DIGITAL AND TECH

Microsoft launches DreamSpark in India!

2008-11-08T03:35:00.000-08:00

On 5^th November 2008, Microsoft unveiled DreamSpark - a software giveaway for an estimated 10 million eligible students in India. DreamSpark will provide students access to the latest Microsoft developer and designer tools at no charge.

Microsoft DreamSpark will be available to all students whose studies touch on technology, design, math, science and engineering. The software available to students will include:

Microsoft developer tools

Visual Studio 2005 Express
Visual Studio 2005 Professional
Visual Studio 2008 Professional
Visual Basic 2008 Express
Visual C++ 2008 Express
Visual C# 2008 Express
Visual Web Developer 2008 Express
XNA Game Studio 2.0
12-month free Academic membership in the XNA Creators Club

Microsoft designer tools

Expression Studio 2, including

o Expression Web

o Expression Blend

o Expression Design

o Expression Media

Microsoft platform resources

SQL Server 2008 Developer
SQL Server 2008 Express
Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition
Virtual PC 2007

Training Resources

IT Academy Student Pass

This broad range of professional-level software will be available both online via www.dreamsparkindia.com; and in offline format via DVDs distributed by program partners NIIT, Aptech and Hughes Net Fusion Centers. A student merely needs to offer a proof of identity at a branch of these institutes to avail of a DreamSpark DVD. There are 125 NIIT, 175 Aptech, and 200 Hughes Net Fusion Centers participating across the country.

These program partners will also provide technology training on the DreamSpark software tools at a nominal cost; as well as have the option of soft skills training in languages like English and Hindi. Microsoft India is also working with academic institutions, government bodies and student organizations across the country to ensure that all students get a chance to benefit from DreamSpark.

The DreamSpark program in India is tailor-made to join the dots between software access and employability - which means making training and enablement complement simple access to technology.

DreamSpark will also facilitate student participation in Microsoft’s annual marquee contest, Imagine Cup, through various contest categories such as software design, short films, photography etc. Students from India that qualify for the Imagine Cup 2009 World Finals will get to travel to Egypt. Selected teams will also get the opportunity to get mentored by the Centre for Innovation, Incubation & Entrepreneurship (CIIE) at IIM, Ahmedabad.

Addressing students and academicians at IIT Delhi – where the DreamSpark program was unveiled - Bill Gates, Chairman, Microsoft Corp, said, “We want to do everything we can to equip a new generation of technology leaders with the knowledge and tools they need to harness the magic of software to improve lives, solve problems and catalyze economic growth. Microsoft DreamSpark provides professional-level tools that we hope will inspire students like you to explore the power of software and encourage you to forge the next wave of software-driven breakthroughs.

Compiling Singularity

2008-09-28T20:16:00.000-07:00

Its been a long time since I posted.. have been very busy lately, but with some time well spent; tinkering with the Singularity RDK 1.1

So finally I managed to install .Net framework 1.1 (Required to compile Singularity) on Vista.. One hell of a job. You will have to slip-stream both .net1.1 and .net1.1sp1 into a single exe and then install it on vista..

After spending hours on installing .net 1.1 and compiling World Distro and Tiny Distro of Singularity, I finally hosted it on a Virtual Machine for the first time.. here is a screen shot.

Currently running the world model.. Will post more soon.. gotta rush and complete some pending files.

Microsoft Mindstorm

2008-09-14T03:47:00.000-07:00

On 30th of August, we finally witnessed the Microsoft Mindstorm at Ahemdabad. We had been planning for such a long time for this, with a lot of initial set-backs right from unavailability of auditoriums to clashing schedules, but finally the event was a huge success.

While planning for the event, we never imagined such a huge response, the seating capacity of the auditorium was about 370 something.... and the total turn over was over 480 students who attended the event. Those who reached late even sat on the stairs!! Whew! that was a very good response to the event..

There were 5 sessions at MM:
1. LINQ by Anand MSP - Kamal Singh Rawat
2. .Net 3.5 features and framework by DDIT MSP - Dhara
3. The third one was a session on Silverlight by our new MSP Acad program manager at Microsoft - Siddharth Prakash.
4. There was a short session by a SQL server MVP - Mr. Pinal Dave
5. Session on NextGeneration Technologies was delivered by myself - Urjit Singh Bhatia, I talked about Cloud computing, Virtualization and the likes.. you can find some articles on Cloud Computing on my blog..

In the end there was a quiz and algorithms round, very entertaining I must say.. All in all a huge success. The press and media coverage are awesome, we got media space on 3 dailies and 2 news channels.. WOW!! Here is the video..

