This blog includes some personal comments along with all the details about what is happening in the today american world. Come here to read some interesting tech tips and get insider information and updates about our service.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
How to add a control to the header of a UltraWebGrid Infragistics control
http://devquirks.com/SelectAllGridColumn.php
But note that the click event does not get fired on the server.
Office 2007 horribly slow?
office 2007 makes your PC very slow. I also know that when you have
many emails in your personal folders, outlook 2007 is the slowest app
on the planet.
Announcing a solution! - day before yesterday Microsoft released a
slew of updates including office 2007 SP2, SQL server 2008 sp1,
sharepoint sp2, etc.
This resolves all performance issues with all these software. The
major improvements are in the performance of office 2007, IE 8 &
sharepoint.
Sharepoint was a crawler till now. It became a corvette after the
update.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
One feature no .NET OR/M tool provides
Every other OR/M tool analyzes the stored proc and says it is an action stored proc. I don't analyze the stored procs automatically, I let the user enter the parameters, run the query and then depending on the resultset, I generate the criteria, entity and interface classes.
So, it beats LLBLGenPro, LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework. None of them support these stored proecedures!!!
It is a shame guys!!
Response to: Stored Procedures Vs Dynamic Queries
Monday, April 27, 2009
How to handle multiple windows with different states in a web application
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Why Modern Education might lead to the demise of civilization
What is the problem with this?
- There is so much indoctrination that we get trapped within the boundaries of what we have been taught or what we have read. How can we think out of the box, when our mental model itself is made of the box?
I mean that, if a person has not done a PHD, he might be able to find out a better solution than a PHD simply because he is not thinking confined to the boundaries of what he has learnt. He may be wrong most of the time, but there is a 1% chance he might come up with the next theory of relativity.
Maybe Einstein was not intelligent – he was very poor in school, maybe he learned so less that, in the process of thinking based on his own thought model, he was able to come up with something different. Maybe no-one else has come up with something as big as the theory of relativity because they have learned too much?
I have seen toppers in class unable to think straight when confronted with a problem – because they are very good at learning what someone else had figured out, but never learned how to figure out something on their own. So, I say, the more we learn, the more we bind ourselves in mental shackles.
Why has India never come up with an Einstein or a Thomas Alva Edison?
Because there is too much indoctrination, too much mugging up, too much stuffing the brain with stuff other people struggled to understand over the years and came up with thinking from scratch.
We tend to forget that education, like software should be tailored to the human brain, and not the other way around.
If a student fails in class, maybe it is not the failure of the student. Maybe it is the failure of the education system which is not able to get through to the most advanced computer ever designed – the human brain.
Maybe the student who fails is the best suited to come up with the brilliant innovation 10 years later, and the topper is destined to be struggling trying to resolve a problem nobody wants to solve. An interesting way to look at it is that, when a software crashes a computer, we do not blame the computer – we blame the software. If education is “software”, and the computer is the very different, unique, special human brain – why is the brain said to have failed?
If we understand this, maybe we won’t collapse like the older civilizations have in the past...
Thursday, April 23, 2009
The problem with Microsoft
Windows applications are slow, and WPF is a farce. Even silver light which is based on it is pathetic. I really wish MS had spent the time developing Script# into a real platform than wasting time on WPF. It would have been lovely to finally have an object oriented way to write client script for browsers. I love the fact that script# compiled to JavaScript. It is a really awesome idea which has been ignored by Microsoft because of vested interests, rather than technology.
I say this time and again and I will re-iterate once more, the failure of Microsoft to develop a proper phone OS with so much time on their hands, and the way Apple came up with the iPhone OS, and how MS shamelessly tries to emulate it now, so many years later.
C’mon... Apple has to show every other lousy phone OS maker that it makes sense to have a phone where its firmware can be updated for new releases and patches. This is not high science – it is purely what happens when technologists run a company to make better software compared to a bunch of business people trying to figure out how to crawl their way around by spending less and utilizing existing resources rather than coming up with a better solution which fits the problem.
The solution should fit the problem and not the other way around.
Software was made for humans, and not the other way around.....
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
To add features or not?
does new stuff versus the competition. Everyone else tries to stuff
too many features into too less and nothing works well.
I think Apple had the audacity to pare things down to the minimum and
the strength of character to determine which features mattered the
most in the beginning.
The interesting part however is that, by adding new features later in
the game, and often after the open source community, they gave the
users time to learn & understand the new stuff while giving themselves
time to do stuff properly & get a stable product in the bargain.
Why the mac netbook will be a hit
stable than Windows on the same hardware. With the Air, Apple already
has some experience building a fast experience into a restricted
space. It goes without saying that the end user experience will be
great because of this.
Just take the iPhone as an example of one of the fastest hardware-
software combo's available as a phone. I have tried the rest, most of
it sucks bad.
Monday, April 20, 2009
So many companies closing shop...
valley, these companies are closing left and right. People are being
fired.
Friday, April 17, 2009
How to buy a good Mac
This has gone pretty well so far. I waited almost 2 years before buying my first iPhone - it never had any issues. Then, I got the second iPhone (3G) one year later - works perfectly. MY latest acquisition is a MacBook Air with the SSD hard disk. I got it for less than half the price and it works beautifully so far!!
So - whatever they tell you - it is better to wait for the problems in the product to get resolved.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
And the mac wins!
configured PC:
1. Better utilizes CPU and gives much better performance over similar
or higher configured PC's.
