I get this question from our customers most of the time, on what should be the ideal time for a WebPage to load that consumers will be bear with and will not switch to an other site. It is not an easy question to answer, as each webpage (and its site) is different, offers varied functionalities, delivers wide range of contents and each sites objective is different. In my opinion only a Search Engine (like Google) can have the simplest (smallest) homepage as it just needs to have one TextBox and still do something useful. For all other sites it is a careful orchestration (and comprimises) between features exposed, richness, content & speed.

On this same topic I read in Business Line an interview "Trends in the making" with Chris Schoettle (EVP, Akamai Technologies) and he sa:

"End users today expect a page to load faster. Average user satisfaction for a page to download is now four seconds. If it takes longer than that, they will typically go to another site. People do not have the patience to wait for pages to load. A couple of years ago, it was seven seconds. And soon, it will be no more than three seconds"

At Vishwak, few months back we collected data on time taken for page load of Google and Yahoo! for academic interest. We did this from various Indian metros both with Dial-up connections and from browsing centres (Broadband).

Disclaimer: This study was done purely for academic interest and we don't guarantee accuracy nor we will be responsible for any consequences of usage of this data. Yahoo! and Google are trademarks of their respective companies.

One of the common things you want to do after you created all your content slides in a presentation is to put an Agenda slide or TOC (Table of Contents) slide. This was easy using the Summary Slide button in Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 as shown below. For reasons best known to Microsoft, this feature to have a summary slide automatically generated is not available in PowerPoint 2007. This MS Knowledge base article confirms this behaviour, and it suggests a tedious manual process of copyring each slide title and pasting it to create a summary slide

If anyone from Microsoft is listening here, please add this feature back. It will take hardly an hour to write a Macro that can achieve this..

Steps to do this in PowerPoint 2003:

• Click on View Menu
• Then on Slide Sorter
• Select the slides that you want in the TOC
• On the "slide sorter" toolbar, 3rd icon along is the "summary slide" clicking it will make a slide automatically

21st June is a special day for me - it is when Vishwak Solutions Pvt. Ltd was incorporated in 2001 and my Son was born in 2003.

This 21st June, I decided to go with my family to Sivaji "The boss", what a mistake - we should have celebrated the happy occassion in a much better fashion. The movie for me was a big dissapointment. BOSS for me implied "Blatant Omission of Story and Screenplay".

Since this movie has been commented to death, I will make this post ery brief. 1) The movie runs for too long (3 hours+), 2) I am not able to figure out how a software architect in USA working for 20 years can earn Rs.200 Crores and 3) Sankar has used the RobinHood theme to death.

Overall Rajini looks young in the movie; but Director Sankar's creativity seems to have aged and in coma!!!

Update 22/Jul/07: I came across this honest review of the movie which was different from every thing else around. Due to the hype created for movie (Hat's to AVM for a great marketing job) everyone seems to be acting like in Emperors New Clothes  when in public.

In Western countries this may not be a news item, but in a country like India where infrastructure works are known to take years due to Democratic party politics, Bureaucracy, Lack of planning, Corruption this is indeed news item worth being blogged. I was pleasantly surprised to hear this news. Last week in Srirangam (my mother's home town) Southern Railways have in 5 Hours (yes you read it correct) have completed a sewage work by removing and fixing the tracks. This rail line is a busy one and it was commendable they finished the work with minimum disruption to traffic.

"The work started at around 10 a.m. Around 150 labourers were engaged in the exercise. A total of 24 pre-cast concrete box segments, each weighing 18 metric tonnes, were placed one by one after removing the earth up to 3.8 m below the formation to a total length of about 40 metres"

Many times you have the need to access data (XML) from other sites than the current page, browser security settings prevent it as it could lead to Cross Site Security issues. I came across these two good references on solving this:

1. Yahoo! Developer Use a Web Proxy for Cross-Domain XMLHttpRequest Calls
2. Mash-it Up with ASP.NET AJAX: Using a proxy to access remote APIs

PCQuest Magazine in its June 2007 issue has listed 250 IT Implementation Projects in India. I am happy to say our Vishwak Portal Framework based solution we provided for Live Mint (Hindustan Times & WSJ Business paper) is featured as one of them. (Case study of LiveMint)

(Courtesy: PC Quest June 2007)

Also interesting is the article's observation that ASP.NET is the preferred platform of choice for Portals in India for its ease of use. Our VPF is based on ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005.

