Educational Tool: Microsoft WorldWide Telescope

Since morning the twitterosphere has been abuzz with news of how wonderful MS Worldwide Telescope is. Jumping in with enthusiasm, the telescope amazed me a lot. to get the virtual telescope, you need to go to the telescope homepage. this is a resource that astronomy enthusiasts are bound to love.

this virtual telescope presents images from various telescopes from around the world and in the space e.g. the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), and the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS). the experience is very interesting as one can start from any guided tour of a region of the space and then continue to explore on one’s own will. you can not only see the visual interfaces but also X Ray view, hydrogen alpha view etc..

the software minimally needs Win XP SP2 or Vista and .NET 2.0. In addition, the software also needs a live internet connection as it downloads imagery on demand.

to get started you can begin with Guided Tours menu and learn more about using WWT. and when ur done, you can start by watching one of the guided tours of the “Seven Top Galaxies”..

the power of the software is in the fact that it lets you create shows with your narration. this is very useful for teachers who want to educate children on specific astronomical phenomenon.

if you have a telescope that supports computer interface you can control the telescope with this software as well.

enjoy the tour of the universe without a telescope! and wonder if this is Discovery Channel 2.0 :)

Technorati tags: virtual telescope, WWT, microsoft, worldwide telescope

FREE Windows based Brainstorming Tool

This qualifies as find of the day!

Cayra.Net is a .NET based brainstorming tool that one can use to put down ideas and concepts in a graphical format.

If you are a regular Windows user like me, then you have often wondered what tool would qualify as brainstorming tool? Most people end up with One  Note or Visio for that of thing…

Cayra gives you a FREE option to capture brainstorming graphically… this is extremely useful if you are working in a team and especially in a distributed team spread geographically. In addition, I have found the mind map to be useful when I am preparing for a talk as well.

Technorati tags: mind map, brainstorming

Windows XP SP3 Releasing (for final)

Today MS will be releasing Windows XP SP3 to web. After a false start, this one seems to be thought out well :). XP SP3 was pulled back at the last moment following discovery of a compatiblity issue between Windows XP SP3 and Microsoft Dynamics RMS.. currently a filter mechanism has been developed that doesn’t offer the update on Dynamics RMS customers.. A fix for this issue is already in testing at Microsoft and may be made publicly available this month.

Windows XP SP3 can be installed from here. 

Windows XP SP3 contains all the previously released updates for Windows XP and a few new features e.g. Network Access Protection..

More information on Windows XP SP3 can be found at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsxp

P.S.: Automatic distribution of Windows Vista SP1 is also being resumed as well...

Technorati tags: Windows XP, SP3

Live Messenger now on Facebook

What are the 2 applications on my machine that are used most often:

1. Microsoft Outlook 2007
2. Windows Live Messenger

Practically i live in these two applications. anything that has to come in or go out has these 2 gateways… and so it makes sense for me to look for gateways into these applications from anywhere people want to connect with me..  and social networking sites are one of the main sources where people want to connect…

of late Live Messenger has made available a lot widgets that one can embed in websites, blogs etc… you can see one on the right in this blog that let’s you communicate with me anytime I am online…

here is a wonderful application that enables the same for facebook. so now when someone is casually browsing on my profile, he/ she can initiate instant communication with me from the facebook profile page itself by clicking on the “Begin a conversation” link.. and i will receive the messages sent from here in the Live Messenger that i am using… of course to protect from spam bots, there is a captcha challenge before the IM conversation can begin…

One can also talk to other facebook friends who have installed this Live Messenger application by going to the application page.

If you want to make yourself available to your friends and readers, you can install the Windows Live Messenger Facebook application from this page: http://apps.facebook.com/windowslivemessenger

and now i am excited about when will we get a Live Messenger application for orkut… (a lot of times scraps are exchanged that are better suited for IM conversations)..

Welcome to the Live Messenger "mesh” …

Technorati tags: live messenger, facebook

Use Live Search via SMS on Vodaphone in India

You are out with your friends and have a need to find something (e.g. chinese restaurant in the vicinity)… what do you do? call a friend? or if ur uber geeky, launch a search using GPRS on live or google… what if ur somewhere between the geekdom and dummyzone?

You search for stuff by sending SMS and getting results over SMS as well.. this is SMS Search for Vodafone customers in India powered by Live Search.

Vodafone subscribers can simply type in their query as a SMS text message on their mobile handset and send to 55060. . this SMS search will set you back by 30 p/ query (all inclusive) making it cheaper than ur regular SMS at Rs 2/ SMS!

