Today American has 90% offline support

Just to let everyone know. TA mobile is almost an offline app now with latest changes deployed yesterday night.

Unfortunately the client app checks for Internet access in the beginning. But if you keep the app open in the beginning, it should fully work when you go out of coverage.

I will be working to give 100% offline access in the near future

Today American up

Everything is up & running again. More work is needed obviously, and it will be done in the coming days.

In the meantime, you can see the significant speed improvement.

Today American will up in 2 hours

It will be up very soon.

Today American updated with HTML5 local database support

To improve the scalability and give better user experience, the today american site has been significantly updated to use HTML5 on the mobile browser.

Please note the outage tomorrow between 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM, PST.

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Today American downtime tomorrow

We are moving the servers. It will be down from afternoon to evening pst.

Today American downtime tomorrow

We are moving the servers. It will be down from afternoon to evening pst.

Microsoft: How greed caused it to destruct on itself

Many of us think that MS people are morons and don't know what they are doing when they make mistakes upon mistakes. The truth is that MS is the company with very intelligent people who choose the path they travel based solely on greed and the goal to disrupt any/ every competitor.

This worked for a long time. But finally they are getting their just desserts. You can see this corrupting influence in almost every product from MS - from the deliberate attempts to destroy public standards to sitting on their asses because they can afford to do so.

The examples are many - windows mobile is the quintessential example of a forced stop on innovation because they could. The other examples are the amount of time they stood still with XP and the horrible Vista experience.

But today I would also like to point out two important examples where they tried to destroy public standards by introducing their own protocols and fell flat on their own asses:

Instead of providing an extraordinary help to developers by creating a way in which we could produce JavaScript from c# code, they deliberately went ahead and created XAML to destroy HTML and JavaScript.

When this became the most miserable failure in their history - which I realized after using XAML for one week and threw it in the garbage, they again tried to kill HTML by putting XAML in the garb of silverlight.

I tried that too - and personally went to the waste management depot and threw it into the cesspool.

These are junk technologies which were meant to undermine Public standards which everyone uses, knows and are comfortable with like HTML and JavaScript.

The saddest part in this story is the part where several years ago, I sent an example c# code to the visual studio team where I wrote c# code which created JavaScript at runtime and it piqued enough interest that they let me know they would consider this idea soon and would get back to me.

I am not sure whether it is related or not, but as a clear example of what MS employees can do, but are forced to toe the dirty business goals of the management, you can see a project called Script# by a lone, valiant, brilliant MS engineer which gives an awesome example of what MS could do, if it chose to do so, but ignores.

And he struggles along updating this framework with every release of visual studio.

My heart goes out to him.

Visitors from the UK - Thanks!

I see lot of visits from the UK to the Today American website. Thanks for using our services! - I am working overtime to better your experience on the site. Please continue visiting.

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Today American web app updated to use local HTML5 database

It is a great day because finally there is a way to scale the Today American website.

This is a partial update. By tomorrow I hope to fully complete this update.

Today American reactivated

I see that I am getting a lot of visitors from other countries. So, I am enabling the site to be online 24 X 7 so that it is accessible for everyone all the time.

Please note that I am working on the site currently and it can go down intermittently.

Weirdness of app fabric

I have 2 machines on my appfabric farm now, with a total of 6.5GB between themselves. It was working fine, then started giving weird errors which pointed to memory load on the servers.

Was not sure how to fix, but notice that it works fine once I removed session state from using app fabric.

This means I really need more RAM on my servers or have to add more servers to my cluster.

iPhone 4 Dock which works with case.

I have an iPhone 4 with a case. I was looking for a dock for it which works with the case. Found out that the Universal Dock from Apple is a perfect fit, and you can use either the switch for the iPod 20 GB or the 60 GB and either works well.

Why I returned my Droid X and got back an iPhone 4

Because everyone is finding fault with the iPhone 4 nowadays, I feel it important to explain why I returned my Droid X after 2 weeks and got an iPhone 4 back.

There is no doubt that Android has promise. This is why I was willing to test out a new mobile operating system instead of the trustworthy iPhone 4 which I already had. I went to the Verizon store and saw the Droid X, and worried about whether to switch to it or not. And finally, because of the hardware - large screen primarily, I decided to switch.

Verizon is a great carrier no doubt. But I have to say that I found dead spots with Verizon in Fremont, CA where I have never had any problems with AT&T. Walking around lake elizabeth, there are dead spots. Also, I was surprised to see no signal and complete loss of service within Target in Fremont. To be noted, I have had AT&T for a long time before, and never ever I have seen loss of service like this in a mall.

I liked many things about Android. The widgets especially - the large screen, N number of customizations, the status display from the top. It is good. However, the crucial thing which made me return it, is that, it does not have the software maturity of the iPhone 4. Android is like Windows. It is slow, sluggish, and full of holes. The browser experience was miserable compared to the taut experience of safari on iPhone. Double tap and it hangs and takes time to display the text properly. The keyboard was a pile of misery.

The iPhone always had great software. But in the iPhone 4, it has become so smooth, that the software and hardware meld together to seem like one computing slab with 0 lag between the hardware and software. Even OSX does not have that "slab" feel. It is futuristic in the complete melting of the software into the hardware.

Why am I saying this? - to point out that in Android, they have added a lot of features, but how can I trust Google to fix basic stuff like keyboard, browser and the miserable messaging app in Android, when they are running behind cool new features like live desktop background and wifi?

The Droid X update has still not come and it is supposedly coming in september. The biggest problem with Android and I have mentioned this elsewhere is that everyone shits on it and adds their lousy software on top of it. And so, a Google update can only be enjoyed on their own device the Nexus one. Coming back to one thing - I can't even search within mail on the Android like on the iPhone.

So, because of this basic reason - that Android has basic faults, and even Froyo does not address these issues, I returned the Droid X and got back the iPhone 4. And now, I can really appreciate why the iPhone is a magical device:

1. It truly has the best mobile operating system in the world. It may not do everything, but what it does, it does 10/10 - so well that nobody else can come anywhere near it. Shame on Google!, Shame on Microsoft!, Shame on Nokia!!


2. The keyboard on the iPhone 4 is magical. To appreciate it, you have to use the Android keyboard for a few weeks and then use the iPhone 4. Now you know why it is successful.


3. I get better signal/ call quality on the iPhone 4 than on the Droid X.


4. The search functionality is a dream on the iPhone.


5. The browsing experience on the iPhone is unparalleled. The Android Browser is worse than IE8. A lot worse.


6. Nobody has built an mobile OS which is more intutive than Apple.


7. I am sure they will build a better notification system in the future OS updates. I know it will take time, but when it comes out, I am quite sure, it will blow my mind away.


8. It is the only OS in the world, which supports multiple active sync accounts on a single device. This is useful because all Gmail accounts support active sync now.

To conclude, I can say safely that, I will always be an iPhone user unless someone can bring an OS which comes anywhere near it. I doubt it. I really hope, in the coming year, Apple comes out with an iPhone with a 4 inch screen - slightly bigger but not too big.

I think Steve Jobs is like Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged. The man who makes amazing devices which surprise and delight end users like me. Such a device teaches me to be a better engineer and to try and build software like the iOS.

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Today American back up again.

Our server is online as of this moment.

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