The Challenge Ahead

You would have noticed that in the past few weeks we have updated our interface significantly so to improve the user experience on touch enabled devices, for different form factors. For those of you who are new to this platform, all these changes are for readers who come into our site, don't register and simply want to browse the news.

This quickly gets old, because as we have mentioned earlier, you end up seeing the same old articles if you visit us frequently enough. For such users, we want to remind you that, you can register with us and obtain a feed url which you can put inside Google Reader or many of the applications like Flipboard, Reeder, Pulse, etc. This is the better way to do it because the feed always shows unread articles, so you don't have to click through pages of read articles to see unread ones.

The real challenge for us now is to provide this experience to end users without their having to register with us. Any Tom, Dick or Harry should be able to just come to our site and be able to always read fresh articles without having to go through read content.

This is the next challenge for us, and we are preparing to solve this problem soon.

More updates to the site

I made more updates to the site basically to improve subtle problems in the news reader page and making it easier to read.

I have to mention, I watched the apple memorial for Steve Jobs in the apple campus on youtube.com and shed many tears today morning. It was very emotional and heart touching. Also, very inspiring to hear "The Crazy Ones" in Steve's voice. It gave real soul to that ad.

His life is such an inspiration, and makes me reach for the best I can do. 

More updates to the site

Thankfully, we got some time to improve the more important areas of the site. Firstly, the home page was too garish for my taste, so even though, we did use the windows 8 colors at first, I moved to something more like what Jonathan Ive would like. It is a work in progress, and it will improve even more in the future. I have had some issues with how difficult it was t move forward from pages like the breaking news and the newspaper like reader page. Now, that is possible, so you are no longer stuck with 20 articles o read. I know the categories page lives in the past. That will change as soon a I figure out how exactly to change it. The news reader page does not look good al the time, that will be updated too. We are working on something game changing. A totally different product, but in my leisure time, I will continue to work on this site until I feel proud and satisfied with it. That seems a long way off. :)

The most important improvements to the site ever

A few weeks ago, our site started a move towards the better by moving to an online provider for hosting. This has improved the user experience significantly as the site loads super fast, and the changes in the past few days, make it even faster than before with some intelligent caching behind the scenes.

However, you might have noticed the new "metro" style UI for the news pages. With a lot of effort, and tears and pain, we have painstakingly got you the Windows 8 news reader experience directly on any standards compliant browser. The best results would be in Chrome, Firefox and Safari. IE 10 might also work fine with this.

It is automatically optimized for tablets, and touch, very easy to read, and with a single click, you are taken to the new "reader" mode which gives you an iPad Flipbook like experience on any modern browser. This is an amazing way to actually read the news, and it also feels great swiping through the pages on a device like the ipad.

We will be moving the entire site to the metro like interface in stages, so that, we can provide you the best news reading experience online without the need to install anything anywhere.

Phase 2 will involve using AJAX and indexed DB, but right now, I just want to focus on improving the user experience significantly. If you are not an advanced user, we want you to have the best experience simply by browsing our site.

These changes are dedicated to the memory of Steve Jobs, who is, was and will always be a constant inspiration for us. More on Steve Jobs in another post..

Updates to the site

You might have noticed that our site loads very fast now. This is because we are now hosting our site online through a provider.

And we managed to do it in the most economical manner. Our top priority is now to do more migration to online hosting so that even if the main database is down, the site can more or less manage on its own.

That is a coding challenge right now because we cannot afford dedicated servers. The main database is still running at home, and we have to modify the site do that it can run on top of a cache if this is down.

And we have a major ui change coming up as well. I am excited about it and trying to schedule that as well as soon as possible, because it truly changes the entire reading experience on the site.

Our site may not be accessible for a few hours

In the meantime, use this url to access our site: www.sparrkle.com

Fixed a small site problem

The news site was not publishing articles to the blog: todayamericannews.blogspot.com

This issue was fixed yesterday night. It should be working anytime now.

What is special about todayamerican?

You might want to wonder or ask why todayamerican is different from any other site which either creates news or publishes news from different sources. Today I will attempt to answer this question in detail.

