Random Rants & Raves

I finally got the nagging problem I had with my Dell notebook sorted out. I happened to notice that the Dell XPS M1730 is now available in India. Seeing this I thought it might be possible that they now also support my Dell XPS M1710 - the predecessor the one they sell here. And turns out they do.

I rang up Dell support last Thursday and on Friday 2 support guys show up my office. I told them that none of my video-out ports (VGA, DVI, S-Video) are functioning. At first they said that it might be a software setting problem or a driver issue and started doing their standard series of test. After I told them exactly what steps they would try next and that I had already tried them and failed, they didn't say anything further - just gave me a big grin and said "No problems sir, we'll replace your motherboard". 20 minutes later with a brand new motherboard, the notebook is happily chugging away and being able to project! Yay to Dell support again!!

I recently happened to watch the new Hindi movie Bachna Ae Haseeno (loosely translated: “Watch Out Girls!”) with my famiy. I was pleasantly surprised to see massive Microsoft product placement in it! The movie stars some very well known names as both the male and female cast - Ranbir Kapoor, Deepika Padukone, Bipasha Basu and Minissha Laamba.

While watching the movie, the hero suddenly states that he’s completed his college and joined MICROSOFT! Parts of the movie (seemingly) are shot in the MS office in Mumbai! There are tons of “Vista rocks” & Xbox posters all over the place.

Not only that, the Xbox 360 and Halo 3 are shown and talked about in detail. Even when Ranbir moves to the MS office in Sydney, he continues being in the Xbox team and talking about this - for instance, "Master Chief's flamethrower is the coolest video game weapon ever!".

His romantic interest played by Deepika, also happens to be a geek girl who not only knows that “Halo 3 is the most talked about video game ever” (actual quote from the movie) but also discusses Xbox live and multiplayer gaming on the Xbox in a party.

This is the first time that I’ve seen such detailed product placement – not just as props but as part of the story and dialogue – in an Indian movie! Kudos to Microsoft for getting this right. The props are not jarringly placed and the dialogue by two of India’s current heart throbs touting the Xbox and Halo 3 is great for a movie that’s gonna be watched by young moviegoers.

After seeing a ton of Mac ads as product placement - every other Hollywood movie has somebody typing away on a Macbook or something similar – it was great to see MS stuff so nicely placed and that too in a Hindi movie!

Well, for the people living under a rock, the IPhone (v2.0/3G) is finally in India thanks to Airtel and VodaPhone. But is it really worth it? Let's take a look.

1. For a minimum price of almost Rs. 32,000, it is sure a very expensive phone. And there are many better options out there that can do everything that the iPhone can and better. Some examples are the iMate Ultimate 9502, HTC Touch Diamond and the top-end HTC Touch Pro.
2. You are vendor locked in to Airtel/Vodaphone. Which means that you cannot swap SIM cards when you please - for instance, you cannot swap out to a Matrix SIM card when traveling internationally.
3. The iPhone available with vendor lock-in in the US is about USD 200 - approximately Rs. 8,500. The current rate is 4 TIMES the US rate - even with taxes and stuff, this is ridiculous.
4. The worst part is that you are paying full price for stuff that you really cannot even use - no 3G in India, no swapping of SIM cards, etc.
5. A 2MP camera with no flash is soooo old school -  at that price a minimum of 3.2 MP and ideally at least a 5MP with flash should have been there - especially since the phone is being touted as a multimedia friendly one.
6. Phones like the Touch Diamond and the Touch Pro have all the features that the iPhone claims and much, much more. For instance, the Touch Pro is touch friendly (including multi-touch), a 3.2MP camera with flash, a full QWERTY keyboard, 1000s of 3rd party applications for all sorts of needs, Direct Push, no vendor lock-in and many more things.
7. All the problems with the original iPhone continue - no copy-paste, soft keyboard only, no 3rd party applications other than through the Apple Store, call clarity, etc.
8. New problems such as a horrible battery, bad reception quality, 3G and GPS drops have also been now coming frequently to light

All-in-all, if you really have/want to spend a whole bunch of money for a very well hyped phone, go for it - otherwise pick up a real phone like the TyTn II, Touch Diamond or Touch Pro

If you want to know more about the engineering process and what's coming in Windows vNext a.k.a Windows "7", head over to the new Engineering Windows 7 blog.

Microsoft's development team has been quite busy lately. Last week we saw the release of SQL Server 2008 and this week we have the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 released as well. There are a whole bunch of things in this release:

• Bunch of bug fixes
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data
• ASP.NET MVC
• SQL Server 2008 RTM support
• Entity Framework
• IIS 7.0 managed module templates
• Tons of more stuff...

You can read about the new features of VS2008SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1 for more details. You might also want to install and run the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack Preparation Tool to ensure that any old SP betas and hotfixes are removed correctly before attempting to install the RTM version of the service pack.

I just downloaded and started installing VS 2008 SP1 as mentioned in my last post. However, taking a look at the installer screen suddenly made my nostalgic. The installer has a fancy set of progress bars and text information - but snucked away at the right bottom below the second progress bar was a small 1-character label that displayed action happening in a completely different way. It cycles between the characters /-\| in a loop to make it look like a simple rotating line.

This was the same stuff that used to appear when one turned on the old IBM PCs in front of which I've spent a whole lot of time experimenting, playing, coding years back. At that time, there was no real GUI and everything was done from the DOS prompt. It was nice to suddenly see the old friend that showed the progress in a simple way despite having a ton of other graphical ways of showing it.

As an aside, on the old PCs, the progress rotation used to be slow due to the slow processing power of then's CPUs. But with today's power machines, this should have whizzed through so fast as to have been unnoticeable. This basically means that someone actually added in a small delay between each character in the loop to get this effect. Must be someone from my generation, I guess, who wanted to also have this effect for old times sake.