However, note that this search is not comprehensive. It appears that it is delivering only city specific information e.g. “Chinese restaurant delhi”… the local search/directory information is available in 8 major cities including Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune and Ahmedabad with 21 more cities expected to go live soon.

however, the search results for most of normal terms will return nothing to you e.g. i tried “what is SAS drive” and that returned - “No results found..”..  the SMS search is obviously a very small portion of the Live Search experience… IMHO, it would have been better to enable it to search everything rather than maiming it to return only local directory information.

Some under the hood features include results based on the user’s city location, keeping track of user’s search session for 24 hours and delivering results formatted to match the user’s phone capabilities.. all this development was done at MS India Dev Center in Hyderabad...

Technorati tags: SMS, search, mobile, Vodaphone

OpenXML wins ISO Standardisation and gets Better with Community

The FINAL verdict on ISO standardisation is out and OpenXML is now an ISO standard.

This standardisation process (that has consensus at its heart) has given an overwhelming endorsement (with 86% of voting national bodies) for ratification of OpenXML as an ISO standard.

The ISO standardisation process has strengthened the OpenXML standard making it much better than ever before. What is even better is that OpenXML is now in stewardship of the community and NOT “owned” by any company. The real motives  behind the protectionist “Open Source” (what a fallacy) lobby now stands exposed..

A lot of countries changed their votes from “No” to “Yes” after their comments were addressed during the Ballot Resolution Meeting process. While the LITD 15 Committee at the BIS didn’t endorse the OpenXML standard but the positive endorsement of various industry bodies and India’s leading IT companies prove that OpenXML has opened up a huge business opportunity for everybody! It has the potential to become the next Y2K goldmine that most of the Indian companies owe their fortunes to..

Another debate that gets settled is that we do need different standards as much as we need different products in the ecosystem.. the strongest standard would only gain widespread adoption and will survive! we don’t need to artificially create barriers for standards or products..

However, the work for Microsoft has only begun.. it needs to continue to work in an open & collaborative manner with various bodies and continue to bring more standards to marketplace.

And the community can reliably start building solutions using OpenXML standard. Here’s what one of my friends from community suggested someone should do - “Build a lightweight FREE application that people can use to author OpenXML documents on their PCs”.. now let the innovation begin!

Related Posts:

Witness the Academia - Industry divide!

OpenXML and ISO standardisation: Community contribution shines

OpenXML: Microsoft gets it right, will India too?

Use Java with OpenXML

ECMA approves Office Open XML as a standard - MS Office becomes standards compliant

Technorati tags: OpenXML, ISO, India

Witness the Academia - Industry divide!

The latest on the OpenXML ISP Standardisation debate is India’s choice to vote “NO” for the Open XML to become an ISO Standard by the BIS committee. the voting pattern was - 13 Against, 1 Abstain and 5 For. So who were the 5 voting for the OpenXML – Microsoft, NASSCOM, TCS, Wipro and Infosys... all of them are BIG IT giants (leaving out MS from this as it is expected to be pro OpenXML) employing thousands of people.

A lot of credit for India’s resurgence in the global landscape can be attributed to these IT industries.. Since their businesses come from a variety of technologies (including Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, SAP etc.) these are truly vendor neutral organisations!

Now, in Sept 2007 BIS had raised 82 Comments for Open XML. On completion of BRM, all 82 comments from India were resolved by the committee. One would expect the committee to then vote “YES” for the standard.. So the question is then why would BIS still choose to vote “NO”?

Maybe the answer lies in understanding the psyche of the remaining participants. from the documents listed on the BIS website (thanks for the transparency BIS), the “rest” seemed to be obvious anti OpenXML lobby (e.g. FSF, IBM) and then the professors from institutes like IIT Delhi, IIT Mumbai.. now i don’t have any less respect for these institutions but from the voting patterns it is clear that these institutes seem to be totally out of sync with the industry stalwarts..

this "out of sync” behaviour only goes on to reflect the reality in Indian education system where large no. of graduates from engg. institutes are largely unemployable. i feel that these institutes should stay in sync with the industry.. only then can our country, industry and the students remain at the forefront of the world!

Technorati tags: OpenXML, india

Making Vista Search your PST Files

Vista can index a lot of files and for some reason it doesn’t index the MS Outlook files.. maybe it is as Outlook is already doing the same.. in case you still want to search PST from Vista Search here is what you can do:

1. Go to the Control Panel
2. Choose "Indexing Options"
3. Click on the "Advanced" button
4. Click on the "File Types" tab
5. Check the checkbox next to "PST" to include it in the search
6. Select the bullet next to the option "Index Properties and File Contents"
7. Click OK and OK again on the message that appears.

