During the past 1.5 years that I have been working for Microsoft India Development Center I have had the opportunity to visit India and China a number of times. Each time I go there on a business trip I try to visit some schools over the weekends and...

This is a 3 part story on how I spent a night on the street in Seattle as an experiment to better understand the life of homeless people that I pass by every day: Part 1: What it means to be homeless, a personal experience Part 2: My notes from the...

This is a 3 part story on how I spent a night on the street in Seattle as an experiment to better understand the life of homeless people that I pass by every day: Part 1: What it means to be homeless, a personal experience Part 2: My notes from the...

There is extensive documentation on Mediawiki on how to shorten the urls from www.yoursite.com/index.php?title=testpage to www.yoursite.com/testpage . After a few hours of research I was able to do just that on my Windows Server 2003 and IIS. It is probably...

The interview on C-span. Some interesting points that I can very much relate to based on my experiences with http://www.wsuswiki.com and http://www.mswiki.com Contributors to Wikipedia: 3000 authors that contribute more that 100 edits a month...

A good move by amazon . They have created a wiki page for each of the items in their catalog. Research has shown that anything mentioned by independent sources about an item will increase customer confidence in that item. Even if the comment is negative...

I was hanging out at the Amsterdam airport and suddenly I ran into Abhishek and 2 of his teammates. They way on their way to Redmond to participate in the customer advisory panel on RFID. It was nice to hear that RFID project was moving along nicely...

Last time I bloged about the Shower in Narita airport a few people asked about the exact detail whereabouts. I will keep a list of these little oasis so you can break up your 20hr flight nicely. Tokyo - Narita: 5$ showers for 30 min. The place is...

One the biggest drivers of user contribution to Wikipedia is clear mission statement they have. I have actually not read it and I am writing this blog in a airplane, but as a user and contributor to Wikipedia I have somehow got the message. "Create...

I was just listening to Tim OReilly's talk at MySQL conference. Here some cool sites he mentioned. Google Map Craig's list http://www.housingmaps.com/ New visualization model Baby name: http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html

Here are some of my key leanings from the past few years of working with wiki communities. I will write more about each of these points in the future posts. Use a license that maximizes content use. Give copyrights of the content back to the user...

One sad thing is that here in Beijing I can’t find any Windows Mobile smartphone. Nokia and Samsung are everywhere ;-( I got a China Mobile SIM card and unfortunately I see some ‘••••••’ on the home page of my phone. I also received some SMS messages...

This months issue of The Economist has a special report on crud oil prices. I have been reading it veraciously in the past few hours in the plane to Tokyo. Back in 1998 crude oil prices declined to near all time low of $10 per barrel. Since then the...

I have not gone anywhere special on vacation for a long time so I finally decided to stop by China for a personal trip before I head out to India to meet my team at Microsoft India Development center. I am flying from Seattle to Tokyo to Hong Kong...

I listen to NPR religiously but sometimes I miss the shows that really like to listen to: Democracy Now, Alternative Radio, This American Life, etc. I spent hours today looking for "TiVO for radio" to record shows for offline listening. Eventually I found...

WSUS is one of the first Microsoft products that has a wiki site . The wiki site has been growing rapidly since beta 2 of WSUS; It is getting about 2000 hits a day at the moments. I looked around at several wiki engines and wiki farms before settling...

I am very please to announce that the release candidate for WSUS formerly known as SUS 2.0 or WUS is finally out the door. I worked on this product for the past 2 years and I am very happy seeing customers using it. It will help IT administrators...

After 5 years of being immersed in software distribution problem space I have just move on to a new challenge of working for India Development Center. I will be based in Redmond and will coordinate the efforts of my team in Hyderabad, India with the rest...

The Hole-In-The-Wall experiment is one of the most amazing studies that show the ingeniousness of children. In 1999, Dr Mitra setup a computer with internet connection in the slums of India and watched children’s interaction with the...

Weblogs and Authority is an interesting way of deducing the influence that a blogger has on the blogging community versus his or her popularity.

Here are some interesting points from Ward Cunningham's talk at Social Computing Symposium Unique traits of Wiki: It establishes a community standard for acceptable quality. It is easier to clean up damage in Wiki than creating it thereby...

Notes from Neville Brody 's talk at Microsoft. (He is a renowned graphic and brand designer) The new information system [Internet, mail, blogs, etc] is forcing to act as data processing nodes. We process information and forward it to other nodes. The...