If you are travelling to Singapore, you can enjoy Free Wi-Fi access at StarHub Access points in Changi Airport, Suntec City and Coffee Bean Outlets. I have used during my trips to Singapore in the last few years and find it most of the time working fine. Today while trying to use it in Changi Airport I couldn't login, after few frustrating moments I realized I was doing it wrong - StarHub please improve your User Instructions in the SMS you send.

Steps:

First you select StarHub as your Mobile Phone Roaming Service Provider. Then dial *9434 from your phone, you will shortly get a SMS with UserId and Password. Then connect to "StarHub" access point from your laptop. Open Internet Explorer, you will get the above shown Login Screen. In the screen, select Mobile/Cellular Phone Roaming Customers Checkbox, before entering the UserID and Password in the Step 2 area. I missed to select the RadioButton - can you believe how dumb I am

In the Jet Airways flight from Chennai to Singapore I watched "Lage Raho Munnabhai". Since I got a Business Class upgrade, they gave a Personal Video System - which was a small Fujitsu Lifebook laptop with customized hardware and software.

I don't understand "Hindi" beyond the basics, so I was skeptical on how much I will like the movie and understand the jokes. But the English Subtitle really was useful and well done that I enjoyed the movie 100%. I laughed and laughed, that I had to control myself during several instances from being heard by my fellow passengers. I didn't know Sanjay Dutt could do this well a comedy performance, I always imagined him to be an action hero (pardon my ignorance of Hindi Movies). The director "Rajkumar Hirani" has done a fabulous job of giving a movie of world-class quality in the presentation style.

Though it is sad that "Gandhian" philosophy has to be shown to be followed by a Gunda, it was given in a nice fashion. And finally, Vidya Balan was looking beautiful throughout the movie!

Today I travelled from Chennai to Singapore by Jet Airways. Though MAA-SIN has several flight I picked this one, as it is conveniently leaving Chennai in the morning at 11AM and I wanted to try Jet Airways International Sector. Jet always has been my favourite airways and I wanted to see how they do in International sector. In short, I loved the flight and Jet's impeccable service.

The ground staff was efficient, and they impressed me most for two things: First for they gracely upgraded me to Business Class (though with a Jet Upgrade voucher but that is valid only on Domestic Sectors) and Second for a very small thing but a gesture I loved - the Immigration Card they handed over already had the flight number filled up. Think about service and this is service - the ability to anticipate little things and do it for customer. Let me stop here I am sounding like their spokesperson . 

Lastly, I am happy that I will get few thousand miles credited to my frequent flyer program, Jet when will you fly to USA?

I recently read Bill Bryson's book "Neither here Nor there" - travels in Europe. A very hilarious book. Bill has made little effort to make it a travel guide, so you will learn little about Europe. Bill's style was very lively, once I picked the book, I couldn't keep it down without finishing it.

Last week while in London, I saw a very good programme in BBC TV titled "How to be Slim?". The programme contained scientific study results and common diet myth debunkers. It included suggestions on adding non-fat Dairy, Visual Clues to reduce in-take, under-sizing, eating filling foods like soups, etc. Check out the webpage here at BBC.CO.UK website.

Unfortunately the accompanying video of the programme only plays for UK Visitors. If you are adventurous you can pretend to be from UK and view the Video content from here [the link uses an UK Anonymizer Proxy Service to do this].

Related Link: Seven common diet myths

Here is the scoope on I got my free Zune Player from Microsoft.

I never owned an iPod and my last brush with a MP3 player was about 6 to 7 years back with now ancient Creative Nomad II Player. Nomad had an extremely limited space even after adding 64MB Smart Media Card (which at that time costed me a fortune). I found limited use for the device, as anywhere I went I had my laptop - whether the trip was for business or vacation. So Music and Video was always there. I considered this as the perfect Digital Media Nirvana - with no need to buy myself an iPod or equivalent. In the mean time, I gifted my sisters with iPod Nano's and they were thrilled - which I couldn't understand why?