"Most of the portal solution projects that we received were developed using ASP.NET or VB .Net. We spoke to the project heads of these portals to find out why they chose this platform. The answer was simplicity. According to them, creating projects on ASP.NET is mush easier and requires less code to write"

Today is Father's Day, I was travelling last one week so couldn't buy a gift for my Dad. So today morning I went to this online e-greeting card site that gives a variety of customizable, printable ecards and then printed a wonderful card with my parents photo. I gave this to my "Dad".

After that, I was filling up several copies (Mr.Sam Pitroda was right 100% we still have this outdated process) of address and personal details in my son's LKG Diary and doing labels for his books. When I did the labels, I remembered my school days and my Dad getting me pre-printed labels with my name in them. How lucky I am to get a Dad like that!

(Pre-Printed Labels for my school books)

Thanks Dad, you have been the greatest dad - giving me the believe in my abilities, freedom to fly, I promise to do the same to my son.

 My title summarizes the experience of reading this book. I picked this book a few weeks back, I started reading it immediately during my travels and I finished it yesterday night. What a book, the style and language is so well written and direct, that you feel Mr.Sam Walton (Founder Wal-Mart) is actually speaking to you. 

If the numbers that Wal-Mart have achieved ($53 Billion Annual Sales) when Mr.Sam Walton wrote the book was impressive and unbelievable; it is even more staggering now ($310 Billion Annual Sales, 1.6 Million Associates).

There are some ideas of Mr.Walton that needs a little fine tuning for the 21st Century, but the basic ideas he outlines are still very much relevant. His experience on how he built Wal-mart is a fascinating read. This is an excellent book that must be read by every entrepreneur - especially those who are thinking of starting a business. It should be (if it isn't already) made a textbook for all business education streams. My sincere thanks to Late Mr.Sam Walton for fighting his disease in his last days and managing to write this book. I am afraid to think the amount of wisdom that woud have been lost if he succumbed to death (which happened in 1992) earlier and never completed this book

How SilverLight was build by Gaurav Khanna (Microsoft Corp):

• SilverLight is Microsoft's paradigm of developing rich internet application (RIA) that runs in Browser Sandbox and are cross-browser in nature
• Gaurav started with a nice white page (Ink Application), wrote on it, rather than do slides
• One file core.dll contains both the CLR and JITing part
• Browsers due to W3C standard downloads only 2 threads (images, CSS whatever), what happens in SilverLight. He didn't answer to my satisfaction, as I suppose everything should be bound by the WinInet limitation.

Building Cool Virtual Earth Mashups by Janakiram MSV (Microsoft India)

• Jani is brilliant and his demos on the mashups with theatres in Mumbai, tab popups, integration with Sulekha Yellow Pages Feed and BharatMatrimony RSS feed was cool
• I am waiting for him to post the samples, code in his blog
• His humour on "You can do anything and everything - server side, client side, JavaScript, XML, Web Services anything, because at the end it is all mash-ups"
• He talked about Map Cruncher (Custom tile generator), MapPoint Web Service (Enterprise Service) & Virtual Earth (Enterprise Service)

Astoria - Data on the Cloud by Janakiram MSV (Microsoft India)

• Accessing data stored in the cloud and access it using HTTP REST
• Astoria is Data Access Pattern, Online Service, .NET Library
• It is about Web Data Access and not Database Web Access - the difference being accessing Data from a URI using REST and not SOAP or anything else
• Explained the difference between Astoria which is an online service and ADO.NET Entity Model and Web Data Extensions
• (References: MSDN Data Access Incubation projects including Astoria and Jasper)

Most of the time, I get this question - not so much nowadays, but a lot in previous years.

