.NET From India

DSG!!

Came across a interesting article titled Do You Have a DSG (Dumb SOA Guy) Issue? in the SOA World Magazine. This is something that I come up against regularly, in multiple places.

This is always a problem when there is what I call the in-thing technology. SOA is currently one of them and is reaping the hype created mis-information...:(

An Eclipse Runtime?

Looks like Eclipse wants to take the jump from being a IDE to being a full runtime platform.

At EclipseCon 2008 in Santa Clara, Calif on Monday, the project leaders announced the Eclipse Runtime project (Eclipse RT) an initiative to build an open source run-time technology based on its own Equinox, a lightweight OSGi compliant run-time. Equinox, the core run-time platform for Eclipse, is not new. The run-time is used by Actuate, BEA, Code 9, Iona, IBM and Oracle and is reportedly deployed on millions of developers’ desktops

Will this be a competitor for Java or .NET. I am sure a lot of people hope so. My take, it is going to be very difficult due to the large following these runtimes currently have and the amount of corporate muscle (MS or Sun is not going to let someone else take over that easily) that are behind these platforms. It is going to be a long shot, but sometime long shots do turn out sucessful..

Eclipse launches super run-time project as alternative to Java and .NET

Those nifty utilities you cannot do without

Everyone has a list of utilities they cannot do without. The first thing you do once you format and install Windows is to go to that directory with all those installs. Some of these are ones you install only when you need them and some you need to have just to get started.

George Ou at Zdnet has put together a list of his must-have free utilities.

Not surprisingly I use quite a few of these or the equivalents (I prefer Azeurus to utorrent etc). Some others like Skype and AVG, I am a big fan of.

The one other utility I cannot do without that is not on that list is DAEMON Tools. This is my preferred CD/DVD emulator. Why? It is small, it does what it is supposed to do well and best of all, it can emulate some of the most common security mechanisms used in CDs. This is very important to me as I usually rip my Game CDs on to my HDD so that I don’t have to keep switching CDs to play games. So without these emulations, I cannot do that.

Free Teleconference!!

The guy who gave you free email is now planning to give you free teleconference facility. Sabeer Bhatia, the brain behind Hotmail, has a new offering called Sabse Bolo (Hindi for Talk to Everyone), which gives you a free teleconference bridge.

You register and get a Conf id and Pin similar to what any of the commercial teleconference providers will give you. The free service allows you to conference with up to 10 people (from what I can gather). How will this help you?? Well think about a conf with multiple friends or family members. This is as yet a untouched area as far as India is concerned. I know of quite a few friends who use services like Skype to do this, but then this can be a good alternative for getting people who do not have a computer/internet or who do not know how to use one.

Will this change your life like Hotmail did?? Well I doubt it. Though a new area that has a lot of potential, I do not see this as something that will have such a big impact.

A few clinks as of now that I noticed. They have only a Banglaore based not (+22), which means there is quite a bit of STD charges involved, if you live anywhere else. I assume going forward, they will create local numbers, but could not find too much of information on that. Also, they do not seem to have any number for people outside India, so if you wish to conf with friends who may be abroad, then you are out of luck too.

From some bits of info on the web, looks like they also will have a paid service aimed at corporate users. That space is quite crowded as of now with the like of Reliance etc offering international conferencing facilities. They may be able to make a impact there only if they are a lot cheaper or they offer something exceptional that they have not announced as yet.

Interesting..

Found this in Manoj Agarwal's blog....

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DivX Pro Free Offer is Back..

For a limited time DivX is offering the Pro version of their software for free for the holidays. Use the link below to get your copy. (email id required for registration)

DivX Pro Free

Amazon Kindle

I just read about this new reading device from Amazon called the Kindle.

I found quite a few interesting technical aspects to it:
1. It uses cellphone technology for data, thus you dont need to be at a wifi hotspot for it to work and all of this does not cost you what a data plan does.
2. The device it self seems to be very small and carryable, atleast in the video.
3. You can read not only books, but also newspaper, mags and blogs. Though it does look like the number of blogs are pre-selected from the information avbl now. You also get some newspapers and mags delivered for free by Amazon.
4. You can read some of the common doc formats like Word etc. But you will have to mail it to the device and Amazon seems to be charging some fee to convert it to a Kindle compatible format.

