One of my good friend and well wisher is Mr.Siva Pillai, Computer Officer of Goldsmiths College, UK. It is interesting on how we got acquainted. That was way back in 1996/97 when we were both members of a Tamil IT Interest email group. Then in 1998 when I visited London I was treated to be a guest in Siva's house. From there over the years our two families have become good friends.

Coming back to this post, I am happy to learn last week that Siva has won a well-deserved award - it is a European Award for Languages for this year. This was for his work on the Tamil Primary Language and Family Learning Project which has made a significant impact on parental involvement in education and learning of the Tamil language in the Downham (UK) area.

You can read full article here published this month in the CiLT UK Magazine where Siva Pillai describes the project's development and continuing success. The full list of 2007 winners can be found here.

People who know Siva including me are certainly not surprised for this well deserved award for him. Even at the age where he has grandkids, his energy levels have to be seen to be believed. Above all his passion to help children (குறிப்பாக புலன் பெயர்ந்த தமிழ் குழந்தைகள்) to learn Tamil language is infectious. He has several works to his credit on this topic, including the recent project for Learn Tamil - through English (Primary) were he helped the founders.

I just finished reading Richard Branson's book "Screw It, Let's Do It", for the ignorant Richard Branson is the Founder and Chairman of Virgin group of companies. The first thing that strikes when you pick the book is the title, especially the first part that is unconventional and bold. Just to see how people are feeling about the first part, I tried saying to few people that I read Branson's book  "Let's Do It" and I didn't say the first part; immediately all of them corrected me saying isn't it "Screw It, Let's Do It". So I guess Branson has proved even by the name that he is a master of branding and publicity.

We all know Branson to be a flamboyant publicity freak. The book tries to portray a related side of him that his daring, scientific and caring. His earlier book "Losing my Virginity" was his biography so this book is about the lessons he learned from life and business. The book starts with how his mother braved the odds against Women in workforce in 1950s Britain, then moves on to his business moves from a magazine "Student" he started as a drop-out, then on the launching and selling Virgin Music, Virgin Airlines and BA's tactics to kill it and finally on his new space travel venture Virgin Galactic. In between he talks about his daring balloon trips, going to prison for customs violation, buying an island in Virgin island, his affair with his principal's daughter and finally ends the book by his call to save the environment.

I will not classify the book as a  business or a management title, but certainly I will encourage it for Self-Help light reading.

As I posted in the past if you need to do screen shots then you can use the free Zabgrab or if you are using Windows Vista the Snipping tool. But what if you want to capture a web page that scrolls for multiple pages. The hands-on winner to do is the award winning Snag-It!. The other day on a Windows Server 2003, I wanted to do a screen capture and for some reasons Snag-It, refused to launch and kept crashing. So I looked for an alternative and found this article on another tool (free) called WebShot that also allows programmatic API to do the same. Tried it and my problem was solved.

This month (Sep '07) has been double lucky for Indian Sports. Last week Indian Cricket team won the world cup for Twenty:20 championship in South Africa. Today Viswanathan Anand has become the new World Chess Champion. The authorities should use this opportunity to give a sustained improvement to Indian Sports.

After the debacle of Indian team in ODI world cup, the media wanted desperately some win, they have got this big bonanza and making the best use of it. Too much hype is going around, which has the risk of making the team over confidence in subsequent matches.

Windows has been having a Disk Cleanup utility from Windows 95/98 days, but I haven't considered it of any use till today. I found today in my Windows Vista Laptop C:\ Drive hardly 2GB of space free out of 31GB. So I decided to delete some unwanted files to get some space; so I gave the Disk Cleanup utility a try and it did result in cleaning up few GB of space for me.

Landmark bookstores in Chennai is running a super sale of selective books with discounts up to 60% till October 2nd 2007. I was there shopping yesterday and was pleasantly surprised to see few good books worth buying offered in the sale. (Disclaimer: I don't work for Landmark or getting paid to post this)

Here are the books I bought (with the original price in brackets):

1. The Seven-Day Weeknd by Ricardo Semler at Rs.199 (987)
2. Bad boy Ballmer by Fredric Alan Maxwell at Rs.299 (1159)
3. Men of Steel by Vir Sanghvi at Rs.199 (295)
4. The HP Way by David Packard at Rs.199 (643)
5. Dilbert: Build a Better Life by Stealing Office Supplies by Scott Adams at Rs.99 (509)
6. Dilbert: Thriving on vague objectives by Scott Adams at Rs.199 (471)
7. Dilbert: Random acts of management by Scott Adams at Rs.249 (471)
8. Dilbert: Dilbert and the way of the weasel Audio book by Scott Adams at Rs.225 (944)
9. Free Prize Inside /Purple Cow Audio book by Seth Godin at Rs.250 (1589)
10. Tough Choices Audio book by Carly Fiorina at Rs.350 (1503)
11. Who says Elephants can't Dance Audio book by Louis Gerstner Jr. at Rs.399 (1288)

In the next few months as I finish reading (or listening) to them, I will post my reviews here. Stay tuned!

