It’s time of the year again when a few bunch of excited students – who represent Microsoft in their respective colleges – gather for a two day Technical Session on various Microsoft Technologies.
Day one comprised of WinForms; SQL and .NET basic framework along with C# Patterns. A 8 hour training session and at the end of it – this is how the gang appeared
What is the future of Technology? Where is the age of Internet going to lead us to? Do we think the last mile connectivity is still an issue for the majority of governments of developing countries? Is there something that I can do – to bypass the limited resources of my knowledge and think bigger?
These were some of the questions that I had to ask to myself before I decided to put in my papers with the Regional IT Team. It had been a tough decision for me – I had been around in the team since couple of years, serving in different capacities and roles. Unlike other CompSci / IT Grads, being a part of Field IT was always the first choice for me (not that I hate coding, but I simply do not like the term “Developer” and the abuses it comes along with), throughout my college life and also during the various interviews that I had been though. Being a part of IT, guys who give your company an environment which is not only robust but also scalable and efficient. The guys who every employee runs to for simple queries like “The Printers are not working”; “Is there something wrong with our VoIP Phones?”, “I need 40GB storage space on the server, do you think you can provide that?”, to more complicated ones like “I need more bandwidth on my laptop, can you please pull a pipe for me?”. In fact, the IT guys are interface between the new employees and the older ones, they take responsibility of getting them introduced (albeit during Xbox Gaming Session or TT or Snooker) and then happy live the life of “King of the Jungle”. It defiantly was a journey, which will still be a part of my life – a part – which has given me confidence, courage and most importantly lead a team in true sense.
I move onto doing bigger and more exciting things. I join the Digital Advertising Solutions team – as a Solution Specialist – Brands- being an interface between the sales folks and the technology folks. I would primarily be a blend for the Media Industry with the IT Industry. Which mean, I’ve moved domains, and look forward to an exciting career in the Media Industry.
Until the next update on my job role (which I am trying to analyze / see though) – you guys have a great time surfing the net :)
Windws Live Messenger on Blog
Finally got this to work - a simply HTML code, embedded in the template, and a simple way of communicating to me over the IM without actually installing it..
And now it's Apple in front of the Law
The recent buzz around - ZapMedia based in Atlanta had filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Apple Inc, for using it'sU.S. Patent Numbers 7,020,704 and 7,343,414, each of which is entitled “System and method for distributing media assets to user devices via a portal synchronized by said user devices." - in iTune and iPod.
iTunes is the famous media player cum online marketplace for songs which gave back Apple it's brand name, image and share in the consumer market. It was because of iPod's and iTunes (and now iPhone) that Apple is called a company which is Digital Media & Consumer centric.
Though the guys back at the Cupertino based company refused to comment on the media reports - Apple has been known as a company which has a loyal fan following.
Windows Server Launched
Fianlly, after a wait - Microsoft Launched Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008. This was one of the most exciting events that I had been to - and was at a local movie theatre. More about it on this.
.... Will post photos and more about it a little later :)
Am I Legend?
One more premier to attend yesterday and my bad luck still continues. After Saawariya and Beowulf this was the third bad one I had.
"I'm Legend" - a Will Smith movie, with bang Bang and bullets all around - as everyone would have expected, is not. It's not a typical Will Smith, and sadly disappointed me.
I won't write the plot here - however - a word of advice - it's not worth a 200 bucks on a ticket and about 150 bucks on popcorn and cola. Watch something else - not this one.
"I'm Legend"? Of course not!!!
iPhone - Jail Broken and Activated
It's Sunday morning, 9th of December 2007, and in comes the call at 0800 hrs of a friend who recently got an iPhone from US. I had promised her to activate and sim break it as a birthday gift (Her birthday was last week). I was wondering - on a Sunday you gotta sleep till 12 noon rather than leaving for Andheri and cracking up the phone :).
I got up - 8:15 was the time and took a public transport to her office, which had WiFi Connectivity. That's the first thing that you will need before you jail break the iPhone. A WiFi connection (non-encrypted, unsecured) is required in the process of jailbreaking and unlocking the iPhone.