First it is neccessary to understand the primary reason we exist - because simply put, today you have to search for tech news or keep pressing refresh on the existing tech blogs to read content online. If you follow many tech blogs, this can quickly get old. RSS readers alleviate this problem to some extent, but how many people really like installing software on their desktops?. Even with an online service like Google Reader, it is just a dumb website, which pulls in data from different sites you subscribe to, without any idea of what content it is pulling or whether it is of interest to anyone or not.

Our service is very intelligent in comparison. And it has features for advanced users as well as completely non tech-savvy users who I think form the bulk of the population.

We get the latest tech news hourly from the internet, we ensure that duplicates are minimized - even across multiple tech blogs, we sort the content based on how many people show interest in it (without having a manual interface for "liking" content). You will notice that we don't tweet all the news we publish - but only the more interesting ones, and we have a content rank, though we don't ask you to "digg", "+" or "like" an article.

We make it very easy even for the most non-technical user to just get the latest, most interesting news. For the tech savvy users, we have personalized RSS feeds which keep track of what they have read, and only server those articles which they have not read before.

In this respect, we compete more with sites like stumbleupon, rather than content publishers like engadget or tech crunch. I think we have gone slightly ahead of the norm by both having our own website, a blog which contains our tech news as a separate entity as well as a twitter account which notifies everyone of the headlines. In effect, this encompasses most of the requirements needed by people who read tech news.

Content improvements in Today American

Now that the website is up and running without issues, I am happy to announce that we have been touching the inner plumbing of the site for the past few weeks. Basically, I want to improve the content quality of what comes through the RSS feeds and even what is shown on the website, before going to improve the layout and other design aspects of the website.

Because we provide an RSS feed now, we leave the RSS readers available on all platforms to provide the UI chutzpah for us.

We want to focus on improving the content you get so that, even more of you would want to actually read what we give you through the feeds and the website. Looks like I have succeeded to some extent, because I have been noticing the significant improvement in the quality of the news which shows up when I refresh my RSS feed reader in the morning.

Even though the presentation may not be as flashy as say - engadget.com, atleast the content seems much more intresting and relevant to read than was before. Our only request to our readers is to send us more feedback, so that we can continue improving our quality.

Super Slow Brand New Laptop? - I have a solution

My Dell E6510 laptop with core i5 processor was running super slow and I tried everything to get it running fast.

It is crazy to see what made it work finally!

1) Firstly select the high performance power plan
2) Change Plan Settings >> Change Advanced Plan Settings
3) Processor Power Management >> Minimum Power State
4) Set both values to 99%

Voila!

Problem solved. This laptop was super slow even with 8GB RAM and a hybrid 7200RPM HDD. So, none of those are the solutions.

[Update: 7-AUG-2011]: As I originally suspected, we can squeeze even more performance from this laptop. I installed windows 2008 server r2 sp1 on the laptop, and it runs even more faster now. Every bit of speed increase helps I guess.

Sweaty leather chair?

You can get the two piece cushion from any department store.

Put it on the seat, and say bye bye to sweaty backsides!!

Improved news results starting now...

I have implemented a major change which will ensure that the most interesting articles will come to you before the boring/ junk ones. It has already started working as of now.

Things are going to get better now..

sql server 2008 r2 sp2 saves the day!

The whole of last year was a struggle because sql server was acting up. Basically it would not utilize resources to scale up properly and used to choke in certain queries.

Even though we optimized to the max, the condition remained the same forcing me to think whether there is anything more which could be done in SQL.

Not anymore!

After installing SP2, I see tremendous improvement in scalability and performance. The site is running very well, and I am happy to move ahead to focus on improving the content, rather than fighting with SQL just to survive!!

- previously deadlocks used to bring down the entire database, now it is handled properly like Oracle does.

- previously long running queries used to bring down the entire database, now that is handled in a much better way.

All services are up again

I would like to announce that today American services are up & running again.

With the readability plugin in the reeder iPhone app, it has become an awesome experience reading articles.

one of the file paths specified for backup is under a reparse point

I was getting this error trying to configure backup on my windows 2008 server r2 box.

