I got the first phase of my pilot program to have my house moved to Digital Media done. I thought the toughest part will be the purchase(choice), installation and wiring of the hardware but it turned out to be the easiest part. I got my SqueezeBox connected through wireless and playing audio (WMA/MP3) from my PC seamlessly, my XBOX 360 connected through Ethernet to my PC with the media shared using Windows Media Player 11/Zune Player Sharing. Windows Media Player (or equivalent Zune) sharing was much better and easier to setup and use than Windows Media Center especially since I didn't want Live TV through this setup at this phase.

I wanted the digital media files to be playable with my XBOX 360 and with Zune Player (so that I can watch/hear on the move). The toughest part was finding a software that will rip (copy) the media from the Video CDs and DVDs that I owned. This was the main motive behind buying the XBox 360, so that I can protect the CDs from my son scratching while trying to put it in the DVD player. Audio conversion from Audio CDs was easiest with Windows Media Player doing a great job in converting it to WMA or MP3 - both of the formats played well with XBOX & Zune. Video was the most difficult. First because of the DVD Copy Protection and then finding a reliable software for doing the copying to PC. 

DVD Copy protection

I don't understand this at all. Why should the Media houses treat me (a paying customer) like a criminal when all I want to do is to convert a legally bought content to a format that is convenient for me to store and watch. On top of this is stupid DVD Region code. When I am allowed to legally buy a DVD from any country I visit during my travel, why can't I watch it in my home DVD Player. Adding to the woe is the situation in India where DVDs are sold in both Region 2 and Region 5 codes with one not playing on the players with the other mark. An instance was the Inconvenient Truth DVD Indian Edition from Saregama that I bought recently was Region 2 whereas as per DVD Region Code chart it should have been Region 5 for India.  Because of these stupidness of the technology used, I have to rely on software that will overcome the protection and copy the media to the harddisk.

For this task I found DVD Decrypter (shown in right) to be the best. Don't waste your money by buying any of the software that claims to remove automatically the CSS copy protection. I have tried almost the top 15 software on the Internet and all of them are not worth the trouble and don't even come close to the reliability, quality and speed of free DVD Decrypter. Only challenge will be to find a reliable site to download the software since it is banned in few countries, Wikipedia and Google might help you on the search.  After using DVD Decrypter I am ready to the next step. Note: I tried softwares that claims to do both the removal of copy protection and ripping to MP4/WMV but they were produced output videos files that were pathetic quality and unfriendly to use.

Encoding Software

After downloading and trying nearly a dozen software from the Internet I finally settled down to Nero Recode. Almost all of them had one limitation or other. Remember I wanted the output to be played both in my Zune and XBox 360 not a easy combination.

• First was Windows Media Encoder did a reasonable job but was very slow and didn't work well with DVDs.
• Convert2Zune  - this was a free script from my fellow Regional Director Vinod Unny. This uses Windows Media Encoder as the backend and had the same drawbacks of that, except that it automated the steps.
• Next was Video VLC Media Player - this was the only reliable software that does both removal of CSS and encoding to WMV well, but the downside it was very slow in its conversion.
• PQDVD - I bought this based on recommendation from my industry colleagues to convert videos to Zune format. Though it initially seemed to work well with DVDs, I soon realized it was unreliable and pathetic for VideoCDs. 50% of the time it produced videos that had audio out of sync by several minutes!
• Nero Recode - Here comes Nero Recode. The software doesn't remove copy protection, but once you have crossed that bridge using DVD Decrypter there is no software that comes close to the speed and reliability of Nero Recode. Couple of points I learned that you need to be before you can start using it.
  • If you choose the profile as default Nero Digital Profile the output file doesn't work with Zune and XBOX. It produces MPEG4 files that uses proprietary Nero Digial Codecs that works only with Nero Digital Certified Media players - obviously Zune and XBOX are out of that. Initially I gave up Nero Recode because of this, but later learned the next point from a forum post.
  • You will have to choose the second profile in Nero Recode called "Nero Digital AVC" which produces industry standard MPEG4 files. The output files thus produced play natively with Zune Player. To make them play in XBOX 360, you need to do two things. First is to use Zune Player Sharing option over Windows Media Player Sharing. Second, go to XBOX 360 and play one of the files - it will automatically prompt to download an optional media update (below screenshot). Once you download and install it, your XBOX 360 can now play seamlessly the MPEG4 files.

Problem solved, case closed. Everyone lived happily ever after

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).