Microsoft Student Partner Lead

2008-09-14T03:41:00.000-07:00

There it is, the email announcing that I have been promoted to the rank of Microsoft Student Partner Lead for the year 2008-09.. wow! that feels really good. I have been so busy these days.. So this email was a great break from the monotony of all that truck-load of work. The other Leads are:

1. Kaushal Bhavsar
2. Lakshman Srikant
3. Mayur Tendulkar
4. Raveesh Maaya
5. Biyan Bhar (Edit 18-sept-2008 - sorry, forgot to add the name, thats what happens when u have 3 projects and the same deadlines!!!)

So a total of 5 leads were announced for this acad schedule.. Congrats to all and thanks to the India MSP Acad team.. you guys really rock!

Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP)

2008-09-14T09:03:00.000-07:00

Hello all, so here is my first post on urjit's blog : www.thenewtech.blogspot.com .. I have been keeping tabs on VRRP lately so decided what better than this to kick-off..

Prologue: This series is about a recently developed approach undertaken by a number of network administrators to provide better availability of the critical network components in a complex network. They take aid of the virtualization construct and implement it on the router. We’ll see how this actually happens. As such this is a wide topic in its own right and so I’ve decided to partition it into a number of posts. I would be dealing with specific areas in each post to provide a sound understanding of the underlying concepts and the related issues.

Convert C++ code into DNA?? Whew! what an idea...

2008-08-13T11:53:00.000-07:00

Ever imagined a technology where you could write a nice C++ program, compile and debug it and then finally cross-compile it to be represented as a DNA sequence!! Sounds pretty cool, right?
Someone's already did it for PERL code and he expects to use BACTERIA as a hard (or soft?) disk... Just write your code, convert it into a DNA sequence, synthesize it in your futuristic multi-million dollar lab and inject it into a Bacteria Culture... and there you go!! Organic RAID storage of the future!! Imagine using bacteria culture dyed onto CD like platters..

Introducing - Harsh Dhulia

2008-09-14T04:19:00.000-07:00

Lets the drums roll... switch on the lights... here comes a new messiah of technology.. Introducing our new "Guest-Column-Write" : Mr. Harsh Dhulia, (HD for short)

So, HD is an enthusiast who digs Information Security and Networking.. all pdfs on these topics are devoured like hot cakes. For times to come, we will see a lot of articles by HD on my blogoshpere..

HD will also share his C# programming experiences at http://www.csharpinmylife.blogspot.com/. His other areas of interest include Virtualization and Operating Systems (we share these interest though..)

So welcome Harsh, looking forward to your expert columns here..

Intel's peek into the future...

2008-08-23T07:27:00.000-07:00

Yes, thats right. Intel is eagerly looking into the future.. The CTO of intel - Justin Ratter, whose job is not about the current products but about the shape of technology (of-course Intel's) 10-20 years from now, disclosed plans for some real eye-candy tech in the recent technology conference Intel Developer Forum (IDF). There were some very cool niche technologies on display (or rather early prototypes).

1. Programmable Matter - Imagine a small crystal ball in your pocket, you step out of the house and put it on the ground, and presto! it turns into a Lamborghini! Reach your office and it turns back into the humble crystal ball. Put it on your desk and it turns into your Power Packed desktop...
Intel wants you to take this flight of fantasy and its working its way to the future with Programmable Matter - > small pellets of matter having a small processing core, independent memory and an electrostatically determined orientation with other pellets. They can shift shape (rather orientation wrt each other) and turn into a solid object as per "program". Imagine a solid model of a car in-design which reflects each change in design instantly for the designers to see if it looks good.

I will post the other 2 tech sneak peaks in the next posts. Have to go to a party tonight.. :)

Cloud Computing... The future Haze.

2008-09-02T06:17:00.000-07:00

Cloud computing has been in the news, a lot actually..

Understanding the cloud:

Cloud computing refers to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) IT paradigm, where the end-user does not know (or have to know) where the IT enabled service is hosted, maintained or stored.

The end-user is simply assuming that the service is somewhere there in the “Cloud”.

Here is a typical Cloud architecture : There can be many background services making up the cloud, DataStorage, Applications, Infrastructure etc, with virtualization adding another dimension to the whole 'Cloud' scenario. The 'Cloud Clients' can be anything right from Mobile Clients to desktops to laptops on Wi-Fi, and as the concept goes, the Client is totally oblivious to the technology in the background, accessing software as a service just as we use electricity on use per unit basis. In the future of things to come, we might be using Visual Studio "Online Edition" and compile our programs on a transparent third-party server and simply save the code on our disk. Pay for as many hours you use the service!!

This is the excerpt from my presentation at the MicrosoftMindstorm - a student DevCon at Ahemdabad on 30th August.

