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Cricket World Cup 2007

Cricket World Cup 2007 has finally begun today. A two month marathon of some of the finest teams and games of cricket will be played in the Caribean Islands. Though “1″ billion Indians love the sport and watch it occassionaly, the noise level about the game in the recent few weeks have been deafening. The amount of money adverisers are pouring to the sponsorship are really huge – unheard in India & Asia before. All the radios, websites, mobile phones carry nothing but about “upcoming” World Cup. I am doing this post while watching the first match between West Indies and Pakistan with the PIP feature of Samsung SyncMaster 910MP. In the stadium again, I am seeing mostly Indian Companies advertisements.

Is it all warranted?, I am not sure.

The matches are happening from 7:30PM IST, so most of the people in India will be catching up on the match from their Telly. One good thing I like about the attention on World Cup is that it does distract people from everyday worries and relax a bit – including myself.  

As a business, I am feeling great and certainly not complaining – as at Vishwak we are working on several cool projects on Web/Mobile for the World Cup for our Media customers.

Connected Applications

I know I am using an over used “Title” for this post. But I really mean it.

It is about building Windows Applications that are connected to the cloud (Internet) for either authentication or utilizing other services. Though there are applications today that work this way – like Windows Live Writer, Google Picasa, Yahoo! Flickr – they are few and very difficult to develop and test. The development tools including Visual Studio 2005 does very little to support a model like this. Microsoft Dev Tools team is aiming to change all this with the upcoming version of Visual Studio “Orcas”. Read about this and other features of “Orcas” and download the CTP from here.

Related Articles:

Read a good blog post on this here by Microsoft’s Saurabh Pant

Juval Lowy (My fellow RD) writes about how to do this with VS 2005 today

Two Wheeler Driving

Today while driving to office from home, a two wheeler narrowly escaped from getting hit by my car.  It happened in front of Ayodhya Mandapam, West Mambalam. An elderly person was driving the motorbike, straight from the opposite street to ICICI Bank which is on the other side of Arya gowda road without even glancing for the traffic flowing on the main road. I was driving towards Brindavan street and had to stop my car with all the energy applied on the brake pedals. Thank God, my Opel Corsa stopped within Centimetres of the bike, otherwise the impact would have been fully on the bike and the rider.

I wanted to shout at the bike driver for his carelessness, but as I said he was a grandfather figure looking very respectful, he apologised, so I moved on. Anyways, what is the use in arguing with him, the act has been committed.  

Please share your similar driving incidents in the comments below.