Here is a most interesting concept I came across today. it talks about how you should never share your goals with someone because if you do, you are more likely to not achieve them as compared to if you had kept the goals to yourself. What does that mean and how can it be? Well psychologists call this phenomenon “Substitution” – basically by sharing your goal with someone and receiving appreciation for it tricks your mind into thinking that you have already done some of the work towards it. This gives you a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment without actually doing anything.

Of course, if you tell your trainer your fitness goals, that is probably different since you are then actually taking a step towards achieving your goal since telling your trainer about your fitness goals (or your dietician your weight-loss goals, or your investor your financial goals, etc.) is an integral part of you working to achieving those goals. But telling your friends or colleagues about your goals is something that you should avoid.

Here’s a video from TED (I love that site) that talks about this (very short video):

So, the other day, I wanted to delete some wifi networks that my computer had remembered and went to control panel to find the familiar “Manage wireless networks” screen (as I was used to doing in my trusty old Windows 7 days). Well, I had installed Windows 8 so this was going to be different. When I got to the Control Panel > Network and Internet > Network and Sharing Center, guess what – no “Manage Wireless Networks” option was available all of a sudden (see picture below). Why Microsoft thought that was a good idea is beyond me (I only hope they bring it back in Windows Blue).

No “Manage Wireless Networks” in Windows 8

Well, I still had to manage my wireless networks. So, I went ahead and started playing around to find the settings – my only conclusion after a few frustrating minutes was that you can’t find it from the control panel. I think they have basically taken it out or made it increasingly hard to find.

So, now I still had the problem that I wanted to forget a network. While playing around with the list of networks that becomes available when you click the wifi icon in the status tray, I accidentally right-clicked the network I was connected to. And out came a context menu that was not available in Windows 7.  It allowed me to forget the network as well as check connection properties – two things that I used to do from the “Manage Wireless Networks” option in Windows 7 (see picture below). It does also add a couple of new options as you can see.

The options I was looking for in Windows 8

This is all good and well, but I still don’t know how to forget networks that are no longer in range of my computer (as I travel the world, I accumulate a whole lot of networks that I will never use again). This is something else I could do using the “Manage Wireless Networks” option in Windows 7. Well, that is a problem for another day I guess, but at least I could forget the network I was trying to forget.

You know, sometimes I miss my old BlackBerry. Not because it had a superior physical keyboard, which provided me with such a nice tactile feedback while typing out my emails. Nope. I got over that within a month of using the iPhone.

My number one reason for missing my BlackBerry is how less often I had to charge it compared to my iPhone 4S. I am not even worried about the fact that I was never afraid of dropping it as it was so robust. while my iPhone gets treated more carefully than I treat my 3 year old daughter. I am willing to put in that care. But that battery life on my iPhone is what gets me. I now have to plug it in every day, and some days more than once a day. And that really gets to me.

Normally, I don’t like to put any kind of cover around my phones – especially the iPhone. Why kill the beautiful look that is there, right? But when I see and iPhone 4S Battery Case such as the one by Rokit Boost, I am really tempted (visit the site by clicking the link to check it out yourself). This case will extend the battery life of your iPhone. And it looks pretty sleek too. The official claim is that the use of this case nearly doubles your iPhone’s battery life.

For me, I don’t even care if it doubles it or not. Even if I get an additional 4-6 hours, I am okay with it. The reason is that on a number of days, the battery in my phone runs out before I get home. That is something that really bothers me. I have been stranded more than once without any battery in my phone and needing to make or receive calls.

I think I am going to pick up one of these. Now if only that logo on the back of the case was a little low key, then it would be a no-brainer.

James over at Coupon Audit sent me an Infographic which I find interesting. Below it is (along with credits to Coupon Audit):

An infographic by the team at CouponAudit

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Google Wants To Grab 90% Of Office Users From Microsoft – this article on Forbes.com talks about how Google’s approach for their Google Apps product is to “get to the 90% of users who don’t need to have the most advanced features of Office”. This implies that they think that 90% of the users of Office don’t use the so-called advanced features of Office 100% of the time. Which probably doesn’t make sense.