This is especially useful for information workers like me who have large PST files and are forced to archive from time to time … indexing the archives would return the information from these forgotten folders as well :)

Tip taken from On10.net

Technorati tags: Outlook, PST, search

Microsoft licenses Flash lite for Windows Mobile Devices

At the recently concluded Mix 08, Microsoft showcased Silverlight 2.0 working on Windows Mobile. In addition, Nokia licensed Silverlight to display on its mobile device.

In a recent news, it is said that Microsoft is licensing Flash Lite for display with Windows Mobile Devices. Here's what ZDNET thinks of it: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8240

Now i don't think what ZDNET thinks is at all on the mark for the following reasons:

1. it has already being displayed at Mix 08 and I don't doubt that it is going to come out soon.
2. If MS has to dissect Flash lite to learn it, there is no need to license the same.
3. Why wud MS want to make Adobe look relevant, when it is fighting Silverlight war with Flash and Expression suite war with Adobe designer suite?

I think:

1. Microsoft will continue to prefer Silverlight for its mobile devices.
2. Flash Lite provides Windows Mobile owners additional avenue of using content.
3. In the new found Interoperability "karma", Microsoft may want various technologies to play on Windows Mobile.

In any case, it is the ultimate consumers who are going to benefot from this deal!

Technorati tags: flash. mobile. silverlight

OpenXML and ISO standardisation: Community contribution shines

I have been following Open XML for some time now and have earlier posted my views on why OpenXML maybe good for India? Here's the latest from the OpenXML ISO standardisation process after I made the last post:

After India saying "NO" to the standard in Phase I of standardisation process, various worldwide committees (and hopefully Indian as well) participated in the meeting in Geneva to resolve the technical comments made by various committees ( in jargon - "Ballot Resolution Meeting" or BRM). By the end of this mammoth five day meeting, 98.4% of the comments (1011 out of 1027 unique comments raised earlier) were resolved (ISO release on the process). IMHO, this is a true example of community contributing to developing a standard and improving it by collective wisdom. Microsoft has in some terms for the first time come to a platform where it is open to review from various companies and nations...

and there has been one good action from BIS, India and that is to make its member's participation, views and stands clear on its website. With this information, one can objectively access what is BIS thinking and why? Earlier, the whole process seemed to be run behind an iron curtain. I really laud the step in the right direction for BIS by providing visibility into this whole process. i have downloaded the objections raised by various people and looking at them to understand their concerns and gauge their thoughts..

I also came across an interesting article by Jesper Lund Stocholm who represented Denmark (apologies & thanks for the correction Jesper) in the above meeting:

http://idippedut.dk/post/2008/03/Why-ISO-approval-of-OOXML-is-not-an-option.aspx

Jesper provides an interesting insight on how IT industry benefits from standardisation of Open XML on similar lines of my thoughts. From there another post from Patrick Durusau came to light. Earlier in July during the Phase I voting, Patrick who was the Chair of committee set up to examine Open XML had recommended disapproval for OpenXML. However, now pleased with the community participation in building the standard, he has decided to recommend approval of OpenXML as ISO standard. He seems particularly pleased with the fact that Microsoft is listening and incorporating changes requested by its members. He offers his thoughts in very interesting but equally thoughtful anecdotes.

The one SHOCKING piece that came to my attention was that IBM India had written mails to its partners asking them to "influence" our national bodies. The grip of establishments like IBM is clear by the assertions made in the email. The abstract from the letter can be found here. What is even more appalling is the brazenness with which IBM is assuming that they are the ones voting and not the national body of India -BIS for this standard!

In my view with the latest developments, the ISO standardization process has only reinforced the openness that Microsoft is committing itself to! It is also indicates that Microsoft is learning to work with the community and this step is sure to make Microsoft products more beneficial to customers.

Just like multiple products in market (e.g. MS Office and Star Office) enhance the value to the customer, multiple standards also enhance that value (e.g. WiFi & WiMax, GSM & CDMA) to customers by bringing the advantage of technology advancement to customers quickly.

I would urge BIS committee to keep the larger interest of IT ecosystem in India in mind when deciding on issues like these. Ulterior motives of organisations should be understood fully and we should not be held hostage to anyone (read IBM and their memo)..

Some other posts from people in India on OpenXML:

http://vasudevg.blogspot.com/2008/02/common-myths-about-open-xml.html

http://dotnetjini.jigneshdesai.com/dotnet-whidbey/ShowArticle.aspx?ID=12

Technorati tags: OpenXML, ISO, India

Office Live Workspace Available NOW

  Office Live Workspace is now available globally! Microsoft Office users will be able to use the English version of Office Live Workspace beta, a free Web-based extension of Microsoft Office, to save and access their works online and easily collaborate with others, whether they live in Australia or Singapore or India or Canada.

