Mayawati spends 1000 crores on her statue

Atrocious, Disgusting, Ridiculous, Obnoxious…I dont know what other words to use after I got to know from a News telecast on TV about Mayawati spending 1000 crore rupees of tax payer’s money…
http://www.ndtv.com/news/india/statue_issue_chidambaram_takes_on_mayawati.php
Yes, thats a full one thousand crore rupees on just making her statues. I cant even start to imagine how such humongous amount of money can be spent by a people’s representative. Is this arrogance or heights of shamelessness?

There are so many basic facilities that can be given to the poor people of India who cant even afford 3 meals a day. And providing these facilities would not even cost more than a few crore rupees. And here we are spending hundreds & hundreds of crores on self-gratification.

After hearing all this, I am reminded of K.Kamaraj who was called a King maker in Congress. He was an epitome of honesty & integrity. He had made sure that he or his family members do not receive any type of gifts lest it puts him under obligation for giving favors. He was the one who said all senior leaders in the party should resign and devote time to organization building to send out a message to people that their leaders do not have the lure for power. And the best part - he turned down prime minister’s post when Lal Bahadur Shastri died indicating that the country needed a more well educated Leader to represent our country in the world arena. A thousand salute to this great leader!

Its such a sad state of affairs and this country has seen leaders on two opposite sides of the spectrum. I am angry, frustrated…but then we are the ones who elect such people. We need good people to come into politics and we need to encourage and support such people.

Take a look at this related post -

http://golumolu.in/blogwp/2009/03/good-people-entering-politics/

Aura Montessori JP Nagar 7th phase

Aura Montessori has been around since 2004, founded and run by Uma Venkatesh.

Uma is an ex-banker, who quit the corporate world to pursue her passion of providing quality early childhood education. She has undergone Montessori training. Uma comes across as a person who is very methodical in her approach.

All the details regarding this school can be found at their website - http://www.auramontessori.org/

We admitted our daughter to this school for the 2009-10 academic year for Montessori 1. When a 2.5 year child likes going to school, it does tell a lot about the school. We are quite satisfied with this school.

Address & location of this school:

Aura Montessori House of Children
# 49, 1st Cross, Wilson Garden Co-operative Housing Board
Society, (Opp. to RBI Layout), J.P. Nagar,
7th Phase, Bangalore -78.
Ph.: 080 -41301219

Landmark:
Next to Brigade Millennium
Behind EverFine Super Market

Uma Venkatesh
Directress, Aura Montessori
9880450115
uma@auramontessori.org

Jnana Sweekar Public School, Kanakapura Road, Bangalore

Jnana Sweekar Public School (JSPS) is a fairly new school situated on kanakapura road. Its probably about 5-6 kms from Metro. We got our daughter admitted to this school for the 2009-10 academic year for II standard.

In this blog, I would like to share our thinking behind choosing this school for our daughter.

1. We looked at the people who were involved in creating this school. One of the well known names - Former Chief Justice M.N.Venkatachalaih who has been heading various value based systems/forums is the chairman.

2. Our daughter studied in a Montessori school till the 1st standard. We were very happy with the montessori approach and JSPS follows this method upto 2nd std. They then transition the children to the traditional method of teaching.

3. Infrastructure: The quality of materials, instruments used in the montessori sections is good. They have a lot of facilities in their sufficiently big campus like a huge library, swimming pool, a full sized football ground, A/V Room, most of the Indoor games and many more.

Our daughter has been going to this school for about a month now and is quite happy. She is specifically excited about the P.T class where kids can play games in the ground or auditorium or do yoga etc.

Full address of the school -

Jnana Sweekar Public School
Kanakapura Main Road
Thalaghattapura
Bangalore: 560 062
Ph: +91-80-28427472 / 73
E-mail: info@jnanasweekar.com
Web: www.jnanasweekar.com

New features in OCS 2007 R1

There are new features added in OCS 2007 R1 apart from LCS 2005 and they are –
• On-Premise Web Conferencing
• Enhanced Presence
• Federation Enhancements
• Deployment and Administration Improvements
• On-Premise Web Conferencing

Office Communications Server 2007 introduces the capability for enterprise users both inside and outside the corporate firewall to create and join real-time Web conferences hosted on internal corporate servers. These “on-premise” conferences, or meetings, can be scheduled or unscheduled, and they can include IM, audio, video, slide presentations, and other forms of data collaboration.

