My opinion about "Is Jungle se mujhe bachao"

After watching the serial for the past few weeks, I have to respect
Aman for the dignity with which he carried himself. And, I absolutely
agree with his opinions regarding the people at the camp. About Marc,
I think with his behavior at the camp, he has proven to be a guy
without a backbone.

Definitely the Aman guy has got his morals right.

Chetan is just a follower and not a leader.

Akash is an animal not deserving of any respect.

The truth is always the truth and is inviolate.

snow leopard purrs softly...

Yes...

Now I see my mac is much quieter, much faster...

You can notice the difference in Mail and Safari

working on snow leopard now

Am not noticing much difference except that everything is faster!!!

My experiments with RAID0

As any developer would know, compiling a huge visual studio solution
takes a long time. Actually even a midsize solution compile is very
time consuming, so over the past few years, I have been trying various
experiments to see what really makes a difference:

1) Compiling on a server does not make very big difference.
2) CPU does not matter much
3) The most expensive RAM does not make a dent (even loads of it)
4) RAID5 does not make much difference
5) 10K RPM HDD does make as difference as does 15K RPM HDD

One sure fire way though is RAID 0 = inexpensive RAID card + 7200RPM
regular HDD makes a huge difference!!!

Windows 7 & vista a file copy which was done @ 2mbps max is done in
18mbps on raid 0 with 2 disks. Increase the disks and the speed
increases rapidly.....

Visual studio compiles like a Mae person!!! - amazing...

RAID0 on database server?

I don't think it is that bad an idea to have RAID0 on all servers if
you are a startup and have limited resources. As long as you are not
really mission critical and there are backups, you will enjoy superb
performance even with low RPM drives like 7200RPM.

After seeing the mind blowing performance, I am sold out on RAID
forever. Even for my desktops!

The advantage of doing RAID

I am astounded by the amazing performance I am getting with 3 7200 RPM HDD's configured as RAID0. It is quite amazing the speed even though the HDD's are not "super fast" by today's stds.

I got a 160gb hdd from frys for $50 making this a value proposition. It also helped that nvidia hardware RAID was embedded in my motherboard and windows natively supports it.

I have to now seriously consider this for future desktops (with backup though).

all sites up now

All sites are up running superfast on RAID0.

Today American site down for a few hours

After we changed the old server which had hardware issues, we used a
newer server. This one was good but had software issues.

We are fixing this right now and implementing hardware RAID as in
RAID0 - this should significantly improve performance.

You are affecte now, but there will be so much speed improvement that
I have to say it will be worth it. Now, finally we will have 3
dedicated servers - one each for database, app & web servers.
Interestingly, the most utilized will be the web and db servers.

You don't need equally sized hard disks for RAID0

Someone told me, I needed it, but it is not necessary. I just did it with different hard disks & it works fine.

Sites are back online

We replaced the web server & things should be fine now.

Web server down

The server has an outage today. All today American websites are hence affected by this outage.

windows xp mode rc in windows 7 faster than vmware virtual pc on mac

I tried this out today, because I need an environment for testing.
This is what I found.

Even the mac restarts for update

So I wonder why it is a big deal that windows restarts for updates. it is interesting though that windows now copies the way the mac restarts and updates itself.

SQL server 2008 install has issues with windows 7 RTM

Interestingly I am forced to conclude after using SQL server express
2008 on different operating systems that SQL server 2008 is a hassle
to install and get running on any OS.

2005 express seems to be better and without the bloat issues.

Concurrency & LINQ to SQL

We have had a lot of concurrency issues with today American and the
Linq context object. Right now the latest fix I have done is to lock
the context object while doing any db operation.

Seems to work for now...

I will post if there are further issues and find any new fix.

I have to use linq as it is faster for development and so far, though
it has been a pain to understand and learn, I think I am finally
getting a taste of how effectively to use it.

I want to use it for it's caching abilities which is why I like to
share a context object across threads. It is a shame that only one
operation can be done by it at any point of time..

Unable to run asp.net with sql server session state?

This is important if you have limited RAM on your web server because it is old:

 

aspnet_regsql.exe -ssadd -sstype c -S .\sqlexpress -d aspnetdb -E

 

Remove the -S .\sqlexpress option if it is a regular database. I needed to do this because the server was old. Usually people do it because they want another server to handle the session state.

Timeout error?

I am seeing this error increase when more people are simultaneously
accessing the site. For now, reload the page, I am looking into
various ways to resolve this.

Bestbuy & Magellan suck!

Magellan support is rude - as everyone knows, Bestbuy refuses to take in for warranty coverage a GPS which I brought through their website and picked up at the store.

Will never buy anything from Best Buy anymore - especially the store in Santa Rosa.

Hate Magellan, their 4370 gps is the slowest, worst piece of crap ever manufactured. Sent it for repair, got a small Tom Tom instead. Seems better than Magellan for now..

Updated my Win 7 RC to RTM

I updated my win 7 rc to rtm yesterday. Have to say it rocks! - very stable and better than vista or rc.

There are issues installing office 2007 or vs 2008 which get resolved either by lowering UAC to the minimum or running the setup as administrator. If neither works and the install fails win 7 will ask whether you want to install with recommended settings. Do that and eveything is fine.

Carbonite has issues opening up my backed up folders. I am not sure whether this is a win 7 compatibility issue or not.

The best size for an apple tablet

I have been thinking about this a lot and feel that something the size of an audio cd, but thin as an iPhone 3gs would be just the right size for it.

Finally all performance issues resolved

We have been struggling with some performance issues since the data
center move. All issues are resolved at this point and the site is as
speedy as ever.

Dear today American user, I too join the ranks of people who acces the
site from an Internet connection (rather than my old gigabit LAN).

So, our user experiences should be similar now...

asp.net = steaming pile of horse dung

This is my opinion after trying to make the website run with session
state in sql server 2008 and windows 2008 server

Found 100 issues, and lot of unhappy people chasing unwanted problems
trying to get this simple thing to work.

It used to work before, now it has become horse dung

Instead of spending money duplicating other company's business plan,
MS should focus on getting the basic stuff working correctly.

An Interesting Discovery

I have done a lot of multi-threaded programming, but learnt a basic thing today... What is executed on a timer method runs blocking the main thread. So, if you want it to be multi-threaded, create a thread within it...

What this means is that if you have explicit code within a timer event handler, then when that executes, it blocks the main thread if anything is running on it. So, to get the best performance, do not write code directly within the timer event handler - create a new thread and have it do the work.

The best way to create threads without too much hassle is to use ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem()

iphone 2G jailbreak with OS 3.0.1

This is not clearly indicated anywhere.

It is easy - update with itunes as normal, the phone will come up as
locked.

Download redsn0w from the iphone dev team

Give it the OS 3.0 ".ipsw" file from the place where itunes keeps it.

Give it the boot-loader files which you can find easily from previous
jailbreaks.

Follow the instructions after reboot, the phone will come out unlocked.

You can restore from a backup after that.

all our websites are up after the data center move!!

It took 2 hours yesterday to get everything up & running...

The internet connection there is faster, so everything must be very
fast.

the easiest way to put the iphone into the recovery mode

http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2009/01/29/iphone-101-put-iphone-recovery-mode/