When u sign up, you should install an addin to your Office applications. This addin provides an additional menu in Office applications that lets you save and retrieve documents from Workspace directly! This enables multiple people to work on the same document. And you can create various kinds of workspaces to categorise the work you are doing!

With the activity pane, you can also track what changes are being made to the document.

but saving documents (excel, powerpoint or word docs) isn't the only thing you can do here! Check out this screenshot that shows other things that you can include in your workspace:

And using Workspace now comes with a windfall gain -  there is a sweepstake that is also available for users in US..

if you haven't started using workspace yet, start immediately and experience the power of collaborating!

Technorati tags: workspace, office live

Encouraging Diversity - Women Students from Engg. Colleges: Interested in joining Microsoft?

Microsoft India is going to be conducting an All India Selection Test for women engineers who are completing their courses in year 2008. You have to be from Comp. Science/IT/Information Sciences discipline and completing a recognised BE/B.Tech/ME/M.Tech course.

Students interested in appearing for this test will have to submit their resumes at www.merittrac.net/microsoft  with the last date of receiving the application being 1^st March 08. This test is being conducted on Saturday 8^th March 08  that coincides with the International Women’s Day across eleven test centers across India. More information on test centers, schedules, contact details for are also available at the above link.

However, just clearing the test doesn't get you the Microsoft job. The students clearing this test will go thru the various levels of interviews before being made the offer to join Microsoft.

This effort is a part of the diversity campaign within Microsoft. I think this is an "excellent" effort to encourage more diversity within the organisation. However i do think that there are few things that MS may also want to ponder over:

1. Does diversity mean women only? IMHO, diversity means people from all walks of life and that may include people with special abilities and needs e.g. handicapped people in terms of mobility, vision, hearing.. Diversity also means people from poorer section of society. It may also mean people from the "hijra" community who are generally ostracized from the community. I haven't heard of these people whenever i hear of diversity in here!
2. Parity of salary levels between new hires and existing employees. Not being from HR, I can only rely on unofficial sources and they tell me that compensation parity doesn't exist between new hires and existing employees. Since MS policies don't allow sharing of compensation data or it being made public, this one is a difficult one to be specific about. However, i know that organisations go to great lengths to ensure this and wonder if MS India thinks of this at all?
3. I have often heard from MS recruiters on how irrelevant it is that a person comes from a specific educational background. you can find employees in MS from diverse backgrounds as well.. How come this initiative is only limited to engg students then? How about bright girls from B.Sc., MCA & other disciplines?

MS India benefits from the global learnings and the time it has been in business. I sincerely believe that this is a great beginning to encourage diversity within MS. There are hardly any other companies in India who specifically have such initiatives.

MS policies on the whole are very intelligent and I hope that in future MS will think about the above points as well. i know that it is easy to preach than practice but this will genuinely take the diversity in MS to the next level.

Technorati tags: recruitment, jobs, microsoft, india

Web 2.0 Storage: Skydrive is now RELEASED!

Skydrive from Microsoft has now been released! Earlier, the free online space from Microsoft was only released as a BETA in 3 countries (I had written about it here)...

with this release, Skydrive is now released to most of the world (officially to 38 countries) and hosts large storage of 5 GB :).. it was earlier only 500 MB when in BETA..

i have been sharing documents on this service.. everything has been perfect except when i wanted to share some ZIP files that created some problems.. however, with this release that error also seems to be fixed :)..

welcome to web 2.0 storage!

Technorati tags: skydrive

Games Everywhere: XBOX Live & at Zune

We all love games.. we all love XBOX.. we all love Zune... and now all of it is coming together... hey wait, I like to write games too.. so be it - one can now author games and run it on Zune and share it on XBOX Live!

I personally think that this is a gaint leap for the Microsoft platform from 2 perspectives:

1. It is community focused. The games that are authored by community members can now be shared on XBOX Live and downloaded for FREE!
2. Interoperability between MS products at a deep level. Zune and XBOX both have direct dependency on the hardware it runs on and by enabling games to be written on both, MS has unlocked huge synergistic benefits..

sometime ago, i was thinking about Zune and wondering why doesn't it take benefit of Silvelight capabilites. going by the direction things are moving it may soon be a reality!

One can develop these games using the XNA Game Studio 2.0 toolset for free from http://creators.xna.com .. there are already 7 games available on the XBOX Live from today!

but to build games for Zune you will have to wait for XNA 3.0 to be available later in the year (with a preview in April 2008)...