I closed the UI, reopened it, unselected bare metal recovery, removed some of the unwanted folders from the C: drive which I wanted to exclude. This time, I did not uncheck some of the users who I had tried to exclude the last time.

It went ahead and created the backup schedule successfully.

Windows 7 Backup failed with weird error

Ran chkdsk with repair option, took an hour and a half, now backup runs fine.

Windows Tip

Did you know you could drag and drop any folder to the "Favorites" menu on the left tree in the Win 7 explorer?

It makes reaching those hard to reach folders very easy.

Discovered by mistake.

Deal Alert for Nashua, NH

Best Buy does not have the advanced Motorola cable modem which supports 3.0 protocol. If it did, the price is $99 or more.

Target has the same thing in stock for $89.99. Go to the electronics section.

Stuck on Boot Screen during OSX Lion install?

I waited for 3 hours - nothing.

Pressed the start button, let the computer turn off, and then started it.

Now, it shows the "Install Mac OS X" screen. Weird!

This is an older MBA with SSD.

What happened to TodayAmerican?

As I had mentioned a few weeks earlier, all servers are in transit. And I went on a vacation outside the country for a glorious, refreshing 4 weeks!

Now, I am back, the servers are en-route to the east coast. In the meantime, I am exploring Windows Azure for future hosting needs.

Let us see how things work out. The code base is on the servers, so unfortunately, I have to wait for everything to come over.

Till then, you can see my updates to the today american twitter account where I keep posting interesting news...

Started with Windows Azure

I have started making baby steps exploring Windows Azure. Here is a good start-up guide:

http://weblogs.asp.net/jeffwids/archive/2010/03/02/getting-started-with-windows-azure-part-1-setting-up-your-development-environment.aspx

AT&T and the 3G Microcell

I moved to NH recently and find that there is no coverage within my home although there is a single bar outside. So, I had no option but to go for the 3G micro cell, because I anyway have a family plan and I tried verizon + android, but came back to AT&T + Apple.

Remember - the chances of the 3G microcell activating is rare especially if you are not within a major city, or live at an apartment.

AT&T customer support have no idea of customer support...

I was getting error code 103 and as the forums say, it was because of a mismatch between LAT & LON and the address of the place. So, I used Skype over iphone for a few days...

Then I found my location using the maps application, and found out that the address which the map says is totally different than what the real address is.

I set the google maps address as the active location and voila! - it just activated in a few minutes...

Nice...

Installing the XFX Radeon Graphics card

BestBuy has a sale going on where you can get a pretty good dual DVI card from XFX for less than $70 (without taxes).

I got one. But it does not work straight away and does not even recognize 2 different monitors. Trying to install the radeon drivers from ATI caused a windows blue screen of death in 2008 server r2 x64 (equivalent to windows 7 x64).

The solution is to register with XFX and install the drivers from then, reboot and voila!!

Everything works fine!!

Improving laptop performance

My laptop was dog slow even though it was Dell E6510, with Intel Core i5 and 4 GB RAM. To make it run in an acceptable manner, I just went to Dell Support and installed the newer BIOS version A09. Now, it works much better and consumes lesser RAM than before, while using more RAM when required.

Huh!

And I was thinking of getting an SSD or 8GB RAM.

The site will be down till mid August

I am moving from the west coast to the east coast and travelling in between. So, everything has been powered off now, and I am hoping to move everything by July end, and have everything setup once more around August.

I have tried Amazon and Azure, but they are expensive, and in the long run, at this time, I have no choice but to shut everything down.

I will be thinking of what to do next w.r.t the site during this time.

The next phase of development for Today American

We have started implementing the next phase of work within the site. This is basically a way to improve the articles which we select for your reading. Many sites like stumble upon customize what they show according to your likes and dislikes. We take a slightly different approach here. Basically we want to improve the quality of the news contents we select in a generic manner, and make it really interesting. Then, we will probably think of personalizing what you read based on your likes and dislikes.

Looking forward to a new phase of development and hope that our readers will like it.