So when I got the Zune players (I got two - one I gifted right away) I was very skeptical on how useful will it be for me. Few weeks after I got Zune, I was to do my business visit to USA. Normally I rip few of the new DVDs and VCDs into my laptop - which in past trips, I hardly had time to watch and will delete on return with wasting the time spent in ripping them in the first place. This time I decided to give Zune a spin - so I was out looking on how to rip the videos to Zune format. After lot of research, trials and discussions with other RDs, I narrowed to "PQ DVD to Zune Video Converter Suite". The software certainly was fast, gave good quality video output and was worth the US$40 I spent on it. I just wish they have slightly a better User Interface and their website worked (now they seem to have a new website). If you are using this software, for better results with DVDs set the frame rate to 24 fps (in more options dialog) and Video Quality to Good (in main window).

 

I carried few Tamil Movies, Cho's Drama சாத்திரம் சொன்னதில்லை, EveryBody Loves Raymond and King of Queens. Zune was god sent when I had to kill my time in Airport waiting lounges and with British Airlines' boring In-Flight Entertainment selection. I just hope no one in London Airport thought I was crazy - when I was laughing funnily while watching King of Queens

Zune's battery was decent, I could get over 2 to 3 hours of video inspite of several pause-and-play situations. I just wish they improve it to last for few more hours to last for a full long flight. While in US, I bought Zune's Home A/V Kit - that consists of a AC Charger, Remote Control and TV Cable from Amazon for $75 against the full price of $99.  The TV Cable was really handy to connect Zune to a TV in the apartment and enjoy the videos I carried on a larger screen. I found the TV Cable to be useful at home as well for showing my parents the trip photographs from Zune.

If you own a Zune, I highly recommend the Home A/V kit for a complete experience. While on that, don't waste your money by buying the Zune FM Transmitter - I bought it as well and found it totally useless. The reception was bad everywhere - I am saying this after trying in the USA and also in Chennai where there is huge available non-used FM Spectrum, but still the signal strength was pathetic.

This probably is the first book that I finished with in days of buying it.

I bought the book "One Night @ the call center" by Chetan Bhagat during my visit to the Annual Chennai Book Fair 2007. Bhagat is a graduate from IIT Delhi and author of Five Point Someone. Though I haven't read his earlier book - I got interested by the story line which as the name suggests is about working in a call center and a phone call from God.

With in days of the book fair, I had two long flights [Chennai to London, London to Seattle]. I finished most of the book in the two flights and the balance pages over the first day in Redmond, WA. Completing a book is probably the only good thing for me of doing these long flights. If in town, I would have never finished a book so quickly.

Anyways, coming back about the book. This is a light reading book and I liked the way the author has made no attempt to make it a literary work. Bhagat has tried and captured largely the pulse of India's call centers - though he has dramatized by a bit of artifically added romance and sex. The phone call from God, was more an anti-climax for me, I wish Bhagat could have continued the tempo by handling this bit a little better.

A enjoyable read and definitely worth for Rs.95 (Two Dollars) !

My family owns The Little Flower Co. - a South Indian book Publisher. Apart from LIFCO Dictionaries, our popular titles includes Hindu Sloga books, Personal development and other vernacular titles.

Last month, while I was in America I was thrilled to learn that our title "How to Cook" (a South Indian Cook Book) featured in Saveur magazine. Saveur has listed How to Cook  as one of their top 100 Favorite List of foods, restaurants, drinks, people, places and things. 

 

(Image Courtesy: Saveur Special Issue)

 

"How To Cook" is also available in Tamil Language as "சமைப்பது எப்படி" ?

Microsoft is sponsoring a project to be built by my fellow RD and good friend Tim Huckaby's InterKnowlogy and The Scripps Research Institute (A Non Profit biomedical research firm). The project is to build the release 2 version of an application built on the .NET Framework 3.0 with WPF, Vista and Microsoft Sharepoint giving scientists a powerful tool to visualize and annotate research results for cancer treatment.

