Today, India celebrates its 60th Independence day with full colors! It has become the greatest nation in these 60 years of freedom.

Happy Independence Day....

Happy Independence Day! Long live Mother India! Jai Hind.

Windows Live Folders got a new name and its so cool. As SkyDrive team reports here, it has below features:

• An upgraded look and feel — new graphics to go along with your new features!
• "Also on SkyDrive" — easily get back to the SkyDrives you’ve recently visited
• Thumbnail images — we heard you loud and clear, and now you can see thumbnails of your image files
• Drag and drop your files — sick of our five-at-a-time upload limit? Drag and drop your files right onto your SkyDrive
• Embed your stuff anywhere — with just a few clicks, post your files and folders anywhere you can post html

This is how it looks:

And, live thumbnails for the images.

and more exciting, drag and drop feature to upload files:

And more, more, more, more excitingly - you can embed the files/folders in your webpage:

It now gives 500MB of free storage, but let's home that they'll increase the future.

http://skydrive.live.com

All new Windows Live Home page is finally out and it looks awesome! The brilliant thing is when you browse to the site at night or early morning (according to the City you have selected), it will give this below dark blue theme.

When browsed in the morning, you will see the below bright theme.  

Its so coooooooooooooooooooooool. And I love the way it categorizes all the live services in one page and I love the Live 2.0 theme - much better than the vapor theme.

Whoohoo.. I was waiting for this report to be out in Compete blog. When June market scores showed a good amount of improvements in MSN/Live query volume, people thought that's gonna be only for June.

July's scores proves that Live Search is on its way and continues impressing! Way to go folks! Jeremy Crane of Compete tells "If I know one thing it’s that you should never ever count Microsoft out.".

Impressing stuff! Congrats again! Keep up the good work! Let's see what August has in store of MSN/Live Search.

Seems like, the Windows Live wave 2.0 promises bigger stuffs. LiveSide tells here about a press briefing in Japan here. And it also gives a picture of the new homepage - it really looks awesome.

I am eagerly waiting for the Windows Live Wave 2.0. Guess there should be a lot more things to be delivered and the way Windows Live has evolved over the years really amazes me. Competing a world leader in Search, Competing Yahoo in email, IM client, Competing major blog sites with Spaces with adding a pinch of social networking also into the spaces simply makes me tell WOW :)

How is my new email address? rakki@vista.aero cool isn't it?

Do you want to show your love of Vista? Go ahead and sign up for this free email address here.

It is very nice to see that the Microsoft's share in the web server market significantly increasing. Below is an image from Netcraft website.

As Netcraft reports,

"The open source Apache has been the leading web server software since the March 1996 Netcraft Web Server Survey. In November 2005, Apache was found on 71 percent of web sites, putting it more than 50 percentage points ahead of Microsoft IIS (20.2 percent). At the time, Apache's market share advantage seemed insurmountable. But less than two years later, Microsoft has narrowed that 50 percent gap to 16.7 percent. The margin is even tighter in active sites, where Apache leads Microsoft by just 12.2 percent."

You can check the complete report here.

I believe that increasing users of ASP.NET significantly contributes to this numbers. And, Silverlight, AJAX.net, et all coming in the future, the web server market for Microsoft looks very promising.

Just wanted to mention that I support IIS5, IIS5.1, IIS 6.0 and ASP, ASP.NET here in Microsoft and going to support IIS7 soon :)

Woohoo.. fakesteve finally got unmasked. NYTimes Brad Stone finally unmasks "The secret diary of Steve Jobs". Here is the report:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/technology/06steve.html?ei=5088&en=f826e2e579cf8ea4&ex=1344052800&adxnnl=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1186419605-JF0yWplFDyOZkRUfVWAwAQ

He is Daniel Lyons - you can find his personal blog here.

So, the long wait is over now. But, how about mini-microsoft?

Live search really rocks when it comes to related searches. For an example, check this out. Search for "Population of India" in Live, Google and Yahoo.

And, the related searches in the left hand side which is very cool. It catches my eyes and they are at the correct place in the search page.

Google gives me this... the number is little below the one given by Live search and I believe the Live search to be more accurate because I know the % of growth in Indian Population daily :-)

And, Google doesn't give me any related searches. I wonder whether they have that at all in their search. If not, sorry, you are losing to Live! And, I still accept that Google is the no. 1 in the Search, but seems like Live Search is picking up very well. Way to go folks!

And, Yahoo! gives me this:

July 2005 estimate! Come on Yahoo! I do not want an old estimate. And more over, Yahoo! has relevant search options right below the search results and above the search results. In some way, it just seems like a spell checker thing - doesn't catching to my eyes as a related search options.

