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In this month (April 2012) issue of Think Aloud magazine published by Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) my article has been published. This issue is a Mobile VAS in India, and my article is titled “Aam Aadmi’s Aspirational needs are the new growth engine”. I have talked about how Indian Mobile Industry is in a cusp of change and it is time they got to move from offerings basics to start addressing consumers’ aspirational needs.
In the article I had outlined various offerings that can increase nearly double the revenue to over Rs. 55,000 crore by FY ‘15. The listings are in FIFO (First In, First Out) order as I thought them and they are presented as ideas. I have not delved on the past and how things are broken, but rather on the solutions and the opportunities they present. Read it and post your comments.
You can view the article from here or download as a PDF from here.
For years whenever I wanted to do some screencasts or record what’s on the screen, I have been using Techsmith’s great Camtasia software or Windows Media Encoder. Today from a FaceBook wall post I learnt that the free & open source video player – VLC Media Player has this feature in every copy.
The steps to follow are just four, first is to select Convert/Save option from the Media Menu, then in the dialog box that appears select “Capture Device” tab, then select "Desktop” in the Capture Mode option, increase the frame rate (for smoother animation provided you have powerful graphic card) and then press “Convert/Save” button. That’s all.
After using DasBlog (.NET & Lucene.NET based Blog Engine) for over 7 years I decided to move to the most popular blogging software in the planet – WordPress. I like DasBlog for its simplicity – it was flat file based (just XML files for content and images stored in file system) so no Database configuration/maintenance, most of the common configurations are available from the Admin panel and more complex changes can be done by editing the ASP.NET source code, it supports AKISMET comment filtering, MetaWebBlog API for blogging from Windows Live Writer & above all just works out of the box. But in the recent months it was showing its age with no upgrade for nearly 3 years, comments pages were becoming slow to open, search was not powerful, no scalable tag cloud, categories can be managed once created and so on. So it was time I had to move and migrate data.
After Windows Live Spaces closed and migrated my blog backup which was in there to WordPress.com, I got familiar on customizing and using WordPress. In the recent years in my firm (Vishwak Solutions) our LAMP developers have been doing many WordPress projects for our clients so I had access to resources who knew about this well. All this made me comfortable to touch something that was working for 7 years, so I went with WordPress. After some searching I found these two blogs (Reeves, Vasanth) which gave step by step that has to be followed. Along with my PHP developer I followed the steps given there and it worked. Thanks to both of them.
WordPress opens up enormous choices and benefits just due to its huge community following & benefits of network effort. I love the power of the Plugins and the choices you get, you will find a plugin for anything you can imagine. The plugin for SEO Optimization, Sitemap.XML generation, Recaptcha, WordPress Stats (JetPack) are all gems. The sheer choice of plugins can also be confusing (just like App Store) as you have tens of choices for the same task and not sure which one to choose, but a bit of Bing! or Google will help you find the right one. The WordPress app for iOS makes it a breeze updating my blog from my iPad and its free!
After the migration we had to fix some rough edges around permissions, redirections & theme.
1.I wrote the following two redirections on top of what Reeves had recommended, which I have given below:
2. I had problems with all the URLs which had a Non-English (Tamil) text in them, I went to editorial console to change all of them to English text
3. WordPress gives more categorization options, including hierarchical categories and Tag clouds. I used those to reorder most of my 1000+ posts for better visibility and SEO benefits
4. I submitted the new SiteMap.XML to Google & Bing Webmaster site, then I am now monitoring the errors that are shown in Google Webmaster tools & Bing Webmaster tools and fixing those links (where possible doing regex redirections):
5. I had deleted the old ASPX/ASMX, XMLs and DLLs of DasBlog but retained the images in the same folder that were used by DasBlog & Windows Live Writer. This way all the image references (URIs) continues to work in WordPress. If I had tried to migrate them to WordPress then I suppose I would have had to write a custom program and do it, which I didn’t bother.
In the end all turned out well. For my blog of over 1000+ posts over 7 years it took less than 2 days of work. Performance is great & overall I am quite pleased with the move.
The other day I got an email from Microsoft Certified Learning reminding me to sign-in to the site. It has been over a decade since I last visited the site. When I logged-in I was pleasantly surprised to see they have data about my certifications done in 1996, 15 Years back. Now you know that I have programmed in Windows NT Server & VB 4.0 
When MS Office 2010 came last year, the first thing I did in my Work PC’s MS Outlook was to switch off some of the new Panes and Add-Ons. I noticed when you are reading an email either in preview or full-screen you got a window at the bottom that showed all the conversations, activities, tasks associated with the sender of that email. I didn’t understand the need for it, immediately switch it off and never thought about it again. Few days back while using my Home PC, I noticed this Pane again, spend some time with it and thought it might be useful to have. Instead of switching between Inbox/Sent items and so on, you got all the details in one convenient window. Now I wanted this feature back in my Work PC but didn’t know its name and it turns out I couldn’t find it nor could my System Administrator.
After few Bing! searches it turns out the feature I was looking for is called “People Pane”.