At Vishwak, we have been using IIS for all our customers for nearly last 10 years and after IIS 5.0 we are very satisfied with it and its scalability. Whenever I get this question I have to keep explaining the differences, pros and cons - but now it is made easy with this excellent comparison written by Microsoft Bill Staples (from Product team of IIS). BillS is very passionate on IIS and I have enjoyed attending his presentations including one in Microsoft Redmond on IIS 7.0.

I don't know what happened, may be it is due to the hard work (or hands off approach) done by Laloo (Hon'ble Railway Minister), Railway Stations are nowadays much cleaner and better looking. It was more than a year or two, I travelled by Indian trains. Last month I went with my family to Tirunelveli from Egmore for a co-worker's marriage. I found Egmore exceptionally clean for an Indian Railways Station, fitted with Elevators, Well Lit signs for each coach, packaged water & usable toilets. Even in stations in between, the coffee/tea were served by making it just in time - hot milk from a thermo flask with Tea Bags or Coffee; impressive.

Indian Railways - Please keep up the good job and the pace, you have miles to go... Millions of Indians need you more than ever and you have a duty to serve them better, they have been putting up your bad service for 100 years now. I always believed Privatization is the best way for Indian Railways (Just like UK) but these small efforts are giving me hopes, we can live through the time till privatization. Each year, during budget session I am left wondering on why Indian Railways (Public Sector Company) still needs to present its separate budget in front of the parliament. Though it employs Millions of People (so does many other Public Sector Companies) it doesn't warrant a separate budget in parliament and make it a big political event. It will be better to spin it off like BSNL or ONGC or IOC, etc.

I have a suggesion for Indian Railways on a big revenue opportunity. This will be to introduce Air Conditioned  Clean Trains in the Metro cities. These need not be separate Delhi Metro like efforts, it can be in the existing rail lines and stations but with new spanky trains but on lesser frequency and premium priced. 

I bought a new car - Honda City GXi early April this year. We all know Honda to be the best car makers' in the worldwide, Yes, the car is fabulous to drive but their service is pathetic & cold.

After the first month, when I left it for the first service, in the bright sunlight of Chennai I noticed for the first time a colour variance (can you believe this in a Honda car) of one of the rear-doors from rest of the vehicle. On complaining this to the dealer (Sundaram Motor, Chennai) they accused me of painting it with a 3rd party - how attrocious. Later when I complaint on how they can accuse like this, the manager in Sundaram said that is their normal procedure to grill down customer before accepting a warranty problem - what a great customer service.

Coming back to the story, after several faxes to Sundaram, Honda (which no one bothered or acknowledged) they accepted the manufacturing defect. Then after repeated complaints to Honda One2One I got my car back nearly after three weeks of being in service. It took them 3 weeks to do it, since they wanted to find what went wrong in their supply chain up to Japan keeping my car in their service. They re-painted (have you ever heard about a new Honda Car getting painted) that side of doors and gave it back to me. Sundaram or Honda never called me once during the whole episode - not even a courtesy "Sorry". Even after I repeatedly demanded to One2One that I needed an explanation from Honda on why this happened, no one called me back. It seems they have a policy in One2One that customer can only talk to them, they will reply only through dealers - and they call the program One2One.

Sundaram after all my screaming promised to give one year of extended warranty free (Rs.8500 value) in 2 days - even after 3 weeks now, no sign of it. 

Read my full complaint to Honda One2One. Finally I would like to congratulate Honda for being completely Indianized (for the worse).

Is there something like this - does Proactive and Indian Bureaucracy go on the same sentence ever. I was pleasantly surprised to see the news today in Mumbai Mirror, that the Mumbai Local Body is taking Proactive measures to handle the monsoon season. The article talks about how local grounds have been booked for parking vehicles during heavy rains, on how companies like SBI have volunteered to sponsor food for the affected people and how health measures have been planned.

Of course since I am not a Mumbaikar so I can't vouch for the true meaning and the impact of the above, but still even the thought of it I feel should be appreciated and copied by other cities or at least the metros administrators. Chennai begs for something like this.

