I have been asked a number of times, what books do I have and use. It is a long list and I am too lazy to list them out. So instead here is a photo I had taken about a year ago. Sure there are more books since then on different topics, but this should be good enough to give you a flavour. Also people asked me about my machines and study at home – and there is a photo for that too. This was in London and not in Bangalore of course. I guess this might mean I need to get to cleaning things more often and probably invest in some cable management solution. :) ...

So I switched on my Bluetooth headset and discovered the Text to Speech feature that Mango has which works brilliantly. On the other hand, the reverse – speech to Text has a few short comings. Here is what was send to the missus when I replied to an SMS using this feature: “Okay calling amusing text to speech not speak to destitute lots of okay bye” And in case you were wondering, no I did not say that – but something quite different. I guess Mango is still beta :) ...

Sorry, this is in Hinglish ; too complicated to try and translate it. :) RESULT AGAR ACHCHA HO: Maa- Bhagwan ki kripa hai. Papa- Beta Kiska Hai. Dost- Chal Daaru Peete hain RESULT AGAR BURA HO: Maa- Aag lage is college main. Papa- Laad pyar ne bigaad diya. Dost- Chal Daaru Peete hain! NAUKRI LAGNE PAR: Maa- Apni sehat ka khyal rakhna Papa- Khoob Mehnat se kaam karna. Dost- Chal Daaru Peete hain! ...

Microsoft recently release the Kinect SDK which allows you to implement a Natural User Interface and program against it! There is a lot of interest around including claims on how Robotics will change to how you can integrate a light sensor. You can use Visual Studio (C++, C# and VB.NET supported) and get quite interesting results. ...

So, what kind of a company do you think Google is? I guess the obvious answer – it is a search company. I would beg to differ and say it is on the contrary a data mining company. They make their money from AdSense and the Click-thru and sure, the search was the initial pull but now it is the data mining which pulls in the $$$’s. In some respects it is a one-trick pony, albeit a pretty good trick. ...

When implementing an occasionally connected architecture for a solution, there are three fundamental requirements: Part of the overall solution, some smart client is deployed and installed on the desktop and a web only approach is not possible. The main rational being that a smart client can work in a disconnected mode which of course with a web application is not possible. Underlying infrastructure needs to be in place to support this. Infrastructure is not specifically networks and servers, but also both the operational environment and the user’s environment and machine. The operational environments need to allow things such as: data caching, local storage of user data, user profile details, etc. More robust exception management process – this is not only about handling errors but also understanding the fact that the application is in a disconnected state and needs to do things differently. When designing an occasionally connected application, there are two design approaches that one can take - data centric or service oriented. ...

If you are a Tea person (and I am not), then you would like Cup of Brown joy from Professor Elemental – who is basically a guy from Colonial India who does hip hop.

Debugger Canvas is a new user experience for the debugger in Visual Studio Ultimate. It pulls together the code you’re exploring onto a single pan-and-zoom display. As you hit breakpoints or step into code, Debugger Canvas shows just the methods that you’re debugging, with call lines and local variables, to help you see the bigger picture. Check out the quick demo below to see what it is capable of and read up on the guide on how to use it . ...

Pedro has build one of the best apps for Windows Phone 7 (WP7) that I have ever come across - TFS on the Road . As the application navigation map shows below it covers most aspects of TFS that you would be interested in – all packaged up in a very nice GUI. :) ...

If you are having constant issues with a specific hardware, then one of the culprits could be a corrupt device driver for that hardware. In simple terms, a device driver is nothing but another computer program which allows Windows and other applications to interact with the specific hardware. Since this is very hardware specific, generally one need to install the specific drivers for that device. ...

Recently the wife installed the latest iOS update for her iPhone 4 (all 600+ MB of it! And people have the misconception that Microsoft software is bloated?). After the update, the Sync on the phone was failing with the following error: “The iPhone cannot be synced. An unknown error occurred (13019)” as shown in the screenshot below. She did have the latest version of iTunes – not that made any difference. Also, restarting iTunes or rebooting the phone and the machine did not help and the error remained the same. After a quick search online , it seems quite a few others have the same problem. ...

One word - WOW!

I am getting bored with the current WordPress theme on the blog and was interested in getting another theme (preferably free), got any recommendations? And nothing from the 10 ugliest WordPress themes please. :-)

If you are ever in a situation where you want to find out if you logged into using cached domain credentials (AD) or authenticated against the domain controller then the easiest way is to open Event Viewer and look for the entry where the source is NETLOGON and Event ID 5719. The description would be something like: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Log Name: System Source: NETLOGON Date: 27/05/2011 08:53:17 Event ID: 5719 Task Category: None Level: Error Keywords: Classic User: N/A Computer: YOUR-Full-Qualified-Computer-Name Description: This computer was not able to set up a secure session with a domain controller in domain YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME due to the following: There are currently no logon servers available to service the logon request. This may lead to authentication problems. Make sure that this computer is connected to the network. If the problem persists, please contact your domain administrator. ADDITIONAL INFO If this computer is a domain controller for the specified domain, it sets up the secure session to the primary domain controller emulator in the specified domain. Otherwise, this computer sets up the secure session to any domain controller in the specified domain. Here is a screenshot (on Win 7) showing a (filtered) view of the same event. ...

If you ever want to get a Mini Dump of a process (of course for debugging purposes) the easiest way to do so is to use Task Manager (or use Sys Explorer ). Just find the process you are interested in, right click and select “Create Dump File” and voila. One thing to be careful – make sure you are using the same version of the Task Manager (or Sys Explorer) as the process. For example if your process is x32 (and you are running on a x64 system), then make sure you are using x32 version of Task Manager and not the x64 as that will cause issues. ...

More related details on Dustin’s post - WCF scales up slowly with bursts of work .

There are times when you need to kill a number of processes in one-go like today when Chrome crashed a few times hanging all the running instances – next time Google says, one tab cannot bring down all of them – send them my way :). For such times, a PowerShell script is all you need. I wrote up a simple one which takes the process name as input and then kills all the processes which match that name. ...

My dear friend Mario has finally got around to blogging and one of his latest posts shows , it is possible to run Hadoop (which if you are not familiar with, can be thought of as an open source version of Google’s MapReduce ) in Azure. You need to setup a typical configuration of nodes (Name Nodes, Tracker and Slaves). ...

After moving to Bangalore, it turns out that I would need to get one or more UPS’s for the machines at home. The place we will be moving to in a few weeks does have power backup, but if/when there is a power cut it takes a few minutes for the generators to kick in and is not instantaneous as I was thinking. I have never bought a UPS until now and don’t have any experience with it - what are the things that I need to consider? I will have the following equipment running which will need to be powered up for about 15 minutes: ...

Read this story in the Guardian about a guy called Matt , who blogged about bringing up his daughter all alone, as his wife died soon after giving birth. This was such a heart stopping story, which is highly recommended. Interesting shift on the tone of the blog which first helped Matt with the bereavement and later gave him strength to cope with this to finally the blog providing support for others in a similar boat and looking for help. ...

In other news of the day … we are going to be moving in the next few weeks to Bangalore. Avanade , is sending me on a posting / secondment to Bangalore for 18 months to help out with a few things. Of course, the family will be moving as well. After my tenure, the plan is to come back to London. ...

Update 2: Car already sold - thanks for all the interest. Update: Dropping the price we we need to sell the car soon! I am wanting to sell my car and thought I would put it up on my blog first before trying other places. It is a Left Hand Drive BMW 330i Automatic (2001 model) with 89K miles in Excellent condition and has both the Sports and Premium packages factory installed. ...