when technology is a part of the whole!

Thanks to Sudhakar , this is probably the first time I am reading in public the importance Product groups within MS see for the great individuals that MVPs are!! Of course, I have "heard" numerous times about people talking about how great the MVP program really is.. but this is one documented musing :) At the MVP Summit, the Product Groups jostled for attention of MVPs and that is a fact important enough to realise the importance of "community" thinking in the products MS is developing going forward. No application in the world has tighter community integration than the one i have seen with MS Office 2003. The community is at the guts of a "commercial" product.. And if you have been following Bill's speech at CEO Summit , you would know about the community and blogs he talked about.. Now if only you were wondering why Product Groups are standing up and taking notice :) -------------------------------------------------------------------

So you wanted to be a techie from IIT? the JEE bowled you out?? take heart - only one in hundred applicants make it to IIT (which is tougher than getting into Ivy League colleges) author of the book "Five Point Someone", Chetan Bhagat (an ex-IITian) says. When i was planning to do my MBA, i read the book "Snapshots from hell" authored by Robinson that gave a insight into Stanford Business School.. Now, we have our own IIT version of the pains and gains one goes through that makes them go from good to great.. The book captures the 5 point GPA (out of 10) travails that a few IITians went through.. the interesting stuff (like the omnipresent playboy) in the IIT hostels are making the book an interesting read :) so things are not that "academic" behind the closed doors ;-) i am still reading the book, it was soo interesting that i couldn't resist writing about it.. and chetan is going to be in bangalore on May 22nd (more details at the URL mentione

Thanks to Tejas , Took a blogger personality test here . The result: My Bloginality is INTP !!! So what does it mean as a blogger? As a weblogger, you might not be as concerned about popularity, but more with the ideas and theories that you strive to understand. Because routines aren't your strong point, you might be more likely to work on the concept of how to do a blog, but not be as excited to keep it up. The next cool thing i did: Added Microsoft Alert from Scoble's blog.. wonder if there is a service out there that just provides people the ability to provide MSN alerts to others who want to subscribe to their blogs?? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

GMAIL: 1 GB YAHOO: 100 MB Confession: I have a Gmail account.. the 1 GB utopia that is unleashing a new kind of frenzy on the internet.. Though Yahoo has made public announcements on the 100 MB space my yahoo account is still the old 6 MB. Yahoo plans to implement the 100 MB space only in the summer! Here are some of the interesting things that I thought make sense: 1. On CNET.com I read an article that said - GMail will be reading all the email that flows in and out of the GMail mailboxes. On further investigation from the GMail help pages, here is what I gathered - "No humans will read the content of your email in order to target such advertisements or related information." This is talking about a technology called Ad-Sense that makes it possible for advertisers to target specific email campaigns based on the text of emails that a person sends or receives. Also, through the magic of "Family-Safe" ads, only safe ads will be sent out to th

Microsoft will be discontinuing the wi-fi hardware that it has under its wings.. Microsoft had a complete line of Wi-Fi products including base stations, laptop cards, and USB and PCI add-ons for desktop machines. i am myself an owner of a base station! what happens if i need support? well, the 2 year support stays with the product.. the product will be available for some more time in the stores.. someone told me that it is illegal to possess a 802.11g wireless device in India.. :( does this reflect a broader range of changes wherein MS exits most of the businesses that are not core to its functioning.. like hardware.. does this mean no more MS mouse or keyboard? or is there a partnership in sight? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Day after day, one thing that bothers me is why isn't there a IT professionals community. i can think of various answers, not knowing the correct one: 1. IT Pros are trained to be sceptical and paranoid. they are told not to trust users asking for more rights to their desktops - look for any suspicious activity :) 2. they are too busy with their work to think about anything else. 3. Sharing to them means letting out company secret. after all they hold the secret of any organisations infrastructure architecture - the first thing a black hat wants to know. 4. In India, we don't have sense of community to start with. probably the reasons are at a psychological level and totally baseless too... but u know the critical mind.. what can we do to improve the situation? 1. Get a public community website? Available at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/default.mspx Has interesting sections like: 1. Most Active IT Pro Newsgroups 2. Most Active IT Pro Discussions

RSS feed for this blog is available now at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/WhenTechnologyIsOnlyAPartOfTheWhole The service is provided by Feedburner . The above URLs make sense to people who would like to consume my blog's feed as RSS rather than Atom (myself included).. RSS Syndication was on my mind for long. Tejas had created a RSS service for me and sent me a mail on how i can enable the RSS feed for my blog. He had proposed a service from Feedster.com . I browsed through the offerings from both services. The one service that Feedburner has is it's ability to provide statistics of people subscribing to my feed. This was missing in feedster. There were no modifications required on the blog's template for feedburner unlike feedster. Finally, feedburner is supporting all the RSS versions while feedster supports only RSS 2.0. So, I am settling for Feedburner as it was offering more services than feedster. I remember where it all started from - Tejas . -----

