The f/stops here

Who the heck is this "Ron" guy?

2010-04-02T09:58:00.000-07:00

Some of you have noticed that you're not getting email from Goutham anymore. The witty responses you're used to getting from him have been replaced by this sardonic guy who puts LOLDOGS and FailBlog pictures in his responses to support emails.

Well....That's Me. The New Guy. Not-Goutham.

As G said when he introduced me, I've been a TouchDown fan since almost day one. I was looking for a worthwhile Exchange client to sync my corporate email and stumbled across TouchDown and pinged Goutham when I couldn't get it to sync with the weird, bizarre Exchange 2003 environment that we used at my unnamed large magenta-themed mobile phone carrier-employer. A couple hours of sitting with G and running a debugger against my G1 and we were syncing email and all the other extraneous stuff that we try to ignore. (like weekly staff meetings)

One thing that was amazing to me about that brief troubleshooting session was how impressive G is at writing code, or whatever it's called these days. He's one of those people who sees code in pictures or something I can't begin to comprehend.

Better him than me, certainly, cause if I had written TouchDown it would force-close on you when you tried to create a recurring meeting at 4pm on Fridays.

The other thing that I was quite pleased to find when I left Microsoft and came here full time was how loyal our customers are.

Not empty-eyed, hipster, fixie-riding Apple fanatics, but smart, well read, reasonable people who would clearly rather have a lack of oxygen than a lack of Email. I actually enjoy talking to most of you (you know how you are). The fact that our little product allows you folks to do all that work-related stuff you need to do makes me warm all over.

Like it or not (probably not), you'll be seeing more of me and my posts on the blog. I'm Scottish, so it's not likely that I'll suppress some rant about something or another. There might even be some useful information here for you.

Cheers!

Ron

Such a stale bolg!

2009-05-14T06:43:00.000-07:00

In case you are wondering why there are no entries here, please head over to the "real" blog at nitrodesk.blogspot.com

Have you been burned by the BluRay yet?

2008-02-11T22:06:00.000-08:00

Just read somewhere that Netflix is going BluRay only from now on.
So that new HD DVD player that i bought a couple of months ago is now just a very expensive up-converting DVD Player.
Another example of monopolistic practices? No laws in the world against this one? Now i know how it must have felt to be a BetaMax owner..
The least Toshiba can do now is have Bollywood release movies in HD-DVD ?

Or maybe Microsoft can consider acquiring a few good studios if the Yahoo deal falls thru ? :-)

Afraid of flying?

2008-02-08T07:56:00.000-08:00

Friend of mine is a self-declared aviophobic.

To make matters worse, before every trip he has to make, he trolls accident databases to figure out the safety histories of the exact make and model of the aircraft he would be flying in.

That doesnt help at all.

Flight is unnatural for terrain-bound animals like humans, hence the prospect of putting ourselves at the mercy of mechanical contraptions which will carry us thousands of feet in the air makes us always wonder what could happen if those contraptions fail and we are left high and dry without a way to safely get down..

My personal belief is that the fear of flying is not entirely due to the awareness of the statistics of avaiation accidents, but the natural tendency to be skeptical about putting oneself in a vulnerable situation without any reliable means of safely gettng back. The amount of publicity that each air accident gets doesnt help either. If every car crash, every train wreck were to get the same amount of publicity and recreation of the gory details, i bet a lot of the aviophobics would never even drive a car.

Cirrus, the makers of the Cirrus SR series of (some really beautiful) planes have an innovative way of ensuring the safety of the air passengers in the event that the aircraft encounters a severe mechanical or airframe failure in flight. It is called the CAPS (Cirrus Airframe Parachute System), which is generically also known as a BRS (Ballistic recovery system). It uses a solid fuel rocket to quickly deploy a large parachute that is attached to the airframe so that when the plane fail to fly, it can float down, minimizing the risk of attempting to land in places where a safe landing is not guaranteed.

BUT Corey Liddle was flying a Cirrus which had a CAPS installed.

The airbag in your car will not save your life if you drive off a cliff. Each safety mechanism is designed to save you in the event of a specific life-threatening scenario.

