Random Rants & Raves

For the 2nd year consecutively I've received a Gold Level Global Impact Award for my work as a Microsoft Regional Director along with 46 other RDs who have received it as well. Silver and Bronze levels were achieved by 24 and 25 RDs respectively. Overall 96 RDs have gotten an award and all Rds continue to be influencers of technology worldwide.

I'm proud, honored and even humbled to be part of this great group.

Although I've had the original 30GB Zune for quite a while now, I've been primarily using it as a video playback device with audio only occasionally being played on it. However, on my recent trip to Redmond, a tour of the Microsoft Company Store introduced me to the Zune Car Kit. Now I've been using the in-dash CD/MP3 player for quite a while in my Optra Royalé - but burning CDs everytime I wanted a change in the albums was getting to be a pain. And listening to the myriad of FM radio channels was getting too irritating as well with the non-stop nonsensical prattle of the RJs, who not only have an opinion on everything under the sun, they wish to share it with their listeners as well - many of who like me only want to listen to the music that they promise.

Anyway, I didn't pick up the Zune Car Kit at the Company Store. Instead I came back to India and used my MVP Dollars to buy it online. The kit was delivered to me in about 4 days and I installed it quickly. Although it found enough free FM spots currently I have set it to 107.5 which seems to give the best output when playing the car with no audible interference. It's great fun to be able use the Zune as the source for the songs and listen to FM radio where the RJ is your truly and since I don't have anything to say to myself that I don't already know - I don't have to listen to any prattle - just music that I want. And with the new Zune 2.x firmware upgrade navigating the Zune has become even better. The car kit is an essential must-have for those who wish to listen to good music or podcasts while travelling.

During the Mix earlier this month, fellow Indian RD Venkat and I were walking down together for a grabbing some snacks to eat and attending the next session when we ran into Scott Hanselman. Venkat had met Scott before and I had corresponded a few times on email as well as our RD alias with him. We got talking about outsourcing and cultures in India and the US when one of the bystanders suggested that the discussion we were having was good material for an informal podcast in Hanselminutes. Next thing we knew, Scott had unboxed an entire audio recording set, took us to an empty corner of the Venetian conference area where the Mix sessions were happening and got us on recording. We talked about a bunch of stuff from outsourcing models, difference in Indian and US cultures, education and more.

I've just landed back from my trip to the Microsoft HQ over at Redmond. This was my second trip to the US and back this month - the first being to Las Vegas for Mix '08. And as was expected (but fervently hoping wouldn't), my international travel jinx made my trips a little less than stellar.

1. On my trip to Vegas, Continental started from New Delhi about an hour late. Which meant that I had less than 1.5 hours for my connection at Newark to Vegas. Immigration took an extremely long time. I also needed to pick up my checked in bag and re-check in it again for the Vegas section. After that I had to run through customs, security and the extremely long terminal. I reached panting and probably close to a heart attack at the gate 3 minutes before gate closing time and was the last in the plane. My experience was not ended though. At Vegas I kept waiting for my bag, but it didn't turn up. Continental informed me that my bag was unable to make it on the flight that I had run and made in the same airport through security and all the long corridors and throngs of people! Anyway, they got the address of my hotel and promised to deliver by the late evening. Thankfully they did do that and that adventure ended there.
2. My trip to Redmond stared off with a pleasant surprise - I got upgraded to Premium economy in British Airways from Delhi to London. The flight however was extremely bumpy with a Boeing 777 being thrown about like a feather. Being a fan of Lost, thoughts of hatches, EMPs, mysterious islands and smoke monsters started running a little amok in my head. However, we made it to London and then to Seattle without too much more trouble. Of course, it was when I landed in Seattle and was waiting for US Immigration that my adventure started again. When waiting in the line, I suddenly hear my name being called out over the PA system asking me to come to the customs desk as soon as I clear immigration. That's not a very pleasant thing to hear - especially when entering the US, especially having heard of even Indian Union Ministers undergoing strip searches! After clearing customs I reach the Customs desk and tell the lady there that I'm the Vinod Unny that they've been paging. She then asks me how many bags had I checked in. I reply "Two". She tells me then: "Well, only one of your bags made it here!" UGH! I ask her which one (the one with my clothes or the one that had some very unimportant stuff considering I needed fresh clothes for my meetings the next day.) She didn't know and asked me to pickup whichever one comes off the carousel and give her the bag number of the one that didn't make it. Considering my luck I did expect it to be the unimportant one - but somehow fate wasn't that cruel. I got my clothes and the other bag was delivered the next day.

