AV's Blog

Last night, all attention was on TV. With the Atlantis scheduled to land. Various TV channels were showing their own coverage.. and perspective of the event. Some were showing people with tensed expressions but waiting to celebrate, some were showing Sunita Williams' relatives being interviewed, some channels were all out to get people even more tensed by showing how the Columbia disaster happened.. and some like Times Now were focussed just at NASA, Reuters and the event. It was all happening.. and then the Atlantis came in sight. truly majestic.. and made what was called a picture perfect touchdown. Whooo... a great experience to watch it live on TV. My palms locked in a prayer, I muttered welcome back Atlantis, welcome back Crew.

The NASA website also maintained a Landing Blog with updates as it was happening and a live video feed too. What a journey it must have been all the way out of the earth's gravitational pull piggybacked on a rocket.. get docked to the ISS... and then back home to the earth. With many such past journeys and many more to come. I got curious about other space shuttles.. existing and non existing.. and their history. I found this interesting Wiki Page which says it all. Also, here is Sunita Williams' Mission Log which I found quite interesting to read.

With all the excitement of the Space Shuttle Atlantis that was expected to land yesterday late night, Indian Standard Time.. I was surfing through news channels watching out for the best coverage. I liked the one showed on Times Now, The Times Of India owned TV news channel. There was live reporting from NASA by Diane King, a Reuters news correspondent. In particular I was impressed with a feature that was titled "Countdown to Touchdown". Excellent information shared out there. What exactly happens when a Space Shuttle lands. Deorbit burn, Entry Interface, Maximum Heating, Exit Blackout, Terminal Area, Approach and Landing.. all about these stages, speeds, when the Commander takes control, the steep nosedive, right to the Touchdown and after. How the crew would be moved out to a safe location. Now thats what I call a good presentation ! Well.. we are all waiting eagerly and praying for the safe return of the Atlantis.

As the world prepares to welcome Indian-American astronaut Sunita Williams back to mother earth, my mind just went down memory lane when India's Rakesh Sharma went into outer space on Soyuz T-11 in 1984. I was a standard 6th school kid then and was fascinated watching all that was shown on Doordarshan. The memory of his famous answer is still fresh in mind. The then Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi asked him, "upar se Bharat kaisa dikh raha hai aap ko ?" and prompt came the reply.. "Ji Bharat to Saare Jahan se Achcha hai". Wow ! That answer went down in history. I also remember his backup Wing Commander, Ravish Malhotra who was on a set of preparatory exercises too. But finally it was Rakesh Sharma who made it.

I noticed something recently with MSN Messenger 8.1. When you hover the mouse over the advertisement section at the bottom of the main window, a big ugly advertisement comes up. Basically the advertisement zooms up and takes a large part of the screen.. and gives me back some distraction in return. Grrrrrr... I hate this !

In 2002 when I saw the Spielberg Movie Minority Report, I was impressed with the stuff shown there. John Anderton, the cop played by Tom Cruise entering the chamber of pre-cogs and using that special computer to "browse" through images captured on it. By browse I meant they showed him actually move his hands through a stored collection of pictures, zooming, rotating and resizing them up by stretching and moving his hands.

Of course I don't wish to narrate the story for those who havent seen the movie but they showed this in a future time era of 2050 which after seeing I said to myself.. eh its not that far and I guess we are gonna see computers like that soon.

And recently when Microsoft unveiled Surface... I said wow ! It's really happening. Check out http://www.microsoft.com/surface and with what Microsoft is heading for.. it's sure to rock !

After a gap of an entire year from the blogging scene, I have finally made up my mind to start blogging again. Well, for now at least. So here I am. As usual, this space will NOT be exclusively dedicated to one-track technical content but rather a mix of lot many things that interest me. Keep in touch. Keep writing. :-)

I was home today and was watching the 7th ODI between India and England. But Sahara One spoilt my mood by inserting commercials just about wherever they could. So much so that they even missed the winning shot to be shown live because they had a silly advertisement that they inserted during the telecast. Even Doordarshan who was showing a parallel feed were not far behind with the same number of commercials being shown there. It was so annoying and I felt that other channels like Ten sports and Star Sports are at least considerate in showing commercials. They do not irritate the life out of the the viewers. For the sake of the game of cricket and the cricket enthusiasts, the people responsible for giving rights for television feeds should keep a clause wherein commercials are shown but at an appropriate time and with a reasonable frequency. I have vowed not to buy Reliance products after being bombarded with Reliance mobile commercials every few minutes during the match.

