May 2009 - Posts
27th May, 2009
Venue: DECC, UWTC, Tripureshwor, Kathmandu
As scheduled, Microsoft Nepal today organized the meeting with Mr. Jonathan Murray, World Wide Technology Officer, Microsoft and Mr. Oliver Bell, Regional Technology Officer, Microsoft Asia Pacific. Also, attraction of the program was the presence of Mr. Feroz Mahmud, Country Manager of Microsoft Bangladesh.
Everything got started formally at 9 am in the morning with a welcome speech by
Mr. Allen Bailochan Tuladhar, Country Manager, Microsoft Nepal. Back to the era of 1960s to 2009 and a decade forward to 2020, Mr. Murray presented his perspective on the trend in the growth and advancement of internet and software industry in the world. He put forward his views on
Cloud Computing in Windows Azure platform and subsequent technology shift to the age of
Ambient Intelligence. Mr. Murray also wanted to let people have an idea that the present education system in colleges and universities is not going to be of much significance to address the ever changing and ever growing technology needs, problems and solutions. So, what is going to be the matter of interest is a person’s ability to learn, unlearn and relearn the relevant technology capsules to meet the global IT requirements.
Mr. Feroz Mahmud in the other hand expressed his belief on the high end competency level of the South Asian IT community of people to deliver world class softwares and IT solutions provided they have access to some core guidances, healthy environment and good opportunity but made an early exit from the speaker’s desk.
Last, but not the least, Mr. Oliver Bell, APAC Officer, Microsoft talked on the issues of interoperability. He shared his descent concern over the matter by expressing that in an increasingly interconnected computing landscape, enabling interoperability between products from different vendors has become more important than ever. Achieving effective interoperability between a wide range of products to meet customer needs is where Microsoft sees future in.
At the end of all the sessions, Microsoft Student Partners among the attendees smartly took TechMeet reason as an opportunity for a short GD(Group Discussion) on their own diverse MSP issues.
Are you guys aware that Microsoft is really trying hard to beat the world of web search apart from it’s core software business? You understand whom Microsoft is challenging in this context ? Let it be your part to find out. Yes, within the next few days, Microsoft is expected to come up with a new search engine called “Bing”. The code name for the working period had been designated the name as “Kumo” for it.
It has also come to my notice that this search engine is gonna be a replacement or rather a modification in name and many other essential factors for the already existing Microsoft’s Live Search. But guys, this is just an speculation as Microsoft is yet to give a final go for this product.
So folks, be ready for a new day. Be ready to use the new search engine, be ready to ‘Bing it’!
It’s a great news for me as a Microsoft Student Partner that Jonathan Murray, World Wide Technology Officer, Microsoft and Oliver Bell, APAC Technology Officer, Microsoft are visiting Nepal and I have been invited by Microsoft Nepal to attend this event.
The event will also see the presence of no. of faculties from different engineering colleges in which Microsoft Student Partners are present.
Since the program will begin early 8:30 am in the morning on Wednesday, 27th may, I will be reaching the venue which is DECC, United World Trade Center, Tripureshwor around the same timing. The program is expected to be over by about 11am.
Lets hope that the meet comes out to be fruitful in whatever way it should come out to be.
Being a Microsoft Student Partner (MSP), I got this opportunity to share and enjoy a quality time with some of the most active MSPs from different engineering and technical colleges of Nepal and a couple of people from Microsoft Nepal as well. This was a kind of informal gathering at a spot called Naghdaha( Nepali translation: Nagh means snake, daha means lake), a place full of greenery and a beautiful lake which lies exactly south, not so far away from the main city of Kathmandu.
Although, it was a MSP gathering, we missed our own Community lead, Mr. Shailendra Jha this time since he was leading a delegation of Nepalese Microsoft Community including an MSP Kushal Gautam to an Annual International technology fair TechEd India 2009 an event by Microsoft to Hyderbad in India.
It was a cool and sunny Saturday afternoon and the meeting was more like a fun. We all the MSPs along with country manager, Microsoft Nepal Mr. Allen Bailochan Tuladhar and Technology Specialist Mr. Udhyan Timilsina got sitted at one of the many shades available there something in a manner that looked like we were in a round table meeting (But I tell you guys, everything was so informal) from where we could enjoy the great looking panoramic view of the lake and the people enjoying boating there as well.