If these aren't enough to convince you that I have an international travel jinx, here are a few more examples:

• On a trip to Japan, my flight from Delhi got delayed by 10 hours due to heavy fog. On reaching Tokyo, I was quickly carted off to a hotel and put up and had missed all my meetings and had no way of contacting anyone (this was at a time prior to cell phones being available in India)
• During another trip to San Francisco, I again missed my connection from Bangkok. Thai Air refused hotel accommodations and I had to sleep at the airport in a chair till they figured out what to do with me!
• Trying to open a bag packed by airport security, I sliced open an artery in my finger in the middle of night in the US and almost bled to death (OK, that's an exaggeration, but it really did bleed copiously and a handkerchief that I tied around it and went to sleep since I was so tired was completely blood soaked and clotted by morning)
• On yet another trip to Japan, I had to carry a server class machine to do a demo at a client's place. This was before the days of laptops in India (at least at an affordable price). I had no luggage in carry on other than this packed server - as I couldn't check in a live server and expect it to live through the journey. After the usual flight arrival delays, talking my way through customs, running through the crowds in Tokyo's underground stations and getting rude stares from otherwise extremely polite people, I end up at my contact's place, plug in the plug and get no power. We realize that the Indian made server accepts only 220 V or above and Japan provides only 100 V. It was then a full fledged panic to get the machine working by ripping out the SMPS of a Japanese machine, and performing a transplant in the crowded train on the way to the client's office. We had no idea whether what we did would work or not. In fact, it didn't! when we tried power in the conference room, it simply didn't work yet again - till we realized that the Japanese SMPS had a small switch at the back that somehow had gotten reset. Imagine our sigh of relief when it all worked after turning that on. Another impact of this crazy trip was getting a slip disk of the 3rd and 4th lumbar  - something that still results in chronic back pain often.

If you've got any stories like these, feel free to post them below.

It is sometimes a pain to download multiple files from a SharePoint document library - especially when there are a lot of them. Many times the Explorer view doesn't work as it should and therefore dragging and dropping the folders you need are not possible. WebDAV may not be working so you can't get connected that way either. 

Which is where a nice, free solution comes into play. I've been a great proponent and user of the free WGET - the open source, command line web downloader. WGet for Windows is also available and simply extracting the files to a folder and adding it to the path allows you to start working with it. All you need to do to get the files off of a folder in a Document Library is give the following command:

wget -c -r -l1 --http-user=[username] --http-password=[password] --accept=aspx,docx,pptx,xlsx http://[Sharepoint URL]/[Document Library]/[Folder]

• r: For recursive
• l1: For downloading only upto 1 level
• http-user and http-password: The username and password to login to the Sharepoint site
• accept: The comma separated list of file extensions that will be downloaded. ASPX is required since all the pages in SharePoint are of this extension

When you do this, all the files in the folder you pointed to will be downloaded into the current directory. You will need to repeat this for each directory in the top level Document Library you wish to download. However, this is a much faster and easier way than downloading each file once at a time.

I'm right now at Redmond in the Microsoft HQ attending a SQL Server 2008 TPrep. There are a bunch of new things for developers, DBAs and Business Intelligence. One of the biggest changes in the BI space is in Reporting Services. There are a huge bunch of changes that allows you to create much more flexible & richer reports easier and faster. Here are some of them:

• A new Report Designer tool that is aimed at end / office users with a new interface with the Office 2007 Ribbon and other UI changes. This allows non-technical users to quickly create reports without delving into the technical stuff.
• A new data formatting control called the Tablix. This is something that designers the ability to use the best features of both the Table and Matrix controls.
• Better rendering support for Excel and CSV export types
• A new MS Word export rending option
• LOTS of new charting options - including:
  • Stepped Line, Range Area, Range Bar/Column, Funnel, Pie Callout, Pyramid, Polar, Error and Radar
  • Secondary X- and Y- axes
  • WYSIWYG chart design control (think Excel charts)
  • Multi Charts
  • Scale Breaks
  • Great new Gauge controls
• Dependency on IIS has been removed - the service uses HTTP.SYS directly

It's great to see the cool, new stuff in the Reporting Services. I'd have liked a couple of other stuff in it as well.

• An auto-format option for the Tablix would have been nice. After all the ASP.NET GridView has them and so do Word and Excel tables.
• An option to allow alternate row formatting for easier reading of reports
• Ability to deploy/install the new Report Designer as a ClickOnce application from the Report manager site
• The Web service endpoint for Reporting Services still remains as ReportServer2005! That's a little nutty I'd say. The name should have been ReportServer2008. Especially since there is a ReportServer2006 that is meant to connect to servers in SharePoint integrated mode. If backward compatibility was such a big deal it would have been trivial to create the ReportServer2008 endpoint and create a wrapper endpoint called ReportServer2005. Explaining this to clients is gonna feel a little stupid! :)

My recent visit to Las Vegas for the Mix '08 conference gave me the opportunity to finally visit what I've been wanting to do for a very long time - Star Trek: The Experience in the Las Vegas Hilton. This is a Star Trek themed area that consists of a large promenade, 2 ride shows, a bar and restaurant and a shopping area. There are many attractions to the place and even if you've never been a major Trekkie/Trekker, this is worth a visit to see the place.

The whole area is built up like the main Deep Space 9 Promenade. Including Quark's Bar where you can go and order fairly out of the world food and drink. There are two ride shows - The Klingon Encounter and Borg Invasion 4D. Both of them are very different from the normal rides you take and are a whole lot of fun with a bunch of interactive elements and surprises along the way.

