The C Word - Part 2

Our confrontation with Lymphoma started in 2011, when the C word entered our life and my wife got diagnosed with Stage 4 Hodgkins sclerosing lymphoma. We have fought through and continue to do so. Even through she is in remission now, the shadow of Cancer still hangs over.

We had just moved across the world from India to the US in 2010 and had no family and very few friends around. We had to mostly duke it out ourselves with little support. We were able to get the best treatment available in the world through the Fred Hutch and Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. However, we do realize not everyone is fortunate to be able to do so.

Our daughter has decided to do her part now and raise funds through the Lymphoma and Leukemia Society. If you'd like to help her  please head to

https://events.lls.org/wa/SOYSeattle20/pbasu

How to run Windows 7 after end of support

Windows 7 end of support is upon us in 1 more day (1/14/2020). This post tries to answer the question on whether you can safely continue to run it. The short answer is that you can't, atleast if it is connected to the outside in some form.

However, I have a friend back in India who has some software that he relies on and he can't run it on modern Windows. So when I was answering his question on how he can run it, I thought I'd write it up in the blog as well.

This post outlines how you can run Windows 7 in virtual machine running on Microsoft Hyper-visor on a windows 10 machine. The process also uses checkpoints to reset the VM back to the old state each time. This ensures that even if something malicious gets hold of the system, you can simple go back to the pristine state you started with.

Pre-requisite

Obviously you need a computer capable of running Hyper-V. For my purpose I am using a Windows 10 Professional machine. You should also have more than enough CPU cores and memory to run Windows 7 in that machine. I recommend atleast 4 cores and 8GB memory so that you can give half of that to the Windows 7 VM and keep the rest for a functional host PC.

Get hold of Windows 7 ISO or download it from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows7.

Then visit the system requirement https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/10737/windows-7-system-requirements. I decided to give roughly twice the resources as the requirements to create my VM.

Setup VM

Hit windows-key and type hyper-v to launch. Then start creating a VM by clicking New and then Virtual machine.

Choose the following Generation 1

I decided to then give it 4GB memory and 2 CPU cores

Chose to create a 40GB OS disk

Then install from bootable CD and pointed the location of the image file to the downloaded ISO image

Click through next to end and finish the creation wizard. Then right click on the newly created VM and choose "Connect".

Install Windows 7

At this point if everything went well the VM has booted off the installation ISO and we are on the following screen. Choose "Clean install" and proceed through the installation wizard.

Finally installation starts.

A reboot later we have Windows 7 starting up!

Created a username, password

Finally booted into Windows 7 and here's my website displayed in Internet Explorer

Secure by Checkpoint

Even though we have booted into Windows 7 soon this will be a totally unsupported OS, that means no security updates. This is a dangerous system to keep open to the internet. I recommend never doing that!! Also to be doubly sure, we will create a checkpoint. What that does is it creates a snapshot of the memory and the disk. So in case something malicious lands in this VM, we can go back to the pristine state when the snapshot was created and hence rollback any changes made by the virus or malware.

To create a  checkpoint right click on the VM in hyper-v manager and choose Checkpoint

You can see the checkpoints created in the Hyper-V Manager.

Lets make a change to the Windows 7 VM by creating a file named "Howdy I am created.txt" on the desktop.

Since the checkpoint was created before creating the file, I can revert back to the checkpoint by right-click on the checkpoint and choosing Apply.

After applying the checkpoint when I go back into the VM, the created file is all gone!!!

Finally

This is a hack at best and not recommended. However, if for some applications or other need where you "have" to run Windows 7, this can be an option.

Customizing Windows Command Shell For Git session

Old habits die hard. From my very first days as developer in .NET and Visual Studio , I am used to have my windows cmd shell title always show the branch I am working on and have a different color for each branch. That way when I have 15 different command window open, I always know which is open where. Unfortunately when I recently moved to GIT, I forgot to customize that and made the mistake of making changes and checking in code into the wrong branch. So I whipped up a simple batch script to fix that.

@ECHO OFF
git checkout %1
for /f "delims=" %%i in ('git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD') do set BRANCH=%%i

@ECHO.
title %BRANCH%

REM Aqua for branch Foo
if "%BRANCH%" == "Foo" color 3F 

REM Red for branch bar
if "%BRANCH%" == "Bar" color 4F

REM Blue
if "%BRANCH%" == "dev" color 1F

I saved the above as co.bat (short for checkout) and now I switch branches using the co <branch-name>.