We enjoyed food and drinks together and had lots of unofficial chats, had a deeper insight of each of the MSPs personal life, a bit of privacy access and so on and so fourth. To make the gathering even more interesting, we hired a couple of boats and all of us had a boating session for about an hour. Looking at the facial expressions and body postures of some of the people among us; it seemed as if they had hydrophobia but interestingly everybody nodded a comfortable ‘yes’ for this experience.
Yes, of course we had some serious talks together for couple of times as well. We took time to discuss about our future plans and events, status of MSP activities at respective colleges and ‘Ask for genuine’ issues. We also shared our individual perspective on the present status of Nepalese Microsoft Student Partners, how we could go about more efficiently in the years to come and roll out more fruitful and rewarding programs at colleges.
Finally, as most of our activities pushed our informality to its limit, we didn’t really realise when we exactly started packing our stuffs to get back to our destinations, but I think the group photo sessions at last, gradual setting of sun and some bid adieus from beautiful lady MSPs made us to realize that, yes it was time to leave.
My experiences tell me that running Windows 7 on a machine which supports Windows Vista is not a problem at all from hardware compatibility point of view. But, for those poor machines which have not had the taste of any of these platforms yet, there is a quick way to know whether your PC can support the latest Windows 7 RC.
To begin with, just download, install and run the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor, which is just a reliable product although a beta now, it gives you a report that tells you if your PC can support and run Windows 7 and also further information about possible compatibility issues.
It is advisable to plug out any sort of Universal Serial Bus devices or others such as printers and scanners before you actually run the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor.
As the technical preview for Office 2010 program is kicking off in July, it is beneficial for us to know a bit about the preliminary system requirements for its deployment. To let you know, I have already registered myself here. So folks, if you too want to receive an email to be able to enjoy the early technical preview of Office 2010, don’t wait, it’s high time you register; get, set and go!
Now, talking about the basic system requirements, Office 2010 will be available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions and it could be run either on Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista or Windows 7 platforms. Compatibility is something I thought about not to miss to mention here as Office 2010 will fully support the hardware that runs Office 2007. I guess this is good on the part that we can take advantage of the hardware that we already own.
Recently Microsoft launched Microsoft Vine, primarily now in its beta form, which is designed to allow small groups and organizations to share vital information. Vine is a downloadable application that allows us to send out Twitter-style alerts, circulate reports with more complete information, and keep track of user Vine contacts. This sounds a lot like a social network, but according to Microsoft, Vine is built solely as a way to organise and disseminate important information among organisations such as sports teams, schools and colleges, or to stay in touch with neighbours, family, and friends during an emergency. Right now, Vine is only available for machines running Windows XP with SP2 or Windows Vista 32- and 64-bit editions.
Vine starts at the dashboard, which pops up as a widget-like window on user desktop. Users can sign in into Vine using user Windows Live ID (Microsoft has not said whether user Messenger contacts would be automatically pulled in to user Vine network). Vine lets us control the information we want to send out by organising user contacts into groups; it also lets us decide who can send information to us.
Users can also send and receive Vine alerts via text message or e-mail. Microsoft says it has plans in the future to incorporate more ways to interact with Vine, including Twitter, landline telephones, and special needs devices. The idea is to make Vine as inclusive a service as possible and allow people to interact with Vine in a way that feels natural to them. As said earlier, Vine is in private beta right now and only open to 10,000 people based in the Seattle area. Microsoft came out with Vine, which the company calls a "societal networking" service. Vine is currently a free service and Microsoft has yet to release any monetisation plans for Vine.
If anybody asks if this is another social media application, then Microsoft has a good answer to reply them back. Microsoft says Vine is a hyper local, personalized message and alert system. It is especially good during emergency periods. And, it's intended to be a dashboard that people can use to keep tabs of their family, friends, activities and major events in their community. The dashboard -- which appears as a widget on a PC screen -- displays a map of the user's community and the status of their contacts. It also has buttons to send alerts or reports, which can be sent and received on the PC or as text messages on a cell phone.
Till now this service is available in US only but let’s wait until it is rolled out in the rest of the world including Nepal. Moreover, it would be interesting to watch if Vine can catch up to Microsoft’s expectations as the similar contenders are already at high pace while this product is now just in its early beta stage.
