Vikram's "Muse" » Vikram

Not very live from WWDC…

Vikram — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 05:55:42 +0000

Figured I would throw my hat in to the ring and forecast what the enigmatic turtlenecked leader would announce tomorrow, and of that – what might be of particular interest to me…

1) Mac OS – “Hobbes” : I would buy a copy of the new version of Mac OS if they really did call it “Hobbes” and did nothing else of note. They should certainly be running out of big cat names by now… so it’s got to be Hobbes or Garfield..right? In any case – I would be very curious to see if and what would be previewed towards the next version of Mac OS. It’s feeling somewhat stale at this point – and I rarely leave Windows 7 these days. Is there enough coming to capture my interest?

2) Macbook Air refresh: While it wowed a handful of folks back when it came out – it was followed by quite a few very impressive laptops (in fact – the Lenovo X301 I use these days is phenomenal) that stole all the thunder. I would be curious to see how this ultraportable evolves.

3) Free Mobile Me: This has been making the rounds – a free tier of mobile me. I suppose it makes sense. Activesync is one of the least heralded yet compelling technologies from MS.

Safari update, iphone refresh and potential price cuts (i think ipads will drop in price – but perhaps not tomorrow) are the other possibilities…

The propensity to dream…

Vikram — Sat, 22 May 2010 21:08:35 +0000

The sun broke out of the clouds then, and it filled the world with sunshine. A few small earthern lamps had filled a boy’s hearts with hope in a dilapidated temple decades back. The same brightness and warmth now pervaded the hearts of everyone magnified – from the boy to the old man and from the children to the old men. It filled them with joy, and it spilled from the lips… here as a smile… there as laughter.

It was Utopia.

A snippet from a story that I wrote years ago…

Things I overheard from myself: Cosmetic Testing

Vikram — Sat, 15 May 2010 03:58:54 +0000

I understand the reasoning behind why animal testing needed to be banned. A question that popped in my head this morning was – if animal testing is gone, what is the alternative? How do cosmetic (and other) manufacturers test to make sure their product does not have short and long term damages on people?

Wikipedia gives a partial answer here. I would be curious to get more detail.

Things I overheard from myself…

Vikram — Sat, 15 May 2010 03:55:37 +0000

I like thinking. Except when things at work keep me insanely busy to the point of exhausting every mental pore – I love thinking. In the shower, under warm covers, driving along green tinged roads and even while waiting for certain meetings to end, I am constantly thinking. Intensity might vary – but the stream of thought is constant.

Children have an elegance to their thought process. Lot’s of people might mistake it for simplicity – but the truth is that they have the capacity to cut through a lot of fuzziness and arrive at startlingly refreshing questions. I miss being able to think that way at all times – but when I can, I try to hold on to those thoughts before they disappear.

Alan Alda was my commencement speaker at Caltech. I hosted him (along with my dear friend Lavi) at my banquet table the night before, and he was absolutely charming, endearing and smart. I love the title of his book “Things I overheard while talking to myself”. This here is the start of a category of thoughts of the type that I mentioned above, under a title thus inspired: Things I overheard while thinking to myself..

Instant Translations in Bing

Vikram — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:20:00 +0000

The Bing instant answer feature powered by Microsoft Translator went live yesterday. I wanted to highlight some tips and caveats.

On availability: This has currently been rolled out to all English and Spanish speaking markets. Other language markets will follow shortly. You get the instant answer if your to: or from: language is English. In the English market, if the query is foreign, the translator assumes that you want it to be translated to English.

On when it shows up: The Bing Instant Answer will return an instant translation only for common words and phrases in common languages, using a fast lookup table. This table is updated with the most frequent queries.

If a translation is not found in the fast lookup, the Answer will produce a link to the translator site, so the user can click through to get the actual translation.

On size limits: The size limit of the query is the same for any Bing query, which I believe is around 1024 chars. The size limit on the translator site text box is 15K chars.

On language auto detect: The auto detection logic is better for longer sentences, and we continue to fine tune it to work better on shorter ones.

Feel free to post any feedback you have to the official blog post here.