Flying has typically three stages to it. Takeoff, Cruise and Landing. Just like driging on a freeway has three stages: Entering on an on-ramp, Cruising and Exiting on an off-ramp. Things can go south in any of these three phases.

Airplanes are reliable, probably even more reliable than cars - Can you imagine walking around your car in the morning looking for oil drips, nasty dents, under-inflated tires, checking the oil level before you start for work in the morning? This is what (good) pilots do before every flight. In addition, they perform run-up checks of the engines and subsystems before every takeoff. Imagine carrying a checklist of systems to check and verify for your car before entering a freeway.

Every pilot is first and foremost, a human, he/she watches the same shows that you and i do, he/she hears about and reads about every accident (maybe more) that you and i hear about. So next time you think you are afraid of flying, remember, there are probably one or two people sitting in the cockpit who share your apprehension. What sets them apart is the knowledge, tools and techniques which can minimize or eliminate the risks.

You are always in good hands.

Remember the time when $EX was safe and FLYING was dangerous? Well, those times are long gone.

Microsoft Yahoo acquisition - Whither my photos?

2008-02-07T17:01:00.000-08:00

One big question arising out of the impending acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft is what happens to Flickr..
See Tris Husseys blog and also Mark Evans.

Scott Gilbertson says this.

The real question is, if not flickr, where?
Flickr, although not much innovation has happened to it since the Yahoo acquisition, still has very powerful community features which few other sites can beat.
In my limited knowledge, the closest to it would probably be SmugMug, which has a terrific UI, extensive APIs which can enable technologies like NitroDesk to complement, and a fairly robust sales mechanism.

However, this does not mean others need to worry, the world of photography is big enough for a lot more sites, especially sites with slants towards specific needs. Flickr was (now why am i already assuming past tense..) good for community building. SmugMug is good for showing off and selling.. PlanetEye is great for looking at your pictures in the context of location. PicasaWeb is good for sharing.

I think PlanetEye, SmugMug, and the likes MAY see a deluge of photo-refugees if the deal goes through.

But i strongly believe that being owned by Microsoft is not at all a good reason for hating Flickr.

For all the bad things you say about MS, you are still probably viewing this post on a windows machine.

-peace

NitroDesk now supports Picasa!

2008-02-01T12:51:00.000-08:00

NitroDesk has finally added support for Picasa. Makes life much simpler now.

I am a big Picasa fan, and i think it has got the simplest interface for photo management without forcing me into a rigid folder structure. Also, the image processing there is golden.

Now i can click a button in Picasa and through NitroDesk send any number of my photos to any of my albums (or create new albums in) Flickr, PicasaWeb, SmugMug, Live Spaces, FaceBook or ShutterPoint..

NitroDesk must be started and running for this to happen though..
Nice :-)

Sager NP5792 Photos

2008-01-30T07:26:00.001-08:00

Review coming soon here!
Specs:

NP-5792
Intel "Penryn" Core 2 Duo T9300 @2.5Ghz 6Mb LII
4Gb
200Gb @7200 Sata3 Seagate Momentus
1650X1080

For now, here is just a slideshow with the photos.

For original photos, go here

Photos Uploaded QUICKLY using NitroDesk Photographers Edition

Some quick facts:

Fan Speed: Can hear it, but not annoying

HDD speed: Excellent

Right palmrest warmth: higher than normal, but good for your Carpals.

App loading speed: Fast with Intel TurboMemory

Graphics speed for Vista x64 : Blazing

CPU Capacity: Runs Win2K3 in 4 VMs without a burp, with still gigs to spare

Note: If you plan to run Vista 64, Dont get anything less than 3Gb, Vista x64 on bootup and no apps running takes more than a Gig

(Disclaimer: I am not a gamer, so dont really get high on FPS and all good stuff)

Spend more time Clicking, less time uploading..

