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For few years now, Citibank India has a Virtual Keyboard for their online login. While this is a good scheme to prevent Keyboard hookers the UI could have been better. Security and Prevention of hacking is not an excuse for lack of design and intuitive user interface, unfortunately many think it is so.
Notice the below screenshot. They say IPIN cannot contain special characters, can contain only Alphabets & Numbers. Then why did the Virtual Keyboard have special characters. Frequently I end up pressing special characters then get prompted I am wrong!
World over Microsoft conducts lots and lots of events every year. Their flagship events are two – Professional Developer Conference a.k.a. PDC (this is where they announce the next big thing like .NET, Windows 2000, Longhorn, Windows Azure and so on) and Tech Ed (this is more hands-on current technologies for IT Professionals with some Developer content) happening almost every year in USA and then replicated across the world. About five years back in 2006, they announced a new event by name “Mix” which for the first time tried to bring 3 stakeholders into one event – Business Managers, Designers & Developers. It was started to promote Web development and Microsoft’s new designer tools family Microsoft Expression. This was the first Microsoft event where you got to hear Microsoft’s competitors like Yahoo! & Amazon (Microsoft wasn’t in cloud yet in 2006), which I found to be quite useful to get a sense of where Web technologies are going in general. And the lunch-table discussions I had with such a variety of audience were very interesting.
 
As a Microsoft Regional Director from 1999 and as a Microsoft Partner for many years, these events have become annual fixtures in my calendar.With the new “Build” event that happened last year (instead of a PDC) where they announced Windows 8, it was clear the existing Microsoft events landscape was changing. And indeed it has changed. First casualty was PDC and today they officially acknowledged that there will be no Mix in 2012. Though I feel sad for an event that offered variety and fun, in the last few years unfortunately Mix was made into yet another Developer event by Microsoft. So it was time the event got killed and merged into a unified better event.
In this moment of our prayers for “Mix” and for its soul to R.I.P I I will like to look back at some of the moments I have experienced around this event.
Mix ‘06
Bill Gates announced and kicked off the very first Mix at the Venetian, Las Vegas. The big announcement was WPF/E (which became Silverlight later) and demonstration of it on a Nokia phone which never got released.
Mix06 was my second or third trip to Vegas so I didn’t understand well on how lodging in Vegas works. I ended up blowing money (literally) by booking a $400/Night (concessional rate for attendees!) room at the venue itself (Venetian).
Mix ‘07
This event was all about Silverlight!. I am sure most of us .NET enthusiasts remember the demo where Silverlight in a browser with C# code-behind winning over Java Script in a game of chess. Looking back (from a world of Node.JS & Chakra) I was not sure on what we were smoking back then in May 2007.
I found the BBC Radio 1 and Windows Live Messenger social co-browsing (called Messenger activity then) & sharing to be quite cool. Unfortunately it never got released outside UK (just like most of the good stuffs from BBC which are available only to UK Residents due to a antiquated theory of UK Tax payer funding).
What got me thinking was a quote made by “The Economist” Publisher Mr.Andrew Rashbass on a panel discussion (which alone was worth my travel to the US from India). The quote was on how Portable Reader devices replacing paper. Andrew said “it will not happen in short-term, not in mid-term and definitely not in long-term and that BillG can use one, but no one else will use it”
I think this year Microsoft started to highlight that Mix was a “72 Hour conversation”, a tag line I liked & which I consider to have captured the essence of what Mix ‘06 and Mix ‘07 were. The evening party on one of the days was fun and colourful.
After blowing my money staying in Venetian, I realized how lodging works in Vegas – you can get rooms from $40 to $1 Million per night, it all depends on what you are looking for. From this year, I was booking myself a room at $40 in the Stratosphere Hotel. Although it is on the other end of the Strip, it was a good 30 minutes walk in the evening after you finish your dinner near by to Venetian like in the Food court at The Capital Grille.
Mix ‘08
This year the keynote was by Ray Ozzie who outlined Microsoft’s investment in IE and Silverlight, Web Slices and more. Lots of demos this year.
Then it was Dean Hachamovitch talking about how great IE 8.0 was (do you remember this IE?)
Lot of coverage about live streaming capabilities of Silverlight during the then upcoming Beijing Olympics
My fellow RD Scott Stanfield’s company Vertigo demoing the “Hard Rock” app they have build using Silverlight and Deep-Zoom technology.
Coca-Cola sponsored UEFA Euro 2008 & Windows Live Messenger community (what was that I don’t remember other than the photograph below?)
On the corridors of the show, I gave an audio interview to Scott Hanselman on Outsourcing (the hot topic then because of a Presidential Election year in USA).
Mix ‘09, 10, 11
Due to the onslaught of recession, travel budget constraints and thanks to great live streaming of the Keynotes by Microsoft, the next three years I decided to watch it from Home, only trouble being the need to have loads of coffee to keep me awake through the Night in India. I didn’t miss out the individual talks either – all the session videos were made available from Channel9 for download in few days of the event getting over.
After 25 hours of listening spread over last 30 days during my regular drives to work and Gym sessions I finished listening to the Audiobook of “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson. Few months back I had finished the book “The Steve Jobs Way: iLeadership for a New Generation” by Jay Eliiots so I was familiar with the man & his life. A lot has been written about Mr.Jobs and about the book in the weeks following his sad demise in October, so I will write in next few paragraphs my impression about the book and what I feel after reading it.