You can see all the color options by running color /? in your command window.

or

Backlight and detergent

I found a cheap $6 black light (or rather UV) flashlight on Amazon. Once it arrived, me and my daughter went out on the quest of finding what glows best in it. Basically some sort of phosphor that absorbs the UV light and emits visible light making it seem to glow in the dark.

Based on a quick bing.com  search we tried a bunch of stuff, but what worked best is laundry detergent. I knew that to make clothes seem bright these have phosphors in them. The indirect proof was how bright a newly laundered T-shirt was glowing. Until I popped open one of the Costco laundry detergent pods and put it under UV light I never could’ve guessed the intense glow they emitted.

Enjoy a video of that.

Bing it on

In early 2008 I joined the CLR team to clean garbage (or to write Garbage Collectors :)). It has been a wild ride writing generational Garbage Collectors, memory managers and tinkering with runtime performance or memory models. It’s been great to see people on the street use stuff that I had helped build or to see internal team reports as .NET updates/downloads went out to 100s of millions of machines. In one case I was under a medical diagnostic device clearly running on .NET. I didn’t run out indicating my faith in the stuff we built (or maybe I was sedated, who knows).

I decided to change things up a bit. So I decided to move from the world of devices, desktops and consoles to that of the cloud. From this week I have begun working in the Bing team. From now on I will no longer be a part of the team that builds CLR but will become part of the team which really pushes the usage of CLR to the extreme. Using .NET to serve billions of queries on thousands of machines.

I hope to continue blogging about CLR/.NET and provide a users perspective of the best managed runtime in the world.

BTW the photo above is the fortune cookie I got at my farewell lunch with the CLR team. Very appropriate.

Information Management on our California Road Trip

I am just back from a road-trip that spanned 3200 miles (5000kms) from Seattle to San Diego and back. We travelled with a 8 year old, which meant more fun and excitement, for everybody ;)

My digital gear on this trip was as follows

	My Cyan Nokia Lumia 920 Wife’s White Lumia 920 Both with AT&T unlimited 4G connectivity. The Live Tile based Windows Phone 8 worked amazingly well. See below for the apps I used
	My daughter’s magenta Microsoft Surface RT My Gray Surface RT The tablets worked remarkably well and battery life was well beyond my expectation. My daughter could just shove in a USB thumb drive and watch videos off it directly on the Surface RT.
	Wife’s Acer Aspire. She still uses a Laptop and I needed it to process photos. The Surface RT unfortunately falls short as it cannot run Photoshop Lightroom for me. This sleek powerful laptop with ultra fast startup (due to SSD) worked pretty well.
	Cannon T1i (time to upgrade) and a bunch of lenses, flash, tripod, reflector, etc….
	Miscellaneous stuff, like thumb drives to backup photos, various chargers, etc…

I kept all of these stuff (other than the camera) in a single bag and carefully hauled them around. I ensured that they were never left unattended in the car.

My Windows Phone 8 (Nokia Lumia 920) rocked this trip. I am sure other phones would’ve worked as well, but the live tiles of Windows Phone really shined through. I installed a bunch of apps and pinned them all together.

One-Note: I literally run my life on One-Note these days. From planning trips, hikes, to debugging notes, I keep everything in One-note. Using One-Note I could plan my trip on the Surface from the hotel bed. The One-note doc would auto-sync with our phones ensuring that the information was on our finger-tips the next day when we were on the road. The large pinned California One-Note tile contained all our trip plans.

Weather App: I used The Weather Channel app. In the screen shot you can see the live tile for my next destination pinned to the home screen. WP8 allowed multiple of those to be pinned and I could always see what was coming up (sunny and mild day in SFO) in all the cities I was planning to be in. I could and did switch around order of cities I was travelling to based on weather forecast.

Nokia Drive + Maps + City Lens: In addition to the car GPS we used Nokia suite of tools including the Drive, Maps and City Lens to get our bearing while walking around in the city. Few times we used the phone for in car navigation as well. The maps didn’t let us down.

gMaps: Unfortunately the gMaps Google map app didn’t work out that well for me. Google maps has much better data in some contexts (e.g. trails and street view) but the app was unstable and also it always needed connectivity and reduced network coverage on the road was seriously hampering the usage. I think it is sad that Google doesn’t make their own apps for the Windows Phone.

Music: We used Nokia Music as it has better Bollywood coverage. We also got a ton of our Bengali music collection onto the phone. By the end of the trip, Prokriti (my daughter) was humming tunes from our college day music.