2008-01-29T13:00:00.001-08:00

I am a photographer, at least i like to think that i am.
I take hundreds of pics when travelling, much to the disgust of my family.
But the time i spend shooting is nothing compared to the time it takes me to upload my pictures for the world to see.
You see,

I have to first open picasa, select the good pictures, upload them to Picasa web.
Then i login to flickr, select the good ones again and upload them there.
Then i login to smug mug, up load my pictures there again
Then comes my Live Spaces account,
The best ones i put up on Shutterpoint in the hope that some professional photographers would leave me some tips, or a buyer might leave me some cash.
Finally, if i have time or energy left, upload some to my facebook albums.

If i add up all the minutes i spend setting up and shooting, it will probably just be a fraction of the time i spend uploading.

All this, of course until NitroDesk came along :-) (http://www.nitrodesk.com/)
Using the free BETA version, now i can select my good pictures once, select one or more destination online albums and let the computer do the uploading. It could take the whole night for all i care, but in the morning, i know my photos will be where they deserve to be..

Oh wait, if i change my mind, i can always transfer whole albums from one service to another.
And later, when i suddenly realize i cant find my best photos on my computer anymore, i can always get a backup of my entire online assets from any of the sites i have uploaded them too.

Boy, am i spoilt now !

Adventures in silverlight

2007-12-21T13:12:00.000-08:00

Typically when you are downloading XAML to show in your silverlight application, you would use a downloader and call createFromXamlDownloader.
This takes the XAML content that the downloader has downloaded and parse that into a XAML tree which you can then paste into your object hierarchy.
Here is the rub: if your downloaded XAML has event handlers for anything other than Loaded or OnLoad, and you are trying to wire it up to a javascript that you have linked in your original pages, you are in for a surprise. the events dont fire or if they do, they dont seem to call the script handlers correctly.
This may be a security thing - i am not sure. maybe you can wire handlers only to script that you have downloaded in the same downloader? Who knows.
Anyways, the only way i seem to get it to work is by getting the responsetext from the downloader and calling CreateFromXAML with that text.

All is well that ends well.

Black Friday like never before..

2007-11-23T18:19:00.000-08:00

Got up today at 6.15 AM. This year, for some strange reason, i wanted to see what Black Friday was all about in Seattle. Reached Frys by around 6.50. There was not a single parking spot. For those familiar with the Frys parking lot in Renton, imagine how many cars would it take to fill the whole lot. Finally found a little spot to park and went in. What i saw inside knocked my breath away! every aisle in Frys had a portion of the queue. The serpentine queue extended from the checkout stands all the way through the XBox area, around the cafe, through the small electronics, into the PC components and a did a few crazy loops around the graphics cards area.

Of course buying the bulbs for the kids bathroom was out of the question. Get in the line, and you would be looking at 2 hours of shuffling towards checkout. In fact, you could do all the shopping you wanted right in the queue. Just get in the queue with an empty cart, and pick up the things you want when the queue reaches each section :-)

Anyways, did the usual rounds at the CPU and Motherboard section, left a few pools of drool there, and the remaining drool at the Camcorder section. Got out in about half an hour, happy to be alive and without the need to waste 2 hours to save 10 bucks. It also looked like people didnt care if the things they bought were on sale or even whether they saved money. I bet if people analyzed the savings they made, they might as well have gone and flipped burgers at McWhatevers to earn more than that in two hours. Some people were smart though. They pulled off whathever they wanted from the shelves and just went and sat at the cafe. They would probably chill out there for a few hours until the queue thinned out.

From Frys straight to Best Buy. No crowd there (not a real one anyway). But then the two things i was interested in either wasnt marked down or was sold out. I wanted a Blu Ray player (out of stock) and a zune (same old price as a week before).

From there to Circuit City. It was looking more like Bharat City, packed with people from good old India. I think CC would have done better had they put Bollywood movies on the display TVs, they would have sold millions of TVs.

Anyways, by about 8.30, i staggered out of there, exhausted, relieved that i had nothing to buy on Black Friday..

Never again

-g

Murkier, gloomier, nastier

2007-11-06T16:10:00.001-08:00

Yeah baby, that's Seattle in Winter..

Maybe time for an IFR rating..

