This weblog is retiring

I have been blogging here for just about less than a year now. By far, this was my longest stint on any blog service!

Not so surprisingly, this was my most successful blog too. I gained some good readership. It amazes me when I meet someone in the hallway who says - "I keep reading your blog".

Thank You readers!!!

I am now moving my blog to my own domain - http://blog.deobrat.com. The content on this blog will remain here and I have decided not to migrate my posts just to avoid spamming the search engines out there.

Please update your bookmarks and Feed Readers to point to my new blog.

The countdown has begun

If you are wondering what that timer on top of this page is for, here is your clue - I got engaged on August 26th 2007. Now do you want to take a guess what that timer stands for????

Correct! You got it right! Actually, irrespective of whether you got it right or wrong, I am still going to state it here in this post cause that basically is the intent of posting this entry. That was a lot of crap!!! Lets get straight to the point - today is January 11th and exactly after 100 days, on April 20th, 2008, 3 PM, I would be tying knots with Esha. To know a little more about Esha, you can read my old post about my engagement.

As everyone kept asking me about the date, I thought it would be a nice idea to put up a tiny little timer here on the blog. I had been thinking about it since last few days. One fine day, I sat down and wrote the timer. And now, its up here.

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Not surprisingly, some of my friends cursed me for not coming out of my geek hat even now. But I personally think its pretty cool! For one, it tells everyone how much time is left for my marriage so they can plan their travel etc. And secondly, I got to write some JavaScript code which I hadn't in about a year!

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UPDATE: The time of wedding has been changed to 11 PM. It was scheduled at 3 PM as mentioned earlier in this post.

Let there be light

Today is a very special day for me. As you may have guessed from some of my previous posts, I am a person who is easily moved with emotions. Today, something happened that ripped my heart apart. This would definitely bring a major change in my life. Or at least the way I look at things.

Microsoft as an organization has been committed to give something back to the society so as to empower the weaker sections to come up and help them shape the future of mankind. As a part of this, we have something called as "Giving Campaign" through which employees can contribute money, time towards this noble cause.

Today, we had people from India Literacy Program who had come to the campus. We could buy things from them (adding our contributions to the base price) and that would help empower the mission. I bought a T-Shirt with a small little contribution towards the fund.

This had again brought me into the "social" mood and I kept thinking about various things that we could do to help such initiatives. In the evening, we had kids from "Devnar Foundation for the Blind" visiting the campus. They were here to show us some of their talents. They were singing, dancing (group dances with amazing synchronization), playing musical instruments. It was an eye opener. And after watching them all, I hate myself for having thought of these bright kids as disabled. They are not disabled. We are. We do not see all the amazing capabilities they have.

There were a few very touching moments. One of the kids was asked what would he want to be when he grows up and he said "I want to become the President of India. We don't need your money. We don't need your sympathy. All we want is for you to share your knowledge with us. We can do everything that you can do. Just open your heart towards us". Have you ever imagined of a blind child having so much of confidence? Leave alone a blind kid, do we see this kind of confidence in ourselves? No. We are nowhere close to how courageous these kids are.

In closing speech, one of the kids (his name was Shrikanth) said, "I want to thank you all for spending your valuable time with us and for giving us a chance to perform in front of you. I know you have to work till late in night. Still you spent your time with us. That is very much encouraging for us. Maybe after 5 years, when I will be an employee of Microsoft, it would give me a lot of pleasure organizing such programs. I cannot describe in words how happy I would be to so. Have a nice day... or night". His last words struck me the most. I just don't know what to say for it. It was just very emotional.

I am moved with this and to start with, I have decided to spend 2 days every month with these kids and try to help them achieve what they want to. I will also sponsor a child's education through the foundation. The reason I am stating this here on my blog is that I know there are few people who read my blog. I want to use this as a channel to ask everyone to try and do their best to help these kids realize their potential. Please come forward. The world needs you.

If you wish to know more about Devnar Foundation, you can visit their website - http://www.devnarfoundationfortheblind.org/.

Mahatma - from my perspective

As a youngster, I always hated Gandhi. For reasons that do not seem too obvious to me now. I just could not understand why someone would not support Subhash Chandra Bose when he was engaged in gun-battle with the British. Why would someone not retaliate when innocents were being jailed, tortured and even killed? These questions were coming from a child who could not understand the greatness of the principle of Non-Violence. At times, I would even go to the extent of endorse Nathuram Godse for killing the Mahatma.

I don’t exactly remember when this happened. I was talking to someone about Gandhiji and was exchanging heated arguments (to be true, it was just me who was arrogant). He then said something that struck my mind really hard. He said, “Take a plain white cloth and sprinkle a little bit of ink in the middle of it. Ask anyone to take a look at it and ask them what they see. They would say – ink spots. Hardly anyone looks at the white cloth but nobody fails to notice the ink spots”. “Gandhiji is a personality far beyond our analysis. We often ignore plethora of things he did for the country and keep our eyes fixed on some of his mistakes”. This thought kind of enlightened me. It was nothing miraculous or anything even close to being miraculous. But it gave me a different way of looking at things. Some people choose to call it as “Dimensional Thinking” or “perspective thinking”.

This incident forced me into reading more about Gandhiji and the history of those times. I read almost everything that was accessible to me at that point in time. Ranging from criticism, third party view, views of some of the British officers, praise etc.

