"MIT" digital drawing board

 

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Red Sea – Under water world

I was so excited after seeing the Red Sea - under water documentary.  The color & very nature is truly amazing.  At least once in my life time, I want to go there.  In YouTube, I could not able to find the matching video to the documentary but the below two are good one to watch…

 

Social Networking Sites & HR

Now-a-days the social networking sites are one of the powerful tool for HR to hunt skilled resource in the filed.  The following are some of the popular tools.

                

TalentBar | Ecademy | Brijj | PeerPower | Doostang | Marzar

Nice article on Design Pattern

http://www.go4expert.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5127#state

IT innovation

I was going thru the list of EDGE winners and following solutions impressive.

Mobile Workforce Solution from HDFC is a complete end to end automation.

Financial Inclusion of the underprivileged makes the banks to move to village with out need of branch just using a Mobile Unit to perform operation and synch-up with center system later.

IBM Implemented a voice masking system to avoid the record of sensitive records in BPO.

Performance

There are movements I though performance of an application is a value add.  But it turns out to a requirement in certain scenarios.  Either performance is a value add or a requirement, the attention needs to be given every stage of SDLC.   Yes, the performance needs to be considered in each stage and the assumptions and SLA needs to be called out clearly.

The design should always talk about the scalability of the application whither that is applicable at the design time. 

Recently we had a major issue in production, an application is throwing time-out exception and whole business process is halted.  To address the production issue, we moved the code from C# code to a SQL code the performance benefit is from few hours to few minutes.  So I would call this as a bad design.  While designing the application if the importance of performance is considered such issues will be less.

There is an another incident, where a small SP malfunctioned and caused the business to halt.  A one line change and proper index in place made a big business impact. 

For example

SELECT  x.d.query('id').value('.','int') as ID
FROM @ItemIDs.nodes('/root/item') x(d)

is re-written as

SELECT  x.d.value('(id/text())[1]','int') as ID
FROM @x.nodes('/root/item') x(d)

So it is obvious that the important of performance. When we talk about the performance we should also consider the load test.  The application must under go the load test and threshold limits needs to be called out at delivery time.

So do give proper attention in each stage of SDLC for performance.

Google Trends

I was going thro InfoSys blog on Money @ Cloud the link points the Google Trends as a proving point to highlight a fact.  I was surprised to see the impact Google Trend created.  Just by achieving search trend and presenting nice UI, Google is able to come out with a new product which helps the business people to make decisions.  It was simple idea executed excellently.

Just for fun I tried, 

1. Microsoft, Google
2. Oracle, SQL Server
3. Sachin, Dhoni, Zaheer
4. Jayalalitha, Karunanidhi

It was really interesting.

Technorati Tags: Google Trends,AdCenter,Business Idea

About Google Trends  Good comparison between Google Trends & MS AdCenter Lab

Typing in Tamil / தமிழில் எழுத

பல நேரங்களில் தமிழில் எப்படி மின் அஞ்சல், வலைபதிவு செய்வது என கருத்து பறிமாற்றங்கள் எற்படுகின்றன.  சிமீபத்தில் நடந்த ஒரு கருத்த பறிமாற்றத்தில் கிடைத்தவை

1. Google 

2. NHM Writter

3. For those who are using XP / Outlook 2007 and not able to see Tamil fonts… can try the option below.

Tools -> Options -> Mail Format -> Editor Options -> Language Settings -> Add required languages.

Buy O2 to live

Soon you need to buy O2 to live.  Can you believe?

May be 10 years back no one believed that people will spend money to buy water.  Now days buying drinking water is common.  The same is going to happen….

Japan is already started selling canned O2!!

Check the article.

jQuery

jQuery is a light weight Java Script which allows to create macro kind of java script.  It is simple and powerful scripting feature.  Using jQuery we can achieve lot in few lines of code.

http://docs.jquery.com/Tutorials:Getting_Started_with_jQuery

zoo zoos – Vodaphone ad

The new Vodaphone ads are interesting.  I came to know that they are not animated characters, they are real people wearing the mask.  Cool ad but I don’t think they can replace the popularity of Hutch dog.

http://www.apnacenter.com/?p=2135

Akshya Patra

Last week we visited of Akshaya Patra Foundation near Pattancheru, Hyderabad.  The foundation prepares and serves Mid-day meals to government schools. 

Typically Mid-day meals for the govt school children's are prepared at the school campus.  Most of the time it will not be tasty and not hygienic too.

