Few weeks back while at my US trip I read this book "Notes from a Big Country" by Bill Bryson. Like his other books, Bryson's humour is unmistakable in this book as well. Like others have said in the Amazon's book comments you will find yourself laughing loud in many places.

  

The book is a collection of a weekly column in Mail on Sundays Night and Day magazine in UK. So this book has been written more for an international audience who will find things different in USA from their country. Having visited USA many times I can say I was baffled too at many of similar scenes observed by Bryson. So in many places of the book I could relate to his experience and enjoy the scene. Commenting on common American living habits, you might be mistaken like some Americans (who have commented in Amazon) that Byrson is making "fun" of Americans at large.  This being my fourth book written by Bryson, I can say that he has nothing against America, this is his style -  It is the same when he writes about UK, Europe or even Shakespeare, so nothing different here. More than the scenes described, what I really liked is Bryson's extraction of Humour from all the weird situations like the once I have mentioned below:

• Picture ID to be shown in US Airports (Bryson calls this as Permissible Visual Cognitive Imaging)
• Junk Food Heaven - "We don't usually clean our fridge - we just box it up every four or five years and send it off to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta with a note to help themselves to anything that looks scientifically promising"
• The countless forms used by American Immigration - "You can spend days repeatedly dialling a phone number that is forever engaged, only to be told when you finally do get through that you must call another number, which the person tells you once in a mumble and you don't quite catch before you are cut off"
• Commercials - "The new Dodge Backfire. Rated number one against the Chrysler Inert for Handling. Rated number one against the Plymouth Repellant for mileage"
• Cupholder Revolution - "But our computers don't come with cupholders"
• Why no one walks - "Not long after we moved here we had the people next door round for dinner and - I swear this is true - they drove"
• The great indoors and the obsession for living always in a climate controlled environment - "Skywalks - enclosed pedestrian flyovers"
• Abundance of choice in American super markets - "Thirty five varieties of Crest Toothpaste"
• Spinning the truth - how the "special offer" advertisements exasperates the truth

If you have visited USA and felt things are different from your country then this book is a must read for you.

I saw this movie, Will Smith's Hancock in my return flight from US in Cathay Pacific. Comparing to his other movies, this is relatively a easy role to be played by Will Smith and he has done it without any disappointment. The movie is about John Hancock (Will Smith) a drunkard with superhuman powers, including supersonic flight, immortality, and super-strength. Though he uses his powers to stop criminals in his residence of Los Angeles, his activities cause millions of dollars in property damage due.

This is an average movie, can be seen if you are a Will Smith fan or a Special Effects fan, other than those two there is nothing worth mentioning.

I came across an advertisement about a product that can charge your mobile on your bicycle during a 15 minutes travel. I thought it was a cool innovative idea that will serve well the millions of rural people in India and China. I was disappointed when I visited the company's website as it carried no information about the product. Doing a web search revealed this was a concept showcased by Motorola in January 2007 itself. Anyways this is definitely an useful innovation for millions.

And if you are DIY type, doing this should not be very difficult or expensive. It can be done with an ordinary cycle-light dynamo and some circuitry to match and stabilize the output voltage.

While doing my morning walking today (after a long time) in my neighbourhood, I saw these Public Safety Message boards kept by Chennai City Police at various places. These are aimed to educate people with simple lines along with an image on importance of common safety messages. A good initiative by the police and we should congratulate the sponsors who helped for this campaign.

(Click the above image for the entire album in full resolution)

The last view days I am staying in Cupertino, CA - One of the cities in Silicon Valley which includes San Jose, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Fremont, Milpitas, Sunnyvale and others where you find the largest number of Computer Software & Hardware companies. What was interesting to me when I drove around to find few of the well known one's are headquartered in Cupertino alone. The list includes Apple, Symantec, SugarCRM.

Yesterday I watched in Comcast, the movie "The Pursuit of Happyness". Will Smith has superbly portrayed the character of a struggling salesman who takes custody of his son as he's poised to begin a life-changing professional endeavour. The story is inspired by a true story of an investment tycoon (of the same name portrayed) Chris Gardener. An emotional story told very well, the boy (done by Will Smith's real son Jaden Smith) has acted great especially in the scenes - where they are moving from place to place after a long day when they don't have a place to sleep.

Don't miss seeing this award winning movie.

In this PDC2008 talk, Chuck Lenzmeier - the Architect in Azure team explains how the Virtual Images of OS works in the Azure cloud data centers. His Bio in PDC2008 says that Chuck has been with Microsoft since 1989, and worked on all versions of Windows from NT 3.1 to Vista. The below video really helps to understand how the Virtual Images are being managed to achieve Windows Azure manage while retaining absolute compatibility with existing OS, Software and Applications.

His co-speaker Frederick Smith from Microsoft explained the other aspects of Windows Azure.

