My World, My thoughts

Guys, I am back here with a new post .... n dis time, I m gonna write about the New Hires Day event of Microsoft India ......

• Most of us had done internship in MS last summer … so it was a fantastic opportunity to meet other interns, respective team members and other acquaintances.
• It was a two day event n dey hadn’t told us the exact schedule of the event … so I was pretty curious to find out wats inside the box

• The prime idea of organizing such gatherings is bonding among the new hires ….. instead of new hires meeting on the training day itself, dey get to know there future colleagues a bit earlier n helps them to bond with each other ….

Hi guys,

Its been a really long time since I last updated my blog .... the reason is that I`ve always had pretty much to say but no time or patience to write it down .... as a result, I simply dint post anything new ....

Well, moving ahead, MNIK released last week ... I was very excited to watch the movie for three reasons:

1) Its a Kajol-SRK starrer
2) The promos made me really curious
3) The dialogue "My name is KHAN and I am not a terrorist ..."

So finally, I watched it ... I loved the movie .... its soft, touching, the performances gave me goosebumps and it gives a very good message in most pragmatic and unbiased way ...... and its certainly not pro-Islamic .... I`m really proud of the fact that such a movie is made in a secular nation like India ....

I was really touched by certain scenes like Rizwan`s scrutiny at airport, FBI torturing him even after knowing that hez autistic, school teacher teaching Islam as the most violent religion, Rizwan`s mother teaching him about good and bad guys etc

I saw the movie on Saturday afternoon .... after coming back, while I was surfing, I came across an article about MNIK saying that Indian audience wont be able to connect with the movie bcoz watever has been shown in the movie does not really happen in India .....but its surely gonna touch people from US, UK and Middle east Asian countries ..... and the reason for this is possibly that India has not seen any 9/11 (the event which changed the way the world looks at Islam ....)

I was shocked to read this ....we may not have 9/11 but we certainly have 26/11 .... both the events happened in name of Jihad .... but, yet in India, we don't see such discrimination against Islam or, for that matter, any other religion (Cheers to our democracy and secularism !!!) .....

I think what we need to understand at this point is that Terrorism has got no religion, that it does not belong to any caste or color ..... It evolved over a period of time and it has grown up to a level that now it has got a nationality of its own .....terrorism does not belong to Afghanistan, Pakistan or India .... It itself is like a country against the rest of the world.... and we cant eliminate it simply by waging a war against a particular religion or a particular country (read Afghanistan).... on the same Saturday, Pune was attacked .... it was the first major attack after 26/11 .... and even though a German bakery was targeted, but it wasn't really targeted against Germans ... its target was entire humanity .....

and yet, whenever we think of terrorists, image of a person with long beard and cap comes in our minds .... whenever news channels are covering an attack report, they`ll show fictitious terrorists with long beard ..... it seems as if all terrorist are born in one religion only ... I am damn sure David Headingly is not a Muslim .... its sad ..really sad ... and we need much more than a simple movie to erase it from our minds, our thinking and our planet ....

We need to understand that we are MORE THAN JUST A NAME ....

Hi everyone,

As I had mentioned in my last blog, I am here with the complete procedure to create a bootable USB Drive for Windows 7 Installation. The advantage of installing it from USB is that it is very fast. Believe it or not, but it took me only 15 mins to get my Win 7 OS ready.

So before going further, please make sure you have Windows 7 ISO file.

This procedure is for Vista Users:

For those who are using Vista, its pretty simply because of the utility called DISKPART that is already there in Vista. Here is the whole process:

1. Using Daemon Tools, mount the Win 7 iso on a virtual drive. And also insert a USB (at least 4 GB) in one of your USB Ports.
2. Click on Start --> RUN. Type cmd on the window that appears. You will see a command prompt window that comes up.



3.Type DISKPART in that window. You`ll find another Diskpart Utility popping up.



4. Type following commands:

List disk

This will show all the storage disk attached to your computer. You should note the number of the USB drive. This can be found out by checking size of the disks shown.



Now type:
Select disk 1 (if one is the number if your USB drive)
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32 quick
assign
exit

Thats it. Your USB is now ready to be used as bootable drive. The only thing remaining is to copy all the files from the Windows 7 iso to this USB. Simply copy all files from the virtual drive to the USB.

Hi everyone,

I have recently started MSDN Academic Alliance in my college. MSDN Academic Alliance is a Microsoft Program for college and universities where the students and faculty can download Microsoft Products for free. MSDN Academic Alliance is similar to various other MSDN and TechNet subscriptions. The only difference is that its meant for colleges. There are lot of useful products available on MSDN AA. One that catches everyone`s attention is Windows 7 Professional Version that is now available for download (much earlier than its scheduled release date October 22nd).

Recently I came to know that people are facing lot of problems in the third step of Win 7 (and few other software) downloads. This step is CRC Checking. Basically, the copy we download from MSDN AA is not an EXE file. Its wrapped in another format which is called SDC or Secure Digital Content. So what happens in that first you download the SDC file and then EXE file is extracted from it. This happens during CRC Check stage. At the same time, it checks for the consistency of the file downloaded.

If this step takes a lot of time, then you need not worry about it. Simply follow the following procedure:

1. Download a small utility called UNPACK SDC. Its a command line utility. To download it, please click here.
2. Once the file is downloaded, extract the zip file. You will get an exe file. Copy it to the folder where you have downloaded the SDC file from MSDN AA.



3. Then Click on Start Button --> Run. Then write "cmd" on Run window and press enter or click on OK.



4. A command line prompt should come up. On this go to the folder where you have saved SDC file.



5. Then type the following command.

unpacksdc "name of sdc file" "output folder location" skipcrc



6. And now your ISO file is ready. Go ahead and burn in it DVD to install Windows 7. Alternatively you can also install win 7 from USB. The procedure is in my next blog post.

I was simply going through random news and suddenly found that Google has launched its improved search engine for public testing today. Codenamed "Caffeine", Google calls it the next generation search architecture with better indexing of links leading to more speedy search results, improved accuracy and relevance. They have definitely made few changes in their Page-rank algorithm which can be seen by comparing search results of new and old Google.

I tried few searches in new Google and found that its definitely better in terms of speed. Now it takes almost half time. but in terms of accuracy and relevance, its only a marginal difference. For those who would like to try it out, here is the link:

New Google

I was actually expecting new user interface features. But I got to see the same old simple Google home page. Google gave no indications about releasing the new search infrastructure. People are looking at this new launch as Google`s reply to Microsoft Bing. But what I feel is that this Google`s strategy to divert the attention of internet users from Bing. Of late, Bing has been in news for its revamped search technology and better results(compared to previous Live Search results). And after making a partnership with Yahoo, it has really emerged as a potential rival to Google. By creating news, Google has surely pulled a lot of Bing users. Further, with Facebook and Twitter launching its own real time search engine, google needed a way to redirect its users back .....

The bottom line: The Search WAR is still on .....