Trusted Certificate Authority Hell

2007-11-06T14:54:00.000-08:00

This issue has been hounding us recently when installing appliances.
Symptoms:
· When you try to verify client certs by launching a browser and pointing to the HTTPS site which requires client certs, you are prompted to "choose a digital certificate" with an empty list of client certs, even though you can see the certificate in the MMC certificate console.

What is happening..
On the IIS, if you open the event viewer, you might see a little event which looks like this

"When asking for client authentication, this server sends a list of trusted certificate authorities to the client. The client uses this list to choose a client certificate that is trusted by the server. Currently, this server trusts so many certificate authorities that the list has grown too long. This list has thus been truncated. The administrator of this machine should review the certificate authorities trusted for client authentication and remove those that do not really need to be trusted.
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp."

WTF !

After a win2k3 machine has gone through a few rounds of certificate updation (which may happen when doing windows updates), it keeps bringing in more and more trusted root certification authorities.
The list of trusted roots keeps growing until one fine day, the IIS finds that the list is too long. When performing the SSL client cert handshake, it is supposed to send a list of trusted CAs so the Browser can decide which client certs to choose from.
When the list grows too big, IIS hits this hard coded limit and finally croaks.

If someone has an idea of how to change this limit, feel free to comment..

Solution
Only way out of this?

Remove a butt load of those useless certs from no-name companies who have decided they are important enough to find a place in your trusted authorities store.

Go to the trusted root certification authorities and blow away a bunch of them, starting with those you don’t recognize and those that has Client Authentication as a purpose.

Meanwhile, don’t accidentally remove those in this list, since Windows needs them.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;293781

cheers

-g

Dead and gone by then..

2007-09-15T13:14:00.000-07:00

Cant believe it, but Vista says my computer sucks.

According to vista, it will take me roughly 121 years to copy a few files from my dvd drive.

But for some reason, the math dont make sense to me.

cheers

Adam Bosworth Leaves Google...

2007-09-12T09:44:00.000-07:00

Looks like HealthCare is a different beast altogether.
Adam leaving might not have as much to do with the complexity of the business for all you know.
But one thing is for sure - HealthCare is not for the faint hearted. It takes tremendous amount of grit and patience to succeed (if there is something like success in healthcare). The most effective driver for success in heatlhcare IT is not money. Its the motivation to do good.

So i wonder if businesses traditionally geared towards making money and doing good by the shareholders can be successful in thinking deeper about patients and their well being.

Developers want to build cool software
Businessmen want to increase share value
Managers want to lead bigger teams
Salesmen want to increase their numbers
Standards bodies want to create standards
__________ want to create systems which improve patient experience - fill in the blanks yourself.

When the sale is done and the dust settles down, who is caring for patients, who are the ultimate consumers of healthcare?
The government?
Hospitals and care providers (who ultimately have a business to run)?
Corporations that develop HealthCare systems ?
Physicians ?
Payers / Insurance Companies?

It seems to me like increasing patient safety, improving patient experience, betterment of treatment outcomes and reduction in expenses are all a by product of the way all of the above work towards achieving their own goals.

Fortunately, there are a lot of people out there working their butts off thinking about the real issues in healthcare. The likes represented by of HISTalk, Dr. Crounse, and numerous other voices in blogosphere. Hopefully the movement will continue and break the shackles of traditional business models to provide pervasive solutions which really do good.

What is a Touch And Go?

2007-09-06T14:23:00.000-07:00

Touch and go is a flight maneuver of landing on a runway and taking off without stopping. This is typically performed for training purposes.
Did a couple of touch and gos at paine field yesterday, and here is the edited video.
Enjoy !

Beautiful San Juan Islands

2007-09-04T16:49:00.000-07:00

Went camping near Friday Harbor last week, great place to camp, especially during a weekday when there is literally no one else around. Highly recommend Lakedale campsite, where we managed to get a secluded wooded campsite.

Fished on the lake, caught some bass, one of which was big enough to fry with some kerala fish masala (yum)

If you want to watch orca whales swim by, pop over to Lime Kiln state park.

Friday Harbor is a nice quiet little town (at least on a weekday), an hours ferry ride from anacortes.

