2009 July | Venkatarangan Blog

What is an Application Platform & comparison of Cloud platforms

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.

Photoshop is a theory subject?

I am not an academician or a teacher, even then I fail to understand on how Photoshop can be a theory subject?. It seems it is so in some schools in Chennai (may be in other schools across India) for students of VII standard. See the below notebook of a Class VII student who has written about Photoshop “Brush” and selecting Colours from the textbook. When I saw my niece having a textbook on Photoshop I was curious and on examining it turns out they teach in class “Photoshop” as a theory subject and are expected to answer exams on the same.

I may be biased here, as I didn’t have any formal computer science education and my engineering discipline was Electronics & Communication and all my computer learning have been practical and self-taught.

Pinnacle PCTV Hybrid Tuner (330e) for Vista x64

In the past I have done two posts on how to use Pinnacle PCTV 330e TV Tuner USB stick to view TV (set-top box) signals from Windows x64 operating systems (Windows Vista x64 or Windows 7 x64). Yesterday while trying to update the driver from Pinnacle site I realized that with the two earlier posts I haven’t documented all the pieces, so I am writing this updated post. My instructions are for using Tata Sky DTH service (set-top box) that’s available in India and my machine running Windows Vista x64 & Nero 8.0 – the same steps should work for most other DTH services (set-top boxes).

Step 0:
Windows Vista x64 SP2 should find the driver for Pinnacle PCTV Hybrid Tuner (330e) automatically, if it doesn’t you can download the latest driver from Pinnacle support site here – Direct link to download here. Look for “PCTV Hybrid Pro Stick (330e)”.

Step 1:
Buy from market a composite video cable (RCA) and a Stereo audio cable (RCA). You get this in various brand names “Belkin Composite Video and Audio Cable Kit” or “Mediabridge – RCA Component Video Cable with Audio”. This cable is not included with Pinnacle PCTuner USB product.

Step 2:

Connect the Audio & Video output (RCA component connectors) of your set-top box to the audio/video adapter cable (the small black colour pin with wires coming out that is connected on the side of the USB stick on the photo below) using the RCA cable kit purchased in Step 1. The small black colour Pinnacle adapter cable is specific to Pinnacle PCTV and is included in the box, you will not get this outside.

Tata Sky and Pinnacle Hybrid USB 330e Stick

Step 3:
Connect your Pinnacle USB stick (with the small black pin and cable connected) to a free USB port in your machine. I will recommend using the USB extension cable (found in the box) and connecting to a free port in the rear of your desktop (also for the fact that most rear USB ports are USB 2.0 for better speed) so that the wires are hidden away from the view.

Step 4:
Now it is time to configure your software to receive the signal and view. I am using my favourite Nero 8.0 (Nero 9.0 should work as well and provide scheduling capability) software. The trick here (which I forgot yesterday while configuring and wasted two hours) is to use the Nero MediaHome software (accessed from Start search menu or from "C:\Program Files (x86)\Nero\Nero8\Nero MediaHome\NeroMediaHome.exe") and not the Nero Home (whose Easy Setup option doesn’t allow us to set the TV input as composite).

After running Nero MediaHome, select the TV->Launch Nero TV Wizard. In the dialog box that comes, select the video device as “PCTV 330e/8x0e Device”, video input as “Composite”, Audio device as “Use audio from video device”. You are good to go, complete rest of the steps and close the dialog box and MediaHome.

Step 5:
Now run Nero Home from desktop or start menu, select “Video” option from “Video and TV” menu – don’t select “Live TV” (that works only with TV Antenna/Cable as input). Then in the next screen (shown below) select “Composite” (ignore the numbers 1, 2 or 3 that may appear in brackets). You will now be able to see the live TV in the “Watch TV” screen that will appear now. You can double click on the playing video to maximize or double-click again to get controls (to play, pause/time-shift, record, stop & volume control). Enjoy!

