Business should not be too different from Life. If you want to enjoy what you are doing and enjoy working with people business is the right place to be. If you think about it in one way business is about maintaining relationships with people who are your customers to your business, employees to your business, and vendors to your business.

Making difference in people’s life should be the core of every business. A business that builds this type of culture will be able to bring satisfaction to customers and their employees and profits shall follow, therefore shareholders will be happy.

Open Control Panel
In view mode “View by Category”, find the section “Clock, Language and Region”
Click “Change Keyboards or other input methods”
Press the button “Change Keyboards”
Press the button “Add”
Scroll down to “English (United States)” and expand.
Check box “US”
Press OK.
Press OK. — You’ll see two keyboards listed “US” and “United States (Apple)”
Press OK.

This worked for me.

Now back to my presentation

1. When you restart the iMac, you must be seeing a black screen.

2. Now insert the win 7 installation cd and restart. After press any key to boot instruction, press F8

3. Now you should be seeing windows is loading files progress bar. Keep pressing F8 until you see a command prompt with options. Go head and select “Start in Safe mode” option. Now you should see windows installation wizard. I know it is really confusing as all you want is to go to the repair mode. Dont worry, go ahead and select “Next” in the wizard.

4. Now this screen should have Repair mode options. Select that option and hit next

5. You will be that windows is loading and files and you will see a screen with options. One of them being “Start Command” prompt. Hit that button

6. You will see good old command prompt. Now enter c: and hit enter

7. After that type the following in the command line and hit enter

“”del c:\windows\system32\drivers\atikmdag.sys”

8. To double check that the file atikmdag.sys (which is causing the black screen) doesn’t exist, type cd windows/system32/drivers and hit enter

9. Type the following command

dir ati*

10. In the list of the file that are displayed, you shouldn’t see atikmdag.sys file.

11. Ok now click on the restart button

12. This time you should see that windows starts normally.

13. Wait not done yet. You must have observed that the resolution is horrible. Let’s fix that.

14. Insert the Mac osx installation disk and double click on the disk drive.

15. You should see a dialog box prompting if you want to allow Boot Camp. Click Yes

16.  If you installed a 32 bit version you can continue installing the BootCamp, or else  if yours is a 64 bit installation, you will get an error “Boot Camp x64 is unsupported on this computer model”. Common !

17. So open the cd/dvd rom drive by going to start-> Computer and then right clicking on the cd/dvd drive.

18. Go to boothcamp->drivers->apple directory

19. Find the BootCamp64.msi file and right click on it. From the options , select Troubleshoot Compatability

20. You will see a dialog box with “Test Compatability settings for the program” and “Start the Program” button. Go ahead and click on that button.

21. Now you will see the bootcamp wizard. If you are prompted with Yes/No options during the wizard, select “Yes”

22. Basically this is installing all the drivers needed for windows

Now enjoy the high resolution screen with your windows 7.

This is becoming painful. So I thought why not use our smart phone for example in my case an iPhone as remote. Now this is 2 years ago that I thought about it. The other day when I was shopping, I accidentally saw Griffin Beacon Universal remote. It’s exactly my idea of using iPhone/Android as remote. So I got excited and bought it.

Now on to Setup:

Not many instructions, very intuitive. Especially the Dijit iPhone app is pretty cool.

So iPhone/Android app shall connect to Griffin Bluetooth Device. Works like a charm the first time itself. Then when you send a command from your smart phone app, the bluetooth device will send the appropriate IR command. This guys are genious. Yes I had the same idea but have no clue on how to achieve this.

Ok I installed the app and went through the wizard to add my devices. I was really praying that this will work as it is cool. Ok the remote needs to be very close to the beacon device. Problems started. I spent may be 30 mins pressing my tv remote that way the beacon device can catch IR signal that my TV remote is emitting and map that to the corresponding device command on the app. Again brilliant idea but the process is not smooth. I finally figured out that my Sony remote needs to be at an angle and within certian distance from the device. I was like ok this is working. So I went on mapping all the buttons on the map to all the buttons on remote. Idea is cool, app is cool. But it’s no where perfect.

