TechAid

Recently Apple announced the latest iPhone which has 3G support and a superior wireless connectivity than its previous generation. And to add the icing on the cake, this version costs half as what the previous version cost. From $399 the price is slashed to $199. I am not complaining, but the people who brought it recently, say a month back, will definitely have something to complain about.

This is the story with every product of Apple. When iPod was released it was priced very high as soon as the later versions were released, the prices dropped considerably. This prevents me from buying any Apple product for the simple reason I don’t want to feel bitter when they release a better version for half the price just after a month after I got this one.

About two years back Microsoft was losing the battle in the IT wars. It was getting poached by Google, Sun, Yahoo, Open source - Linux, Apple, IBM, Mozilla etc. Some even predicted that the Microsoft empire would crumble down.

But after these two years of lull, Microsoft has managed to surprise all of us with a series of product releases. It has engaged in a lot of battles and is emerging a winner. Windows 7, Xbox, World Wide Telescope, Microsoft surface, Live Mesh, Silver-Light and Visual Studio 2008.

Microsoft is taking this battle to a place where it has no challengers. The generally thrown security issues, no longer hold true as for the past two years Microsoft has hardly suffered any major security attack.

The MSDN forum is a developing into a cognizance of geeky knowledge. The community out there is smart and the type that would change the world.

For the next 5 years, my money is on Microsoft.

Thanks to Narga and Kottke! They got a good collection of resource to help me understand everything about Google Adsense. I also spent some time and went through the Google sites and found it to be interesting. I’ve not - so far - had the opportunity to experience Adsense, since WordPress doesn’t allow scripts. For those of you who haven’t yet discovered about Adsense, here is my version (or rather, what I can remember from what I read in those posts).

Do you think Google is gone Crazy?
After seeing my friend use Adsense for couple of months, I now understand (of course with the help of the posts) that it’s a win-win situation for Google as well as the people who use it.

Let me make it clearer…
The advertisers get a boost in their traffic since they are advertised in a lot more sites in the internet than Google alone. Google charges advertisers for every visits from those Ads. Google(middleman) brilliantly increases the amount of money they earn with the help of the web site owners who in turn are getting paid.

There are a lot of terms/conditions you have to follow when using Adsense. I’ll share with you whatever I remember from Narga’s site.
• Never Click on your own Adsense ads or ask your friends to get it clicked for you. They track the IP address so, if you happen to click a multiple number of times from one particular IP, Adsense bans you.
• You can place a max of three ad units on any web page. Even if you have more than three, the ads won’t appear.
• Don’t have more than one accounts, use the same account for multiple websites.
• Make sure the language you use is supported by Adsense.
• Give the heading as “advertisement” or “sponsored Links”.
• Never disclose any of your confidential information (CTR, CPM, etc).
• Don’t launch a New Page for clicked ads by Default, the ads have to open on the same page.

Insight on how Adsense is used
When I conducted a Survey last month among my friends and colleagues, there were three common ideas that came up:
• My Adsense ads are horrible.
• My Adsense CTR is horrible.
• It’s a good source of income.

But when I further looked at the survey, I found that there where hardly some bloggers who gave the first two comments. On further looking into it as to why there were less number of bloggers who opted for this options, I found that bloggers made a large percentage through Adsense. I’d like to talk about it a little and share my feelings on this subject. Blogs where initially used as a online diary, but nowadays it’s just as likely to be used as a commercially. I know, I termed blogs as commercial, but that’s the truth. I would broadly classify bloggers into three categories, namely:
• People working for Recognition.(Few, big visionary people)
• People working for Money.(Majority of them fall in this category)
• People using it as online dairy(Very hard to find these days)

What ever you do, Don’t Copy!
I read an article recently in Digit magazine (I guess) where in Ravi(name changed) copied all his posts from another site and posted them in his site. He also joined the Adsense but was banned for life by Google for plagiarism. I still am not sure how in the world did Google find this out.

All the major search engines have started to ignore pages with duplicate content and its now become almost impossible for cheaters to get Page Rank in these Search Engines.

There is no point in getting up a site which would just copy contents from another site, though it might get you recognition (probably in a short run) but once you become a stud blogger, everyone would know that you have copied the contents. You also would be banned for life by Adsense, you would also lose all the Readers as well. So, be original and try to write on something that you are well aware off or you have an interest in.