Hotels.com: I did most of my booking on hotels.com. Especially because it gives 1 day free stay on making 10 reservations. The limited screen on the device did pose some issues in making the right hotel choices but I even made a reservation while standing in a queue in Seaworld.

TripAdvisor: for finding local points of interest

Yelp: For deciding where to eat.

4th & Mayor for making foursquare checkins so that I can later recollect where I’d been.

Netflix: To keep my daughter busy when the trip really seemed long. I do have unlimited AT&T 4G on our phones but high-speed connectivity is hard to come by on the road. So she mostly watched stuff on her Surface.

Photoshop Lightroom: On most nights after settling down in the hotel, I would transfer photos from my camera and do a quick pass with Lightroom. I’d make reject and keep calls on them. Then backup the photos on a thumb-drive and also copy over to one of the Surface RT. So I essentially had 3 copies backed up at all times.

Moving to Outlook from Google Reader

I am sure everyone by now knows that Google Reader is being shutdown. I am a heavy user of Google Reader or Greeder as I call it and I immediately started looking for an alternative, when this suddenly occurred to me, that all PC’s I use have Outlook installed on them. So if you work for an organization that runs on Exchange server, this could really work out well. You can use Office Outlook and Exchange as a great RSS feed reader. Consider this

1. It will provide full sync across multiple Outlook clients running on different PCs
2. It will provide on the go access via Outlook Web-access
3. Your phone’s outlook client should also work with it
4. You can pretend to work while wasting time on boingboing

First things first: Export the opml file from Google Reader

Login to www.google.com and then go to https://www.google.com/takeout/#custom:reader

This will take some time and create an archive.

Click on the download button and save the zip. Then extract the zip as follows

Inside the extracted folder you will have the opml file. For me it’s in C:\Users\admin\Desktop\XXXXXXXX@gmail.com-takeout\XXXXXXXX@gmail.com-takeout\Reader\subscriptions.xml

Import to Outlook

This opml file needs to be imported into outlook. Use the File tab and bring up the following UI in Outlook.

Then use Import. To bring up the following

Choose OPML file and tap on Next. Now point it to the file you extracted. For me it was C:\Users\admin\Desktop\XXXXXXXX@gmail.com-takeout\XXXXXXXX@gmail.com-takeout\Reader\subscriptions.xml

Hit next and finally choose the feeds you want to import (Select All).

The tap on Next and here you have Outlook as an Rss feed reader…

Read Everywhere

It totally sync’s on the cloud. Here I have it open on the browser. As you read a post it tracks what you are reading and across the browsers and all your outlook clients at work and home it will update and keep everything in sync.

Works great on the Windows Phone as well. I assume any Exchange client should work.

Pain Points

While reading on Outlook was seamless, there are some usability issues in both the browser and the phone. Surface RT is broken. Someone should really fix the mail client on Surface

The major paint point I see is that in the Outlook Web Access the pictures are not shown. Tapping on the picture placeholders work. I think some security feature is blocking the embedded images.

Also on the Windows Phone you have to go to each feed and set it up so that it syncs that folder. This is a pain but I guess this is to protect against download over the carrier networks.

Palouse Photography Trip

From Wikipedia, “The Palouse is a region of the northwestern United States, encompassing parts of southeastern Washington, north central Idaho and, in some definitions, extending south into northeast Oregon. It is a major agricultural area, primarily producing wheat and legumes”. But that doesn’t really tell you what Palouse is :). My daughter named it more aptly as Greenland and the photo below is explanatory.

 

It’s a beautiful land of rolling green (or Yellow based on season) hills and a photographer’s delight. It’s one of the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen. It’s easily worth the 5-6 hour drive from Western Washington cities like Seattle. The receptionist at the hotel we stayed in said that they’ve had photographers from as far as Australia visit them.

Last week (6/16/2011) I went on a 2 day trip to the Palouse area in Eastern Washington. The primary plan was to just drive around and take some great shots. This post captures the quick details about what went right, what went wrong and some tips about how to make the trip family friendly.

Good Time to Visit

I asked around and checked Flickr for Palouse photos from different times of the year. I think early to mid June is pretty good time to see the excellent green colors in the field. August is great for capturing the golden yellow pre-harvest colors.

Where to Go

My agenda was to cover Palouse water falls, the Colfax-Steptoe-Garfield-Palouse-Pullman pentagon. I took the following route. Click around to see the main routes travelled.