2. File transfer over a wifi network 10X faster than much, much faster
PC.
3. Video playback much faster, lesser crashes than much better
configured PC.
I am surprised that when you consider a program which can be installed
on a PC & a Mac, the Mac runs it better and faster even on lesser
hardware.
We a comparing a 2.4 GHz, 4GB RAM laptop with a 1.6 GHz, 2 GB RAM air.
I am wondering whether this is because the PC development tools are
too much backwards compatible that it is dragging it back.
You must have read my previous posts on www.todayamerican.com on how
Vista bests XP in some ways?
Well I think the very advantage of a PC - that it has more programs is
it's undoing, because definitely it has quantity, but not much quality
(in comparison).
I have tried out various Windows flavors on different hardware, the
only one I have liked is windows 2008 server. Vista is not adequately
performant even on very expensive machines ($4000+).
I think the next step for any long term windows user is a mac -
because of it's speed, performance & stability.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
MSMQ a bad choice for enterprise applications
Linq should not be used at this time for database access, if too is not production quality at this time.
WCF is fine now - after .net 3.5 sp1.
WPF sucks big time - wait for atleast one year before going ahead. If you don't believe me true the times reader app from nytimes.
I hate recruiters who want developers who are good in the front-end, middle tier & the database. They end up getting people who can do all 3, but not very good in any of them.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Search across all your machines & Download files - seamlessly & securely
Like any other geek, I have many computers at home and office, and there have been times when I know that something which I need is on one of these machines. Till today, there has been no way for a person to securely search across all her/ his machines and download files - from any of her/ his other computers.
So, I have built sparrkle.com which lets you download what is effectively one year of my life. It uses windows desktop search, sql server express and a variety of windows services on your machine to let you search all your computers. Once you see the search results - simply by clicking on the file name, you can download your file from any computer which has sparrkle installed on it. No need to worry about firewalls, complex configurations, nada - nothing. Just click to download.
It is completely seamless, and very, very performant. I have spent months testing it for stability, installation and performance. I hardly noticed it when I was using it from a $400 laptop from Walmart, with a 1.6GHz AMD processor.
It is very secure, your information is transmitted using encryption and if some machines are offline, when they come online sparrkle will automatically query those machines and retrieve the search results. By default, you don't have to open any incoming ports on your firewall.
Basically, all you really need is just the windows install and that is it! - You can register after installing the software. The only pre-requisite for sparrkle is windows desktop search on pre Vista machines.
If you are interested in this solution, I would really be thankful, if you atleast visit my site so that I can know how many people would like to see a software like this.
True love...
It never happens in a flash,
Or at the first glance
You spend years alone,
Loneliness becomes your best friend,
You see happy couples all around,
You wonder when you will find the one
She is definitely out there somewhere,
Maybe she is right beside you now,
She is the one who has always been by your side
Amazing!
sikh!!
Without this man, there would be no Internet today...
Saturday, April 11, 2009
.Net Secrets
You will need to call the GC explicitly if you are writing a .Net 1.1
application.
If you use .net remoting, every class you want to truly run remotely
has to be included in the remoting client & server config files.
The biggest reason to migrate to .Net 3.5 is for using LINQ, but not
for database access.
As of this time silverlight or WPF is not robust enough for a
production application.
Windows 2008 Server does significantly improve your app speed.
Yahoo iPhone App - Nice!
iPhone. The NY Times app used to be the only other option, but once it
started crashing, it has been pretty much unusable.
I went through the crazy objective C language a few days back and feel
"no wonder!!". When are these guys going to make things better?
Apple should implement a higher level popular language like C# or Java
so that more developers can learn iPhone programming easily and build
stable applications.
The kind of features you find in Objective C maybe powerful &
flexible, but the syntax is like a crazy, mad beast!!
Friday, April 10, 2009
The Software Development Lifecycle
Too much adherence to processes can only be done in companies with unlimited money & time to kill. Take the example of the recent case of a person leaving Google because of weeklong meetings on which of the 48 shades of blue to choose.
In startup companies on the other hand, because of the lack of time, people usually follow no processes leading to disaster. In today's world where there is a lack of time, it is essential to me able to come to market quickly otherwise you lose your advantage. See the case of Microsoft and Vista. It took more time & had a lousy reception even after it arrived.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
How apple can beat microsoft
to sell OSX as software which can be installedon any PC. I can
virtually guarantee that most iPhone users with PC's will consider
buying it.
Also I see the OSX as being a very good replacement for the computer
connected to the TV in my living room.
It can give very good performance - this I have noticed since getting
my mac. Only problem is, now I think all laptops are obscenely heavy!!
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Apple released new iTunes 8.1 Update!
By the by, I just installed office 2008 for mac. It is pretty interesting I would say!
Getting to know my new Mac
I like the default email client. I think it works on IMAP way better than any windows client including outlook express or even ms outlook itself. In fact it is my observation that ms office 2007 significantly slows down a computer.
I am not sure what the reason for this is. Why is the mac more performant than a better configured PC?
On the other hand, I do have some peeves like no right click button on the air (what were they thinking?) and the difficulty to get a window to go full screen (maybe there is an easier way than dragging the mouse).
Windows does not have anything like spaces & my biggest complaint with it is that it has not changed much since windows 95 in a fundamental manner. They should do something so that for different classes of users they can provide drastically different stuff.
Windows is boring...