What Apple really needs to do to prevent 1990's from happening again

I think Apple has got great products and now unlike the last time, the price points are low enough for them to be competitive. However there is still one glaring problem with their ecosystem which might cause them to win all their battles but lose the war - developer friendliness.

With Google having an ok Dev environment and Microsoft supported by Visual Studio & C# there is no way that the clunky Apple SDK can continue to thrive or even give any competition w.r.t developer friendliness especially when they are using the outdated Objective C as the programming language.

This will cause the company we all love to hate MS to win eventually because like it or not they have the best developer friendly tools which are easy to learn. Their OS might be called clunkers but ease of development will outpace other platforms are they slowly but surely catch up.

It is a sad state of affairs for the most admired company to be in. They got everything else right - they must adopt an easier to use Dev environment and a modern programming language.

The way to go seems to be something like a customized form of the eclipse environment and a language like java which can compile to objective c as an intermediate language.

Some vendors already provide such tools. Apple must provide these natively and also support tools on Windows. Fact is Windows is the dominant OS on the planet and all people can't afford Mac's. Apple has to chew the bitter pill like they did with iTunes and let their user base grow.

Only then, there is hope. Otherwise for all it's efforts it looks like history is repeating itself once more.

Massive update to the site

We have always wanted to provide all our articles for viewing without having to register explicitly. Finally, we are able to provide this functionality via the "Top Categories" section of our web site. Basically, this shows all the top categories in our site depending on the number of articles each one has. This "ranking" changes dynamically when we download new articles. Clicking on a category will let you see articles within that category and also comment or like the article in Facebook. Enjoy!

All pending issues have been fixed as of now

There were a spite of issues small and large which were affecting the overall user experience. I am happy to say everything has been fixed so far.

Uninstalling Powershell to upgrade from windows 2003 server to 2008 server

None of the things mentioned in the google search work. Ultimately, I had to rename the install folder for power shell and delete all the registry keys I could find.

Note that before doing this, I did manage to uninstall whatever I could find related to powershell in the add/ remove programs. Powershell 2.0 comes as part of another microsoft package which I uninstalled first.

Lot of updates posted today

We did a lot of updates today including performance fixes, perf counter based monitoring of services, better quality RSS feed where links actually work, and ensuring that reads are tracked properly.

Hopefully, none of these things will need fixing anymore.

The real problems with LINQ to SQL

Here is the list of issues with this technology which I have learnt after extensively using it everywhere:

1. It cannot handle multiple threads. Basically it cannot even run 2 database queries at the same time!
2. Above pretty much means you cannot share the context object to use the caching.
3. You have to create multiple context objects everywhere. This is too heavy to use like this.
4. You have to go and set all the columns of the table to "Do not check" and primary key to "Always Check" if you want to use the context object properly.

Just in, I found another problem which made me write this post. If you use LINQ to SQL to interface with a stored procedure, then when you iterate through the result object, the data reader is actually open in the background. This is horrible!. I can't believe MS developers could have written code like this. If you don't know about this behavior and make other database calls before iterating through the result object, the data reader remains open and can cause a deadlock, and the database to get super slow!!!

Wow. Have to use entity framework now. Let us see how good that turns out to be..

Desktop Site significantly updated

We have published the biggest set of updates ever today. The site will run 50% faster now. Hope everyone likes the changes. There was a small problem with user registration which has also been fixed now.

A very easy way to deploy across multiple servers

Use dropbox to sync the latest code across all servers. Amazingly, if you do this very often, you will find bugs with Dropbox!!

Multiple Network Adapters in Windows and Network Location Type Public

It is a mess if you try to assign static ip addresses to multiple network adapters in windows. Basically you will see the network location type set to Public and no way to set it to private.

This is because for some weird reason, it sets resets the default gateway to BLANK when you press OK. Just reopen the adapter settings and set the default gateway to the IP address of your router and all will be well again.

Windows Desktop name resolution from a Mac

I have struggled with this problem using ip addresses for years now. Turns out it is very easy to get name resolution. Just use .local on the LAN.

Our upcoming home page

Take a look here:

http://www.todayamerican.com:81