Compiling the Cloud…

2008-09-04T19:01:00.000-07:00

Windows Live Messenger - 9 its a WPF baby

2008-08-15T00:39:00.000-07:00

Microsoft's next in the Windows Live Messenger series is expected to have some serious eye-candy, all thanks to Microsoft WPF. Its going to be something looking very cool and probably the Vista Client will make some cool use of Aero like GUI extensions. It is still under wraps, but boy, we sure love to anticipate..don't we?

Microsoft's Open Source Wing

2008-08-11T06:58:00.000-07:00

Microsoft is bracing the OpenSource ideology as a part of its initiative towards future trends in computing. CodePlex - hosting open source projects is a supported partner of Microsoft. On offer for Developers is Microsoft support for starting with OpenSource projects. Check out Microsoft Open Source website here.... It has good sections for Learning about the tools available for the OpenSource venture.

Busy with EXAMS!!!!

2008-07-20T11:52:00.000-07:00

Stuck with prep for multiple exams here.. CCNA and then GRE on 28th July.. and what not..so wont be able to post much this week or two.. Hope my GRE goes well..Wish me luck guys!

MSI offers ATOM based Laptop

2008-08-07T11:36:00.000-07:00

As I was reading in a tech magazine, MSI's advertisement for their laptop U100X caught my attention. The specs are like this:

Intel ATOM processor (1.6Ghz,512K L2, 533 Mhz FSB)
10" LCD
HDD, Full size keyboard... and so on..

How successful the ATOM processor is on a laptop is yet to be seen. I guess MSI is trying to offer a mobile Internet Device with the ATOM.

In another news snippet some time back, I read that a cell phone powered by the ATOM processor was running Windows XP without hiccups!! whew! seems like cell phones are going to pack more punch than ever. The touted power consumption is like 0.35W at idle load!! Intel engineers are working real hard... Keep it coming people..

CERN fears allayed..

2008-08-10T11:46:00.000-07:00

In a comment to my previous post about the CERN's Large Hadron Collider,

Moody wrote:

"According to Sean Carroll (of Cosmic Variance), the likelihood of there being a dangerous black hole created is 0.0000000000000000000000001%. That's far, far, far less than a one in a million chance."

Thanks to Moody for sharing this information...

Intel ATOM vs AMD Bobcat!! The processor wars

2008-08-04T11:25:00.000-07:00

I had once posted about the Browsers wars.. the classic tug-o-war between IE and FireFox and as they say - history repeats itself, this time its the "Low-Wattage-Processors wars". Not much after Intel's ATOM hit the commercial market, rival AMD has burst the Bobcat bubble.

AMD's Bobcat is their answer to Intel ATOM and is designed for low power consumption functionality. These are targeting the Mobile Internet Device segment in the market. AMD Bobcat will be formally announced in November later this year. Some rumored technical specs say that the proccy will run at ~1Ghz with 128KB L1 cache and 256KB L2 cache.

Comparing both ATOM and Bobcat, the power consumption of Bobcat is likely to be around 8 watts - about three times more than that of ATOM, but Intel's design lays the extra burden of the NorthBridge running at 6 Watts, so the total touches almost the same figure in both architectures.
AMD's solution includes an integrated NorthBridge. The end point is that the commercial IMD segment is going to grow in leaps and bounds now and we can expect many price drops in the near future..

Virtualization Ahoy!!.

2008-07-15T00:00:00.000-07:00

Looking at a lot of info about Virtualization, and especially Microsoft Viridian, I see there are various twists and turns to the whole issue..

PROS..

Same Hardware but multiple software roles.. Imagine Print Server, File Server, RADIUS Server etc all on the same machine but on different OSes.. So any admin repair to the File Server that needs a re-start or suspension of the service wont affect the other services.

CONS..

At the same time, the hardware proves to be a single point of failure. what if the parent OS goes down??

CERN - gifting you a black hole this season

2008-08-10T09:08:00.000-07:00

CERN's latest project - The Large Hadron Collider is going to gift you a probable Black Hole. The CERN LHC lab will be creating small black holes by smashing protons and consider the tiny possibility that one of those cute little black holes gets hungry at the wrong time..

Fortunately, the chances of that happening are really small. But we dont want it to be that particular one in million case where things do go wrong..Good luck to the CERN scientists and hope their computers dont crash in the middle of the experiment.

Singularity - Series III : Look into Contract Based Channels(CBCs)

2008-07-07T07:42:00.000-07:00

CBCs - Contract Based Channels can be thought of as Pipes in the conventional OS analogy. CBCs are used for communication between SIPs (Software Isolated Processes).