Some areas that I would like more improvement
1. Make it possible to setup a list of blogs you are interested in and get those on the device
2. Somehow allow the device to connect to a PC via USB so that I can also download documents into it without having to pay Amazon everytime
3. It currently looks to be a BW screen. Now sure if this is a good way to read books that may have a lot of images etc.
4. It is very pricey for what it does. I would be willing to look at this device at a round a $100 price point.

Leopard Security...

ZDNet has a article on how some of the independent security reviewers are not very happy with the new security enhancements in MacOS X Leopard.

I am not too suprised. As a platform becomes more prevalant, more will be the attention it will get from a security perspective. Not having had too much attention till recently, I would say, MacOS most probably is not in a position to be too secure. :)

Yahoo Search Assistant

Yahoo was the first major Search player and then kind of lost its way. Google came, it conquered and remains king.

Yahoo has been improving a lot over the last year or so and results have been felt in a lot of areas, including it becoming the top portal site that people visit. But for search, most of us still go to Google.

The first major search improvement from Yahoo that made its appearance today is what they call the "Search Assistant", which is similar to Google suggest. I find the Yahoo Search Assistant UI experience better, though it does take a second or so to get up and running.

Google security bugs

ZDNet has a article on a large number of security vulnerabilities have been discovered in multiple google apps including GMail, Google Appliances, Blogspot, Picassa etc.

Why as I not suprised??

Well, I strongly beleive it is not purely Microsoft's fault that is the reason for Windows being targetted by hackers. It is the number of users out there that really attracts them. So as google gets popular, so does it attract hackers. As more people use google to do financial transactions (or stuff that may help a hacker make money), more attention it will get.

Yahoo, Ask, MSN Move up and Google Moves Down!!

Well it did suprise a lot of people..

Yahoo Takes Top Spot From Google In Customer Satisfaction Report

The last year or so, I think Google has done too many things and a lot of those have not been very sucessful though mostly the geek crowd were drooling over anything out of Google, I think this is a clear warning to Google. Focus on stuff you are good at, improve those, and slowly move to other things.

Is this the end of Google?? Was MS Bob the end Of Microsoft?? Of course Google is now big enough to take a few hits, but then Ad revenue is also one of the foundation of its revenue stream. And Ad revenue is based purely on hits and customer perceptions. So this is important...

If the guys at Google are as smart as people make them out to be, then I am sure, they will take this warning seriously...

Best Firewall

Scott's Newsletter is comparing the current set of personal Firewall softwares available, both from a security standpoint and also ease of use for a normal user. One of the main outcomes of the study is that most of the big name products do not mesure up. It is usually the smaller products that are really good and usable.

Computerworld also has an article on this effort:

Review roundup: Slim is in for Windows desktop firewalls
You don't need a bloated security suite to get the best protection from a firewall. In fact, many of the biggest names offer less protection than simpler, lesser-known firewalls.

Scott's Newletters AV review for 2007 can be found here. (The winner was NOD32, though I still continue to use Free AVG at home and have not had any problems as yet)

Divx Pro for Free

Looks like there Divx Pro for free for a limited period. Don't know how long this is available though. Try your luck.

Update: Not available anymore

Scratch - A programming language for Kids

Scratch is a new programming language for children from the creator of Lego, Mitchel Resnick. It seems to be built on the same logic a lego, where there are basic building blocks and then you use those to build more complex things. Similarly, Scratch seems to have GUI, which allows you to do things like animate, play music etc using basic building block like symbols.

Here is a BBC article that also contains a cool video of Scratch in action.

