AV's Blog

Bureau of Indian Standards ! These are the people who represent India at ISO and give their views on Standards and their adaptation. Funny to say that these people voted against OOXML. Their reasons ? Here are the minutes of the "experts" meeting, but to cut a long story short, here are my sentiments :

1) It seems BIS does not understand the fact that the design goal of OOXML was not to deal with binary file format. They seem to be more worried about conversion from Binary format to be part of the standard rather than looking at how the new standard can actually make life a lot more easier from interoperability point of view.

2) The enlightened guys in the committee objected to Custom XML being allowed to be embedded inside OOXML documents. To quote "... the provision to include custom xml elements into a document unacceptable if inter-operability must be ensured." Guys ! dont you understand the basics of what XML is used for ?

3) As stated by a learned professor of the committee, he is strongly of the view that voting for OOXML by BIS at ISO will increase the digital
divide in India and will harm the domestic industry and economy. Eh ?? On what basis sir ? Care to explain ? Or you just like making statements ? And he feels it wise to go by ODF. I hope he is currently living his life with an Open Standard wordprocessor running on an Open Standard Operating System with an Open Standard thought process. I wish the BIS team reads up on the fact that the ODF format is limited to the features and performance of OpenOffice and StarOffice.

As far as the story goes, Microsoft has won the OOXML battle and has won ISO recognition as a global document standard. Of course, Microsoft has frowned at BIS for voting against the format which as the ruling suggests, most are in favour of. However, Microsoft has agreed to work and support what BIS expects from them.

So at the end, OOXML joins the ranks of PDF, HTML and ODF amongst document formats.

Participating in the Batti Bandh organized by Mumbai Unplugged. So here I go offline and off power for an hour.. Whoop...

Recently I wanted to clear by Bluetooth Devices History on the Send To menu on my computer. With many files being sent to different devices and computers over a period of time, my Send To Bluetooth menu was quite cluttered with a long list. Many of these entries were useless since they were probably a one time transfer but they remained on my list forever. I tried to Google up (ahem.. tried Windows Live Search too) but there was nothing I could find for clearing this list on Windows Xp. Did a Registry Search too but to no avail. Thats when I came across a simple way to to this. My computer uses the Widcomm Bluetooth stack and here's what I did. I went to c:\Documents and Settings\< username >\Send To\Bluetooth (its a folder with the Bluetooth Icon on it) and thats where I could see 1 KB Shortcuts for each device. Interestingly these shortcuts point to c:\Program Files\WIDCOMM\Bluetooth\Bluetooth Software\btsendto_explorer.exe with a list of parameters which have the Bluetooth Device Address, Device Name and Device Class and deleting the relevant (or rather irrelevant) shortcuts result in the discovered device getting knocked out from the Send To Bluetooth list. I do not know of an option on Windows Xp which does this so I thought this might help someone who needs a solution to this.

With the 2nd of October just having gone by, every newspaper, publication, media spoke a lot lot lot about Gandhiji, the father of the nation. There were full page advertisements of most companies and most political parties trying to grab their share of attention by writing about the Mahatma's good and simple ways. Thats another story though.. But everyone seems to have forgotten an even more simple and humble person who deserves his share of respect who happens share his birthday with the Mahatma... Shri. Lal Bahadur Shastri. Did we care to highlight that he lead the nation at a crucial time, his slogan Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan ? Did we care to highlight that he lived such a humble life ?

In India, today when farmers are commiting suicide because they are heavily in debt and with the government not doing much to ensure that these farmers live a good life. In India, today when cine stars who probably has never touched plough before claim to be farmers (to keep a 20 acre property). In India today when we remember the forces that guard our nation only when there's a Kargil like episode, we seem to have forgotten the values of Shastriji.

This is not the first time and I am not the first person to write about this. Every year, there are a few people who suddenly remember about Shastriji, just like I did.. after the 2nd of October. I think Shastriji deserves his respect and its high time we start doing it now. If not 2007, at least from 2008 onwards.

Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan.

Awright ! So finally Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 is available for public now. This most awaited download is 99% feature ready as per what Scott Guthrie says. Can't wait till I get my hands on it. So, its time to get busy again. Theres some interesting stuff mentioned by Somasegar in his blog. So now there's a lot to go after. The time is now !

You can get the download here. There's also a video by Scott and Somasegarhere where they talk about whats new, what's changed from Beta 1 to Beta 2, the state of .NET languages like VB9 and C# 3.0.. and how .NET has changed from 1.0 to 3.5. There's a Lap around Visual Studio 2008 video by Jay Schmelzer, which is a recording of what was presented at TechEd 2007, Orlando.

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.