What I observed is that the beacon device didnt work with my magnavox. For Sony Bravia LCD TV, I was able to control Power, CH up and down, Volume up ( no Volume down) from my iPhone. Kind of disappointed. But as an electrical engineer  background and with Software Engineering experience and with lot of experience in developing iphone & android apps and programming overall, I am still impressed with what they did. Is it perfect, not yet but can they make it perfect, hopefully pretty soon.

 Another idea that crossed my mind is all new entertaining devices should come with a bluetooth remote interface. Think about it, then we can develop apps to control the devices with our smart phones pretty easily.

Conclusion: Not ready for prime time. Don’t buy.

I really hope that Griffin will improve this universal remote and make it better that way it will work. I can understand the challenge, numerous devices to support and line of sight issues, not an easy problem to solve but they had a good start.

I guess I just need to buy a logitech Harmony for now . Or may be you know an app that can do that. If so please share it.

Life with technology is awesome. Well if you use it carefully.

It’s very easy to say that ” I loved reading Pro Silverlight 3 in C#
book and worth my time and money”. The book is very easy to read. All the chapters are arranged systematically, that way it’s easy for readers at every level. It starts with explaining the history of Silverlight and slowly introduces all the basic concepts necessary to develop Silverlight applications.

 I loved that the author has a “What’s New” sections wherever applicable, that way for people like me who is upgrading their skills from Silverlight 2 can jump to those areas if they are only interested in the new features of Silverlight. As far as the depth, the author has done a very good job of explaining all the important concepts and almost all the controls available out of the box and controls available in Silverlight Toolkit.

 What I liked is that the author also mentions the limitations if any or cautions and because I have implemented multiple projects in Silverlight, I can tell that all those tips , cautions and Notes  can save you lot of time and frustration. For example, the mouse wheel event only fires in IE and not in other browsers or how to handle exceptions at an application level and how VS handles them when you are in debug mode vs. release mode. Those types of tips are very useful when implementing a feature and when you put the app in productions. 

All the new features like Out of Browser, Navigation are discussed. Individual chapters  are dedicated to Animation and Sound, Video and  Deep Zoom to go deep in these areas which was very useful for me personally. 

.NET Ria Services is slightly touched, not in depth as its relatively new which can be slightly disappointing for those who want to learn about it .Data Annotations and Data Validation for the forms  and other Data Controls are discussed in depth.

I wished the author has talked a little bit more about  Rest Services as the web Client has some limitations in areas of REST,  Frameworks like Prism and Caliburn and Commonly used design patterns like MVVM  and other TDD  best practices in context of Silverlight.

For that reason, I would say that this book is more suitable for entry level to mid level Silverlight developers. But if you are completely new to Silverlight or just touched few areas in developing Silverlight, I seriously recommend this book to get strong in all core areas of developing Silverlight applications.

Then ofcourse i searched for remote in app store. ofcourse there is an app for that. i bought hipporemote for 4 bucks.it solved my problem. i can use my iphone/itouch as magic mouse on trackpad. it even has profiles for media center and other longlist of commonly used apps. the screen changes that way i can easily navigate through the selected app.

i use media center to watch netflix movies. so i can use hipporemote yo easily navigate. in addition there is login profiles that way when you go to a particular site. you can login using login profile. you can even record macros. so check hipporemote app on iphone store. also visit their site at  http://hipporemote.com/

in short for $5 bucks, i saved 100 bucks . All i need when i am browsing internet on my tv is my iphone or i touch or android phone.that will be keyboard, mouse heck magic mouse and more.

by the way, this whole blog entry is typed using iphone as keyboard and mouse while kicking back in sofa and using my lcd tv as screen.i love technology. makes life so much easier.

I love C# and is my primary choice. Having coded in objective C for couple of months, its lot easier to code in C# and one can be very productive and can use all the good features of C#. For example in this tutorial I have used Linq to XML to parse the feeds.

Download the sourcecode here.

http://mobiforge.com/developing/story/deploying-iphone-apps-real-devices

Here is the link http://coenraets.org/blog/2008/02/sqlite-admin-for-air-10/. That’s awesome. Most of the times when i get an idea for some product development, I google it and I am not amazed any more that some one has already done that. It’s amazing that we all think differently but yet we achieve the same thing.