 

• Windows Azure provisions and monitors hardware elements (Compute nodes, L2 Switches, LBs, Routers), hardware lifecycle management (burn in tests, diagnostics and repair, failed hardware are replaced) and capacity planning
• Azure Fabric is highly available: Network has redundancy built in, services deployed across fault domains, load balancers route traffic to active nodes only, Fabric Controller state check-pointed periodically, FC state is stored on multiple replicas
• PDC 2008 CTP release of Azure has Automated Service deployment, Three Service templates, change number of instances, simple service upgrade/degrade, Automated service failure discovery and recovery, external VIP Address/DNS name per service, Service network isolation enforcement & automated hardware management
• For 2009 release will have ability to model more complex application, richer life-cycle management & richer network management

I was in the talk by Andrew Fitzhugh from HP's Magcloud.com. The site is HP's attempt to do on demand publishing of magazines and allow anyone to publish, sell and distribute magazines. An interesting statistics that was shown that in USA about 3.6Billion magazines were delivered to US News stands last year and out of which 2.3Billion was never read.

He talked about how Magcloud moved their front-end systems and portions of storage to Windows Azure.

Magcloud.com on-premises architecture	Magcloud.com utilizing Windows Azure

Seeing the title I had good expectations, but the session turned out to be disappointing. The speakers completed the talk in 30 minutes and didn't have anything more to talk or go into architecture or code details. The project seemed to me to a half-hearted attempt to test drive Windows Azure and was a simple project to showcase anything interesting. 

Today was the keynote by Rick Rashid, Sr. VP from Microsoft Research. Notes on the session:

• Why is fundamental research important to a company like Microsoft or country like USA. It is to survive tough times, about agility through your earlier investments and having smart people
• Talked about Terminator, liveness property. Basically if you create a lock in say "C" will the code release it and so on
• Talked about Dryad - Dryad is an infrastructure which allows a programmer to use the resources of a computer cluster or a data center for running data-parallel programs, without knowing anything about concurrent programming
• The study on computer "programs" help us to understand more on human "cells", similarly study on "cells" is helping us to understand "programs"
• Microsoft has been working with Washington university for Collaborative technologies - ConferenceXP
• Microsoft released today a new version of Microsoft Worldwide telescope Autumnal Equinox Beta

Feng Zhao (Principal Researcher) talked on the energy usage, how to sense and how we can reduce. He showed a small device made by Microsoft Research that uses a 16-bit CPU, 10K RAM, 40K ROM to collect humidity, temperature and  other parameters. It then transmits it using a low-power Radio as they are powered by batteries which need to last long.

He showed the below demo on how this data can be visualized:

These visualizations used in Data Center has helped them to map and plan on how cooling happens, where to place heavy computing loads, etc. He talked about Senseweb - a Wikipedia of Sensors  which is used by over 11 universities worldwide. This is used primarily in Swiss alps to collate data from different instruments on alps and study them for impact of humans on climate change.

David Heckerman in a video talked about how they are helping to find how HIV mutates in a person using technology from SPAM identification and statistical analysis.

Matthew Maclaurin talked about Project Boku - Lightweight programming for kids. Boku is a character/robot, he needs programming to succeed. Why for Kids - because it is a life skill, demystify and engage & make it easy for learning. All programming is done with XBOX Game Console, no keyboard use. See the demo below:

Finally they showed "SecondLight" an innovation based on Microsoft Surface. In SecondLight you can show over the regular display, which gets shown only when you move an ordinary paper above the display. There is an infrared sensor that follows you on the second display. This is exciting stuff, so don't miss seeing this video from Tech Flash showing this.

This session was done very well by Eric Schmidt (Director, Microsoft).

Some top-level highlights were:

1. 34 top level events sorted by icons
2. At the peak, 17 live separate events were happening
3. 2000 hours of live content and 2200 Highlight content that was created
   

The result was staggering: 1.3 Billion Pageviews, 50 Million Unique Visitors, 70 million videos watched, 5000 Unique clips viewed per day during the final week, 600 million minutes of video delivery, 27 minutes of viewing per session, 35 million mobile views (external), 130,000 peak streams, 3.4 petabytes of video delivered, were built for 2.5 times of what was delivered.

Four main types of contents:

1. Live Content were delivered with Windows Media Server, with commentary was coming from commentators typing in a CMS which got moved as XML to production
2. Rewind - Video on Demand play of live content
3. Highlight NBC pulled out 50 Interns from college put them in 30 ROCK and make them create these 3-5min highlights of individual events.
4. Encores – Broadcast replays
   

Other points mentioned:

• Planning of capacity was most important. When, Where and Size (each sport is of different length) was to be planned to determine the CPU, storage and ingress/egress needs.
  