Scratch Home Page
Download Scratch

Ad Supported Applications

I have an idea for an application that is focused on some india specific needs for which I don't see an application out there that fits well. My current thought process is that I will create this application and then maybe offer it free, maybe with some kind of Ad support for the hosting and other costs. This is not a pure web app, but rather a smart client kind of application. For a web site, I know that Google Ads work out very well, but what about a smart client applications?

Before Google Ads, you had to be a very sucessful site with millions of hits to get some kind of Ad revenue. But now even sites like mine with a few hundreds of hits a day can make enough to cover my hosting costs. Is there an equivalent for the smart client/desktop space?

I know that the big games developers sell Ad space on their games, but what about smaller application developers. Also I want to be sure that this is not of the spyware type, but rather non-intrusive text or graphics based Ads that will not invade the users privacy and that will not scare users away. Has anyone tried something like this before?

Is the number of Spinal Tap Fans increasing??

My colleague Ankur pointed out an interesting set of pictures at the Microsoft and nVidia web sites. To understand why I found these funny, you need to have seen a film called “This is SpinalTap”, a rockumentory about a hard rock band called “Spinal Tap”.

In one of the famous scenes in this film (Watch this Scene in YouTube), one of the band members takes the interviewer around to show their new amp, which can go up to 11, instead of the normal 10. This scene has a famous one-liner “But this goes up to eleven”.

So I almost laughed out loud when I saw two pictures that reminded me of this at two different sites on the same day. The Microsoft picture seems to have disappeared now, but the nVidia one is still there at their home page.

Has Scoble lost his blog power?

Usually when you get Scobleized your hit rates spike and leave you wondering if you wrote something controversial!!!

Actually Scoble linked to my blog last week (Indian BlogCamp gonna be bigger than TechCrunch) and there was hardly a blip in my hit rate.

So did Scoble leaving Microsoft actually affect his blog power? I thought his being in MS was not what made him a A-list blogger, but then the numbers seem to suggest otherwise?

Robert, did you loose traffic when you left MS or is it just that none of your current/new readers are interested in .NET nor India (I thought that was a deadly combination when I named my blog)? Hopefully the former is not true. :)

An Indian Community around Windows?

A new community site for India around window is now available at Merawindows.com.

If you join now, they are giving away Vista Beta 2 DVDs...

IE 7 vs FF2

In interesting article in ZDnet comparing the Betas of the next versions of the two major browsers, Internet Explorer 7 and FireFox 2.

From the analysis it looks like IE is no more the non-secure browser anymore...:)

HP Takes over Mercury

The news of HP taking over Mercury is all over the web now. In an article in SDtimes, Alan Zeichick talks about how the press statement does not mention the testing and QA tools that made Mercury so famous in the first place. I agree and knowing that so many people use these tools am not sure how it is going to affect the software testing market.

One of my recent projects included looking at tools to perform LoadTesting on .NET web applications. We had LoadRunner, but were also looking for cheaper alternatives. We spent around two weeks looking around, but still could not find an comprehensive tool to replace LR. There seems to be a recent explosion in load testing tools market with a lot of entrants. Though most of these are good and cheap, none of them have the feature coverage that LR has. Ofcourse, if HP does not continue improving LR, these tools will slowly, but surely, move up to fill the gap.

The current customers and partners of Mercury, who have invested a lot of money into the testing and QA tools will surely be worried about this.

Webcasts by MVPs

There are going to be a series of webcasts by my fellow MVPs on Vista based upcoming technologies. You can register for the sessions at Webcasts by Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs). The schedule and topics are also available in the same page.

This is a good way to take a peek into this upcoming technologies from your desk.

Google - Losing the Cool Tag??

ZDNet has a post on how a lot of the new products from the Google stable is no more innovative or cool, but just a me too kind.

I think after Search and Ads they are not yet sure what would be thier next major move and they are just trying out stuff they can think of. No more a small and with so much money to burn, I think they just are enjoying the sucess and forgetting innovation. Maybe it will take some time before they find thier feet.

I also think that the intial honeymoon period, when anything Google does is cool, is over and people are looking at what is the innovation that Google has come up with. "It is from Google" is not enough, it is more important to see how useful it is to me.