To sum it up, Live Search rocks in the Instant Answers, Related Searches. It just need to improve on its search results on which they are  doing a tremendous improvements over the months. I expect to see more growth on this in the coming days. I'm also waiting on the Compete Search market analysis for the month of July. June numbers were really promising on the Live Search part.

Hmmm.. seems to be a million dollar question to everyone! Here comes a very good song which tries to explore more about who is human and who is not. This is my childhood favorite song - Rajini was my favorite actor right from my childhood. I had my cousin who is 10 years elder than me who was a avid Rajnikanth fan and he influenced me a lot in this.

There is a beautiful line in the song - "Oru poondhottamaa Vazhikai, illai - poraattamey vaalkai!!".. how true it is? The English meaning goes like this.. is life like a flower garden? No, it is always a struggle.

I can hear this song through out the day! Love this soooooo much.. one more classical tamil song!

Very true!! Live your life like a King!! And.....

Love, Laugh, Live - who knows what tomorrow has in store for us?

Hmmmm.. Its raining everyday in Bangalore.. oops.. Bengalooru.. I love to get drenched in the rain, but one day I hated the rain to the core. This happened 3 days back when I was coming from Koramangala to my office (EGL, Domulur), I got totally wet! I'm was going to office to work - you know how bad it would look when you enter your office with water dripping from your body and you look like an a**hole for rest all people there. Everyday I take my overcoat, but that day I forgot. Guess Varuna bagavaan wanted to play a little game on me that day.

So, I parked my bike in the underground parking lot and I took the lift and came to the 3rd floor to my office. The security was looking me somehow - but I still remember when I looked myself in the rest room mirror, I was really looking like I jumped into the swimming pool with my clothes on and walked into the office. Now, comes the hard part. I wanted to dry my clothes - so got a towel from the Gym - Yeah - we have towels provided to the employees in the Gym. I tried to dry myself - all set and done, but my clothes - still wet. I tried to dry my shirt with the hand drier (I know what you are thinking about me), but no use. Then I took a bold move, let me go back home and change my clothes and come back - because I can't sit at office with wet clothes on for the whole day.

The reason why I called it a bold move was because of the traffic in the inner ring road, Ejipura, Koramangala, Madiwala and BTM. I live in BTM and it is hardly 8-10 KMs from my office, but it almost took 1 hour to reach my home that day. When I was coming back to home from office, I was literally scolding the rain which I used to love before. One day, one incident - made my hate rain.

Here is me again came to office, but little rain and I loved driving my Honda Unicorn on the Inner Ring road to office. It was drizzling over and I loved rain again. I was thinking about a classical Rajinikanth song where he and the heroine will be dancing in the rain - the song goes like this.. pothukittu oothuthadi vaanam.. neeyum othukittu kooda vara venum.. I simply love that song, not just because of that being a rain dance and sexy moves - it is a very nice song indeed.

When I think about songs which will come into my mind while it is raining is a beautiful ARRahman song.. chinna chinna malai thuligal serthu vaipeney.. minnal oli nool edhuthu korthu vaipeney.. what a beautiful song is that.. here is that..

And also this song from old classical Chinna thambi.. I love this song soooooo much!!!

The whole idea about this post was not to tell you that I hate rain - but, one single incident made me hate it, but started loving it after rain promised me not to drench me out while riding in bike to office :-)

Till now, Customers were getting the hotfixes for Microsoft products after talking to Microsoft Support and getting a support incident created and talking to the support professionals.

Now, Customers can submit their hotfix requests through this page.

Todd posted about this here.

Lot of my friends in Windows Live Messenger ask me what is that i'm which is displayed in my name in the messenger. I really take my time to explain them what it is, because of the fact it is worth to put in your messenger. This directly helps you raising funds for a lot of social causes. Below is how my display name looks:

So, what is Microsoft's i'm initiative? As explained in the official website http://im.live.com

i’m is a new initiative from Windows Live Messenger™. Every time you start a conversation using i’m, Microsoft shares a portion of the program's advertising revenue with some of the world's most effective organizations dedicated to social causes. We've set no cap on the amount we'll donate to each organization. The sky's the limit.

So any time you have an i’m™ conversation using Windows Live Messenger, you help address the issues you feel most passionate about, including poverty, child protection, disease, environmental degradation and animal protection. It's simple. All you have to do is join and start an instant messaging conversation. We'll handle the donation.

There's no charge, so join now and put our money where your mouth is.

Do you want to make a difference in millions of heart by just doing a simple thing in your favorite IM client application? You decide.