Random Rants & Raves

I’m updating my blog after a long time since I’ve been tied up in doing a large number of Windows 7 Application Compatibility workshops all across India with a number of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) for their products. We’re basically testing out their products on the Windows 7 RC to see any issues that might surface and what they need to do to resolve them.

Most application run just fine on Windows 7. However, in the cases where there is an issue, it almost invariably turns out that the product has not been tested on Windows Vista and therefore it also fails on Windows XP. Vista and 7 have a tighter security mechanism called UAC that needs to be addressed in applications – and is something that many developers face problems with.

So here are two of the biggest issues that I’ve seen and their solutions: More...

Ok, I admit it – I was a skeptic about the choice of theme for the new Star Trek movie considering that it was to be based in the Original Series time frame and with new actors playing the iconic characters we know. How could someone else play Kirk, Spock, McCoy and all the others – each with their own distinctive personalities and styles of playing the character. I watched all the trailers and read all the reviews of how well the new Star Trek movie is doing – becoming the top grossing movie of 2009 so far, beating Wolverine, Angels & Demons and Terminator Salvation. I was still not convinced.

It was after I watched the movie that I realized I had been wrong – completely so. The movie was not just a great summer sci-fi action flick – it was Star Trek. As a full fledged Trekkie (see what I wore to the show – thanks Binesh), I loved the new movie. Here are some thoughts around it.

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True to the name of my blog, here’s a list of rants and raves about the new Windows Virtual PC 7 that I’ve been using the past few days for some Windows 7 App Compat labs for ISVs.

What I Like:

• Love that the install size of WVPC is only a little more than 5MB.
• The new “Virtual Machines” magic folder is a cool way to organize all your VMs.
• The USB support is a great feature – all devices that I threw at it (other than 1 set of devices being tested by a particular ISP manufactured by a Chinese company) worked!
• The Desktop Integration mode is absolutely great – it even lets you see full Aero effects within the VPC. (However, also see next section.)
• Networking just works!

What I Dislike:

• Closing the VM doesn’t give me an option anymore to save or discard undo disk changes. I need to SHUTDOWN the VPC and then Apply or Discard it from the settings page. Ugh!
• No drag-and-drop into or out of the VM.
• Desktop Integration mode seems extremely flaky – at least with a Win7RC guest VM. It works sometimes, it doesn’t at other times. Not sure what are the steps to ensure this mode.

I can live with the first two issues – there are workarounds or a different way of doing the same stuff after all. But the last one is a pain – I just don’t know what is it that I’m doing or not doing to get it working.

Well, the new search engine from Microsoft is now “live” – ummm, no I mean “bing” - “bing” is now “live”, ugh. “bing” is the new “live” and is “live”.

Ok, ok, what I mean is that www.bing.com is the successor to the www.live.com and is now active. Browsing to Live redirects to Bing and so do the Internet searches from Internet Explorer and Windows. Bing has a ton of new features that you can find out more about.

The only problem is that this is currently available only if your settings are for United States – English. If not, you see a bunch of different things. For instance, take a look at the screens below.

 
This is the Bing home page with “India” settings. As you can see, the auto suggest works quite well.

 
This is the Bing home page with US settings. Not just do you get an additional menu on the left, you also get hot spots on the image background with interesting information and ability to browse backgrounds!

 
A search result with India settings shows the information as well as a “News” link on the left.

 
The same search with US settings – notice the whole new set of filters on the left – Map, Hotel, Airport, etc. Clicking on any filters results to what you need as below:

 
The filtered search – quickly get where you want to go!

So if you want all the features of Bing, you need to set it to the US – English setting by clicking the language on the top of the screen and selecting it. Hopefully, the other settings will also get these features soon.

I finally upgraded my blog with the latest version of BlogEngine.NET. This is a free, open source, implementation of an ASP.NET 2.0-3.5 blog. I was running v1.3 till now and have now upgraded to v1.5.07. There are a ton of new features in this release including new widgets, nested comments and more. I’ve implemented these features on the left column as you can see.