Multimedia Capabilities:
OCS 2007 provides rich multimedia capabilities like group IM, audio and video, multiparty audio conferencing. For these it includes 4 servers—
IM Conferencing Server
Web Conferencing Server
A/V Conferencing Server
Telephony Conferencing Server

OCS 2007 also includes multimedia conferencing with external users – For this it includes edge servers to be configured in the perimeter network.

There are 4 main types of multimedia conferencing –
? Group IM
? Data Collaboration
? Audio/Video
? PSTN Connectivity

Group IM
This refers to IM conversation among 3 or more parties. We can send IM to a group and when replying back the IM will be delivered to that group.
We can invite other person to IM when the conversation is happening between 2 members.

Data Collaboration
OCS 2007 Web Conferencing support a rich mix of data collaboration which includes—
Power point Support, Application Sharing, Microsoft Office Document Imaging Support, Web Page, multimedia, snapshots etc.

Audio/Video
OCS 2007 support multi party audio/video support. Users can specify a/v when scheduling a conversation or to an existing IM conversation.

PSTN Connectivity
When a user places a call from an enterprise voice client
1) Server normalizes the number to E.164 format and invokes routing rules based on the location profile and user policy and directs calls to Mediation Server.
2) Mediation Server performs any necessary media transcoding and routes call to IP-PSTN gateway.
3) Gateway, based on topology applies local dialing rules or PBX dialing rules and passes call to the PSTN or PBX.

For Enterprise Voice, this uses 2 protocols –
SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) for Signaling and
RTP (Real Time Protocol) for Voice.

Enhanced Presence
This provides infrastructure to enable client application to publish extended presence information. This infrastructure includes Categories and Containers.
Categories include presence information like status, location and calendar state.
Containers are logical buckets into which clients publish instances of various categories of presence information.

Federation Enhancement

OCS 2007 had made some federation enhancements which include –
Federated Conferencing – Users in federated domains are considered to be authenticated for the purpose of joining on-premise conference.
Support for partners with multiple domain name – Enhanced federation now uses SANs (Subject Alternate Names) in certificate to support enterprise with multiple domain names.

Deployment and Administration Improvements
OCS 2007 has come up with new set of management tools which made administrative and deployment task simpler.

Universal Group Support
OCS 2007 supports the native mode universal groups in the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 Server operating systems. Members of universal groups can include other groups and accounts from any domain in the domain tree or forest and can be assigned permissions in any domain in the domain tree or forest. For example, it is no longer necessary to add one domain to another in order to enable an administrator to manage both. Eliminating the domain-add requirement also simplifies deployment.
Enhanced in-band provisioning
Office Communications Server 2007 administrators need to be able to customize clients in accordance with the requirements of their particular deployments.
Office Communications Server 2007 uses in-band provisioning to convey the following categories of information to the client:
• User Identity includes display name and e-mail address.
• Server Configuration includes such information as Address Book Service download URLs, group expansion Web Service URLs, console installation URLs, and conference troubleshooting URLs.

Integrated Address Book Server
Address Book Server daily provides global user information to Communicator clients. In Live Communications Server 2005 with SP1, Address Book Server was optional and had to be installed separately from the server. But in OCS 2007 Address Book Server is required and which is installed as part of Standard and Enterprise Edition Setup.

Call Detail Records
Call Detail Records (CDRs) provide a way to collect both IM and meeting data, and generate reports on usage characteristics, which can be used to determine network bandwidth load, employee usage patters, and return on investment. CDRs capture user logons and logoffs, IM conversations, and conference starts and joins.

Support for Globally Routable User Agent URI (GRUU)
OCS 2007 has improved the routing capabilities by introducing support for GRUU technology.
A GRUU uses the following syntax:
sip:ted@contoso.com;opaque=epid:qIIWS2j5AVeD_HxnQdxmlwAA;gruu
The “opaque” parameter makes this URI unique even though the prefix of the URI is still the user address (ted@contoso.com).
In summary, a GRUU is a URI for a specific device whereas ted@contoso.com is a SIP URI that refers to Ted as a user. The Communicator client running on Ted’s laptop will have its own GRUU that allows other applications to route messages specifically to that device.

