Of This and That

Microsoft’s Windows 10, last of the lot , upgrade started to roll out yesterday world-wide and I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to be one of those who upgrade on the first day. While at my home laptop I had reserved the Windows 10 upgrade via the Windows icon in the task bar, I had not been able to do so for my work laptop. The Windows icon wasn’t appearing. KB 3035583 is required to be installed via Windows Update for the icon to appear, however my attempts to install this optional update failed continuously. When I tried various options like sfc /scannow or DSIM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth , I could not get past the failure. My system constantly showed that a system reboot was pending and however many times I rebooted, it kept showing the same message. I wasn’t however going to miss the opportunity for the free upgrade, so I followed the steps mentioned in this article . Note that if you are upgrading the OS on the machine on which you access this link, then...

"Change is the only constant" is something that we in IT world strongly believe in and the technological evolution around us have been a constant reminder of the same. However the recent declaration by Microsoft that Windows 10 will be last in the series of Operating Systems (OS) seems to go against this well accepted norm. It is a significant milestone of sorts, this announcement.  Microsoft so far had relied heavily on sales of OS, Microsoft Office and more recently SharePoint Server as their backbone. Newer versions every few years was the way things had been all these years. If I look back, I started my career with Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in the year 1995, which was a significant improvement towards graphical user interface based working experience. Then I worked on Windows 95, which added preemptive multitasking and then on Windows NT that introduced the UNICODE character set. Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Millennium edition (that actually disappeare...

If you planned to do some basic computing experiments that possibly includes both software and hardware integration as well, but wanted all of that to be at a throw away cost, then am sure you would have heard and possibly already being using Raspberry Pi. At a price of just about $ 40, this credit card sized board, along with basic computing power, using an ARM chip, can connect to a regular desktop/laptop and use external keyboard and mouse and allows you to easily program in a language like python (you can also use other languages like C, C++, Java, Ruby, Scratch etc.) The recommended OS is Raspbian but ARM Linux is equally popular. Here’s  the list of additional OSs that can be used. The device can be really useful, as I said earlier, for quick throw away programming. The idea being that you use this low cost device to quickly do some POC and if that works out, you can then plan to go big (commercial) with possibly a full-fledged computer or maybe a tablet device or even...