Some Random Thoughts

Last couple of days a critical and important piece of news that has been doing the rounds of the newspapers is the future of the Pune Power Model. MERC or the Maharashtra Electricity Regulatory Commission recently passed a judgment stating that the MSEDL or the Power Distributor needs to suspend the Pune Power Model. Ok so how does this make any difference? Well to understand this in greater detail lets first understand the Pune Power Model. The Pune Power Model is a scenario where some 80 odd major power consumers in Pune decided that they would generate their own Power and the difference between the cost of captive power generation and the grid based power cost will be borne by the Power consumers in Pune. In return for bearing this additional cost the consumer will not face any power cuts. This model has been working smoothly for the past 2 years. However, it needs to be remembered that as a city Pune has been experiencing a growth that far surpasses Mumbai. This inevitably has lead...

Managing access to business critical information has long been a challenge faced by CXO's across the world more so because the leakage of business critical information can lead to major ramification for organizations. To help overcome this precise challenge Microsoft Office 2007 provides a comprehensive and cost effective platform for ensure that the right information is made available to right people in a secure manner. The key benefit of Information Rights Management (IRM) is that it is far more secure than passwords as long as the security of the digital certificates is not compromised. Further the system also supports Document Life cycle management. Information Rights Management (IRM) allows individuals and administrators to specify access permissions to documents, workbooks, and presentations across their life cycle. This helps prevent sensitive information from being printed, forwarded, or copied by unauthorized people. After permission for a file has been restricted by using...

Blogging has been a long term hobby of mine and so I keep looking out for ways to make my experience as simple as possible. In fact for a long time I had been looking for means of blogging straight from my word processor (the default usually was MS Word). Previous to the Office 2007 this could be accomplished using third party add-ins to MS Word but with Office 2007 Word the process becomes more or less seamless. This blog entry provides a short summary of the How-to for Blogging using Office 2007 Word. A more detailed article is available from the Microsoft website and can be accessed by clicking HERE . Before you start blogging you need to setup a blog account. You can host your blog either on the internet or the intranet depending upon the content and the audience. For external blogs you could use providers like Live.com (the mother portal of the Hotmail Service) or TypePad. Usually the easiest way to setup your blog is to go to http://spaces.live.com and login using your hotmail u...

After a long tenure of nearly 7 years at the niche BI and Analytics player SAS Institute I will be moving on to a new role with one of the three IT giants. This blog will announce my new location in the next few days. I think SAS was a excellent place for me to formalize a lot of ideas and the new opportunity will allow me to put these into practice on a much larger canvas.

I have just installed the Prism Beta version on my laptop to check it how.. Seems Ok to me as of now but really can't make out the real difference between the browser based and Prism based platforms.. Well the developers may consider this to be a good sign but for me it still does not show me a killer app potential. Still need to be convinced on this application platform let see how it evolves. BTW if you are interested in the Project then do visit the official Prism page at the hyper linked words that follow: Mozilla Labs Blog » Blog Archive » Prism Cheers till then.

I have been spending the last couple of days recuperating from a emergency operation for the a severe nerve root compression. In fact its been a period which has given me time to catch-up with some serious reading. That means on a average 2 books a week and that will need to go on for another couple of weeks basis the Doctor's Order. A topic I have been reading and researching a lot over the last couple of years has been the nexus between politicians, business, bureaucrats and the common man. It sort of explains a lot of things happening in todays India and put the dynamics behind the things into perspective. Two very interesting books that I read were the Ambani Saga "Storm in the Sea Wind" and a political commentary on the Russia of Today very aptly titled "Inside Putin's Russia". Both these books are a must read for any student of Politics and Business in todays world. While the former book will provide you insights into the Art of Policy Formation in Ind...

I guess this is a good idea. Will give us the best of both MS innovation and Open Source Freedom. The people who want a beefed up Wordpad can go in for STAR OFFICE/ OPEN OFFICE. For the power users there will be Microsoft Office.. France suggests merging OOXML into ODF : "and fireworks, and what a show it has been. If this weren't such a hard fought battle of fairness and competition against greed and monopoly for the future of record keeping in governments and businesses, it would be a comedy. But, because this is serious, it's more like watching the tragedy of a massive train wreck in slow motion. One is both horrified and fascinated. That said, here's the latest news, such as it's reported so far. Hungary decided to revote due to 'irregularities', although that bland term doesn't even begin to describe the intensely contentious meetings that reportedly led up to Hungary's first vote. Due to its seeming inability to reach anything resembling con...