Now I think, to some extent I understand what Gandhiji was and the difference he made to our society, our nation and to the entire world at large. While trying to understand a personality as great as Gandhiji, we must keep one thing in mind – Gandhiji was not GOD. He was a human being. And it is unfair if we expect a human being not to make any mistakes throughout his life. Everyone makes mistakes. We need to be wise enough to look at the larger picture and not confine our vision only the mistakes that he made (if I can take the liberty to say so).

As I write this today, I know and I understand that there are many (not just youngsters) who do not think Gandhian principles are applicable now. Today, on his 138th birthday, I am announcing a series of essays that I am going to write on my blogs about Gandhiji. This is an attempt to make people aware of what Gandhi was and how his principles can still change the way we carry on with our lives and how we can use them to make the world a better, safer place to live in.

Hindi version of this essay is available on my other blog.

A bunch of announcements

It’s been quite some time since my last post. So much so that people have started asking me why am I not posting anything? Well, there are two reasons for it

• I am going through a lot of changes in my personal life
• I wanted to separate personal blog entries from those related to Microsoft

Changes in my personal life

One BIG News

I know this is probably not a place to announce something like this! But hey… this is my personal blog. And I want to give it a further personal touch by posting things that are actually personal to me.

So… the news is – I am getting engaged on Sunday August 26^th 2007 with Esha Singh. I have been personally instructed by Esha not to post her pictures. So I won’t do it (basically I don’t want to get into trouble at such an early stage!). As opposed to most of my friend’s expectations, it’s an arranged marriage!

I am very excited about it and am looking forward to a happy new life.

Some more changes

A few years back, when I was a kid, I started reading about Mahatma Gandhi. It took me so many years to understand the value and impact of Gandhian principles. In the recent times, I have been reading a lot about history, politics, and a lot of other social issues that affect an average Indians life. When I put both the learning in context, it surprises me to see that this nation of Gandhi has deviated so much from Gandhian principles. It has only been 60 years and the political system as almost collapsed.

It may sound little too big (and a bit stupid too) but I have decided to take an effort to change this. More on this front in the coming few posts.

Moving MS Related posts

I will no longer post Microsoft related stuff here

I have a blog on MSDN to which I have not posted anything so far. Primary reason for this was that I did not have too much of tech-stuff to contribute. Or, to be more specific, I didn’t have any experience of writing a tech-blog. And being a long time reader of various blogs on MSDN, I understand that a normal reader would expect technical content on MSDN blogs.

The new destination for MS Posts

All the forthcoming posts will be on my MSDN Blog.

I have started writing at least informative posts about Microsoft and its products, so, after contemplating the decision for the past few weeks, I have decided to move this piece to my MSDN Blog. However, I will keep posting a link to the posts on my MSDN blog for the first few posts.

What happens to this blog?

I will continue to blog here but only on things that are not related to Microsoft (my personal life beyond Microsoft). Additionally, as I said, I will be linking to my posts on my MSDN blog.

Introducing Windows Live SkyDrive

Windows Live SkyDrive team at Microsoft announced three major changes yesterday-

Change in Name:

As you can see, Windows Live Folders is now Windows Live SkyDrive. I like the new name because it sounds cool. Way better than something like "Folders" or something.

Bunch of cool new enhancements

• An upgraded look and feel — new graphics to go along with your new features!
• "Also on SkyDrive" — see most recently visited SkyDrives and easily navigate to them
• Thumbnail images of the image files on your SkyDrive
• Drag and drop your files right into your SkyDrive
• Embed your stuff anywhere — with just a few clicks, post your files and folders anywhere you can post html

Expansion of user base

Windows Live SkyDrive is now available in three regions - US, UK, and India.

I tried playing around with it a little and found it to be super cool. Very easy to use and yet very powerful. Go, sign-up now!

Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 launched

July 26th was quite a happening day at Microsoft. As outlined in my previous post, Microsoft launched "Open Source at Microsoft" to connect better with the Open Source Community.

On the same day, Microsoft launched beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008 and .net framework 3.5. Also, there came an announcement that Silverlight 1.0 RC will be available for public download in the next couple of days.

For further details on Visual Studio 2008, you can see go to Visual Studio 2008 Downloads website.

Open Source at Microsoft

I know exactly what's on your mind. Is this some kind of a joke??? Well! your reaction to the unexpected title is quite expected. Generally, developers (or in general software users) do not relate Microsoft and open source in a positive sense.

But Microsoft has shown time and again that it is committed to the evolution of software platforms and to sharing knowledge via various open source/shared source initiatives. On July 26th 2007, Microsoft took one more step to reaffirm its commitment.

Bill Hilf, General Manager, Competitive Strategy at Microsoft announced plans to submit the Microsoft Community License (MS-CI) and Permissive License (PL) to the OSI. Both these licenses are available as of today.

Additionally, Microsoft launched a new web property Open Source at Microsoft that contains information like how to get engaged with Microsoft in various shared source initiatives and updates on what Microsoft is doing in this space.

I remember I heard of Rotor (commonly known as SSCLI) several years back. I am amazed to see people still getting amazed by the fact that Microsoft has such an initiative. In fact, that precisely is the reason why the title of this post startled you. Probably we were not able to build a proper channel to connect with the open source community. The newly launched initiative will sure help bridge this gap.

BTW, you see... I wasn't joking :-)