My personal feeling about Adsense.
I agree - it’s a total no-brainer! It’s also easy. And bloggers who do it, find that it makes them a LOT of money.

Google Adsense has started to act weirdly, and the Terms and Conditions of Adsense have been changed recently according to Kottke’s post.

Google offering this service to the user, has got all the Rights to put in whatever they want in the user’s site. But, when the user is found to break the Terms and conditions, he is terminated without any clarification and he also loses the money he had earned prior to his termination. No one is allowed to comment on the Terms and Conditions that brought about the termination is Rude (rather, Evil).

Publishers and the advertisers in the Adsense network may also lose revenue if the Trojan becomes widespread according to BitDefender’s Balazs. For more info, check this out.

So anyone considering of using Adsense, just give it a thought…

Cheers!!!

The Last couple of hours I had an issue regarding the support of my asp application in IE7. I could find the issue when I was trying to access the application from IE7. It was pretty clear that the Thread switching was not working in IE7. Below, I have mentioned the code that works fine in IE6 and not in IE7:

function fnFlash(intMilliSecs)
{
var dlgScript = ‘window.setTimeout(’ +’ function () { window.close(); }, ‘ + intMilliSecs + ‘);’;
var result = window.showModalDialog( ‘javascript:document.writeln(’ + ‘”<script>’ + dlgScript + ‘<’ + ‘/script>”)’);
}

For which I was given the following code snippet by my Tech. Lead:

 <script>

 function msgIsIE(){
  var browser = navigator.appName;
  return browser == "Microsoft Internet Explorer";
 }

 function msgSendToServ(url){
  try{
   var http = msgCreateObject();
   var url = url;
   http.open("GET", url, false);
   http.send(null);
   return http.responseText;
     }catch(ex){throw ex;}
 }  

 function msgCreateObject(){
  var object;
  if(msgIsIE()){
   object = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
  }else{
   object = new XMLHttpRequest();
  }
  return object;
 }

 var start = new Date();
 sleep(500);
 alert((new Date()) - start);

function sleep(ms){
msgSendToServ("http://localhost:1111/dyn/sleep?ms="+ms);
 }
 </script>

Later I came to know that fnFlash() was actually a hack for the sleep functionality since there is no sleep function in javascript. Which doesn’t work anymore. And the script above is one of the other ways to circumvent the problem. The only problem with the script is that, this would increase your network traffic a bit. The url http://localhost:1111/dyn/sleep?ms=500 does a Thread.sleep(1000);Due to the network delay, the time out might take slightly greater time than 500 ms.Cheers!!!

What do you think about CMMI 4, ISO 9000 and Six Sigma. ALL are freaking me out when it comes to my Productivity.

I spent the Last 1 hour trying collecting all the info I can, on:

• The number of days I spent on training.
• The Amount of Effort I have put since October 27th, 2006 till date.
• The amount of coding I have done (as in the Lines of Code)
• The Project plan and the Estimate plan.

Seriously, am I(as in people working in IT companies) Spending too much time on maintaining statistics just to live up to a few standards that Supposedly decide your Quality System, considering that end of the day most numbers are just made up.

People who are Procedure/Process Oriented and not Result Oriented get better Recognition then the Latter. This is very well reflected in the Internal Appraisals.

“According to me, the emphasis is more given on filling up details like this in the company than truly Increasing Productivity and Quality”

Standards!

Something really strange. Was installing a LAMP Server (6.06 Ubuntu Server) and the installer got stuck at the ‘parted’ stage.

A peek at the syslog showed this: configure harddrive-detection, status:0
SGI XFS Quota management subsytem

File Descriptor 3 left open
File Descriptor 4 left open
File Descriptor 5 left open
File Descriptor 6 left open

No matching Physical Volumes found

File Descriptor 3 left open
File Descriptor 4 left open
File Descriptor 5 left open
File Descriptor 6 left open

Reading all physical volumes. this may take some time

No volume groups found.
A few CTRL-Cs actually got me some screens of Logical Groups and Logical Volumes (with Create/Delete/Modify options) but none would go through!

The optiplex gx520 was running XP on it properly.

I have used the same ISO (on a CD) quite successfully in my earlier installs. Or, am I missing something very badly?

How many of you would agree to that? Before just rejecting the statement outrightly, please think about it.

Normally, We would think money provides motivation and once you are motivated, its unlikely that your mind degrades.