• NBC was helped by Intel Penguin processor, NBC waited for it and the servers got shipped around in May and took 6 weeks to go to Beijing
• Bandwidth out of Beijing was limited to a 40 meg (DS3). 40 encoders were running live, so about 1MB per encoder (Digital Rapid). All this went into two windows media services box in Beijing, this got patched to window media services in 30 Rock, New York so that they can control if they had to. Which was then mapped to Limelight & Level 3 CDN's massive WMS boxes. More details of encoding process in the blog post here
  
• No full screen due to IOC Advertising requirements on the percentage of advertisements to video
• Many partners were involved: Deltatre (Italy) had the CMS the best in the world to do live score on web
• HTTPWatch Professional (and Fiddler) was useful to see what’s going on
  

Lessons Learned:

• Scrum and Scrumming builds better teams as the teams were distributed worldwide
• Meeting Face to Face was very important, especially to bring this up cost in RFP stage
• Everyone should know all roles and all architectural touch points
• Reduce complexity via common schema
• Long-tail delivery hides issues, when you are watching current items you needed to focus on the older contents that were being watched by the long-tail
• The industry needs better telemetry and monitoring solutions
• “Chunked” workflow (smaller sized thousand of files created) presented new challenges – Now IIS 7.0 Smooth Streaming in Media Pack announced yesterday does this better
• Over 250 people between Microsoft, NBC and all other partners
  
  

The announcements made in this keynote today was picked by every media around the world, so I will be brief. You can watch the full keynote from here.

Windows 7

1. The improvements were on decreasing Memory, Disk I/O, Power consumption and on Increasing Speed (Faster Boot, Device Ready), Responsiveness (Start Menu) and Scale up to 250 Processors
2. BitLock on USB Drives to protect your data
3. Native VHD support to mount and boot
4. Remote Desktops now support Multi-Monitor, cool
5. Multi-touch, Start Bar UI improvements and more...

On seeing this I was initially disappointed to see no new UI or major changes. However, after using Windows 7 in the labs and attending more sessions, I realized Microsoft was not throwing what was done in Windows Vista, but improving on it, which is good.

The UAC improvements made me think why not introduce "Roles" like in Windows Server for Windows 7 (Client) also. This way "Developers", "Power Users" and "Home Users" can have different settings and security prompts.

.NET 4.0

The idea to have the "Web" guy Scott Guthrie do the talk on Windows 7 developer improvements and on WPF was a "major coup" to promote it.

1. AutoCad was showing how they are using Windows 7 Multi-Touch, Ribbon APIs for their native C++ rendering
2. A new WPF Toolkit and Silverlight Toolkit were announced today
3. In .NET 4.0 you will have side by side hosting in the same process both .NET 4.0 and .NET 2.0 CLR
4. A new managed extension framework which was shown in VS2010 on how the Text Editor can be customized
5. VS 2010 is being rebuild on top of WPF, this I felt will certainly force Microsoft to improve the performance and invest more on WPF and make it better
6. Having JQuery (an Open source project) supported is another major coup within Microsoft
7. ASP.NET 4.0 will support multiple web.config, one each for Debug, Production and so on
8. Today Silverlight 1.0 is in over 25% of all machines in Internet and nearly in 100 million of them have Silverlight 2.0

Live Services

1. David Treadwell showed Live Services which consists of Search, Geospatial, Live ID, Communication & Presence and Directory services
2. Live ID will now support Open ID. This if works well, has the potential to make it come alive the dream of a single identity provider on the Internet
3. The demo of BBC Live Player using Live Mesh services to sync up was cool. The BBC Engineer talked that "Last Year Broadcaster decided what you saw, This Year you decide what you saw, Next Year will determine what you see". What they are watching, which segment is good will all be shared using Social networking tools and powered by Live Mesh

Office "14"

1. This was perhaps the most interesting demo of the day, with a lightweight of office (Word, Excel and OneNote) for the Web
2. The cool thing was how it synced up in real-time changes done in Client version and the Online version. All working behind the scene with "REST" protocols
3. Microsoft claimed this to be "Office without Limits"

Reviews on the Web: Windows 7, Office 14

After showing preview of Silverlight for Mobile two years back, Microsoft has been absolutely silent. Since there was no news for a long time I presumed they have killed this project. After seeing this session today I am glad the project is alive and getting closer to release. In this session by Amit Chopra and Giorgio Sardo, they talked more about this - both the speakers did a fabulous job of entertaining the audience and making the session fun. Notes on the session:

• The Mobile version of Silverlight will be Silverlight 2.0 with .NET Managed code support and not the SL v1 with JavaScript (Thank god)
• Public CTP will be released in Q1 '09
• Most of the Silverlight applications written for desktop today can run in SL for Mobile
• A new emulator for debugging Silverlight for Mobile is now integrated with Visual Studio
• By using the User-Agent and Platform class you can determine whether your application is running in Desktop, Windows Mobile or Nokia phones, etc.
• Lot of optimisation work is happening to play media well on SL for Mobile

You can see one of the demos in the video below that was shown running in a Windows Mobile:

You can read here an interview with Amit Chopra by Register, where talks about what's in and what's out.