The theme that I use is called StarGazer created by Jason Lay. I’ve made massive modifications to this theme for my blog including:

• Moving the right side column completely to the left using CSS. This is because I sometimes have code and images that flow across the page and in the case of a right side column would cause the layout to go for a toss.
• Added the ability to use the first post as a Internet Explorer 8.0 WebSlice. This also requires a code change in the BlogEngine.NET core. I’ll be submitting this patch to the developers of BE soon.
• Changed a bunch of ASPX layout to add the nested comments feature of v1.5 of BE.
• Changed a huge bunch of CSS to get the styles correctly setup for different elements that didn’t even exist in the original theme but now appear due to structural changes in BE’s rendering.

For doing all this, it took me less than a couple of hours which included downloading, setting up and understanding the changes in BE1.5 on my local machine. I was greatly helped in the entire endeavor by Visual Studio 2008 and the Internet Explorer 8.0 Developer Toolbar. The latter was exceptionally useful in figuring out the classes and styles being used in any page and on the fly changing them to see what happens. Clearly a great tool to have for Web developers.

There are still some small changes that I need to do. The visitor info widget has a annoying icon that I want to get rid of and the Twitter widget doesn’t refresh automatically and the “Follow me” gives an error. I’ll need to look into this soon – but for now the blog is back up and running.

For anyone who is interested in the StarGazer theme, I’m putting it here to download:

So finally I’ve too jumped onto the Twitter bandwagon. I did have an account for a while, but never really went around using it. But Shekhar convinced me to try it out during a “presentation” to convince someone else.

After some initial hiccups of logging in, I went ahead and downloaded a bunch of Twitter clients for different things.

• Blu: This is one of the best looking Windows Twitter clients. Using WPF, it has a really slick interface and requires .NET Framework 3.5. On Windows 7, it just works out of the box perfectly. You’ve got to try this one out to see the power that WPF can provide.
• Chirpr: This is a Windows Vista Sidebar / Windows 7 Desktop Gadget that lets you not only view your Twitters but also send updates all from the convenience of your desktop.
• PocketTwit: This is a great Twitter client for Windows Mobile phones and lets you customize the look as well. A completely touch friendly interface lets you manage your tweets quite easily.

I’ll also need to see if there is a BlogEngine widget for adding tweets on my Blog page and update it sometime. For now, you can just go ahead and follow me directly.

I have a Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 which is a really great input devices that I carry around with my notebook. I’ve been using it with Vista when doing presentations and it has been a really useful companion.

However, with Windows 7, the device seems to be a little flaky. During the beta I even gave it as a feedback and now that the RC is here I tried it out today. Windows Bluetooth recognized the device and showed me the full name even. It even downloaded some driver from Windows Update and installed it successfully. Or so it said. I simply couldn’t get the mouse pointer to move using the mouse.

I then downloaded the beta drivers for the IntelliPoint software for Windows 7 (x86, x64) for my installation and tried again. Removed the device, updated the drivers manually and everything, but it still wouldn’t work. Doggedly, repeated the process a few more times till suddenly the mouse sprung to life. I have no clue whatsoever regarding what I done to get it working. But it seems to be ok for now.

Update 1: I’ve switched off the mouse and turned it back on. Seems to be still working

Update 2: Switched off Bluetooth and turned it on again and it’s working still. Yay.

Update 3: As the release notes for the beta drivers state, you cannot switch to “presentation” mode with these drivers and the presentation special buttons don’t function. BUMMER! But at least I’ve got a working mouse now.

I’ve been using Win7 since the M3 build on my machine. I recently put the Win7 RC on my machine and everything went absolutely fine. Today I decided to repave my wife’s 5 year old notebook and install the 32-bit version of the RC on it.

After backing up everything she wanted on the D drive, I quickly formatted the C drive (which had Vista on it) and installed the RC instead of upgrading. Problem was that I hadn’t noted down any hardware specs of the machine (a Dell 510m) and after the first boot the machine came up with quite a few drivers missing – especially the wireless network and the graphics card. So I was running at a resolution of 640x480 without Wi-Fi.

The Wi-Fi took about 10 minutes to get running. I downloaded the Vista 32-bit drivers for the Intel PRO 2100 Wi-Fi from here. Did an update driver and our home network was recognized immediately and I added Neeta’s notebook to our HomeGroup.

