For 17 years or so, Bill Gates has done the keynote at CES and this year is claimed to be his last year. At the show yesterday they had shown a funny (imaginative) video of last day of Bill Gates at work in Microsoft. You can have a Good Laugh, check it out. 

Bill Gates Last Day CES Clip

Last month returning from a trip to Danvantri Temple, Walajapet went with my family to Sripuram Golden Temple near vellore. It is built by Sri Narayani Peetam and is situated some 5Kms from Vellore downtown. When we went thousands of people were in the temple, after locking you in cages (like in Tirupati) they send you in batches to control the crowd. I suppose most of the crowd visiting were curious and interested to see the new golden temple rather than the deity. The temple, covering 55,000 sq ft, has intricate carvings and sculptures in gold. Except for the pathway, the entire structure has been made of gold and copper. About 400 goldsmiths and coppersmiths, including craftsmen from Tirumala-Tirupati Devasthanam, have completed the architectural marvel in gold in six years. The approximate cost of the temple is Rs 600 crore.Visit the official website here for more details and photos.

It was a long walk to the temple and inside the temple - as they make you walk a kilometre or two in a path formed in the shape of Srichakram (the holy sign of Vaishnavism in Hindu Religion). The main temple and surroundings have been done built aesthetically and maintained very well, the whole place is so beautiful and calm.

As I have written in the past I like Irish Folk songs. So the other day while at Crosswords I saw & picked up the CD "Ireland - The greatest songs ever". One song among the 12 songs in the album impressed me a lot and in the last few days I have listened to it several times.

The song was Four Pence a Day by Tola Custy & Cyril O'Donoghue. Surprisingly my 4 year old son has taken a liking to it and he demanded I play it twice today!.The song talks about the hard working conditions for Four Pence a day as salary. 

You can sample the songs from this Amazon page. If you like Irish Folk Songs this is a good album but the price at Rs.395 is damn expensive. You may be able to buy the few good songs online for much cheaper price. 

Over the few years our team size in Vishwak has grown from less than 50 to over 150 now. This means as the Chairman of the organization I don't get to meet every team member individually, have a chat with them and get to know them better. So few months we experimented with a program titled "Coffee with Venkat", obviously inspired by the TV talk show by a similar name. This is a bi-monthly event normally held on the first & Third Saturday's of a month. A few randomly selected team members spend an hour over coffee to have an informal chat with me. Only one condition - no work related topics. I have done over half-a-dozen of this programs so far, and mostly the topics they choose to talk are around their aspirations, ambitions, school/college days and future plans. Every time after the program I feel extremely energized and inspired. I highly recommend this to every business or organization heads. 

I use a Windows Smartphone (HTC s710). Few weeks back while attending a professional presentation I took down some notes and saved it in the SMS "Draft" folder. Today I wanted the text available in  my PC so that I can use the contents, I didn't want to retype the whole text (it was few SMS messages long). SMSing to my same number won't work & Windows Smartphone OS doesn't have a copy-paste option - had it got that I could copied and pasted it as an email.

Finally I found a way, I have a PCMCIA Internet Data Card in my laptop from Tata Indicom. I sent the SMS to that number, then opened the data card software which showed all the SMS (as seen in the right hand side image) in a textbox, I copied it from there.

Isn't this a neat solution?. Only drawback was that I had to pay for 4-5 SMS messages though

It was exciting to see the Indian economy growing closer to becoming a mature economy. My random thoughts below on the subject as a novice.

You should give credit to the brothers (Mukesh and Anil) because in the last 2 years after their split-up it is amazing the amount of wealth they have created for themselves and their shareholders. The overall market capitalization of Reliance Industries and ADAG after the split-up is multiple times of the value when they were as one single unit. So it is not surprising if you are wondering like me whether the whole story of differences between the brothers and the split-up episode was orchestrated. Anyway it is, the split-up seems to be only for the good and has made all the stakeholders more wealthier and happier.

Today Reliance Power announced their IPO which they are claiming on TV to be India's largest public offering. The IPO opens on January 15 and closes on January 18 in the price band of Rs.405-450/share. They have announced incentive for individual investors by the flexibility to pay say Rs.110 or so while applying and the balance within 21 days from the date of allotment and a 5% discount. You can read the full news here.

Having bought the DVD several months back, I managed to watch the movie "Guru" staring Abhishek Bachchan yesterday. The story was widely rumoured to be based on Reliance Dhirubhai Ambani's life. Abhishek definitely has done a superb performance in the movie coming as the ambitious businessman. Though Aishwarya Rai comes throughout the movie, she has very little role and leaves no impact.

The first half of the movie, where Gurukant Desai raises to fame fast was well taken, but the second half resembles more a routine Hindi Movie with a fight (not physical) and the Hero winning at the end. Overall, if you remove the Reliance Ambani connection from your mind, this is a very ordinary movie - Director Mani Rathnam could have done better.

During my christmas vacation now, I just finished reading the book "Five Point Someone" by Chetan Bhagat. Few months back I read the author's (Bhagat) second book "One night@the call centre" and was interested to read his first book "Five Point Someone".

The book is a story on life in IIT campus and what not to do at IIT. Though the story is somewhat usual, the author has a fantastic way of narrating it in first person. Certainly a good read to pass time.

Microsoft recently announced their new virtualization technology  "Hyper-V" (codename Viridian) as part of Windows Server 2008 that will replace Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. I wanted to understand the differences between the two virtualization products and how to use Hyper-V. In my search, I came up with the following list of references and understandings.

Rough Technology differences between Hyper-V and earlier products:
One way to think about these new chip technologies is that they introduce a “-1” ring essentially to the usual four rings in the x86 CPU architecture. With the VPC and Virtual Server offerings, they use a trick called ring compression where the kernel of the VM is placed into Ring 1, instead of the expected Ring 0. This is so that the host can absolutely ensure that VMs are running in their own sandbox and can’t gain access to any resources of the host or other VMs. There is something like 14-17 CPU instructions in the x86 instruction set that can’t be executed directly because of sandbox violation. Hence, the need to place the child VM’s kernel into Ring 1 so that the host can place itself in Ring 0 to intercept those calls to protect them directly or to emulate them. By introducing a “-1” ring, the hypervisor lives here and controls the access to the various virtual machines. So, with the introduction of a hypervisor living in ring -1, the need for ring compression of child VMs is essentially removed. At least, this is one way to think about. They hypervisor itself is not a complete OS, per se. The hypervisor is a VERY thin and small, trusted computing base.

Technical References:

• Hyper-V Architecture, API overview from Wikipedia
• Windows Server Virtualization (WSV/Hyper-V) Preview
  
• Hyper-V Documentation from MSDN
• Install Hyper-V Beta
• Step by Step document on Hyper-V
• Installing Windows Server 2008 on Hyper-V
  

VM Additions for Linux

Earlier Microsoft Virtual PC and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 didn't have VM Additions for Linux, recently Microsoft released fully supported VM Additions for Linux (Download from here).

Though Microsoft Silverlight is a cool technology, it pales in front of Adobe Flash (98% of browsers have it) in terms of availability. It is not an unique MS problem, it is a problem for any new offering when there is an incumbent who has a majority market share. To change this requires education, awareness creation and put it in front of users at many as possible in exchange for an added value to them. I was pleased to see Microsoft doing some steps in this direction (unlike their pathetically nil action to have .NET Framework Runtime in desktops widespread in its earlier days) by having a beta of Silverlight enhanced downloads when people come to MS Download Center site.