Writing this blog entry on the flight back to Seattle from Philadelphia. Bente and I went for Ashrith's (our nephew) 2nd birthday party.

The birthday party was amazing - there were tons of kids and folks around. Believe there were around 70 guests. Kids were busy playing on the slides, painting clay pots, running around in the yard, and completely devouring the "Barney" cake.

Ashrith was a bit taken aback by all the folks around, so it took him some time to get used to everyone. He was running around everywhere when comfortable. The best part was Ashrith completely enjoying the chocolate cake made by Bente.

Apart from the birthday celebration, this was also the celebration for Ashrith officially being in "Remission" stage in his Leukemia treatment. The last chemo for Ashrith was last month. His appetite is back, he has a full head of hair, his energy is back, and he is now a little riot. :-) I must say looking at him now, there is no way to even guess what he and his little body has been through last year.

Ashrith had me running after him all weekend. I lost almost 5 pounds in 3 days. I must say that was the best part of the trip. The "little man", as Bente called him, is quick to pick up all words, talking all the time, and full of energy. He is also seeking attention constantly. :-) I am already missing hearing Ashrith calling out "Tantoth" (as he calls me). It was sad to leave him and walk through the security lines at the airport.

This was one of the best trips I have had. I am really glad to see that Ashrith is starting a new phase of his life with vigor and happiness. Here's to a "new beginning", with love from "Tantoth Thittappa" and "Bente Titthi".

I was pleasantly surprised to notice that http://maps.live.com (Live Search Maps provided by Microsoft) shows the traffic alerts in some of the major local roads in Greater Seattle Area.

Most of the online traffic or map services only show the Freeway and major Highway traffic.

This is definitely a wonderful value add to the Live Search Maps Service.  We used this today to decide the route to take to downtown from our house. It was great to be able to see the interior road condition and also see the alerts (such as traffic due to soccer game b/w Mexico and China in Qwest field :-)).

-santosh

Amazing video made by my cousin Meera for my nephew Ashrith. Ashrith was diagnosed with infant acute lymphocytic leukemia last year when he was 7 10 months old. He went through treatment and chemotherapy at the CHOP (Children's Hospital of Philadelphia) since last March (07).

I am overjoyed and ecstatic to say that Ashrith has been off chemo and treatment for around a month (everything has been great). I can't wait to meet him in May.

The above video was put together my the most talented person in our family - Meera. The hindi song selected for this video is very significant.

Demo -

Savas Parastatidis (architect of the Microsoft repository platform) created a demo for Open Repositories Challenge 2008 that shows the ability to pull data from two repositories, create the appropriate relationships and display the relationships in a WPF based network graph.

He pulls the relationships b/w people and resources from MyExperiment, and resources from Microsoft Research Output Repository Platform. He then creates a network graph displaying relationships b/w people and resources from the two repositories. He also displays a preview when the appropriate resource or person is selected. For ex. in the demo, you will notice upon selecting a video, the video is played.

This kind of visualization of relationships using network graphs on web pages (using technologies like Silverlight) is truly very useful to visualize the social networking relationships.

Additional info - http://savas.parastatidis.name/2008/04/03/2e308e65-a670-40a3-80ae-a283de1ee917.aspx

Blog - http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001591.html 

<EDITED UpdatedDate="Apr 4 08">

Slides - http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/84/1/Research_Output_Repositories_-_Microsoft_Initiatives.pdf 

</EDITED>

The Presentation at the Conference today went well (Monday session was held by Microsoft for interop b/w repositories, with a few known members of the community). This session was open to all members of the conference - we had a decent turnout.

Lee Dirks went through the charter of TCI team, and Microsoft, in the Scholarly Communications space, followed by my presentation and Savas' demos providing the "Wow!" factor.

Overall the response/questions were positive. We had a few folks talk to us after the presentation for additional information and explanation.

-santosh.

Traveled more in trains the last two days then in the last seven years, and it has been fun.

Just got off the train from London to Southampton. Of course the train and the ride was very comfortable, but must say the instructions were pretty confusing. :-)

30 min into the ride, comes an instruction - the train is going to be split into two in some station. Only the first 5 wagons are going to Southampton. I look around to find which wagon I am in (did not remember where I got in - as literally ran and got into the train less than 5 min before it left). Unsure I asked around, and others were as confused as I was.

Finally few of us decided to take our luggage and walk up front. Good we did, because we had to walk a bit to get to the right wagon.

Another confusing thing was no pre-announcement of upcoming stations. Southampton Central was announced after the train stopped. Had to dump the laptop in the bag, gather stuff and run out. :-)

Despite all the above looking forward to more train travel. Probably back in Seattle will try the train to Portland.

-santosh.

Just saw one of the best goals in the highlights of the women's soccer world cup semi-final game between Brazil and the US.

Check out fourth goal for brazil scored by Marta in the highlights at - http://sports.espn.go.com/broadband/video/videopage?videoId=3038594&n8pe6c=3. (the goal is around 40 seconds into the highlights)

Looking forward to seeing the finals between Germany and Brazil on Sunday.

While doing some research on features for a HTML text editor for work, I came across the FCKeditor (through a colleague). This is an open source  HTML editor that is easy to use, and has a lot of rich features for content editing.

Apart from regular rich text editing features, such as font, style, color, etc., it also has a good selection of features such as insert from word (maintaining styles), insert flash, tables, images (resizing, alignment etc. of images), special characters, anchors, spell checker, localized menus, and few other text and content editing features.

They have included the ability to embed form controls such as creating drop down lists, radio button lists, etc., and form actions (which I have not played with).

One of the most surprising things about FCKeditor, apart from the name, is that the feature of a Universal Keyboard was removed from the editor. I find that feature very interesting, as editing content in various languages is essential in certain situations. I realize that creating the content of an entire page using the small online keyboard is very painful, but it is a great feature for people who want to add words in different languages. I have asked in their forum the reason of removing the feature. Lets see what I hear back.

I will be playing around with the features and the code of the latest version and the older version (with the Universal Keyboard) to see the merits of this editor..

Do let me know if you guys have played with other rich text editors, and have liked it.

Link to gadget download - here

Well finally I got around to playing with creating Vista Gadgets, and my first try was a gadget to search the Microsoft Research Web site. I personally like the concept of gadgets in Vista. I love to have gadgets for actions I do frequently. With my current Microsoft Research Web Portal redesign project, searching for data on the site was a frequent task. :-)

With regard to developing the gadget, here's to great MSDN documentation. I was able to find tons of information on MSDN http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms723694.aspx that enabled me to easily create the gadget. I also looked at the code base of many different gadgets. It was a fun experience, and allowed me to play around with the code. Hopefully this starts the development of more fun gadgets.