The display card, based on the Intel 855GM chipset, was a different matter. Although I found a number of places having a “modified” driver for Vista, none of them seemed to work. Updating the driver would, after a reboot, still revert back to the Standard VGA Adapter and show the 855GM driver as having a problem.

It’s then that I came across this blog post and this thread linked off from it. Following these instructions allowed to the notebook to start using the new drivers and I was able to max up the screen res to the highest setting immediately. Only issue is that the Aero effects are not available on this.

i guess Intel really needs to get a Win7 driver out for older cards as well since this machine is good enough for all work other than playing games. I wish it was possible to get the Aero effects as well – but overall Win7 seems quite snappy on this older hardware as well.

May 7th – Day for polling in Gurgaon. I was in Pune till the 6th and arrived back in Gurgaon late at night. Neeta and I got ready at 6:30 AM on the 7th and ventured out by around 7 AM to go cast our vote.

The only problem was that we had no idea where our polling station was situated. We only had a station number – P125. We first roamed around near our sector (47, 46, etc.) and didn’t find even one polling booth. We then went to some local cops standing around and asked for directions to the nearest polling booth. They sent us off to Badshahpur village – a good 6 KM from our place. We then wandered around in the village and reached one station where they told us that P125 is not in this one but in the one inside the village. On reaching that place, they again told us that we are quite far from the place where ours should be and sent us back to Jharsa village which is closer to our residence.

On the way to Jharsa, we reached Sector 40 having another station which had booths from P121-P124. Figured out from there that our booth is inside the Jharsa village and we then went there. After again going to the wrong booth first we finally landed up in the right place. We couldn’t even park the car near it since the place was completely inaccessible by vehicles and we had to park our car far off and walk to the booth through fairly dirty paths. It took about 10 minutes to find our name in the voting list and then 10 minutes more to actually cast our votes.

I have a few observations about the entire process.

• There are no signs anywhere that can direct voters to their correct voting locations. Even the address of the polling station is not mentioned in anyplace and online.
• Polling stations need to be closer and more accessible than what they are. I understand that there need to be booths in the villages. Keep them there. But also make booths available to people from the cities with cars. I’m sure if we were not such determined voters, we wouldn’t have ventured for so far, long or such an inaccessible place to cast our votes.
• We voted for the candidate who was the most educated, qualified and completely criminal case free. I’m glad that at least we had such a choice. There are apparently locations in the country where such a choice is impossible since all have major criminal cases against them.
• Talking to my driver after the elections, I realized that in India voting follows an unfortunate pattern. People vote based on religion, caste, personal benefits and other interests rather than voting based on who or which party will actually do something good for the country.
• The problem with is that the fractured mandate that we all expect in this elections are going to make us even more cynical and disillusioned. Especially if the government is unstable and/or ends up falling and creating another election soon.
• I also have issues with “post-poll” alliances. Unfortunately, this is what most of the parties are planning to do. I think of this more as “prostitution” rather than “government”. Parties are willing to get into “bed”, so as to speak, to keep other such alliances out. What I want is clear information about who each party’s partners  are before the elections, so that we, the voters can decide whether we want to vote for them or not. For instance, if I know party A and party D are going together, I may want to vote for Party A or D depending on who is standing from my constituency. However, if I know party A is going with C and D is going with B, I might want to vote for party E instead since I don’t like the A-C and B-D combinations. But if don’t know of this in advance, well, I might vote for the wrong set of people whom I don’t want to ever see in power.
• Come May 16th, I think we are going to be treated to “political-porn” of the dirtiest kind. Each party try to “seduce” the others into “sleeping” with them so that they can get to the seat of the government. Remember the saying “Politics make strange bedfellows”? It is remarkably apt in this current situation.

I get more and more cynical watching the political “leaders” attack each other on various news channels. Yet, I went and cast my vote. Will it make a difference? I don’t think so. But now I at least have earned a right. A right to crib and criticize the government. If it’s the government I chose, I have the full rights to bash them if they don’t do what they promised. If it’s not the government that I chose, well, I have even more rights to crib and criticize them since I didn’t get what I wanted even after exercising my franchise.

What do you think?