The Akshaya Patra Foundation prepares the food in central location with modern technologies and distributes to the schools which around are 100 KM surrounding.

The highlights are

• Additional fund added to the govt allotted fund to make the program successful.
• Modern cooking - Pressure based cooking.  Rice for 25,0000 children prepared in 20 minutes.
• Nutrition and Taste are given priority.
• Automated cooking process confirms the hygiene.

The foundation is part of Hare Rama Hare Krishna (ISKCON) the donations are tax exempted.

Think before vote

It is an election time in India.  The 15th parliament election of India is most modernized and take the advantages of electronic media.  The Lokshabha site is so informative and provide the questions and discussions happened in the house.  You can at least realize the wide spectrum of issues and the size of democratic system.

Each party is putting effort and making their party attracts youth.  Check out the sites of BJP, Congress, Communist, Marxist.  I really like the congress site, which connects each individual details some of the members have their own site.  They listed the questions they asked and their role in the house.

As an Indian we must look all these info before voting.  Democracy will be successful only by participation.

Jai hind!

Amazing Innovation

How cool it would be when you look for a product in a store, your sixth send searches Google and presents you the information you are looking for.  The innovation done by Pranav Mistry from MIT Media Lab is one such think.  It is called wearable gestural interface.

Check out the link you will like it.

http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/

Could you get me a job in IT?

It becomes usual when go to my home town, my friends or neighbor coming to my home to refer their friends or relative for an IT job, and asking my help to get them a job. In IT we cannot get a job for other until otherwise the person is ready to prove himself.

Usually I suggest the following

Target: Make your career aspiration align to your resume. If you looking for a .Net developer role make sure all the details in your resume align to that, if you have connect which is not align to that remove it. If you are not sure about your role, build the role based on your existing knowledge. Don’t put all your skill and the employer to choose the role for you.

Aim: Prepare a clear resume

• Prepare similar font and size in all pages.
• Use Verdana or Arial font and size 11
• Make sure the resume is short and right to the point
• Highlight the strong skills with bold
• In work experience section talk about your role rather than about the project and company

Fine tune: Build your knowledge and prepare well for the interviews. Attend as many interviews you can and write down the discussions of each interview and improve on it. Find the answers of those questions that you could not able to answer in the interview.

Act as if you are in job: Even if you don’t have experience, put yourself as an experienced person and try to answer the interview question with real world examples. When you study the concepts you have to correlate with real time situations.

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It is also true that some of my friends keep complaining about their existing job and role, in such cases our discussion leads to the following

• We need to be clear with our ambition and path; the project we work should not determine our career path.
• Try to make sure our career ambition and the project we work are align, if not plan your time to work on path and plan ahead to change the track.
• As the experience count increases, the expectation will be increased. Make sure that we are aligning with industry expectation.
• Each project is unique and has its own issues, try to isolate the project issues and career. Dedicate time for career growth.

Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer is an interesting tool to write and update blog entries.  It makes the blog entry extremely simple.  You can keep the history, connect to multiple blog site. It provide the edit screen with same template of your blog site.

Including Pictures, Hyperlink and Videos in your blog will be simple using Write.

Download the tool and start blogging.

Auxiliary numbers table - MSSQL Technique

Auxiliary numbers table is a T-SQL technique. It uses a simple table (say num) with one column with a sequence of numbers. Using the num table we can avoid loop structres

http://sqlserver2000.databases.aspfaq.com

Screen Zoom

During the presentation we may need to highlight certain part of the screen. We need to highlight the details. Usually we change the screen resolution, but there are some better way you can use the ZoomIt tool to zoom part of your screen and you can use the marker as well.

It was a cool tool and easy to use.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897434.aspx

ZoomIt v3.02 | By Mark Russinovich

Handling Cheating

When you found you cheated in a business transaction, How do you handle. The first option comes to our mind is Police FIR, There are so many options to handle it. Below list are few. If you have some other option post it in comment section.

pgportal.gov.in | core.nic.in | icrpc.org

consumer_voice_india@yahoogroups.com

MSSQL Statistic Update

We had an interesting issue today. We have stored procedure which gets the ids using a CTE and update attributes using the ID. The SP is timing out and when we try to execute the scripts in the sp separately, it worked without timeout issue.

After all the analysis we realized that it may be due to bad statistic issue.

