 1 and proceed from there. My installation
was dual-boot configuration - having both Mac OS and Windows 7. Once Windows is installed
, you continue with the devices installation which can be a little tricky. Below are
few issues I faced before I could get everything working fine.
-
In Mac OS, you can select one of the OS to boot into after a restart. Unfortunately
Mac OS didn't show the Windows 7 installation. Nothing to sweat. When you switch ON
your machine you need to keep holding Alt (option) key till you the
see the boot options. Here you can select Windows 7.
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In Windows 7, initially for some reasons Boot Camp icon didn't show
up in System tray. I had to run it from C:\Program Files\Boot Camp\kbdmgr.exe.
I found it useful to update all Apple software then it seems to have got fixed.
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Audio (Sound card) didn't get its driver installed correctly. MBA
has a Realtek HD Audio, so I went to Realtek site and downloaded the latest Vista
driver (R 2.22) from
here or here.
The site is designed a little counter-intuitive so be patient.
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If some devices like in-built Camera didn't get installed correctly, go to device
manager, update driver and point to the BootCamp CD.
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I have a HP Photosmart C6288 Printer (part of HP Photosmart C6100
series). The default setup from HP will fail to install as it couldn't find either
Windows XP or Vista. To fix this, right-click on the setup program (AIO_CDA_Full_Network_enu.exe).
Then use the "Troubleshoot Compatibility" option or select properties and the compatibility tab:
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Set the compatibility mode to Windows Vista
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Set the privilege level to "Run this program as an administrator"
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I have a Tata
Indicom Plug2Surf USB data card. To install this, first time when you run the
setup, Run it as Administrator. Even then when you run the application it
will not detect the modem. You will need to ignore the application and create yourself
(manually) a dial-up network connection. Customize and follow the instructions from this
blog post (which talks for Huawei card though), skip the portions specific to
Huawei, but it gives the correct username/password phone number to dial, etc.
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For PDF creation, I was using CutePDF which
doesn't work with Windows 7, so I went with PrimoPDF (free).
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For Antivirus, I went with my good
friend Kesavan's - K7
Computing Antivirus which works fine in Windows 7.
>
You should be all set by now, as for me (as seen below) all the devices are working
fine. Eagerly waiting for Windows 7 RC.
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Bill Gates is my inspiration in technology and I love Jerry Seinfeld shows , so what more better than seeing both of them together in a hilarious clip. It doesn't matter it was a commercial from Microsoft - did it? [Watch the low-bandwidth version...
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If you don't have Microsoft Office Outlook in your machine, then
how do you search for people in your organization (assuming they are listed in your
organization's Active Directory)?. With Windows XP you can use the Address Book Applet
to do it. In Windows Vista there is no stand-alone program or shortcut (searching
for People yields nothing useful) to do this. The answer I found out is to run the Network Applet
( Start->Network) and then click on the Search Active Directory button
in the top tool bar.
(The Network Applet in Windows Vista showing Search
Active Directorybutton)
This brings up the applet Find Users, Contacts and Groups. Using this you
can search for People, Computers and Printers (Entire list shown below)
This is fine. But is there a way to get this applet as a shortcut on your desktop?.
Yes, there are two ways to do that:
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This is the easiest, launch the Find Users, Contacts and Groups Applet and
select File->Save Search menu option to do this.
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The second is to create a shortcut from Desktop and type in rundll32.exe dsquery,
OpenQueryWindow. Then save it by giving a name like Find People.
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Few weeks back I had a strange problem, my Vista installation kept saying it is going
to expire in 11 days. If you see the above image of the Control Panel-Systems says Windows
is Activated. So I was puzzled, how can something that is activated can expire.
Strangely the same error kept coming in few other machines in our office.
After several hours with Microsoft PSS on phone, they diagnosed the issue in my machine
to be a time-bombed SP1. Since I was in the beta program of SP1, I had downloaded
the RTM of SP1 from Connect which was time-bombed. The safe way is to get SP1 through
Windows Update or Microsoft Downloads.
I uninstalled this SP1, installed a fresh one from download.microsoft.com; now my
machine is fine. I had trouble with installing Windows
Search 4.0, which also got resolved after the fresh SP1 install.
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Following Microsoft's retiring of Windows XP on 30th June, there has been lot of talk
on the Internet on how Windows XP is better Windows Vista. I love Windows
Vista and I have been using it from Beta days. I will never even dream of going
back to XP. Why?.