So there I was at her office and ready to hack into the iPhone, activate it and give her an awesome birthday gift. We got ready to unlock - a coffee & a coke as our only refreshments - and an awesome WiFi connection. Mind you - the phone was pre-installed with ver 1.1.1 of the firmware and it was upgraded to ver 1.1.2 by the seller. The crack is not possible if you have the newer iPhones which come pre-installed with ver 1.1.2
I stated up my Vista, installed iTunes (yes - you need to download a 51.08 MB of crap) and connected the iPhone to it. The idea was to first downgrade the firmware to 1.1.1 and then jailbreak in. We downloaded the ver 1.1.1 of the firmware on our local machine, got into the Apple Recovery mode (turn off the iPhone, Hold the Power button & the home button, release the power button after 10 seconds and you will enter into the recovery mode). Once in recovery mode, iTunes detected it and asks us to restore it to the latest version of the firmware - in our case it was 1.1.2 - however we did not want to do that. We had to manually select the downloaded firmware by holding the "Shift" key on our machine and then hitting the restore button - where it will displayed a "Windows explorer" type window. The firmware was highlighted - which was just downloaded and the restore process progressed (it just took about 10-15 mins). At the end of the restore we got an error (1015), and just as mentioned on forums, ignored it.
Now came the most crucial part of Jail Breaking into the phone. We had to search for "iPhuc for Windows" to get out of the recovery mode. Once installed on the system, shot three commands to get it out of recovery mode:
cmdsetenv auto-boot true cmdsaveenv cmdfsboot
A wait for 20 seconds and we were able to see the screen which says "Slide for Emergency" We were now ready to JailBreak the iPhone. Then followed the coolest and sexiest part of jailbreaking. We followed the process till Step 9 and the phone restarted - however to our surprise it went automatically into the Recovery mode :(.
After a lot of R&D, and searching onto other forums, upgrading to 1.1.2, and again downgrading it to 1.1.1, we still would get stuck up on the same screen. There was a moment in doing this when the Phone just didn't respond for couple of mins and our heart were in our mouth (I was just praying that I didn't iBrick the phone - it would have been the worst ever birthday gift to anyone then). However - I was lucky and the phone rebooted after a wait of 5 mins.
I later realized the mistake I was doing when downgrading the iPhone to ver 1.1.1. When you downgrade the phone, only the firmware get downgraded. It was also necessary to downgrade the "BaseBand"firmware as well. Hence I followed steps mentioned here under section "Downgrade the baseband firmware". Once the baseband was downgraded, we had to restore the firmware to 1.1.1 and follow the steps of "JailBreaking" mentioned here. This time the screen changed to "Slide to Unlock" rather than "Slide for Emergency" (This is when I said to myself - the phone is about to get SimUnlocked - and the birthday treat would be awesome).
Then followed a series of simple steps right from installing the AnySIM application to doing all the patches. It was all unlocked and activated ready to use in under 15 mins :).
And finally the iPhone springboard came up without any glitches
In all - it was an awesome beginning to a rocking Sunday :)
First's from my EOS
After a long wait (of over 8 months) - I finally managed to get a D SLR for myself. Being super excited ever since it has come - here are the first few from it :)
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Radio on Google Talk
Wanna listen to Radio? Internet Radio? On your Google Messenger? Follow the steps:
.... Make sure you have good internet bandwidth before you listen. You do not want the songs to kill in between buffers.
Windows Mobile 6 for HTC S620
For the past few months - a wide number of SmartPhone users had purchased HTC Codename Excaliber (HTC S620 / T-Mobile Dash / Dopod C720w). This is probaby the best Smartphone that is available as of today - however it came loaded with Windows Mobile 5.0.
T-Mobile was the first one to release a Windows Mobile 6.0 upgrade last month and now its the turn of HTC. The HTC upgrade can be downloaded from here. And for those who did not know - Dopod has merged with HTC and this build can be used on a Dopod phone as well
DevCon is a Developer Conference from the developers, by the developers and for the developers. Developers may be professionals or students who will represent next generation developers.
DevCon was first held in the year 2003 at Trivandrum. It attracted approximately 200 professionals. After this success at Trivandrum, in year 2004, Mumbai User Group organized “DevCon 2004”, which included two different tracks, one for Professionals and another for Academia, and combined track attracted more than 500 professionals and students.
In year 2005 “DevCon 2005” was organized by Pune User Group in association with the Mumbai User Group and INETA, following with the blueprint of “DevCon 2004” and attracted more than 600 professionals and students. I
n year 2006, Pune User Group, in Association with Microsoft® organized Acad DevCon 2006. This event was the most successful event of all the times with a huge response of 700+ audiences.