I haven't seen either of the movie, this post is not about the movies themselves but on how they are made and marketed.

I also wanted to break my pages after pages of technical bullet points from Tech Mela . Those tech posts are more my notes and it is easier to take down using Windows Live Writer (blog) and access them later, rather than using Paper (and never look at them) or Outlook or OneNote; and also share it with others and with my team.

Coming back to movies, I am amazed at how movies are now made in Bollywood and Kollywood. Sivaji was made at a cost of Rs.80 Crores or more - unbelievable!. Look at the original VCD & DVD packaging and cover designs of recent Hindi Movies like Dhoom2 or Jhoom - I am not able to find a difference between them and Hollywood movies. Packaging is certainly international quality. Hindi Movie houses also seem to have understood the benefits of DVD market and how to make them work rather than fight technology. They now release the Original VCD & DVD after few months and keep selling them for years. For example, today in Mumbai PlanetM I found tons of Lagaan DVDs, I bought one and I was told it sells very well not bad for a movie that got released few years back. I hope, if Tamil Producers follow suit sooner and release movie DVDs shortly after screering, rather than release them after the movie is all forgotten.

Every Media is talking only about Sivaji or Jhoom whether it is English, Hindi or Tamil or whether it is NDTV, CNN IBN or Times Now. I am amazed at how movie houses have tied up with Media to create such a hype for Sivaji. Well I suppose to get back Rs.80 Crores + Profit you got to do every marketing trick in the book, isn't it

Microsoft Performance Point Server (PPS) by Abhishek Srivatsa (Microsoft India):

I had little understanding on this product, so decided to start with this. The session gave me some overview on the product and on how it helps to collect and model data with its built-in tools. It uses SQL Server 2005 Enterprise for its own Meta-Data and Cubes, but the actual data can come from any source (RDBMS). End users can enter data easily through Excel and don't need InfoPath (it is not supported now). PPS needs WSS or Sharepoint to run. Currently the workflow it uses is different but will be merged with WWF in coming releases. There is a RAD environment for doing Scorecards easily. The UI is Office 2007 like so better than the BSM UI. The presentor choosed not to show any demos and it all PPTs and I lived through it . I was told to go the afternoon session by one of the PMs of the product "Rohit"  which I did.

REST with WCF by my good friend Janakiram MSV (Microsoft India):

• He showed a demo of Weather.com XML and he commented on their URL having XOAP which he said could be for XML Object Access Protocol  
• COAP (Complex Object Access Protocal) which Jani has coined which is for SOAP with all complexities of WSDL, etc.
• He brought in good humour by calling all the assumed tenants of Web 2.0 - have a multi colour logo with reflection, rounded-edges, always is in Beta, register your domain with 'r' as suffix - flickr, twitter,etc.
• He talked about how bollywood is reinventing old movies like DON. Similarly how industry is reinventing CSV. He was drawing a parallen on JSON which was plain old CSV with some simple meta-data.
• He joked on how Microsoft has embraced extensively XML so that people may call it "eXtremely Microsoft Language"
• Wired Format Protocols:
• POX - Plain Old XML has no meta-data; SOAP has meta-data. POX comes with a catch, there is no contract, you get something from a server and you figure out the schema and hard-codes them.
• JSCON - Javascript Object Notation
• WCF in .NET 3.5 (Orcas)
• JSON/AJAX Support (WebHttpBinding, JSON Message Encoding)
• Syndication Support (RSS 2.0, ATOM 2.0)
• HTTP Programming Support (REST, POX)
• Data Contracts are object contracts that we can send over wires.
• He showed a good demo on Maps with Theatre mash-ups
• There is a good blog post by James Clarke on JSON vs XML
  

Extending Browser Object with Silverlight by Pandurang Nayak (Microsoft India)

• Though I have been to the same session on Silverlight in Mix '07, I decided to be here because I haven't been any of Pandurang's session before.