First thing you notice is the size of the book which looks exhaustive, over 600 pages in the hardcover edition. A thorough work by the author “Walter Isaacson”, considering it should have been a monumental effort for Walter to make Jobs talk and then to verify/cross-verify facts as Steve Jobs (as you will learn in the book) is known to distort reality both wilfully and unawares.
In the recent years media has taken a liking to Apple because of Apple’s phenomenal success in Marketplace and its massive market capitalization. Millennials reading it are unaware of the two decades of struggle Jobs had to grow through to bring (personally mature and ripen with age) to that level, he had to suffer through being ousted from the company he founded & so on. Jobs’ early life was unlike any others, he had to deal with the fact of being adopted, had long stints with most things that are narcotics (ACIDs, LSDs), his year of free-roaming in India in Himalayan plains, his interest of Japanese Zen philosophy, yet his appreciation of Italian architecture and the list goes on. What strikes you is the realization that a man as creative as Jobs, with his Buddhist bend he can be a sensitive person, pick up easily vibes assessing people emotionally, yet can use those same skills to hurt the people who are around him at his will. It is well know that Jobs liked the quote “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” from the back cover of last issue of “Whole Earth” magazine in 1971. Jobs had a way of thinking/behaving like pirates during the original Mac development times in early 1980s. Jobs doing most of his important meetings and probably decisions too during his long walks with the concerned person – be it Sculley, Gates or Music label titans. Jobs had an enviable ability to laser-sharp focus on items he cared and completely ignore things he doesn’t care or don’t want to hear – this led him to create brilliant products of our age.
Readers will see the obvious differences between the two personalities who shaped the digital world in last 4 decades – Bill Gates & Steve Jobs, they are exactly of opposite poles. I enjoyed this quote from Bill Gates while countering Jobs claims that Microsoft stole for its Windows the GUI from Apple Mac OS – “Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbour named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it”.
In the last chapters of the book you are left wondering what if this man could have lived for few more years, what more great products he could have given us and what about his young kids losing their father for ever. But then it suddenly hits you, that’s what life and nature is. All of us including Jobs get to stand on giants (and generations before us) shoulders and it is up to each one of us to make use of the vantage point & the time we have got there.
After listening to the Audiobook I bought the hardcover edition as well – as the book certainly needs a reserved place in my bookshelf and the hardcover has some of the rare photographs from his life journey.
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 upgrading to iOS 5 in both my iPhone & iPad, one issue I have been struggling was with Photo Stream – the automatic sync service of photos across iOS devices & PC/Mac. The issue was how to get the sync done to Windows PC faster and how to delete photos in the stream. There is no feature available for editing or deleting the photos in the Photo stream. Then I saw this Apple support article that says how you can reset and get all the photos deleted in the stream.
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 
After listening to few audiobooks with the last being “The Steve Jobs Way: iLeadership for a New Generation” I bought this book from my Audible monthly Gold subscription about 2 months back. The audio version is in two parts (8 hours each) and the best part it was read by the author “Douglas Edwards” himself.
Douglas Edwards joined Google as its 50 something employee on November 29, 1999 just about a year after founding and full 5 years till March 4, 2005 before its stunning IPO in 2004. Before Google he was working for San Jose Mercury News, a 150 year old newspaper managing their online product “Merc” (The Newspaper of Silicon Valley). Douglas was the first director of Google managing its early days marketing and brand management, much of what we saw of initial days Google marketing was written by him. He has penned the text and documentation of many of the early products the mountain view firm. One of the first products for which he wrote the welcome text was for Google Toolbar for which he wrote the below “…NOT THE USUAL YADA YADA” text, he seems to be so thrilled by this line that he repeats it often in the book.
Douglas recalls about the early crazy days of working in Google, late nights, mid night emails to getting to office next day early morning. His encounters with the Chef Charlie, interactions with Larry & Sergey, Product managers like
He recalls tales of how everyone in Google helped to add server capacity in their data center just before big customers like Yahoo! or AOL signed up. How Will Whitted, Hardware Engineer of Google designed Machines so cheap that they don’t need to care if they fail – this is something that all new age computing firms including FaceBook, Amazon seems to take advantage of today.The author goes into explaining what he saw happening on how Google won many of its early deals with Yahoo!, later with ISP as first customer for Adwords & then the biggest of all AOL
In the later chapters as Google evolves & grows big, teams were formally divided Douglas recalls many occasions where he was constantly in struggle with Marissa Mayer who was managing Product Development and Douglas was managing Branding & Marketing. What Douglas leaves out, probably we readers can guess the reason for Larry to be siding with Marissa was because he was dating her then. Douglas seems to have had a better relationship with other early product managers including Salar Kamangar (9th employee and presently CEO of YouTube).
Douglas talks of many Holiday parties at Google, how extravagant they were and the facilities in Googleplex. He talks of the founders obsession with trying to solve everything with Engineering & Algorithms, not having empathy or respect for conventional way of working with people & companies, sometimes this bordering on arrogance. He recalls how the founders disliked to spend money for vendors, they wanting a vendor of a CRM system they wanted to buy to give it free for the privilege of having Google as their customer. In the end how they went with a not so popular CRM solution to manage the thousand of email pouring in to Google from users and all the problems they had till finally writing an email & CRM system on their own. He recalls of what they did immediately after 9/11, pouring into Web logs trying to dig any clue that may be useful for security agencies.
Douglas talks on how Google went searching the next billion dollar idea after search’s success – how it accidentally got GMail! and Google News. He talked on how he got into preparing company’s IPO documentation, how he parked his car miles away from the Investment banking firm handling the deal.
An interesting book to read if you are interested to know the true Google story.
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”.
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