A CBC is bi-directional and both end points are predefined in terms of functionality, working as an in-order message queue.. The bi-directional CBC's two ends are called as Import End (Imp) and Export End(Exp). The CBC is managed by a predefined protocol that is established by the two communicating SIPs.

Thus the 'Contract' in Contract Based Channel defines the arguments and the protocol that will be used during the communication. It also specifies that the protocol applied to one end i.e. either the Imp End or the Export End will not the inter-changeable.

By the details in the research papers, one can confer that the CBSs are owned by exactly two threads.. that is, one end of the CBC is controlled by one thread exclusively and other end by the other and cant be shared by any other thread of any other SIP. This will force the designers to re-think how multiple threads will communicate with each other. There might be a hypothetical situation where say more than 2 threads need to work on the same set of data, in that case maybe there is some mechnanism for chaining the CBCs.

Visual Studio 2008

2008-06-27T17:48:00.000-07:00

Here come the Visual Studio 2008, having used the Team Edition, I bet its the best IDE yet. I liked LINQ the best...

The flexibility to loosely declare variables (a La Javascript) is a cool feature..

var myVariable;
myVariable = 10;

now the 'myVariable' variable that was generically declared as 'var' assumes the functionality of a qualified int. The reflection can be immediately seen as soon as the variable has been 'type-defined'.

LINQ -

int[10] myInts = {.......};
var Query = from number in myInts where number <6 style="font-family: courier new;">

Microsoft Singularity - Series II

2008-03-21T13:04:00.000-07:00

Somehow, the Singularity project has something that keeps you coming back to update. As I promised, I delved into the innards of Singularity and today I read about the Software Isolated Processes (SIPs) in Singularity.

Basically a SIP is a holder of processing resources and
provides the context for program execution. Unlike
traditional processes, SIPs take advantage of the type and memory
safety of modern programming languages {C#(Sing# in this case)} to dramatically reduce
the cost of isolating safe code.

Execution of each user program occurs within the context of a
SIP. Associated with a SIP is a set of memory pages containing
code and data.

The best feature of using the SIP architecture is failure isolation, which I believe is very important in the OS purview.

More on MBP- Manifest Based Programs in the next post..

Microsoft Singularity - Series I

2008-03-15T12:17:00.000-07:00

I have been reading a lot about Microsoft Singularity, the nex-gen OS research platform and since I have not been updating very regularly lately, what better than Singularity to start with...

What has caught my fantasy in the Singularity Project is the amount of code that has been written in higher level languages, especially C#, breaking the age-old adage that 4th Gen and higher Languages are not meant to write OSes. Around 80% of the source code of the Singularity project has been written in C#. Actually, the Singularity is not an OS in itself, its a platform that allows you to code specifically tailored OSes with an eye into the future, giving emphasis on modularity and impregnability of process memory.

The 3 pillars on which Singularity, conceived in 2003, stands are - Software Isolated Processes (SIPs), Manifest-Based Programs (MBPs) and Contract-Based Channels.. There are many more features that show a radical change in the architecture of OSes that we should look forward to in the near future.

Watch this space for an in-depth analysis of the Singularity architecture.

Microsoft XNA 3.0 CTP - made for the ZUNE experience

2008-06-20T11:59:00.000-07:00

Microsoft XNA 3.0 CTP has been touted as the next-gen Game Development Platform released by Microsoft. With support for Zune, enthusiasts all over the world are busy making games for the ZUNE platform, throw in some wireless support and you have a frag happy tag match....Read more on my original Channel8.msdn post..

Imagine Cup 2008

2008-01-27T11:05:00.001-08:00

Image Cup -08 is awesome, and the best news is that I have qualified for Round 2 in Project- Hoshimi Programming Battle!!
Lets see now, the round 2 starts on 15th Feb, till then I have to learn every small thing in the whole Project Hoshimi Namespace.
This time its going to be the expert group.. Hope, I can make it through. I am going to Paris!!

Noise cancelling headphones.

2008-01-19T10:20:00.000-08:00

I was browsing around for some good headphones and found this web site where they have very nicely organized the headphones based on ranking, quite solved my problem. My old headphones were broken a few days back - the wire snapped. They were cheap ones, just temporary so now I thought that I go ahead and get myself some real good "Noise Cancellation Headphones"..
Initially I got lost at ebay! thousands of fakes every where. But WIZE.com has a great listing of headphones from quite a healthy mix of brands: panasonic, Digital Age, Shure, Koss, JVC.... the list goes on.
I also liked the filtering system, so I could filter by brands, type, cost etc.. great website design deserves a mention sure.
I shortlisted the following :

Just love the looks of the ER20BP!
I have put a screen shot of the website for you guys out there to look at.. quite nice design i must say again.