Building Business Insights using Performance Point 2007 by Rohit Rahi (Microsoft Corp)

• May be b'cos he was from the product team, but this session was fabulous on its own and especially after the morning one I attended on PPS. The speaker had only 1 hour (Organizers: You need at least 75-90 minutes for a decent tech talk with demos) and he did a fantastic job of it - skipping all PPTs, showing only demos and took taking plenty of questions patiently even on licensing which he had no control on
• You can download the current CTP2 as a complete VPC with Server and Client preinstalled and ready to play with. Lot more features are coming in CTP3 in few weeks. The final release is getting shipped by end of this year.
• When you buy PPS v1.0 you will also get Proclarity 6.3 free - so you can both servers. In next version of PPS lot more features of Proclarity will be introduced, currently almost all Proclarity web features are in PPS v1.0
• What is ScoreCard - it is a sweet spot between Reporting and Analytics
• In PPS now you can easily create dashboard using an Office 2007 like UI client, and publish the entire dashboard in one click to MOSS without the cumbersome process of creating each webpart in MOSS. This client - Dashboard Designer is a huge improvement in PPS from BSM. You also have bulk editing capabilities, Analytic view designer,  Time Intelligence. New data sources including SAP BW 3.5, Sharepoint Lists, Excel Services are introduced
• BSM 2005 and Proclarity 6.3 users and applications can easily move to PPS v1.0 straight away.
• He demoed a cool Strategy Map which is a visual representation of Balanced Scorecard. Helps you to see how KPIs are related. You can also have your reports to linked to each KPIs. KPIs can be imported easily from your SQL Server Cubes or from Excel as well.
• Strategy Maps are actually Visio 2007 web part, so it can be easily a Plant Map or any other diagram in Visio 2007. Even Organization charts can be connected and shown how each is performing to their KPIs
• People confuse between Dashboard and Scorecard. There is no clear definition, but Microsoft likes to call Dashboard as an entire page which has one or more Scorecards and reports.
• PPS v1.0 supports parameterized Scorecards which can be used to see your scorecard for a selected value (Country, Price, etc.)
• Unlike in BSM where it was difficult to create scorecards since first you have to create KPIs; in PPS it is other way - create scorecard first and then KPIs
• PPS v1.0 is introduced some new web parts like OLAP Grids and OLAP Charts - these can be thought of as next version of Office Web Components
• Answering questions:
• Sharepoint and PPS - How do you compare them for dashboard functionality, since both provides dashboard capabilities and how do you rationalize the choice. Some you can do even with Excel Service. Rohit acknowledged it was a tough question and the overlap between products, which over versions will get ironed out
• Why should I buy CALs, when I already Sharepoint CALs and that too only to see the data?. Again Rohit acknowledged the problem, but highlighted how Microsoft PPS is still cheaper at $200 per CAL compared to Cognis and other competition at $4000 or so.  
• Does it support versioning and archiving in scorecard. It seems "No" for right now, but BSM has it today.

Device Independent UI for Windows Mobile by Mel Sampat (Microsoft Corp)

• There are tons of devices with different form factors with more coming in the months and so the UI should work well across these. They are working on wide device like Nokia Communicator
• In Windows XP/Vista we can have fixed size Window dialog, but not in the Windows in Mobile where they are always are full-screen and to the size of the hardware.
• He demoed how say Windows Live Search Application works very well in all different form factors
• ScreenLib is a free library from Microsoft to achieve device resolution independence in native code. It is a C++ Class that works with Win32 and MFC, lightweight and works with all versions of Windows Mobile Devices. And it is open source and has been included in Windows Mobile 6 SDK
• Suggestions:
• Set the Anchor Property to Top, Left, Right for textboxes and Anchor Property to Top, Left, Right, Bottom for the list control
• Use ScreenLib for Native Code

Choosing the best technology for Integration and Workflow by Janikiram MSV and Vineet Gupta (Microsoft India):

• This is a topic of huge interest to me and any architect for that matter, so my expecations were high because both are excellent speakers. It turned out to be a Q & A, which by itself it good, but I am not impressed
• Though both of them have tons of experience and tons of things to say, the session turned out to be just talk without any breaks or organization. I got lost after first few minutes. It turned out to be kind of a private conversation between both of them. Sorry guys!