I have tried to use Google Docs many a times, but have never been satisfied with them. I am definitely not the average user of Office, but 90% of my use cases for Office can be met by Google Docs – however, I continue to use Microsoft Office because that 10% of the time, I will need a feature that will not be present in Google Docs. I notice that a lot of users in my company fall in the same category.

We do use Google Apps and we pay for them (as we do for Microsoft Office too) – the primary reason for using Google Apps was sharing with multiple people through the cloud (as we do not currently deploy SharePoint internally). However, with SkyDrive and Office Web Apps, that advantage may soon go away for Google.

I think Microsoft Office is a great product and if you are a user of Office, you only realize how good it is when you are getting frustrated trying to do even the simplest tasks on Google Spreadsheets and failing.

But then again, stranger things have happened so maybe Google will take over that market.

Are you having trouble connecting your Surface to your iPhone’s hotspot? Well it does connect. But you need to make some changes to your iPhone. By default, your iPhone names your phone your_name’s phone. So my iPhone is called Vaibhav’s iPhone. That apostrophe is what throws the spanner in the works for the Surface. So, it is a simple fix.

Go to your iPhone’s Settings, General, About, and Name. Change your phone’s name so that it doesn’t have any special characters in it (I didn’t test whether it works with a space in the name). Save, and bam, it now works.

Why Microsoft doesn’t support it? No idea. Based on what I understand the standard for naming Wifi SSID allows an apostrophe in the name.

There are so many minor irritants that you encounter in life; things that you feel should really be different. They frustrate you because you can’t do anything about them. As a frequent traveler, here is one that I have to put up with several times a year. When you are flying, if you use the toilet on board the plane you come across a neat little message just above the basin:

As a courtesy to the next passenger, may we suggest that you use your hand towel to wipe the basin.

Or some variation of that (and on Lufthansa flights, in German too). So anyway, it is a great little suggestion and makes the world a better place. However, here’s what I started noticing in the past few years.

The faucets on these basins have become motion-activated – so you basically wave your hands under them and they start pouring water.

Think about that.

So, when I use the hand towel to wipe the basin, the motion of doing so activates the faucet and pores more water in the basin. If you try to be careful and avoid the sensor, you will not be able to clean it out too well, so what’s the point.

So, till recently, I always thought that their signage has not kept up with the technology in the basins. I always thought so maybe they must have upgraded the basins but not removed the signage.

But recently, I traveled on the A380, a brand new plane. And guess what, it has the same signage. And guess what, it has basins which have motion activated water faucets in the basin. I felt like pulling my hair out. To me, something like this is very frustrating.

For the past 4-6 months, it seems that I have been surrounded by dragons (not in real life, thankfully). There is so much of it, that I had to put it together in a post. So, here goes, in no particular order, my experiences with Dragons this year:

Minecraft – one of my favorite games this year (whenever little I got to play it). When it finally released to a full version, Notch (the creator of the game) had built dragons into it. Nice, I thought.

The books by Christopher Paolini – I finished reading Inheritance a few weeks ago – and one of the main characters is a Dragon (named Saphira). I like the four books quite a lot. Good reading if you like fantasy adventure type books.

Lord of Ultima – this one is a minor one – I checked out this MMO recently, and one of the magical creatures in this game is a Dragon.

Skyrim – last week, I played Skyrim for the first time on my XBox. And my in-game character is actually a “Dragonborn” who can absorb the powers of Dragons. And there are dragons all over the game.

I have watched re-runs of a number of Dragon movies on the Tele (How to train a dragon, anyone?).

Finally, a dear colleague at work highly recommended A Song of Ice and Fire (a series of novels which are all the rage in the US right now due to the highly popular adaptation of the novels into a TV series by HBO). I just finished reading the first one called “A Game of Thrones”. And while the book refers to dragons in the history all the time, it ended with one of the primary characters ending up with 3 real baby dragons. So well it looks like the next few books are going to see some dragon action.

