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.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Monday, April 4, 2011
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SDK can continue to thrive or even give any competition w.r.t developer friendliness especially when they are using the outdated Objective C as the programming language.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.
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.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
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!
Monday, March 14, 2011
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.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
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.
Hopefully, none of these things will need fixing anymore.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
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..
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..
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