Date: Friday, May 2, 2009
Venue: Unlimited Building, Khichapokhari, Kathmandu.
Participants: Nepalese Microsoft Student Partners and guests.
‘More than 90% of Nepali population is not good at English. But, more than 90% of the computations, including the websites are in English. The problem of hacked font based solutions for Indic computing is over. Now, we can develop really OS supported fully integrated OS solutions employing Unicode.’
I think this rationale is just sufficient to justify why attending the Bhasa Workshop fully driven by the series of hands on presentations from Country Manager of Microsoft Nepal, Mr. Allen Bailochan Tuladhar was fruitful. Yes, the ultimate goal of the Workshop was to be able to develop products which would be used in Nepal and particularly target the growing Nepalese market.
The workshop got started at 9 am in the morning with an interesting and informative video clip by Young Asia Televison in which Mr. Tuladhar was tagged as King of the Nepalese Software Market. It’s commendable to note that he and his unlimited team were able to produce and supply softwares as per the demand of Nepalese market which otherwise the international software industry would not have created for the developing countries like Nepal.
Then, after a short rudimentary session on fonts and Unicode, the workshop took full swing in discussing several aspects of ‘Bhasa’ (which means language in Nepali) including Globalization, Localizability, Localization and Resources. It was interesting to learn from the grass root level that to simplify the installation in Windows platform to meet the user’s requirement, the languages with similar characteristics are grouped together into collections and hence there are mainly three main language categories: European, East Asian and Indic languages. This discussion primarily focused on the various types of Locales it’s installation in OS. The presentation seemed so simple in itself yet the content was very informative and practical.
Between the sessions, Mr. Nutan Marasini, an SQL expert, gave a glimpse of front and back end aspects in web development, presented his expertise in SQL and database basics and unicode implementation for multi-lingual approach.
We also had a session on Indic languages in which we got to learn Unicode, Complex Script support, Multi Lingual User Interface and fonts among others. The sessions were pretty long and it wasn’t really easy to spend hours in a single sitting. So, Mr. Tuladhar time and again came up with cool jokes and Video clips that supported Bhasa Workshop some way and smartly captured the refreshed attention from the participants.
The session on Open Type Font (OTF) was the core part of the workshop. And, this component was not so easy to learn though. But, somehow I guess we all survived. In between, looking at the procedure, it seemed creating the glyphs were really tedious. But, yes again, it’s a known fact, hard work never goes unnoticed. We were pretty sure the end result would be magnificent. FontoGrapher was a good application to create glyphs yet there were other tools like FontLab to play around. Gradually, we got to know about using VOLT (download here), a great tool for adding Opentype tables to fonts and we had hands on session in its implementation as well.
A 45 minutes long lunch break in the afternoon gave us a good time to fuel up and stretch out ourselves and two coffee sessions and circulation of goodies kept us lively for around 8 and half hours, thanks to Microsoft support!
Finally, what I can say is the taste of Nepali bhasa and Nepali font with Microsoft’s tongue was absolutely tasty!
Redmond, Washington - Microsoft has yesterday made the Release Candidate of Windows 7 available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers. General public availability will follow on May 5 at the Microsoft Download Center.
New features in the release candidate include remote media streaming, Windows XP Mode and a beta of the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor. A number of enhancements have also been made to existing features based on feedback from beta testers, including enhancements to the Windows taskbar and improved functionality for touch screen machines.
"Listening to our partners and customers has been fundamental to the development of Windows 7," says Bill Veghte, senior vice president for Windows business at Microsoft. "We heard them and worked hard to deliver the highest quality Release Candidate in the history of Windows. We have more partner support than we've ever had for an RC and are pleased to say that the Windows 7 RC has hit the quality and compatibility bar for enterprises to start putting it through its paces and testing in earnest."
The updated minimum system requirements for Win 7 now state 1GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor, 1 GB of RAM (32-bit)/2 GB of RAM (64-bit), 16 GB of available disk space (32-bit)/20 GB (64-bit), DirectX 9 graphics device with Windows Display Driver Model 1.0 or higher.
And, yes there is no limit to how many copies can be downloaded. The software will run until 1 June 2010.
So, people try out before you have to buy to try!