And if all of this is not enough, the year 2012 will be the “Year of the Dragon” as per the Chinese Calendar. So, it looks like I am going to be surrounded by dragons for a while now. Not that I mind (as long as I am not in real life).

Everyone is always making fun of Facebook about privacy and how it doesn’t do enough to protect the users. Well, it was in this context that I saw this box on my Facebook side bar today:

Well, I thought – nice, so Facebook is letting people with poor privacy settings in place know that they can actually do something about it (another problem with Facebook has always been that even though users can do better with their accounts settings – and protect their privacy better, sometimes they just don’t know about it).

So I clicked it wondering that what privacy options have I left open – and how nice of Facebook to let me know. Anyway, what I saw was not what I expected. It was a screen for the protection of my account (damn, that is what it said on the section, why wasn’t I reading; why did I think it was to do with privacy). Anyway, it was about the security of my account (you know, alternate email addresses, etc.). The reason I was getting this alert was that I didn’t have a security question configured for my account. You know those “what’s your pets name” questions.

Well, here’s what Facebook presented me with:

These are the only 4 options for questions “that only I can answer” as per Facebook. I don’t know about the others, but for three of them I will have to ask my mom. I don’t remember the last name of my first grade teacher (not sure my mom would, but she might). I have no clue where my mom was born – do people normally know this? And I have no idea about the street name where we were living when I was 8 years old. Seriously, if I have to ask my mom for the answers to these questions, then where’s the security.

And the last one – the 5 characters of my driver’s license – that assumes that I have a driver’s license (well I do, but not everyone does).

How difficult is it to have me define my own question to which only I know the answer.

Apple may be designing the best hardware on the planet currently, but when it comes to software, they still have a long way to go. My hate for iTunes has been documented before. So, it is no surprise that I am finding myself writing again against iTunes.

I was installing iTunes recently on a computer (which is a 64 bit Windows 7 machine), and on Apple’s website, there is a special link for 64 bit Windows. So, I downloaded that. The file that was downloaded is called “iTunes64Setup.exe”. Now, I fully expect this to be a 64 bit app.

When I run the installer, this is what I see by default:

Notice how the destination folder is Program Files (x86). For those who don’t know what this is – it is the default location where 32 bit programs running on 64 bit Windows are installed.

Now two things are possible:

• Either the “64-bit” version of iTunes is not really 64 bit – so it’s being installed in the right place.
• Or, the developers at Apple didn’t even bother to configure their installer to install iTunes in the right place.

Either way, this is very irritating.

Very recently, I saw a presentation where there were certain slides which were left for the audience to scan through, with little or no voice from the presenter. These slides had simple text which you would scan through, or most likely ignore as an audience. However, there was one small difference on these slides – as you scanned the text, selective words in on the slide were being emphasized – drawing your attention to key points on the slide.

I found that effect very useful, and tried to put it in my next presentation. This is where things got stuck. PowerPoint doesn’t allow you to animate selective words in a text. You can apply animation effects to complete sentences only. This means that there needs to be a hack to get that effect which I saw. To clarify, I made a video of the effect that I am looking to achieve (embedded below the disclaimer).

Disclaimer: a lot of you may already know how to do this, but it took me a bit to figure it out (specially since I kept thinking how to do it natively in PowerPoint).

So, now that it is clear what I am trying to achieve, let me explain how I did it.

The trick is to first accept that you cannot do it using normal animation functionality of PowerPoint. Once I did that, it becomes quite easy.

Step 1: Identify the words that you want to highlight on the slide.

Step 2: Create text boxes with white background and same font size as your slide text for each of these words (you can see where this is heading).

Step 3: Position the text boxes on top of your words and center them horizontally (since if you are using bold emphasis, it would tend to move your text to the right) and align the bottom edge with the bottom edge of the rest of the text – use Ctrl+arrow key to nudge the boxes into position.