I have always been fascinated by various Microsoft Product Codenames and what they mean to Microsoft as well as what they mean to the real world. Many codenames came and went and I thought I should compile a list and create it.. just for kicks. While looking up online, I came up with a list already made by someone. For those who are equally interested, here's where you can read up : http://www.dnjonline.com/articles/backend/codenames.asp

Also check a very helpful list which talks about the latest updates from Microsoft and the various upcoming products with their expected launch dates. This is at : http://www.dnjonline.com/articles/backend/listings/default.asp The good thing is that this is a single page where you have everything you need about Microsoft's updates and new versions.

Who would have imagined travelling down an expressway at high speed, sitting at the back seat of a car and surfing the net, chatting on msn, writing a blog and doing a Google Earth lookup to see a satellite pic of the area where u currently are in. This would be called nothing short of silly or over ambitious a decade back. Thats what I am doing right now. I am travelling down the Mumbai-Pune Express Highway at 100kmph (good enough speed for this part of the world) and I am online and in touch with the world. Its fun. Actually I hadn't blogged in a while since I was busy preparing on quite a few things. So today I said to myself this would be a nice time to blog. With GPRS on the move its fun. But slow at times. With the RConnect PCMCIA card its even more fun because it's a lot faster. So I can afford to keep a host of internet based applications open at the same time. Whats more exciting is I needed WinZip on one of my VPC Images and guess what ? There I go online, get onto winzip.com and download the winzip application and install it. all at 100kmph.. oops.. at 15kbps :-p Cool aint it ?

While we were all waiting for 2005 to rollover to 2006, the year 2005 decided to hang on... for a second longer of course. The Leap Second as it is officially known as delayed 2006 (or should I say held back 2005) by a second. A Leap Second is added to keep uniform timekeeping within 0.9 second of the Earth's rotational time, which can speed up or slow down because of many factors, including ocean tides. The first leap second was added on June 30, 1972, according to NIST, an arm of the U.S. Commerce Department.

There's more you can read up on this at :

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1345656.cms
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/12/25/leap.second.reut/

Are you missing your custom emoticons when you switch machines or if you format your machine ? At one time I had a nice collection of these emoticons... Stuff that was collected from others. Its just the same old thing, if you like it, you save it ;-) Now obviously since they are not stored on the server, they do not travel with you if you switch machines or are not going to come back if you format your machine.

So here's a simple solution that I bumped into long back. MSN Messenger 7.0 and above (I am currently using 8.0 Beta) store their custom emoticons under the logged in users profile. In that there are separate folders per MSN Account that you use, organized by what I believe is the numeric MSN ID.[C:\Documents and Settings\Your Login Name\Application Data\Microsoft\MSN Messenger\Your Numeric MSN ID\CustomEmoticons] All files here have a .dat extension. These files (except index.dat) can be simply copied to any other folder and renamed to .png extension. Use the MS DOS REN Command to make life easier. Then just add them up into your new MSN UI by going to the My Emoticons window and clicking Create.

I have always been a biggg fan of Mr. Amitabh Bachchan. I have relished all his movies. From the best movies till date to the movies which the film industry deemed as flops. People laugh at me when I say I loved the movie Toofan... or Jaadugar for that matter. Anything that the Badshah does is acceptable by his die-hard fans. He is the best!!!. At 63, he can sell Boro Plus, Navratna Hair Oil, Cadbury's Chocolates, Himani Fast Relief ... to name just a few of the brands he endorses... and that too with so much ease. When he says "Hum Keh rahe hain", its law.

The news of his hospitalization a couple of weeks back created a furore amongst people all over the country... all over the world for that matter. Everyone was concerned. There were prayers happening amongst all religions for the Sarkar's well being. That just goes to show the love that people have for the superstar. No one can take his place. He rules ! I pray for his well being...now and always. I still remember as a school kid how I had cried and pleaded to God for his well-being when he was injured during Coolie. I was in the 5th Standard then.

I never like to miss what he says in KBC everytime when the show concludes. "Good Night.... Shubh Raatri... Shabba Khair... And please take good care of yourself." Bachchan saab, we love you. Get well soon.

Finally after more than a year of frustration, BPL Mobile's GPRS Service has just got better... or rather is getting better. Since Saturday, 19th November 2005 I seem to get connected back to GRPS if I get an incoming call while using the service. I even tried making calls while I am on GPRS and after the call is through, I get connected back without having to disconnect and reconnected like I had to before. So it's not my handset which has the problem after all (as per what the support staff had claimed long back).

So at the moment I do not need to switch to another provider. Looks like BPL Mobile is onto some serious upgradation. And thats good news for people like me who use one SIM card all the time. Wonder whats the next advancement/betterment on mobile technologies from BPL Mobile's side. Lets wait and watch.

This morning while sipping my cup of tea and reading up through the Mumbai Mirror, I came across this article in The Sunday Read section (here's the online version) titled "Look who's blogging!" and I was amazed with a big list of celebrities who blog. Some casual, some serious bloggers ! So I decided to look up on the web to see if they really write and what they write. For the more curious, Intentblog is one site where you'd find most of the known faces as listed in the Mumbai Mirror article. And for the bollywood fans, here's Bipasha Basu and Aamir Khan... their own blogs.

