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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).
- According to Adobe, Flash Player is the most widely available software on Earth (Is it?)
- 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
- 80% of Creative Professionals or 2.6 Million people use Adobe’s Creative Suite
- Adobe has 1 Million developers using its products compared 4 Million Software developers using Microsoft .NET Tools
According to Taxman in India, from 1st June 2008 (after this year Union Budget was passed) a licensed software like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office is both a Service and a Product. While world over taxes are being simplified, streamlined and modernized keeping pace to technology – in India our Finance Ministry has proven its fondness for complicating existing laws and getting into legal word tangles. This is in spite of record tax collections in the last few years, this year TDS (with holding tax) collection were up by a whopping 60% from last year.
While change of classification of software may seem insignificant it has real impact on the tax that a consumer/business is charged while buying a software package. Earlier all Packaged Software/License were treated as a sale of product and charged VAT @ 4% to 12% (varied by state). Now all software are treated as a services as well. It is not reclassified from Product to Service but classified to be both – strange is India’s tax laws!. The industry is suffering for the last few weeks with all major dealers and distributors waiting for some clarity from government as this change will result in a tax of 24% on licensed (legal) software, which is absurd. In India Service Tax is Central (Federal) subject, VAT is State subject – so both don’t want to clarify this situation.
This week I couldn’t buy a software that I needed because of this issue. My regular dealer refused to give me a quotation for few products that I wanted because of this legal mess. He said in his 25 years of being in the business this is the first time he has stopped billing for over 3 weeks. What is even more strange is that none of the software industry bodies are vocally raising this issue to the government – may be they feel the government has no ears to serious issues like these, they are busy listening to the daily threats from the left parties 
The other day I wanted to password protect for privacy a word document before emailing it. I came across 3 different features in Word that are related to security and it was confusing at first. It took me sometime and few web searches to figure it out. Though the 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.
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.
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.
In the last two to three quarters we are seeing a huge surge in SharePoint projects and as a result the demand of SharePoint developers is sky rocketing. Initially we were thinking this to be a local (India) phenomena but when I talk to many of my contacts in the industry worldwide and check out articles in the Internet, it turns out to be a worldwide phenomena.
Below are some random resources on SharePoint that might be useful for developers:
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. (0×80070002)
I tried doing Vista Disk cleanup, no use. Doing few Internet searches with the error number 0×80070002 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.
 Though I purchased this DVD a year ago (at a steep price @ Rs.499) I didn’t get the time to watch it till now. Today being a Sunday and free from any work luckily I had the time to watch the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" made by Former Vice President Al Gore. I didn’t know Al Gore was such a powerful speaker, he was amazing on stage – I have noted down few presentation tips from his speech. He seems to have come out as a more powerful person after his dramatic hair-splitting loss of the US Presidency to George W Bush in 2000.
The movie is brief and runs only for about 90 minutes and it is completely on a presentation given by Al Gore with clippings in between. Since enough has been said about this movie and global warming, all I will say – this is a very compelling movie for the cause of reducing our effects on environment. I pledge to start doing my small baby steps on this from today.
The hugely anticipated release of Kamal Hasan’s mega budget movie – Dasavathaaram got released yesterday after many delays. Apart from the inherent delays due to the complexity of producing the movie, there were many court cases against the movie and the producer V.Ravichandran had to even change his film production company’s name from OSCAR to AASCAR due to a legal notice from Hollywood (Economic Times news yesterday) in the last few days.
Kamal stars in 10 roles in the movie. The movie (details here) is released in almost all theatres in the city (and in the state) and in all the shows. Adding to this Government has also allowed few extra shows at 9AM, etc. , even then when I checked with few theatres I was told the movie is full for next 15 days. Luckily my wife got two tickets for today (second day of the movie) 11:25AM show at INOX City Centre. Show started 10-15 late as the earlier show got delayed, the movie is a long one nearly 3 hours with a brief 5 minute intermission. There was a huge queue to even get into the theatre
The story line of the movie is very simple and nothing exceptional – just a routine action chase film. The first half of the movie was boring and very long, the intermission came only after 2 hours. Kamal has done the story, screenplay and dialogue, so in his signature style there are few atheist touches – the 13th Century "Nambi" story possibly hurting a bit of religious sentiments. The second half was more interesting, especially where all the characters converge into the single climax moment. Lot of hard work seems to have gone into making of the movie – in the direction, acting, makeup, stunts, planning, etc. which has to appreciated greatly. Tamil movie industry has been elevated several steps with this movie – no doubts on that. The story and music could have been better. Movie is all about Kamal, with only two other characters having some role – Asin and M S Baskar. Kamal has roped in Jayaprada for a role in a Tamil Movie that too a song after a long time. Mallika Sherawat doing a song sequence and few fight scenes.
The ten roles Kamal dons are:
- Rangaraja Nambi – 13th Century Vaishnavaite
- Govind Ramasamy -the "Hero", a scientist
- Christian Fletcher – Villain (Ex-CIA Agent)
- Balaram Naidu – The funny CBI officer with nice Telugu Accent
- George Bush – American President (surprising why Kamal wanted to do this role, compared to other roles not very impressive)
- Avtar Singh – A Punjabi singer
- Shinghen Narahasi – Japan Marshal arts master (Impressive fighting scenes)
- Krishnaveni – Iyengar Great grandmother (Excellent in the makeup)
- Vincent Poovaraagan – Social Activist (nice black skin makeup)
- Kalifullah Khan – The 7 Feet Tall Role (An antitode to the Aboorva Sagatharagal shorter Kamal)
Will I recommend the movie, "Yes" to watch a brilliant cinema and appreciate the hard work. Do you need to rush to see the movie – No Need!.
I came across this brilliant site called "Geonames.org" – a Geographical database for download free of charge containing over eight million geographical names. The site allows you to search for any city or place or postal code and the best part is all of this is also available through a number of webservices and a daily database export. This can be useful while you are developing a website and have to get input of a city or determine a place in a transaction.
Check out these examples:
- Chennai
- 600017 (Postal Code in India)
GeoNames was founded by Marc Wick. Marc is a self-employed software engineer living in Switzerland. Thanks to Marc Wick & the other volunteers of the site.
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