Why the site is misbehaving.

Just to let everyone know, this is a hardware issue with the web server. Still trying to get it to work.

The os which destroyed embedded devices

No doubt windows ce. The Magellan gps used to be so reliable when they used to run on Linux.

Ever since they used windows, slowness, lag, crashes and reboots all the time.

:-;


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Wcf scalability secret

This is something you will not hear anywhere and which I have found out after a month of study. The real problem in calling a Wcf service which in turn is the client for another Wcf service is that throttling comes into the picture.

But throttling happens on the server - this does not prevent the client service from creating channels without any limit once the throttling limit is reached.

Hence handle count increases exponentially and a problem is created.

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Why AT&T network congestion is not going to reduce with limited Internet sizes

I think AT&T network congestion was not really the point of the $15 and $25 data plans because most people would use around 400mb of data minimum if they used the 3G without trying hard to hog the bandwidth. I have tried as much as I could but even with Pandora, I could only use 376mb out of 2 gb. I think most people with these 2gb plans will stop using wifi at home and office so that they can get some benefit out of paying $25 a month.

The iPhone uses a lot of data. Why hog wifi bandwidth at home for that?

Really, in most countries of the world, the minimum iPhone plan is 400-500mb. This is because that is what you would use "reasonably". With the 200mb limit, I always have to worry about bandwidth and it takes all the fun away.

So, now I have turned off wifi at home and office, so I use as much of the 2gb as I can. Let me know see how much I an use maximum in a month. That will tell us how realistic 200mb really is.

We are going backward. Maybe when Verizon gets the iPhone we will get a better deal.

Did I tell you the poor sobs who are getting verizon phones now are all going to go out of date in a year?. That is because then we will have LTE.

Lot of updates to Today American

While our UK subscriber base continues to grow, want to say that a lot of updates were posted to the site today.

Best one being the ability to send real time service updates to twitter so I can see what exactly is happening and do something about it.

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 Update

We are in a weird alternate reality land where today American itself works wherein the sites to which we link to are slower!!!

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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The SQL Queries which saved Today American Web Site

Here are the queries which were killing the Today American Database and how I fixed them:

(1) Query 1

--3 secs
select * from rssfeedcontents
where ContentId IN
(Select TOP 50 ContentId from UserRssFeedStatus
Where UserId=4 And [Read] = 0
order by ContentId desc)
order by PublishDate desc, ContentId desc

---1 secs
SELECT RFC1.* FROM rssfeedcontents RFC1
INNER JOIN (SELECT TOP 50 ContentId FROM UserRssFeedStatus
WHERE UserId=4 And [Read] = 0
ORDER BY ContentId DESC) RFC2 ON (RFC1.ContentId = RFC2.ContentId)
ORDER BY PublishDate DESC, ContentId DESC

-- 0 secs
SELECT TOP 50 RFC1.* FROM rssfeedcontents RFC1
INNER JOIN UserRssFeedStatus URFS ON (UserId=4 And [Read] = 0 AND RFC1.ContentId = URFS.ContentId)
ORDER BY URFS.ContentId DESC, RFC1.PublishDate DESC

(2) Query 2

--13 secs
select TOP 250 4, ContentId, 0, GETDATE() from rssfeedcontents
where ContentId NOT IN (Select ContentId from UserRssFeedStatus Where UserId=4 And [Read] = 1)
order by PublishDate desc, ContentId desc

--9 secs
SELECT TOP 250 4, RFC.ContentId, 0, GETDATE() FROM rssfeedcontents RFC
LEFT OUTER JOIN (SELECT ContentId FROM UserRssFeedStatus
WHERE UserId=4 And [Read] = 1) URFS ON (URFS.ContentId = RFC.ContentId)
WHERE URFS.ContentId IS NULL
ORDER BY ContentId DESC, PublishDate DESC

--6 secs
SELECT TOP 250 4, RFC.ContentId, 0, GETDATE() FROM rssfeedcontents RFC
LEFT JOIN UserRssFeedStatus URFS ON
(UserId=4 And [Read] = 1 AND URFS.ContentId = RFC.ContentId)
WHERE URFS.ContentId IS NULL
ORDER BY ContentId DESC, PublishDate DESC

(3) Query 3

--3 secs
select * from RssFeedContents
Where ItemTitle IN
(select ItemTitle from DuplicateItems
where itemcount > 1)
AND Contentid NOT IN
(Select DISTINCT ContentId from UserReadRssFeedContents)

--2 secs
select * from RssFeedContents RFC
INNER JOIN DuplicateItems DI ON (RFC.ItemTitle = DI.ItemTitle AND DI.ItemCount > 1)
LEFT JOIN (Select DISTINCT ContentId from UserReadRssFeedContents) URFS
ON (RFC.ContentId = URFS.ContentId)
WHERE URFS.ContentId IS NULL

Today American operational once again

I have been increasingly frustrated by the lack of an alternate to today american. So after a log time, i revisited the code & implemented some fixes which make the site useable again.

Users are welcome to start using the site while i am testing and fixing issues as i find them.

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Deleting windows.old folder after windows upgrade

The best option is:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/19151-windows-old-folder-delete.html

Orb.com is cool...

They have been working on this for quite sometime. It works really well these days, atleast as a streaming solution.

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Windows 7 taskbar becomes invisible

This can happen after the screensaver runs. To fix this, run screensaver again and exit from it.


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Today American domain expired on me!

But now it is back up again.

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Indian websites are weird...

They are all heavy, slow loading pages which take forever to load on the lousy Internet connections!

The worst site I have seen so far (even in terms of content) is the Toyota Indian website. It is a disgrace considering their cars are relatively expensive.


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Last of the site issues squashed as of now!!!

As many of you know, some softest issues have seriously hampered the site experience for the past month.

These have been resolved now. No more seeing the same articles again & again even after you login.


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Today American Software Issues resolved

I know that readers must have been very frustrated with the software and hardware issues we have been facing so far. I am happy to announce that as of right now, everything is working as it should. Things have stabilized. I will be testing the site to ensure that no problems remain.

Thanks for using Today American.

Today American outage over

After a very long outage, everything is operational again. I am planning to work on other issues this week.


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Saw veer movie

Too many songs, but definitely watcheable. This is no Gadar though. Everyone seems to be influenced by the Troy fighting scene in front of the gate.

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Today American outage

Trying to fix the issue now. I am also working on trying to resolve the software problems which have cropped up in the past month.

Delays are due to my move outside the country.


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Airtel data roaming

Not sure why but when you roam on Airtel, data stops working on the iPhone. Turns out a hard restart and it starts working again.

Maybe network settings are getting reset...


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Airtel India network better than AT&T USA!!

I am seeing better call quality and faster Internet speeds on 2G.

I wonder why??

It is a good speed even with tethering..


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