I had a very interesting chat today with one of the most important people - one MVP on the direction of the MVP Program in India. I reproduce in a "scrubbed" manner some of the intersting things we discussed: 1) Nomination Forms in Infopath ... ? how will that work. in India hardly anyone has InfoPath ... or you are expecting someone will download the demo to file his nomination ? you can create a ASP.NET webform that can utilize the same backend ... for ppl who want to submit it online.. My answer: there is a SP1 that is available for download for free on infopath. people can download the same. it is a fully functional standalone download of 135MB :) (functional till July when it expires). that means that even if you don't have Office installed on your machine, Infopath would install without any hitch. infopath is meant for scenarios like filling forms etc and hence it makes sense to convert our forms to infopath. later in time we will directly connect the form

MVP Nominations are now open. We will be nominating people who have contributed to the community in an exemplary way for the past year. The nomination will remain open for the week of May 10th to May 15th. This year we are using Infopath SP1 Form to invite nominations. The same will be available on the website starting Monday. The learning curve for Infopath form development is steep in the beginning. once you get a hang of it, things move really quick. Another feature this time is that the nomination will be concentrating on more experienced people who have made the Indian Programming landscape noticable in the world. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

'cause i couldn't add it to the comments... ------- thanks Tejas for taking time to break the myths.. i think this is what people need to know when they start a blog.. for all the reasons i wrote, it was prefixed by a statement - "Funny!!! I am blogging about why blogging is not for me..." 'cause truly i am beginning to see the value of blogging.. the VERY fact that people are shy of talking about their affairs, their sex stories, their night mares leads me to believe that the butterfly is yet to emerge out of the cocoon.. it is probably simple to write about the things that are neutral and impersonal.. that is something that i wanted to steer clear of.. buddy, there is a set of people called "geekswithblogs" and there is another called "idontknowblogs".. i am sure i would make friends with blog community now that i am here... i agree with blogging being a dialogue than a diary but u see i never wrote what i felt.. it is

here is me, official and a haircut 26 yrs old... . drum rolls and here emerges the free spirit.. some have been calling it "punky", some "smart", some "funny"... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

orkut.com has been inaccessible the whole day.. though i would like to say thank you to gmail for the XTRA Large storage made available for free but QOS is bad for a site that is down for a whole day and reads "in affiliation with google".. i wonder what is it... my guess... DoS..... sanjay vyas has added me to his circle of friends and i am unable to accept the invitation.. bad karma i guess... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

wanted to check if blogger supports images... had seen images being displayed by buzznet.com photo blog... so was sure that there was a way to get the pictures in... for starters, i loaded the image (440 KB) to my FREE hosting site that i once had... well 440KB, shattered the whole space... needed to reduce the size of the file... used "Microsoft Office Photo Manager" to reduce the size of the file to 45KB... neat!!! i first tried this link- "img src="www25.brinkster.com/abhishekkant/DCP_0088.JPG" This didn't work.. the solution was that i needed to attach "http://" in the src of the image... reached that conclusion, once i used frontpage to insert the same image and noticed the "http" part... so here is the first photo posted on the blog... the bright flowers to light up your day... Wild flowers in Seattle, somewhere ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This posting is provided &quo

now that i have been bought into blogging, i wonder what is a better way to blog.. text or photos? the other day i was authoring an event newsletter. i wrote volumes of material. looked at it and then deleted the whole thing. replaced the whole thing with 5 photographs and captioned it "because a picture is a thousand words".. probably people take a glance at the photographs and get drawn to the email. text based newsletter, i would not look at.. if it was not a life saver... buzznet is one photo blog that i have subscribed to. both are cross linked. let's see what people find more interesting.. the text or the photo.. to end the debate, probably the answer would be a balance of the two... but if u have to keep the debate going..... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

With Longhorn taking stage at most of the events (read DevDays), there was an interesting topic on WSE vs Indigo. Should people keep looking at WSE 1.0 and 2.0 and 3.0 and ..... or wait for Indigo architecture? Here is a great resource to tackle that question. http://msdn.microsoft.com/theshow/episode040/default.asp It's a John Shewchuk show on the .NET show talking about Indigo: when it started, what the roadmap is, why/how the relationship with IBM and also how WSE gradually will 'evolve' into Indigo. Given the SOA is the architecture of the future, this will be a very interesting development to watch!! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Loyalty is not a new concept. it is old to any organisation that dares to look beyond the product it provides. an organisation thinking about the loyalty has taken the leap from inner facing management to a culture that is outward facing. apparantly there is nothing in short time that an organisation gains from loyalty programs, probably some RED figures on the P&L, red faced boss....... MSDN Connection is a one such loyalty program from Microsoft. If you are a developer and have been to various MS sessions (official or community activities) you would know that each time you register with your entire details. Did u ever wonder where does all that information landing up? MSDN Connections seeks to set correct this redundancy.. the personal information resides in a US privacy law compliant database (read passport).. the other event specific details remain on local databases and provide the local flexibility that is soo important for local action. But is this all MSDN Connect