This is good thing as it is going to help Google stabilize (get over the IPO and having a lot of money) and actually start being innovative again, if they do not want to die.

Riya Beta

Just now I got an invite to the Riya Beta. I signed up a few months back when they had just announced it and now looks like they are ready for a more widely available Beta.

They seems to have a problem with allowing me to use IE 7, since they seem to have done a browser version check and allow only IE6 or Firefox. Anyway, I have written to them. Lets see if they add access to IE7 or I will have to wait till they do.

How will it look on the UMPC?

I blogged about the UMPC/Origami that Microsoft has announced. It run full fledged XP, but has a different form factor. If you want to check how your app is going to look on the UMPC, MS has a UI emulator available (in Beta) now that will allow you to check.

via Vasanth

VMWare to have a Free Product?

This ZDNet article talks about a possiblity that VMWare is going to make one of its virtualization product free. I remember beta testing the first version of VMWare and being very excited. I even went so far as to buy one of the low cost hobbyist versions that they had at that time.

But then the hobbist version dissappeard, and the cost kept going up. Then MS came out with Virtual PC, so I just shifted to VPC (I was anyway getting it as a part of my MSDN subscription). Now with the free version (if it does come out), I suppose VMWare is trying to get back in the race.

What would Microsoft do now??

Did you say Unbreakable?

Oracle from unbreakable to unpatchable

The title really caught my eye when going thru the latest ZDNet. If you have been reading my blog, you would have found that I was very pessimistic of the unbreakable claim when Oracle started that campaign.

But will it make a difference to Oracle's campaign?? I don't think so as this is not so much in the public eye. If it were a MS hole, every newspaper worth its salt will have its technology writer come up with an article on how bad the situation it is. I am yet to read a print article on the unbreakable claim that has been broken multiple times now.

Java Evolution too slow?

Found this article quite interesting. The problem with Java evolution that is being discussed can actually happen to any technology.

For example, when .NET came and did not have backward compatibility with VB, there was a big hue and cry on loss of backward comapatibility. So a decision had to be made between being compatible of innovation, MS took the plunge and rewrote for the better.

So it should be interesting to see how the Java community handles the tougher moments that will come up in the near future.

What does SO have to do with Architecture?

I had wanted to do this post for a long time now, but never actually got down to typing it out.
(Note: Some of the stuff I talk about here are outcomes of some discussions I have had over a few months time with many people)

The Tech community is well known to have a hype cycle for everything (I suppose it is true for a few other industries too, but I personally beleive we are the best). One of the things in the hype mode over the last year has been this stuff that is called SOA. The web is full of people talking about how SOA can actually change the whole way we develop applications (Paradigm shift, is a word that is usally always linked to a hype cycle).

So the idea is overtime everything you would want to do with a computer, would be written up as a service and you just buy different services and patch up an application in a jiffy. Sound good and attractive to the CIO. The only problem is that the services are not yet out there and writing a good service is such a pain in the worng place that few people even attempt it. Anyone remember what components were supposed to do. The interface that was supposed to be a contract stuff. Does this not sound very similar? Except that now you have different protocol underneath (SOAP instead of COM, so it is no longer MS alone hype, but the whole industry can join in). How much reuse has COM given us? What is the difference now?

The other stuff is about the term SOA itself. What does Architecture have to do with Service Orientation? To my mind, the major step toward SO, is that you decide on a Interface and a Messaging format and go ahead and do whatever you have been doing. So this is more of a issue that each programmer has to work on, rather than the Architect. It is like OO to my mind and nothing to do with Architecture at all. The only decision the Architect really makes is to use SO and maybe a little bit in the Service Interface design part. A lot of work on the message strucutre etc are usually made by the programmer and this is the most crucial part if you want reuse.

I also do not buy the argument that each service has to be autonomous etc. In a real business scenario, any part of the application cannot be autonomous. Worst case you need to depend on a external part called the Database server. So if the DB server fails the service fails. Also if the data is bad(What if I fire a few random Updates from ISQL), the service fails. So where is autonomy here?

