Venkatarangan TNC

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.

When Dr.Santosh Babu (IAS), Managing Director of ELCOT invited me to present in this year CETIT Conference, I had not known much about the event. Then searching on the Internet, I learned that “CETIT 2010 is the second year of the conference-***-exhibition on e-Governance organized by FICCI in association with ELCOT. CeTIT claims to provide an opportunity to take stock of the practice and the promise of digital technologies on e-Governance”. This certainly sounded interesting, so here I am.

This year program happened yesterday and today in Chennai Trade Centre. I presented on the topic of “Relevance of Unicode to e-Governance”, this was part of the session on “Back Office” Chaired by Prof.M.Anandakrishnan (Chairman, IIT Kanpur).

In my brief talk (~10 Mins) I was keen that I didn't confuse audience with too much engineering detail on Encoding. At the same time I wanted to demystify Unicode and what it is, importance of a single uniform encoding, where we are in terms of acceptance of Unicode by various State Governments & Govt. of India. That I think I achieved.

(Download the presentation as a PDF from here, the PowerPoint version can be got from Docs.com)

My earlier presentation on UNICODE for Tamil can be seen here.

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):

1. 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
2. Connect the XBOX 360 console to one of the other ports in the same LINKSYS Router
3. Leave the Internet port in Linksys Router to be empty
4. Turn off firewall & DHCP server in the Linksys Router
5. Give it a static IP, Configure Gateway and DNS to be the IP address of the NETGEAR Router
6. Configured the wireless settings with a SSID and a WPA2-PERSONAL passcode
7. 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!

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:  

1. How to use mail merge to create e-mail messages in Word
2. How to Create and Send a Word 2010 Mail Merge E-Mail
3. Mail Merge: How to send a personalized e-mail to many people at once

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.

Last two days I am here in Tech Ed 2010 in Sri Lanka. I enjoy coming to Sri Lanka for two reasons. One, compared to India developer population here is small but they are very eager to learn new technologies. Second, the local Microsoft DPE team is very innovative in their programs and their hospitality is awesome & very Sri Lankan. The last time I made a talk in the country was for DevDay 2007.

My first talk on Day 2 was titled “Lap Around the Windows Azure Platform” where I covered on the Introduction to Windows Azure, Need for a cloud computing platform, case study video, a lap around the platform and a live demo. I am happy to share few of the comments I received from the audience for this session: - Great introduction to Windows Azure - Communication skills is good & examples given on practical environment

My second talk on Day 3 was titled “Introduction to Building Applications with Windows Azure” where I covered about building an application with Windows Azure end to end, Roles, Storages in Azure (Blob, Tables, Queues), SQL Azure and a guestbook demo application. I am happy to share few of the comments I received from the audience for this session: - Good Detailed one - Got a good overall introduction of Windows Azure. The speaker managed to cover the essential usages,and aspects of this platform. I enjoyed it. - Very good demo - I'm little bit new to Windows Azure and have got consider idea about Azure. Thanks - very useful presentation to understand - It was really valuable speak that helped us a very much - He used lot of demos rather than presentations and hence, it was very useful - "Learned a lot about Windows Azure, SQL Azure , Development & deployment. Really enjoyed the session"

Thank you all, who attended my talks and thanks for the feedbacks.

Sometimes the best possible way to visualize something really complex is to see it as a graphic and have it printed on a huge poster. Few years back in one of the Microsoft Mix event, they released this super cool visualization of an illustration of the process of launching a web site. It was released into a website as well called “A website named Desire”, which made the huge poster available as a SilverLight  Application using Deep Zoom. It is super cool, check it out.

(I saw this few years back and today I was trying to find it. Few hours of Google & Bing search, I couldn’t find it. Then with some help from a friend, I found it back. This shows how much more work has to be done in Web Search)

One of my favourite getaways from Chennai is Yelagiri hills (details in my earlier post). This time I went there with my family and my brother in law Mr.Badri Thirumalai’s family for the XMas holidays. Staying in Yelagiri is a very relaxing experience and I love it. This time 3 of us (myself, Badri and his son Aravind) decided to do the 4KM trekking into Yelagiri forests. We went and came back on our own, but not sure whether we went in the correct trekking track.

We ventured up to an old pond (360 degree view done with Windows Live Picture Gallery below) in thick of the forest and a little beyond it and when the tracks ended we turned back :-)

The experience was wonderful and relaxing. The trek route was peaceful, clean and green, absolute silence almost all the way in the forest – you can hear only the occasional bird chirps (see the video below), that’s all. It took us less than 2:30 Hours to complete the trek & return. Next time, probably I will take a “Guide” so that we can venture more into the forest.

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Last week while in San Jose (CA), my good friend “Ranga” took me for a change to have Ethiopian food for dinner at “Zeni Ethiopian Restaurant”. I readily agreed as I like to experiment any food that is Vegetarian (As I say in foreign lands - No Fish, No Meat & No Chicken).

We went through the menu and decided to play safe with their ready-made “Vegetarian Combo” (shown above). I didn’t understand a single item contained in the combo (YE-MISER WOT ,YE-KIK ALITCHA, ATAKELT WOT, YE-GOMEN WOT, YE TIMATIM FITFIT) but once served and tasted figured out that all of them are names of different gravy (side-dishes). Each of them tasted like “Yellow Dal”, “Tomato/Onion Salad”, “Green Salad” and so on. All of these side-dishes were served on a big bread they call “Injera” (it looked to me and tasted like a big South Indian Dosa).

Overall it was spicy, tasty, filling and I loved it!. Thanks Ranga.

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!

There are tons of cool stuffs for Silverlight 4 that are being shown in Day 2 keynote of PDC ‘09 and in the SL4 overview talk by Karen Corby. I am amazed at the speed in which the Silverlight team in Microsoft has been able to churn out releases at rapid pace – SL 1 in Nov ‘07, SL 2 in Oct ‘08, SL 3 in Jun ‘09 and SL 4 Beta in Oct ‘09.

The main features of Silverlight 4 that caught my attention are:

1. Access to Webcam, Microphone and other devices like Digital Camera
2. Print Preview and direct Print support
3. UDP Multicast, very useful for organization wide network distribution of live video
4. Authorization support in client HTTP Stack (NTLM, Basic and Digest)
5. Same .NET compiled code runs in SL 4 and .NET 4
6. Offline DRM play support
7. Drag/Drop, Clipboard support
8. Audio and video local recording capabilities capture RAW video without requiring server interaction
9. Embed a HTML control including a Flash control inside that HTML, all usable from Brush
10. Styles support
11. RichtextArea control and better internalization text support

I am in LA for Microsoft PDC ‘09. One thing in Day 1 I was happy to see in real was a Azure container that was on display in the exhibition floor. These are containers (shipping container) that have all included in them – Hundreds of Dell Servers, Climate controlled, Networked, Monitoring and so on. When a container arrives at a new Microsoft Data Center location, all they need to do is plug in power and network uplink. Everything else is included in the container box. A typical data center will have hundreds of these containers

Today my mother while cleaning her book shelf, found few of my envelopes. They were from my High School days. One was Rs.51 Cash Prize I won in Twelfth Standard for “Most Deserving Student of the High School”. The other was a First Prize with Rs.150 for “Best Speaker” in a debate competition – I am trying to recollect whether this was in any Inter School or Intra School event. Going back nearly two decades is quite challenging, but nevertheless seeing the prizes feels good.

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.