If you think you are a good .NET Developer and have some time to spare - you can enroll. You will be paid for the time.

For details visit:

• My fellor Microsoft Regional Director - Stephen Forte's post here
• The post here by Microsoft's Eileen Rumwell announcing the program
• Video about this project

If you are doing Webpages in Indian Languages like Tamil, Hindi, Punjabi, etc. and you want to embed dynamic fonts (fonts that are shown without being installed in your PC) you need two items:

1. A tool to create Dynamic Fonts (EOT) - this can be done by the free Microsoft WEFT Tool. Netscape's Dynamic Font technology Bitstream has been discontinued few years back.
2. Apart from WEFT, you need the actual Open Type fonts for the language. Unfortunately the fonts that ship with Windows XP or MS Office or MS BhashaIndia.com sites are copy righted and cannot be used without explicit license from Microsoft. So you need free Indian Language fonts to do this.

Govt. of India has released free Indian Language Software and Fonts CD for about 10 languages (and growing) in its ILDC.in website. You need to register here and download the fonts for the particular language you want.

Related Links:

• Read about my presentation on stage during the release of Tamil Free Software CD here
• Microsoft Office 2003 in Tamil Language

What I started casually has now completed THREE YEARS and into its Fourth Year. I am talking about this blog that you are reading (www.venkatarangan.com/blog). I started it more as a log book - but now has become a reference and as a good outlet for me. I myself keep coming back to this blog mostly to reference on some links or recollect on how I felt on a issue or technology sometime back. Blogging has convinced me that who you are here, your thoughts changes on the experiences you keep having - and the experiences themselves change on time; in short we evolve over time.

If you haven't started blogging, please do so - and remind yourself constantly to keep posting. In reality if you prepare for each post mentally before hand it takes only few minutes for the actual post to be done.

• Second Year of my blog - Anniversary Post
• Third Year of my blog - Anniversary Post

If you are wondering what happened to me over last few weeks - here is the scoope. Over the Christimas '06 I was in a much needed vacation with my family in Hosala Village near Belur, Helibedu temples; over the last few weeks business traveling in USA and London. Will post about the places and photos of these trips shortly - stay tuned.

One of the questions I frequently get is how to upgrade from VB 6 to VB.NET. Though there are lot of upgrade scenerios explained in detail in MSDN, my favourite has always been step-by-step upgrade. In this approach, you take one of your existing forms, upgrade/re-develop them in VB.NET and have it being called from VB 6.0 applications. Then you move to the next form, by doing this, over a period you can have the entire application moved to VB.NET. The problem in doing this was to have the knowledge on how to turn the VB.NET form into a COM component that can be called from VB 6.0, MS has made this easier now with Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0.

• See a screencast on using Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0
• Hear the behind stories on Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0

Having the forms developed in VB.NET brings in lot of capabilities - foremost being the ability to support 100% Unicode, which is very important for Indic Languages like Tamil, Hindi, etc.

For doing Unicode with VB 6.0:

Though basic: If Windows XP / 2003 - First ensure you have selected the check box in Control Panel -> Regional and Languages Options -> Languages Tab -> Install Files for Complex Script and Right Languages (or) If Windows 2000 – Ensure you have Indic Support enabled

VB 6.0 even with MS Forms 2.0 will have some issues with Unicode, especially Indic languages like Tamil. I found it easier and better to do the forms in VB.NET 1.1 and then call the forms from VB 6.0. So the .NET application can be either a standalone EXE (or) called as a ActiveX COM DLL .

These references might be useful, check them out:

• http://www.cyberactivex.com/UnicodeTutorialVb.htm
• http://www.bhashaindia.com/Patrons/Events/ExpertChatTranscripts.aspx
• http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/6/e/f6e7aea8-d238-4676-93bd-1dcc0fa6c276/IndiaDevCon99PM.ppt