Random Rants & Raves

Tags: politics, personal, rant
Categories: Politics | Personal

Finally, after years of trying to buy a house and meeting with challenges and almost got it instances, we’ve done it. We’ve managed to purchase an apartment in Sector 47, Gurgaon and move in there over the weekend. Here are some of the high- and low- lights of the transition as well as some pointers for those planning to purchase a house.

• It took us 3 years of searching, negotiating, fights and sleepless nights off and on to buy a house in Gurgaon.
• For all those media people who claim property prices are falling, they’ve got their heads in the clouds - prices in Gurgaon are atrocious.
• The apartment at a total built-up area of 2615 sq.ft. and covered area of 2365 sq.ft. is large compared to the most of the other apartments at the budget we had. Fairly well planned out other than the placement of structural beams and columns.
• We had to spend a huge amount of money more to get all the woodwork, electrical fittings, plumbing and painting done. Never trust the builder’s work in any of this.
• Make sure you apply for a home loan well in advance. The more the documentation you can provide, the faster the loan can get processed. Have scanned copies of anything and everything you can think of.
• Woodwork takes x*1.5 days at least where x is the number of days promised to you by the carpenter.

Anyway, I’ll put up some shots of the house soon. We’re still living out of boxes for this week while some plumbing and electricity stuff gets done.

Tags: house, personal, tips
Categories: Personal

WHY???!
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Well, the long wait is over – the full official trailer of the upcoming Star Trek movie by J.J. Abrams is now available to watch online. You can also get a glimpse of walking through the Enterprise over at StarTrekMovie. The trailer is unfortunately hosted at Apple for this week but other sites will pick them soon.

If you want to simply download the HD trailer rather than just seeing on the Web page you can head here. It’s about 20MB in size. If you want the super-duper hi-res one (1080p version) you get that here. This weighs in at about 159MB.

Live long and prosper.

Tags: star trek
Categories: Star Trek | Movies

Microsoft recently released a new set of chart controls for Windows and Web forms for .NET 3.5 SP1. However, to install and use them in Visual Studio you need to download and install a minimum of two different downloads and an optional third.

The first one is the main update for .NET 3.5SP1 available here. If you need Visual Studio 2008 SP1 support you need to install the add-on from here. If you need the full documentation, download and extract the file from here.

Once these are setup, you can add the Chart control from the Data group in the Toolbox. Add a data source, set the series data points in the properties and you are done. Quite easy to start creating dynamic charts on your site without any expensive 3rd party solution.

Tags: rave, asp.net, charts
Categories: ASP.NET | Development | Rave

As is usual to a slightly long post, I start with a bit of historical context. In the days back when I was a student in school, computers were a fairly new thing. I was lucky to have started early on BBC Micros and having access to the Internet waaaay before most people had heard of it thanks to growing up in one of India’s premier universities. In school, our PCs, PC-XTs and PC-ATs were major drool points for us geeks.

However, software was another issue. A few of us loved programming – but access to software was fairly impossible. Getting Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ was quite difficult and it was usually from a (friend-of-a-friend)^n from where we would (ahem) make copies to try out our pieces of code. I remember writing (literally) entire programs on sheets of paper with dry run notations on the side for each variable for each pass and then go type it out in school to try out some new stuff that I had “created”.

These days however, access to software is much easier. Unfortunately, professional quality software is usually quite expensive and for a student in India, typically out of their budget. This is where Microsoft’s recently announced DreamSpark initiative comes to their rescue.

DreamSpark allows students in India to download or get a DVD of most of the Microsoft programming and designing stack for FREE! All a student needs to do is register at the site, get their student status verified and they can get access to the free download and go and simply pick up the free DVD from any of the over 200 locations in India and start using it.

And what is it that they get for free? The list includes:

• Windows Server 2003 Standard
• Visual Studio 2008 Professional
• Visual Studio 2005 Professional
• SQL Server 2005 Developer
• Expression Studio
• XNA Game Studio 2.0

Remember that these are FULL versions of these products, without any restrictions (time or uses) for FREE.

This means that computer science students can now start working with professional level tools right from the start. Also, if anybody uses the “Open Source is best for learning programming” argument, this is no longer true. The Microsoft programming stack is so much more productive and now is accessible by any student in India and all for free to. I wish this was available to me when I was in school too.