Someday, would love to try a landing at Roche Harbor at the north end of the island, where the strip is nothing but a narrow road.

Enjoy the pics.

Lunar Eclipse from the Northwest

2007-08-28T03:20:00.000-07:00

Spectacular event today morning around 2.00. I started a little late, hence missed some of the early action. Here are some of the better looking shots..

Great photography tip here

2007-08-23T07:21:00.000-07:00

Friend of mine sent me this one, took me a while to understand the simple tip on how Flash can improve your pictures..
http://img297.imageshack.us/img297/1096/2137a9950nf3.jpg

Valiant effort to provide friendly messages

2007-08-16T21:47:00.000-07:00

Our friends in the Vista team has gone a long way to make the OS friendly..
In fact, these days even when programs crash, Vista tells you in a nice way...

Today, trusty skype failed with this,

It took a while for that one to sink in..

Another little while to start imagining the possibilities...

_______ has stopped working.

Come up with your own friendly application name to insert here..

All you need is a C++ app which does

int * i = NULL ;
*i = 0 ;

Bite the bullet and RHIOlize..

2007-08-15T16:14:00.000-07:00

The portland tribune has an excellent article published on how efforts to bring health information technology to share healthcare information has been stalled by different reasons such as lack of cash and privacy issues in Oregon.
http://portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=118670243207447600
The longer such efforts have reasons to stall, the more precarious the condition of the ultimate end users of such systems. It could be you or me, this week, next year or five years from now.

I just wish the hospitals would realize this, come forward and talk to the technology enablers about how this can be addressed. But of course, who wants another big project when something like a pesky time tracking system takes 6 months to install and is the top priority ?

I guess its all about buying into a vision and trusting the geeks.

Trip along the oregon coastline

2007-08-14T13:13:00.000-07:00

touch the skies, old video

2007-08-07T22:39:00.000-07:00

Flowers in the garden

2007-08-05T11:19:00.000-07:00

Navajo Country

2007-08-01T13:41:00.000-07:00

Pictures from scenic Navajo country.
enjoy
-g

Olympic National Park Pictures

2007-08-01T13:35:00.001-07:00

Pictures taken from Olympic National Park, EOS 30D, 17-85 IS
enjoy..
-g

Levitation is easy

2007-07-24T10:19:00.001-07:00

Flight over KPAE

2007-07-03T22:19:00.000-07:00

Grand Canyon - Day 1

2007-04-02T22:03:00.000-07:00

Grand Canyon - Day1

Better late than never they say. The trip was a couple of months ago. Beginning of April is a good time to visit the region. Moderate temperatures, high 60's everywhere, no sun-tan lotion required.

But boy was it a treat for the roaming lens!

The new EOS 30D and the Canon 17-85IS had a good time, with the 70-200 4.0 L stepping in at times to bring the distant temples closer.

Rough Itinerary

2 hour flight from SEA to Phoenix
3-4 hour drive from Phoenix to williams, AZ. ( good marriot facilities at most places in the area)
1+ hour drive from Williams to the south rim of Grand Canyon.

Just make sure you hold your breath before you step into the vista.

The first thing you notice is the mind boggling expanse in front of you. The place will probably be crowded, but ignore everyone else. You are on a once in a lifetime journey, and dont let the others bother you.

Once you get accustomed to the sheer magnitude of the place, start looking at the details. Those temples you see in the distance? Most of them have names i am told.

After you have seen the canyon during the day, try the sunset. Though it might be a little windy, there is no sunset like this one. The sky and the canyon walls turn progressively red and dark. Its a spectacular show, never to be missed.
Watch out for the dust kicked up by the strong winds. Can get into your eyes, and your lens, especially if you change lenses on your SLR.

Once you have watched the show, head on over to the Grand Canyon Village for a great chow. They have a variety of foods from pasta, pizza, burgers salads, ice-cream, wine, beer, coffee, you name it. If you are lucky, you might even catch a moonlit night, and that would be another experience.

But for us, the day was over, and we head back to Williams (hour long drive, dont doze off) to sleep.