We executed sp_updatestats commend to update statistics. The query worked in no time!

Fiddler - HTTP trace tool

I came across an interesting tool, which trace the HTTP transaction. It was really simple and amazing tool which shows all the input and output happening in the HTTP 80 port. Even we can edit the delivered HTTP content and see the output in the browser.

You can download the tool from http://www.fiddler2.com. and the site all has a simple video to demonstrate the features.

It will be really helpful to debug ASP.Net / Web service code.

Microsoft Research

It is interesting to read future technologies. Microsoft spends lot of its efforts towards research.

Check out http://research.microsoft.com for the cool features.

Data Type and it's Danger

I was working in a finance application. Recently we discovered the simple mistakes done the datatype and its dangerous implications.

1. Temp table column data type
We had a report SP which has temp tables. The data type of temp tables are set exactly matching to the base column. But when the report is executed it gets the consolidate values, so the data lost is happening.

2. GUID
In the latest stage of the project we have change the data from INT to GUID, which lead to break the existing codes. We need to have a special consideration for GUID data type.

3. VARCHAR
When declaring the VARCHAR it is mandate to specify size of the VARCHAR other it will be defaulted to 1 and data lost will happen.

4. NVARCHAR
Whenever you data has multi language characters we must use NVARCHAR, if you use VARCHAR the charters are set o ?.

Login failure when default DB deleted

When the defauld DB of the user is deleted. We could not able to login to DB.

Error Message:
Cannot open user default database. Login failed.
Login failed for user 'xyz'. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 4064)

Solution:
Change the default DB.

USE [master]
GO
ALTER LOGIN [FAREAST\v-prcher]
WITH DEFAULT_DATABASE=[AnyOtherExistingDBName],
DEFAULT_LANGUAGE=[us_english]
GO

Indian spice names

Be an Indian we use lot of local spice products. When you are out of tamil nadu, it is really hard to get the same just because you don't know the local name of the item.

For example
Pacha karpuram – cooking camphor
Sukku – Dry ginger
Sitharathai - licorice

Govenment of India has a web site which gives detailed information on this.

http://www.ccras.nic.in/PharmacopoeialWork/20081103_E-Books.htm

Online FM

It is always interesting to listen to FM Radio, specially when you are out of Tamil Nadu. Here is the list of online tamil FMs

Suryan FM
http://www.techsatish.net/2006/12/27/suryan-fm-chennai-india/
http://www.loka.fm/Player.aspx

List of tamil FMs
http://www.tamilfms.com/

http://www.airtamil.com/
http://www.fmworldmusic.com/
http://live.shyamradio.com/index.aspx
http://tamilo.com/

From Canada
http://www.kalasam.com/

Hope the list is usefull. Add in the comment section, if you know more.

Paste without formatting

Get the application puretext from www.stevemiller.net/puretext. This handy application will clear all formatting from text you have stored in your clipboard. Nearly every publisher has a style sheet that they require you use, and frankly if you have any Word skill at all you always use styles for titles and headings at the very least. The most annoying thing though is that the text you copy from SSMS has formatting in it, so when you paste it into your documents you have this formatting that you need to get rid of in lieu of the stuff that the publisher wants. With Puretext you simply use a slightly different paste key (like Windows-V) and you get the plain text you need. Same time estimate for this feature. Before I found this application I used to paste into Notepad, the copy it to the clipboard and then into Word. Very tedious.
Note: Tips from blog http://sqlblog.com/blogs/louis_davidson/archive/2009/01/18/a-few-word-tips-and-tricks-for-writers.aspx

Free eBooks

I came across a web site which provides e-books of most of the .Net topics. We can download e-books on the latest technologies like WCF, WPF from www.free-ebooks-download.org

.CHM warning

I downloaded a .CHM file from internet. I double clicked the file to open in Vista m/c the following popup prompted and I selected Open. The file has been opened but I could not able to see any of the link in the .CHM file is working. Later reopened the same file by unchecking the "Always ask..." checkbox in the popup everything seems to be working. Wounder why it is so...

Online Survey

One of my friend forwarded a survey link. He was doing a MBA project for that he is collecting some survey results. There seems to be an online tool, which we can use to collect such survey results. It was pretty good and we can use when we need to do some generic survey.

www.zoomerang.com

Character Set

Today I was going through the blog sites and found an interesting blog about characterset.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
It is really very basic, which I don't know till I read the blog. Every developer must read the blog.