But I couldn’t find the button in Ribbon to turn-it ON. The button & feature appears only if you have installed and enabled Microsoft Outlook Social Connector Add-On (File->Options->Add-Ins->Manage:COM Add-Ins). Enabling it I got the feature and I am giving it a spin for few days before deciding on retaining it.
I have two PC’s in my house. One is my primary desktop which is the family PC running Windows 7 Ultimate. The other is used a Media Center Server (lets call it MCPC). After I got my iPhone, iPad and AppleTV I have moved all my digital media from Zune to iTunes (who knows when I buy Nokia Lumia 800 or a later Windows Phone, I will need to do the reverse all over again). My favourite application to convert DVDs and VCDs that I own into iTunes/Zune format is a free tool called “Handbrake” (that I had written about earlier).
My MCPC was about 4 years old, has outlived and needed an upgrade very badly. The MCPC had a AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 6000+ CPU, 4GB DDR2 RAM and a ASUS M2NBP motherboard with NVIDIA Quadro NVS210S GPU. Instead of throwing away the entire PC I decided to retain as much as I can and upgrade only the portions I needed to, which meant I can’t change the CPU or RAM, without changing all the three (Motherboard, CPU and RAM).
1. First item that I replaced was the 3 year old 1 KVA UPS from APC that I had been using to connect both the PCs. I shopped around for a 2 KVA with 2 Hours backup, but it turned out to be expensive (Rs.40,000 to 60,000 depending on features & brand) and huge in size to fit under my desk. Instead I went with 2 separate UPS each giving about 30 minutes backup time, first was a 1 KVA (APC Back-UPS RS 1000) and the second was a 1.5 KVA (APC Back-UPS RS 1500). Both costs together Rs.18,200 and it provided the convenience of using one of the PCs even when the other UPS dies out of its power. Both the UPS came with PowerChute client software which helps you to monitor the input voltage, set the input power sensitivity, set the voltage range and importantly shut-down the PC automatically when Power is about to run out – which ensures your drives are not corrupted. APC provides a RJ-45 to USB cable and software drivers to do this magic.
2. With the ever expanding size of my Digital Media (Music, Photos, Movies and TV Shows) stored in iTunes and as folders, I needed bigger hard-disks and also redundancy. So I replaced all the hard-drives and went in for 3 new HDDs – 1 x Seagate 500GB (Rs.2350), 2x 2TB (each Rs.4350). I didn’t choose Solid-State as they were expensive and anyway I thought I can buy a new PC with SSD in next few years. I configured the 500GB for the OS (Boot & System Partition for Windows 7) and the two 2TB as one single drive (Windows 7 Mirroring). I went for Software (Windows OS) Mirroring and not the BIOS which I was using earlier, as BIOS mirroring kept getting broken very often (may be due to the frequent Power shut-downs and problems with my UPS). It turns out this works great, only the first time I had to open Disk Management (Computer Management) and leave it open for the drives to Resync.
3. Then I went on to replace the graphics card (NVIDIA Quadro NVS210S GPU) which started producing washed out colours and lack of sharpness in the output. This meant purchasing a new add-on PCI Express Graphics Card. I selected an affordable one from ASUS called “HD 5450 Silent” costing Rs.2300 and featuring AMD ATI Radeon HD 5450 & 1GB DDR3 video memory.
(Output from my old GPU, taken with iPhone4) |
(Output from my new GPU, taken with the same iPhone4) |
4. You can’t get an improvement just by changing the GPU, you will need a matching monitor as well. So I replaced my old HP 15” TFT with a new ViewSonic VA1931WMA-LED 19” Monitor which costs Rs.5390. I wanted a monitor that is not state of art (and hence expensive) and one which had a built-in speaker (which limited the options dramatically). Remember I am using this as a Media Center PC with occasional YouTube & iTunes watching, so there was no need for a real speaker or a higher resolution display. I tried to have built-in USB Hub, but I couldn’t find one.
5. Now it is time to to focus on USB ports. The built-in USB ports tended to be slow and flaky (may be due to MagicJack or many other USB devices that I connected over the years). Getting new USB ports was the easiest and cheapest, it costs about Rs.250 to buy a 4 Port USB 2.0 add-on card. To get the USB ports in the front (instead of bending and reaching in the back of the PC) I purchased a Belkin 4 Port 2.0 Powered Hub for about Rs.800.
6. The next item was to look at the Network equipment (Ethernet Switch). I was using a 100Mbps Switch to connect my Wireless Router, Desktop, MCPC and other Ethernet ports in the house (like the one going to Apple TV or Daisy Chain). I upgraded this with a faster switch – a Netgear GS608 8Port Gigabit Switch which costs Rs.2475, this gives a smoother playing from iTunes Home sharing.
7. The last item was a WD 1 TB USB External HDD which costs about Rs.5000. This is to carry select media that I will be interested to have during my travel trips.
Overall the PC now manages to get about 4.0 (from 3.0 or so earlier) in Windows performance rating:
Final steps was to setup Windows to auto-login, launch iTunes automatically. I did the first using “User Accounts” (instructions here and here) and the second was done using Task Scheduler with a Trigger “When I log on”.