That does not mean I am against SO. If you do it right, SO can improve reuse and interoperability. But I dont see too much of that happening. I only see people use SOA as miracle cure for everything under the sun.

So if you want go the service oriented way, first start training the programmers. Those are the guys who will have to do the most work to get your applications Service Oriented.

AMD beat Intel on Performance

I actually missed this CNET article comparing the performance of AMD's dual core processors and Intel's. Just got to it today when browing elsewhere. It did suprise me that Intel could not even make it to the top in even 1 or the seven tests.

Hmm. better performance at a lower price?? A very difficult to beat combination. As I am planning to get a new computer in the next 3-4 months, I suppose I need to start checking my options, instead of just going for the latest Pentium??

Looks like AMD is having a wonderful 2005. Their sales figures have been very good this year. Dell seems to have started stocking AMD CPUs now. And they have beaten Intel hollow on performance.

Using Websphere does not guarantee scalability!!

Nor does using any tool/technology. It all depends on how well you architect/design/execute the project.

This was bought home to me when I read this post on Aussie Customs software debacle by Bill.

The software originally was budgeted at $33 million dollars, blew-out to $250 Million dollars

Now it is Oracle's turn to go Express

According to Syscon, looks like Oracle is going to come out with a lightweight low end free version to compete with the likes of MySQL and SQL Express.

Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Oracle's server technologies division, has given a briefing to CNET in which he apparently says that a new low-end edition of Oracle's 10g database will be released by Oracle Tuesday, aimed squarely at free and open-source alternatives to Oracle's 10g such as MySQL and EnterpriseDB.

Oracle To Release No-Cost Entry-Level 10g Database Today

New Version of VistaDB

If you think MSDE is too big and want a alternative database, then you can think of VistaDB or Firebird. Looks like VistaDB now has a new version out there, with full support for C#, VB.NET, Delphi,NET, Delphi/C++Builder and COM.

They also have started off a new campaign with the support of blogs to get the news out.

More about VistaDB
Offer for Bloggers

New OpenOffice

I have and continue to use OpenOffice as an alternative on my machine, but find the interface different/slow enough from MS Office to be a chore to use it. Now a new version is out. I am yet to use it, but the reviews do not see too impressive though....

OpenOffice.org 2.0 is here, but is it a pig?
OpenOffice.org 2.0 is finally out with much fanfare, but is it a memory and resource hog? This is what I was wondering when I did this shootout last month between Microsoft Excel 2003 and OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 Calc. The backers of OpenOffice.org immediately complained that I didn't test their new OpenOffice.org Beta2.

I would love to vote online!!!

Well, saves a lot of time and travel for me if I could vote online for local elections. But I suppose concerns about security and the level e-enablement in India does not look promising enough that I would get that option in the foreseable future.

But Estonia has sucessfully conducted an national election with online voting option.

A tiny Baltic nation last week became what appears to be the first country to open its local elections to Internet voting on a nationwide level--although only about 1 percent of the votes were cast online.

Read more at Estonia pulls off nationwide Net voting

The Deluge is On

I talked about how Firefox is starting to feel the heat in a previous post. Today Neowin points to a new security hole in Firefox and one that affects only Linux/Unix and not Windows.

Windows without services!!!

I was just reading this post from Mark at sysinternals. Super post and I am gonna try it out once I come back to India. I am really interested to see how much of a performance gain this can give to Windows and if .NET Apps will run with something like this...:-)

Have you got SPIT?

I have not lost my manners, nor is this a rant.

SPIT is the newest on the irritating advertising tactic block. SPAM on emails and SPIM on IM. Now it is the turn of VOIP.

I find that nowadays most international calls out of office use VOIP. And as the use of VOIP increases I am sure spammers would love to get on to that. This article talks about SPIT (SPam over Internet Telephony) and how some of the VOIP providers are trying to protect their customers.

