Sunday, January 28, 2007

Time to reduce my weight - Part 1

I have been putting on some extra too much weight since I moved back to India from US, thanks to the food provided by the company and the frequent visits made by visitors with Sweets(pure ghee). My weight is around 83 Kgs now...I know that's a lot.. So I am going to make concrete efforts to bring it down below 80kg (that will be my first target, once I am able to achieve it I want to take it down further).

I came across a nice post on reducing your weight. It suggests good workable tips to reduce weight and to keep it away. Let's see if I can implement it and get some real results. Will keep you posted about my results in this blog.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

E-Mail from Paramount airways going to Yahoo junk folder

I have been trying to book an e-ticket for my friend who is going to fly from Chennai to Coimbatore in Paramount airways. I used my yahoo account to get the confirmation email about the reservation process, but even after hours I didn't get any mail from the reservation process. First I thought that their mail server is playing catch-up with thousands of emails generated throughout the day. I checked again after few hours but still didn't see it my inbox.

Now I knew that there is something I might be missing, I started looking for culprit like "Did I enter my email address correctly"... yeah ..It's rite.. so now looking for the second option I started searching through my spam folder in yahoo.. and I was happy to see the mail from paramount sitting happy inside that.. I hope this post will be helpful for someone using yahoo and trying to book their tickets through paramount airways.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Getting started on WCF

If you are looking for article to get started on WCF on .Net 3.0, Microsoft has a decent e-learning course
Clinic 5137: Introduction to Developing with Windows® Communication Foundation and Visual Studio® 2005. I wouldn't say it's one of the best ways to get started on WCF, but if you have been looking for something on WCF to get started, this might be a good place to start with.

I tried to read blogs related to WCF, listen to podcasts, etc.. but personally I have been waiting for the book by Juwal Lowy on Programming WCF. He is the guy who can explain you WCF inside and out. Make sure you pre-order yours with Amazon.

Monday, January 15, 2007

Microsoft .net Interview Questions

Shivprasad Koirala has written/composed an excellent pdf file of interview questions on .Net, anyone attending interview on Microsoft technologies will benefit a lot from reading this. It's a pretty big .pdf file having around 528 pages. Even though I have not read through from end-to-end it covers many areas of Microsoft Technologies upto .Net 3.0.

But even others not looking from interview perspective has lots to learn from this .pdf file and brush up their knowledge on various subjects. It's a pretty nice gesture by the author to publish this well compiled .pdf file free for users.

Good wallpaper Collections

Check out this site for getting good wallpaper collections. They have collections in various areas like XP theme, sports, flowers etc.. But I really loved the collection of wallpapers they have on Apple. I have been looking to give my Vista an Apple laptop look and the wallpaper available in the site helped me achieve that.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

IASA Launch of Chennai Chapter

10th January was an interesting day for IT Architects(includes both categories aspiring and folks who have already attained that designation) in Chennai. It was the launch of IASA - (Internation Association of Software Architects) chennai chapter. The event was sponsored by Microsoft and was held at Taj connemara. Around 400 associates attended the event and it had interesting sessions by Paul Priess (president of IASA) and Vivek Bhatnagar (Microsoft India). From what I can gather from the meeting was IASA is focussing on
  • Developing more IT architects in India
  • Providing guidance for existing architects to go to the next level
  • Creating a good networking forum which will bring all IT architects working in different companies

To summarize, it was nice to meet fellow architects working in other companies and gather some good ideas. Looking forward to have more such sessions in future.

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Cool feature in Google Reader

I simply love this new feature in google reader. The new feature provides "trends" which is very useful in visually analysing our reading trends and subscription trends.

Reading trends gives you data like how many posts you have read/starred/shared in the last 30 days. I currently have 18 subscriptions in my Google reader and I have read 840 posts in the last 30 days (I feel good about it).

Subscription trends gives you data about the feeds (how often they are updated). This is a nice way to identify whether you have some dead feeds that have not been updated which you are better off removing from your list.
It also provides interesting graphs about what time of the day do we ready our blogs and what day of the week we read them as well.. (pretty interesting to see my midnight bar soaring above the rest).

You can read more about it here.

Monday, January 01, 2007

Is google going downhill

I read a good article by Nathan Weinberg about how "Google ends year on sour note". It was an interesting article about how Google has lost credibility in some of its core areas including deleting all mails from 60 gmail accounts (even worse they don't have any backup).
Even though I have an email account, I primarily use my yahoo account but have been thinking for some time now to permanently to switch over to Google. But this will make me think a while before making the decision.

It's bad that even orkut was down for around 22 hours over friday and saturday. To add to the misery Blake Ross of firefox came out against google for promoting its own products for tips as part of search result.

I personally don't think that the quote by Nathan "By the end of next year, no one will like Google as much as they do today" is going to be a reality in a year from now. I believe google is a company with good vision and they will take a quick steps to regain the trust of end users.

2007 is going be an interesting year with some of new enterprenaurs like Powerset entering the search market. We have to wait and see who the next google is going to be...
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