Random Rants & Raves

The Government of India (GoI) has been lately revising a Draft Policy on E-Governance – which is all well and good. However, a number of clauses in this are quite concerning – especially the ambiguity and general mix-up between what is called “Open Standards” and “Open Source”.

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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.

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?

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

Since I've been traveling for work almost continuously since March and have been extremely busy otherwise as well, I thought a small family vacation to my home town (Palghat, Kerala) would be a great respite. I packed up the wife and kid and went to Bangalore first where I had a 3-day SQL Server 2008 BI session to conduct. After that I sent them off to Palghat while I went to Pune to conduct an architecture design session for a client. Finally on Saturday I took a flight from Pune to Coimbatore and landed up home completely beat.

I was supposed to attend a cousin's engagement at Calicut on Monday, but I bailed - not really out of choice but because first my son, Akshat fell ill with an upset tummy and soon after so did I. My parents went off to Calicut and returned the same day.

I then planned to at least get some rejuvenating Ayurvedic massages done - but not only did it start raining like mad - making travel well nigh impossible - but my dad came down with a flu. The worst was yet to come - Neeta (my wife) suddenly developed an extreme case of pollen allergy due to the thick vegetation around. We were then constantly on phone with her doctor here and getting new medicines to give her. Since she was completely breathless and in pain, I had to take two decisions quickly - one, move out of my parents' house and into a hotel room with air conditioning and two, to cut short our vacation and reach back home in Gurgaon. So I had to cancel my non-refundable tickets and buy new ones for the next day and fly back.

So, in the end not only did I not get a vacation (which I still think is very well deserved/required), but instead got a whole bunch of tension and a good amount of money spent. What a waste!

A few posts back I made a comment about the excellent service I got from Dell for my notebook having international warranty since it was purchased in the USA. In that case it was a laptop adapter that got replaced the next day.

However, I now have to eat my words about the Dell service - especially their so called "Complete Cover International Warranty". My notebook suddenly decided that it will not use any of the video out ports anymore - VGA, DVI or S-Video. So I am unable to use the notebook to project using a projector or TV. I tried all the ports, and even went ahead and formatted the system and reinstalled the default drivers - all to no avail.

Finally, I called up the XPS tech support line and told them about the problem. They immediately told me that the motherboard would need replacement - however since India does not sell the model of notebook I have they are unwilling to ship the motherboard to me. I reminded them that I have an international complete cover warranty and therefore it shouldn't matter whether the country in which I currently am in sells the model or not - I need to have it supported as this is critical. After a lot of checking by the tech, she came back to me and said that there is no way that they can support it. I even gave them a few options - ship the motherboard to me and I'll replace it myself at my own risk or ship it to Dell India and have a XPS technician install it for me. I even said I don't care about the next-business day clause - even if it takes them a month to get the part, to do so and ship it so that at least I can use it a little later. None of this was acceptable to them and even though I paid extra for getting international support from Dell, it is of no use to me - and this is for a high end notebook that costs more the $3,500!

I'm sad to say I take back the good stuff I said about Dell support and keep this as a warning to others who might want to rely on international support for high end models around the world. They should have at least given a list of countries where there is full support and called it Limited international warranty instead doing this.

Recently Alex Brown of the ISO made a blog post regarding a test he ran on a Word 2007 DOCX (OOXML) file on the final standard of OOXML that was ratified by the ISO. Suddenly, the infamous Groklaw took up the results, mangled it out of proportion and came up with a sensational verdict of "Office 2007 itself fails the OOXML standard with 122,000 errors". Other news sites quickly picked this up and started reporting the same. I too was quite surprised with this result till I went over to the actual blog post and read through it myself, instead of trusting what Groklaw had reported. Let's analyze what's been said.

Very clearly, Alex states that:

The STRICT conformance model is quite a bit different from Ecma 376, essentially because most of that format's most notorious features (non ISO dates, compatibility settings like autospacewotnot, VML, etc.) have been removed. Thus the expectation is that existing Office 2007 documents might be some distance away from being valid according to the strict schemas [My emphasis --Vinod]

This basically means that since the format's specification has changed (due to the changes requested by many countries in the first round of voting after it was submitted), it can be expected that these changes wouldn't have gotten implemented yet. It's obvious if you think about it. Microsoft submitted the original specification for its OOXML format to the ISO. When countries decided that the specification requires a large number of changes, Microsoft went back, worked hard and incorporated those changes into the specification. Obviously they didn't spend time and effort in making those changes into the product itself before the specification was accepted - since for all they knew it might get rejected again or more changes could have been asked for.

So when there are 122K errors on the STRICT conformance model, it is to be expected - as Alex Brown very clearly states above. Somehow people tend to skip over that part for their own convenience. The really great part comes a little further down:

TRANSITIONAL conformance model is quite a bit closer to the original Ecma 376. Countries at the BRM (rather more than Ecma, as it happened) were very keen to keep compatibilty with Ecma 376 and to preserve XML structures at which legacy Office features could be targetted. The expectation is therefore that an MS Office 2007 document should be pretty close to valid according to the TRANSITIONAL schema.
Sure enough (again) the result is as expected: relatively few messages (84) are emitted and they are all of the same type ... [My emphasis again --Vinod] 

Reading this lets you know that a different conformance model also exists for working on a transitional format which contains a super set of stuff that the STRICT has and Office 2007 is expected to be compatible with it. And surprise, surprise, it sure is. There were 84 warnings that were generated on the same document using the TRANSITIONAL model - and they were all for an element

<m:degHide m:val="on"/>

which according to the specification should have been using "true" instead of "on" (and "false" instead of "off"). That's it - a simple little thing to fix isn't it? Now that the OOXML spec is becoming a standard, MS can go ahead and make the changes in the product to make it conform to the standard and apply it in any major Office 2007 update as well as in the next version of Office. And this is what the entire hullabaloo was about.

Basically I think it is time that news sites read the original source of any "news" and make interpretations themselves, rather than rely on obviously biased reports from sites like Groklaw or Slashdot. Anti-OOXML fanatics also need to get their act together and when they make a claim, substantiate it with actual facts rather than spewing fire and brimstone over nothing. You can also read a much more detailed analysis of this over at Doug Mahugh's blog and discuss it different forums.

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.

The Windows Live team has recently taken SkyDrive out of beta and released it officially. This service lets you sign up using a Live ID and gives you 5 GB of free space that you can use to store your files and share it with others - to specific friends or publicly. Overall sounds like a great idea. However, I find that SkyDrive has a number of glaring shortcomings:

1. There is no option to sync files from my machine. This means that I cannot use SkyDrive as a place where I can keep important documents, edit them from another machine and have it sync back to my main machine automatically. I should have been able to say "Sync my Documents folder with the SkyDrive Documents folder every week" or something like that. The Windows Vista Sync Center should have been able to do this as well.
2. I do not get WebDav or FTP access to my space. Which means that there is no way that I can access it without going into the Web site - not something that I'd always want to do - especially if I'm on a low speed or mobile phone Internet connection.
3. The multi-file upload tool that gets installed is pretty useless as well - it cannot upload folders. So if I drop a folder called "Official" which in turn has tens of folders inside it, SkyDrive can't upload it. It expects me to actually create each (sub)folder manually and then upload files into each folder separately.

I guess till these features come up, I'm going to use SkyDrive only as a tool to dump files I want to share with others and don't want to email it to them.

PS. Yes, I know about FolderShare as well - but I have an even longer list of rants against that. :)