On the Way

On the way (and back) you should stop at the great I90 rest areas. They are spread around every 30-40miles and there are blue signs on the way indicating where they are (e.g. Rest Area Next Right) and how far the next one is (Next Rest Area 34 miles). Many of these serve free free hot coffee and cookies and all of them have rest rooms. After gorging on the super hot coffee and home made cookies made by dear old ladies who run these places, do remember to generously donate in the donation boxes. We carried our camping stove and had some nice warm noddle soup for lunch at the rest area.

We then stopped at the Palouse falls (B in the map). As with most remote sites with dirt roads, the GPS picked up some really bad roads for the routing (Nunamaker Rd). Avoid this road and follow the signs and the route showed in the map which is to avoid Nunamaker Rd and continue straight on 260 and take a left onto 261. This goes into the Palouse Falls State Park. The Park has around 10 campsites and has a huge waterfall plummeting down 190ft. Covered picnic shelter with tables, water and barbeque pits are available here. The camp sites are first come only and there is a resident host as well. There is water but no power hookup at the sites. There are some short hiking opportunities as well where you can hike 0.5 miles up towards the waterfall top. However, do note that the hiking routes have some points where there is significant exposure to heights and you gotta be very careful. There is also no safe way to descend to the bottom of the falls even though there seems to be some trails that go down.

There are a lot of cute Marmots and a lot of huge insects and snakes all around.

The Palouse

We didn’t stay in the Falls area. Instead we went ahead to Colfax which is around an hour away. I really liked the Best Western Wheatland Inn at Colfax where we stayed. We paid around $110 for the night. It had a nice hot breakfast, good rooms with TV and a nice warm indoor swimming pool. I cared about these because my wife and kid would spend a lot of time indoors as I’d drive around on the dirt roads for the next day or so. Just opposite to the hotel was a store, Taco Bell, Subway and other eating joints. I have had other friends who stayed in Pullman (30mins south of Colfax) which has many more hotel options because it’s the house to Washington State University. However, I ‘d recommend staying in Colfax due to it’s proximity to Steptoe butte and other interesting areas.

After checking in I went to the Steptoe Butte for the customary Sunset shot, which however was utterly ruined due to rains and clouds. Steptoe Butte is a very important geological feature and a must visit. So much so that other geological features of it’s type is called steptoes. Steptoe is a 400 million year old rock sticking up high over the rolling hills of Palouse. Amazing views of light and shadow on the Palouse and patterns of wheat harvest can be seen from top.

Post sunset I got back to the hotel. Next day morning I mainly drove around inside the Pentagon. Then came back for some lunch in the hotel. Then again after some driving around headed back via I90.

To drive around the key thing to remember is that all state routes have almost no shoulders and no place to stop. So even if one route offers a good view, you cannot stop to photograph. Also the broken down barns are not really on the main routes. So you need to pick up the dirt roads and drive on them. These are gravel roads and cars skid a lot on them. So a 4x4 car is a good thing to have but not really mandatory. The route I mainly drove on is in the map linked above. However, they show the main route taken, you’d need to continually divert from them to get to the side roads as well.

1. 

Some nice roads to try

1. Palouse Alboin Road. Get into the side roads for broken garages and barns
2. I tried and really liked the Chief Kamiakin Park >Fugate Road > S Palouse River Rd. However,
3. Hume Road (From SR 195 to Oaksdale)

The photographs at http://www.flickr.com/photos/abhinaba/sets/72157626870022427 are manually geocoded, so that should give an approximate idea on where they were taken.

The Way Back

We came back via a different route because we were already close to Oakesdale and were told that the road from there to I90 had some nice views. We took the Oakesdale > Thornton > St. John > Sprague > Seattle via I90 West route.

We did make some stops on the way back. One was the scenic viewpoint just before crossing the Columbia river gorge. The other was the Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park Visitor center. This is just after the gorge. It contains some fantastic samples of petrified tree trunks where Ginkgo trees have been transformed to rocks (silica) after being covered by lava flows some 15 million years back. Also from the interpretive center you can see the banks of the Columbia river. We had some fun counting the layers of Lava visible on the banks where each layer corresponds to a major lava-flow incident millions of years back.

Back Home

The trip was awesome and covered 400 million year old rocks, 15 million year old tree trucks, 3 month old crops and everything in between. I plan to go back again to capture the Golden hues of the pre-harvest crops soon.