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The UAC prompts are certainly annoying, needs to be turned off for a "Developer" machine
which is what I did in my Work PC. I have it ON in my Home PC and Laptop and it works
great in both machines. It gives me confidence that no rogue application can harm
my PC or data
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The Visual Aero interface certainly makes the user experience more pleasing. After
all you are starring at your PC for more than 8 hours a day, so why not have some
pleasing effects in it
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Last and the most important for me is the integrated Search. With the new Windows
Desktop Search 4.0 which made search in Vista faster, I cannot think of going back
to Windows XP. The convenience of searching from Start button or in any Explorer Windows
is a sure productivity gain
If you are wondering why am I talking about Vista here which is not connected
to the title of this post, answer is in the next paragraph.
Microsoft rightfully abandoned the original Windows XP code and started Vista (internally
called Refreshed the code) from the more stable Windows Server 2003 code base (as
reported few years back in WSJ). Now few critics of Vista are asking Microsoft to
scrap Vista code-base and to start a new Windows OS from scratch - something like
basing it on MinWin
kernel. Within "Techies" there is always an urge to do everything from scratch
- this is one of the never ending arguments in Software industry. Is it good to keep
patching a code/application (or) to bite the bullet, scrap the code and rewrite from
scratch. I believe there is no single correct answer for this and it depends on the
parameters. But the question keeps coming up in daily situations. To answer
that read Joel
Spolsky's post back from 2000 - I don't agree with many of his recent posts but
this post is a master-piece and a must read for all developers.
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The other day I wanted to password protect a word document before emailing it for
privacy. I came across 3 different features in Word that are related to security and
it is confusing at first. It took me sometime and few web search to figure them out.
Though the below features can be accessed from the Ribbon they are spread over different
places. It is much easier to access them from one place - which is the Office Button
on the Left Hand Top corner, then selecting the "Prepare" option as shown below.
1. Digital Signature: This requires you buying a Digital (SSL) certificate
from a Third Party costing around USD 90 per year before you can do anything useful.
Signing with this gives it legal validity in countries that support it. Any changes
made to the document after the signing, breaks the signature. This way it validates
the integrity of a document (as long the signature is present, the document hasn't
been tampered). It doesn't offer any significant privacy benefits.
2. Restrict Permission: This uses the Microsoft IRM (Information
Rights Management) service. Using this with a Windows Live ID (Free) or a IRM Server
running in your company, you can assign permissions and access level to the document.
With the Windows Live ID feature, the recipients need not be in your corporate network,
it will as long as they have a Hotmail ID (Live ID).
3. Encrypt Document: This is a simple password protect feature. Assign
a password and then only people with the password can open the document.
All the above three features are present in Excel and PowerPoint 2007 as well.
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One of the compelling reasons I tell customers and friends for upgrading from Windows
XP to Windows Vista is the extremely easy to use yet powerful backup feature. All
it takes is three clicks to backup your entire computer to a removable USB storage
or DVDs. You can backup a partition or folders to another partition. And the entire
backup procedure for few hundred gigabytes of files takes less than an hour the first
time itself, after that the incremental backup get done in minutes. The best part
is that the backup is stored in VHD (Virtual PC format) format, which is a fully documented
and free to use file specification. This means even if Microsoft restore utility is
unable to open the VHD file, some 3rd party utility may be able to open it. I have
been using the backup feature for nearly a year and I am very pleased with it. Recently
when I had trouble with Windows in my Home PC, I restored my backup that was taken
few months back - the entire restore process worked flawlessly and my Windows installation
was good as new. 
Today before I did a routine backup of my Home PC, I wanted to clear some space in
the external USB drive. I deleted all the previous backup files in the drive. Then
I ran the complete back up. Unfortunately after several minutes the backup utility
failed with the following strange error.
The backup did not complete successfully. An error occurred.
The following information might help you resolve the error:
The system cannot find the file specified. (0x80070002)
I tried doing Vista Disk cleanup, no use. Doing few Internet
searches with the error number 0x80070002 I found a forum post
that talked to clean up registry keys in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList that pointed to orphan profile paths. I checked
that, in my case all the profiles had correct paths. So that was not the problem.
Then one of the forum post talked about running Chkdsk on the drives,
I did that. Rebooted the machine. Tried the backup again, this time it went smoothly.
Now my love is back for the Vista Backup tool. I just wish Microsoft wrote the backup
utility a little bit more tolerant or instructive error messages for handling these
occasions.
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