NOW, “DevCon 2007” is being held this year at Pune organized by Pune User Group in association with the INETA, following with the pattern of “DevCon”. This year it is also targeting both professionals and academics with two separate tracks of sessions for students and professionals.
Microsoft Student Partner Meet - West Zone
The last three days of my week have been on a roler coster ride, with Microsoft Student Patner Meet on one end and implementing the Exchange UM Project on the other.
Over the last two days, we have talked a lot about User Groups, SQL Server, Windows Server 2008, ISA Server, SMS Server, MOM Server, ForeFront Server, MOSS, and probably all the products under Microsoft's Infrastructure Domain.
Today - we will look upon technologies like AJAX, Katmai, Secure Coding and lastly - we will watch Die Hard 4 :)
Back after long
Due to commitments and a stressful days at work, I was out of the blogging scence for over 6 months.
Now I've made a promise to myself to try and post atleast one everyweek - so I am back to blogging and rocking.
.... things that happened in the last few month
New Job role at Microsoft
Showcase of e-Home at MES
Showing Technology Scenerios at Microsoft TechMela (formely Microsoft Tech.Ed)
Shooting for bit for MTV India on various technologies
POCs on SharePoint Portal Server
POCs on Live Communication Server and Exchange Unified Messaging
6-7 User Group Meets
Cascading Dropdowns in Infopath Forms
SharePoint and Infopath forms ideally go hand-in-hand. There have been times when doing a POC questions are asked if we can do a "Leave Request requisition". Sometimes the data needs to be populated using other dropdown boxes.
Digging though information - I ended up landing on the Infopath Team's blog. They have a great article on how to design "Cascading Dropdowns in Browser Forms". A great article and must read if you work extensively on Infopath
I have been trying all these days to make my hands real dirty with SPS 2007! And I finally suceeded.
I have a machine running Win 2003 R2 and SPS 2007 (Beta 2). The idea was to try and get hooked up with SPS 2007. There are couple of things that need to be done (as pre-requisties) to install SPS 2007. Here are a few of them:
1. .NET Framework 2.0 or later 2. Windows Workflow Foundation Beta 2.
I 'm smart and installed .NET 3.0 RC! (it has released versions of both the components) And bingo - my SPS got installed without any glitch! No additional stuff to be downloaded or installed except for Framework 3.0.
However, couple of days later - I was trying to work on a "Approval" workflow, which is pre-defined in SPS 2007. I give all the parameters, all the options filled up and start the workflow. The workflow on starting says "In Progress" however within moments it changes to "Failed to Start". I tried installing SPS again and the framework as well - but the workflow just couldnt start.
I failed to understand the reason - as all the pre-requisites were installed and the workflow should have run. Infact stuff like Excel services were running great. I failed to get a solution to why this was happening.
Then came a brainwave - I installed Sharepoint again - this time with .NET Framework 2.0 and Windows Workflow foundation 2.2 (Beta). I tried running a workflow on a document library and voila, this time it surely worked! No more errors and the process was as smooth as it can get!
Here is a story behind! SPS 2007 Beta 2 was supposed to work with Windows Workflow Foundation 2.2 Beta! With .NET Framework 3.0 - I got the RC build of WWF. That created the problem. I had hence to download both the components (WWF and .NET Framework 2.0) and reinstall SPS 2007 Beta 2. However, I guess if I had Beta 2 tech Refresh of SPS 2007, .NET 3.0 RC would have work - thats my assumption - though havent tried that out.
Task finally completed - and a Shutdown in process. More about SPS 2007 installation comming up in later posts! Keep blogging :)
Great SharePoint Server Consolidated Links
I have been getting my hands dirty - and I mean it - real dirty with Sharepoint 2007. There have been times when I am frustrated and just end up banging my head on the desk - cause there are only a handful people whom I know - have an drilled down in-dept knowledge of sharepoint and have answers to most of the question that you can ever have.
This guy is really awesome and wonderful! He has gone ahead, taken pains to consolidate all the link of articles, trainings, weblogs, webcasts, etc on Sharepoint and post it on his blog! A truly awesome community spirit - and probably my only one stop source (his blog) for all my sharepoint problems.
Will Vista stall Net traffic?
There have been talks going on in forums about Vista doubling the internet traffic because it supports the new IPv6 standard, which will provide a broader and a larger range of IP Addresses.
I tumbled upon a CNET News article, which have interviews from Paul Mockapetris, the guy who invented DNS (Domain Name System). Its a must read article - probably one of few better written.