You also get to go onto a fully to-scale bridge of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D: Picard's original ship. The viewscreen shows the stars while in warp and at one point even Cmdr. Riker and Geordi La Forge talking to some StarFleet "personnel" around you. The rides are just great - with parts where you are weaving in and out of a dogfight in space between Klingon Bird-of-Preys and the Enterprise. A built to scale area even lets you wander around in the saucer section of the Enterprise and that's when you get to feel the size of this StarShip - it's huge!

I went ahead and got myself clicked sitting in the Captain's Chair of the Enterprise D as well as in Picard's and Seven-of-Nine's Borg Alcove. I also took both the rides, a behind the scenes tour, visited the History of the Future museum and had lunch in Quark's bar.

After all this, I went ahead and bought a bunch of stuff from the shops as well: a limited edition die cast model of the USS Enterprise D, a scale model with sound and light effects of USS Enterprise E, a TNG-era communicator, a copy of the Star Trek magazine and a couple of T-shirts! Cost me a bomb - but it was worth it.

If you want to take a look at some of my other photos, head over to my Star Trek Experience gallery. There are no photos of the rides and stuff since it's prohibited there.

If you've ever used the Google "office" applications - Google Spreadsheet, Google Docs, etc., you'd have known that saving and using files over the Internet has it's advantages. However, the Google office has some stuff that you can't really do - and that is work with your documents offline and having richer edit capabilities. Imagine being stuck in a long flight without having the documents you need with you on your notebook or a time when you need to create a richer document - with maybe a fancy table of contents, cover page etc.

This is where MS Office really shines. You get extremely rich editing capabilities within it. To those who call Office "Bloatware" and say that 90% of the users use only 10% of the features that Word, Excel and PowerPoint have, all I have to say to them is this: if you ever reach that time when you want more than that standard 10% you use, you'll be extremely glad to find that Office already has it and can ease your burden of doing it considerably.

You can now get the best of both worlds by signing up into the Office Live Workspace for free. It allows you to store, view and edit documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) as well as share and collaborate with others. You can also create lists like Tasks, Contacts, and Events here and store them in specific workspaces. If you've never used SharePoint earlier, this is a good first step to seeing the stuff you can do.

The best part is that the site can get fully integrated with your Office product by simply installing the Office Live Add-in available on the site. (Note: If you're on Vista, you also need to install this update and reboot before using the add-in). Once ready, you can save and open files directly from the Live workspace from within the Office applications. This also gives you offline capability to allow you to work with the documents when not connected to the Internet and then syncing them back to the workspace when you are connected.

There are only two small downsides to this stuff:

1. If you've already worked with SharePoint (WSS or MOSS), you'll find that a lot of features are missing from this hosted version. This is however a good thing so as not to confuse or frighten most people who've never worked on SharePoint before.
2. There is no in-place editing of documents inside the Web browser like in the Google apps. I however prefer editing with all the rich capabilities of Office, but it might be a small deterrent to some.

Just saw a story on the heavily biased Slashdot about comments Miguel de Icaza was supposed to have made during his session at Mix which criticized the MS/Novell Pact. This is typical Slashdot/Linux FUD against anything Microsoft. I was there in the discussion and even asked Miguel specifically about these topics. I posted a reply to the article at Slashdot (quoted below since Slashdot has a way of making pro-MS comments vanish):

This is simple, absolute FUD - typical of Slashdot. I was there and Miguel never said any of those things in the _public_ presentation.

But if slashdot, you want to even appear fair you should also report the other stuff he said.

Things like "Linux on the server is boring", "We open source commies...", etc. In fact I asked him specifically about the GPL and its effect on the MS/Novell/SL/Moonlight stack. His comment was that the GPL is quite irrelevant since most Linux vendors are going to be fighting with each other (he gave an example of 'committee for freedom of  Judea' and 'Judea freedom commitee' fighting with each other instead of for the actal freedom).

There were enough comments from him to "prove" that he thinks Linux sucks royally (if you were there and saw his Termnial font change problem comment, you'll know what I mean). But we know he doesn't hate linux. So again, a comment made by him aobut the deal doesn't mean he doesn't agree with it and endorse it. He might have personal opinions which he puts out in a private group - that shouldn't be taken as him hating the deal.

Slashdot - at least report the full facts / comments and try to be fair.

Hopefully, (although I don't think so), Slashdot will correct their story. If any of you were there and want to add to this, please do so.

Thanks to Kevin, our RD Dad, we had a (literally) closed door meeting with none other than Scott Guthrie himself. This was the first time I was meeting him and I found Scott to be a warm, friendly, funny, down-to-earth, and really knowledgeable guy.

We had a great open discussion with Scott - praising and criticizing Microsoft technologies and policies, asking him his thoughts on a number of topics, getting the inside scoop on the future roadmap and more. Unfortunately, all our discussion comes under our NDA and I can't say anything about what we talked about.

I will however leave you with this one thing - if you're a developer or designer in the Web world this is a great time for you. The stuff that is already here and the stuff that is coming up - both soon and in the longer term - will let you expand the boundaries of the way that the Web works and give your users a whole new way of working with it. Be sure to keep an eye on what Microsoft is doing in this space.