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Entrepreneurship for Engineers

I was invited to do a presentation to students at my alma mater (SVCE, Pennalur). The occasion was a day long event today organized by ECE department’s Alumni Association & IEEE Chapter. I decided against a technical topic for fear of boring the students, instead I made a talk on "Entrepreneurship for Engineers". Following what "George Bernard Shaw" said "I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation", I started by quoting myself  “There has never been a better time in Indian History for becoming an Entrepreneur”.

EntrepreneurShipforEngineer
I tried my best to make the session very lively and at the end when I counted only few heads where sleeping out of nearly 100 students in the hall. And in the 90 minutes I heard no "Boos" or "Whistles" which itself I think was an achievement in itself. Download – Entrepreneurship for Engineers v2.0.pdf (292.67 KB)

In the evening I presented one more session. This time it was at Vishwak for our weekly Friday sessions organized by our team members as a forum to share knowledge and best practices. Here again I went against a technical topic as I didn’t have the time in advance to prepare on any of the latest or upcoming topics, and if I presented on any of the existing technologies then my team knows more than me :-) . The topic I talked was on "Presentation Skills" on which I have earlier posted a detailed 7 page post here and as a way of demonstration I did the talk without any presentation aids (No PowerPoint and no Projector).

EntrepreneurShipforEngineerPhoto
See the event photos here

Digital Media in your house – Part 2

Read the earlier part of this project here where I talked about the Digital Conversion of VCD/DVD and sharing in XBox.

Zune Media Sharing After all the Proof of Concept, I decided it was time to go full time Digital. Bought new hardware for my house. One was a high-end desktop where I plan to do the conversions and regular PC usage. The second was for server role, where I had two 500GB HDD Mirrored for storing all my Digital Media files and sharing them. I then converted few dozen of VCD and DVDs into Nero AVC (MPEG4) format with the new desktop in few days.

I tried in the server machine, first Windows Home Server but that didn’t the driver for Mirroring H/W that I had), then Windows Server 2003 but that didn’t support installation of Zune Client Software, after that thought Windows XP SP2 will be the best but that didn’t allow Zune sharing to be visible in XBOX whatever I tried. So I had to resort to Windows Vista SP1. Installed Media Center Extension that went through smoothly but my main requirement was to have Zune Network Sharing working so that all my Photos, Music & Videos are available for playback at my XBOX 360. These two articles have step by step instructions needed for a normal setup:

Zune Network Sharing User I had bought Norton 360 that contains Antivirus, Firewall and Antispyware. The firewall configuration was pathetic in Norton 360 so I switched it off and turned to Vista’s default firewall. I installed and easily got SQUEEZEBox music sharing working. Zune Network Sharing was a big hurdle to cross, what ever I tried the videos and photos were not visible from XBOX. After several hours of trying I figured out the way to make it work.

  1. Create a new user exclusive to run Zune Client Software, call it say "ZuneUser" make it administrator in Vista
  2. Switch off User Access Control (UAC), this was the biggest problem cause
  3. Reset all security settings for the drive/folders where you have your media files (Give Read/Execute for ZuneUser)
  4. Go to Zune Client Software, configure your monitoring folders for media
  5. Enable Network Sharing, give it a name and tick Music, Video & Photos
  6. Go to Services Applet, replace the user account for the Zune Network Sharing (ZuneNSS) service from Network Service to ZuneUser.
  7. Restart the ZuneNSS service
  8. Give some time for monitoring job to pickup files
  9. Go to XBOX 360 and look for your media files and play them

 Zune video library