Tags: rave, microsoft
Categories: Development | Internet | Microsoft | Rave | SQL Server

Live mesh is a great service that lets you sync devices or store it online from where you can access them from anywhere. It’s currently available as a tech preview and if you’re signed up you can sync multiple devices across.

Finally, the team has released Live Mesh for mobiles as well. Currently it support Windows Mobile 6.x. However you will not be able to access this from the usual places – that is, by either going to http://m.mesh.com or by logging into your Mesh Desktop and trying to add a device. You need to go to https://www.mesh.com/Web/MobileDownload.aspx and follow the onscreen instructions to download the installer (.CAB). You can then connect your WM device and install the software through ActiveSync/WMDC.

Tags: live mesh, windows mobile
Categories: Gadgets | Internet | Microsoft | Windows Live

Watch out Google Apps, Office “14” is coming to the Web – and unlike the Google version, it works with the offline rich client as well as mobile devices to give a whole new set of features.

Some salient points:

• Office 14 is going to be available in the normal rich client version
• The Web version will be included into the applications
• Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote are the apps that will be available in the “cloud” :)
• Seamless syncing of content between the desktop, Web and mobile will be possible
• Multiple people can work on the same document in different media at the same time and see changes in real-time
• The Web version works on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari
• If you have the Silverlight 2 plugin installed (in any of the above browsers) you get an even richer experience than the Ajax based one which mimics the rich desktop client almost exactly
• The rendering engines in each application is the same as the one in the desktop version and hence the document you view in your desktop will be exactly the same as the one the Web!
• You get all the rich features – charts, tables, WordArt, SmartArt etc. on both the Desktop and Web version – YAY!

Check out the video over at Channel9 for a quick cool demo.

Tags: pdc, office, beta
Categories: Office | Internet | SilverLight

Vista has a number of new features that optimize the way that your computer functions – especially in the area of power consumption. The new power plans, sleep mode and more intelligent management of hardware resources are some of these. However, there is one small problem that comes with this – if you leave your computer to perform a download, in many cases it just doesn’t complete since Vista automatically puts the computer to sleep after a period of inactivity. This is especially true if you’re downloading on a laptop and on battery.

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Tags: tips, vista
Categories: Tips | Windows Vista

This post actually started out as a comment on a Slashdot story about how the economic downturn is going to (negatively) impact free and open source software. As expected, the comments had a ton of ayes and nays – both sides having their merits. My thoughts about this are like this:

1. The economic downturn is going to affect everyone – including people who are passionate about writing free software. Are you single or do you have dependents (wife, kids, parents, etc.) who depend on your livelihood? In this case, would you as a developer rather work for a commercial vendor (who pays you something) or an OSS project where you are a contributor and the possible future fame (no fortune) is the only incentive? (Unless of course, you were born with a silver spoon and write code only as a passion.)
2. If you were the owner/major stockholder of a company would you depend on a software project that’s been written in the garage of the developers or with a company which has fairly good stocks as well as a few billion dollars in liquid funds? Think about which one is more likely to close shop and disappear. Would you want to be stuck with a product running your critical LoB application which has no future?
3. The argument that since you do have the source you can modify it is fallacious. What if you’re not a technical company? You will need to hire programmers to modify the application which can turn more expensive very quickly.
4. What if the main argument was that it would be cheaper to get the free software than a commercial one during an economic downturn? Again, see point 2 as well as that commercial OSS projects have the same or more TCO of offerings from commercial vendors. Most commercial OSS projects are in the same price range (they call it “charging for services”) as commercial closed source ones.
5. Commercial vendors also give a pay as you need and monthly/yearly model of software purchase. All you need to do is talk to the sales/marketing team of the vendor to avail of this – with guarantees on the software (and company – very important during this economic phase). This means that you can spread out the cost of the software over many years and still get the benefits of a solid company backing and software.
6. People who claim that developers can continue to write code for OSS only see part of the picture. What about all those people who are not technical but yet have a whole bunch of stuff to contribute to software – QA, designers, technical writers, software packagers,etc. Will all of them also be willing to work for free/peanuts?

Although I do not foresee the end of OSS or even want it to happen, these are hard questions that not only contributors to OSS but also companies who rely upon them must think about seriously. What do you think?

Tags: oss, economy
Categories: Development