-Vikram

Counting down to MIX 09

Vikram — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 03:24:13 +0000

Our team members have started descending into Las Vegas for MIX09. I will be reaching tomorrow morning, and will be in prep for our sessions and announcement. You can follow the action on twitter. I recall being very impressed with the very first MIX, what with the convergence of designer and developer (very un-microsoft in those days), BillG, IE7, Atlas and more. Several years hence, here I am - very pleased to be playing a part.

If you are an attendee – our session is on thursday, but you will also see peeks at what we are doing all around MIX. Look in your attendee bags for a few surprises, including something nice for your laptop.

Stay tuned, and also check out the team blog for updates.

Installing Windows Seven from a USB disk

Vikram — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 17:59:54 +0000

I have been running Win 7 builds since last October and I have to say I haven’t booted in my other partitions since that time (earlier I used to boot into OSX on one of my laptops, and to other assorted server OS partitions on my other machines). 7 is super easy to install (and fast too!) but for convenience nothing beats installing it by booting from a fast USB drive.

Here are the instructions to create such a USB drive:

1. Open CMD.exe (in vista – open it as administrator)
2. Type diskpart
3. Type listdisk
4. Type select disk # (# of your flash drive)
5. Type clean, create partition primary, select partition 1, active, format FS=FAT32 (or NTFS), assign, exit
6. Extract (or mount) the downloaded iso and copy the extracted contents to the flash drive. Setup.exe should be at the root of the drive.
7. Boot from the flash drive.

Long has a tutorial here as well.

Quick Notes from the PDC

Vikram — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 21:23:09 +0000

Great Win 7 demo. For those of us who is into UX, the new UI features are outlined here. Great Touch UI improvements. My next laptop HAS to be a convertible with multi-touch (along with the digitizer). I saw most praise from the audience for the stability and performance improvements. Also high approval for UAC becoming less annoying. Much better multi mon support (including multimon over RDP). Native VHD support – including virtualization. WMP natively supports Divx, AAC etc.
Mediacenter 7 is evolutionary. H.264, TV pack etc will all be included. The UX has a more ‘Zune’ish feel to it.
Office Web Applications has been announced. IE, Firefox and Safari. Lots of Mesh based syncing in office overall. Blogs and web pages can suck in information through REST APIs to render charts and other office data objects inline.
Mesh Live Services – super cool demo by BBC showing off iplayer via Mesh. Pause a video on the desktop and resume on the phone. Lots and lots of social scenarios – harvesting friend preferences.
BTW, for Azure (aka Red Dog – the cloud computing platform) announced yesterday – the CTP usage limits are: Total compute usage: 2000 VM hours, Cloud storage: 50 GB, Total storage bandwidth: 20 GB/day. See below for an overview of the Strata stack and what’s above/below it. Below Azure (not pictured) is GFS (Global Foundational Services).

Stay tuned for more.

Very Astute Article from Steve Gilmor on Mesh

Vikram — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 07:58:45 +0000

Just Say Yes – Gilmor talks about what Mesh means to the world.

If you don’t know much about Mesh you can get that here.

Troubleshooting driver problems in Vista

Vikram — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 08:11:08 +0000

This is a problem that has confounded and caused no end of trouble to me and several friends/colleagues. Now that I seem to have found a fairly reliable solution, I wanted to highlight it here.

Problem Symptom: Vista fails to find drivers for devices – typically USB devices. Often these are devices that don’t require drivers (many USB keys and hard drives) or you have already installed drivers for them. After plugging them in you end up with a driver not found dialog box.

Quick Solution: Download this batch file (zipped version). You will need to run this from a command prompt with admin privileges. (Be careful though – usual disclaimers apply about doing it only if you know what you are doing and have backed up recently).

Detail: The reason for this problem (to the extent that it has happened to me) is that the driver cache for vista got corrupted somehow and the fix basically forces Vista to rebuild it.

Here is the breadcrumb trail of my search sleuthing that led me to the solution:

LockerGnome

Winmatrix forums

Technet (this helped in certain cases)

and finally Peter & Laura (many thanks!)

Nitty Gritty:

Typical error messages:

Error 1: Windows couldn’t find driver software for your device

Error 2: Windows Encountered a Problem while Trying to Install your Device