Google's Ranking

Found this article which contains some information on the changes in Google's ranking algorithm. Am not sure if this is still valid as from what I hear, Google keeps changing their algorithm as they find some spamming happening. Still interesting reading.

(via Tejas)

Internet Attack Trends for 2005

Bruce Schneier has published an article in ACM's Queue magazine of Internet Attack Trends for the year 2005. You can access this article from his site pdf or html.

We expect to see more blended threats: exploit code that combines malicious code with vulnerabilities in order to launch an attack. We expect Microsoft's IIS (Internet Information Services) Web server to continue to be an attractive target. As more and more companies migrate to Windows 2003 and IIS 6, however, we expect attacks against IIS to decrease.

We also expect to see peer-to-peer networking as a vector to launch viruses.

KHRONOS PROJECTOR

Quite an interesting concept and does create wierd outputs..:-)

The Khronos Projector is an interactive-art installation allowing people to explore pre-recorded movie content in an entirely new way. A classic video-tape allows a simple control of the reproducing process (stop, backward, forward, and elementary control on the reproduction speed). Modern digital players add little more than the possibility to perform random temporal jumps between image frames. The goal of the Khronos Projector is to go beyond these forms of exclusive temporal control, by giving the user an entirely new dimension to play with: by touching the projection screen, the user is able to send parts of the image forward or backwards in time. By actually touching a deformable projection screen, shaking it or curling it, separate "islands of time" as well as "temporal waves" are created within the visible frame. This is done by interactively reshaping a two-dimensional spatio-temporal surface that "cuts" the spatio-temporal volume of data generated by a movie.

Read about it at The KHRONOS PROJECTOR interactive-art installation

(via surrealization)

Web URL Mistypes

Web URL mistypes usually resulted in you landing at sites loaded with Ads. But now it looks like criminals have found a way of stealing money using this.

This techworld article talks about a site that takes advantage of mistyping google to install trojans and malware on your machine.

(Thanks to fellow MVP Naveen for the link)

Electronic Passports

Looks like US is looking at embedding chips into passports from mid this year. This chip will contain basic passport data and also biometric data.

More Information

Creating Media Center TV Guide

Reading about the recent announcments on India becoming a supported country for Windows XP Media Center, I remembered a fellow MVP sometime ago asking about the non-availabilty of support for Indian channels for the electronic programming guide.

I guessed that they used somekind of a web service to go and retrieve the programming guide information from some kind of server that they are hosting. Having an hour or so free, I was just reading thru the Media Center developer documentation and it does not seem to talk anything about program listing. Only about writing Add in and HTML apps that run on the media centre.

A google search did not turn up with enough clear cut information on this.

Anyone has more information on how this really works.. Just curiosity, but still I thought with all that hype of web services, this would have been well documented..:-)

Bill Gates' Interview

A good interview of BillG in ABC News. Unlike normal marketing or press interviews, this one tries to get his personal reactions to a wide range of topics.

Study finds Windows more secure than Linux

The title says it all :-)

Read the Article

They compared Windows Server 2003 and Red Hat Enterprise Server 3 running databases, scripting engines and Web servers (Microsoft's on one, the open source Apache on the other).

Their criteria included the number of reported vulnerabilities and their severity, as well as the number of patches issued and days of risk — the period from when a vulnerability is first reported to when a patch is issued.

On average, the Windows setup had just over 30 days of risk versus 71 days for the Red Hat setup, their study found.

One security hole IE can protect you from!!

Quite suprised reading this post at Logu's blog..

Looks like, it does help being out of date :-)

Tweaking NTFS

A neat set of tips to speed up NTFS.

NTFS Performance Hacks

Well no major hacks here. A few like defragging are well known best practice. But some of them are things that I did not know about.

via Tejas

Innovative use of Google!!

A virus/worm using google to find new sites to infect. According to the BBC article this is not the first one to do so, but this certainly is the first I have heard of where google is the only agent used by a worm/virus to spread.