Step 4: Add animation effects on each of these boxes. Now here’s what you want to play with to get the settings right according to your taste. I have an entry and exit effect on each of the boxes. The first text box entry effect starts 1 second after the slide is shown, and each subsequent word’s entry effect starts the same time as the exit effect of the previous word. I am using the “Fade” entry and exit effects. Here’s a screenshot of the timeline:

The exit effect is setup to “Start after previous” with a delay of 1 second. This gives the word being highlighted 1 second to stay highlighted before it is faded out.

Here’s a screenshot of the slide showing the text boxes on each word:

And here’s a screenshot that shows the text boxes displaced (to show that there is normal text underneath the text boxes). Note that I have made the background of the text boxes a little transparent for illustration purposes – in practice this should be opaque.

If there are other easier ways to do this, I would certainly love to know about them. But in the meantime, this is what I will be using.

If you would like to have the PPT file for this experiment, it is available at this link.

Last weekend, I wasn’t feeling very well (and most of the last week too) – and I couldn’t concentrate on my work either. So I needed some mindless activity to distract myself – and because I had a bad headache to go with all this, I couldn’t resort to my normal escape of gaming on my XBox – besides, that is not so mindless. I needed something to give myself a break.

So, I decided to see how difficult it is to make a Google Chrome extension. It turned out that it is super easy to make one. So, I decided to make a very “Hello World” type extension which I would actually use as a fun tool in my current favorite browser: Chrome.

Presenting Tab Statistics:

So, what does this extension do? Not much really, but I see myself checking it out a few times a day. It sits in a corner of your browser, and counts the number of tabs you open.

Yes, that is it. Well, I wanted an escape, not another project, and so I tried to put together the simplest extension I could. The hardest part about coding this thing was actually creating the CSS for displaying the aggregated count, when you click on the button. So, a couple of hours of poking around later, I had my extension, which I tested for a few days on my browser. Then I decided that it’s worth the $5 that Google is charging me to place this extension out for the public to use. So, I did.

If you would like to install it, go to the Chrome Web Store. It’s available there. Below is a quick round up of what it does (not much):

As you can see in the screenshot, it does the following:

• Shows you a button in the toolbar which has the total number of tabs opened on the current day.
• Clicking the button shows you the total number of tabs that have been opened since the day of the install.
• And it also shows the largest number of tabs that were ever opened in a day.

Other than that, it doesn’t collect any personal data, and it doesn’t send any data out of your computer. All tab counts are stored locally on your computer. As I said, it’s more a fun app, than anything else.

If you would like to see improvements to this, then leave a comment on either this page or the Extension page on the Chrome Web Store. If you like it, please rate it on the store, and tell your friends about it.

While I have faced this problem many times, it was only recently that I got ticked off by it a bit too much. The problem? If you are writing a document, and you have non-English things such as Code snippets, or foreign language phrases, etc. in it, you will end up with a lot of red and green squiggly lines in your document. See the image to understand what I mean:

Not only do these spell and grammar checks become irritating, sometimes they can detract you from observing other errors in your document. So, I asked myself the questions, can I turn off spell and grammar check for certain parts of the document? It turns out that I can.

Well, in an ideal world, I would simply highlight the area where I want to turn off the spell and grammar check, click a button and be done. The true solution is almost as simple, but you have to do a bit of work to set it up first.

Let me continue with my example of code in document being the most obvious target for this type of thing (at least for me). I often like to have code snippets in the document as a different font (as do most people), and towards that, I normally setup a quick style (Word 2007, Word 2010) called “Code” which allows me to quickly setup the desired font, indentation, and size for any part of the document that is a code snippet. (Here’s a quick Microsoft link for “creating a new quick style” – if you Google/Bing, you should get much more help there).

So, basically, I already have a way of marking parts of the document where I don’t want to have any grammar or spell check (all these parts are formatted under the Style “Code”). I can leverage the Quick Style feature to achieve what I need – I can tell a Style that I don’t want to check grammar and spelling for any text that is formatted as that style.