Some key features that will be available:

• Ability to support local ad-hoc wireless play with up to 8 different Zunes.
• Discoverability/access to user’s music – allowing the user to customize background soundtracks or create real-time visualizations

Now i think Zune is more social than iPod and is definitely a better player than iPod.. hope that the community takes to developing these games quickly! i for once would like an "Abhishek" authored game to debut on Zune devices!

for indian software industry, this opens up new opportunities of developing new age games.. for mobile game developers distribution of their games was a big issue.. with XBOX Live opening up, there is potential for them to reach out to a larger set of audiences..

Technorati tags: XNA, XBOX, Zune

New Version: Microsoft Forums

Microsoft has been running newsgroups and forums to provide community support for its products.. incidentally, many MVPs come from forums where they are TOP contributors to the forums..

but this isn't about MVPs today :)

it is about MS forums... to begin with Microsoft used Community Server from Telligent to host its forums. And now they are revamping the same on to its own code.. in the background, there seems to be an entire Community Platform emerging with blogs, tags, forums & wikis within Microsoft.. (very much in line with MSs focus on community)..

The new forums are available at:

http://forums.msdn.microsoft.com/

http://forums.technet.microsoft.com/

http://forums.community.microsoft.com/

However, the older forums are also around and the migration will be done in a phased manner. there are plenty of exciting features in this release:

· Dynamic Posting, Quoting and Paging: Now posting, quoting posts and paging in a thread are now all client site events. Users can post replies or quotes to thread without having to wait for the server to reload the page. These features makes the application snappy, dynamic and friendly.

· Inline Posting: New posting of questions or replies keeps you on the same page which you can still scroll and see the contents of as well as page through the threads or posts while creating your message. This allows you to “Multi-Quote” when replying to a thread. This makes it easy to respond to several posts in a single post.

· Thread Preview: This allows users to view the first 20 posts of a thread in line without needing to commit to a post back or page navigation. Users can preview threads and then decide to dive in and participate.

· Real Time Updates: Every page updates with new activity. Home pages update to show changes in recently online users, forum pages continually update to show recently updated threads and new posts pop up dynamically to users viewing threads.

· Code Formatting and Spellchecking: Users have the ability to include code and format it to the specific code language. C++ users want their code to look like C++ code. People adding XML want it to look like XML. This is now possible with the latest editor. Users can also spell check their posts if they so choose.

· Proposed Answers: Any user can now more actively participate in helping other users by selecting "Proposed Answer" in any question thread. This should help others that have the true authority to validate the answers, Moderators and Question Askers, find questions that may be very close to being resolved.

Community Features

· Online Avatars

· Recently Online

· Filtering By Users: Users can scope down the list of contributors to a particular thread by simply selecting the user filter bar. This is especially useful for users who know "who" they are looking for and want to see contributions from trusted sources.

· User Recognition and Affiliation: A medals recognition system rewards users for their participation. This can help users understand whether the source of a post is from a novice or someone who has invested a lot more time and effort in continual online forums participation.

· User Based Tagging: Users can apply tags to threads which help other users find content the community find relevant to a particular term. Users can select multiple tags, every one, applying a more targeted query to refine the pool of threads.

· Browse Users: Simply browse the user list and review any user's recognition status or last participation date and clicking "view threads".

Discoverability Enhancements

· Enhanced Filters: A powerful set of additional filter options allow for finding threads of various types, states and properties. e.g. a moderator can look for people that have posted questions with no replies that include code snippets.. Better yet, these filters can also be subscribed to as RSS!

· Tag Browsing: Users at any level of the forums application (brand, forum or thread) can find threads by tag.

· Top Level Filter Entry Points: Users that always like to start off at the top level of the forums list can now quick link into the unanswered or answered threads in the forum of their choice. This saves what used to be three or more clicks, anchoring the user into a context pre set for them.

· Search Result Filters: When search results come back and seem overwhelming users can select a filter for various thread states and properties. Users can choose to select only answers, only questions or any of these threads that may contain code.

the base to a successful community is the community platform it uses.. with this release, MS has reaffirmed its commitment to the community!

What remains to be seen in such a high usage site is how well will the site be able to run without any hiccups? MS has a lot of experience running high traffic sites and this should be also run smoothly.. but u can never be sure of 1-2 bugs lurking in the vast expanse of code :)..

IMHO, Microsoft should also think about releasing these community platforms for the community so that community software on .NET technologies become more widespread!

Technorati tags: community, microsoft, forums