Bangalore metro rail work to start next April - The Economic Times I really hope the karnataka gov is serious about considering a alternative to the massive traffic problems in bangalore. Last time I visited bangalore in Dec 2002, I was amazed to see the explosive growth of this city. All the other mass transport plans never saw the light of the day, hope this is not one of them.

Wishing you all a very happy and wonderful new year (2004).
I really hope this year will enable me to do more of blogging.

Regards
Ajay

webservices.xml.com: Web Services Acronyms, Demystified [Jan. 09, 2002] A very good article, although written in Jan -2002, gives a high level overview of some of commonly used web services acronyms. Lots of new protocols and WS standards have been since added.

Testimony of Dr. David R. Criswell: Senate Hearing on "Lunar Exploration" | SpaceRef - Your Space Reference. Save the environment by harnessing the solar power generated and beamed from stations located on the Moon . I personally think it is going to take a couple of decades before this technology can be made practical. But this possibility can save our envioronment on earth, this can also bring down the cost of producing power significantly.

Sessions

For those of you who missed the action in Microsoft PDC. All the material from various PDC sessions where you can find information on latest and greatest MS technology and products.

ScienceDaily News Release: Quantum Computer Could Solve Problems In A Few Months That Would Take Conventional Computers Millions Of Years. This is clearly a disruptive technical innovation that can change the way we look at computing power today. In a decade or so we will reach a saturation point with the semi-conductor technology in terms of die size and speed, quantum computing has a very good chance of being the next leap in scientific development. The challenge will be to find the supporting applications requiring the horse power in the consumer market. Can anybody think of applications that require the computing power other than games in the future?

Steve and I went for a beautiful hike in the Mt. jefferson park last weekend. To get to the hike is about 1.5 hr drive from Portland, Oregon.

Driving direction:
From I5 sounth (south of salem) take 22 west. Immediately after the mile post 60, turn left into white water rd (it is very easy to miss this turn). Follow the dirt road for 6 miles till you hit the trail head.

Total Hike distance is around 12 miles with a toal elevation gain of 2,100 ft. You have to hike along the ridge line (on the pacific crest trail) with the beautiful view of the forest below and the Mt. Jefferson staring right in front of you. Finally you will reach a series of beautiful lakes called the bay lake, strout lake, heart lake etc. A wonderful day hike with some spectacular views.


some pictures are attached

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I am taking an interesting class this quarter called the organization change management. Some of suggested reading material seems pretty good. I will post more about this class as it progresses.

This is the executive summary (Marketing part) for my MBA class business plan. I think the product One-Card has a lot of potential ... there is a clear market need, we will see how the business plan progresses.

I. Executive Summary
One-Card is a convenient, secure and practical digital card product and service. One-Card aims to eventually replace the traditional bulky wallet with a single easy to carry digital solution.
The Product
Multiple current offerings of plastic money, digital money and various membership services will all be rolled under one standard One-Card interface. The patented technology behind the product called “One-Card common cryptographic interface” has combined existing proven technologies in creative ways to support the digital card infrastructure. One-Card works with existing infrastructure, making it widely acceptable.
Market
We will supply an added convenience of One-Card to the rapidly growing PDA users who currently carry many cards. This market has been well established, Gartner predicts PDA sales of 33.7 million by 2004, up from this year's projected 13.7 million. Of this number, a significant number is held by the small business owners. Many small businesses have some pretty complex purchasing requirements, this is where the One-Card product provides valuable services to organize and manage all credit transactions securely. The small business owner is the primary target market segment for this product.
Objectives
Security and privacy of customers will be key objective along with supporting numerous value-added services that enhance the value and developing a strong global retail channel for making this product widely available and acceptable.
Mission
Our goal is to establish One-Card as a market leader in digital card solutions by forming a network of users and vendors with emphasis on security and standardization of card technologies. Enhance the acceptability by licensing the standard interface to other product manufacturers and vendors.

With E-mail Dying, RSS Offers Alternative. An excellent article that describes RSS as an viable alternative to using email as means of reaching subscribers. Using email to generate newsletters or daily, weekly content summaries through subscription is annoying to users thus gets trapped by junk mail filters. It is very clear that the industry is rapidly adopting syndication as a means to reach customers.

I finally placed an order for a new laptop. I bought Dell's Inspiron 300m
Dell - Dell Home Systems Inspiron 300m Notebook with the following additions..
60GB hard disk instead of the standard 40 GB.
Dell TrueMobile® 1300 WLAN (802.11b/g, 54Mbps) miniPCI Card (I think having 802.11g support is a great to have)
128MB dell USB key
24X CD/RW / DVD combo (I was tempted to buy the DVD RW .. oh well) ...

Turn home number into mobile one. The most important feature that I am looking for is the capability to keep the same phone number even if I change the service provider, better still keep the same instrument (phone) as well. Hope all this changes happen as soon as possible.

Sluggish PC?

In case you started to notice a decline in your computer's performance over a period of time, it may be because of many unwanted tasks that are running in the background, read this article for find out more details.
Possible solution:
Run msconfig and go to the startup tab where you will notice all the processes that get started during startup. Disable processes that are not needed, you can find out more about what they do by going to this web site .

Microsoft to Test 'Voice Command' for PDAs, Phones. A person walking next to you can erase the data on your device by just talking ... alright I am kidding. We need a better way of controlling and communicating with our mobile device .... voice activated dialing is any catching on and I think this is a step in the right direction.

Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows: "Longhorn" Alpha Preview. I am not particularly impressed by any new longhorn features yet.

Few comments
New welcome screen -- can I plug my own screen which should be fully customizable?
Start Menu -- my contacts is useful .. but will I upgrade for this feature ... the answer is NO.
I don't clearly understand the benefit I would get from my hardware as opposed to the device manager.
My Computer --- Disk space is currently available as a tool tip .. maybe a marginally better way of representing the disk space.

I will update this post with more comments on longhorn.

Tinny computers, I always wondered how the actual usability will look like when the technology gets smaller and smaller. I am confident that technology hurdles are easy to overcome compared to the application, usability, privacy and security issues. Thinking about usage scenarios or what I call business innovation ahead of the technology innovation is going to be critical for succeeding in the future.

Red vs. Blue PDC Video All roads leading to the Microsoft PDC conference. It is a very well done video .. comment on the developers is pretty funny :)

I have started focusing on the marketing plan that needs to be completed for the MBA class. The idea for the marketing plan is called one card, the concept of consolidating all your credit cards, debit cards and memebership cards into one easy to use smart card.
Lots of problems with the infrastructure change and general customer acceptability. I will be blogging more about this work as it progresses.

FeedDemon RSS newsfeed Reader for Windows happens to be the best RSS reader and agreegator I have seen so far. This has some nice capabilities like groups, channels etc.

The best way to determine whether or not your .NET component belongs in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) is to answer the following 2 questions:
• Do you expect many applications to use your component on the same machine?
• Is there a significant disk requirement by your component?

If the answer is “yes” to either of the above questions then the component can potentially be installed in the GAC.

Location for my random rants on technology and architecture.