Here’s how. First go to the style and open the “Modify…” dialog box:

Now, click on the “Format” button and choose “Language…”:

Now, simply check the “Do not check spelling or grammar” option, press OK, and then OK to confirm.

That’s it. Now, whenever I format any text as “Code”, it doesn’t get checked for spelling or grammar.

Peace of mind.

I have been back for over a week after a long trip out of home; I got to visit a lot of interesting places this time around and had a lot of fun. Here’s a quick log of our recent trip to Vegas, Grand Canyon, and California Bay Area. This was a family outing – Divya, me, and Aanya – along with some friends for part of the vacationing. I will start posting photographs on Flickr as soon as I have time to start going through them.

The number one place we visited was Las Vegas. It is a great place, it really is. We loved the city, the hotels that we stayed in, the casinos, the shows, the restaurants, the decor, the people, and all the glitz. We stayed at Planet Hollywood towers, and the rooms there were very nice, the staff awesome, and the food delicious. They have a huge amount of shopping right outside the hotel which we made good use of.

The Casino? Well, I ended up spending a lot of money there for a lot of gambling fun – the variety of slot machines, roulette, black jack – and poker. It was a lot of fun, and while I would have loved to win the jackpot, the only thing I won was a lot of entertainment. Um, did I mention the poker games – let’s just say that those were the most expensive.

Well, the other thing that is worth pointing out is the show that we saw by the Blue Man Group. THE BEST AUDIO VISUAL treat EVER (while others may disagree). Here’s a video:

Well, from there it was a drive out to the Grand Canyon. A BEAUTIFUL drive, and the Grand Canyon leaves you breathless with its grandeur. And makes you think. That’s all I can say. It snowed while we were leaving.

On the way back from the Grand Canyon, we stopped over at the Hoover Dam. Which was a nice spot too. But once again, the drive between Las Vegas and Grand Canyon is beautiful to the max.

In California, it was the Napa valley (a must visit, if wines (or vines) is your thing). The vineyards are beautiful in their own respect, and the wine great if you decide to taste any. We brought back a lot of food items from the Garlic capital Gilroy – suffice it to say that vampires are not visiting our home in the near future. The 17 mile drive (which is really not 17 mile long) is a beauty and we went there twice. Big Sur was as breathtaking as the Grand Canyon, and we couldn’t get enough of it. But the hidden gem was Monterey Bay. We fell in love with the old Fisherman’s wharf, and the aquarium there is one of the best that I’ve ever seen.

That is about as short a review as I can give without making these posts into pages long descriptions of the visit.

IE9 beta is available, and I finally decided to give it a spin. I wanted to actually title this post: Internet Explorer 9: the complete circle. Why? Because, it is a full circle for me, the moment I downloaded IE9. Let me explain:

• Years ago, after getting fed up with IE, I shifted to Firefox. At that time of course, I used Internet Explorer to download Firefox and installed it. And that made Firefox my primary browser.
• A couple of years ago, when Chrome was released, I used Firefox to download Chrome and installed it. And that made Chrome my primary browser.
• A few hours ago, I used Chrome to download Internet Explorer 9 beta and installed it.

It remains to be seen whether IE9 will become my primary browser, but just after a few clicks in the browser, I am actually pleased so far. This post is being written side by side as I quickly take IE9 for a spin, and record my impression so far.

And wherever it is relevant, I will compare it to my current primary browser: Chrome.

Installation experience:

After downloading it, I ran the installer and was immediately presented with this screen:

I thought that it is installing some pre-requisites, which it might be downloading. After a while, it showed me this screen:

And there, we were done – a one-click installation. It didn’t ask me anything about making this browser the default, or anything else.

I would have liked to see more info, since this was beta, about what components it is updating, since IE9 is well integrated into the OS, I was worried it might update some core OS components with beta versions.

Anyway, I like the clean setup overall. Less work for me if I don’t have to digest any information during installation.

