Sunday, August 29, 2010

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

Sunday, August 22, 2010

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.

Friday, August 20, 2010

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.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

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.