Conference Protocols Used in OCS 2007
• SIP(Session Initiation Protocol) – This is used for initiating, managing, and terminating sessions between one or more participants.
• HTTP(HyperText Transfer Protocol) – This use in OCS for communication between the focus and conferencing server, downloading address book server updates to clients, and downloading meeting content to users.
• CCCP(Centralized Conference Control Protocol) – A custom protocol for communicating conference creation and control commands from clients to OCS 2007.
• PSOM(Persistent Shared Object Model) – A custom protocol for transporting web conferencing content.
• SRTP(Secure Real-Time Transport Protocol) – This used for securely transporting audio and video content to various media devices.
• RTCP(Real-Time Control Protocol) – This used in conjunction with SRTP to convey information about the signal quality of an audio-video conferencing session to various media devices.

Questions and Answers (FAQ)

1) When we are done with a IM Conference, where is the History stored ?
After the IM Conversation, all the conversation details will be there in “Conversation History” Folder in Microsoft Outlook .

2) When we are doing a Group IM , all the members in the group can receive the message, but can they reply to the same message.
We can go with the Group IM feature, and when the members in the group will receive the message and when replying for the message it will received by all members in the group.
3) We can transfer a file to a single person in the conversation but not to a group.
4) We can have a audio between the 2 members and in a conversation.
5) In OCS 2007 , Presence Information is—
Status, Location, Calendar date, Display Names, Title, mobile phone, home phone, company, meeting location, meeting subject etc.
6) PSTN Connectivity –
In LCS 2005 Front-End Server will connect to CTI(Computer Telephony Interface) and then to PBX to PSTN-gateway and to phone.
In OCS 2007, Mediation server has been introduced. From here it connects to IP-PSTN gateway and there to PSTN to Phone.
Signaling for phone calls coming from the PSTN is converted to SIP by the Media(IP-PSTN) gateway

State of Indian politics, Congress is the party for the future

The political scenario, post general elections 2009, in India has taken a very interesting twist.

Sometime back it appeared like there is “tough competition” between Congress & BJP during the elections 2009; but subsequently it was a comprehensive victory for the Congress. A lot of things have changed since then. The BJP did not even give an impression of carrying out a proper postmortem and lessons learnt from the debacle. Instead the infighting within the party has just come out more in the open. This party needs a good leader; and unfortunately this has been a problem since Vajpayeeji retired from active politics. At this rate, instead of the second largest party, BJP is likely to become yet another party like CPI or DMK and so on. These are small parties who can be termed as party spoilers than someone who can create a significant impact or forming a government on their own. And the Third Front crashed even before it could take off.

On the other hand, take the Congress Party. They have exceeded people’s expectations. The strategy of gaining Uttar Pradesh was so well planned and executed. Superb! They got the best leaders at the helm - Sonia & Manmohan Singh. And Rahul is showing the right signs of becoming one of the influential and iconic leaders in the future. Congress ministers look more well-versed in their domains and look more capable than the counter parts in other parties. Congress shows clear signs of accountability, performance and the best thing is that they are bringing in youth into the mainstream. BJP is a big loser on this front.

Given the current trends, Congress party is the party for the future. It will be a while before any of the parties are even able to come close to them. The only thing is that Congress should not allow the victory to get into their head and end up doing something stupid; I guess the party is mature enough to manage that. I would even go one step further and say that they will get a clear majority during the next elections, and wouldnt need support from the smaller parties. They wouldnt need to handle messy situations like appeasing DMK and so on for portfolio assignment.

Way to go, Congress!

TATA AIG-IRCTC Insurance Marketing agents are rude, aggressive

I was horrified at the behavior of the marketing agents for the TATA AIG-IRCTC combined Insurance schemes. If you go to irctc.co.in website for your railway bookings, you will see an Ad indicating that you can get life insurance for Rs. 10. The offer looked interesting and I signed up for it.

The clause in the offer was that you could try the policy for two months as a trial by paying rupees ten per month and discontinue it, if you wish to and no questions asked. I later felt the policy was not worth it and decided to discontinue it.

The marketing agents started following up aggressively after that. They will refuse to talk to you in any other language other than Hindi and are very aggressive. It was almost like I was being forced to continue the policy; had to really push hard to get them to cancel the policy.

After a few days, there were calls again trying to sell me other policies. Again, the same aggressive marketing; and they bang the phone down if you refuse to give in.

May be, the other TATA AIG agents are OK; I dont want to generalize. These guys seem to be working in some backoffice or Data Center, may be from Mumbai or Delhi. Anyway, the experience was horrible and I wish I had not got into it.