First look, I opened the browser

The first thing that hit me when I started the browser for the first time is this screen:

Note: this screen actually only shows the first time you run the browser, so since I didn’t capture it at that time, I had to copy this screenshot from the article that engadget ran.

I think this is brilliant. I have written before about how add-ons can really slow down Internet Explorer, and this basically makes that fact available to everyone in their face. Since IE8, Internet Explorer shows you how much time any add-on takes to load in the Manage Add-ons screen. Notice how it asks you to specify what your comfort level is for how long in total all add-ons installed on your browser should take, and it will inform you if the total add-on time goes above that.

My only crib with this is that in a couple of scans of the menu items and options, I couldn’t find where I can change that time on the bottom once I set it up in the beginning.

Moving on:

Here’s what Internet Explorer 9 looks like with only one tab open.

And here’s what Chrome looks like with one tab open:

Things to notice:

• I noticed that the logo in Chrome is smaller than the logo in Internet Explorer. I found it weird till it turned out that the HTML that was rendered is different in Chrome than the one in Internet Explorer, and both refer to different logo files with different image sizes.
• Another thing to notice is that the available space is a little bit more in Internet Explorer – as an effect of it combining the address bar and tabs in the same vertical space (this is however not always true, see below).
• I opened both the windows in Private Browsing mode (or Incognito as Chrome calls it). The indications for both are wildly different. Its very clear in Internet Explorer, and reflected in the address bar. In Chrome it is indicated by the icon in the top left corner.

The vertical space in Chrome and IE9 is about the same when both are maximized though. This is because when Chrome is maximized, it moves the tabs to the vertical space besides the control box. The above screenshots are not taken in maximized mode. See below for what I mean:

The above is when Chrome is maximized, and the below is with Chrome in normal window state:

I have my browser window maximized and normal equal number of times, so I am guessing Internet Explorer 9 wins in terms of maximizing viewable area of the browser.

Speed test:

While this is not really a speed test proper, I went and clocked the speed of 3 of the sites that I visit daily, and did so 5 times each to get average speeds for start to completely loaded on a stopwatch.

I did this after clearing cache, and in the private mode so there is nothing stored in each session. Each time, I closed the previous window and opened another one.

Here are the average site load times:

• Reddit – Chrome 8.4s, and IE9 5.4s
• Youtube – Chrome 2.9s, and IE9 2.5s
• Cricinfo – Chrome 6.9d, and IE9 6.2s

While they are close (with IE being slightly faster), on reddit for some reason, Chrome was always taking much longer. I bet there are sites out there where Chrome would be much faster than IE9 too.

But IE9 is really fast, loads really fast, and feels really fast.

Minor annoyance:

The one thing that Chrome has that no other browser does is that a lot of thought had gone in its usability. The best feature of Chrome for me is that when I have a lot of tabs open and I want to close some of them quickly, I can basically click multiple times on the same spot, since Chrome doesn’t resize tabs when your mouse is on the tab bar. IE9 and other browsers do. If you don’t know what I am talking about, try doing this:

• Open IE9/Firefox and open 20 new tabs.
• Now select the first tab.
• Now using your mouse, start closing the tabs. You will notice that as more space becomes available on the tab bar, the tab sizes start expanding, which moves the location of the close button from under your mouse. So to close the next tab, you have to move your mouse.

Now do the same thing in Chrome.

There are other special things:

For example, the most popular sites ‘dial’ which shows on a new tab displays an indication (in the form of a colored bar on each site box) conveying how often you use that site. This bar seems to be in the dominant color in the site’s favicon. See below:

There are overall many improvements in terms of UI, and I like them all.

There are still some issues though in UI and usability:

• The options and menus can do with a complete overhaul. They are the same as the earlier versions, and a nightmare for casual users.
• Options being opened in modal dialog boxes.

There are many more things that are nice in the new browser, and I am certainly going to be exploring them (a big reason is that when I use software such as SharePoint, there are limitations when using it from Chrome). I am really hoping that this will be a good browser, and I will switch to it, completing the circle back to IE.