Don’t waste your time trying to get Windows Media Center in Windows Vista x64 to work with this Pinnacle product (PCTV 330e TV Tuner USB stick), it doesn’t work. Windows Vista insists on input coming via TV Antenna/Cable, where as in our setup above we are using a set-top box and the TV input comes as composite audio/video signal. As I have written in my Windows 7 beta post the above setup (even with a composite audio/video signal) seems to be working for India in Windows 7 Media Center.

The Pink Panther 2

After watching few months back The Pink Panther movie I was interested in seeing the sequel Pink Panther 2 by Steve Martin. So got a DVD of the movie and watched it today. It is a very hilarious movie. As in the first movie Steve Martin was all round funny. Aishwarya Rai has done a good performance in an important role. If you get a chance don’t miss to see this comedy movie.

the pink panther 2

Add a bit of Bing to your Hotmail

I noticed today in Hotmail, on right-hand side a new window titled “Quick Add”. This seems to allow you to insert Image & Video search results from Bing directly into your outgoing Hotmail messages. Apart from images, videos, you can also insert results of Movie times, Maps, Restaurants and Business Listings. Though the Maps, Movie Times & Business Listings didn’t work for me (may be India is not yet fully supported), I found Restaurant listings and video inserts to be working well and quite useful in everyday usage.

Bing Quick Add module in hotmail

As for availability, I read in Live wire blog that Microsoft has only rolled out the new tool to Australia, Canada, China, India, the US and the UK so far.

My son’s birthday party

My son, Vaageesh’s sixth birthday was last month. We couldn’t have the birthday party on that day due to various reasons – finally we arranged to have it today and invited his friends few days back. Being a member in TNCA Club, Chennai I decided to have the birthday this time around in my club. The club has a nice spacious hall “VAP HALL” that can comfortably seat about 70+ people. Being our normal practice we had invited only his close friends and family and that was less than half of the capacity, so the kids had a ball playing in the huge vacant hall.

My sister had organized for a nice magic show by Mr.Puyal Ganesh (Phone: 044-2474 9138, email: puyalg at gmail.com). Mr.Ganesh did a variety of simple magic tricks that the kids could follow easily, he had them entertained nicely – keeping the mischievous “First” standard kids in their seats is a “magic” by itself which Mr.Ganesh managed to do for most of the time.

After the event I managed to have my car keys inside the locked car. It happened this way – I had the car keys in my shoulder bag, so I opened the car, put down the shoulder bag inside the boot and closed it, then suddenly the car got auto-locked. So I had to return home in another vehicle, collect the duplicate key and go back to the club and get the car. What a night it was!

Vaageesh birthday party - Vaageesh doing magic with Mr.Puyal Ganesh

Vaageesh birthday party

Nice user interface – Undo!

Alan Cooper (the father of Visual Basic) in his famous book – About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design, talked about how we have to build software that matches the user’s goals. Much of software even today (after nearly two decades of this book) is built by developers to meet their development goals. If I remember correct, in one of the chapters Cooper talks about how almost all the word processing software including MS Word asks “Do you want to save this document” when you are closing a window with an open document. What a stupid question. “Yes” I want to save it, that’s why I spent last 1 hour in typing the document. He argues a better interface will be to first ask for the title when you create the document and when you close automatically save it. Of-course now MS Word has an option to Auto-Save option, but not the way Cooper would have liked it.

This style of poor UI from Windows world have been to a large extend carry forwarded to the Web world. In many of the websites even today when you do something, you are asked to confirm it. I can understand this method is useful and needed for transactions like a purchase or banking, but why on a simple email program or when I change my profile. Talking of this, I have seen two examples of what I think is a better interface in Google’s Gmail and YouTube. I have shown them below.

1) The first one happens when you had a favourite in YouTube. You are given an option to Undo rather than asked to confirm before saving (which will surely be an hindrance). Statistically most of the time you are not likely to add a wrong video as favourite and even if you do nothing bad to world peace is going to happen.

Adding a favorite in YouTube with the Undo option

2) This one is in Gmail when you delete an email (or an conversation). They sport an Undo option.

Having said the above, as a Software Engineer I am comfortable with Undo’s; I am not sure whether a normal user will prefer this option to something else. Let me know more such good examples of good user interface and your thoughts in the comments link above.

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