What I mean here is that paid jobs usually(not always) take you as a BLACK BOX with certain capabilities and the employer/manager etc give you the minimum input and look for expected output. Although you feel that you are working hard and are motivated by the appreciation you get for your sincerity, you are not using your mind to the extent you should be using.

Even if you explore few things here and there and say you are learning and enhancing your skills, your mental ability might not be on a rise.

What happens is we mistake our work and relevant skills as a measure of our mind’s ability. I feel that you can be on a always increasing learning graph if your motivation is real and not the imaginary one like the ones mentioned above.

This means that the ‘PAID JOBS’ mentioned in the quote is the surreal means of motivation. Wanna upgrade you mind, go for real motivation.

XPath is a specification that allows you to address individual parts of an XML document, originally intended for use in XSLT transformation language and the XPointer sysntax for XML fragment identifiers.

The essence of XPath is that you can select certain nodes from within an XML document through a simple XPath expression.

//inventory/date/@year
//item[@productCode='GN0500']
//item[@quantity<10000]/@description

You should use XPath when you have an XML node in memory and you wish to navigate directly to a particular child node.

XPath is a good substitute for xmlReader when you have already read an entire document into memory, and the document is to be processed randomly.

It is the industry report you don’t want your Project Managers to see, 66% of IT leaders indicate that their teams are inadequately staffed. The CIO magazine is reporting that there will be an increased demand (not to mention the existing shortage) for Project Managers, Business Analysts, Internal Relationship Managers and IT strategists in the next 2-5 years. Business Process Management skills and Application development are the top skill requirements in the Technical domain.

As if that is not enough, rediff.com is reporting that in India the estimated demand for IT resources is so high that ITES-BPO companies are hiring students barely out of high-school and IT companies are making do with BSc graduates with Physics, Maths and Statistics. I wonder what the other non-IT businesses, banks and the likes in India are getting to hire finally.

Interestingly CIO reports that the students in United States are not too enthused to take up Computers in college since a lot of them are convinced that those jobs are going to be outsourced anyway.

This leaves us with an interesting equation, the IT talent pool in India is getting sucked up completely even while the number of engineering graduates produced increases annually and in the United States the number of graduates ready for IT is reducing year on year.

Recruiting large numbers from American Universities, expanding China operations are the obvious new bets. More aggressive recruiting and shorter recruiting cycles can help too.

New incentives to retain are a must, shorter or no commute time can be interesting perks in a world of many choices. Has the time for the remote office arrived and is it the end of large self-sustained development centers? Only time will tell. But Bangalore is curling up – we need to flatten it a little.

In recent years, AJAX(Asynchronous Javascript and XML) has becoming more and more popular. Nobody believed that only IE could give user such perfect function and UI(user interface) without any plug-in before everyone was shaken by Google Map, Gmail etc. Once developers realized that, it’s not strange that introduction and discussion about AJAX fills everywhere now.

I keep away from the craze of AJAX. Many years ago before AJAX became popular, my colleague had use similar technology to resolve problems, the differences were my colleague only used xml to store data and javascript, xsl to show the UI, not requested data from server without refresh the whole html page. In essence we make use of javascript and xml to do the same thing——constructing maintainable architecture and enhancing user experience.

What’s user experience? It’s about human feelings, hence it’s hard to quantify and changes according to different environment and emotion. When I learned painting in elementary school, I thought the principle of a perfect drawing was what you painted looked similar to it really looked like. Later when I enjoyed the production of Van Gogh, I found that a drawing which did give people strong perfect feelings was perfect. Hence, in my opinion, which can give user convenient and comfortable feelings based on the satisfaction of function is a perfect UE.

How can we make the software based on architecture show a perfect UE? I don’t talk about the satisfaction of function point here, just focus on UI(user interface) and UO(user operation).According to my experience, something we can do to improve UE are as follows:

Making user do any operation he/her wants only in one page or seeming like in one page, making the operation as simple and convenience as possible, such like only using keyboard, puckered and labeled menu etc .
Making what are showed in the page is what he/her wants, just as simple as Google’s main page
P.S. don’t consider user foolish, let they manage the software .

A simple way to justify whether the software has a good UE is thinking in the way of customer and operating a same function point eight hours sequentially. You are the person developed the software, but the customer uses the software to do their business daily.

Cheers!!!