Update 2/Oct/2007: Not being satisfied with the above, I went again today and bought the following titles.

1. Blue Streak by Barbara S.Peterson at Rs.225 (1073)
2. The Dragon and The Elephant by David Smith at Rs.250
3. Buddha by Deepak Chopra at Rs.395
4. The Romance of Tata Steel at Rs.495
5. Profitable Growth by Ram Charan at Rs.249 (946)
6. The new imperialists by Mark Leibovich at Rs.149 (1075)
7. Managing a time of great change by Peter F.Drucker at Rs.299 (1073)
8. Blog! by David Kline at Rs.299 (1073)
9. The story of My Experiments with Truth by M.K.Gandhi - Audio book read by Shekhar Kapur and Nandita Das at Rs.200 (250)

Yesterday I finished reading the book "The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid" by Bill Bryson who is a popular writer of travel books which are very hilarious. In this latest title, Bryson writes about his childhood days in IOWA, USA. Don't be fooled or put off, this is certainly not his biography - obviously who will pay money to read about a writer. Like other books of Bryson, he doesn't attempt to make the events and stories told factual and accurate. Instead he takes a jovial approach and makes fun of him and the 1950's America in his classic style. The sections on US obsession in the 50s over Nuclear Bombs are very hilarious. 

In page 208, Bryson writes "Two deep drafts of a freshly run-off mimeograph worksheet and I would be the education system’s willing slave for up to seven hours". I didn't know what was mimeograph so I searched in wikipedia for it. To my surprise the wikipedia article on mimeograph quotes the same line from the Bryson's book . By the way, Mimeograph is nothing but what we call Stencil in India.

Footnote: One thing I don't seem to get is why the titles from US or UK most of the time have a different cover design in India (where I buy the books) than the one you see at stores in US or in Amazon. Are these publishers customizing the colours and designs to cultural / national preferences?. Even this title has a different cover design shown in Amazon (see right) than in the book I own (see left)

I read in IEEE Spectrum July 2007, a detailed technical analysis of how a high profile mobile phone bugging that happened in 2004. It was of Greece Prime Minister, his cabinet colleagues in defense and foreign affairs, MPs and others. The interesting thing the authors (Vassilis Prevelakis, Diomidis Spinellis) point out was the fact the whole episode was undetected for several months. The hackers (till date even after a Greece Parliament Commission was not identified) had used very sophisticated techniques to hide traces of their activities and ensured they left no entries in any logs.

The cellphones of Greece PM and others were wiretapped to unauthorized numbers by hacking into Ericsson's AXE Switches used in Vodafone Greece mobile network and installing RootKit softwares. Ericsson switch software has the ability to patch its Operating System code without rebooting by using something called has Correction Area. The hackers installed about 29 blocks of code in this correction area, tampered all checksums to go undetected, modified (made itself hidden) the list of active processes in memory. The rogue software stored all the mobile numbers that has to be tapped in memory (there by avoiding any disk entries) and copied the voice calls to parallel numbers.

From a software best practice angle, what was interesting was this could have been identified much earlier if Vodafone had purchased a front-end (GUI) software called IMS (Interception Management System) that maintains a list of legal wiretapping numbers. This list could have been compared periodically with what was in memory and any differences between the two alerted immediately. In this case, the backend OS in the switch had legal wiretapping capabilities enabled and working, but the front-end to manage it was not purchased by customer. Clear case of not reducing the attack surface area by removing unwanted piece of software in live environments. 

Many times you might have got stuck not being able to open a Word/Excel/PowerPoint file because MS Office is not available in that machine. Though OpenOffice/Office Suites in Linux can open MS Office documents, it is doesn't work perfect with all documents.

Microsoft has for long provided for free, viewers for these formats. These viewers can be downloaded from Microsoft.com website and allows you to open, view and print the documents without requiring you to have full blown (paid) MS Office in the machine. The viewers now support the new Office 2007 formats as well, with the additional requirement being to download and install the Office 2007 Convertor as well.

Links to download:

• Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Viewer (Doesn't require the Convertor)
• Microsoft Word 2003 Viewer (Install after this MS Office 2007 Convertor)
• Microsoft Excel 2003 Viewer (Install after this MS Office 2007 Convertor)
• Microsoft Visio 2007 Viewer

Remember, to visit Microsoft Update and install the latest security fixes as well for the above software. The MS Office 2007 File Format Convertor can be installed in MS Office 2003/2000/XP/97 versions as well to open and save in the new formats.