Thousands of website bulletin boards have been defaced by a virus that used Google to spread across the net. The Santy worm first appeared on 20 December and within 24 hours had successfully hit more than 40,000 websites. The malicious program exploits a vulnerability in the widely used phpBB software. Santy's spread has now been stopped after Google began blocking infected sites searching for new victims.

BBC Article - Santy worm makes unwelcome visit

How to become a Good Programmer

I subscribe to a newletter called the The Java Specialists' Newsletter (Yes, you read it right, it is about Java). It is a very interesting to read up indepth Java articles, even though I do not and never have coded a single line in Java. It gets me thinking on .NET equivalents etc. The 100th issue of this newsletter titled Java Programmers aren't Born, talks about how to become a good Java programmer.

Replace Java, with any other language and it still holds good. Interesting read..

Computer Heal Thyself

It is not as simple as that, but people are working on making computers self-healing. This article in ADT mag looks at one such effort.

Emotional Computers?

A lot of research is going to into getting computers to understand emotions and to also express emotions. An article on the new extentions to speech synthesis that adds emotions (Free, but registration needed).

Excel is Cool

Was doing some work on an excel spreadsheet and I entered 1st and then did the normal drag the corner to create incremented values. I assumed it would create 2st, 3st etc and I would have to go and change the stuff.

I was delighted, when Excel understood my need and created 2nd, 3rd etc. Incredibly cool..

Mac Malware

A new Apple Mac Malware, dubbeb Opener is doing the rounds. It does not yet have viral capabilities, but this does show that as as OS becomes more widespread, hackers will start turning thier attention to it.

ZDNET Story - Mac users face rare threat

Google's Passport??

I just happend to visit the Google Accounts page and it struck me that this looks like googles version of passport. Yes this currently only works with other google offerings and there is nothing about google allowing third parties to use Google Accounts. But google currently offers Mail, Goups, Social Networking, Localized content, most of the things that a normal web citizen would want.

In the future, I am sure google will also offer a Google Accounts SDK similar to the Passport SDK and that is when we are going to see some fight for market share happening..:-)

Upgrade to SQL Server 7.0 from Yukon!!

I was installing Great Plains 8.0 and since I already had Yukon and the readme said GP needed SQL 2000, I though it should go thru without a problem.

The install got thru fine and then the database setup utility and it did find the ODBC I had setup and then I get this wonderfully funny error message:

I really don't plan on Upgrading to SQL Server 7.0 from Yukon. Thank you.

Gmail Invites

I have a few gmail invites. If you want one just leave a comment with name and email id.

Linux not Secure enough

Inadequate Security Poses National Security Threat

This article talks about the US Defence departments move toward using more and more of Linux based systems and argues that Linux security is not good enough for defence use.

First Pocket PC Virus

The First Pocket PC virus makes an appearance...

It does seem to be a very gentlemanly virus. It asks for your permission before infecting and is not destructive.

Duts is a 1520 bytes long program, hand written in assembly for the ARM processor. When an infected file is executed the virus asks for permission to infect:

WinCE4.Dust by Ratter/29A
Dear User, am I allowed to spread?

When granted the permission, Duts attempts to infect all EXE files in the current directory. Duts only infects files that are bigger than 4096 bytes and have not been infected yet. As an infection marker the virus writes the string 'atar' to the Windows Version field of the EXE header.

Power of Google

I had gone to an Architect day session on Friday was surprised by Google power.

The key note was done by a Senior Architect called Suriya Narayanan, who works for Polaris(But in a different group, we had met once or twice before) and he was discussing challenges faced by architects etc.

And in the last slide he had a screen shot. I was quite surprised, as it was a post I had written a long time back (almost a year back) and I did not know he was reading my blog.

After the talk I went up to him and asked him about it and then realized that he did not know that it was my blog. He had googled for info on architects and found my post. He was impressed by it and so added it to the slide deck. I little humbling, but then made me realize Google power.

Throw out your monitor

This sounds a lot like the sci-fi movies, but there seem to be systems out there that can beam a image directly into your retina, thus by passing the need for a monitor.

In the Eye of the Beholder