I always used to think.. "hell, who has the time to blog ? I dont get time for myself since 24 hours of a day are just insufficient for me." I may have improved just a little now but when it comes to time management, I struggle even today. But then, come to think of it, if the really busy people can find time to blog, why can't I ? A lesson for me to learn. Like I benefit by reading others blogs, someone somewhere might benefit from reading mine. Dear Sir, you were right ! I understand what you said then.. now.

I use a Nokia 7610 which has a big database of my contacts. After all I have 8 MB of on phone storage plus a Storage Card capacity that can go upto 1 GB with the RSMMC (Reduced Size Multimedia Card). I use PC Suite and sync my phone data with my Outlook Contacts regularly.

When I am in a training program, I keep my phone on silent and usually call back during a break. But many a time if its a number not listed in my contact list, I hear someone trying to sell me a new Sim Card, a new Credit Card, a Car, a Flat and it gets very annoying. MTNL, Tata Indicom (and a few other providers) offer a complete web based query engine where you can do a number to name seek and find out on whose name the phone is registered. Wouldn't it be great if the cell phone company displays the name if available and number rather than just the number ? The last option could be showing only the number i.e. when the search does not yield any data. With so many unimaginable advancements happening in the world of mobile technologies, this could be just another move.

I have been a user of BPL Mobile's GPRS Service since a little over a year now. And a subscriber of BPL Mobile since about 4 and a half years now. This company was indeed the first to introduce GPRS Services in India. But since the time they have introduced GPRS, they havent learnt ! While on GPRS if I get an incoming call, or a message or even a delivery report, the GPRS service goes "On Hold". Thats the status it shows on my Nokia 7610. and then it never comes back to "Connected". GPRS doesnt work till I disconnect or at times reboot the phone. Though rebooting is not a mandatory thing.. thankfully. The friendly folk at 800 customer support initially gave me a lot of settings to try, from changing the IP and port upto even naming my connection. Geez ! Finally, after almost a year of me following up with them on and off they told me that their services need to be upgraded and they are in the process of doing the same. This was last month. There was unofficial information that the upgradation would happen in October 2005. Its November 2005 now and still no sign.

The irony is that when I roam on Hutch, I get GPRS on roaming and that too without the "On Hold" problem. When I am on GPRS, if I make/get a call or a message, my GPRS icon shows a G slash, goes "On Hold" momentarily and comes back to "Connected" as soon as I end the call or the message gets sent. And my MSN Messenger or any browser connection on phone as well as laptop behaves as if nothing happened. The folks at 800 dont seem to know about GPRS and roaming since they told me "we are so sorry sir, GPRS is not available while roaming". By the way, all Hutch and Orange users get GPRS while roaming at no extra cost. I believe even Airtel offers GPRS while roaming at no extra cost. Outside the Mumbai circle, theres no GPRS from BPL Mobile. So when I go to Goa or anywhere in Maharashtra theres no GPRS. With BPL Mobile now an Essar Company, I hope this nagging issue gets resolved. I dont intend waiting for too long. The trade off is that I'll have to give up my almost 5 year old cell no. but if I get a good deal from another provider, I might just give up my faith in BPL Mobile.

For quite sometime now, I have been an avid user of Microsoft Virtual PC. Seen it first when the product shipped from Connectix. Before VPC, installation of products, especially Beta Editions was a plug and pray approach. I remember when installing products that used to ship on floppies.... the moment the floppy drive used to start making cranky noises, I used to join my palms and say "nooooo.. please dont gimme a bad sector error". With CDs and now DVDs, its become a lot easier. But then...once you start installing, you've got to wait till the installation completes. And also do things like reserve a partition to try products which need an exclusive installation of the operating system.

But today, you don't need to wait for completing the installation of your product when you are installing it on a Virtual PC. The great thing I love about VPC is the save state feature. When I am just too tired and want to call it a day, I do a save state and VPC goes off to sleep. After which I shut down my system and do the same :-) The next time I am back on the system, I restore the VPC from it's saved state and it continues installing from where it left last. And this works great even while installing an Operating System!. Fancy your chances while installing Linux and you say, "Aaj ke liye bahut ho gaya. Kal continue karte hain.". Thats what I did. And I installed Linux over a few days time.

Virtual PC maketh my life easier.

Hi friends (and foes). I am back at blogger. After going off blogging for over a year, I felt the urge to start blogging again. Not that I was a great blogger before.... But then I had moved over to mblog.com which later shut down and thats when I stopped blogging. No backup, No data about old posts. So now its a new beginning for me and I hope I am read, heard and commented by the friendly fellow bloggers and readers.