This is something that I saw two and half years back during Microsoft Mix ‘09 conference. I wanted to blog about it then but somehow seemed to have missed it. Today I was reminded of it when I was talking to my Yoga master about my experience of going to a Doctor in USA and buying medicines there few years back when I fell sick during a trip to Houston. Unlike India where prescription drugs are sold in sealed aluminium foil strips, in USA I found many of the medicines are packaged in bottles.
There was this talk in Mix ‘09 conference following IE 8.0 keynote on User Experience by Deborah Adler, Ms.Adler was an attractive young UX designer whose prescription packaging system simplified the design of Pill bottles & information presented in that. It also reduced the chances of wrong usage of pills and resulting complications. The design was adopted by Target Pharmacies and is marketed under their ClearRX brand. I found the idea of improving on an everyday problem to be quite impressive & encouraging. Check out the video here (skip to 30.30 Minute to get to this section directly).
In my main PC at work where I store most of my documents and data, I have been using Hardware RAID for mirroring between two 500GB Seagate Hard drives for last 3 years. This provides me with automatic redundancy and minor performance benefit while reading large video files. All was well till last week, when on boot BIOS warned that the Mirror is broken. Having seen this happen few times before I quickly updated my backup to external drive and then rebuild the mirror. Yesterday I got into the same problem, I decided and moved to Windows (Software) mirroring. Today afternoon Windows 7 showed me the below dialog and warned me that S.M.A.R.T. data is indicating an impending failure/error in one of the drives. The warning was just about useless beyond that – no indication on which Physical drive is having the problem.
On searching for this issue in Bing!, I found this free utility called DiskCheckup which can read the S.M.A.R.T data and provide more information, which it did. I found one of the drives was having high “reallocated sector count” which was told me by few hardware blogs to be bad. But since both my physical drives were the same model their class names displayed were same, which didn’t help me in isolating the failed one. So I went to computer management and broke the mirror. Reran Diskcheckup few times (disabling one drive after another in Device Management) and identified the failed one. Since I didn’t have a spare 500GB to replace, I fixed a 1TB drive in place of the failed one. Fortunately Windows 7 didn’t mind setting up mirroring between two drives of unequal size. I managed to select the 500GB, Add Mirror to a portion (which Windows created automatically) of 1TB and setup everything, the balance space I could create another simple volume. Windows is currently Resyncing the mirror between the drives.
Just like the other 4999 attendees of Build Windows Conference, I am too happy to have got a test Samsung Tablet running “Developer Preview” of Windows. Having got a touch netbook previously in PDC 2009 towards launch of Windows 7, I should say I was expecting something like this.
The tablet looks great, feels a little heavy compared to iPad but has a USB port, plays all media formats that Windows Media recognizes (and for those it doesn’t you can always run VLC Player) and starts up in less than 2 seconds (awesome).
The machine specifications were impressive too and ships with SDK & Visual Studio to develop Metro style Apps.
And I was surprised to see some “Humour” in Microsoft EULA for the tablet. When was the last time you read anything in a Microsoft material that you can understand?
In this post let me write about some highlights about Metro UI that I saw in the Big Picture sessions of Day 1.
(Update: You can watch the entire keynote here )
The default templates shipping in Visual Studio whether it is for C++ or C# or JavaScript, they all do a great job in handling all the layout complexities and do the heavy lifting for building Metro UI
Microsoft has done lot of user study to see the most ideal and convenient position in the screen where user’s thumb can reach and they are in the edges. As a result it is good practise to put frequently used interaction surfaces near the edges
When you are porting your existing Windows Apps UI to Metro, best is to start from scratch, when you can’t even simple things make a lot of improvement (like removing the lines and borders, more spaced out, large icons and so on). See in these four steps from left to right:
 
 
Touch is direct, so performance issues are felt more directly and viscerally. Animations when content is appearing of changing helps a lot in the feeling of fluid to the users. Metro Apps require assets in 3 sizes (100%, 140% and 180%) and better still you can provide them in vector formats (SVG) or CSS primitives or XAML.
Your content needs to adapt to multiple screen sizes and orientations:
Contracts are the glue that bind Metro style apps together and to the system UI. There are many contracts, but the three of the most fundamental are Share, Search and Picker.
There are many styles of Live tiles. You can choose the one that suits your app. Live Tiles are updated using your “Local” logic, Scheduled or Push using Windows Push Notification Service (WNS)
In-box controls that ship in Windows 8 for Metro style apps are shown below:
Metro style apps when making calls to WinRT those calls go directly to Core OS or though a broker (only on select cases). All running Metro apps are suspended by the OS when the user switches away from it, this is done to preserve the battery live and give maximum performance to the foreground application. This means Apps get about 5 seconds to save their state before the OS puts them on Suspend. Apps when in Suspend are still in memory but no CPU cycles are spent and Windows kernel never schedules those threads. Apps are also terminated when there are low resources, in those cases Apps never notified at all.
Five main design principles of Metro style apps are
- Pride in craftsmanship
- Be fast and fluid
- Authentically digital
- Do more with less
- Win as one
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